REAL ART (and politics and culture)

2009-11-27T17:04:00.002-06:00

FRIDAY CAT BLOGGING

Introducing Becky's third cat...

Roi

I reminded Becky that once you pass the two cats per one human ratio, that the cats take over, but she really, really, really wanted little Roi to join her pride. But now I ask who owns whom?

Be sure to check out Modulator's Friday Ark for more cat blogging pics!

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

2009-11-26T16:40:00.002-06:00

Atlantis crew surprised by Thanksgiving feast

From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — Space shuttle Atlantis' astronauts thought they were going to give thanks with pantry leftovers Thursday as their mission drew to a close, but found turkey dinners awaiting them.

The meal switch was revealed Thursday morning when a TV interviewer brought up the absence of turkey dinners aboard Atlantis. “That's not going to be on your menu today, is it?” the interviewer asked.

“Shockingly, yes, I think it will be,” commander Charles Hobaugh said as some of his crew members grabbed the still unopened pouches of turkey and trimmings, and let them float around.

Hobaugh, a no-nonsense Marine, had made it clear before the 11-day flight that he did not care what he ate on the holiday, be it beef brisket or tofu. He made no special meal requests.

But somehow turkey ended up on Atlantis — smoked and irradiated — along with pouches of candied yams and freeze-dried cornbread stuffing and green beans — just add water and bon appetit.

More here.

Commenting on yesterday's Star Trek episode post, which took the Enterprise back to 1969 to interact with the USAF and NASA at the height of American space exploration, my old pal Shane wrote:

Made back when America was madly in love with the space program.

Indeed. There was once a time when a story like this would have been on the front page, and would have led off the evening news. When I was a very little kid, the powdered drink Tang's main advertising campaign was that astronauts drank the stuff while in orbit. Seriously, people went nuts for all this shit. Space food was a minor topic in national discussion for a while there back in the day.

Today, space food is just a sidebar blurb, which is a drag because such minor news status is yet another disappointing reminder that the final frontier is more Hollywood than national dream made reality. Longtime Real Art readers are probably aware of what a space geek I am: I'd really, really, really love another space race of some sort; I'd really love this country to get serious again about NASA.

But I have no idea what it would take. I mean, the first space race, back in the 60s, took place in front of a Cold War backdrop, tapping into anti-communist and patriotic cultural strains, which made supporting NASA as American as apple pie. Somehow, it seems unlikely that space travel can be tied to fighting rag-tag fundamentalist terrorists with turbans, beards, and low tech improvised bombs. Just not the same thing as the mighty Soviet Union.

Maybe the shitloads of water they've found in lunar soil, which makes Moon Base Alpha a distinct possibility in the near future, could do the trick. I guess we'll see about that.

Space food

Anyway, happy Thanksgiving!

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

2009-11-25T22:28:00.002-06:00

STAR TREK
TOMORROW IS YESTERDAY

From Wikipedia:

"Tomorrow Is Yesterday" is a first-season episode of Star Trek: The Original Series. It is episode #19, production #21, first broadcast on January 26, 1967, repeated July 13, 1967, and was remastered in 2006 for syndication broadcast on May 5, 2007. The screenplay was written by D.C. Fontana and directed by Michael O'Herlihy.

Overview: The crew of the Enterprise travels back to 1969 Earth and must correct damage they caused to the timeline.

More here.

This one blew me away when I was four years old. I mean, it has Kirk and crew visiting twentieth century Earth, interacting with the US Air Force, like only three years before I first saw the episode! I still have the image, burned forever in my brain, of the Enterprise flying through the blue sky, on the television set my family owned back in 1972. Definitely a keynote memory for me.

But my love for "Tomorrow Is Yesterday" goes beyond simple nostalgia. I mean okay, it's cool to see Star Trek placed in what is more or less our era, but this is a good time travel story, exploring the potential paradoxes and harms which could stem from knowledge of the future contaminating the past--indeed, much of the story is about keeping the Air Force from learning anything about their future visitors at all. And there are some great characters. USAF Captain Christopher is, in his own way, every bit as cool as Captain Kirk. The Air Force security guards are a lot of fun, too. Not the greatest episode of the series, but definitely good.

Alas, CBS appears to have disabled the embedding function for this one, so you've got to go there to see it. But that's okay. Here you go. Really, this is a good one.

Lieutenant Colonel Fellini: I am going to lock you up for 200 years.
Capt. Kirk: That ought to be just about right.

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

2009-11-25T01:26:00.002-06:00

OLD NEWS
Jimmy Carter says 'You lie' outburst was based on racism

From the AP via the New Orleans Times-Picayune back in September:

Former President Jimmy Carter said Tuesday that U.S. Rep. Joe Wilson's outburst to President Barack Obama during a speech to Congress last week was an act "based on racism" and rooted in fears of a black president.

"I think it's based on racism," Carter said in response to an audience question at a town hall held at his presidential center in Atlanta. "There is an inherent feeling among many in this country that an African-American should not be president."

The Georgia Democrat said the outburst was a part of a disturbing trend directed at the president that has included demonstrators equating Obama to Nazi leaders.

"Those kind of things are not just casual outcomes of a sincere debate on whether we should have a national program on health care," he said. "It's deeper than that."

More here.

"Well yeah," I thought when I first heard this, "obviously." Liberal friends all agreed. Definitely racism. "But impossible to prove," I thought almost as quickly.

I mean, as ludicrous as some of the radical right's views on health care reform are, it doesn't make conservatives racist to simply disagree with a black President. And yeah, some of these right-wing nuts are toting around guns at tea-bagger parties and town hall forums and whatnot, but we saw the same thing, more or less, back in the 1990s with President Clinton, who is white. How can you convincingly argue, in a public forum, that opposition to health care reform is "based on racism" when health care reform as an idea is racially neutral, and when a white Democratic President was treated approximately the same way by conservatives a decade ago?

