Month: December 2014

Who’s the real Scrooge here?

by digby

I’m sure everyone remembers Cokie Roberts kvetching about President Obama having the audacity to take a vacation in his home state of Hawaii:

Roberts: …going off this week I know his grandmother lives in Hawaii and I know Hawaii is a state, but it has the look of him going off to some sort of foreign, exotic place. He should be at Myrtle Beach if he’s going to take a vacation at this time. I just think this is not the time to do that.

Hawaii is just too “foreign” for Real Americans. To the many millions of us who live on the west coast or in Hawaii, Myrtle Beach might as well be on the Black Sea. What’s “foreign” to you Cokie isn’t foreign to many Americans.

Now get a load of this from a Washington Times reporter recalling how the White House press corps always has to travel with the president but George W. Bush was jolly old Santa Claus and Barack Obama is an icky old scrooge:

In December, we never left Washington, D.C., until the day after Christmas. Never. Mr. Bush and his wife, Laura, would always depart the White House a few days before the holiday and hunker down at Camp David, the presidential retreat in Maryland. After a few years, I asked a low-level White House staffer why.

I still remember what she said: “So all of us can be with our families on Christmas.”

Who was “us”? Hundreds and hundreds of people, that’s who. Sure, the reporters who covered the president, but also dozens and dozens on his staff, 100 Secret Service agents, maybe more, and all of those city cops required whenever the president’s on the move in D.C.

For me, that one-day delay was huge. My kids were 6 and 8 years old when Mr. Bush took office. When he went home to Prairie Chapel that last time in 2009, my girl was driving, the boy was 6 foot 1. But in the meantime, I was home for eight Christmas mornings, playing Santa, stoking the fire, mixing up hot chocolates.

That was President Bush. And every year for the past five, I’ve thought about what that meant to me. (By the way, some years, I got holiday duty, which meant I was off to Waco, Texas, the day after Christmas. But once again, the Bush White House had us covered: A press plane flew out with the president, and back then, reporters could pay $100 per family member for the plane ride. So sometimes, the family went along. For the kids, it was an adventure; for me, well, we were all together.)

All that has changed with President Obama. No more press plane, for one. Reporters are on their own — so taking family is, say, $1,000 a pop. Not likely. And this president would never delay his trip to his island getaway. He’s off every year well before Christmas. Hundreds and hundreds head off with him, leaving family behind.

No Christmas at home. Instead, the Hawaiian Village Waikiki Beach Resort. Nice, but not exactly home.

Those awful Obamas force the press corps to go to Hawaii in the middle of the winter. The humanity. And I’d guess they don’t feel they could get away with having the taxpayers foot the bill for all the reporters’ families to go with them as George W. Bush did. After all, there’s no doubt that the Washington Times would dog them mercilessly if they tried it.

There’s another little factoid that should be factored into the Bush and Obama family friendly policies toward the press:

Q: Is it true that George W. Bush took more vacation days than Barack Obama?

A: Yes. Before his two-week trip to Martha’s Vineyard in August, Obama’s count was 125 full or partial days and Bush’s total at the same point in his presidency was 407.

That’s 13 months the White House press corps spent away from home attending to George W. Bush at the same point in his presidency. 13 months away from their kids, most of it spent in that hellhole at Crawford Texas.

And that’s not all:

We last dealt with the who-took-more-vacation question in January 2010, at which point Obama had spent 26 days on “vacation” during his first year in office, fewer than the first year totals for Presidents Bush, George H.W. Bush or Ronald Reagan…

Bush’s total for his two terms in office is 533 days, which includes 490 at the ranch and the rest at Kennebunkport. For comparison’s sake, President Bill Clinton’s total is 174 days, and Reagan hit 390 (349 at his ranch and 41 in Palm Springs), according to Knoller.

Adding in Camp David visits would bring Obama’s total to date to 223 (that’s 83 days at Camp David) and Bush’s total for his entire time in office to 1,024 (491 days at the presidential retreat). Note that Obama still has more than two years in office to narrow the gap.

That’s nearly 3 years the press corps spent with Bush on vacation during the 8 years of the Bush administration.

So please, let’s not get carried away with the great family friendly policies of the Bush administration. If all you want is to be present for your family on Christmas morning then he was terrific. If you actually wanted to watch your kids grow up, be involved in the lives then he forced you to miss 3 years of their childhoods while he hung out at a faux ranch in a Texas desert so he could stage photo-ops in a ten gallon hat, his family compound in Kennebunkport or in retreat at Camp David.

Oh, and I’m fairly sure that some of their kids would love it if Mom or Dad arranged for them to be in Hawaii on Christmas too. It’s really nice.

