Cogitamus

Women at Risk by Bob Herbert

From Bob Herbert's latest column in the NYT:

. . . I wrote, at the time, that there would have been thunderous outrage if someone had separated potential victims by race or religion and then shot, say, only the blacks, or only the whites, or only the Jews. But if you shoot only the girls or only the women — not so much of an uproar.

We have become so accustomed to living in a society saturated with misogyny that the barbaric treatment of women and girls has come to be more or less expected.

We profess to being shocked at one or another of these outlandish crimes, but the shock wears off quickly in an environment in which the rape, murder and humiliation of females is not only a staple of the news, but an important cornerstone of the nation’s entertainment.

Weekend Horizons: Belgium and Sweden

As promised.

Let's start with Mathilde by Belgian legend Jaques Brel, as suggested by Minstrel Boy.



Now on to Sweden--meet The Movits, who come with MR Bill's fond recommendation, as well as that of his son; this piece is called Äppelknyckarjazz.



More musical travels soon, barring the eruption of any boy incidents.

Bon Weekend, everyone!

A Little Friday Night Fight Music

"Know Your Enemy" - Green Day

Sorry for the poor video quality but this is culled from the concert that I went to last week.  And from about 2:36 in the video to the 3:00 mark, yours truly is visible -- the guy in the black shirt clapping along standing next to a friend of mine on the right with a head of pure white hair.  Billy Joe Armstrong, who is really little, is standing on the chair directly in front of me.

I would jump at the chance to see them again.  

The Nihilism of the Respectable Media

Sorry long time no blog, but my glamorous lawyerly life has been a bit much lately.  But sitting here in the airport lounge in beautiful Traverse City, Michigan (on my way to the Big Apple), I thought I'd try to quickly weigh in on Mara Liasson's characterization of the Cash for Clunkers program as Katrina-like.  (Oops now in a bar at the Detroit airport.) 

First, this came as no surprise to me* as Liasson is another of the NPR crew (along with fellow Foxer Juan Williams and inane Villager Cokie Roberts) who is always willing to spout right wing talking points in that mellow Morning Edition style.  Liasson's sin was such that the ombudsmen at NPR, a woman who can't bear to utter the word torture when it comes to American "enhanced interrogation techniques" called her on it in pretty strong language.  (It probably helps that Liasson made the statement during her Fox gig.)   But this is consistent with Liasson's work overall -- wrong and right.

The Cash for Clunkers program appears to be a success as a stimulus measure and, probably to a more modest extent, as an environmental measure despite Liasson's derision.  I think, however, her comment is more significant as a general, reflexive default position of thoughtless people in the media, i.e. government can do nothing right.  Of course, every day we are confronted with evidence to the contrary, from Medicare and the VA system to the Interstate Highway System to Social Security to the U.S. Mail and air traffic control -- the United States government, largely through programs enacted by Democrats, makes the lives of ordinary people better.  

So who cares what a lightweight like Mara has to say?  I guess I do.  The fact is that these attacks on government are not ideologically neutral.  They are part of a systematic, nihilistic attack on government, designed to promote despair in people that things can ever be made better through political and governmental action.  This is a direct attack on progressives who look to collective action to solve our social problems.  It gives aid and comfort to the right wingers (who when they do govern really attempt to make it seem like government can't do anything right.)  Coming from someone with the NPR seal of approval, it is doubly damning.

Politics isn't a game.  It has life and death consequences for people, as Liasson's unfortunate metaphor reminds us.  I won't give NPR a dime while she and Juan Williams remain on the joint Fox/NPR payroll.          

*Also written in a bar.

It's Like Someone Had An Accident In The Gene Pool

Amanda has Three Reasons the Euthanasia Lie Has Taken Hold, and they're very good and valid.  But there's something deeper behind the acceptance of this lie - and the birfers, the people who think Dr. Gates and Justice Sotomayor are the real racists, and who wave little bags of tea in protest of getting a tax cut because their betters told them to, and so on - something that is completely necessary for any of these beliefs and actions to take hold.

Like John Cole says, "it just seems like everything is dumber this summer."

