Onyx Lynx

Theodore Sorensen, adviser to President Kennedy.

He's pretty much the last of them, isn't he?

Via Anglachel's Journal, Yves Smith's op-ed piece written for the New York Times, "How the Banks Put the Economy Underwater."

Evidence is mounting that these requirements were widely ignored. Judges are noticing: more are finding that banks cannot prove that they have the standing to foreclose on the properties that were bundled into securities. If this were a mere procedural problem, the banks could foreclose once they marshaled their evidence. But banks who are challenged in many cases do not resume these foreclosures, indicating that their lapses go well beyond minor paperwork.

And Anglachel, taking off from a Brad DeLong article, ponders the true lesson of 1994:

DeLong seems to think that the lesson of 1994 on Democrats is that "Democratic senators do themselves no good either in the next world or in this when they block sensible initiatives from Democratic presidents," but neatly sidesteps the reason that block of senators was blocking sensible initiatives from a Democratic president in the first place. The fantasy of bi-partisanship remains strong among precisely those Stevensonians who thought (and think) that teaching lessons to hicks is more important than having functional power.

Leigh Van Valen, evolutionary biologist.

[crossposted because fascinating.]

Occasionally I hit the sidebar at Brilliant at Breakfast.  This time I got Princess Sparkle Pony, who reads Politico so I don't have to:

Politico's "Arena," where important questions are met by talking points and press releases from a diverse group of hacks, lobbyists, publicists, and other compulsive faxers, today asked if it was "refreshing" that John Boehner and Mitch McConnell had promised an agenda of total, nihilistic obstructionism rather than "the usual platitudes about bipartisanship and working across the aisle."

For a change they got hardball:

Is this question a joke? When one of the country's two major political parties announces that it has no intention of joining in trying to solve the major problems the nation faces, that is an obvious scandal. POLITICO is enabling U.S. decline by implying otherwise. No country with 10+ percent unemployment, decaying infrastructure, major wars to fight and educational and health crises can survive the sort of political extremism for obstructionist purposes that the GOP is willfully and proudly engaging in. Only the super rich who want mansions in enclaves at home or abroad benefit from this.

Americans of all persuasions have said they do not want this, but media outlets continue to use fake "debates" like this for marketing purposes.

That would be Theda Skocpol, sociology and government professor.  (She has a Wikipedia entry.)

(Princess Sparkle Pony is now Peteykins, but the blog is still Princess Sparkle Pony.)

I also popped into "Doghouse" Riley, because I never remember that Bats Left/Throws Right is not a baseball blog.

Oh, and McCarthy of Echidne of the Snakes on media consolidation and why NPR is no help.

Southern Beale tells a story about her Congressman.

Remember BP?

Terrance of Republic of T, of course.

There is more than one kind of “boot to the face,” and the Tea Partiers don’t even own the “boot” with which they willingly and gleefully stomp the face of anyone with the temerity to tell them otherwise. The Tea Partiers don’t have the gold, and thus even if they “take the country back” it won’t be theirs. They are merely taking for people who believe they should own it by virtue of nothing more than their monetary might.

The Tea Party gets played.

Scott Horton on the Washington Post and WikiLeaks:

It’s also untrue that the new disclosures contain no “major revelations.” It will take some time to fully digest this material, but the disclosure of a Fragmentary Order (“Frago”) authorizing soldiers not to investigate cases of torture that do not involve coalition forces is extremely important. It counts as evidence of high-level policy to countenance war crimes and violations of the prohibition on torture, which requires not only investigation but also intervention. Recall this astonishing exchange that occurred between Rumsfeld and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Peter Pace at a DOD press conference in November 2005. Pace stated “it is absolutely the responsibility of every U.S. service member, if they see inhumane treatment being conducted, to intervene to stop it…” Rumsfeld interrupted and contradicted him, but Pace stood his ground. He was reciting well anchored military doctrine. He was also overruled by Rumsfeld.

The WaPo editors think this is “nothing,” but a court or tribunal examining the matter would likely come to a starkly different conclusion.

So next week is Election Day (in the United States, that is) and the media is pushing for Republican or Tea Party victories in the House and Senate races, as well as those states choosing governors and legislators and occasionally judges, not to mention massed ads for all the candidates.

