Old Hickory's Weblog

The Howler, white racism and the Radical Right

2009-12-10T13:30:00.000-08:00

Laura Bush: adored idol of the downhome reglur folks?

Bob "the Daily Howler" Somerby is easily my favorite media critic. No one is better at cutting through the show-business mystification that has grown up around our celebrity pundits and reporters, especially those on television. On the one hand, it's not hard to see how goofy a lot of their reporting and commentary is. But without some meaningful framework in which to place their dysfunction, it's all too easily to be sucked into their often-bizarre scripts. Conservatives have the Liberal Press Conspiracy framework, which is so little reality-based these days that it's hard to see how that's not worse than having no way to frame the strangeness of our national press. Somerby isn't an ideologue. But he's constructed a narrative that does give all of us outside the Republican Party bubble, where Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck are taken seriously as political analysts, a meaningful way to understand the massive clown show our national press has become.

Pilar Marrero of La Opinión gives a good statement of a major aspect of the general problem in Ya está bien de la misma historia 12/08/09. There doesn't seem to be an English version, but she gave this quickie summary on Twitter: "My column. Tired of Tiger Woods, fed up with the White House Crashers, sick of balloon boy, etc" She talks about how it may well be a good marketing decision for an individual news service to give play to such stories that are entertaining but have no particular value in terms of public policy or anything else but pure titillation and gossip. But when all individual news providers start doing it, the market segment that wants substantial reporting on policy issues starts getting undeserved. And the social function of news businesses in informing the public of information we need to be good citizens and informed voters falls away.

But Bob Somerby also suffers a bit from the self-selected purity of focusing on the failures of major media. He's actually been trying for a while to focus more specifically on the more liberal/progressive media, which he sees as the main hope right now for reconstructing a news media based on journalism rather than pure entertainment. But the "purity" part comes out sometimes when he takes liberals to task, usually with good reason, for condescension and arrogance. If those sound like typical conservative buzzwords, that illustrates part of his problem.

Somerby doesn't exactly know how to approach the issue of white racism. And, in a closely related problem, his literalist/positivist approach to evaluating what people say is sometimes inadequate to understanding Christianist religious figures or secular far-rightists, who often use cult-like alternative meanings for common words and often pursue "stealth" strategies of deliberately concealing their conscious political aims. I've e-mailed him a few times about his overly-credulous approach to such characters as John Hagee, for instance. Preachers can be very slick about putting on a benign face for reporters who don't know how to ask them probing questions about their faith claims or their political activities, even if they were interested in trying to ask probing questions.

His columns this week have illustrated how Somerby bounces around the horns of this dilemma. On 12/07/09, he makes the plausible point that the Beltway Village denigrated Clinton and Gore in part because they were Southerners. Plausible - but that doesn't explain why the same crew mostly swooned at the manly manliness of George W. Bush, who played the Good Ole Suthun Boy role to a far greater degree than Clinton or Gore ever did.

On 12/08, he was harshing on Rachel Maddow for seemingly showing class snobbery toward voters uninformed about health care. But in the process, he himself makes the case that white racism is likely behind much of the opposition to health care reform:

Why did European nations pass national health systems in the late 1940s, while the U.S. failed? In The Conscience of a Liberal, Paul Krugman asserts (with limited documentation) that our failure at that time represented a racial breakdown—that southern members of Congress balked at the notion because they didn’t want to integrate southern hospitals. We have no idea if that’s true—but it’s certainly plausible. But even now, in 2009, we remain a much less homogeneous society than the European societies which passed national health plans in the late 1940s. Presumably, this can affect the societal drive to extend benefits to all. In a non-homogeneous society, dreams of The Other bloom, killing the generous impulse. ...

In her longer statement, [Melissa] Harris-Lacewell began by focusing on the motives of senators and members of Congress, rather than on the views of voters. But we would guess that her overall picture may well be accurate. It has been harder for our society to achieve consensus about national health care due to its racial/class/ethnic diversity. Most likely, due to its regional diversity as well.

So it's pretty clear here that Somerby is saying that it's very likely that white racism, and particularly the Southern political culture in which white racism has played a distinctive role historically and in the present, plays a major part in opposition to health care reform.

And yet he doesn't seem to think anyone else can say that without being a sinfully condescending liberal snob. And for that matter, he typically savages pundits who make such broad claims as he makes on this issue without citing more substantial evidence.

On 12/09, he was back into outrage mode at snobby liberals who sneer at reglur folks and hurt their feelings and make them vote for Republicans. Okay, I'm characterizing it a little ungenerously, but I'm linking it so you can read for yourself. But he really misfired on this one:

Over the past fifty years, part of the liberal world’s “messaging” problem has involved the tendency among certain liberals to exacerbate distinctions of class and region - elements of fragmentation which make social progress much harder. It was true in the 1960s, and it’s true again now: A certain type of pseudo-liberal has always loved to mock the (white) rubes who live in red-state America. The pattern is familiar: First, we mock their rube-like ways. Then, we marvel at the fact that these rubes won’t accept our own brilliant views! Over the past fifty years, this class condescension has made it harder to build consensus for certain kinds of progressive ideas.

It’s part of the liberal world’s “messaging” problem: A certain kind of pseudo-liberal has always loved to mock the rubes. (Their limbic brains don’t work right, we say. They’re a bunch of redneck racists.) And at present, no one seems to do this more than Rachel Maddow, the host of last Friday night’s program. What’s the matter with (voters in) Kansas? In part, the problem may lie with the type of sneering Kansas voters have long heard from us!

He goes on to chide Maddow for trying way too hard to come up with a criticism of Laura Bush, the former First Lady, for speaking at what was apparently a charity fundraising event. He seems to be making a good point about Maddow's carelessness of her reporting on the story.

But as an example of mocking the reglur white folks as "redneck racists", criticizing Laura Bush doesn't really qualify. Good grief! This is the former First Lady, a woman who has for most of her life been part of the Bush family, one of the wealthiest and most powerful families and political dynasties in the United States or anywhere. Sure, it might tick off Republicans to hear Laura Bush criticized. And, if his description is accurate, it probably made a lot of viewers groan at the sloppiness or triviality of the report.

But criticizing Laura Bush is an example of insufficient respect for downhome "redneck racists"? Please.

On 12/10, he seems to be thinking both ways at once, which is a quality I admire but can be confusing. He's talking about blog posts by Digby (12/07/09, 12/08/09 and 12/09/09) and Paul Krugman (12/08/09) in which they speculate about what the emotional appeal of climate change denial may be:

Liberals often seem to have a hard time processing this kind of information. Over the years, we keep failing to come to terms with the nature of the electorate. We keep being surprised by the things the American public believes—and we tend to react with expressions of ridicule. In our view, these expressions may tend to make our political problems worse.

Simple fact: Tens of millions of Americans voters are very “non-scientific.” They don’t believe in evolution; they don’t believe in global warming. They do tend to believe in a series of portraits about society’s sneering elites - the kinds of portraits they constantly hear advanced on programs like Hannity’s. But then, they have heard these portraits advanced, quite aggressively, over the past fifty years.

These people are your neighbors, your fellow citizens. It’s their country too. They vote - and they won’t be going away. Their beliefs are a fundamental part of American political culture, and will be for decades to come. If we want to effect certain types of “progressive” change, we have to work with those beliefs—for example, by trying to change them.

On our side, we constantly seem to be surprised by the things these voters believe. Fun is fun, and there’s nothing like scratching an itch. But aren’t we being a little bit clueless when we keep being surprised?

These people are your neighbors—your fellow voters—and no, they won’t be going away. One final note: If you want to know why someone thinks something, there is a traditional approach:

You sit down with that person. You ask.

Here he's saying that it's silly to not realize that many voters are misinformed, underinformed and/or wrongly informed about some important public policy issues. But then he says that those naughty liberals shouldn't be condescending about it. Which is fine as far as it goes. But if you sit down with a global warming denier and ask why they take that position, it would be gullible to just take their response at face value without getting some idea about their level of information about the issue and what related political and/or religious assumptions they may be bringing to bear on it. Because good old fashioned fanaticism may well be at work.

And while he recognizes that it's part of the conservative schtick to say how all them thar libruls are lookin' down on all us reglur white folks, at the same time he doesn't seem to recognize that they don't need actual condescension to make that claim. As a professional comedian like Somerby knows, there can sometimes be a fine line between respectful mocking and insult. But some level of scorn is also what it will take to get some people to even begin to re-examine their premises about some issues like global warning. If you're stuck with strong beliefs rooted in fear - if I believe in evolution I'll go straight to Hell, if we don't torture Arab prisoners the turrists will kill us all in our beds - it normally requires some mitigation of the fear for people to reconsider. Ridiculing the ridiculous can help mitigate those fears.

I would also say that just humoring people who are telling you crazy stuff to your face and trying to get you to agree with it can also be a form of condescension. What good does it do to pretend that someone who's telling you Obama isn't really an America but Kenyan instead is expressing a position worth considering seriously? They're just lying in your face, even if they happen to believe it themselves. You don't have to call them stupid white trash. But you don't have to pretend you think that claim is just as valid as any other, either.

Tags: bob somerby, radical right, republican party

Afghanistan "Surge" (2)

2009-12-10T00:05:00.000-08:00

Gene Lyons is a bit more optimistic about the prospects of Obama's plans in the Afghanistan War than I am. But that's partially because he assumes that Obama is looking for an exit strategy. But Gene emphasizes that the whole Afghanistan Surge is based on a shaky faith in the triumphalist interpretation of the 2007 "surge" in Iraq:

Petraeus, of course, conceived and executed the vaunted 2007 "surge" in Iraq that's touted as the Bush administration's greatest (perhaps only) success in that misbegotten war. While the strategy's ultimate success won't be known until U.S. combat forces actually leave Iraq, it's seemingly made an orderly withdrawal possible, which appears to be all Obama hopes for in Afghanistan -- an interval of relative stability enabling the Karzai government to get its act together.

Or not, which is where things could get tricky. Reportedly, Gen. Petraeus cautioned Obama to think of the current Afghan government as essentially "a crime syndicate." That is, a hierarchical, semi-conspiratorial organization based on tribal and familial loyalties rather than abstract ideals of patriotism or public service -- basically the only way Afghan society has ever run, and realistically the only way it's going to function after Americans leave. ...

The success of Obama's plan further hinges on Pakistan's ability to confront jihadist elements on its side of the border. Essentially, the president is like a poker player trying to draw to an inside straight, gambling that his troop buildup can buy enough time to bribe Taliban fighters motivated by dislike of foreign invaders more than jihad into changing sides, another Afghan tradition.

It's definitely a long shot. The hopeful part of Obama's policy, however, resides precisely in the calculated ambiguity of the July 2011 date.

And Gene Lyon's view is very much on the optimistic edge of a realist view of the prospects.

Tags: afghanistan war, gene lyons

Democratic blues

2009-12-09T16:26:00.000-08:00

Markos Moulitsis in Idiocy 12/09/09 expresses his outrage over the Senate Democrats' and the President's sorry performance on health care reform by reacting to a fund-raising e-mail he got from the MyDemocrats.org. Signed by President Obama, it asked for help against "big insurance company lobbyists and their partisan allies." Markos comments:

This is so freakin' obnoxious I can hardly stand it. We are about to get a turd of a "reform" package, potentially worse than the status quo. We have the insurance industry declaring victory, Republicans cackling with glee, and the administration is using that piece of s**t to raise money?

Obama spent all year enabling Max Baucus and Olympia Snowe, and he thinks we're supposed to get excited about whatever end result we're about to get, so much so that we're going to fork over money? Well, it might work with some of you guys, but I'm certainly not biting. In fact, this is insulting, betraying a lack of understanding of just how pissed the base is at this so-called reform. The administration may be happy to declare victory with a mandate that enriches insurance companies, yet creates little incentive to control costs or change the very business practices that have screwed so many people. But I'll pass.

Democrats are demoralized, and have little incentive to turn out next year. The teabaggers will turn out. If this is how the Obama camp thinks we can energize the base -- by promising them a health care pony for $5 to the same Democratic Party that is home to the likes of Baucus, Nelson, Lincoln, Lieberman, and the rest of the obstructionist gang -- then we're in for a world of hurt in 2010.