Para Sonia, La Suprema

We follow our shreds of fame into an ambush.
Then (as while the stars herd to the great trough
the blind, in the always-only-outward of their dismantled
archways, awake at the smell of warmed stone
or the sound of reeds, lifting from the dim
into the segment of green dawn) always
our enemy is our foe at home, more
certainly than through spoken words or from grief-
twisted writing on paper, unblotted by tears
the thought came:
There is no physic
for the world's ill, nor surgery; it must
(hot smell of tar on wet salt air)
burn in fever forever, an incense pierced
with arrows, whose name is Love and another name
Rebellion (the twinge, the gulf, split seconds,
the very raindrops, render, and instancy
of Love).
All Poetry to this not-to-be-looked-upon sun
of Passion is the moon's cupped light; all
Politics to this moon, a moon's reflected
cupped light, like the moon of Rome, after
the deep well of Grecian light sank low;
always the enemy is the foe at home.
But these three are friends whose arms twine
without words; as, in still air,
the great grove leans to wind, past and to come.

-- from Train Ride, by Frederico García Lorca

Congratulations To Supreme Court Justice Sotomayor

By the way, your honor, if you want to now show yourself to be a huge progressive that's only been masquerading as a "centrist" in order to ease your confirmation to the Supreme Court, it's fine by me.

Having Harrumphed And Jiggled Their Whiskery Jowls, The Senate Leaps Into Action

Apparently they felt it was time to throw the commoners a bone, because the Senate passed the $2 billion supplement to the CARS program.  That or some constituents that matter - that is, people with money - made their wishes known.

It's no surprise that Ben Nelson ("D"-NE) would vote no.  What I don't understand is why in the world Claire McCaskill (D-MO) would vote against this measure.  Ford and GM both have factories in Missouri; perhaps the fact that Kt Bond (R-MO) voted for the measure shows which of Missouri's Senators gets their contributions and which doesn't.

EXPOSED! Marley is not a Real American

King Marley Tornello of Cogitamus, born in Kenya (apparently)

All this time, we'd assumed that Marley's birth on the floor of my closet in Saint Petersburg, Florida--along with his five pom-pom-sized siblings--meant he was a native-born American. I mean, what better example of American soil could there possibly be than the floor of my closet? (Trust me on this one.)

Mais non! It turns out there's a Kenyan birth certificate floating around that proves otherwise. King Marley was actually born in Saint Petersburg, Kenya. Yes, indeed. The Internets have confirmed it, and now we're just waiting for the Librul Media to report the truth. Look:

(click to embiggen)

You too can come up with hard evidence of someone's Kenyan birth!

Via Wonkette.

Cranks vs. buffoons - Birthers, meet the MSM

I'm probably going to be the odd one out among you on this one, but is there anyone else who comes away from this video feeling as turned off - okay, almost as turned off - by the MSNBC anchors in the video as by the loony Birther?

I mean, good on David Shuster and Tamron Hall for trying to debunk Orly Taitz's rants on air, instead of resorting to 'he said, she said' reporting, I guess - and for rebuffing some of her particularly outlandish excursions ("Obama's brownshirts in the mainstream media"?). But I still come away from the vid feeling that with friends like these, maybe you shouldn't be too surprised about the attraction exerted by the enemy.

I'm admittedly having trouble putting my finger on what is turning me off by Shuster's performance, in particular. Maybe I'm just being a pansy European and it's the whole culture in which endlessly shouting over someone is considered debating. But I don't think that's the only thing.

They let stuff like Taitz's claim that 85% of US citizens think Obama needs to be vetted and provide his birth certificate - made up on the spot, I suppose? - slide. Instead, and this might be the other thing that bothers me about it, they seem to consider the prime evidence that Taitz is a crank her inability to wrap her argument in a ten-second soundbite, and that she gets all agitated. The wrong kind of agitated, that is, because the faux agitation peddled by hosts from Olbermann to O'Reilly is just fine - it's finely calibrated to please the respective partisan audiences, it's made for TV. This woman is just not behaving like a .. professional.

To get to her point about how the Hawaiian newspapers would have posted false birth announcements, she starts at the beginning and first wants to explain about the kinds of announcements there were. And then starts over from the beginning when she's interrupted. She's awkward and incompetent at pitching her message in neat talking points, she rambles, is incoherent, gets emotional. When she makes up a percentage on the spot, she overdoes it and picks a wildly outlandish one.

The truth is that Taitz is a crank because she contends idiotic things, peddles hateful nonsense and blithely ignores any sense of logic. But the anchors seem to mostly be offended that they have to deal with, with ... such an amateur. They mistake her incompetence at doing TV for her incompetence at doing logic or sense - or just equate the two things. The arrogance and vanity of the media/DC village and all that - didn't they treat Cindy Sheehan the same way? Which ends them up looking - in my eyes at least, if perhaps in noone else's - like insulated buffoons in their own right.

Nebraskans, call your Senator. Liberals, go to those town hall meetings.