Don’t tell Rush, but his favorite heroes aren’t real

by digby

One of my favorite quotes is by baseball legend Kirk Gibson who, when asked how he felt about his legendary home run in the 1988 World Series being compared Roy Hobbs’ light smashing home run in the movie “The Natural”, Gibson replied, “well … Roy Hobbs was a fictional character, I actually did it.”

Some people can’t tell the difference between fact and fiction and Rush Limbaugh is one of them:

“James Bond is a total concept put together by Ian Fleming. He was white and Scottish. Period. That is who James Bond is, was,” Limbaugh said, in comments flagged by Media Matters. “But now [they are] suggesting that the next James Bond should be Idris Elba, a black Briton, rather than a white from Scotland.” “But that’s not who James Bond is,” he continued, acknowledging, “and I know it’s racist to probably point this out.”

It’s not just racist, it’s dumber than dirt. Just like Roy Hobbs, Bond is a fictional character. He doesn’t really exist except in our minds. (Of course, Rush seems to think Jack Bauer is real too, so this is a bigger problem for him than James Bond.)

If Shakespeare’s characters have been re-imagined in every possible way, so too can James Bond. And I, for one, would love to see Idris Elba in that role. He’s one of the best actors of our time and he’s extremely handsome, sexy, smooth and athletic. Just like James Bond. If he really existed. Which he doesn’t.

And neither does Santa Claus.

Shhh. Don’t tell Rush.

Does Bedford Falls need an armored vehicle?

by digby

Manchester Police are on a mission this Christmas Day–delivering toys to needy children.

Police cruised through town this morning in an armored vehicle, decked out in lights and tinsel, to hand out toys to needy children.

I know it’s the thought that counts and the thought is very decent and generous. I’m sure the kids were thrilled to get some presents no matter what kind of scary vehicle delivered them.

But somehow this message doesn’t really fit that particular image:

For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace.

10 years ago today

by digby

I recall watching the news the morning after Christmas a decade ago at a big family gathering and seeing the first reports of the massive tsunami hitting Indonesia and Thailand. The horror that followed was the stuff of nightmares. Nearly 250,000 people died.

When I see America go into full panic mode the first chance it gets, whether it’s a terrorist threat or a contagious disease (not to mention the inept response to Hurricane Katrina) I can only imagine what we’d do if this happened to us.

According to Tad Murty, vice-president of the Tsunami Society, the total energy of the tsunami waves was equivalent to about five megatons of TNT (20 petajoules). This is more than twice the total explosive energy used during all of World War II (including the two atomic bombs) but still a couple of orders of magnitude less than the energy released in the earthquake itself. In many places the waves reached as far as 2 km (1.2 mi) inland.

.@Reuters Photos: Releasing of paper lanterns during ceremony for victims of 2004 tsunami in Ban Nam Khem pic.twitter.com/bEDWEVbKoq
— BuzzFeed News (@BuzzFeedNews) December 26, 2014

More police professionalism

by digby

BREAKING UPDATE: Coalition of #NYPD Cops pay for plane with banner bashing de Blasio over NYC http://t.co/iybgMQ1LV2 pic.twitter.com/j03CvRoQIH
— Breaking911 (@Breaking911) December 26, 2014

Petulant, immature, unprofessional, armed, militarized cops acting out. What could go wrong?

Corey Robin is a New Yorker and I’m not, so when when I read this the other day I thought maybe he was feeling the emotion of the moment more acutely than I was and it felt a little bit over the top to me. But now I’m thinking that maybe he’s on to something:

Listening to these cries from the cops—of blood on people’s hands, of getting on a war footing—it’s hard not to think that a Dolchstosslegende isn’t being born. Throw in the witches brew of race and state violence that kicked it off, the nearly universal obeisance to the feelings and sensitivities of the most powerful and militarized sectors of the state, and the helplessness and haplessness of the city’s liberal voices, and you begin to get a sense of the Weimar-y vibe (and not the good kind) out there.

“… the nearly universal obeisance to the feelings and sensitivities of the most powerful and militarized sectors of the state.”

Can you see the problem here? I knew that you could. Not only must we respect their authority and instantly bow to their will upon demand. We must be sensitive to their feelings.

And as Robin further points out, the entire government apparatus seems to be politically terrified of them. This story in the today’s New York Times spells it out explicitly:

Just how dramatic the turnabout has been in New York could be measured by a scene that unfolded this week at City Hall. There were no Council members blocking traffic. There were no choruses of “I can’t breathe.” And there were no mayoral meetings with protesters.

Instead, there was unstinting praise for the police from the Council speaker, Melissa Mark-Viverito, who earlier this month had asked her colleagues to repeat “I can’t breathe” 11 times, for the number of times Mr. Garner said those words before he died in the encounter with the police.