Jane Hamsher weighs in with a response to those who are resistant to recognizing that Obama's team has been pushing all along for a public option "trigger", which in practice nullifies the public option (Obama Fought Hard For Triggers, Why Won’t He Own Them? FDL Action 12/09/09):

It’s time that people took off the rose colored glasses and faced the fact that Obama’s “leadership” on health care was empty and passive. He went for the corporate-friendly “win” that enriches the insurance and drug companies, just as he has enriched the banks and failed to hold them to account. Those who look first to others as scapegoats for his actions have apparently not come to grips with the fact that as President of the United States, he’s a very powerful man who is not using that power to advance the progressive agenda they attribute to him. [my emphasis]

We have a sad national political situation in the United States. In a two-party system, we have one conservative Party, the Democrats, and a reactionary-authoritarian Party, the Republicans. It's not that the Democratic base or even a majority of Democrats in Congress are conservative. They're not, they are liberal (in American terms) or progressive. But the awful spectacle we're seeing in the Senate this week shows how a really small number of corporate-conservative Democrats like Ben Nelson, Mary Landrieu and Joe Lieberman (who was re-elected in 2006 in opposition to the Democratic Party candidate) can dominate the entire Congressional Party.

So here we have a form of bipartisanship that makes a major strategic difference: the Blue Dog Dems can make a coalition with obstructionist Republicans that blocks meaningful reform. Two weakness I see that could be easily removed that would make an immediate difference in the chances for progressive legislation are (1) the filibuster rule, which the Democrats should just abolish; and, (2) Harry Reid, who the Democrats should kick out of all leadership roles and maybe the Party, too.

And is there an appropriate metaphor to use for the role of our national press that doesn't sound completely melodramatic? Because only something like "the poison dagger sticking in the staggering, dying body of American democracy" seems description enough. That's not nearly so easily fixed. But boy-hidey, they've got the Tiger Woods sex story covered! I'm thinking about claiming to have had an affair with Tiger Woods myself just so I could get national coverage for about two seconds to say "we've got to have a public option!"

Seriously, when a reform as popular, as widely demanded and as practical for American business and the American economy generally as health care reform along the lines of that of Switzerland (itself more conservative than the successful ones most western European countries use) can't make it through Congress with a huge majority of the pro-reform Democratic Party in the House and a popular President who came into office claiming the reform mantle and making health care reform with a public option a major issue in his campaign - then American democracy is continuing to break down, to the point of practical paralysis when it comes to innovations needed by the general public.

Prospects for a major third party remain practically non-existent. If the progressive movement can't make the Democratic Party deliver on health care reform or dump Harry Reid from the Senate leadership, it certainly can't create a left Labor Party that can replace the Democrats. There's always the option of swearing off any real pretence of trying to influence policy decisions that matter to the lives of working families while declaring doctrinal purity. Chris Hedges gives an example of how to do that in Liberals Are Useless TruthDig 12/07/09. It's nice to be pure. And easy when you just wash your hands of the political battles that affect people's lives in a major way. Ironically, one of the accusations he makes against Democratic Party liberals he delivers with no hint of self-reflection at his own purist rant: "This sterile moral posturing, which is not only useless but humiliating, has made America’s liberal class an object of public derision."

A line like that is not something you would be surprised to hear at a Tea Party rally. And it also doesn't reflect the realities of this political moment. With the Republicans in pure Wrecker Party mode and just saying "no" to health care reform with a purity equal that that assumed by Chris Hedges, the real real fight over health care has been within the Democratic Party. And it has come down a few Blue Dog Senators operating with the ridiculous Senate filibuster rule and a feckles, conservative-leaning Senate Majority Leader being able with the support of the President to defend the insurance industry positions.

But progressives do very much need to distance themselves from the institutional Democratic Party. An obvious way to do that is to direct any political contributions and direct activism toward progressive candidates, especially including primary challengers to corporate Blue Dog conservaDems. And to organizations that actively assert progressive causes against conservative Democrats as well as against Republican. The Stupak Amendment incident in the House brought new negative attention to NARAL, for instance, a high-visibility anti-abortion group that shows signs of reflexively supporting Democrats like Joe Lieberman and using things like the Stupak Amendment to raise funds after the fact - but wasn't there raising a stink before Stupak passed.

Certainly there are groups like the ACLU and the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) that are actively pushing for a return to the rule of law on torture and war crimes that are fighting the efforts of Congress and the Obama administration to protect perpetrators from prosecution and to preserve and expand the government secrecy on which they depend.

There are ways to support practical progressive reform without directly supporting keeping Harry Reid as Senate Majority Leader, in other words.

Tags: democratic party, health care reform, obama administration

Health care reform - or what's left of it?

2009-12-09T00:05:00.000-08:00

As of just past my normal weekday bedtime, even the bloggers who have been following this the closest don't know what kind of deal the Senate Democrats have worked out on the public option in health care reform. Which in itself is an indictment of how badly the Senate Democrats have performed on this issue. From the statement that "Give 'em whine Harry" Reid put out late Tuesday, it looks like the Senate Dems used the filibuster as an excuse to cave to the insurance companies and sell the public down the river on the public option. Which in this context means, a health care reform that may literally be worse than none at all. If Brian Beutler's report is right and the public option is now reduced to a trigger, aka, has been eliminated from the plan in all but name, the Senate has agreed to gut health care reform. If this is what the Senate passes, I'd rather see the House Progressive Caucus kill the whole thing than pass a plan that would magnify the current problems instead of solving them. Which is what individual mandates to buy health insurance without the public option would be.

It's not over until it's over. But the Democrats' performance over this has been genuinely pathetic. And since we know from the "Gang of 14" incident over judicial nominations that the Republicans wouldn't hesitate to flush the filibuster rule over something important to them, the filibuster is no excuse. If the public option and health care reform with it go down, it's the fault of President Obama and the sad excuse for a Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. Yes, the Republican Wrecker Party has been totally negative. But the Democrats have their 60-vote majority that would be enough to overcome a filibuster even without abolishing the filibuster rule which they should do in any case.

If health care reform goes under - and passing a castrated, industry-friendly version is the same as it going under or even worse - it's a whole new political ball game in the United States. And I don't think any of us have an idea of what it's going to look like. Except maybe Jerry Brown, who seems to be able to see decades ahead on some of these major things.

The Democrats have no excuse for failing on health reform. No excuse.

Tags: democratic party, harry reid, health care reform

Shakira Mebarak at Oxford Union

2009-12-07T16:22:00.000-08:00

Shakira Mebarak - yes, the "hips don't lie" Shakira - spoke on Monday at the prestigious Oxford Union, as reported on her Web site: Shakira, Invitada de Honor Disertó en la Universidad de Oxford 12/07/09. Her topic was the democratization of education. She was there in her capacity as a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador and in particular in her role as an advocate for children's education via her Fundación Pies Descalzos, which has build schools for children in her native Colombia.

She also mentioned another topic: "Así es como quiero que la juventud del año 2060 nos vea: que nuestra misión por la paz global consistió en enviar 30,000 educadores a Afganistán y no 30,000 soldados." (This is the way I want young people of the year 2060 to see us: that our mission for global peace consisted in sending 30,000 educators to Afghanistan and not 30,000 soldiers.)

Amen to that!

Tags: afghanistan war, shakira, shakira mebarak

Feed your head?

2009-12-07T10:13:00.000-08:00

This post is about LSD and other cognitive enhancers in 2009. No, I'm not following up a post on a 1968 drug movie with this one to promote the uses of recreational drugs. As Henry Greeley et al, write in "Towards Responsible Use of Cognitive-Enhancing Drugs by the Healthy", Nature 456/12/11/2008:

Cognitive enhancements affect the most complex and important human organ [the brain], and the risk of unintended side effects is therefore both high and consequential.

One of the practical consequences of the "drug culture" of the 1960s and the collective freak-out over it in much of American society is that actual medical research on LSD and closely related chemicals was largely discontinued.

The National Geographic channel has a documentary called Inside LSD that has recent reporting on the state of LSD medical research.

National Geographic's current summary description of LSD at that Web site, which it classifies as a "soft" drug as distinct from "hard" drugs, a distinction that does not mean the "soft" drugs are harmless. Notice that they list as possible long-term effects "random flashbacks, may develop long-lasting psychoses, such as schizophrenia or severe depression." None of which are desirable.

LSD

Street names: acid, Bart Simpson, microdots, boomers, and yellow sunshine
Usage method: often packaged in small bottles or applied to blotter paper, sugar cubes, gelatin squares, or tablets
Recreational uses: produces delusions and visual hallucinations that distort the user's sense of time and identity
How it works: binds to serotonin receptors in the brain, causing changes in the sensory pathways of the brain
Effects: hallucinations, distortion of time and space, pleasant feelings and thoughts or paranoia, panic, and agitation, subtle changes in body temperature, blood pressure, and pulse, sweating, chills, headache, and nausea
Long-term effects: random flashbacks, may develop long-lasting psychoses, such as schizophrenia or severe depression
Physically addictive: no

Scientific American Oct 2009 has two articles on drug research that especially caught my attention, both of them by science writer Gary Stix, "Turbocharging the Brain" and "Return of a Problem Child".

The first focuses on the potential for some drugs to enhance healthy brain function, as well as treating health problems. He focuses on three types: methylphenidate (commercial names included Ritalin and Concerta) and amphetamines (Adderall), the latter commonly known as speed; modfinil (Provigil); and, donepezil (Aricept).

He quotes Helicon's chief scientific officer Tim Tuylly cautuioning about the superficial way the mass media often handle information about such products:

What the media loves to totally ignore is the side-effect potential and jump right to the wild speculation of this as a lifestyle drug. ... The reality is that if you've got a debilitating form of memory impairment these drugs may be helpful, but they're probably going to be too dangerous for anyone else.

Aside from some real news value to the possibilities of cognitive ehnhancers, there are also great commercial possibilities. Just as athletes find various forms of physically enhancing drugs appealing, drugs that could safely boost intellectual functioning would be enormously appealing to executives, knowledge workers of various kinds and students. As Stix writes:

The potentially huge market has led some companies to tak unorthodox routes to market, revisting a fialed drug or one that did not complete clinical trials and selling it as adietary supplement or as a less stringently regulated "medical food".

A sidebar provides some examples of how the three groups of drugs mentioned above affect cognitive functions (the bullet points are my own wording):

Methylphenidate and amphetamines: used medically for attention-deficit disorder (ADHD) and narcolepsy, and chan enhance normal functioning when someone is tired, but can cause addition, heart problems, seizures and hallucinations. In short: it can help you concentreate when you're sleepy but may give you a heart attack.

Modifinil: used to treat narcolepsy and sleepinessrelated to sleep apnea, may improve concentration and some recall like on long strings of numbers, but can be addictive and also causes skin rashes. Short version: it may help you on a math exam but your skin may break out while you're taking it.

Donepezil: used in treating Alzheimer's, could possibly help healthy memory and learning but could cause an actual deterioration in cognitive function. Short version: it may help you remember more or forget more, who knows?

Some of these drugs are being used, particularly by students, for non-medical purposes. But the research data Stix cites on their effectiveness as cogntive enhancers in the healthy suggests that the actual benefits are far less than what the users perceive. And the actual benefits themselves are questionable. Or, as Six puts it:

Repackaging old attention-boosting durgs as cognitive enhancers for students, executives and software programmers may produce only marginal benefits over consuming a double espresso.

And presumably they don't taste as good as a double espresso, either.

He mentions four drug classes which drugmakers are using to develop new medical treatments for dementia: nicotinic acetylcholine recptor activators, ampakines, phospho-diesterase (PDE) inhibitors and antihistamines.

The other Gary Stix article is about how new research has been undertaken that last few years to find new medical uses for lysergic acid diethylamide-25 (LSD). A study at the Swiss Medical Society for Psycholytic Therapy is examining how LSD used under carefuly controlled conditions may help in treating cancer.

With perhaps a bit of psychedelic symbolism, a study is also undnerway at UC-Berkeley on how LSD may enhance creativity, a claim which was made by LSD advocates in the 1960s.

[Full disclosure: I currently have a business relationship with UC-Berkeley though not with that study.]