The HuPo reports on how a local entrepreneur, appearing in a TV commercial to pressure Ben Nelson into backing a public option, seemed to make the Senator a little nervous. But buried deep in the article is the detail about what direction Congressmen like Nelson are being pulled in overall. If you're a conservative Democrat with a penchant for getting weak-kneed quickly when you think you're discerning the kind of anti-Democratic backlash you're always already half-expecting anyway, then this will do the trick:

But for all the outreach, the pressure on Nelson has only mounted as he remains on the fence when it comes to President Obama's health care agenda. The senator's office says it is currently getting calls at a nine-to-one rate from individuals who don't want him to support a public option for insurance coverage.

The article next mentions that from the other side, the PCCC and DFA have pledged to triple the amount of money behind that TV ad pushing Nelson in the other direction. But to make the more wishy-washy Democrats feel less like they'll be facing a flood of anger, whether organized or not, if they side with Obama, they need to feel as much heat from the other side on all fronts. It may seem pointless to talk to a nice secretary who politely registers your complaint. But if people like Nelson get only calls from detractors of public health insurance, at the very least it will be all too convenient an excuse for them to side with the industry plying them with donations. Help rob them of that excuse and call them.

Not just that - go to those town hall meetings the conservatives are now dominating. At the Atlantic, Chris Good is highlighting what is "essentially a four-page handbook on hand-to-hand activist combat the the new battlefield of heated town-halls that's emerged this August," produced by Health Care for America Now!:

Until now, liberals have focused on turning out members for phone banking, visits to members' offices, canvasses, leaflets at churches and worksites, and rallies [..]. But now that town-hall confrontations have dominated discussion of health care this week--and, if unchecked, may continue to dominate discussion for the rest of August--HCAN is addressing it with a turnout effort of its own.

One critical suggestion from the memo: "Bring more people than the other side has." That is something that's been missing from these YouTube videos--liberal activists making their voices heard, as well.

The North Korean Circus Is Back In Town

Laura Lee and Euna Ling were released from their North Korean prison and allowed to return to the US with President Clinton.  This is a good thing.  However, it should be noted that the reason these women were given such a harsh sentence was to specifically entice a high-ranking American official to visit Pyongyang for photo ops and what is surely being described in the North Korean press as groveling before the might of Kim Jong Il and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.  The whole circus has been staged for domestic consumption.

It's not that I'm against what Clinton did; there really isn't a downside to it unless, as Atrios points out, you're like John Bolton and your penis shrinks whenever a Democrat engages in foreign policy.  It's just that this outcome has been guaranteed from the moment the two journalists were arrested.  The only real problem that I can forsee is if North Korea can use their graciousness to finagle two-party talks with the US, excluding China, Japan, Russia and South Korea.  John Boonstra makes a good point here, that the six-party talks are not only good for dealing with North Korea, but for getting several nations together that are "'working at cross-purposes' on seemingly everything else."  However, we also need to understand that the other four nations have a larger stake in what North Korea is allowed to do than we have, and they know it.  This means that it'll be far harder to get them on board with anything that comes out of bilateral talks than it would to just include them in the process.  It has also been true that North Korea can usually get more out of us than they can China or Russia, so conducting talks with each nation separately means they'd most likely get more concessions than they would out of six-party talks. 

North Korea probably has the most straightforward foreign policy of any nation on earth.  It is always about short-term gain coupled with internal propaganda fodder.

The Fucking Stupidest Deliberative Body In The World

The US House has passed a bill giving the immensely successful and popular "Cash for Clunkers" program $2 billion more dollars.  It's a rare example of the federal government reacting quickly and decisively in the face of obvious public desire.

The US Senate, however, seems dead-set on its course toward exhausting the English language's store of insults and pejoratives as it blithely puts the brakes on the program.  Senators behaving like members of the French royal court in 1788 is hardly news, but what makes their antics different this time is how absurd they are even given their incredibly high standards for absurdity.

The Democrats have 60 votes - in theory, since two of our Senators haven't been in attendance for some time now.  I'm sorry to be mean, but perhaps it's time for Senators Kennedy and Byrd to retire, accept all the various honors and plaudits due them and put some people in those seats who can show up to cast a vote.  But even with 58 votes, it shouldn't be too hard to find two Republicans who don't want to make enemies of their constituents.

