Hate Crime

With the House of Representatives debating a Hate Crimes bill named for Matthew Shepard, it should be no surprise that the crap is flowing from the right. On the floor of the House, though, makes cleaning a bit more difficult.

Rep. Foxx: "The bill was named after a very unfortunate incident that happened, where a young man was killed, but we know that that young man was killed in the commitment of robbery. It wasn't because he was gay. The bill was named for him, the hate crimes bill was named for him, but it's, it's really a hoax, that that continues to be used as an excuse for passing these bills."

Once again, for those who refuse to understand what's happening, we'll go through it. The bill does not create new rights; it doesn't mean a violent act against gays, or African-Americans, or whomever, is worse than any other violent crime; it doesn't target ministers in the pulpit.

What this bill does it target perpetrators. Here's a scenario. I'm walking down the street, minding my own business. A group of men confront me, calling me a fag, then beat me senseless. This is a hate crime because, for whatever reason, this group targeted me precisely because they (a) believed me to be gay, and (b) would not have happened had they not thought I was gay. In other words, Hate Crimes laws do not target "thought" (what a stupid notion), nor do they create "special rights" or protected classes. Rather, like the differences between homicide and manslaughter, voluntary and involuntary, etc., they target the perpetrators of crimes, their motivations, and specify the way these crimes are considered in a court of law. Had this group of men driven by me and merely shouted "Bum-puncher!" out their car window, there would be no crime. Had they rolled a drunk and stolen his money, it would have been simple assault.

The issue in Hate Crimes legislation deals with the reality that certain crimes are motivated by hatred. It deals with material facts in a criminal case, not thought, not the status of the victim, and certainly not "political correctness".

Matthew Shepard died because a couple yahoos decided to beat up some poor gay man. That is what they set out to do, they posed as gay men to lure him, then beat him and left him to die on the side of the road. In the process, they robbed him, but robbery was not the motivation. It was, in fact, a ruse, an act committed to cover up the fact that these two men killed Shepard because of his sexual orientation. In other words, they understood that it was a crime of hatred, and tried to disguise it by robbing him.

Anyone who fears this legislation should look within him- or herself.

The Country And The Right Wing

Today is the official 100th day of President Obama's first term as President. His approval rating, overall, stands at 69%. In other words, even people who didn't vote for him are supporting his Presidency.

Yet, should one be an avid reader of right-wing blogs and news sites, or a consumer of FOXNews, one could miss the fact that Obama is spectacularly popular. From the Tea Bag Revolt, which made most people laugh, to the uptick in racist hate-group recruitment, to the emerging paranoia over the swine flu outbreak, the right is a festering sewer of fiction, resentment, fear-mongering, and fantasies of armed rebellion.

Of course, these are the people who are driving a conservative guy like Arlen Specter out of the Republican Party. While not really caring all that much - with new party members like that, we could use a little ideological backbone - it is nice that the True Believers are at least fulfilling their role of gate-keepers at the insane asylum.

Since the Republican Party has ceased to function as a viable alternative, and the spectrum of moderate to moderately-liberal policy alternatives is almost wholly a Democratic operation, I am not surprised at all that, for example, not a single Republican voted in favor of the President's budget in the House. With the biggest media stars for Republicans being Sarah Palin, whose life more closely resembles a daytime drama; Rep. Michelle Bachman, R-MN, who is so dumb she managed to give a floor speech in the House in which she blamed the Depression of Roosevelt and something called "the Hoot-Smalley Tariff" (honest to God, she should be recalled for being so ignorant); Sen. James Inhofe, who seems to think that ignorance, even more than bliss, is actually wisdom; and, of course, Newt Gingrich, whose ubiquitous presence on the Sunday chat shows is always a boon to Democrats. Even the normally staid CNN can't take it anymore; yesterday, Jim DeMint appeared on CNN, trotting out a new talking point for Republicans in the face of Specter's defection, and Rick Sanchez finally managed to laugh out loud at the stupid.

The fever swamps of the right are chock-a-block with low-info, outright falsehoods parading as serious inquiry, and just batshit insanity offered as calm analysis. Steering clear of both our local, small versions of the cookiness of the right, and their larger media brethren and cistern is the best antidote to believing that Pres. Obama actually faces serious opposition.

Learning To Do Without

Part of my life-journey as a Christian has been coming to terms with all the things I have managed to put in the way of focusing on God and what God is calling me to do. One of the biggest obstacles I face is taking seriously the business in the Gospels where Jesus declares that unless we hate those we are supposed to love, we are unworthy to be called his disciples. That is to say, I take this seriously - and therefore, it is an obstacle.

My wife, in fact, is an object lesson in the reality of this statement. Dietrich Bonhoeffer's paraphrase of this line - "When God calls a man, He bids him come and die"(forgive the exclusive language) - is another way of challenging our facile ways of understanding the whole Christian things. God takes it seriously; we should, too. Lisa doesn't seem to get that I understand this. It makes for some rough going on occasion, to be sure, but as I always tell her, what choice does she have, really?

Anyway, as part of my desire to flush all the bad spiritual crap out of my life (and I do so hate that word, "spiritual", because everything is "spiritual"; we westerners, with our compartmentalized ways of looking at life, tend to make boxes when everything is really just strewn all over the attics of our lives), my latest struggle (for well over a year) has been with music. I realize this sounds stupid, but if you have been paying attention to this blog, or know me well enough, it is rather a big deal.

Before I even contemplated taking music away, the big struggle sat on shelves in the front living room. Books. Lots of books. Books on all sorts of subject. See, I used to think that reading all those books, getting all that education, meant something. I suppose it does, in a way, but I am far less impressed with the ability to complete a sentence than I used to be (although, as I read blogs and other things, I probably should be so impressed). In a long discussion I had with someone from work last year, I just no longer cared about it all that much. Having a graduate degree. Starting a doctoral program. All it means is I've read a couple more books. Hardly a feat worth shouting about.

When I said that, I realized that I no longer needed all those books on my shelves. They no longer were a part of me, or I a part of them. They were just a bunch of paper sitting there. The only thing that has kept me from tossing them out is they are useful, on occasion (including serving to hold up a box spring on a bed with missing slats . . .).

Now, the dual challenge I have is figuring out if I can really live without them. Ship 'em off to a library or something.

Now, music . . . I have done better. Have been blogging in silence for a couple months, which is new (I usually either have the CD player running, or some Internet Radio thingy going). Silence isn't golden, though. I find it harder to concentrate. I find it kind of sad, really.

Ridding myself of all this stuff is more than just an exercise in discipline. Whether it was books or is music, it is all part of stripping away the unnecessaries in life. Years ago, we go rid of TV, and I'm far happier not having the end of that particular cultural sewer pipe spewing in to our home. With the demise of books and all that learning as a part of my identity, I see far more clearly what a jerk I have managed to be over a long span of years of my life, when I thought it meant something that I had read a book.

Now, ridding myself of music . . . That's hard.

A Switch In Time Makes 59

So Arlen Specter has made the leap. Woo-hoo. Number me among the unimpressed. I'm too frigging old to be sanguine about this. After all I remember this:

And this:

And that's just a couple examples.

To my mind, he deserves no benefit of the doubt. There are far better Republicans we should have lured over - the two ladies from Maine being utmost in my mind.

He's just running scared. The Democrats don't need him; more proof the Senate is nothing but a bunch of old, rich, white guys.

Advice From The Lovelorn

Thanks to Duncan, I managed to read a pretty apt criticism of this icky piece of sludge. I'll let you check the links if you wish, but I wanted to add my own thoughts to the whole "get-hitched-early" business.

Why is it that people like this seem to frown and wag their fingers at other people for the choices they make? Who are these young-people-not-marrying hurting? From the article, it is pretty clear that Regnerus thinks "themselves" is the answer. Yet, if that were really the case - if young women were, indeed, as a class, hurting themselves in the long run (don't even get me started on the "shelf life" crap; good Lord but that's awful), it would seem that their younger peers would see the damage wrought and change their behavior.

Of course, Duncan is correct that what we are really reading is the view of a dirty old man, a nosy Nelly who sees all these single ladies in their early-20's being, well, single ladies in their early-20's and is both attracted and repulsed by their actions. Imagine young women behaving that way! I wonder how often Regnerus sits around in bars doing "field research"; it's actually kind of creepy.