I mean, I wouldn't personally go as far as Carter did, asserting that racism plays a central role in motivating Obama's critics, but race is almost certainly a major factor here. At this point in history, the Republican "Southern Strategy" is well understood: the South didn't go red by accident; for decades Republicans have been rhetorically exploiting the irrational racist fears of Southern whites in order to get them to vote for the GOP against their own interests. Code words like "crime" (black men will slit your throats) and "states' rights" (principally, the right to discriminate against lazy, criminal, and drug-addicted black people) and "welfare queen" (who is always a big fat black woman driving a Cadillac to pick up her welfare check) are now deeply embedded in Republican mythology. It's pretty tough to be a Republican these days, especially in the South, without buying, at least, some of the racist bullshit.

So it's out there. Racism is necessarily a part of modern conservatism in the United States. I mean, clearly, most Republicans don't think of themselves as racist, but they're very quick to tell you that most crimes are committed by blacks, or that they hate welfare, or that they want to get the federal government off "the people's" backs: I'd bet my copy of The Autobiography of Malcolm X that many, if not most, of these Republicans see black faces in their minds when they're talking about these issues.

But how can you expose the content of people's souls during an argument? How can you prove that when Republicans talk about "states' rights" that they're actually talking about turning back the clock on civil rights, especially when they won't even admit it to themselves?

President Obama was wise to steer clear of this one. It's an argument liberals can't win. At least, not today. I mean, liberals and conservatives don't even understand the term "racism" in the same way: to conservatives it's about how individuals treat each other; to liberals it's about individuals, groups, and institutions of power. When the left and right discuss racism, it's a fucked up conversation. They're not talking about the same thing.

For now, it would be better for liberals to keep pounding away at the limited right-wing definition of the word "racism," opening conservative eyes to the racial injustices they refuse to see. Because playing the race card in the way that Carter did simply makes them feel persecuted and self-righteous.

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

2009-11-24T00:27:00.003-06:00

FORT HOOD SHOOTINGS: TERRORISM/NOT TERRORISM

From MSNBC's Rachel Maddow show a couple of weeks back, right after running a montage of FOX News personalities insisting that the shooter, US Army Major Nidal Hasan, is a terrorist:

TURLEY: Well, first of all, I think that the Army is going about this in the right way. In fact, they‘re taking a very measured and unprejudiced view. They‘re actually investigating a crime.

Criminal investigators and lawyers and judges don‘t have the luxury that some people have on television to just simply say this must be terrorism. Why? Because we want it to be terrorism. Words have meaning in the criminal code. And that‘s what brings the integrity to the code. It brings this legitimacy.

And you can‘t just simply say that because somebody kills a large number of people, that it‘s terrorism. There are plenty of people that act out of rage.

If you take away a few of the aspects of this case, you would have a typical disgruntled worker shooting. We have these shootings all over the country where people are disturbed and disgruntled and isolated, and they come in and they shoot people in their workplace. Now, some of them are perfectly unhinged and they will latch on to religious views or political views. But what they‘re really acting out of is mental illness.

And so, when you really want to do justice, then you first have to start by defining what the crime is. And I think that these investigators have done a good job. They don‘t see evidence thus far that he‘s an actual terrorist.

Full transcript here.

Oh, I see. The liberal position is that Hasan is not a terrorist.

Apparently, according to Maddow, the reason conservatives are so dead set on labeling the Fort Hood shootings as terrorism is so they can lambaste President Obama for being a shitty national security guy. Okay, that makes sense, and it's probably even true--after all, the whole "terrorists are gonna get you" line has been pretty much the only idea that's gotten any traction for Republicans with the US electorate over the last decade or so; of course, they're going to go as far as they can with this.

But political motivations don't always make an argument wrong.

That is, sure, Hasan is an American. Sure, he's a disgruntled worker. Sure, he's probably deeply disturbed, psychologically speaking. But he's also, clearly, a radicalized Muslim, with intense anger toward the US government. So angry, in fact, that he attacked and killed over a dozen US soldiers. Personally, the only difference I see between Hasan and the 9/11 hijackers, between Hasan and desperate Palestinians who strap bombs to their chests and blow themselves up within dense crowds of Israeli citizens, between Hasan and the men who attacked the US Cole in motorboats loaded with C-4, is that Hasan is an American and the others are not. All these terrorists were also disgruntled. All these terrorists were psychologically disturbed enough to see suicide/homicide as a damned fine idea. Why is it that they're terrorists, but Hasan is not?

This is a stupid position for the left to take. Hasan is a terrorist. I mean, okay, the left has an argument, sure, but it's all legalese, all about protecting our darling "liberal" President, all quibbling over definitions, all rhetoric and very little substance. And it's doubly damning because it plays into the establishment narrative about combating terrorism, you know, the storyline that says we can win "the war on terrorism" by using force.

The point is that the awful act of violence at Fort Hood fully illustrates that radical Islamic terrorism, as a global movement, cannot be countered with more violence. When one of our own, an American citizen, joins the terrorists, it proves beyond a doubt that what we're really wrangling with is an idea, one that has some truth to it: American foreign policy pisses off hundreds of millions of people, some so thoroughly that they're willing to kill themselves while killing many others in order to extract what they believe to be crude justice. Pissing off millions more by waging war on them and others they consider to be brothers only creates more terrorists.

We cannot win a "war on terrorism." Indeed, such a notion is utterly counterproductive. Until we stop supporting the corrupt governments of the Muslim world, which oppress their own people, while giving us oil and strategic position in exchange for the billions we hand over to Muslim elites, radical Islamic terrorism will only continue to grow worse.

Pretending for partisan reasons that terrorists aren't really terrorists is tantamount to Nero fiddling while Rome burned. Expect more Majar Hasans in the future.