Frederik Pohl, bless him, has a simple algorithm for who should get your vote.

When a politician lets lobbyists “suggest” changes in legislation he isn’t working for the voters any more, he’s working for the people who are giving him money. I’m assuming that isn’t the way you want it.

Arthur Silber has largely written the entire process off.

Also not by the way: this is not at all to say you should give up hope for your personal future, or surrender the desire for happiness and fulfillment. The problem for most people is that they place hope in all the wrong things, and look for happiness and fulfillment in all the wrong places.

And Driftglass remembers 2004 and features a long screed originally posted at The News Blog in 2004.

Commencing with a long quote from Bob Somerby, Anglachel takes a poke at "clueless elites":

That seems to be the true cultural divide - those who want to talk about eroding wages and those who want to pat themselves on the back for their moral superiority.

Personally, I find that if I am yelling "Liar!" during a political ad, I should probably not vote for that candidate.  (It is already on record to whom I refer.)

[crossposted]

ETA:  Shark-fu has not given up. Also, belated hat tip to FKB.

Via Mills River Progressive, George Monbiot of the UK Guardian (I can't remember the proper misspelling right now) assesses the Tea Party Movement.  With footnotes!  Hint:  He compares it to something used on sporting fields.  (The link given at MRP is still arguing with Safari.  Guardian direct link here.)

Astroturfing is now taking off in the United Kingdom. Earlier this month Spinwatch showed how a fake grassroots group set up by health insurers helped shape the Tories’ NHS reforms(18). Billionaires and corporations are capturing the political process everywhere; anyone with an interest in democracy should be thinking about how to resist them. Nothing is real any more. Nothing is as it seems.

Jane Smiley reviews Republican Gomorrah (for the Huffington Post) and notes their relation to responsibility and the wielding of power in ways that would not shock Arthur Silber or Dr. Alice Miller.

And power plays are the key to right wing psychology. Right wing psychology is the other thing that Blumenthal has to offer. At the periphery of this world is your run-of-the-mill bully, a man like Jack Abramoff, whose brutality is well remembered by his high school classmates, but who sang like a bird once he was caught. At the center of is James Dobson, a much more destructive figure than Abramoff, who advocates, in the strongest terms, child beating, and not only child-beating, but dog-beating. At one point he brags about going after the family canine (who weighed twelve pounds) and engaging in "the most vicious fight ever staged between man and beast." As for children, the goal is to keep beating the child until "he wants(s) to crumple on the breast of his parent." In other words, Dobson is a proud sadist who thinks sadism is kind of funny, and who, over the years, has successfully advocated sadism as the only workable form of child-rearing.

And not consensual sadism, either.  Via The Sideshow.

Southern Beale on the vast sums of money spent on elections by both parties.

The only people campaign advertising makes a difference to is the people selling the air time. And it makes a huge difference to them. It will continue to make a difference to them until the candidates and campaigns themselves decide TV advertising isn’t effective. When that happens, the local and national networks will have a huge sad. Maybe as big of a sad as the one we’ll see by the RSCC, RCCC, DSCC, DCCC, U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and every other group with their hand out seeking donations for ad buys that we could all do without.

(Schools?  Highway repair?  A Jedi marketer cares not for these things.)

The New York Times Book Review has a roundup of books on liberalism and conservatism, in which they explain:

1. Think of it as a distinction between “action liberals” and “movement liberals.” Action liberals are policy-oriented pragmatists who use their heads to get something important done, even if their arid deal-making and Big Money connections often turn off the base. Movement liberals can sometimes specialize in logical arguments (e.g., Garry Wills), but they are more often dreamy idealists whose hearts and moral imagination can power the deepest social change (notably the women’s movement and the civil rights movement). They frequently over indulge in fine whines, appear naïve about political realities and prefer emotionally satisfying gestures to incremental but significant change. Many Democrats are an uneasy combination of realpolitik and “gesture politics,” which makes for a complicated approach toward governing.