When will others besides us filthy liberal bloggers tell these dirty old men to get their minds out of the gutter and mind their own business?

Music For Your Monday

Certainly not GREAT, perhaps not even great, but good, solid, old-fashioned rock, 70's style. Heart had two good looking women, some solid licks and hooks, and the times on their side. Their 80's success would be the victory of record executive A&R men over their natural inclinations (in other words, bleh!). First up, their Zepelineque "Love Alive" (really sounds like "The Battle of Evermore", huh . . .):



Another one of their acoustic numbers, I've always thought "Dog and Butterfly" was a pretty tune, executed well.



What would a little Heart compilation be without their middle-finger to the record industry, "Barracuda"?

Crisis Du Jour

The news that an outbreak of swine flu in Mexico has now moved to the United States is the latest test case for the efficacy of our 24-news channels. On the one hand, we really don't seem to know a whole lot, either about the initial outbreak (other than it seems to have occurred in Mexico) or that there are differences between the Mexican and American strains (at least, differences in virulence; read this New York Times article to see the host of questions raised by this outbreak).

It certainly seems some folks are losing their grip; a Congressman has called for closing the US-Mexico border, although this is most definitely a case of the barn door being pushed shut long after the horses are not only out, but in the back forty.

The larger issue here is the tension between getting the story (and, obviously, getting it right) and the duty not to create a panic by hyping beyond the facts. It should be obvious that even if we are facing a dangerous pandemic, we are in the very early stages of such a creature. My guess, if it's worth anything at all, is that this outbreak has been discovered early enough to keep it from reaching true pandemic proportions. Yet, as the story unfolds, we should keep an eye on how the media deal with this issue. Whether it's the border with Mexico, or various offered measures for containing the outbreak - if such are even needed - it seems that facing the threat of a serious flu pandemic is far more of a challenge than facing the actual thing. Were we in the midst of a true pandemic, the challenges would be different. Right now, it seems far more important not to run ahead of the facts, and the response.

How soon before we have all sorts of news channel chyrons on "The Great Flu Outbreak" or what have you?

100 Days

So, we've reached the mythical, point that always seems to be some kind of benchmark for Presidential Administrations. "100 Days!".

Except, Barack Obama doesn't operate like that. He doesn't operate on the nightly news schedule. He gives speeches, to be sure, and does appearances - most recently at a green factory in Iowa - but he isn't focused on whether or not he gets a good story on the three networks, or a good spin during the on-going 24-hour news stations. Recognizing the artificiality of the pressure-cooker created by 24-hour news channels, Obama has opted, for whatever his reasons may be, to govern as an adult. He understands the depth of the challenges he faces, not the least of them being an establishment that is geared to doubt the effectiveness of any attempt he may make at correcting the situation.

For that reason, his one big piece of legislation - the Economic Stimulus package - passed pretty much as he proposed it, after some back and forth, especially in the Senate. This remarkable victory - which is yet to be seen for what it is - shows both his intelligence and political abilities. His refusal to make more of the pirate situation, and the swiftness and almost absolute silence that accompanied it, also shows his confidence, and his refusal to allow events, or the conventional wisdom of the chattering classes, to dictate how he should respond.

We are at the beginning of a very long ride with Pres. Obama; he understands this better than we do. He operates with that understanding. The Washington-based new media, in particular, is still locked in to certain mindsets, relying on some very tired - and occasionally unreliable - sources for analysis and commentary. One of the biggest assumptions, I believe, is the necessity to play to the 24-hour news channels. Precisely because of their ubiquity, however, they create a sense of importance and crisis in even the most mundane situation.

The most important thing I have taken from the first 100 days of the Obama Administration is that we are dealing with a President, and senior staff, who refuse to allow the agenda to be set by others. That would include how to respond to the most serious economic situation in a quarter century.

On the other hand, many liberals are upset that Obama has not simply moved with lightning speed, for example, to take legal action against those who authorized the use of torture during the Bush Administration. I think that he will no more be pushed to act by his natural constituency than by his opponents. Part of the reason for this, I think, is a sense of propriety; one of the things Obama is asserting is the inherent limitations of the Office of the President, and simultaneously the independence of the Department of Justice. He has also refused to insist that Congress do anything - in regard to the torture memos or anything else - precisely because it is an equal branch of government to the Executive.

In other words, we are looking at a patient, fairly deliberate man using that patience and deliberation for the long-term benefit of the country.

With just 100 days under his belt, Barack Obama has already signaled to the country that he is in this for the long haul. I think the best is yet to come.

Saturday Rock Show

From John Barleycorn Must Die, this is "Empty Pages".

Rights, Freedom, And Words

It all started so innocently. A friendly little discussion on the Second Amendment. Crabwalking toward Armageddon, however, left me figuring that I had better make my position clear, or at least clearer than a few scattered comments on a blog post could render. I realize my position sounds funny, especially for a self-confessed liberal (I was accused of sounding like Robert Bork! That hurt . . .), but in my own defense I believe that while there might be some superficial resemblances, we come out in very different places.

First of all, just by way of general understanding, I think that much of the talk about "rights" fails because it is embedded in a far larger point of view, world view, what have you, that I don't accept. Human beings, as far as we know, have never lived in some fantasy land called "the state of nature". Human beings do not, as far as I am concerned, have some metaphysical properties that inhere in them precisely because they are human beings. It would be nice if this were true, but it isn't.

That being said, yes, I agree with Judge Bork, and would go even further and insist the entire Constitution of the United States is nothing more and nothing less than "ink blots on paper". All writing is just that and nothing more. This is bad how? Even this blog post is nothing more than a series of black dots on a white screen. Whatever "meaning" it may or may not have comes not from those dots, but from the readers who assign those dots a meaningful value, related to other such marks they have encountered before. In other words, it's all just words, and all words are nothing more than sounds we make or marks on some surface. Meaning comes from those who have assigned such to these marks (and for the monolingual amongst us, excludes other marks as meaningful for him or herself in the same way).

Having said that, I would reiterate the point I made in comments: There is a difference between rights and freedoms. The rights we as American citizens possess, if they are truly "natural" and, indeed, inalienable (according to Thomas Jefferson), should not only be recognized universally; there should be no reason to enumerate these rights because they would be an assumed part of our identity as human beings. Yet, I challenge any American to go, say, to Uzbekistan, and stand on a street corner and call the President of that country a dictator. I know I wouldn't do it, because I have no desire to end up in an Uzbek prison.

Traditional contract theory would say that the first Ten Amendments to the Constitution of the United States recognize the limits of state action in the face of our claims against the state, claims that inhere in us prior to our membership in a given society. Thus, the opening clause of the First Amendment reads, "Congress shall make no law . . ." Why can't it make such a law? Traditional contract theory would state that such a law would be a violation of natural law.

Now, it is a curious phenomenon that less than a decade after passing the first ten amendments to the Constitution, Congress indeed curtailed all sorts of rights in the Constitution, including freedom of speech, when it passed the Alien and Sedition Act. During the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus in territory occupied by the Union Army, first Maryland, and later in occupied states that had surrendered. The Supreme Court endorsed this action ex post facto. Another Alien and Sedition Act was passed after the First World War, during the first Red Scare. The Smith Act of the early 1950's made membership in the Communist Party (CPUSA) illegal.

Don't even get me started on the PATRIOT Act. . .

That's just a sampling of ways our "rights" have been legally curtailed. Everything from search and seizure, trial by jury, speedy trials, to the general statements of the 9th and 10th Amendments have been abridged, ignored, set aside, violated, what have you, in the course of our history. For this reason - i.e., because the reality is far different from the theory about "rights" - I stated that the Constitution, at least as it pertains to individual liberty and justice before the law, is far more aspirational than descriptive. I don't think this is a bad thing; it would be nice to have a society as described in the Constitution. We don't, and tear ourselves in knots over what, exactly is, for example, an "unreasonable" search and seizure, what constitutes "probable cause" for a police officer to believe a crime is being committed, or what "the people's right to bear arms" means in light of the qualifying clause concerning "a well regulated militia" (the amendment that started this brouhaha).