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

2009-11-23T01:38:00.003-06:00

OLD NEWS
WELL, ACTUALLY, IT WAS INDOCTRINATION...

From the New York Times back in September:

Some Parents Oppose Obama School Speech

President Obama’s plan to deliver a speech to public school students on Tuesday has set off a revolt among conservative parents, who have accused the president of trying to indoctrinate their children with socialist ideas and are asking school officials to excuse the children from listening.

And

The White House has said the speech will emphasize the importance of education and hard work in school, both to the individual and to the nation. The message is not partisan, nor compulsory, officials said.

“This isn’t a policy speech,” said Sandra Abrevaya, a spokeswoman for the Department of Education. “It’s designed to encourage kids to stay in school. The choice on whether to show the speech to students is entirely in the hands of each school. This is absolutely voluntary.”

More here.

Of course, this controversy was bullshit from the get-go. Obama's bland "stay in school" and "get good grades" address was the same sort of pablum every student gets every day, all day long, year after year, in various ways, in various forums. Only the paranoid, psychotic, and marginalized far right wing can "see" communist indoctrination embedded in such traditional go-school rhetoric. I mean, the conservatives never even had an argument, just a bunch loony raving.

I've filed this one away with black helicopters, New World Order fear mongers, "Birthers," and gun-toting Tea Baggers. You should, too. Like I said, it was total bullshit.

On the other hand, in one of the great ironies of this era that virtually no one caught, Obama's speech, while not socialist or communist in nature, was definitely indoctrinational. Long time Real Art readers may remember my countless assertions that, very contrary to conventional wisdom, American schools serve primarily to indoctrinate children into the culture of obedience and authority. Indeed, when the US public school system was just starting to get its shit together in the nineteenth century, famous education "reformers," such as Horace Mann, pitched the heavily militarized Prussian school system to the new super rich class of industrialists as the ideal way to create a docile work force for factories. The rest is history.

Today, you can get a high school diploma and be stupider than shit, but you fully understand, down to your bones, that there are rewards for obedience, and punishments for disobedience. Really, the entire debate about whether we have good schools or not misses the point: we have great schools, all of them, as long as it's understood that their function is to teach obedience, which they do extraordinarily well.

Part of the game, however, is that we all have to believe that what the schools are really trying to do is facilitate learning, which, of course, they do pretty badly for the most part--I mean, this doesn't really matter in a lot of ways because actual learning is only a secondary or tertiary goal for the schools; as long as teachers crack the whip, they're doing great. But because we're freedom-loving Americans, we just can't admit that one of our most invasive government institutions, education, runs utterly counter to our most cherished principles. We Americans, especially liberals, tend to glorify educators, mythologizing them in movies, television shows, books, and casual conversation. It's pretty sick, actually.

Anyway, it is in this context, the glorification of public education in order to divert attention from the schools' actual function, that the President made his speech. Really, one can interpret Obama's address as a plea to students to obey because obedience is the only way to "succeed" in school. That is, the speech was straight-up indoctrinational propaganda, totally sinister, just not in the way that the right-wing freaks understood it.

It's like I keep telling conservative friends: you have nothing to fear from Obama; he's here to save the establishment, not destroy it. I mean, c'mon. Right wingers ought to like all this Nazi obedience shit. It's totally up their alley. But why should I be surprised that large groups of Americans are stupid fucktards? They're just a product of their schooling.

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

2009-11-16T02:02:00.002-06:00

HIATUS UPDATE TWO

Okay, I give up. My computer wins. This round.

No need to go into excruciating detail, but when my computer crashed, oh, two and a half months ago, I saw it as an opportunity to do some much needed tuning up, clearing up my partitioned hard drive, reinstalling my operating system, yadda yadda. Suffice it to say, the partition has to stay for now, which means I'm only going to be using half of my hard drive's actual space.

Whatever. I'm starting to get sick of this blogging vacation. Look for me to be back online next week. I'll have a lot to say--I mean, you know, a lot's happened these past ten weeks or so, from the Obama school speech to the Longhorn's drive to the BCS championship, to this awful massacre at Fort Hood.

Yep. I'm gonna run my mouth with a vengeance.

Soon.

Meanwhile, if you're in the NOLA area this week, I'm doing another gig this Wednesday night, the eighteenth of November. Same place as last time, the Neutral Ground coffee house, Uptown, off St. Charles, at 5110 Danneel St., from ten to eleven p.m. The last show was a smashing success, lots of friends showed up to give me their rowdy support. I don't know that this time will be as wild as last time, but I'm proud of my show, and, at the very least, it appears to get people to think about issues. So come check it out if you're inclined.

And prepare yourselves for the return of Real Art!

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

2009-09-30T23:14:00.002-05:00

HIATUS UPDATE

Okay, so about a month ago I said I'd be back online in about a week. Obviously, I was wrong about that. And after blowing seventy bucks with Best Buy's Geek Squad to learn that nothing is wrong with my computer, which took three weeks instead of the one week they promised, I'm feeling a bit frustrated. The good news is that Windows is now booting up, whatever the reason, so the next step is a a Windows reinstall. I'm trying to do that in the bits of free time I have here and there.

Does anybody know how to permanently remove a hard drive partition such that I'm able to use my entire hard drive?

Does anybody know how to keep Firefox from hanging, which is what's preventing me from posting from my laptop? I use Norton virus protection, if that's any help.

Also, mark your calendars. In the no-blogging downtime I've had lately, I've crafted an hour-long acoustic set with a couple of one-man theater performance pieces thrown in for fun. And I've got a gig:

Wednesday, October 14th, from 9 pm to 10 pm, I'm the guy performing at the Neutral Ground coffee house, 5110 Danneel, in Uptown New Orleans.