2. Republicans’ future electoral fortunes will depend on domestic policy and specifically on whether they can reconnect with “small-c” conservatism — the conservatism whose mottoes are “Neither a borrower nor a lender be” and “Mind your own business,” and the opposite of which is not liberalism but utopianism. The Bush administration was a time of “big-C” Conservatism, ideological conservatism, which the party pursued with mixed results. As far as social issues were concerned, this ideology riveted a vast bloc of religious conservatives to the party, and continues to be an electoral asset (although that bloc, by some measures, is shrinking). Had gay marriage not been on several state ballots in 2004, John Kerry might now be sitting in the White House.

Well, actually the articles meep about both parties being in trouble and out of touch while reviewing several books attempting to give that impression without giving that impression.

Wink Martindale?

Texas v. San Francisco.  Wednesday.  All the players one loves to hate have retired or gone to other teams.

Bob Herbert on how we treat the troops that we are supposed to be supporting.

One of the things we have long known about warfare is that the trouble follows the troops home. The Times published an article this week by Aaron Glantz, a reporter with The Bay Citizen news organization in San Francisco, that focused on the extraordinary surge of fatalities among Afghanistan and Iraq veterans. These young people died, wrote Mr. Glantz, “not just as a result of suicide, but also of vehicle accidents, motorcycle crashes, drug overdoses or other causes after being discharged from the military.”

Texas is going to the Series.  Nolan Ryan talks about his first postseason Series since the '69 Mets.

1. Anglachel does some history.

   Looking down your upper-middle class nose at the party loyalists who are sliding into poverty because of erosion of wages, pensions, job security, health care and related practical matters because they're fat and white and probably are racists doesn't earn you many adherents.

2. bfp questions the double standard for hateful commentators.

   what the fuck is UP with all the people of color in media being fired over one comment (some of them really questionable in their objectionability see: helen thomas)—instantaneously dismissed within *hours* to *days* of the objectionable comment—whereas actual hate speech, continuous, almost fucking *monotonous* hate speech gets shifted out to the public *daily*—*hourly* by white broadcasters with nary a comment? FOX news, rush limbaugh, glen beck, lou dobbs—their *hate* speech is in every single thing that they *say*. continous day in and day out.

3. Anthony McCarthy warns about the Supreme Court and the Senate.

   For people my age, who were brought up to revere the Supreme Court during the Earl Warren years, facing that reality is very difficult. It's the high priesthood of “justice”, holding seats on the Court which used to be held by far more just people, which is actively and deliberately dismantling, not only the progress in civil rights of the past century, not only destroying protections from wealthy corporations and the robber barons that own them, they are actively and intentionally subverting the possibility of self-government by a population on the basis of accurate information.

Well.  The temptation is to shrug this off as hyperbole.  You know, like Reagan couldn't be as bad as the left was painting him?

Y-y-y-yeeeeaaaaahhh.  Right.

Panicking is a bad idea, but:  Take note of shoals and outcroppings and steer accordingly, because your boat is already shipping water.

The New York Times has put up the Iraq archive:

A close analysis of the 391,832 documents helps illuminate several important aspects of this war:

¶ The deaths of Iraqi civilians — at the hands mainly of other Iraqis, but also of the American military — appear to be greater than the numbers made public by the United States during the Bush administration.

¶ While the abuse of Iraqi prisoners by Americans, particularly at the Abu Ghraib prison, shocked the American public and much of the world, the documents paint an even more lurid picture of abuse by America’s Iraqi allies — a brutality from which the Americans at times averted their eyes.

¶ Iran’s military, more than has been generally understood, intervened aggressively in support of Shiite combatants, offering weapons, training and sanctuary and in a few instances directly engaging American troops.

¶ The war in Iraq spawned a reliance on private contractors on a scale not well recognized at the time and previously unknown in American wars. The documents describe an outsourcing of combat and other duties once performed by soldiers that grew and spread to Afghanistan to the point that there are more contractors there than soldiers. [An article on this topic is scheduled to appear in The New York Times on Sunday.]

The Iraqi documents were made available to The Times, the British newspaper The Guardian, the French newspaper Le Monde and the German magazine Der Spiegel on the condition that they be embargoed until now. WikiLeaks has never stated where it obtained the information, although an American Army intelligence analyst, Pfc. Bradley Manning, has been arrested and accused of being a source of classified material.