At one point, Feodor asked if he had the "right" to walk down the street. No. He certainly has the freedom to do so. In traditional contract-theory language, neither he nor anyone else has a prior claim against the state inhering in him by nature to walk down the street. He has the freedom to do so, to be sure, provided he obeys all relevant laws and regulations pertaining to such activity. He has no right - no claim against the state's ability to so regulate - to do so. That is the difference, in traditional "rights" language, between a right and a freedom.

In a more mundane, contemporary understanding, I would say he has no "right" to walk down the street because such a right isn't in the Constitution.

Now, this is not to say that unenumerated rights haven't been found, or discovered, or claimed. For example, one of the more notorious discoveries was Supreme Court Justice William Douglas' discovery of a "right to privacy", existing in "penumbras and emanations" from various specific, enumerated rights.

TStockman mentions the following amendment:

Amendment IX

The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

Had Justice Douglas used the 9th in his argument, he might just have been on a little firmer footing. Yet, he did not. Rather, he divined the right of privacy, in essence, from shadows cast by some rights, and ejaculations from others. Since, to my knowledge, no new right has ever been delineated as flowing from the 9th - and since the lack of specificity leaves this Amendment, to my mind, utterly meaningless - I'm not sure arguing that we have various "rights" because one Amendment in the Constitution says such is possible is a good argument.

The question of what constitutes our freedoms, our rights, and even our understanding of the law has been in full force over the past week or so, with the release of previously classified legal memoranda from the Bush Administration Office of Legal Council (OLC) concerning what has euphemistically been termed "enhanced interrogation techniques". Now, to someone who might imagine that what is described crosses certain legal boundaries, these are onion-skin-thin rationalizations for torture. The entire process of setting down on paper these legal opinions was done to give legal cover to those who would actually perform them. Now, to most people with a lick of sense, the reasoning was so bad it would have been laughed out of any court of law. Yet, before Barack Obama could end the practices outlined (contrary to myth, the '06 curtailment did not end, only reduced the number, of "enhanced interrogations"; the OLC recommendations were still in force on January 20, 2009), his own OLC had to rescind those opinions, which they have done.

Rights, freedom - we are constantly in need of making sure that these words mean something for us. That is the struggle. We must always be moving toward the state outlined in the first ten Amendments to the Constitution. We should never, pretend, however, that our rights are anything more than the words of the Constitution, interpreted by Courts, or enacted under laws passed by Congress in light of those rights and freedoms.

The Gravest Threat

One would think that an image such as the one below would warm even the coldest heart. Yet, such is the insanity of the right that, rather than see such closeness and devotion as something to celebrate, they see nothing more than the most dire threat to our entire political, economic, and social structure.

Which only goes to show how ridiculous, stupid, and hate-filled they really are.

Foreign Policy

Ever since I was a freshman in college, I have been an interested observer of foreign policy. In the old college bookstore - it moved at some point - I found a remaindered copy of Einstein on Peace, an edition of Albert Einstein's writings on matters pertaining to war, peace, international and supranational organization, and nuclear armaments running from the beginning of the First World War up until his death. While I didn't agree with much of what he wrote, and I agree that his attempt to defend some kind of supranational structure, especially in light of Stalinist Soviet adventurism was beyond naive, I found it refreshing to consider alternatives to the realpolitique that governs so much of our considerations of foreign affairs.

The intervening quarter century, however, has given me a greater appreciation for political realism in dealing with other countries. I do not mean the kind of realism epitomized by Henry Kissinger (and outlined in his too-long book Diplomacy in which, among other things, he reveals a serious man-crush on Josef Stalin). I mean realism as practiced by most countries most of the time. Our foreign policy has been driven, in my lifetime, first by Cold War lunacy and its near-kin of nuclear gamesmanship, then by a kind of empty-headed triumphalism (New World Order! Ronald Reagan Won The Cold War!), then by another kind of weird synthesis of the two (Nuke The Muslims!), with occasional forays in to Cold Warism (Boycott Cuba! Hugo Chavez Will Kill Our Men And Steal Our Women!) just to keep things interesting.

Bill Clinton's attempt to create a foreign policy driven by considerations of trade failed in the face of Republican intransigence and the notion that he was selling our sovereignty to China.

With the right out of power, we are slowly attempting to right the ship of State Department toward a more classically realistic approach to foreign affairs. This was epitomized this past weekend during the Summit of the Americas, when President Obama shook hands with Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, which made heads explode all over the place. During the summit, Cuba's leader, Raul Castro, offered open negotiations with the United States even as the President said that travel restrictions to Cuba will soon be lifted (I look forward to a sojourn on one of Cuba's beaches in the near future). These are good first steps. Even as the President seems to be doubling down in Afghanistan - a few years too late, I believe - and keeping a wary eye on Pakistan and North Korea (without, in the latter case, getting too worked-up over a failed missile launch a couple weeks ago), he is moving at a pretty rapid pace towards making American foreign policy far more sane, and the United States a serious, credible international actor, rather than, as Noam Chomsky pointed out, the largest rogue state in the world.

One of the biggest obstacles toward a truly realistic foreign policy is the persistence of the idea of American exceptionalism. The last dregs of this farcical idea are still with us, and we need to toss them down the drain in order to deal with the world. We are no more some special case in world history than was the British Empire, the Spanish Empire, or any other imperial power. An accident of history, combined with an abundance of natural resources - that's us in a nutshell.

In light of my preference for a return to sober, mature realism in our dealings with other nation-states, I find it amusing to consider what Matthew Yglesias calls the "alternate reality" and "fever swamps" of the American right. I especially love the idea, in the first linked piece, that Argentina is in some manner, fashion, or form, an American antagonist. The move in Latin America toward various places on the social democracy continuum should be a welcome development, as is the attempt by Brazil, Argentina, and Chile to become far larger actors on the world stage even as their societies mature and move away from the pendulum swings of economic and political collapse and authoritarianism.

The marginalization of the kinds of nonsense we continue to hear and read from the American right is a good thing. Obama's adult approach toward the realities in the world is also a good thing. After a quarter century of really bad foreign policy, it will be nice to see how this unfolds.

More Humor For Your Monday

Courtesy of our President.

Venezuela is a country whose defense budget is probably 1/600th of the United States’. They own Citgo. It’s unlikely that as a consequence of me shaking hands or having a polite conversation with Mr. Chavez that we are endangering the strategic interests of the United States. I don’t think anybody can find any evidence that that would do so. Even within this imaginative crowd, I think you would be hard-pressed to paint a scenario in which U.S. interests would be damaged as a consequence of us having a more constructive relationship with Venezuela.

All of which is to say, in extremely polite, diplomatic talk:

Some Humor For Your Monday

Classic Monty Python. Why? Because I want a laugh.

"The Dead Parrot" - a classic that never gets old.



Why not another classic? "The Lumberjack Song", preceded by a little sketch in a barbershop. . .



A love song. . . Not Safe For Work:



From Monty Python and the Holy Grail, a scene that makes me laugh so hard I usually end up running to the bathroom. French taunting, indeed . . .

Presidents And Dictators

In the days just before he and his shoe collecting wife were booted out of the Philippines for good, Ferdinand Marcos got a huge boost of rhetorical support from then-President Ronald Reagan. When Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier was fleeing for his life from his own private fiefdom of Haiti, he received it in part courtesy of the CIA. After murdering hundred, perhaps thousands, of pro-democracy protesters in Tiananmen Square, the Chinese government received the American Secretary of State, James Baker, who showed proper respect to the butchers of Beijing. The list of murderous thugs in Latin America given kid-glove treatment by American Presidents is long and stretches back at least a century - shoot, the CIA managed to start an uprising in Chile against a popularly elected leftist President - and the body count is enormous. South Vietnam, Indonesia, the Congo, apartheid South Africa, Rhodesia, Angola, Greece, Spain, Portugal, Saudi Arabia, Iran under the Shah - the list of countries whose dictators have been photographed with American Presidents, whose regimes have been given money by the American government, is long and bloody.

Let's not even start with Stalin dealing with two American Presidents during the Second World War, Kruschev with Kennedy, Breznev with Nixon and Ford and Carter, or Gorbachev with Reagan. The Soviet Union was the sine qua non of dictatorships, and Stalin second in line behind Mao Tse-tung in butchering his own people (and, of course, the Chairman received Nixon in 1972), and was given the sobriquet, "Good Old Joe", by Pres. Roosevelt (not one of his brighter moments, let us confess).