Yeah, that's right. I'm a musician now. Really, I'm approaching it as theater, but it's definitely in a music venue. I'll be playing old songs of mine with which some of you may be familiar. Hey Matt, remember "Love God" from back in high school? Apparently, people still like it. More on this later.

Anyway, the bad tech hiatus will be over soon. Hopefully.

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

2009-08-25T23:42:00.003-05:00

BAD TECH HIATUS

In short, I can't get Windows to boot. When this has happened in the past I've always been able to get my old laptop to serve as a temporary substitute, but it's being very difficult right now, and the internet is problematic. So hopefully I'll manage to get back to regular blogging sometime next week, after I get some tech guys to look at the mess I once called my computer.

This is kind of a drag for me. We've got former Homeland Security Czar Tom Ridge saying that the Bush administration used those old terror alerts for political advantage, which I'd just always assumed, but still, this is yet another significant correction to mainstream US history that makes conservatives look really bad. And we've also got a possible DoJ torture investigation in the works, finally, thanks to that CIA torture memo that was released late last week.

Lots of good blogging fodder. But not for me. Not right now.

Sigh.

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

2009-08-21T12:48:00.001-05:00

FRIDAY CAT BLOGGING

Sammy

Frankie

Be sure to check out Modulator's Friday Ark for more cat blogging pics!

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

2009-08-20T22:06:00.002-05:00

Twelve Carry Guns -- Including Assault Rifle -- Outside Obama Event

From Talking Points Memo courtesy of Eschaton:

About 12 people were carrying guns, including at least one semi-automatic assault rifle, outside a building where President Obama was speaking today.

No one was arrested outside the VFW National Convention in Phoenix, according to the Associated Press, where hundreds of people demonstrated both for and against health care reform. There are no reports that the 12 were part of an organized group.

The man spotted carrying the assault rifle and a pistol, who gave his name only as "Chris", was asked why he was armed. "Because I can do it," he said. "In Arizona, I still have some freedoms."

More here.

Because he can do it.

Okay. That's a bullshit response. The gun's clearly a threat to the President. Period. I mean, this idiot may have had absolutely no intention of taking a shot at Obama, but he definitely wanted people to see him carrying around his assault rifle; he definitely wanted to send a symbolic message. Same with the other eleven there. Same with the two who showed up at a similar Presidential event last week in New Hampshire.

You put these high-profile right-wing displays of weaponry together with the Tiller murder and the shooting up of that Unitarian church in Tennessee, and an extraordinarily disturbing picture starts to emerge. Back in the 90s, these violent conservative weirdos were dressed in fatigues and mostly confined to their paramilitary "patriots" compounds: today they're running around in public, menacing Americans with whom they disagree, and sometimes killing them.

Not only am I worried that one of these psychos might kill President Obama, I'm also worried that they might kill me. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think civil society has been so bad since the decade immediately preceding the Civil War. Are these motherfuckers going to force me to do what I currently believe to be unthinkable? Will I have to buy a gun?

I don't really think I want to live in a country where I have to arm myself for fear of political violence. What the fuck is happening here?

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

2009-08-19T22:07:00.000-05:00

STAR TREK
THE ALTERNATIVE FACTOR

From Wikipedia:

"The Alternative Factor" is a first season episode of Star Trek: The Original Series. It is episode #27, production #20, and was broadcast on March 30, 1967. The episode was written by Don Ingalls, and directed by Gerd Oswald.

In this episode, the crew of the Enterprise encounters a "reality jumping" madman. This is the first Star Trek episode to deal with parallel universes.

More here.

Okay, I like this one, but I have to be honest. It's got some problems. For starters, it's got that first season awkwardness I've written about for earlier episodes, mostly due to the guest star, Robert Brown, who was cast at the very last minute because Drew Barrymore's father, John, failed to show up when they started shooting, apparently something he did often--it's tough playing a psycho in the first place, but doing it with very little preparation was something Brown just couldn't pull off. But it's not all his fault. The dialogue gets weird in places. For instance, Shatner had no idea how to deliver the episode's final lines, "But what of Lazarus? What of Lazarus?" To be fair, as an actor myself, I have no idea what I would do with such faux poetry, either. A lot of the episode just looks plain cheesy, too. The negative image shots look cheap, which they are, and I knew it even when I was a kid. But the continuity errors with Lazarus' beard are simply insulting. Is it a thick and manly beard? Or is it thin and wispy? Depends on what scene he's in, I guess.

But for all that, it continues to engage me. Parallel universes, holes in the fabric of reality, time travelers who jump from dimension to dimension. The idea of a man from our universe, which is made of matter, touching his duplicate from an anti-matter universe resulting in the destruction of all reality is something that captivates my imagination to this very day. I mean, these are the sci-fi ideas that made me a geek.

I don't know. Maybe you'll like it too:

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

2009-08-18T22:38:00.001-05:00

Why Does Popular Culture Treat Prison Rape As a Joke?

From AlterNet:

"Humor is part of the cultural attitude that (prison) is the one place where rape is okay," said Linda McFarlane, JDI’s deputy executive director.

McFarlane added that, "Jokes target the pain of a particular group of people and dehumanizes them. … It layers the discourse with a veil of acceptance."

This dehumanization trades on the well-being of the thirty-some individuals that write letters to JDI each week, telling their stories of abuse and asking for help. A 2007 survey from the Bureau of Justice Statistics found that nearly 1 in 20 inmates -- more than 60,500 people -- experienced some form of sexual abuse in the previous twelve months. That’s considered a conservative estimate since many survivors prefer not to admit the abuse they’ve suffered. As well, the study did not include people involuntarily detained in juvenile facilities, halfway houses, or immigration centers.

More here.

Right.