Tags: cognitive enhancers, lsd

Krugman on cap-and-trade

2009-12-07T09:14:00.000-08:00

Paul Krugman at his blog gives an accessible defense of the "cap and trade" incentive system to reduce greenhouses gases in Unhelpful Hansen 12/07/09. The Hansen of the title is James Hansen (not neocon war zealot Victor Davis Hanson), who Krugman praises as "a great climate scientist", noting, "I take what he says about coal, in particular, very seriously." But Hansen argues that cap-and-trade is ineffective, and Krugman explains why he disagrees with that view. An excerpt:

... the fact is that cap and trade works. Hansen admits that the sulfur dioxide cap has reduced pollution, but argues that it didn’t do enough; well, it did as much as it was designed to do. If Hansen thinks it should have done more, he should be campaigning for a lower cap, not trashing the whole program.

Oh, and the argument that if you create a market, you’re opening the door for Wall Street evildoers, is bizarre. Emissions permits aren’t subprime mortgages, let alone complex derivatives based on subprime; they’re straightforward rights to do a specific thing. It will truly be a tragedy if people generalize from the financial crisis to block crucially needed environmental policy.

Things like this often happen when economists deal with physical scientists; the hard-science guys tend to assume that we’re witch doctors with nothing to tell them, so they can’t be bothered to listen at all to what the economists have to say, and the result is that they end up reinventing old errors in the belief that they’re deep insights. Most of the time not much harm is done. But this time is different. [my emphasis]

Tags: cap-and-trade, paul krugman

Afghanistan "Surge" (1)

2009-12-07T00:05:00.000-08:00

The invaluable Andrew Bacevich writes about how the Afghanistan War has become Obama's folly Los Angeles Times 12/03/09. He characterizes the nature of Obama's escalation decision well:

Through war, Bush set out to transform the greater Middle East. Despite immense expenditures of blood and treasure, that effort failed. In choosing Obama rather than John McCain to succeed Bush, the American people acknowledged that failure as definitive. Obama's election was to mark a new beginning, an opportunity to "reset" America's approach to the world.

The president's chosen course of action for Afghanistan suggests he may well squander that opportunity. Rather than renouncing Bush's legacy, Obama apparently aims to salvage something of value. In Afghanistan, he will expend yet more blood and more treasure hoping to attenuate or at least paper over the wreckage left over from the Bush era.

And he describes the obstacles that Afghanistant presents:

What Afghanistan tells us is that rather than changing Washington, Obama has become its captive. The president has succumbed to the twin illusions that have taken the political class by storm in recent months. The first illusion, reflecting a self-serving interpretation of the origins of 9/11, is that events in Afghanistan are crucial to the safety and well-being of the American people. The second illusion, the product of a self-serving interpretation of the Iraq War, is that the U.S. possesses the wisdom and wherewithal to guide Afghanistan out of darkness and into the light. [my emphasis]

A false version of the Iraq War holding that The Surge of 2007 represented a brillian military success by our glorious generals has already established itself as a "lesson of Iraq" to guide policymaking. And Obama's Afghanistan "surge" is predicated on that false version of the Cheney/Petraeus/McCain Surge of 2007 in Iraq.

Tags: afghanistan war, andrew bacevich

Meet the Press 12/06/09

2009-12-06T13:55:00.000-08:00

I watched Meet the Press today online. The entire hour was devoted to the Afghanistan War. The online presentation is sponsoring by Boeing.

There was a great diversity of opinion among David Gregory's guests. There was Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, both obviously defending the Obama administration's escalation policy.

There was that bold Republican prowar Maverick McCain defending the Obama administration's escalation policy but grumping about the vague implication that there might be a withdrawal date someday.

Then there was a pundit segment featuring Tom "Suck.On.This." Friedman and one-time investigative journalist and now notorious hack stenographer Bob Woodward. Both defending the Obama administration's escalation policy.

In a special online segment, the diversity of opinion was expanded with two pundits from The Economist, Robert Guest and Zanny Minton Beddoes, both defending the Obama administration's escalation policy but grumping about the vague implication that there might be a withdrawal date someday.

Pew Poll, Sept 2009: Public Support for Afghanistan War Wanes: Majority of Democrats Favor Removing Troops 09/22/09:

The latest national survey by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, conducted Sept. 10-15 among 1,006 adults finds that most Democrats (56%) favor removing troops from Afghanistan as soon as possible. Just 37% of Democrats say U.S. and NATO troops should remain in the country, down somewhat from the 45% who said this in June. By contrast, Republicans by a wide margin (71% to 25%) continue to favor maintaining U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan. Opinion among independents mirrors that of the population as a whole; currently, 51% favor keeping U.S. and NATO troops in the country while 43% are opposed.

Pew Poll, Nov 2009: Polling Wars: Hawks vs. Doves by Jodie Allen 11/23/09:

Though most Americans are not ready to cut and run [sic], an increasing number are having second thoughts about U.S. involvement in Afghanistan. Pew Research Center's November poll finds the number saying the initial decision to use force in that country was the right one has fallen to 56%, 8 percentage points below the level recorded in January. ...

... only among Republicans is there substantial support for keeping troops in Afghanistan (71% favor staying until the situation there stabilizes)...

That article provides some useful historical analysis showing how near-impossible it will be to increase public support for the Afghanistan War on a sustained basis.

Pew Poll, U.S. Seen as Less Important, China as More Powerful: Isolationist Sentiment Surges to Four-Decade High 12/03/09. This was a poll sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). The report uses the word "isolationist" carelessly; among the political class and punditocracy, "isolationist" is a dirty word referring to any serious challenge to the state of permanent war once known as the Cold War, now morphed into the Long War. But the findings are important:

In polling conducted before President Obama's decision to increase U.S. troop levels in Afghanistan, both groups expressed pessimism about prospects for long-term stability in Afghanistan. Fewer than half of the public (46%) and CFR members (41%) say it is very or somewhat likely that Afghanistan will be able to withstand the threat posed by the Taliban. While half of the CFR members (50%) favor increasing the number of troops in Afghanistan, just 32% of the public agrees.

In the midst of two wars abroad and a sour economy at home, there has been a sharp rise in isolationist sentiment among the public. For the first time in more than 40 years of polling, a plurality (49%) says the United States should "mind its own business internationally" and let other countries get along the best they can on their own. ...

Only about half of CFR members (49%) say the Taliban's growing strength in Afghanistan represents a major threat to the United States; 70% of the public sees this as a major threat. Yet CFR members are much more supportive than the public of the initial decision to use force in Afghanistan -- fully 87% say this was the right decision compared with 56% of the public. CFR members also are more supportive than the public of increasing the number of troops in Afghanistan.

You wouldn't have guessed from watching Meet the Press today that the Afghanistan War was so unpopular.

It's a reflection of what a serious gap there is between the assumptions and policy preferences of the political class and the pooh-bahs of the Establishment press, on the one hand, and the American people, on the other. That gap is particularly striking within the Democratic Party and especially on the issue of the Afghanistan War.

Tags: afghanistan war

Four columns

2009-12-06T00:05:00.000-08:00

Here are four columns that present a good snapshot of what is wrong with our national press. First, the stars, both in the New York Times in their regular high-profile Sunday columns:

Maureen Dowd, The Lady and the Tiger. Second consecutive column complaining about White House social secretary Desiree Rogers. MoDo compares her to Tiger Woods. (?!?)

Frank Rich, Obama’s Logic Is No Match for Afghanistan. One of the highest-profile liberal "opinion makers". He uses a column on the Afghanistan War to also complain about those White House party crashers. And then he works in - why not? - Tiger Woods.

Democracy can't survive over the long run with a national press like this.

On the other hand, here are two columnists who you are not likely to see on the Sunday morning bobblehead shows, Joe Galloway of McClatchy and Jules Witcover of TMS Features. Witcover got booted from his long-time gig as a columnist for the Baltimore Sun years ago, almost certainly because of his sensible criticisms of the Iraq War.

Joe Galloway, It’s hard to get into the holiday spirit 11/25/09. He writes, "What's the point in having a Democrat in the White House and Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress if they all act like Republicans?" A question most Democratic base voters are asking right now. On the Afghanistan escalation, he writes, "There are several very good reasons why sending 34,000 more U.S. troops there is a very bad decision." And proceeds to explain.

Jules Witcover, Going for the Quick Fix 12/04/09. Witcover says of Obama's Afghanistan escalation: "He is rolling the dice on this one, against high odds."

No word in these columns from Galloway and Witcover, however, on White House party crashers or Tiger Woods' love life.

Tags: establishment press, frank rich, joe galloway, jules witcover, jules maureen dowd

Newt at Millsaps

2009-12-05T14:38:00.000-08:00

My undergraduate alma mater is a Methodist-affiliated liberal arts college in Jackson MS, Millsaps College, which is a great liberal arts college. But when I saw that they posted this on their Facebook page, Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich Speaks at Millsaps College Millsaps College Website 12/04/09, I couldn't help but poke a little fun at them in the comments there. Millsaps has a reputation in Misissisippi as being a particularly liberal place, for reasons that are not immediately apparent. A lot of the following is from my comments that I left there.

This is kind of sad. Surely Millsaps can get more distinguished speakers than a has-been politician who hasn't held any political office of responsibility in over 10 years and whose ideas seem to largely consist of the magic mantra of deregulate, cut taxes and make wars.

The speech itself was pretty thin. He tells a long, dumb story about people who don't know how to grow corn. And about how 2+2=4. He blames the 2007 housing crash was due to a "cultural crisis" because too many dang poor people wanted to buy a house. No word from Newt on the massive fraud committed by lenders, the recklessness of investment bankers creating high-risk derviatives based on subprime mortgages, and the irresponsibility of the Federal Reserve and other federal regulators that led major financial institutions getting way outsides the bounds of responsible lending and investment practices. But he does gripe about administration "czars", whose jobs he says are un-Constitutional. And he recommends Communist China as country we should imitate on promoting investment. Go figure.

And what's with the photo? Everyone there but Newt seems to be in a white robe! And when I watch the video, there is a whole phalanx of people (students?) behind the speaker in "Millsaps" shirts, the ones that look like the white robes in the photo. What's up with that? Are you hoping for donations from Newt Gingrich fans? Anything is possible, I guess.

What's next? Inviting Glenn Beck to enlighten Millsaps students on theology? Rush Limbaugh to instruct them on journalistic ethics?

You know, it's sweet and all that State Auditor Pickering opened with the Pledge of Allegiance - a not particularly spirited version, I notice - and a prayer. A very *Christian* prayer, at that, "in the name of Your Son Jesus Christ who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit forever". I guess Pickering figured that there probably wasn't none of them thar Jews showin' up to hear ole Newt. (You do still admit Jews to Millsaps, don't you?) But I guess it makes sense. Newt impressed everyone with his Christian witness in 1996 when he recommended that his Republican colleagues attack their Democratic opponents with words like "anti-flag", "anti-family", "anti-child", "bizarre", "decay", "radical", "sick", "traitors". Yeah, that Newt, he's a class act.

Gingrich's puerile speech seemed to be aimed to a group of high-school admirers of Ayn Rand. It's pretty darn boring but the video is there so you can watch it if you feel like punishing yourself.

Tags: millsaps college, newt gingrich

Will 2009 be the high-water mark of reform for the Obama administration?

2009-12-04T00:15:00.000-08:00

If so, that would be one of biggest squandered opportunities in the history of the country.

Paul Krugman in Things to come 11/30/09 at his blog lays out what could be called the Clinton II scenario: an Obama administration that survives for eight years but achieves only incremental reforms. His summary version: "So what I see is years of terrible job markets, combined with political paralysis."

He does offer the possibility of an alternative:

What can the rest of us do? Progressives have to keep the pressure on. The time for trusting the administration to do what's necessary is past — all indications are that it won't, not on its own. But maybe, just maybe, the president can be brought to see the danger he's running by playing it safe. [my emphasis]

One factor that Krugman doesn't mention in his Clinton II scenario is the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. With the Iraq War still not resolved and an open-ended escalation in Afghanistan, he has two situations there that can go really bad. And escalating in Afghanistan virtually assures that things will go really badly there.

The timid Democrats, and the corporate-owned Blue Dogs, may be calculating that the Republican Party is racking up so many negatives with its current Tea Party antics that it will be effectively relegated to permanent minority-party status in the foreseeable future. That was what Dick Cheney and Karl Rove thought they would be able to do the Democratic Party, too, and that should be a cautionary example.