Now, the right is enraged because Pres. Obama shook hands with, and received a gift from . . . Hugo Chavez of Venezuela.

As police Chief O'Rourke used to say on the old Batman TV series, "Saints preserve us!"

First off, giving air time to Newt Gingrich is always a good thing for Democrats, so I'm all for allowing him to get his mug out there and yap about anything he wants. The President's approval rating probably gains five points just from Gingrich talking smack about him.

Second, so what? Who is Hugo Chavez? The twice-elected President of a sovereign nation with whom the United States has had (until recently) normal relations, including business ties. Then, along came the Bush Administration that supported a coup attempt that failed miserably (which certainly didn't hurt Chavez re-election bid). Whether or not I'm a fan of Chavez is immaterial. Like equally loud, and irrelevant, Bolivian President Evo Morales, he happens to be the President of the country, and we have to deal with him. Period.

Standing behind all this is, I think, a fascinating phenomenon outlined in the linked piece in TPM. Josh point out that American power, properly understood, shouldn't be something we wave around like a big old sword or gun pushed in other people's faces. Rather, true power rests in not having to show how powerful one is. The former is the act of a bully, someone afraid of his or her lack of power. The latter is the way a leader accepts power, and uses it wisely. For all those out there frothing at the mouth at the temerity of the President of the United States shaking hands with the President of another sovereign country - and please, remember, that is all he did (well, he took Chavez' gift) - please remember: this is a President supremely confident, a practitioner of Theodore Roosevelt's dictum of walking softly, precisely because he knows that the US has a stick larger than the next 20 nations' combined militaries.

It would be nice if we had better people with which to deal in other countries. Unfortunately, we do not. I think that Chavez revels in the status given him by right-wing Americans, using it to bolster his position at home, and giving him leverage with, for example, the Russians, who are desperate for a return to a Caribbean port for its navy. Most of Latin America is, currently, swinging toward social democracy in its politics. Former military dictatorships from Brazil and Argentina right up through Nicaragua and El Salvador are moving away from Banana Republic status, reforming their politics, and staking a claim to enter the century as modern states (Brazil, Chile, and Argentina in particular are determined to show they are major world players in a variety of ways). American leverage over Latin America has been declining for 20 years, and will erode even further in the coming decades, and this is a good thing for everyone involved. The sooner we grow out of our imperialist ways with our southern neighbors, the better it will be for all involved.

Part of that pattern is treating the duly-elected President of a sovereign country as a . . . President of a sovereign country. You shake his hand, you smile, you thank him for his gift. Then, you move on. If the right needs devils and enemies everywhere around the globe, they certainly know how to create them. Obama, a far more intelligent and self-possessed individual than the combined foreign policy team of the Bush Administration, has no need of devils. All he needs is for the rest of the world to know that he isn't George W. Bush. I think he's done quite well.

Torture Memos (UPDATE)

As anyone paying attention knows by now, the Obama Administration released four memos relating to the legal justification for what it called "enhanced interrogation techniques", otherwise known as torture. Coming on the heels of the release of those memos was the President's announcement that those who acted under the aegis of these memos will not be prosecuted. There has been more than a little furor raised over the announcement, even as Obama has been praised (and vilified, by an anonymous Bush Administration official) for starting to open doors and windows, at least a little, on the dark world that was the Bush Administration.

I have been cautious in addressing this issue because I think I see a pattern of Administration behavior that might not be clear. I could be wrong, but I believe that what many, including myself, see as foot-dragging on overturning Bush-era policies is actually a deliberate attempt on the part of Pres. Obama to be the anti-Bush. While I know it might be difficult to remember pre-9/11 Bush Administration practices, one of the complaints against them was that, in essence, they went out of their way to undo Clinton-era policies. They reflexively overrode pretty much anything that Clinton did.

While there is much merit to the idea that part of what Obama needs to do is simply reverse course, I believe that Obama is being very deliberate in his cautious approach to policy review. Thus, for now, we have the spectacle of the Obama Justice Department hewing the Bush-era line on matters of secrecy in the courts. As far as the release of these memos is concerned, and the ensuing outcry over the President's announcement that those who acted under these memos will not be prosecuted, I believe this might just be a signal of this deliberateness in action.

At the same time, the President certainly didn't rule out investigating those who actually ordered and those who wrote these memos. Part of the issue, of course, is that, from a legal point of view, we don't have a crime yet. While this may be difficult for many on the left to grasp, we do not, as yet, even have a case that anything illegal was done. Nothing has been brought before the courts. No individual has been indicted under war crimes laws, or crimes against humanity. Before we get to the point where such prosecutions take place, we first have to determine, from a legal point of view, whether laws were broken.

From a common-sense perspective, of course, this might seem cut and dry. Yet, our legal system being what it is, it isn't, and we need to remember that part of this long process is restoring the rule of law. Part of restoring the rule of law is not rushing to judgment. It might be well and good for a constitutional lawyer like Glenn Greenwald to make arguments that amount to summary judgments on the guilt or innocence of individuals, it should be noted that he does so not as a lawyer, but as a political commentator. I might even agree with his opinions. That doesn't mean, however, that we can then, willy-nilly, go out and grab folks and put them behind bars because they set in place policies and practices with which we disagree. There is a difference between the common sense understanding that, indeed, the Bush Administration violated any number of American and international laws. This is not the same thing as a legal case.

If I had to guess, I would say that the Obama Justice Department is being as deliberate as possible in order to make sure that no one believes that any potential legal action is politically motivated. While I know that many on the right will believe this no matter what happens, most Americans, even conservatives, are fair-minded enough to accept that, if done with deliberateness and thoroughness, an indictment of senior Bush Administration officials for crimes related to reports of torture would be far more acceptable than a quick rush with a whole lot of press coverage.

It certainly doesn't satisfy many liberals and leftists - including me at times - but it does have merit. We should also remember that Obama has not yet completed the first 100 days of his first term; consider how profoundly different our political discourse is, our politics is, in less than 100 days, and perhaps we should give him the benefit of the doubt.

UPDATE: I may have spoken too soon. Apparently, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel announced on This Week that there will be no prosecutions even of senior Bush officials who created the policy that led to torture.

We'll see, won't we?

This Is Lisa; This Is Lisa Commuting With Her Husband

All for real, Lisa and her husband. Far too much fun not to post. For all fans of the blogger formerly known as DCup, this is just a treat.

Leave Wal-Mart out of it. More vaginas, though, definitely.

My Current Obsession

I have always been fascinated by ghosts. This is a kind of generalized thing in our family, too. Now, I have had some interesting stuff happen to me, including a very scary event in my parents' house when I was in high school (never repeated, though), and some interesting stuff at my oldest sister's house. So, when I discovered a show called Ghost Hunters was actually in its fourth season, well, I was all over it.

Now, I don't want you to think I've lost my mind. I am truly agnostic about what occurs on this show. The whole thing, while posing as a "reality show" could, in fact, be staged. My own favorite moments tend to be the discovery of what are known as EVPs, a phenomenon in which sounds like voices are recorded, sounds not heard at the time. While as many as fifty percent of the described "EVPs" on the show might also be nothing more than aural illusions, the brains connecting unconnected sounds to create a patterns (much the way we see constellations in the stars, or faces in photographs that aren't really there). On the other hand, there have been more than few things that have happened that, while not giving me the creeps necessarily, are most definitely interesting.

In the season finale last year, the TAPS (The Atlantic Paranormal Society, based in Warwick, RI) was investigating a closed-down sanitarium in Clovis, CA. In this clip, the two leaders, Jason Hawes and Grant Wilson (plumbers by trade) are trying to chase down the source of some sounds they have heard but cannot pinpoint. What happens toward the end of this clip, well, I'll just post it:

Some other highlights are the investigation of the lighthouse in St. Augustine, FL; an abandoned sanitorium, Waverly Hills, outside Lexington, KY; the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, CO, and of Leap Castle in Ireland. There is a spin-off, Ghost Hunters International that has been a whole lot of fun, too.

Dana Milbank Hackfully Dismisses Complaints He's A Hack

I shouldn't have, but Dana Milbank's column in the Post really is an exercise in cluelessness.

On Tuesday, I learned that I am a right-wing hack. I am not a journalist. I am typical of the right wing. I am why newspapers are going broke. I write garbage. I am angry with Barack Obama. I misquote Obama. I am bitter. I am a certified idiot. I am lame. I am a Republican flack.