I'm simply unable to understand why the Senate isn't enthusiastically supporting this.  The few liberals should be on board because it'll get money into the economy in a much more efficient way than driving dump trucks full of cash to Wall Street.  The vast swath of centrists conservatives should support the program because it puts money into the hands of auto dealers, and they supposedly love business interests.  And the Screaming Ninnies of the extreme right - that is, everyone in the GOP caucus not from Maine - well, who cares what they think?

Hell, it's obvious that the program's biggest beneficiaries are going to be people in suburbs, small towns and rural areas, because they're the ones that don't have public transportation options and greater distances to drive - and those are the people most likely to support conservative Democrats and the Screaming Ninnies party.

The best that I can figure is that Senate opposition to the "Cash for Clunkers" program stems from a combination of pique at the US House daring to take the lead on something, a deeply ingrained hatred of unions that extends to even to businesses that dare to sell a union product - or in the case of non-US carmakers, dare to sell products in the same class as union products - and the astounding, toxic separation that almost every Senator has from any experience of what it's like to be middle class or poor in this country.

Redeeming The Name Mr. Potter

Wendell Potter worked 15 years for CIGNA health insurance.  Watch this video of Potter on Bill Moyers (the transcript is there too) and remember that what he saw in West Virginia that day is perfectly fine with Ben Nelson, Chuck Grassley and anyone else defending, even partially, our health care system's status quo. 

We need to win this.  Probably all we can get is a partial victory now.  But for once the progressive movement needs to be able to take a long view:  let's fight for as much as we can possibly get now, and then keep chipping away at an ultimate goal of reducing the health insurance industry in this country to a bit player, a sad, shrunken shadow of its former self.  Let's turn private health insurance in America into something completely unnecessary, something silly and redundant that rich people have to show each other how rich they are.

God damn I fucking hate these people

Your Monday wake-up call: Pete Seeger; Casey Jones

Reader big bad wolf writes: i guess we'd call this a sunday song for Sir Charles, and sends along this great song from the album The Legend by Pete Seeger, himself the living embodiment of the word legend. Okay, so it's actually Monday morning, but I think this is a great wake-up for the coming week, don't you agree?

(Weekend horizons will resume this Saturday with music from Ethiopia and Sweden.)

Saturday Frank: Montana; 1973

I may be movin' to Montana soon...

Shall we expect a bumper crop of Palin Dental Floss* to hit the stores by Christmas?

* cf.

The Family

What can I say about "The Family," the "C Street Fellowship" that seems to function as one person - Bill Maher? - put it, a frat house for fundamentalist Christian Representatives and Senators in DC?  If you haven't read at least Jeff Sharlet's article about them, let alone the book, you should. 

It's sick and twisted, genuinely scary stuff.  I want to be able to dismiss Sharlet as being paranoid, but I can't; any person or group who holds up a litany of murderous tyrants and warlords - Genghis Khan, Hitler, Mao - as people to admire and emulate is not only outside the tenets of any of this world's religions, but outside the parameters of what makes a human being human.  And that's completely beside the Family's involvement with Suharto of Indonesia, who has been accused of murdering hundreds of thousands of Indonesians in so-called communist purges; it's hard for Americans to know the truth of it, because what happened in Indonesia involved brown people and was for the benefit of capitalists the world over.

Weekend horizons: via Pakistan; Awaz, Mr. Fraudiay, 1996

At the recommendation of reader Prup, let's explore the beautiful sounds of Pakistan today, specifically, mid-90's Pakistan and the reggae-inflected sounds of Awaz. From the album Shola, here is Mr. Fraudiay. Enjoy!

I encourage readers to share their favorite tunes from afar with fellow travelers (ahem) and either leave me a link in comments or shoot me an e-mail (litbrit at gmail dot com, as ever). What say you we make this horizon-broadening thing a semi-regular exercise?

The 'Cash For Clunkers' Program Is Wildly Successful

No, really.  It's not "running out of money" in the sense of poor planning.  It's not "ending early" in the sense that it had a specific amount of time it was supposed to last.

The reason the US House just voted $2 billion more for the program is because it's easily the most popular and effective program the US government has created in years.  Consumers get to buy new cars that get better gas mileage and have lower repair costs than what they've owned, saving money in the long run.  Dealers get to move inventory and pay employees, automakers earn more, and we all benefit from reduced gasoline consumption and pollution.

The Republicans are trying to spin all this as a failure and make it about hwo the government will mess up health care:

"There are a lot of questions about how the administration administered this program. If they can't handle something as simple as this, how would we handle health care?" Boehner told The Associated Press.