But the future won't look exactly like the past. What I see is a Cheneyized Republican Party with big issues they can exploit; a Democratic President in the White House who appears more interested in soothing the fears of Wall Street bankers than about what his voting base needs and demands; a public that has been ready for big reforms this year but is now losing confidence that the Democratic Party can provide them; and, a badly broken national press whose dysfunctions the Republican Party is far more able to exploit than the Democrats.

I can't predict what comes out of that picture. The most hopeful scenario would be a 2010 turnaround by the White House that leads to an aggressive push for a federal jobs program, comprehensive immigration reform and the Employee Free Choice Act. And decides it's time to disengage from Afghanistan.

That scenario doesn't look likely at this point. And if a solid health care reform isn't passed very soon, it becomes far less likely.

Otherwise, the Clinton II scenario becomes one of several. But "something's got to give" in this situation. Hope can be a powerful thing in politics. So can frustrated hope.

Tags: obama administration, paul krugman

More on Tom Hayden and Obama's disappointing the base

2009-12-04T00:06:00.000-08:00

I posted earlier about the criticism that Joan Walsh directed at Tom Hayden for what she saw as an overly-credulous attitude toward Obama on progressive priorities. I was focusing there on her criticism of his 2008 position. On Thursday, Digby seconded Joan's criticism in Fergawdsake Hullabaloo 12/03/09.

There were a lot of comments to her post, including some good ones gizmo, rilkefan (great screen name!) and Mitchell Freedman. I'm incorporating into this post most of what I said in a comment there. Digby always seems to get a number of commenters lecture shaking their heads at her thinking that anything positive can be accomplished because Big Money has everything locked up and why bother to complain about them. I guessing most of those people fit into the category I call "Republicans and future Republicans".

Here I want to talk more about the substance of Tom Hayden's position on Obama. Because it's actually carefully considered and is not really much different from the analyses that Joan and Digby also make of Obama and the state of the Democratic Party.

It's true that those who were adult New Left activists in the 1960s do sometimes have a tendency to fall back on wooden rhetoric, even someone like Tom with a lot of experience in retail electoral politics. But the "manifesto" quality of that group statement to which Joan and Digby are referring isn't his normal style, either. What he has to say about politics and about both the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars is usually worth hearing. In the case of Iraq, he was personally active early on in trying to bring together Iraqis and Americans to promote peace talks. And his book Ending the War in Iraq (2007) is going to be worth reading for a long time. I learned during these last eight years that there was particular value in reading some of the better analyses of the Vietnam War from the time that the war was still going on. And the same will no doubt be true about those from the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars.

Joan singles out Tom in her criticism, but the 2008 statement she quotes actually was a four-person manifesto-type endorsement. Tom himself wrote separately at the Huffington Post in 2008 about his endorsement of Obama, titled An Endorsement of the Movement Barack Obama Leads. He wrote there:

As for issues, the differences between Obama and Clinton on Iraq are difficult to pin down. Obama was against the Iraq war five years ago, and favors a more rapid pullout of combat troops than Clinton. But both would replace combat troops with an American counterinsurgency force of tens of thousands, potentially turning Iraq into Central America in the 1970s. Obama seems more supportive of diplomacy than Clinton, but he supports military intervention in Pakistan's tribal areas. Edwards favors a more rapid pullout from Iraq, but is unlikely to prevail. ...

I do not like the Hillary haters in our midst. As president, her court appointees alone would represent a relief from the present rigging of the courts and marginal improvements for working people. On Iraq, I believe she could be pushed to withdraw. She is a centrist, and it will be up to social movements to alter the center. ...

Is Barack the one we have been waiting for? Or is it the other way around? Are we the people we have been waiting for? Barack Obama is giving voice and space to an awakening beyond his wildest expectations, a social force that may lead him far beyond his modest policy agend [sic]. Such movements in the past led the Kennedys and Franklin Roosevelt to achievements they never contemplated. [As Gandhi once said of India's liberation movement, "There go my people. I must follow them, for I am their leader."]

That last sentence appears in the original in brackets,for some reason; my emphasis is in bold.

And I think his perspective as he expressed it then, "sixties" rhetoric or not, is basically correct. And it's essentially the same position that Joan Walsh is arguing: Obama is governing as a "centrist", i.e., a corporate Democrat who is far too open to the advice of warmongers on foreign policy and to advocates of what most of the world calls "neoliberalism" on domestic policy. If he becomes the leader of a successful progressive movement, it will be because the base forces him to do so. Politics is still politics, in the 2000s as well in in the 1960s. And it is still "up to social movements to alter the center."

The article which set Joan Walsh and Alex Koppelman and Digby off is Obama Announces Afghanistan Escalation The Nation 12/01/09, which he opens by saying, "It's time to strip the Obama sticker off my car."

His immediate comment on the Afghanistan escalation was:

The expediency of his decision was transparent. Satisfy the generals by sending 30,000 more troops. Satisfy the public and peace movement with a timeline for beginning withdrawals of those same troops, with no timeline for completing a withdrawal.

Obama's timeline for the proposed Afghan military surge mirrors exactly the eighteen-month Petraeus timeline for the surge in Iraq.

He makes it very clear that he would expect to support Obama in 2012 against Sarah Palin or any other Republican candidacy "of the pitchfork carriers for the pre-Obama era." But he also stresses the need to actively oppose the Afghanistan War:

Beyond public persuasion and pressuring Congress, activists are sure to be hitting the streets and precincts in the year ahead. The antiwar movement has a certain leverage based on the current doubt in the minds of voters and policy experts, and the potential dissent from within the Obama base. Democratic turnout increased 2.6 percent in 2008 over 2004, while Republican votes dropped by 1.3 percent. Twenty-two million more young people voted in 2008 than in 2004. The unprecedented energies of those young people who volunteered their time, money and hope could drain away by 2012, if not sooner.

In addition, the peace movement will be globalizing its reach as Obama seeks to extract more troop concessions from wary NATO countries. Opposition is particularly strong in the United Kingdom, Canada, Germany and France. When Obama accepts the Nobel Prize in Oslo on December 10, he may address as many as ten thousand protestors. ...

The albatross of the Karzai government will threaten any plans to rapidly expand the Afghan army and police, themselves divided along sectarian lines. In 2005, the Kabul regime ranked 117th on the list compiled by Transparency International; by this year it was 176th. [my emphasis]

His piece is mostly about the Afghanistan War and it's worth reading in full.

The last eight years have reinforced very strongly for me the need for the United States to drastically reduce our military budget and adopt a far more cautious role about military intervention. The Long War is corrupting our democracy and seriously undermining the rule of law. What the constant state of war and manufactured fear is doing to the US is grimly illustrated in this Pew poll commissioned by the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), reported with the title U.S. Seen as Less Important, China as More Powerful 12/03/09, as shown by their summary table on description of their findings on American opinions about torture:

The proportion of the public saying torture is at least sometimes justified against suspected terrorists has increased modestly over the past year. Currently, 54% say torture is at least sometimes justified to gain important information from suspected terrorists, compared with 49% in April and 44% in February.

As long as the US is spending half of the world's military budget, the ugly reality is we will have a military establishment closely tied with major economic interests from weapons manufacturers to mercenary companies and war-loving think-tanks who will always be finding new enemies to fear and fight. And the findings of that poll on torture show the kind of baggage it brings with it.

Tags: long war, obama administration, tom hayden, torture

Joan Walsh on adjusting to Obama's disastrous Afghanistan policy

2009-12-03T00:05:00.000-08:00

There has been some amount of grumping among antiwar Democrats about whether Obama's escalation in Afghanistan is a betrayal of his campaign and of the trust his supporters put in him.

(I can't help but think in this connection about the phony hissy fit the Republicans threw about MoveOn.org's "General Betray-us" ad. Although that ad was a clumsy conception, no one actually has any trouble distinguishing between the concept of "betraying" the trust of supporters - in fact American politicians routinely accuse their opponents of betraying their supporters' trust - and accusing someone of betraying the country or of being a traitor to the nation.)

Other Democrats who also oppose the Afghanistan War are saying, weren't you people listening to what Obama was actually saying in his campaign of 2008? He said as clear as day that he intended to put more emphasis on the Afghanistan War and to send in more troops. I always expected to disagree with his Afghanistan policy because I disagreed with it during the campaign last year. I had hoped he would reassess his intent to escalate. But this is a campaign position that Obama is keeping and following through with. I hope in 2010 he's as eager to follow through on his 2008 support for the Employee Free Choice Act to protect workers' rights to organize unions.

Phyllis Bennis in her well-argued analysis of President Obama's Afghanistan Escalation Speech 12/02/09 at the Institute for Policy Studies site puts the case fairly, if a bit disingeniously, when she writes that his escalation speech Tuesday did not reflect "accountability ... to President Obama’s base, the extraordinary mobilization of people who swept this anti-war and anti-racist candidate into office."

But Joan Walsh has the better part of this particular little argument in The poster boy for progressive self-delusion Salon 12/02/09 when she scolds Tom Hayden for over-rating Obama's lbieralism in his primary endorsement of Obama over Clinton. Joan's main point is this. Even though she voted for Obama over Clinton in the primaries by her own account, she makes a realistic and important point:

I want to be clear here. I am not saying, and I never said, that Clinton was more progressive than Obama on any of these issues. But Hayden, Michael Moore and too many progressives claimed, with zero evidence, that Obama would be more progressive than Clinton. He wasn't, and he isn't. There were many reasons to choose Obama over Clinton, but that he was the better progressive was never one of them.

Still, as entertaining as it may be to read her poking fun at the leaden quality of Tom's endorsement of Obama - "I felt like I was in some kind of Maoist reeducation camp, being urged to struggle mightily and cheerfully for Chairman Obama" - I also think she isn't giving enough credit to the point that he was making in his 2008 endorsement. Just as Joan was struck at the time by the tone of it, I was struck by the fact that he was carefully qualifying that what he was really endorsing was the movement that coalesced around Obama's campaign. But she does quote this part:

We intend to join and engage with our brothers and sisters in the vast rainbow of social movements to come together in support of Obama's unprecedented campaign and candidacy. Even though it is candidate-centered, there is no doubt that the campaign is a social movement, one greater than the candidate himself ever imagined....

That's an important factor that we shouldn't lose sight of. The hopes that not just Obama activists but a large portion of the majority that voted for him placed in the potential Obama represented were bigger than the cautious candidate's stated positions. And if as President he can't show that he can and will deliver on major elements of those hopes, the Democrats could wind up blowing one of the most promising opportunities for progressive reforms that any American Presidential administration has ever had.

Tags: democratic party, obama administration

Escalating in Afghanistan

2009-12-01T16:20:00.000-08:00

Here's my reaction:

"Forward, the Light Brigade!"
Was there a man dismay'd?
Not tho' the soldier knew
Someone had blunder'd:
Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die:
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.

From The Charge of the Light Brigade by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Escalating this war is a bad, bad idea.

Tags: afghanistan war

Deactivating the Democratic base

2009-12-01T11:12:00.000-08:00

Aimai in Investment 11/30/09 No More Mister Nice Blog gives a good, brief description with reference to her own experience as an Obama activist of why the Blue Dog strategy that has had a disporportionate influence on the Obama administration's approach to governance was bad for the immediate prospects of the Democratic Party and of progressive reform:

If I fault the Obama administration for anything it is that they allowed all that sense of voter investment to die off. I don't have the sense that people watched the inauguration--the high point of my life, certainly--and thought "ok, now I can chill." People were hungry to be called to service, and to be trusted with stuff do to, but the Obama campaign put them out to pasture and only weakly appealed to them late in the Health Care Debate. I know because I stopped getting useful organizational materials and started getting annoying vague appeals to "support the president" by "calling my representatives" or donating money. Previously I could have discovered online groups pushing specific policy proposals, or asking me to go door to door with some kind of locally responsive action agenda. [my emphasis in bold]

And she points to something that is a useful lesson for Democrats in the Tea Party movement:

I hate to go for the sentiment but "in the end, the love you take, is equal to the love you make" goes double for political action. People are hungry to work with and for their own lives--the teabaggers are proof positive that people will heave themselves up out of their easy chairs, stand in the rain, wear silly clothing--if they feel that their political leaders are asking this sacrifice of them, and if they feel that they will be listened to if they do it. The Obama Administration, unlike the Obama campaign, has forgotten this simple fact and true: the more your trust and empower your supporters the more they are invested in you and your goals. Its a virtuous circle.