On Thursday, I realized that I am a media pimp with my lips on Obama's butt. I am a bleeding-heart liberal who wants nothing more than for the right to fall on its face. I am part of the ObamaMedia. I am pimping for the left. I am carrying water for Obama. Lord, am I an idiot.

Since both these positions contain ideological elements that cannot coexist, is it necessary to conclude they are both false?

Actually he doesn't do that. What he does, however, is even less intelligent and artful.

The comments are naturally an unscientific indicator, but the impression I got is consistent with what I've heard from colleagues: The vitriol of last year's presidential campaign has outlasted the election. For the right, this isn't terribly surprising; their guys lost the White House in 2008 and control of both chambers of Congress in 2006, so lashing out in frustration is to be expected. The left, however, is more difficult to explain. It made sense for them to be angry when George W. Bush was in the White House. But now, even under Obama, the anger on the left is, if anything, more personal and vitriolic than on the right.

Rather than deal with the substantive issues - the very idea that Dana Milbank is a clueless reciter of conventional wisdom is impossible for Dana Milbank to contemplate - he asks a question that redirects the entire issue to those who have left comments in his online columns. He isn't a clueless hack, "the left" is angry!

First of all, to dismiss "the right"'s anger as understandable - and the substance of which we really need not concern ourselves with - shows that Milbank really hasn't been paying attention recently. While media clowns from Bill O'Reilly and Glenn Beck to Rush Limbaugh certainly are entertaining in a sick kind of way, the expression of racist and mindless political complaints verge on the scary; how many times do we have to hear these people use the word "revolution" before we realize that, some of them, are quite serious? Milbank certainly doesn't; the expression of popular political outrage just isn't his purview, apparently.

Second, the real Left in the United States is almost non-existent. There are liberals, to be sure, of various shades; there are the self-labeled Progressives, who exist further to the left than conventional liberals. Real, hard-core left-wingers - socialists and communists shading in to one another - are certainly out there, but have no impact on our political life. Furthermore, it shouldn't surprise anyone with a modicum of political sense that "the Left" in the United States, such as it may be, would be dismayed with the Obama Administration. Hewing a pretty conventional line, it exists completely within acceptable limits of political discourse and practice, although a portion of it that has been sidelined and even ridiculed for decades.

So much for part of Milbank's phony bit of wonderment. Second, the "anger" Milbank deals with is almost wholly anger directed at himself and his colleagues in the punditry. So, of course, it's all about him. Sigh.

So why is the left so angry? I don't know (I'm an idiot), so I put the question to the readers in my weekly online chat on Friday.

A reader from Rockville described it as a "sore winner" phenomenon. "People get used to being angry and when things change, they don't. So they find stuff to be mad about." Another said that some on the left "feel obligated to stay in the fight" because of the harsh treatment of Obama by the right.

But many focused on a frustration on the left caused by Obama's centrism -- his opposition to prosecuting those involved with torture, for example. "I am angry because the whole Republican party has not been rounded up and thrown into a black site," one wrote. A reader in Evanston, Ill., took a similar view, that true believers on the left don't want "b.s. rhetoric about looking forward." Okay, but why wouldn't this be directed at Obama? Readers explained that some of it is. But, "if we yell obscenities at Obama," replied a reader in Dunnellon, Fla., "we get a visit from the Secret Service. Yelling them at you is worry-free."


So the angry left should thank me: I'm taking one for the team.

The "left" isn't institutionally angry. On the contrary; we tend to push a far more positive view both of the potential of this country and its people as well as have a far more hopeful approach to broader participation in public affairs. The anger that Milbank has directed at him lies precisely at his cluelessness in the face of this anger. Rather than deal substantively with it - perhaps calling Obama's speech on mortgage refinancing a commercial for on-line lending, he might deal with the substantive policy aspects of mortgage refinancing in a time of financial and economic meltdown - he dismisses these complaints of his powerful intellect and humorous insight as, well, anger for anger's sake.

Finally, in regards the last comment Milbank cites, I would say that I have seen more than enough criticism of Obama and his Administration online to dismiss the idea that the entire phenomenon is some kind of massive example of misdirection. On the contrary, it is directed quite honestly at the kind of hack-filled dismissal and condescension apparent in this very column.

Saturday Rock Show

This is Black Sabbath, posing as Heaven and Hell for legal and other reasons, doing their Dio-era song, "I", which has quite the nice little punch. I like any song that wrestles with the confusions of identity we all experience.

Laughing

Atrios is right. We are laughing at you. The hilarity is almost nonstop. There is nothing serious here. There is no movement. As the video here shows, these people have no idea about history, what they are protesting, and some are so ignorant they are almost inarticulate. This isn't made-up stuff. This is who is left holding the teabag - ignoramuses mad as heck because the evil liberals won an election and are actually doing the stuff they said they would do.

I also agree with atrios that they should do this as often as possible. Let the teabagging continue, from sea to shining sea. Let the sun never set on the teabaggers. The entire thing is a wonderful exercise in how years of really stupid public discourse has created a situation where people dumb as a bag of bricks assume that, just because we are writing about them, we must be . . . afraid . . . of them. While I do not like to repeat myself, once again may I just say - We think you are so damn funny, we want more not less of you. While you go off ranting about tyranny, getting Gov. Rick Perry of Texas talking about secession, the President and Congress and the vast majority of the American people who support both the Democratic Party and its policy agenda can go about the business of saving the country from what eight years under people like you have done. So, please, gather together and teabag to your heart's content.

Rush Loves Pirates

Next thing you know, he'll be arguing that we should have held hands and sung "Kum Ba Yah".

RUSH: You know what we have learned about the Somali pirates, the merchant marine organizers that were wiped out at the order of Barack Obama, you know what we learned about them? They were teenagers. The Somali pirates, the merchant marine organizers who took a US merchant captain hostage for five days were inexperienced youths, the defense secretary, Roberts Gates, said yesterday, adding that the hijackers were between 17 and 19 years old. Now, just imagine the hue and cry had a Republican president ordered the shooting of black teenagers on the high seas. Greetings and welcome back, Rush Limbaugh, the Excellence in Broadcasting Network and the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies.


They were kids. The story is out, I don't know if it's true or not, but apparently the hijackers, these kids, the merchant marine organizers, Muslim kids, were upset, they wanted to just give the captain back and head home because they were running out of food, they were running out of fuel, they were surrounded by all these US Navy ships, big ships, and they just wanted out of there. That's the story, but then when one of them put a gun to the back of the captain, Mr. Phillips, then bam, bam, bam. There you have it, and three teenagers shot on the high seas at the order of President Obama.

A Teabagging We Will Go (UPDATED with video)

It seems that the right is truly clueless. A couple months ago, they decided to set up nationwide anti-tax protests and attempt to cover them in a blanket of patriotic respectability, linking them to the anti-tea tax "Tea Party" in Boston of colonial days. Unfortunately, they chose as their nom de protest a phrase that conjures up images of a gayer sort, and have been the butt of ridicule ever since. No amount of huffing and harrumphing from them changes the fact that a bunch of anti-gay bigots decided to use a term for testicle stimulation for their movement.

Tax day is always a fun one. For some reason, people in the news business decide that it is necessary to interview, or cover, "anti-tax protests". Many years ago, on C-SPAN, I saw a speech by some guy who went out of his way while giving a speech to declare the income tax unconstitutional. No one pointed out the following:

AMENDMENT XVI

Passed by Congress July 2, 1909. Ratified February 3, 1913.

Note: Article I, section 9, of the Constitution was modified by amendment 16.

The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration.

Now, my wife and I paid our taxes all through the Bush years, when our money went to fund everything from the Iraq war to hush money to the guy Cheney shot in the face. We did so even though it continues to be a burden, not only because it's the law, but because it feels like one of those days where we do some serious participation in national affairs. No one likes to pay taxes, but you know what? It reminds me, at least, that I am an American.

Anyway, the teabaggers picked April 15th to stage their "nationwide protests" and the results are mostly funny, with occasional hilarity and a smattering of scary. They have turned from being anti-tax to a kind of generalized anti-Obama rallies (tea shirts with the words "Chairman Maobama" proliferate alongside signs declaring him a fascist; cleverness isn't a strong suit among the right). Coming on the heels of the leak yesterday of a DHS report on right-wing domestic terrorism, it seems the FBI has their job of monitoring these people made much easier.