“We are here to send a simple and direct message: that we unequivocally support, appreciate and value our police officers, that we condemn any and all violence against them, that we must end hateful and divisive rhetoric which seeks to demonize officers and their work,” Ms. Mark-Viverito, flanked by fellow Council members, said at a news conference.

Update: Read Howie’s remembrance of what happened when his record label released Ice-T’s group Body Count’s famous album featuring the song “Cop Killer.”  It’s quite a story.

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What’s in a racial label?
by Tom Sullivan

Esther J. Cepeda’s Washington Post op-ed discusses a study by Emory University researchers, “A rose by any other name?: The consequences of subtyping ‘African-Americans’ from ‘Blacks’”. Specifically, the study looked at how white people responded to the two terms and their attached stereotypes. Notice, there’s as much class as race here:

The researchers conducted four distinct studies in the realms of employment, media and criminal justice to determine the perceptions of the two labels in different contexts.

The data they collected point to whites believing that the label “Black” evokes a mental representation of a person with lower socioeconomic status, education, positivity, competence and warmth than the label “African-American.” And whites “will react more negatively” toward “Blacks” than toward “African-Americans.”

Even more chilling, the researchers found that use of the label “Black” in a newspaper crime report is associated with more negative emotional words than in an article featuring the words “African-American.” And whites view a criminal suspect more negatively when that person is identified as “Black” versus “African-American.”

Wonder how they’d react to calling them “citizens” or “people”? Or “neighbors”?

I noticed how both Cepeda and I both typed lower case above when writing “white” as though it is an ordinary adjective and less of a racial label, while the study prefers “White.” Race is always there, Cepeda notes, because “no matter how post-racial any of us thinks we are, we’re all carrying around varying degrees of racial and ethnic bias.”

For example, this reference in the report to another study jumped out at me for some reason:

Participants, who were predominantly White Americans, rated “poor Blacks” low in both warmth and competence and perceived them similarly to poor Whites and welfare recipients (Figure 1, p. 885, 887, Fiske et al., 2002). Conversely, participants rated “Black professionals” as having high competence and high warmth and perceived them similarly to Americans, the middle class, Christians, the Irish, and housewives (Figure 2, p. 638, Cuddy et al., 2007).

The Irish? HEY! What’s up with that?

If we want it …

by digby

The older I get the more pacifist I become. War is the most insane thing humans do — and we do a lot of insane things. It’s not soft or naive to point this out once in a while.

It doesn’t have to be this way … if we want it.

“Get the kid his peaches”

by digby

Journalist Helaine Olen (@helaineolen) called this the best Christmas column ever and I think she’s right:

He understood not only what we did but what we were supposed to do. :

Reck of the Tribune

December 25, 1986|Al Martinez

It happened one Christmas Eve a long time ago in a place called Oakland on a newspaper called the Tribune with a city editor named Alfred P. Reck.

I was working swing shift on general assignment, writing the story of a boy who was dying of leukemia and whose greatest wish was for fresh peaches.

It was a story which, in the tradition of 1950s journalism, would be milked for every sob we could squeeze from it, because everyone loved a good cry on Christmas.

We knew how to play a tear-jerker in those days, and I was full of the kinds of passions that could make a sailor weep.

I remember it was about 11 o’clock at night and pouring rain outside when I began putting the piece together for the next day’s editions.

Deadline was an hour away, but an hour is a lifetime when you’re young and fast and never get tired.

Then the telephone rang.

It was Al Reck calling, as he always did at night, and he’d had a few under his belt.

Reck was a drinking man. With diabetes and epilepsy, hard liquor was about the last thing he ought to be messing with, but you didn’t tell Al what he ought to or ought not to do.

He was essentially a gentle man who rarely raised his voice, but you knew he was the city editor, and in those days the city editor was the law and the word in the newsroom.

But there was more than fear and tradition at work for Al.

We respected him immensely, not only for his abilities as a newsman, but for his humanity. Al was sensitive both to our needs and the needs of those whose names and faces appeared in the pages of the Oakland Tribune.

“What’s up?” he asked me that Christmas Eve in a voice as soft and slurred as a summer breeze.

He already knew what was up because, during 25 years on the city desk, Reck somehow always knew what was up, but he wanted to hear it from the man handling the story.

I told him about the kid dying of leukemia and about the peaches and about how there simply were no fresh peaches, but it still made a good piece. We had art and a hole waiting on page one.

Al listened for a moment and then said, “How long’s he got?”

“Not long,” I said. “His doctor says maybe a day or two.”

There was a long silence and then Al said, “Get the kid his peaches.”

“I’ve called all over,” I said. “None of the produce places in the Bay Area have fresh peaches. They’re just plain out of season. It’s winter.”

“Not everywhere. Call Australia.”