Yup, the fact that everyone involved in the program loves it - and even those dealers complaining about the backlog of reimbursement requests will come around once everything works through the system; typical that businesses which make you wait 2 days for a widget to get shipped across town to fix your car need their business taken care of right the hell now - and that it's succeeded so well that even GOP lawmakers support putting more money into it means that the government-run health plan which will never exist is going to be a failure. 

I swear, these guys have so many different layers of deception going on it's hard to know just what it is they're lying about at any given time.

No, if this program tells us anything, it's that we finally have some people in Congress and the White House who have the slightest clue about what matters to American citizens.

Friday Funk: Johnny Guitar Watson; A Real Mother For Ya

For my money, this is one of the best bass lines ever. I dare you to try to sit completely still, ha!

Bon Weekend, everyone.

XXX
D.

Wednesday Grace: Steve Vai; I Know You're Here; Denver, 2003

Beautiful guitar music for a summer night's musing. Spiritual Steve looks so grown-up compared to his protégé days of playing alongside Frank Zappa (who called him the "Little Italian Virtuoso") while wearing leopard-print t-shirts and wowing the girls. I love (and relate to!) the glasses, too--apparently even rock-'n-rollers get around to needing them sooner or later.

Guantanamo, Revisited

Naomi Wolf returns to the scene of the crimes.

Blowin' in the wind, Arlen Specter is blowin' in the wind

No idea if that makes sense in English, actually. But it seemed a fitting title for the numbers Nate Silver laid out this weekend. Read his post for the details, but this chart sums up his findings:

Development In India

India recently launched their first Indian-made nuclear submarine.  They relied very heavily on Russian help, but obviously going forward they will be able to build items such as nuclear-powered-and-armed submarines on their own.

What struck me, at least, from this article is how the USA isn't mentioned.  Like most Americans I tend to think that everything in the world is about us.  However, it does seem clear that if there is a message being sent by this submarine, it is primarily to China, with Pakistan stinging from the fact that India is able to pursue such projects while they can't. 

India's rise as a world power, seen through an USA-centric lens, is encouraging.  While they have their share of problems, India's government can be said to be at least as open and benign toward its citizenry as ours, and as we've seen through nimh's excellent reporting, India has a vibrant democratic process.  They're close allies with the USA, and since we're still indebting ourselves to China at an insane pace, it's nice to see an allied nation make moves toward being able to take a leadership role in that part of the world. 

Let's face it:  America's reign as the world's superpower is over.  We'll still command respect and appear to be preeminent among nations, at least to ourselves, for a while because of the inertia of history.  But our time is over - and really, I'm ready for someone else to muck things up for a while.

Pelosi more unpopular than Cheney?

In my post just now, I noted the irony of David Brooks lamenting the "media and activist cocoon" liberals reside in, even as he himself demonstrated having apparently no idea what actual liberals feel about Obama. Pot and kettle came to mind.

It's worth noting, though, that Brooks also derided liberals relying on "their own cherry-picking pollsters" to confirm their biases, before proceeding to ... cherry-pick poll numbers to confirm his biases. Brooks:

Nancy Pelosi has lower approval ratings than Dick Cheney and far lower approval ratings than Sarah Palin.

Is that really true? Lower approval ratings than Darth Cheney? Well, kinda ...

Cheney is out of office, so there are no more approval ratings, which measure how people consider an elected politician to be doing his job, for him. There's only favourability ratings, which measure how people view that politician as a person. For Pelosi, there's a smattering of both types of polls. (In general, favourability ratings tend to be higher than approval ratings, even for the same person).

I found four recent polls that asked about both Cheney and Pelosi - three of them asking the favourability question on both, and one (CNN) asking about favourability for Cheney and job approval for Pelosi. Turns out that it's true that she has lower approval ratings ... but she also has lower disapproval ratings. Because she is less well known and fewer people have an opinion about her one way or another. In three of the four polls, the net balance is better for Pelosi than for Cheney; in the fourth poll (by NBC/WSJ), they come out equally badly.

Less impopular than Cheney - 't aint much to be proud of. But it's also the opposite of what Brooks asserts.

Pelosi vs Cheney

	Favourable	Unfavourable	Net
	Approve	Disapprove
NBC/WSJ 6/12-15
Nancy Pelosi	24	46	-22
Dick Cheney	26	48	-22
Fox, 6/9-10
Nancy Pelosi	29	47	-18
Dick Cheney	34	57	-23
Hotline, 6/4-7
Nancy Pelosi	32	43	-11
Dick Cheney	36	53	-17
CNN, 5/14-17
Nancy Pelosi	39	48	-9
Dick Cheney	37	55	-18