The teabaggers aren't a threat. They aren't the beginnings of some nascent anti-Obama movement that will sweep Republicans back in to office next year, and the White House in 2012. On the contrary, they are a bunch of ridiculous sheep being led around by very rich patrons. One hilarious aspect is highlighted by Josh Marshall:

DON'T BE DUPED! The term "teabagging" has strong sexual connotations. Be wary of anyone with a camera asking you if you are a "teabagger" or if you enjoy "teabagging" or similar leading questions - they are trying to make a fool of you.(emphasis added)

Trust me. That wouldn't be hard.

Like all the right-wing attempts at restoring their broken brand - Sarah Palin, Joe the Plumber, Rush the Party Chief, Newt Gingrich's rehabilitation tour - it is more a source of laughter than anything else. A hint would be this - since you're not laughing, it might be a clue that we are laughing at you.

UPDATE: I know that Bob Somerby thinks this is reprehensible. I think it is necessary to just laugh at how funny and stupid they are. This is like an entendre-fest:

This is LOL of Epic Fail proportions.

Columbine High School Ten Years After

Everyone who was even semi-conscious a decade ago remembers what happened. Unfortunately, according to a report in USAToday, most of what we claim we know, from the social status of Harris and Klebold, to specific accounts from the killing floor of the high school, is wrong.

They weren't goths or loners.

The two teenagers who killed 13 people and themselves at suburban Denver's Columbine High School 10 years ago next week weren't in the "Trenchcoat Mafia," disaffected videogamers who wore cowboy dusters. The killings ignited a national debate over bullying, but the record now shows Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold hadn't been bullied — in fact, they had bragged in diaries about picking on freshmen and "fags."

--snip--

A decade after Harris and Klebold made Columbine a synonym for rage, new information — including several books that analyze the tragedy through diaries, e-mails, appointment books, videotape, police affidavits and interviews with witnesses, friends and survivors — indicate that much of what the public has been told about the shootings is wrong.

--snip--

What's left, after peeling away a decade of myths, is perhaps more comforting than the "good kids harassed into retaliation" narrative — or perhaps not.

It's a portrait of Harris and Klebold as a sort of In Cold Blood criminal duo — a deeply disturbed, suicidal pair who over more than a year psyched each other up for an Oklahoma City-style terrorist bombing, an apolitical, over-the-top revenge fantasy against years of snubs, slights and cruelties, real and imagined.

Along the way, they saved money from after-school jobs, took Advanced Placement classes, assembled a small arsenal and fooled everyone — friends, parents, teachers, psychologists, cops and judges.

"These are not ordinary kids who were bullied into retaliation," psychologist Peter Langman writes in his new book, Why Kids Kill: Inside the Minds of School Shooters. "These are not ordinary kids who played too many video games. These are not ordinary kids who just wanted to be famous. These are simply not ordinary kids. These are kids with serious psychological problems."

--snip--

At the time, Columbine became a kind of giant national Rorschach test. Observers saw its genesis in just about everything: lax parenting, lax gun laws, progressive schooling, repressive school culture, violent video games, antidepressant drugs and rock 'n' roll, for starters.

Many of the Columbine myths emerged before the shooting stopped, as rumors, misunderstandings and wishful thinking swirled in an echo chamber among witnesses, survivors, officials and the news media.

Police contributed to the mess by talking to reporters before they knew facts — a hastily called news conference by the Jefferson County sheriff that afternoon produced the first headline: "Twenty-five dead in Colorado."

A few inaccuracies took hours to clear up, but others took weeks or months — sometimes years — as authorities reluctantly set the record straight.

In the wake of Columbine, some people who were prominent at the time - Newt Gingrich and Tom DeLay in particular - went on record blaming "liberalism" and the theory of evolution, respectively, for the events. While it might seem far better to pass over nonsense like this in silent derision, we should note that Gingrich, at least, is still appearing on television, still mouthing off. It might not be a bad idea on this tenth anniversary of these horrible events to ask him about his views in light of the information now available. While I doubt contrition would occur, it might be at least possible that he would admit the facts are far different from what we were given at the time.

What's most surprising about this detailed report is how unsurprising it all is. That one of the pair was a full-fledged psychopath, the other a clinically depressed youth, easily manipulated perhaps by his more flamboyant and intelligent partner makes far more sense than the whole "bullied-goths-and-gamers-getting-revenge" scenario. This latter fiction, created as much by a lack of facts and treating high school rumor and confession as having any merit at all, served only to confuse matters. The author of this summary is to be commended for putting in the public realm a wonderful summary of the reality behind the many myths of that very horrible day.

Matt Yglesias On Ideas In Political Discourse

Surprise! I would read a post about the role of political philosophy, link to it, quote it, and discuss it. Unfortunately, the link to the article that prompted the post - on alleged "anti-intellectualism" (God, I hate that term) - does not work, so we are kind of reading St. Paul's letters here, i.e., replying to things without any specific references, trying to reconstruct them as best we can.

I think that the questions that political philosophers have taken to debating professionally in recent decades have a limited relevance to contemporary politics. But I think a number of fairly abstract misguided ideas in ethics, political philosophy, and economics have come to have extraordinary cultural and political power in the United States and to a lesser extent elsewhere in the English speaking world, all to incredibly pernicious effect. What’s more, though most of these ideas are propounded, originally, by people whose degrees are in economics most of them are really ideas of a philosophical character.

Which ideas?

Well I’d say one important set of ideas is the perverse notion that it’s wrong or inappropriate to subject people to moral criticism for making selfish decisions as long as the decisions don’t involve breaking the law. I’ve been writing a bit about this lately with respect to greedy financiers, but it’s a more general thing. If a person announced to his friends and family “I’m going to steal $17 billion from aspiring college students and give the money to banks” we would expect a degree of shock and ostracism to follow. Indeed, if a person said “I’m going to pick a student’s pocket at rob him of $17″ we would expect some shock and ostracism.

--snip--

Another example is that, as Brad DeLong pointed out yesterday, economists’ protestations that they’re doing value-free social science actually embeds an implicit idea that “that shifts in distribution are of no account–which can be true only if the social welfare function gives everybody a weight inversely proportional to their marginal utility of wealth.” In other words, under guise of eschewing values, economics has adopted a philosophical value system which says that the well-being of rich people is more important than the well-being of poor people. Nobody ever says “social welfare function” when engaging in practical political debate, but the idea that not caring about distribution constitutes some kind of neutral middle ground is an important underlying premise of much practical political debate, and it’s viability stems from the fact that everyone remembers being taught that this is true in their Economics 101 courses.

As a third example, as a society we’ve become accustomed to the idea that when empirical evidence seems to contradict basic economic theory—as when the United States experienced rapid economic growth under conditions of widespread unionization and a high minimum wage—that we ought to accept the theory as true. This, again, is usually a claim you hear being made by economists, but its social prestige ultimately is a kind of idea in epistemology or the philosophy of science. And all this, of course, is to say nothing of the specific influence of particular empirical claims in economics which hold that high levels of taxation and government spending are everywhere and always economically destructive.

A big part of changing America is much more practical interventions into specific elections, congressional debates, media controversies, etc. But ultimately I do think that these big ideas matter as well. They’re enormously important in terms of setting the terms of political debate, in terms of influence what’s considered “possible” and what kinds of people have standing to have their views taken seriously. Building a better world ultimately requires getting people to understand that both the empirical and philosophical underpinnings of America’s free market society are much weaker than is generally understood.

What is important to note here is that Yglesias is taking some pretty abstruse philosophical positions and plugging in names and (corporate) faces and making them real. Philosophy, properly understood, isn't at all about "first principles" (what ever they might be). It's about taking a moment to figure out what's going on in the world.

As long as one is explicit about one's preferences, the joints and marrow of one's own web of beliefs and desires, and is willing to risk a clash over these, then we have the makings of serious public fun. For the most part, liberals have shied away from taking on conservatives on this very point - conceding the very ground, for example, on matters of political economy rather than challenging them - because liberals begin by conceding the mundane reality that conservative and liberal sets of beliefs are equally valid for those who share them, rather than insisting that just for that very reason it is important to take on the notion that the conservative set is vulnerable to the criticism that it has no prior claim upon us.