“Al,” I began to argue, “it’s after 11 and I have no idea . . . . “

“Call Australia,” he said, and then hung up.

If Al said call Australia, I would call Australia.

I don’t quite remember whom I telephoned, newspapers maybe and agricultural associations, but I ended up finding fresh peaches and an airline that would fly them to the Bay Area before the end of Christmas day.

There was only one problem. Customs wouldn’t clear them. They were an agricultural product and would be hung up at San Francisco International at least for a day, and possibly forever.

Reck called again. He listened to the problem and told me to telephone the Secretary of Agriculture and have him clear the peaches when they arrived.

“It’s close to midnight,” I argued. “His office is closed.”

“Take this number down,” Reck said. “It’s his home. Tell him I told you to call.”

It was axiomatic among the admirers of Al Reck that he knew everyone and everyone knew him, from cops on the street to government leaders in their Georgetown estates. No one knew how Al knew them or why, but he did.

I made the call. The secretary said he’d have the peaches cleared when they arrived and give Al Reck his best.

“All right,” Reck said on his third and final call to me, “now arrange for one of our photographers to meet the plane and take the peaches over to the boy’s house.”

He had been drinking steadily throughout the evening and the slurring had become almost impossible to understand.

By then it was a few minutes past midnight, and just a heartbeat and a half to the final deadline.

“Al,” I said, “if I don’t start writing this now I’ll never get the story in the paper.”

I won’t forget this moment.

“I didn’t say get the story,” Reck replied gently. “I said get the kid his peaches.”

If there is a flash point in our lives to which we can refer later, moments that shape our attitudes and effect our futures, that was mine.

Alfred Pierce Reck had defined for me the importance of what we do, lifting it beyond newsprint and deadline to a level of humanity that transcends job. He understood not only what we did but what we were supposed to do.

I didn’t say get the story. I said get the kid his peaches.

The boy got his peaches and the story made the home edition, and I received a lesson in journalism more important than any I’ve learned since.

I wanted you to know that this Christmas Day.

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I found Zuzu’s petals

by digby

This is how I feel on this Christmas Eve:

Thank you so much for your support everyone.  Every time you donate a dollar a little conservative nut gets his wings clipped …

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Christmas monsters

by digby

I lived in Holland as a child and very vividly recall the tradition of “Black Pete”, St Nick’s assistant who will beat you with a stick if you are bad.  I’ve often wondered how I failed to become a total white supremacist after having that fear instilled in me as a little kid. The Dutch persist in this creepy tradition (which doesn’t really go back that far as it turns out) even in the face of international criticism, which is weird because in many ways they are among the more tolerant people in Europe. (And, in some ways … not.)

Anyway, while this tradition has gotten a lot of attention in recent years, this other one has not. In fact, I’d never heard of it:

Long before parents relied on the powers of Santa Claus to monitor their children’s behavior, their counterparts in Alpine villages called on a shaggy-furred, horned creature with a fistful of bound twigs to send the message that they had better watch out.

Tom Bierbaumer recalls the trepidation he felt every Dec. 6, when the clanging of oversize cowbells signaled the arrival of the Krampus, a devilish mountain goblin who serves as an evil counterpart to the good St. Nick. He would think back over his misdeeds of past months — the days he had refused to clear the supper table, left his homework unfinished or pulled a girl’s hair.

“When you are a child, you know what you have done wrong the whole year,” said Mr. Bierbaumer, who grew up in the Bavarian Alps and now heads a Munich-based club, the Sparifankerl Pass — Bavarian dialect for “Devil’s Group” — devoted to keeping the Krampus tradition alive. “When the Krampus comes to your house, and you are a child, you are really worried about getting a hit from his switch.”

Obviously “Black Pete” is some derivative of this horrible, horned creature. Which figures.

Anyway, here’s what he looks like today:

Merry Christmas kids.

But that’s nothing compared to this much, much creepier Christmas monster:

A record 17,000 people have joined the latest in a string of demonstrations against Islam in Dresden, eastern Germany, celebrating the rise of their far-right populist movement by singing Christmas carols.

The march on Monday night was organised by Patriotic Europeans Against Islamisation of the West – a group that has grown rapidly since its first protest in October.

Politicians from all major parties have been stunned by the emergence of the right-wing nationalists who vent their anger against what they consider a broken immigration and asylum system.

About 4,500 counter-demonstrators marched through the city under the slogan “Dresden Nazi-free”, warning that there was no space for racism and xenophobia in the country that perpetrated the Holocaust.

Most Pegida followers insist they are not Nazis but patriots who worry about the “watering down” of their Christian-rooted culture and traditions. They often accuse mainstream political parties of betraying them and the media of lying.

They sang Christmas carols.