Democratic progressives don't have to fold our hands and cynically declare "a plague on both your houses" and enjoy our moral superiority in doing so while getting nothing done.

But we do have the option of supporting activist groups and organizations that are not controlled by the Democratic Party that support health care reform and comprehensive immigration reforms, or that oppose the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars or support union organizing. We can support groups backing "fighting Dem" primary opponents to Blue Dog Democrats. In terms of pressuring Obama, building up the Democratic Caucus in the House and their allies in the Senate is critically important. We need Paul Wellstone Democrats as the Senate Majority Leader and as Committee chairs, not Harry Reids and Ben Nelsons.

Tags: democratic party, obama administration

Cop-killer a Christian terrorist?

2009-12-01T09:57:00.000-08:00

I've been following the story of the man who apparently killed four policemen in Lakewood WA, a Tacoma suburb. The suspect, Maurice Clemmons, has been killed by a Seattle police officer. At the end of this story by Gene Johnson of the A********* P**** appearing in the San Francisco Chronicle 12/01/09, Seattle police kill suspect, he reports:

Clemmons was charged in Washington state earlier this year with assaulting a police officer and raping a child, and investigators in the sex case said he was motivated by visions that he was Jesus Christ and that the world was on the verge of the apocalypse.

But he was released from jail after posting bail with the assistance of Jail Sucks Bail Bonds.

Documents related to those charges indicate a volatile personality. In one instance, he is accused of gathering his wife and young relatives and forcing them to undress.

"The whole time Clemmons kept saying things like trust him, the world is going to end soon, and that he was Jesus," a Pierce County sheriff's report said. [my emphasis]

In other words, his expressed motivation for his crimes was his Christian religious beliefs. The undressing scene described seems significant, because it's the kind of sexual control associated with cults. In other words, however pathological, that he had religious motivations for his crime.

This is important in light of Mike Huckabee's unusual clemency policies toward violent offenders during his Governorship of Arkansas. He relied heavily on the prisoners' expressed religious faith and the recommendations of other Baptist ministers - the Huck was a Southern Baptist minister himself - in his clemency decisions, as Joe Conason describes in Mike Huckabee's fatally bad judgment Salon 11/30/09. Joe quotes from Clemmons' own clemency petition to the Governor:

"I come from a very good Christian family and I was raised much better than my actions speak," he explained in his clemency application in 2000. "I'm still ashamed to this day for the shame my stupid involvement in these crimes brought upon my family's name ... I have never done anything good for God, but I've prayed for him to grant me in his compassion the grace to make a start. Now, I'm humbly appealing to you for a brand new start."

This article, Suspect's sister said he was 'not in his right mind' by Levi Pulkkinen and Vanessa Ho Seattle Post-Intelligencer 12/01/09, has more detail on Clemmons' religious delusions, including his claimed that he had been studying to become a minister.

It's notable that no one in their right mind would blame the Christian religion in general for Clemmons' actions, even though he may have been entirely sincere in his Christian religious professions at the moments he made them.

But that's not the standard that a star pundit like Tom Friedman, who is actually one of the most influential opinion columnists in America, applies to Islam, as Friedman showed us in his column just this weekend.

But aside from highlighting the screaming hypocrisy of American anti-Muslim bigots holding all of Islam to a foolish standard they don't expect of the majority Christians in the US, there is a genuine concern that some Christian leaders are promoting or simply maintaining a heavy silence in the face of rhetoric that creates a climate in which crimes like those of Clemmons become more likely.

It's not directly addressing the Maurice Clemmons case, but it is relevant to the larger question of Christian-motivated violence. Ex-Christian-Rightist Frank Schaeffer asks Christian Cowards: Why Don't Evangelical Leaders Condemn the Hate Spouted by Right-Wingers? Alternet 12/01/09:

There will always be hate-filled nuts on the fringe of any movement; left, right, religious or secular. No one in leadership should be blamed for their fringe -- unless they don't speak up. Post "Tea Parties", "Obama isn't a real American", and all the rest it is strange and disturbing to witness the silence of the evangelical leadership in the light of so much venom directed against our President by a largely evangelical Republican base.

This is shocking to me, given that for much of my life I was not just the son of a famous evangelical leader (Francis Schaeffer -- "credited" by Max Blumenthal and others as a founder of the religious right) but for a time I was also his sidekick and a leader in the evangelical world in my own right. I quit over the slide of the religious right into extremism. That said I'm still a believing Christian (non-evangelical and progressive) and to see the name of Christ used to promote hate outrages me. To see the Bible used as a political bumper sticker source (for whatever "side") is an affront.

He points out in particular that Billy and Franklin Graham recently had a high-profile meeting with Sarah Palin and put out a friendly statement about her. But neither of them saw fit to condemn her dishonest and inflammatory rhetoric about the "death panels" she claimed that health care reform would bring.

The rhetoric from antiabortionists that has become as common as dirt about abortion being like the Holocaust is another example of the kind of talk coming from respectable leaders that help to unhinge desperate and troubled believers. Not only is it anti-Semitic, i.e., asserting that terminating the pregnancy of a fetus with no possibility of surviving without being part of the mother's body is worse than killing a real live Jew. It also creates an image of not only medical providers but advocates of women's right to choose as being murderers beyond the pale of human decency.

My wife is an operating room nurse who does not take part in abortion procedures. But any doctor or nurse may be in the position at some point of having to perform an operation that risks the life of a fetus in order to save the mother's life. So I'm particularly aware of sleaziness of people demonizing medical providers as murderers for performing legal abortion procedures.

The article by Rick Anderson linked below says that Clemmons was fatally shot while fleeing from a police officer, who apparently was patrolling alone.

More on the Clemmons case: Clemmons manhunt over by Max Brantley Arkansas Blog; Huckabee revealed by John Brummett Arkansas News 12/01/09; Huckabee's Christ Delusion by tristero Hullabaloo 12/01/09; Accused Lakewood Cop Killer Maurice Clemmons Shot Dead by Lone Officer in Rainier Valley; Cop Unhurt by Rick Anderson Seattle Daily Weekly; 'All I do is feel sad for it,' Clemmons' grandmother says by Eric Nalder Seattle Post-Intelligencer 12/01/09; 'Latest incident ranks among deadliest days in U.S. law enforcement history' by Scott Gutierrez Seattle Post-Intelligencer 12/01/09.

Tags: maurice clemmons, mike huckabee

Climate debate

2009-12-01T00:05:00.000-08:00

Scientific illiteracy may not destroy the world. Scientific literary in nuclear physics is more likely to do that. But if we dumb down our world to the point that no one knows how to use nuclear weapons any more, the planet could still fry.

The British Royal Society last week put out this Climate science statement 11/24/09 emphasizing the urgency of addressing climate change:

As three of the UK’s leading scientific organisations involving most of the UK scientists working on climate change, we cannot emphasise enough the body of scientific evidence that underpins the call for action now, and we reinforce our commitment to ensuring that world leaders continue to have access to the best possible science. ...

The 2007 Assessment Report of the UN’s climate change panel (the IPCC) – made up of the world’s foremost climate scientists – provided unequivocal evidence for a warming climate, and a high degree of certainty that human activities are largely responsible for global warming since the middle of the 20th century. However, the IPCC process is based only on information already published and even since the last Assessment Report the scientific evidence for dangerous, long-term and potentially irreversible climate change has strengthened significantly:

Global carbon dioxide concentrations continue to rise, and methane concentrations have started to increase again after a decade of near stability;
The decade 2000-2009 has been warmer, on average, than any other decade in the previous 150 years;
Observed changes in precipitation (decreases in the subtropics and increases in high latitudes) have been at the upper limit of model projections;
Arctic summer sea ice cover declined suddenly in 2007 and 2008, prompting the realisation that this environment may be far more vulnerable to change than previously thought;
There is increasing evidence of continued and accelerating sea-level rises around the world. [my emphasis]

Meanwhile, crackpot eccentrics that we still generously call conservatives and cynical industry flaks are promoting the notion that, "Aw, these here scientists don't know what they're talkin' about. Heck, it don't say nothing about global warning in the Bible unless it's one of them thar strange things in Revelations so it must be part of a plot to turn America over to Kenya."

Unfortunately, the flat-earthers seem to be gaining some advantage in the American political debate. Their latest hobby-horse is a pseudo-scandal about scientists e-mailing each other, as explained by Bradford Plummer in How Important Are Those Stolen Climate E-mails? The New Republic 11/25/09.

The late astrophysicist Carl Sagan in Demon-Haunted World - Science as a Candle in the Dark (1995) was already concerned about the dangers of insufficiently widely-spread knowledge of science. With particular reference to the US, he wrote:

... the consequences of scientific illiteracy are far more dangerous in our time than in any that has come before. It's perilous and foolhardy for the average citizen to remain ignorant about global warming, say, or ozone depletion, air pollution, toxic and radioactive wastes, acid rain, topsoil erosion, tropical deforestation, exponential population growth. Jobs and wages depend on science and technology. If our nation can't manufacture, at high quality and low price, products people want to buy, then industries will continue to drift away and transfer a little more prosperity to other parts of the world. Consider the social ramifications of fission and fusion power, supercomputers, data "highways," abortion, radon, massive reductions in strategic weapons, addiction, government eavesdropping on the lives of its citizens, high-resolution TV, airline and airport safety, fetal tissue transplants, health costs, food additives, drugs to ameliorate mania or depression or schizophrenia, animal rights, superconductivity, morning-after pills, alleged hereditary antisocial predispositions, space stations, going to Mars, finding cures for AIDS and cancer.

Without some basic scientific literacy, industry lobbyists and superstitious fanatics can point to a phrase like that in the Royal Society report above, "a high degree of certainty that human activities are largely responsible for global warming", and say, look: these scientists can't say for sure that this is true, they just say they think that's the way it is. And then arguing for taking another 50 years to "study the issue" have greater plausibility than they should.

As Sagan went on to explain, pseudoscience is easier to make arguments with than science is, because it's not so constrained by having to deal with discomfirming reality. In addition, "The standards of argument, what passes for evidence, are much more relaxed." This makes it "much easier to present pseudoscience to the general public than science."

He also notes that wishful thinking is part of the appeal of pseudoscience. And that goes as well for the global warming denial. It would be more pleasant to believe that is was all a big goof, or a scam by a cabal of scheming evil scientists, that we are melting the polar icecaps. And that tremendous consequences ensue from that.

Tags: global climate change, global warming

The good and the bad about Presidents - and Obama's position on torture

2009-11-30T00:05:00.000-08:00

I've often written about the reasons I admire Andrew Jackson and the democratic politics he represented. Heck, I even named my personal blog after him! If I had to state very briefly why I consider Jackson, half of the founding duo that the Democratic Party honors in its "Jefferson-Jackson" dinners, it would go something like this. Jackson was a wealthy man who successfully fought the power of concentrated wealth in the form of the Bank of the United States on behalf of the people. He was a Southern slaveowner who successfully stood up for the United States and the Constitution and democracy against the South Carolina secessionists. Saving the Union from John Calhoun would be reason enough in itself for him to be considered a great President.

He made the right decisions on those issues. On relocating Indians from the Southeast to Oklahoma, he made the wrong one. It's a reminder that even the energetic leader of a movement that continued to fight to expand and defend democracy long after he was out of office can make really bad decisions. An d that democracy is a phenomenon that emerged the historical process due to decisions made by real people. Democracy isn't a synonym for all things good and wonderful. And it's actual development has at times been ugly. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't celebrate the real progress that the development of democracy made in the life of humanity.

On the other hand, I wouldn't see Jackson as such a favorable symbol if I thought that his decision on "Indian removal" was done with genocidal intentions. I discuss that decision at greater length in Old Hickory and the Indians 04/08/04.

Torture, on the other hand, is today a clear-cut criminal and immoral act. Even more than the death penalty, torture involves the deliberate infliction of cruelty. And its not about getting information or insuring justice. Government torture is an act of state terror.