They got it from WikiLeaks.  This is in the intro.

Three items from Scott Horton:

1. Analysis of the situation in Iraq via a 6-question interview with Nir Rosen (author of Aftermath);
2. Slight sarcasm in an explanation of why Attorney General Holder would defend Don't Ask, Don't Tell;
3. A report on secret prisons in Afghanistan.

Maybe not so unconnected.

Elizabeth L. Sturz, another of those hidden lives of women, and an example of privilege used for good.

First:

!!!I'm on Avedon's blogroll!!!
Ahem.

So I guess I'll have to be serious and stuff.

Anglachel writes on the disadvantages of locavorism, getting at one of the things that bug me:

But the bigger picture is that if every person living in Manhattan showed up at the Union Square green market, there wouldn't be enough of these wonderful eggs laid by contented chickens and lovingly packaged by organic Elves as they perform interpretive dance (or however they get in their containers) to go around.

The rest is good, too.  (Another article links to Safe Browsing.)

Mills River Progressive covers unemployment and outsourcing.  Brilliant at Breakfast analyzes spending cuts.  Echidne of the Snakes looks at the Gallup poll on Social Security and Medicare and sees...a wrongness.

One short bit from Scott Horton at Harper's:

The truth at the center of this work is the deforming power of ideology, its power to cause misery in the lives of ordinary people it claims to raise up.

Via Anthony McCarthy at Echidne of the Snakes, an article by Sue Wilson at Buzzflash about the Fairness Doctrine and why we don't have it anymore.

Benoit Mandelbrot.  That Mandelbrot.

Real Live Preacher, which I've been reading almost since its inception as a Salon blog (in fact, I think I still have that bookmark [yup!] in a folder of bookmarks), may be going away.

i was a preacher for a long time and i did the best i could with it and i even liked preaching and thinking i was helping people
i was real live preacher for a long time and i did the best i could with it and i even liked writing and i think i wrote some good things here
but every thing has its season and if you dont know when that season is over you end up shrinking and becoming small and protective and boring so i have to say goodbye to real live preacher i have to shut this down

He does not sound as though he's in a good place.

[crossposted]

Daisy Deadhead begins to dissect the American left.

And my question is, why doesn't this happen now? Why has the right-wing Tea Party movement been so successful in cashing in on class resentment?

Where is the Left in these harsh economic times?

I have decided the Left is largely IN ABSENTIA because the American Left now comes from the elite class itself; their political convictions are basically a reflection of the warmed-over liberalism they obediently ingested while attending Good Colleges. They believe what they believe out of a sense of common decency, fairness and goodness. But not because most American Leftists have experienced classism themselves.

Read the rest; it's all good. (Note:  This may dovetail into some arguments on the "Left."  I do not have a dogma in this fight.)

Slate article on liberals, conservatives, messages, and marriage counseling.  Pointed at by wcg.

If you could haul liberal and conservative America into a counselor's office, the left would produce loads of evidence showing that conservatism is regularly anti-intellectual when it comes to questions of evolution or global climate change. Sarah Palin really did evince a limited knowledge of foreign affairs during the 2008 election. George W. Bush really did say "misunderestimate." Conservatives would tell the counselor about how liberals are always slow to see threats to national security, always "blaming America" and always quick to support international institutions such as the U.N. and the International Court of Justice.

At least the article was not written by Saletan or Hitchens or Yoffe.

Legislators think people earning the minimum wage are overpaid.

It’s not just that conservatives are opposed to minimum wage. It’s like with Social Security. It’s not that conservatives are opposed to Social Security, the program. They are, of course. It’s that their really opposed to the idea of social security (with a small “s”) for any American who work for a living and make less and a few $100K a year, at least. What they’re in favor of is social security only for those whose bank statements prove they deserve it.

It’s not that conservatives are opposed to a minimum wage. They are, of course. What they’re in favor of minimal wages for everyone. Or almost everyone, anyway.

Read the whole thing, because that fountain pen? is pointed at you.

It's 53 seconds long and makes me want to break out a Janet Jackson song.  Oooo-oooo-o-hooooo, yeah!