The obvious answer to the question posed by the essay's title is the prevalent American social anxiety about male homosexuality--anxiety about male homosexual rape, on the other hand, is probably close to non-existent, if only because it is inconceivable to most American men. Nonetheless, prison rape is a very real and very disturbing phenomenon, and the jokes, as the essay asserts, do nothing but grant legitimacy to this extraordinarily barbaric aspect of American society--indeed, prison rape, and other issues, are so problematic to me that, odds are, prosecutors will always strike me from any jury panel where sending someone to prison is a possibility.

Anyway, go check out the essay. It's only marginally about pop culture attitudes toward prison rape, and much more about the rape issue itself. We, as a people, really need to confront this issue, and in order to do that, we need to know about it. Clearly, the thing that allows prison rape to continue is that it is out of sight, and consequently, out of mind.

I cannot possibly imagine that the American people would approve of this if they really understood what was going on.

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

2009-08-17T22:59:00.001-05:00

White House appears ready to drop ‘public option'

From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

Bowing to Republican pressure, President Barack Obama’s administration signaled on Sunday it is ready to abandon the idea of giving Americans the option of government-run insurance as part of a new health care system.

Facing mounting opposition to the overhaul, administration officials left open the chance for a compromise with Republicans that would include health insurance cooperatives instead of a government-run plan. Such a concession probably would enrage Obama’s liberal supporters but could deliver a much-needed victory on a top domestic priority opposed by GOP lawmakers.

And

Under a proposal by Sen. Kent Conrad, D-N.D., consumer-owned nonprofit cooperatives would sell insurance in competition with private industry, not unlike the way electric and agriculture co-ops operate, especially in rural states such as his own.

With $3 billion to $4 billion in initial support from the government, the co-ops would operate under a national structure with state affiliates, but independent of the government. They would be required to maintain the type of financial reserves that private companies are required to keep in case of unexpectedly high claims.

And

Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson, D-Texas, said it would be difficult to pass any legislation through the Democratic-controlled Congress without the promised public plan.

“We’ll have the same number of people uninsured,” she said. “If the insurance companies wanted to insure these people now, they’d be insured.”

More here.

If the liberals I've been reading on this subject are right, and some of them are economists, this may very well signal the end of any kind of real health care reform. The whole point to the "public option" is to use federal economic force, by offering inexpensive health care to the currently uninsured, to make insurance companies lower upward spiraling costs for everybody else. You kill two birds with one stone, cover the uninsured while putting the brakes on insurance rates that for years have outpaced inflation at frightening rates.

I don't understand how these "co-ops" are supposed to accomplish the same thing. Indeed, without the federal purse, it seems highly unlikely that this exotic compromise idea has any chance of undercutting the existing insurance market. I can see them offering slightly less expensive health insurance, which, of course, won't do much in the way of universal coverage. Likewise, for-profit insurance companies will have no incentive to reign in costs because "co-ops" can't rock the market. That is, "co-ops" will still be pressured by the same fucked up "market" realities that pressure for-profit companies, you know, staying away from the people who really need insurance because they're either very young or very old or very sick.

Only the federal government has enough economic power to deal with this, which is why the only real solution to America's health care shame is the single-payer solution, or if you prefer, Medicare for everybody. Personally, "co-ops" remind me of the bizarre market driven ideas offered by the likes of right-wing think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation or the American Enterprise Institute, ideas that look interesting on paper but have no chance of working in the real world. Remember "health care savings accounts"?

This is all one big fucked up mess. House liberals may very well kill the bill altogether if there's no public option, and I don't blame them one damned bit. Meanwhile, Senate Republicans are denouncing the "co-ops." Apparently, there's just no pleasing the conservatives. And that's why the President needs to just ignore them and get this thing passed, with the public option. Bipartisanship means no reform, no matter what compromises the Democrats make.

You know, I've purposely kept my expectations for our new President low because I've not for one moment believed he's a liberal. But I had hopes for health care reform. I thought he was serious about pulling it off. That's what I get for hoping. Damn my audacity.

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

2009-08-16T19:43:00.002-05:00

QUIS CUSTODIET IPSOS CUSTODES
Means "Who Polices the Police?"

From AlterNet:

Cop Tasers Mom During Speeding Stop

"In January, an Onondaga County sheriff's deputy pulled over Audra Harmon, who had two of her kids with her in her minivan. A routine traffic stop escalated quickly.

The deputy, Sean Andrews, accused her of talking on her cell phone. She said she could prove him wrong.

He said she was speeding. She denied it and got out of the van. He told her to get back in. She did, then he ordered her back out.

He yanked her out by the arm, knocked her down with two Taser shots and charged her with disorderly conduct and resisting arrest. His rationale on the disorderly conduct charge: She obstructed traffic when she got out of the van. The speeding accusation: going 50 mph in a 45-mph zone."

More here, including cop dashboard video of the incident.

As was much discussed during the recent Professor Gates "disorderly conduct" scandal, it's generally a bad idea to mouth off to a cop, or even to disagree with him in any way at all. So this woman wasn't being very smart; she should have been all "yes sir; no sir" and shit.

Having said that, Tasering her was a clear cut case of police brutality. If you click through and watch the video, it's obvious that she was no threat: the cop used his Taser on her, which is lethal in some circumstances, because he didn't like how she was talking to him. Indeed, as the above linked post goes on to relate, the DA's office dismissed charges after seeing the video; she committed no crime.

The only crime here was committed by a cop who, like an amazingly huge percentage of his fellow cops, believes mouthing off to a cop is a crime, to be punished violently, on the spot, with police officer as judge, jury, and executioner. That is, police culture, nationwide, doesn't accept the laws policemen are "sworn" to uphold. As an elite class, cops think they're the law.

Is this ever going to change?