So its grim news to see the recent reports indicating that the torture program may well be continuing under the Obama administration: Afghans Detail Detention in ‘Black Jail’ at U.S. Base by Alissa RubinNew York Times 11/28/09; 2 Afghans allege abuse at U.S. site Joshua Partlow and Julie Tate Washington Post 11/28/09.

The torture issue isn't going away. Not for the Cheney-Bush administration. And if it is continuing under the Obama administration, not for them either. The sooner Obama normalizes the treatment of prisoners of war and terror suspects and brings them in line with US and international law, the better it will be. But his record so far has been very discouraging, and that's probably putting it mildly.

I'm not willing to credit Obama administration officials with any good will if they are allowing torture to continue. We know what torture is. And what the consequences are for the rule of law. No excuses on this issue.

Further stories on the torture issue and the Times and Post stories above:

Marcy Wheeler, The TWO Afghan Black Site Stories Emptywheel 11/28/09

Glenn Greenwald, Is Obama's civil liberties record understandable? Salon 11/27/09

David Dayen, Detainees At Black Jails In Afghanistan Allege Abuse FDL News Desk 11/29/09

Marcy Wheeler, The 13 people who made torture possible Salon 05/18/09

Joe Conason, We tortured to justify war Salon 05/14/09

Tags: andrew jackson, torture

Domestic terrorism

2009-11-29T13:35:00.000-08:00

It was November 5, more than three weeks ago that a shooter identified as Maj. Malik Nidal Hasan murdered 13 people and wounded dozens in a shooting spree in Ft. Hood Texas. Three weeks later, there doesn't seem to be terribly much national press interest. And we know little more about the Maj. Hasan than we learned in the few days after the shooting. The military seems to be keeping a tight lid on information about the crime.

This 11/25/09 piece from the local Killeen Daily Herald, Attorney: Hasan may use insanity defense says that Hasan refused to speak to military investigators, that his attorney has said very little about the case publicly, and that the attorney has indicated that Hasan may pursue an insanity defense.

Of course, our rightwing culture warriors decided quickly that Hasan was a jihadist terrorist inspired by Islamist ideology to commit the crime. And based on what's in the public record, it's still entirely plausible that religion may turn out to have been involved in his action. But what we know from the public record about Hasan and his actions haven't really progressed much beyond where they were when Mark Benjamin wrote The media's silly Fort Hood coverage Salon 11/12/09. This item from ABC News 11/19/09 suggests Hasan Was Worried About Results of Recent HIV Test. The accompanying video says that details about the shooting were being withheld even from members of Congress cleared for top secret intelligence briefings.

But none of that stops war enthusiast Tom Friedman from declaring with confidence that Hasan was acting on a set of anti-American Islamist beliefs that he describes as "The Narrative" in America vs. The Narrative New York Times 11/28/09. And since our war-lovers also love to be afraid and want us to be afraid, he writs, "What is scary is that even though he was born, raised and educated in America, The Narrative still got to him."

Now, the truth is almost certainly that Tom Friedman knows nothing more about Hasan than he can find in the news, which might give a real journalist pause before describing in his high-profile column what specific ideology it was on which Hasan was operating. But our star pundits regularly read minds, in Maureen Dowd case with the aid of The Voices in her head whose information she periodically shares with us.

Really Friedman is just tossing Hasan in as a scary figure to serve his long-time war chant for how American motives in killing Muslims in wars are pure as driven snow. Funny, though, that isn't the impression I get from Friedman infamous 2003 "Suck.On.This." interview about the Iraq War. In this /column, "Suck.On.This." has transmuted into sweeter words:

Have no doubt: we punched a fist into the Arab/Muslim world after 9/11, partly to send a message of deterrence, but primarily to destroy two tyrannical regimes — the Taliban and the Baathists — and to work with Afghans and Iraqis to build a different kind of politics.

Although he does allow, "In the process, we did some stupid and bad things."

Oh, Tom, you mean "stupid and bad things" like invading Iraq based on lies and in violation of the Congressional Resolution authorizing war under specific conditions so that overgrown frat-boy blowhards like you thought some of them thar A-rabs needed to "Suck.On.This."? Uh, no, Friedman doesn't mean that. Glenn Greenwald focuses on this aspect of Friedman's silly column in the ironically titled The crazy, irrational beliefs of Muslims Salon 11/29/09.

And after putting some of his stock war propaganda in the mouth of an anonymousJordainian source - a favorite Big Pundit ploy - he plays Muslim-hater dumb and blames Islam for anti-American violence using the evidence that Muslims don't display sufficient outrage at such acts for Friedman's liking, an obligation that American Christians obviously don't feel for acts of fellow Christians. Did we see millions of Christians demonstrating in the streets of America, much less anywhere else in this world, this past summer when a Christian extremist acting on what certainly look like religious motives based on far more evidence than we've seen about Hasan murdered an abortion doctor in his own church? No, we didn't. This complaint is just a way to demonize the entire religion of Islam. Friedman does it by imagining Obama delivering Friedman's own words in a speech:

In his Cairo speech last June, President Obama effectively built a connection with the Muslim mainstream. Maybe he could spark the debate by asking that same audience this question:

“Whenever something like Fort Hood happens you say, ‘This is not Islam.’ I believe that. But you keep telling us what Islam isn’t. You need to tell us what it is and show us how its positive interpretations are being promoted in your schools and mosques. If this is not Islam, then why is it that a million Muslims will pour into the streets to protest Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, but not one will take to the streets to protest Muslim suicide bombers who blow up other Muslims, real people, created in the image of God? You need to explain that to us — and to yourselves.”

Tom Friedman's blustering blowhard opinions are taken very seriously in the Beltway Village.

Meanwhile, a suspect that looks an awful lot like a would-be far-right terrorist has been arrested in Ohio: Ho hum. Just another would-be domestic terrorist found with a bomb-making lab. Nothing to see here, just move along by Dave Neiwert Crooks and Liars 11/28/09. But our national press corps is largely ignoring it. This character doesn't fit into any of the Long War propaganda scripts that the Tom Friedmans of the Village care about. As Dave puts it:

Of course, if this had been a Muslim extremist caught with such an arsenal, we'd be getting talk-show panels on Hannity featuring Michelle Malkin ranting at length about the threat of Islamic jihad, blah blah blah. Not to mention chatty discussion on Fox and Friends and Morning Joe.

But instead, because he's just a white anti-government extremist, hey, let's just give it a big shrug.

The Tacoma News Tribune reports on the murder of four police officers early Sunday morning: Four police officers shot dead at coffee shop near Parkland by Adam Lynn and Stacey Mulick 11/29/09. The details on the motivations of the killer matter in cases like this for reasons going beyond the prosecution of the perpetrator. Details on the shooter are very sketchy from the article. I'll be curious to see how the press covers this, whether it will become a "lone nut" story or a "Muslim terrorist" story and how well the press script matches to reality.

Tags: domestic terrorism, thomas friedman

A surprisingly good Psych-Out from 1968

2009-11-29T12:39:00.000-08:00

I recently saw a 1968 movie called Psych-Out about hippies in Haight-Ashbury called 1968, produced by Dick Clark. (Yes, the eternally young Dick Clark.) I think it's considered a bit of a "cult movie" and I expected it to be entertainingly hokey. But sometimes low expectations are an advantage. It's actually a pretty good film.

It stars Jack Nicholson as Stoney [groan], who has a psychedelic rock band called Mumblin' Jim that's trying to get a gig at the Fillmore, which is called the Ballroom in the flick. He meets a run-away named Jenny (Susan Strasberg) who's searching for her long-lost brother Steve (Bruce Dern) who she believes is in the Haight. Strasberg was 29 or 30 when the movie was made, though she has to look younger for the part. Since Jenny is described as a runaway, presumably she was no older than 17. Here's Jenny meeting her first flower child in San Francisco as she arrives in town on the bus:

I was a little surprised at how familiar the scenery looks. Although since I've lived in the Bay Area most of my life, I guess I shouldn't be. Shoot, I even go to the annual free bluegrass concerts that have happened in Golden Gate Park every October for the last few years. For that matter, I went to the Summer of Love 40th anniversary event in 1967 held in the same place that the bluegrass concerts take place.

Psych-Out has pretty much all of the stock features you might expect: tie-dyed clothes, hippie coffee houses, dope and more dope, paisley designs, beads and crystals, gurus and hippie-sympathizing ministers, stiff cops, group living, a psychedelic sex with Nicholson and Strasberg. And, of course, the bad trips. Pretty spectacularly bad trips, actually. And groovy music.

Stoney (Jack Nicholson) and Jenny (Susan Strasberg)

But what saves it from being hokey is that the writers evidently made some effort to understand the hippie culture as it was at the moment, and the actors play the parts in a serious way, so that it doesn't come across as either a moral instruction tale or as camp. And while it may still have the capacity to scandalize conservative cultural warriors - shoot, even Disney pablum can do that!- it's certainly not a propaganda film for the alternative hippie lifestyle, either. You do get a sense that the characters in the film are looking for more personal and collective freedom than they were finding in "straight" society. (Straight meant non-hippie at that time.) That there were looking for a life with more sense of living in the moment and a greater appreciation of joy in life.

But a character named Dave played by Dean Stockwell has the role in the movie of being a kind of devil's advocate to Stoney as well as a rival for Jenny's affections. At one point, Stoney is about to sneak off to sleep with a groupie but has to explain his absence to Jenny. Dave confronts him with the fact that he either has to stick with his "do your own thing" ethos or with his value of being honest and direct, but can't do both. Stoney winds up lying to Jenny about where he's going. But the scene is played as though this was a serious conversation between two people who were both committed to certain alternative ways of living. Dave doesn't come off as a simple hippie moralist, and Jack Nicholson's Stoney doesn't come off as a manipulative hypocrite.

The movie doesn't demonize the drug culture. But it also makes it clear that there are definite risks involved. Jenny has the mother of all bad trips with flames spurting out of the ground at her and so forth. She winds up right in the middle of Golden Gate Bridge at night in heavy traffic. You don't get the idea that it was a pleasant experience for her.

Another reason the movie doesn't come off as hokey is that it doesn't stick with stereotypes. In one scene, Stoney and two of his band members are helping Jenny search for her brother and they wind up in a junkyard surrounded by street punks. One of the hippie guys is in the middle of an LSD trip. The street punks assume that the hippies are gutless peace-and-love types and start getting aggressive with them. And then the hippies just beat the crap out of the punks. The guy tripping sits out the first part of the fight smiling and saying, "Peace, man!" But then he picks up a thick board and joins in the fight, thinking he's fighting a knight and a dragon. At the end of the fight when the punks are lying unconscious in the dirt, he hugs his club smiling and says, "It was beautiful." This is the funniest scene in the film to me just because it plays so deliberately against the stereotype.

Jenny, in line with the screen conventions of the time, had to cower in fear while the guys did the fighting. There were already some popular culture images like the TV shows The Girl from U.N.C.L.E. and The Avengers where women were allowed to kick butt themselves. But the age of Buffy the Vampire Slayer was still a ways off.

One of the first scenes is a reminder that long before Starbucks, the hippies had used coffeehouses as a social meeting place.

One of the special features on the DVD is a short about the making of the film, called "Love and Haight". [groan] It features the eternally young Dick Clark from several years ago, before his stroke, talking about making a film. In the process, he makes this comment, which is pretty psychedelic itself:

I've always been a square individual. I mean, I've attracted a very strange group of friends, from Hell's Angels to junkies and psychopaths and a lot of other people. For some reason or other, they're attracted to me, knowing that I'm not of them.

I'm still trying to get my head around the image of Dick Clark hanging out with the junkies and psychopaths.

The Web site of San Francisco's artsy-alternative Red Vic Theater quotes Michael Weldon from the Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film calling Psych-Out the "(t)he best Haight-Ashbury drug film".

Someone has posted at least major parts of the movie on You Tube. No telling how long it will be there.

I got another period movie from NetFlix, Getting Straight (1970). I made it through about the first ten minutes and that was all I could take. The hokey stereotypes and the script were so nails-on-the-blackboard bad it was amazing. A real contrast to Psych-Out.