I also think Yglesias' point about the priority of a theory that aligns with empirical studies is important, but is also subject to the same criticism. After all, people can find fault with just about any empirical study and set of data (we have been having this discussion far too long not to recognize how muddied the waters have become on this very point). He and I and others may valorize these kinds of things, but that doesn't make them Gospel. They are just our preferences.

In any case, his more basic point - ideas matter - is demonstrably true, and needs to be remembered as we move along.

The Right Is Wrong - And They Doubt The American Military

The resolution of the standoff with the Somali pirates - using the Navy SEALS and snipers to remove the immediate threat and then rescuing the freighter captain - shows, once again, how cool Obama is. He didn't make a "crisis" or "test" out of this. It was a situation to be dealt with. My guess is it took a few days to get all the pieces in place before the operation could take place; more than likely that was why the FBI hostage negotiation team was brought in - buy time. With this operation, my guess is it is far less likely American-flagged freighters will have troubles with the pirates.

What's most hilarious about this is the way the folks on the right, and Fox News blabbers managed a wrongness that should be remembered forever after. From Daily Kos, here's a nice summary, with reality entering at the end to put an end to the fantasy-mongering:

Music For Your Monday

A few weeks ago, I featured some amazing guitar work. Today, I would like to enter realms undreamed. The whole thing began because a friend of mine emailed me a link to the first video here - the John Butler Trio doing "Ocean". First of all, I dig the hair. I want that hair. Second, please note that he actually plays an 11-string; he has removed the high G-string, which is practical as it is usually the first to go.



This is Dominic Frasca. This is a 10-string classical guitar. This is a sample of some seriously awesome playing. And, yes, that is a c-clamp holding down one string at one point.



Finally, a pair from an artist whose last name is Hettory. Here he demonstrates a double-tapping technique on a Chapman-stick-like guitar. This is "Dedication".



Here is Hettory with his trio in El Paso, TX. I post this because at one point he plays two guitars simultaneously. This is "Inner Funk" - and it does, indeed, appeal to the inner funk in me . . .

1977

My cousin has inspired a bit of nostalgia in me. This is off the usual, beaten path of this blog, but so what?

If there is any year in my childhood and youth that stands out for me, it is 1977. 1981 comes in a close second, but after sitting down and listing all that happened in just the first eight months of that year, I realized nothing compared to it.

In January, my oldest sister got married. I remember most two things. First, it was snowing like crazy. All day. Drive up. All day during. I think it actually got worse on the way home. At the beginning of the reception, my new brother-in-law was popping a bottle of champagne, and the cork ricocheted off the low drop-ceiling and hit my mother in the chest. I remember thinking, "That's no way to start out an in-law relationship." Also, I remember, on the drive home, hearing some song by the rock band Heart on the radio; it made such an impression on me that, forever after, whenever I hear them, I think of that day.

Later that spring, in May, this same sister graduated from college, SUNY Brockport. I remember hanging out in the little apartment they lived in - I wish I could remember the tiny town! - and reading a book about the Lizzy Borden murders. That, and the ceremony itself seemed to take for-freaking-ever. Oh, and we had dinner at this restaurant and I ordered Lake Ontario-caught lake trout, and they brought me "fish-on-a-plate", the whole thing, head and all. I ate it, but it was the first time I ever ate an animal that was looking at me doing so.

A month later, late June, and it was my brother's turn to graduate. Usually, the ceremony was outside in the HS football stadium, but storm clouds threatened, and for the first time in years, the ceremony was held inside in the high school auditorium. Afterward, the sky was a beautiful lightshow, but it was raining harder than I had ever seen before.

That summer was the most eventful of my young life. First, the pool at the high school was open every day, from one pm until 3:00; for a quarter, my friend Kenny and I would enjoy almost daily fun (the next year, we would ride our bikes to the Sayre high school pool, which was open until 5:00 and charged the same as the Waverly pool). Nights were spent at my friend Mike's house, playing "Jail Break", a kind of group hide and seek. We managed to get neighbors up and down the street to give us permission to ramble through their yards after dark, and the games seemed, in memory at least, to never end. Indeed, they usually just petered out into weird, surreal events barely remembered.

On the way to the high school, daily, some folks would blast out the Fleetwood Mac album Rumors. I can't here any of the songs of that LP without thinking of those summer days.

My first nephew was born in July. July 5th actually (his sister was born on December 26th; my sister's clock was off just slightly). I went to my first camping experience in the middle of the month, and was surprised to be picked up by my brother and my brother-in-law; I came home to meet my new nephew, two weeks old and all red and newborn. He was the most beautiful baby I would ever see until my daughters were born.

In August, my older sister graduated from the University of Southern Mississippi. We made the trip from our home in two days - a glorious trip that included a stay at some motel in Tennessee, and a stop for directions in Jackson, MS that made my mother burst out laughing at the depth of the accent on the young man who gave us directions. The night we arrived in Hattiesburg, I went with my father to the local McDonalds to pick up eats for us all, and my father got talking to a man who, I think I recall, was the night manager there. It was the first of many times this weird connection would occur; the man knew, through business contacts, a man who quite literally lived down the street from us. We had traveled 1500 miles, entering a totally different world, and yet . . . we weren't very far from home at all.

To my mind, the highlight of the trip wasn't the graduation (a long night in the domed coliseum), but the next day's trip to New Orleans. First, that was the day that Groucho Marx died (we received the news of Elvis' death on the road). Second, the French Quarter was, to this then-eleven-year-old, an exotic place, full of strange and wonderful shops. I went in to a voodoo shop, where an old woman, blind and obese (probably from diabetes) sat and smiled and chatted about what a "sweet spirit" I had. I explored the little gardens in the squares within a couple of the blocks; entrance was gained through old gates, some of them rusty. I sat on the banks of the Mississippi near Jackson Square Park (I wouldn't cross it until I was an adult). We ate a picnic on Pontchartrain, and my brother was attacked by fire ants (I still laugh at that), and on the way back to the city, we went through a zoo and my sister insisted she wanted to see an emu. Sure enough, around the next bend there was . . . an emu.

The night life along Bourbon St. was a revelation for me. Jazz and strip clubs, complete freedom without any bad vibes. I had my first-ever vision of the nude female form, and it formed a life-long impression on me (I hope, for the good).

Back home, and a couple weeks later, I went with my father to take my brother to college - Clarkson College (as it was then) in Potsdam, NY, which is almost as far north as you can go before you start speaking French Canadian.

Anyone like to share their most memorable events/times/years?

"Bo" Is Arabic For "Kill American White Men"

I was going to avoid politics today, but part of me couldn't resist.

I was also discouraged because Tbogg beat me to the punch, in a way.

JammieWearingFool seems unhappy because the Obama's named their dog Bo. Better safe than sorry. Had the first family named their dog something like Allahu Akbark, it might have been enough to send someone on a cop-killing spree.

See, the Obamas have chosen a puppy for their girls, as he promised on election night. Now, I read the other day that the breeder who provided a German Shepherd to the Bidens has been so inundated by stupid, hateful correspondence of various kinds, she regrets ever doing this (most of it came from animal-rights people who insisted that the Bidens "should have" taken a puppy from a shelter, say; that they might actually want a German Shepherd apparently makes no difference, because like all radicals, these people are really quite stupid). I wonder if the previous owner of the puppy bought by the President and First Lady for their daughters will receive the same treatment.

Now, the title here refers to this wonderful little tidbit from the "mind" of Frank Gaffney. I honestly don't know what to say about what follows other than, perhaps, the medication ran out right before the show began.

GAFFNEY: I think what he is using is code — … When he uses the word “respect,” in the context of a waist-bow to the king of Saudi Arabia, for example, and talks about respectful language, which is code for those who adhere to Sharia that we will submit to Sharia. We will submit to the kind of program –

SHUSTER: We have to know the code? We all have to know the code to understand how we’re making ourselves more vulnerable? … David Corn was asking you for a specific example, and you’re referring to code. You’re referring to code!

GAFFNEY: I’m telling you the code as they receive it in the Taliban headquarters and in al Qaeda’s cave and in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia. They perceive this as submission.

See what I mean?

Personally, I'm still laughing over "Allahu Akbark".