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

2009-08-15T19:17:00.002-05:00

Republican Death Trip

Yet another poignant essay by Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman:

Sure enough, President Obama is now facing the same kind of opposition that President Bill Clinton had to deal with: an enraged right that denies the legitimacy of his presidency, that eagerly seizes on every wild rumor manufactured by the right-wing media complex.

This opposition cannot be appeased. Some pundits claim that Mr. Obama has polarized the country by following too liberal an agenda. But the truth is that the attacks on the president have no relationship to anything he is actually doing or proposing.

Right now, the charge that’s gaining the most traction is the claim that health care reform will create “death panels” (in Sarah Palin’s words) that will shuffle the elderly and others off to an early grave. It’s a complete fabrication, of course. The provision requiring that Medicare pay for voluntary end-of-life counseling was introduced by Senator Johnny Isakson, Republican — yes, Republican — of Georgia, who says that it’s “nuts” to claim that it has anything to do with euthanasia.

More here.

I wrote this about then candidate Obama back in April of '08 during the height of the Reverend Wright dust-up:

The only way for Obama to survive this crap-scandal is to take charge of the narrative. He's got to get out of the rhetoric of denial, which is now doing nothing but digging a bigger hole, and start talking about real issues, the ones that piss people off. He's got to take sides. He's got to declare enemies. He's got to tell Americans that, even though he would never phrase it as "God damn America," we have some horrific sins on our national conscience, with which we have never dealt.

The time for uplifting good vibes is over. Obama's got to roll up his sleeves and ball up his fists. Time to fight. 'Cause right now, he's getting his ass kicked.

And I wrote this during the Congressional fight over the stimulus bill last February:

This was my biggest fear about Mr. Change. He talked big during the campaign. "Yes we can," he said again and again. But he also said all this uplifting shit about coming together, about being "post-partisan." These two ideas, change and unity, are incompatible. There are vast concentrations of economic and political power that will and are doing everything they can to resist both change and unity. The only way to get past them is to fuck their shit up. The only thing to get this wonderful "change" President Obama's been going on about for a couple of years now is for him to roll up his sleeves and punch these motherfuckers in the nose. Repeatedly. Unity ain't doing nothing but repeating the dreadful Democratic mistakes of the past.

Unless Obama takes the lead in branding these Republican know-nothings as straight-up bad for the country, which they most decidedly are, he'll lose, big, and take the nation down with him. Fuck friendliness; the conservatives don't go that way.

So, obviously, I think I, and many others with much louder voices than mine, have made the point already. You can't be friends with people who are beating the shit out of you. Thing is, President Obama appears either to not understand or to not be listening. Same difference: in his drive for bipartisan "unity," he's getting his ass kicked. If the President doesn't up his rhetoric into the stratosphere (i.e. "These Republican attackers are just f'ing stupid."), his goose is cooked, health care reform is dead, and so is the rest of his first and what will probably be his only term.

You can't have "post-partisanship" without a preexisting and popular philosophical and intellectual framework within which to contextualize it. That is, America just isn't ready to get along with itself. The right wing continues, even after some fifteen years, even after reality has rendered the majority of its favorite ideas dead, to be in hyper-self-righteous mode. They will not give up. They will not stop fighting. They will use, and are using, every tactic they can imagine, up to and including outrageous lies and, yes, even violence, to destroy anything they don't like.

Right now, America has little use for "unity." What we desperately need is a fighter. I'm rapidly losing hope that President Obama is up to the challenge.

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

2009-08-14T12:40:00.001-05:00

FRIDAY CAT BLOGGING

Reine and Dash

Be sure to check out Modulator's Friday Ark for more cat blogging pics!

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

2009-08-13T22:10:00.002-05:00

Averting the Worst

New essay from Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman:

For all that, however, the latest flurry of economic reports suggests that the economy has backed up several paces from the edge of the abyss.

A few months ago the possibility of falling into the abyss seemed all too real. The financial panic of late 2008 was as severe, in some ways, as the banking panic of the early 1930s, and for a while key economic indicators — world trade, world industrial production, even stock prices — were falling as fast as or faster than they did in 1929-30.

But in the 1930s the trend lines just kept heading down. This time, the plunge appears to be ending after just one terrible year.

So what saved us from a full replay of the Great Depression? The answer, almost surely, lies in the very different role played by government.

Probably the most important aspect of the government’s role in this crisis isn’t what it has done, but what it hasn’t done: unlike the private sector, the federal government hasn’t slashed spending as its income has fallen.

More here.

Krugman goes on to assert that the federal stimulus and the bank bailouts, as ham-handed as they are, have played an even greater role in preventing Great Depression II. Sadly, conservatives, who are ideologically opposed to government spending on anything that doesn't further conservative causes, will never admit it, either to themselves or others. They'll say it wasn't so bad in the first place, or that government spending made the crisis worse, or some other nonsense. And the corporate news media may very well project such views through their enormous megaphone. It's almost as though conservatives and establishment journalists simply don't have the intellectual structure from which to understand what has happened.

And really, when you get right down to it, the economic crisis, and the Obama solution to it, aren't so hard to fathom. While the US economy was entering a not so unusual business cycle recession, the banking system failed, causing the money flow to sieze up dramatically. That is, businesses and individuals, having lost confidence in the entire economic system, stopped spending, which created a frightening downward spiral of economic inactivity. The federal response was to replace the now gone private spending with public spending, keeping the overall GDP in survivable shape long enough for people to relax and get back to work, which is what is apparently happening right now.

Conservatives simply can't understand this, and corporate journalists are simply stupid. In their minds, government is the problem, never the solution, so a federal rescue of the economy is, to them, a non sequitur. But there really is an intellectual framework from which to understand all this. It's called Keynesianism, and it used to be the prevailing economic paradigm, back before the conservatives rammed neoliberalism down our throats.

All of us learned about Keynesianism in eleventh grade. Why do so few people remember it now? Especially after it's once again saved our collective ass?