Tags: hippies, psychedelics, psych-out, sixties

Jerry Brown, 1995: theology, politics, civil liberties and corporate Democratic politics

2009-11-28T16:30:00.000-08:00

"Theology is more important than politics." - Jerry Brown, 1975

Jerry still reflected that perspective 20 years later in an interview he did with The Progressive in 1995 that was published in their September 1995 issue:

Q: What did you learn from the time you spent in Calcutta with Mother Teresa and on spiritual retreat in Japan?

Brown: True spiritual practice teaches you to overcome your conditioning, your programming. From Zen, I learned how conditioned I was. From Mother Teresa, what it is like to observe the poorest of the poor, and how generous human beings can be.

You can either unselfconsciously follow your program or you can work to transcend it. That's what enlightenment is. That's what the Buddhists call nonattachment and the Jesuits call detachment. The precondition is to free yourself from, as they say, your addictions. In the religious context, they call it your attachments. Saint Ignatius, which I studied as a Jesuit novice, said you have to free yourself from inordinate attachment. Inordinate attachment, that means you crave, you need, you are dependent on desires for material things that distort your capacity for wisdom. If your consciousness is broadened and if you increase your awareness, then your action should follow, because action and consciousness are linked together. Even when we do dumb things, it's because we have a dumb idea in the back of our head. People who live selfish lives or spend their time building little private empires of greed are missing something.

Q: Do you consider yourself a spiritual person?

Brown: I would say I'm certainly aware of the world of spiritual practice. I've pursued it for many years of my life and I've also neglected it for many years of my life. [my emphasis]

As this quote shows, Jerry's religious views don't imply a theocratic perspective. But it does give him a real intellectual perspective from which to take a critical perspective of politics and society.

One of the biggest reasons people find Jerry's perspective puzzling is that they don't take account of his religious perspective. He actually is more familiar with philosophy and theology and thinks more in those terms of perhaps any major political figure in the US. I assume that people like Sarah Palin are serious about their professed religious convictions. But that's a whole different thing than having a general perspective rooted in reflective theological and spiritual thinking.

This is not something that every Democrat would find reassuring because of the very real concerns today about the commitment of today's Republican Party to Christianist theocratic ideas. But a real advantage it gives to Brown is that he actually understands religion and religious language in a way that other Democratic politicians don't and can reassure voters who may have real (as distinct from propagandist) concerns about the Democrats' alleged lack of respect for religion. He's also far less likely to be conned by the "theocracy lite" approach of the so-called "common ground" anti-abortion zealots than some other Democratic politicians have been.

This response is an example of Brown's intellectual/theological perspective, which basically none of our Pod Pundits today could process in any meaningful way:

Q: what would you'say to those people who doubt your sincerity based upon your background?

Brown: Well, I think that's a good place to start: with great doubt [laughs]. What is it they say--to achieve enlightenment you need great faith, great perseverance, and great doubt. All three working together.

At this point in his career in 1995, Jerry had left his role as head of the California Democratic Party to host a liberal national radio program. At the time of this interview, he had moved to Oakland to promote local community activism. Although he had described himself as a "recovering politician" in this period, he was presumably thinking of running for Oakland Mayor with his move to Oakland.

His interview is worth reading in full, not only for the perspective it gives on Jerry's own history but because he remained critical of the Clinton administration from a liberal/left perspective. Even though I was aware of his position on this, I was a bit jarred to read his harsh words for the civil liberties implications of the anti-terrorism legislation proposed by the Clinton administration in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing. Today, a suggestion to return to the Clinton administration, pre-Cheney standards of civil liberties would be regard by Republicans and most Democrats as practically a radical step. Here was Jerry's criticism in 1995:

I believe we have to look into our collective condition and we have to say, "Does this square with what we know to be right?" We can look to the Bible, we can look to our experience. How do we treat friends? Is this the standard that we're seeing applied? That's the analysis that's missing. And if we don't do that in some collective way, we're going to see the country continue to move in a fascistic direction.

If your approval ratings go up fifteen points after Oklahoma City where 168 people are killed, how do you think you react to that as a President? Do you care more about your poll ratings, or do you care more about those people whom you never met before? The system is rewarding things that shouldn't be rewarded. There's no reason why the President's polling should go up fifteen points. That is perverse. Just the measurement of that is perverse.

The FBI trots out its wish list and you get several hundred more agents and all the other agents combined are up to 1,000. And they get new powers of surveillance and infiltration. [my emphasis]

I should note here that Jerry, unlike today's Republicans, actually knows what the word "fascism" actually means and doesn't confuse it with every thing else than one might consider bad.

That passage also shows an example of how Jerry can reference the Bible as a source of values relevant to a moral judgment on politics without it sounding self-conscious and to promote what would be a liberal/left position in politics.

This is also a strong statement on the dangers of the loss of civil liberties:

The Supreme Court voted 6-3, with two of Clinton's appointees forming the majority, that if you want to play sports, the school can drug-test you, the state can drug-test you. The most significant part of this is again the tilt toward authority, toward subservience, toward obedience, toward a nation of sheep. You take the child's mind at a vulnerable age and you embed deeply in the consciousness of that child the idea that taking orders is what it's about to be an American. Take your pants down and pee in that little jar and we will send it to a certified laboratory. You won't see it, but you will know, you can believe, that the results will tell us whether you're clean or not. This is the way the state builds totalitarian consciousness. It's what Ivan Illich calls the "symbolic fallout" of the use of technology. The symbolic fallout of drug testing is that the child learns without even being able to debate it that his job is to follow orders even to the point of yielding up bodily fluids to the state to be evaluated by a process that he or she can't understand. That's true disempowerment.

This is an interesting example of how Jerry can draw meaningful distinctions that we just don't hear very much from our broken national press:

Q: Do you fear the far-right agenda?

Brown: I don't know about the far-right agenda. It's the survival agenda of the incumbents that I'm most concerned about. The militias are going in there and calling attention to the dangerous power-grab of the state. What do you have? You have the ACLU and the NRA, two groups that are not viewed by the establishment very seriously. So The New York Times did a piece comparing the militias to the Black Panthers, not ever drawing the conclusion that they both were talking about excess oppressive practices by the government. They drew the conclusion that, well, the Panthers were wacky, and now the militias are wacky. The Panthers committed crimes, but that doesn't mean that they weren't speaking from an authentic community and speaking heroically in many, many instances. And all these militia people are marching around because they think the state has been taken over. If you really look at it, the United States has certainly been submerged in a transnational system where one-person-one-vote or the checks-and-balances as envisioned by the founders in the Federalist Papers barely exist.

Here's one place where I wonder if Brown was taking the problem of far-right extremist politics seriously enough. But in the context, he was pointing to the civil-liberties concerns that concerned him and citing the diversity of criticisms in the same way that Glenn Greenwald often does. I would prefer to see these kinds of analyses be more specific about the distinctive and limited nature of far-right arguments that momentarily overlap with civil-liberties concerns.

But maybe that's not an appropriate criticism of a statement like that in which Jerry was stating that the Black Panthers were reacting to very real problems that the established system was not addressing back in the 1960s. You don't hear many politicians, and especially white politicians, making those kinds of comments in either 1995 or today. (Jerry's no dummy, so he obviously knew that those comments were likely to play better in Oakland than in many other places.)

Brown made a harsh criticism of the Cold War policies that had already in 1995 morphed into the Long War, though that name came from the Cheney era:

Q: What do you think the price is we're paying for all the murder and mayhem committed by the United States abroad?

Brown: I don't know about prices. It's wrong for the people who suffer. If you say human-rights violation, that's an abstract word. If you say castrating somebody, putting a balloon full of water down their throat, or cutting their arms off with electric saws--what they did in El Salvador and Guatemala--horrible, horrible things, cutting heads off, putting them on platters, that was reported by the Jesuit magazine America. Why is the money and prestige of America playing into that? The entire story of Haiti. That was an eye-opener to read. The people who were involved with the murders of Haiti were receiving American intelligence payments. So what is that all about? It appears to be a deeply corrupted form of activity that cannot be good for the American government, is not right morally, it is not good for the country, and it's kept a secret.

If we don't have morality at the top, how do you expect morality at street level? It's not going to work. Clinton had a drive-by shooting in Baghdad. [A 1993 bombing attack.] There was no war, there was no judicial order--not even a Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. It was just, "Let's send twenty-five Tomahawk missiles toward Baghdad." I believe a half dozen or more landed and eight people were killed. Now what's that? What's the moral label that you affix to that? Does he have a right to kill innocent people to send a message to Saddam Hussein? Those people didn't do anything. It was supposed to be about the alleged plot against [Old Man] Bush. What happened to the alleged plotters? They were not the ones who were killed. It's almost like burning a witch. It reminds me of the short story by Shirley Jackson, The Lottery, in which the town picks one person to be stoned every year. We need a few people to die, just to make an example of them. [my emphasis]

Finally, his criticism of the campaign-financing system and the ability of the wealthy to corrupt the democratic process is even more relevant today. He references his ploy in the 1992 Presidential campaign of setting a $100 limit on individual contributions to his Democratic primary campaign against Bill Clinton. And he ties foreign policy into his observation, which again is informed by a more general sense of morality based in his religious frame of thought:

Every one of these guys--Dole, Gramm--they're playing football, and in the football game of politics, you have to have the big bucks and the 1 percent who own 39 percent of all the assets. That power is the reality, unless you have an agenda for changing that reality, disrupting it, coming up with an alternative for the people to consider. ...

The experience of the $100 limit in the campaign, making fundraising no longer the key to the campaign, gave me a detachment and a separation to observe the incredible dependency of the politician, and therefore the government, on this very narrow band of people at the highest strata of the society. That goes contrary to the notion of a middle-class, almost class-less society, that the American political class likes to pretend we have. So that's on one level, the political.

Then as I read more about covert action, what the intelligence agencies are doing, and what really went on in Vietnam, in Grenada, in Reagan's bombing of Qaddafi, Clinton's bombing in Baghdad, or Bush's intervention in Panama, I realized that there is an immoral, inhuman kind of formula that is being pursued by the government.

And the magnitude of the injustice appears to be increasing. [my emphasis]

These are perspective worth keeping in mind as the Obama administration is again starting to play footsie with the anti-Social Security fiscal hawks, escalates its disastrous war in Afghanistan, backs off on its commitment to counter global warming and proceeds to gut the rule of law by continuing to use the Cheney-Bush military commissions and promoting extreme claims for government secrecy powers and surveillance.

Tags: jerry brown

Thanksgiving with Darwin

2009-11-26T12:30:00.000-08:00

Charles Darwin's Bible

Roy Edroso takes an entertaining look at how Rightbloggers Fight War on Thanksgiving (And, Of Course, Muslim Obama) Village Voice 11/26/09. I didn't know that there was a mythical War on Thanksgiving along with the equally fictional War on Christmas. But why not? When you need something to be afraid of and are used to creating phantoms in the air, I guess one is as good as the other.

Darwin doesn't actually have anything to do with Thanksgiving. Though we can be thankful for his work, since he theory of natural selection forms a huge part of the basis of present-day science. But Edward J. Larson has a good piece out this week on the sometimes-uncomfortable meeting of Darwinism and Christianity, "I Had No Intention to Write Atheistically": Darwin, God, and the 2500-Year History of the Debate Religion Dispatches 11/24/09.

Darwin was open to the notion early on that humanity as well as other animal species could have evolved on a natural basis, a process that could be explained without resorting to divine intervention:

Alluding to William Paley’s analogy between a crafted telescope and the human eye, which was a key part of the Anglican theologian’s famous proof of an intelligent designer behind organic creation. Darwin then added, “Not believing this, I see no necessity in the belief that the eye was expressing designed.” Even human nature and mental ability might result from natural processes, he concluded.

The sequence in Darwin’s letter to Gray is telling. It passed quickly from observations of what seemed bad in nature (such as cruel animal behavior, which even devout creationists hesitate to blame on God) to ones about what seemed good in nature (such as the human eye, which Victorians typically credited to God), and then moved on to ponder the origin of what seemed best of all, human morality and mentality, which natural theologians typically hail as the ultimate gift and proof of the divine supernatural. In Origin of Species, Darwin avoided making comments about human evolution, fearing that they would prejudice readers against his general theory, but his private notes, essays, and letters reveal his longstanding fascination with the issue.