Early In The Morning Our Songs Shall Rise To Thee

Mourning Into Dancing

This is the day when we Christians celebrate the resurrection of Jesus from the dead.

Trying to understand this is a bit like trying to understand four-dimensional mathematics. While it is certainly possible to talk about such a creature, even write the equations out, it is actually impossible to create a physical representation of such equations. The so-called four-dimensional cube - the teseract - exists only as a theoretical construct for the very practical reason that there is no fourth physical dimension for the next set of angles to project 90 degress out from. Does a teseract exist? The equations certainly say so.

The analogy, like all such, is imperfect. The risen Christ is a reality for us; but, like the teseract, of what that reality consists is something we cannot grasp. Part of the problem in dealing with the question of the resurrection of Jesus is the simple fact that this is not something for which we have any categories for understanding. This is not a resuscitation, a "coming back to life" in the way medical science does for us. It isn't anything anyone has experienced, before or since. That it is, we declare without fear. What it is, well, how do you talk about something for which there not ony is no precedent, but no understanding?

Jesus tried with the Sadducees, who tried to trip up Jesus with questions about the law and its applicability after the resurrection. Paul tried in his letter to the Corinthians when he wrote about "spiritual bodies", although one gets the sense from reading the passage in the fifteenth chapter that Paul is straining to make sense without conceding the completely "new" involved. When presenting various bits of resurrection accounts, there are hints of this wholly new reality in the confession that various people who knew Jesus did not recognize him. How could they? They were confronted not with the Jesus with whom they were familiar, but Jesus raised from the dead. Not "brought back to life" like Lazarus, say, or the boy raised by Elijah in the Old Testament, or the girl raised by Jesus. This is something wholly new, wholly different - a taste of what is to come.

We stand in the light of this new day, this day when we remember that everything has, indeed, changed, and rather than sit around and try to figure out "the physics of resurrection", say, or "the biology of the New Creation" - we need to declare the reality of the resurrection for us. We need to live as if this new reality were completely around us - and have eyes to see where it peeks at us through the shadows.

We need to have the faith that stands in the graveyard and does a little dance. The grave upon which we dance is our own. Not just the little plot of land in which our dead bodies will be placed (or, in my case, where a little marker will be placed because my ashes will be scattered somewhere); but this whole world whose first unspoken assumption is that this little plot of land is the final answer. We see it in our politics. We see it in our culture. We see it in our medical science where death, not dehumanization through the imposition of technology, is "the enemy". We see it in our art. We try to shield our children from the reality of death, claiming "they won't understand", when I have come to remember and see in my childrens' eyes and words that there isn't much to understand, and they get it just fine. Just as I did.

How hard is it to understand? It is part of our set of reality, after all.

Resurrection, though . . . Just dance, man. Find the beat and go.

"I like things wide open, with question marks hanging over it, everything changing - nothing settled."

This is another in a series of my discussion with Feodor. If you're out there, read on.

A few year back, conservative columnist David Brooks wrote a book entitled Bourgeois Bohemians, which did little more than earn him the sobriquet "Bobo". It was nothing more than an updated version of the term "limousine liberal". The latter term emerged in the 1960's, after the New York literati flirted with the radicalism of serious militants, including the Black Panthers.

A common complaint among some political radicals is that the bohemian tradition in America is actually an elite revolt against itself. Ronald Steele's biography of Walter Lippmann has snippets of this same phenomenon in pre-WWI America. What could be more ridiculous than the thought that students at Harvard University in the years of Teddy Roosevelt's and William Howard Taft's Presidencies were actually communists? Well, in fact, John Reed would die and be buried a hero in the Soviet Union, and Lippmann was a member of Reed's circle, celebrated by Reed for his embrace of socialism. Lippmann's one foray in to practical politics was a stint as an assistant to the socialist mayor of Schenectady, NY. Lippmann was also a regular at various bohemian salons in New York.

Harold Bloom wrote a book in the 1990's, The American Religion, in which he argued, by way of examples from American history, that gnosticism lies at the heart of the American pursuit of spiritual enlightenment. While I disagree with some of what Bloom has to say, there is no doubt that this trend extends far beyond the various religious traditions he traces. An examination of the radical tradition in the United States, at least its aestheticized, bohemian tradition, has more than a little of the gnostic about it. I also think the criticism that it is an elite revolt is both fair and also inconsequential. When are revolts not led by an elite against certain elements of whatever reigns as elite practice and opinion? What could have been more elite than the group gathered in Philadelphia, first in 1776, then eleven years later to rewrite the American Constitution? Who could have been more elite than the son of middle-level Russian nobility who led the Russian Revolution, having already written several theoretical works putting Marx's theories in a Russian context?

Who could be more elite than a blogger writing about this stuff?

The Grateful Dead has been on my mind as I have been contemplating my discussion with Feodor. They epitomize a strand of aetheticized American radical thought, apolitical yet socially radical nonetheless, gnostic in their appreciation for the mind-expanding possibilities of art and rejection of the then-reigning values embodied in post-WWII America. Dirty, frightening in their unruly looks and embrace of everything from Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters to the Hell's Angels, the Dead embraced all of life - the positive and the negative - in a way that is both almost touchingly naive and deeply American. They were not blind to the threat they embodied, but insouciant to the political dimension of their refusal to play by society's rules. Their entire ethos centered on the personally transformative potential of music. They lived it out night after night, trying to play something new, and to have the audience be a part both of the playing and the newness. On their first trip to New York, they received a pretty typical (for them) dismissal by rock critics as part of some supposed California elite, ignorant of and apathetic to the real issues facing the country. On the contrary, they were coming at those issues from a different angle, one that should have been familiar to New York radicals who only a few years before had hyped the folk revival embodied by purists like Pete Seeger and newcomers like Bob Dylan and Joan Baez. The problem for the Dead was these three, in particular, were overtly and self-consciously politically radical as well as typifying a kind of bohemian aesthetic and lifestyle.

The quote that is the title of this post comes from an early-1980's interview with Jerry Garcia, in which he criticizes then-President Ronald Reagan. This sums up not just Garcia's views on Reagan, but a general approach to life that, I believe, is embodied in the best of the American pragmatist tradition, and embodied in the folk art tradition as well, including the folk music tradition, in which I put the Dead. After all, "Wharf Rat", "Franklin's Tower", and "Eyes of the World" from Garcia/Hunter, and "Me and My Uncle", "Mexicali Blues", and "Weather Report Suite" from Bob Weir are nothing more than folk songs played really loud. The American folk song tradition tells the stories of outsiders - criminals, the down-and-out - and does not so much celebrate those outside elite and polite society as it does simply portray the reality of that life (which is why, say, Snoop Dogg and NWA, Tupac Shakur and Notorious B.I.G. are also in this tradition moreso than, say, MC Hammer; they are just reporting from a different context and history).

The political dimension - and I daresay the philosophical dimension as well - of this tradition is both the rawness of and openness to all that life has to offer. It neither accepts nor rejects what comes, it simply faces it squarely. Part of my own embrace for this openness, which includes a refusal to get down and dirty and settle moral issues once and for all, comes (ironically enough) from reading a German theologian. Dietrich Bonhoefer's Ethics fragments, includes a discussion in which he turns Nietzsche's post-morality on its head. For Nietzsche, morality was a playground for infants; true humanity only emerged once one rejects good and evil. Bonhoeffer does one better than the anti-Christ from Basel, however, and says, "Yes, indeed. But moving on past notions of good and evil is only possible in a Christian context." Bonhoeffer specifically states that a Christian ethic that centers on the question of good and evil, on morality versus amorality, is a sign of human fallenness and sin. Christian ethics, properly owning that name, concerns itself only with doing God's will. Getting in to questions of "good" versus "evil" is a sign that we are not centered on God's will, but still under the spell of the serpent and the apple.

The willingness to be open to all that life has to offer - the good and the bad, the Puckish and the Violent, the dark and the light - takes courage. It also takes a certain sense of humor. Finally, it has to be taken with the understanding that none of this - not even death - is the final answer. This is the way the Dead approached their art and their lives, collectively and individually. There is something deeply familiar, deeply attractive for me, in this approach. It may not satisfy all sorts of tests of intellectual rigor, or political correctness, but it does have the virtue of being honest, even in its naivete.