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

2009-08-12T22:59:00.002-05:00

STAR TREK
ARENA

From Wikipedia:

"Arena" is an episode of Star Trek: The Original Series. It is a first season episode, #18, production #19, first broadcast January 19, 1967 and repeated on July 6, 1967. It was written by Gene L. Coon, based on a short story of the same name by Fredric Brown[1], and directed by Joseph Pevney. The episode introduces the Gorn. While pursuing an unknown enemy for an apparently unprovoked attack, Captain Kirk is forced by powerful entities to battle the opposing captain unarmed.

More here.

Another great one. And I mean great. This one's easily on my top ten list, and a viable competitor for best of all time. For starters, it's totally solid, absolutely clicking in terms of the Star Trek formula, no awkwardness, extraordinarily well paced, nothing weird or out of place. You get to see a battle devastated star base. You get to see some high tech Star Fleet ground combat technology. You get to see some red shirts die horrible deaths. You get to see one of the great Star Trek aliens, the lizard like Gorn. You get to see yet another god like and superior race coming in as deus ex machina, the Metrons. You get to see the Enterprise go to warp eight. You get to see Kirk in an extended hand to hand combat sequence, complete with blood and ripped shirt; you get to see Kirk win the fight by constructing a cannon using all natural materials. You get to see some fabulous pre postmodernism when the audience literally joins the crew of the Enterprise while it watches, helplessly, on the bridge screen while their captain fights for his life.

All of the above makes it a really good episode. But what shoots it to the top of the list is Gene Roddenberry's humanistic philosophy.

When Kirk defeats the Gorn, he moves forward to finish him off, but hesitates at the last second. He then chooses not to kill his vanquished foe, declaring, "No, I won't kill you," standing up and shouting to the superior and invisible Metrons, who have arranged the death match, "No I won't kill him! Do you hear? You'll have to get your entertainment someplace else!" When one of the Metrons appears, congratulating Kirk for demonstrating mercy, and speculating that humans might one day equal or surpass them, the Captain is humbled, but happy and encouraged.

I must have first seen this episode when I was four or five, and it is perhaps the single most important lesson I have ever learned: killing, even in battle, is deeply immoral, and is to be avoided in virtually all circumstances; human beings possess greatness, and can become greater still by embracing peace and mercy. Almost everything I believe today has a foundation in the humanism of Gene Roddenberry. I didn't get these ideas from the Bible or school or my family or rock music. I got them from Star Trek. "Arena" may very well be the clearest and most concise expression of that philosophy, and that's why it may very well be the best in the entire series.

Check it out:

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

2009-08-11T22:21:00.001-05:00

I FUCKING LOVE THIS SONG!!!
MARLENE DIETRICH SINGS "SUCH TRYING TIMES"

I've known New Orlean's public radio station WWOZ for years, and became a frequent listener once I moved to the Crescent City. I mean, there's no way I wouldn't be a bigtime fan of the station: no commercials, really intelligent programming of roots music, blues, jazz, zydeco, gospel, you name it, the sound of the Big Easy. But there was one show in particular, which appears to have been recently replaced with an equally good accoustic blues show, on Sunday afternoons. I don't even know how to describe the show's unifying theme, maybe "obscure and eclectic twentieth century music," but the song it always opened with blew me away, Marlene Dietrich singing "Such Trying Times."

Of course, I've loved Dietrich for longer than I've loved WWOZ. Her whole German cabaret thing drives me wild, and has been more than a bit influential to me as an artist. That she was one of the most beautiful and charismatic women ever to appear on the silver screen doesn't hurt either. So this song I'd never heard before instantly captivated me. It's totally in a Weimar style, sort of off-kilter, a bit weird, featuring both banjo and orchestra. I figured it was some gem from the twenties or early thirties before the Nazis started rounding up cabaret artists, communists, Jews, and homosexuals, but no: it's Dietrich's version of a song by John Addison from the early 60s British comedy film Tom Jones. I've never seen the film, but maybe I should, given the song's strength, and the fact that it got the Best Picture Oscar for 1963.

But really, this post isn't about the movie; it's about the song. Go check it out. I think I'm going to learn it for performance at open mike night. It's perfect for me.

Marlene Dietrich, 1930.

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

2009-08-10T23:44:00.002-05:00

Tarmac policy violated in smelly, stalled flight

From the Houston Chronicle:

A Continental Airlines regional partner kept 47 passengers inside a cramped and smelly plane over the weekend for twice as long as permitted under a policy the Houston-based airline adopted earlier this year.

The passengers who boarded Friday night's Continental Express Flight 2816 — marketed and booked by Continental Airlines and operated by ExpressJet Airlines — expected a three-hour flight from Houston to the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport.

They wound up stuck on the 50-seat aircraft more than nine hours, three in the air and six on the tarmac outside the terminal in Rochester, Minn., where the plane was diverted to avoid heavy rain at the Twin Cities airport. They sat and waited to be released from the airplane from midnight Friday to about 6 a.m. Saturday, as the parents of two infants on board ran out of diapers and the lavatory toilet stopped flushing.

In January, Continental implemented a policy “that no passenger should be subjected to a tarmac delay of three hours or more without being afforded the opportunity to get off the aircraft, provided we can do so safely,” Continental spokeswoman Julie King said in a written statement Monday.

And

Less clear was exactly why the passengers weren't allowed off the plane as hours passed, the cabin conditions worsened and the meager food supply dwindled to nothing.

ExpressJet said Sunday that it couldn't gain access for the passengers to the terminal at Rochester International Airport. But airport manager Steve Leqve told the local Post-Bulletin newspaper that was not correct and that “they could have come into the airport.”

More here.

After reading this story I looked around my apartment and very quickly felt a great deal of empathy for these essentially imprisoned passengers.