While the article is very good in describing the history of this conflict, I don't really like the next-to-last section "Humans are Survival Machines" in which he writes, "Today, Darwin’s sketchy social theories have matured by way of E.O. Wilson’s sociobiology and modern evolutionary psychology to become foundational for understanding in the social sciences." Uh, no, "sociobiology" and "evolutionary psychology" are nothing but cleaned-up terms for Social Darwinism, which is certainly not "foundational for understanding in the social sciences" or for understanding anything but Social Darwinism. The arguments that go by those terms are barely-updated versions of Victorian-era arguments that the current "traditional values" hierarchies of gender, class and (if you look closely) race are rooted in immutable biology. And it's hard to imagine that Darwin wouldn't have been embarrassed to see the sloppy, speculative reasoning that underpins most of their arguments.

What we've come to call fundamentalism, the notion that the Christian Bible should be read as though it were a history and science text, was also a 19th-century phenomenon like Darwinism. But it wasn't only in opposition to the theory of evolution and new astronomical and geological discoveries that it developed. Especially in Germany, scholars like David Friedrich Strauss (1808-1874) were analyzing the Scriptures with new historical and linguistic methods. Strauss' Life of Jesus (1835-1836) argued that the New Testament did not actually describe Jesus as God in human form, which is the basic Christian notion of the Incarnation.

The whole concept of history as describing accurately and analyzing the procession of actual events that took place was one that began developing with the modern age in 15th-century Europe and took centuries to establish itself as a more general understanding. (Keith Thomas describes some of this process in the print edition of the New York Review of Books, "Fighting over History" 12/03/09 edition) So those who felt uncomfortable with the religious implications of the historical-critical method of seeking to understand the Bible - a method which was by no means linked exclusively to atheism or strict materialist philosophy - began to articulate an understanding of the Bible that redefined it in more literalist terms than had been common among Christians before that.

Tags: christian fundamentalism, darwin, evolution

Two resignations, two columns and the American press today

2009-11-25T10:46:00.000-08:00

High-level resignations have been in the news lately.

Greg Craig, chief White House counsel, resigned after being targeted by press leaks blaming him for the failure to close Guantanamo by next January, a goal Obama announced this past January and has now abandoned. On Tuesday, Phil Carter, an attorney, former blogger and Iraq War veteran, resigned from his Pentagon position as the top official there for detainee affairs.

Glenn Greenwald writes about the latter in Phil Carter's resignation from key detainee policy post Salon 11/25/09. He puts Carter's resignation into the context of Craig's and of the rule-of-law disputes over trying terrorism suspects that have been held for years at Guantanamo and other stations of the Bush Gulag. He also states straightforwardly that both men "remained loyal to Obama by refraining, at least thus far, from publicly criticizing any administration policies." He provides some careful speculation about what policy differences might have been part of their decisions but does so in a way that his information and analysis is still informative and useful even if both resignations turn out to be effectively unrelated to policy issues.

This is what not so long ago in the United States, and still today in much of the world, is called "journalism".

(On the Carter resignation, see also Noah Schactman's Danger Room piece, Why Phil Carter Left the Pentagon 11/25/09.)

Then there's Maureen Dowd. Her column Thanks for the Memories New York Times 11/24/09 is actually an example of why many of us once thought of MoDo as a good columnist of a generally liberal bent. If you didn't know anything about her track record, this piece would probably read like a liberal Democratic criticism of Obama for not delivering to the Democratic base on some important issues. And the Craig resignation is a big part of her analysis. (She doesn't mention the Carter resignation.)

But if you follow MoDo as closely as I do for some sad reason, or if you were a casual MoDo readers and concentrated on what she's actually saying, you would notice what she's really saying is: Obama sucks as a President and it's Bill and Hillary Clinton's fault. By some miracle - or maybe her editor had a brief moment of diligence - she doesn't mention her favorite female character from the Clinton story that The Voices in her head continually remind her about. She does mention Lani Guinier and Kimba Wood as obvious examples of the Clintons' badness. Quick, without using a search engine: who is Kimba Wood?

MoDo winds up telling us nothing worth remembering about Craig's resignation. The Huffington Post gives MoDo's column credit for revealing that Bill Clinton lobbied against Caroline Kennedy being appointed to fill Hillary's New York Senate seat: Maureen Dowd: Bill Clinton Lobbied Gov. Paterson To Keep Caroline Kennedy Out Of Senate 11/25/09.

I see two problems with this. One is that I never take MoDo as an authoritative source on anything because she makes stuff up. Second, MoDo is such a committed Clinton-hater that I doubly discount her claims of knowing Bill Clinton's motive for this alleged anti-Caroline-Kennedy lobbying. And she doesn't cite even an anonymous source for the claim. She writes:

Gov. David Paterson was dragging [Kennedy] through mud and refusing to announce a decision on the appointment for the New York Senate seat. Paterson was being lobbied by a vengeful Bill Clinton. Bill was still upset at Caroline for bestowing the Camelot mantle, which he had tried to claim during his campaigns, on Obama.

And then she says what probably for her is the nastiest thing she could say about Obama: she compares him unfavorably to Bill Clinton.

And she notes in a chipper tone that Obama's alleged actions are:

... especially puzzling given that Obama faces tough midterms and a less-than-certain re-election - and given that we all now know someone on the unemployment line. (A new poll shows Obama and Sarah Palin neck and neck among independents, but then it is a Fox survey.)

She's pumping up Sarah Palin again like she was doing in her previous column. But if she doesn't think the FOX News "survey" is reliable, then why is she using its results to make her point?

So, a story of two columns. One, from Glenn Greenwald in Salon, which says something useful and is careful with facts. The other, from one of the countries leading pundits writing at the "paper of record", the New York Times, filled with pointless speculation about what might be going through the heads of Obama and of Bill and Hillary Clinton, without any particular concern for facts. But then, who needs facts when you have The Voices?

Tags: glenn greenwald, maureen dowd, obama administration

Indo-Europeans, language and the myth of the "Aryan" race

2009-11-24T10:49:00.000-08:00

Guido von List (1848-1919)

Earlier this year I spent some time look at the relation between what was once commonly called the ancient Aryan language and the 19th- and 20th-century concepts of the "Aryan race that the Nazis made so infamous.

This article, Arier, from the Glossar Rechextremismus of the German state of Brandenburg on the concept of Arier gives a very good summary (in German) of the concept of "Aryan" as it came to be used by the Nazis.

As they employed the term, "Aryan" actually meant little other than "not Jewish". Although the Nazis considered Germans a superior race to Slavs and others, as well. But my focus in this post is not the Nazi concept but the much older history that racist thinkers and propagandists have claimed as a background for the so-called Aryan race.

As the Glossar Rechtsextremismus notes, the Nazis so discredited the word "Aryan" that the ancient langauge that was once described neutrally as Arnyan is now called "Indo-European."

The Indo-European languages are many, extant and otherwise: the proto-Indo-European language gave birth to the following languages, in alphabetical order: Afrikaans, Albanian, Armenian, Avestan, Bengali, Celtic, Czech, English, Faliscan, French, Gaelic, German, Greek, Hindi, Hittite, Illyrian, Italian, Lithuanian, Latin, Latvian, Luvian, Messapic, Oscan, Persian, Phrygian, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Sanskrit, Spanish, Swedish, Thracian, Tocharian, Romany, Welsh, and Yiddish.

J.P. Mallory in his text In Search of the Indo-Europeans: Language, Archaeology and Myth (1989) argues that the most plausible location of the original Indo-European "homeland" is in the steppes of the "Pontic-Caspian" area, very roughly the area north and northeast of the Black Sea. The primary evidence for this reconstruction of prehistory is linguistic and archaological, but primarily linguistic. He dates the development of the original Proto-Indo-European language as no latter than 2500 BCE and with evidence of an existing "cultural vocabulary consistent with a date of roughly the fourth millennium BC." Language and archaeology are related in examining the evidence. He describes, for instance, how the Proto-Indo-European word for horse, *ek'wos, correlates with the archaeological evidence of the spread of horses in Central Europe and the types of terrains which would have been most congenial for them.

Mallory writes:

Proto-Indo-European probably evolved out of the languages spoken by hunter-fishing communities in the Pontic-Caspian region. It is impossible to select which languages and what areas, though a linguistic continuum from the Dnieper east to the Volga would be possible. Settlement would have been confined primarily to the major river valleys and their tributaries, and this may have resulted in considerable linguistic ramification. But the introduction of stockbreeding, and the domestication of the horse, permitted the exploitation of the open steppe. With the subsequent development of wheeled vehicles in this area, highly mobile communities would have interacted regularly with the more sedentary river valley and forest-steppe communities. During the period to which we notionally assign Proto-Indo-European (4500-2500 BC), most of the Pontic-Caspian served as a vast interaction sphere. ... Words would have passed freely between different dialects, and the later isoglosses which seem to leap geographical boundaries, such as Greek or German and Tocharian, may have been the result of these interactions. In addition, higher versus lower variants of Indo-European languages may have been spoken, which would further account for why some linguistic groups preserve certain words and others lack such reflexes. In the east, both Proto-Indo-Europeans and later ancestors of the Indo-Iranians were in contact with Finno-Ugric speakers. In the west, the shared agricultural vocabulary of the European languages may have developed along the middle Dnieper or in contact with the numerous Tripolyean settlements of the western Ukraine.

This common linguistic background reflects a cultural background. But it can't be considered a "race" in any meaningful sense of the word. Much less a group of pure descent from some original proto-Indo-European speakers 4500 years ago. Whatever their distinctive physical characteristics may have been in 2500 BCE, their genes have been widely shared since then, and other genes widely shared with theirs.

Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels (1874-1954)

The racial theories of the 19th century were largely pseudo-science, or just plain bad science. The late Stephen Jay Gould did a fascinating book called The Mismeasure of Man (1981) describing how white scientific researchers on race who appeared to be seriously trying to ground their work solidly in evidence were nevertheless heavily influenced in their intrepretations by their cultural assumption on race. He does so by re-examining the original data from which they were drawing there conclusions.

But pseudoscientific theories of race like those elaborated by Joseph Arthur, Comte de Gobineau (1816-1882) and Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855-1927) cannot be assumed to have been based on scientific good intentions. Those influences heavily formed the Nazi brand of racism and anti-Semitism. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy summarizes Chamberlain's view in its article on Race:

The apogee of post-Darwinian race-thinking was arguably reached in the book The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century by Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855-1927), the son-in-law of German opera composer Richard Wagner. Chamberlain argued in the evolutionary terms of sexual selection that distinct races emerged through geographical and historical conditions which create inbreeding among certain individuals with similar traits ... Moving from this initial specification, Chamberlain then argued that the key strands of western civilization - Christianity and ancient Greek philosophy and art – emerged from the Aryan race. Jesus, for instance, was held to be of Aryan stock, despite his Jewish religion, since the territory of Galilee was populated by peoples descended from Aryan Phonecians as well as by Semitic Jews. Similarly, Aristotle's distinction between Greeks and Barbarians was reinterpreted as a racial distinction between Aryans and non-Aryans. These Greek and Christian strands became united in Europe, particularly during the Reformation, which allowed the highest, Teutonic strain of the Aryan race to be freed from constraining Roman Catholic cultural fetters. But while Roman institutions and practices may have constrained the Teutonic Germans, their diametric opposite was the Jew, the highest manifestation of the Semitic Race. The European religious tensions between Christian and Jew were thus transformed into racial conflicts, for which conversion or ecumenical tolerance would have no healing effect. Chamberlain's writings, not surprisingly, have come to be seen as some of the key intellectual foundations for twentieth century German anti-Semitism, of which Adolf Hitler was simply its most extreme manifestation.

This wasn't science or good-faith inquiry. It was crass anti-Semitism and racism cooked up to meet the prejudices to which Chamberlain wished to pander.

But pseudoscience isn't the only source of misinformation about the fictional "Aryan race". Esoteric groups also promoted racism notion about the "Aryans", particularly the theosophists. The Austrian cranks Guido von List (1848-1919) und Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels (1874-1954) were two esoteric racial theorists whose work influenced Hitler's thinking and the racial/historical writing in his book Mein Kampf.

Tags: indo-european language, national socialism, nazism, racism