The company that owns the place where I live is doing some major renovations here, and the work has been going on for weeks. Because I work nights, and usually get up around 1:30 in the afternoon or so, I've lost some serious sleep as workers have hammered and nailed what seems to be every square inch of my home's exterior. But that was just the warm up: the renovations have had workers actually coming inside every other day for a couple of weeks now. They're converting my small balcony, which I loved because it gave my cats some much needed outdoor time in a relatively safe environment, into a "sun room." Well, okay, no balcony now, I guess I'll learn to love my tiny "sun room," and the cats will just have to deal. Meanwhile, they're converting my storage closet, in which I had stored a bunch of shit, into a microscopic laundry room; this involves work in my bedroom closet where the water heater is located. The long and short of it is that my apartment now looks like I'm in the process of moving, with all my stuff all over the place--it's not easy to get around in here at the moment.

Last week, my cable and internet were down for a couple of days, and I had to call in a technician to hook it back up--he told me the construction workers had disconnected it for reasons unknown. Last night, I had to spend the night over at Becky's place because I was informed in a terse memo shoved under my door Friday evening that plumbers were coming over at 8:30 Monday morning to work for many hours whether I liked it or not. Another time, workers left a window open after they were done; I got home six or seven hours later to find my air conditioner cooling the greater New Orleans area.

My cats are traumatized. My home life is utterly disrupted. I keep losing sleep. And my lease is up at the end of the month: I have a creeping dread that my rent is going up to compensate for all these renovations. I wonder how much I'll have to pay for my troubles. This is what it's like for a business to bend you over and stick it in. And that's exactly what the passengers on this flight had happen to them.

It's not simply that corporate forces have hijacked our political process, rendering the notion of democracy moot. Corporate forces are increasingly taking over our personal lives, and because they already control the government, there's very little we can do about it. Compare my troubles, and the plight of the passengers of Continental Express Flight 2816, to the people whose dogs and cats were poisoned in the tainted pet food scandal a couple of years back, or to the various salmonella and E. coli scares over the years, or to people sucked in and fucked over by subprime loans, or to people screwed by their health insurance providers. This shit just goes on and on.

Other than smiling to hold back the tears, I have no idea what to do about this.

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

2009-08-09T20:10:00.001-05:00

Congressman gets death threat over health reform

From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

A North Carolina congressman who supports an overhaul of the health care system had his life threatened by a caller upset that he was not holding a public forum on the proposal, his office said Friday.

Democratic Rep. Brad Miller received the call Monday, one of hundreds the congressman's office has fielded demanding town-hall meetings on the health care proposal, said his spokeswoman, LuAnn Canipe. She said the callers were "trying to instigate town halls so they can show up and disrupt."

"We had one of those kind of calls that escalated to what we considered a threat" on the congressman's life, said Canipe. "These are some strong-arm tactics, and we are trying to deal with and trying to talk to people in good faith about health care reform."

More here.

Wow.

This guy made a death threat, to a fucking congressman, because he wouldn't have a town hall meeting for the purpose of allowing conservative agitators to disrupt it. I've been thinking for years that the country's going nuts, but it is interesting to note that I can still be amazed.

More generally, I strongly condemn, of course, these right-wing disruption tactics, whether astroturf or genuine. If democracy stands on a foundation of free speech and lively debate, shutting down debates is necessarily anti-democratic, and therefore anti-American. And given all the misinformation and lies conservatives have been hurling about health care lately, such as the absurdly false Obama "euthanization program," Americans desperately need to know what's going on.

On the other hand, the left wing has been using this tactic on various issues for decades. It is truly ironic to watch liberals howl about all this when they've kept their mouths shut about it for so long: if it's wrong when they do it, it's definitely wrong when we do it.

But then, liberals have never been too good at looking themselves in the mirror.

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

2009-08-08T19:52:00.002-05:00

Ex-Democratic lawmaker convicted in bribery case

From the Washington Post via the Houston Chronicle:

Former Rep. William Jefferson, D-La., was found guilty of corruption charges Wednesday in a case that featured $90,000 in bribe money stuffed into his freezer and a legal battle over the raid of his Washington office that reached the highest levels of the government.

Federal jurors in Alexandria, Va., convicted Jefferson of using his congressional office and staff to enrich himself and his family, offering and accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes to support business ventures in seven West African nations. The eight-woman, four-man jury convicted Jefferson on 11 of 16 counts that included bribery, racketeering and money laundering.

More here.

If you serve as an opposition party representative during what arguably amounted to the most corrupt administration in US history, that is, the Bush era, the least you could do is keep your nose clean. Jefferson, for all his accomplishments, was apparently unable to do that. I mean, relative to the corruption of the likes of Tom DeLay and the entire Bush administration, Jefferson's down-home Louisiana style of corruption wasn't much more than chump change, but it's anti-democracy bullshit when it's hundreds of thousands of dollars, just as it's anti-democracy bullshit when Republicans do it with billions.

That is, fuck Jefferson. He betrayed his office and his nation.

Which reminds me, how is DeLay's trial going? And is the DoJ ever going to look into all those no-bid secret contracts former VP Cheney gave out to his company Halliburton? Are we ever going to get serious about corruption? I'm not too hopeful.

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

2009-08-07T12:11:00.001-05:00

FRIDAY CAT BLOGGING

Frankie

Sammy

Be sure to check out Modulator's Friday Ark for more cat blogging pics!

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

2009-08-06T23:59:00.002-05:00

INTERNET DOWN LAST FEW DAYS

So I got home Tuesday night to find both my cable television and cable internet service out. Always a drag. Fortunately, I had already pre-posted for Tuesday and Thursday, but could do nothing about my Wednesday Star Trek episode. Bummer. I guess I'll put that up on Saturday night.

At any rate, my internet access is back, so normal blogging will now resume.

Yea!

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$