Joan Sutherland, soprano.

Solomon Burke, singer/songwriter.

Media Justice at flip flopping joy on the Jiggly Boo Dance Crew:

I knew I wanted to join. Every part of my body and mind and spirit needed this. I even began to shamelessly plug the crew to my friends, encouraging them to join with me. One of my current homegirls, Sparkle, who I’ve mentioned before , decided to go for it and signed up for an interview. When we first met Kantara and Alice at the NYU campus, of which I graduated from 10 years ago with a masters degree but still got lost, I knew it was love. Not just love like puppy, butterflies-in-the-stomach love, but love in all the most revolutionary ways. Love for our bodies, love for how we move, love for what we bring, love for simply surviving in a world that doesn’t love us back in the same way we love the world.

Yesterday I croaked sang with a pair of subway musicians (I really do know all the words to "Hard Day's Night") for three songs.  And now I'll have to avoid that station for at least a month!  They were really advertising a church but I'll take free music wherever I can get it.

Dancers of size other than stick are routinely disappeared.  (Judith Jamison, you say, and I say that by and large, you should excuse the expression, her size got disappeared.  Because she was Judith Jamison.  Still is.)  I'm looking forward to further dispatches from Media Justice.

[crossposted]

Lisa Golden on the unforeseen consequences of privatizing services.  It's about the Cranick matter, but not just about the Cranick matter:

People who think we can have nice, safe, clean communities with good educational systems, and up to date infrastructure without having to pay the taxes to support it are simply idiotic. Someone has to pay for it. That's why we have the common good and the tax structure. We all contribute and if we don't, our houses may not burn to the ground, but the taxing body has some kind of legal way of getting the money from you.

Being opposed to the common good and the taxes that support it seems just fine until your house is on fire or you get hit with a bunch of new fees (shifted from taxes to fees) when you go to renew your license plate or your kids are now in classes with thirty kids or more or you flatten your tire because the road debris on I75 is left to lay because budget cuts mean road maintenance has been reduced to next to nothing.

Read the whole thing, please.

1. Bugs Bunny on DVD.  Actually, the review of Bugs Bunny on 2 DVDs.  Which I must now get, you'll excuse me...
2. Metsgrrl's ranking of teams she's rooting for in the postseason, since the Mets didn't make it.
3. Via Shakesville, student finds secret tracking device on his car.  FBI wants and gets it back. By the way, the trackers don't have battery packs anymore.
4. ETA:  Tiger Beatdown throws a dead fish in Ted Hughes' grave.

So I was having a look around and noticed Bitch Ph.D. on somebody's blogroll, and said, gee, I haven't looked in on that in ages.

Good thing I did.  They're shutting down.

We Have All Been Here Before...

(There was so much I wanted to link to that the brain just shut down.  Republic of T is up to the third installment of the Eddie Long saga, Echidne of the Snakes has two posts on feminism, and there is the continuing mess that is the U.S. government.  Conservatives want to preserve bullies and puppy mills [the former so that there will continue to be conservatives; the latter so that something, human or not, will continue to suffer].  Also, it's election season, and I am just putting all that stuff through the shredder.  Without reading it.  I am disgusted with people, and you all are very lucky that I am not God, because it would be Ugly City on this planet.)

Via B@B, from Tata's blog:  Why you don't want to union-bust the teachers' union.

If you take a step back, busting up the teachers’ union has two other goals: 1. to de-stabilize one of the largest employers of women in this country, and one of the few where being a woman is only a small impediment; 2. to privatize a large public revenue stream. Once the union is wrecked, you can count on whole towns closing their public schools the same way you now see towns replacing roads they don’t want to maintain with gravel. De-stabilizing the teachers’ union is the path to permanent feudalism.

And the Middle Ages were not nearly as much fun as the SCA makes them look.  (I suspect that a lot of Tea Party people would not like where they'd end up under the feudal system.)

From the Daily Howler:

Taibbi was helping us liberals laugh at the rubes in the other tribe. But just how dumb do you have to be to miss the problem with his “reasoning?” Taibbi was playing an old refrain, in which we laugh at the Tea Party folk for being such blooming hypocrites about the role of government.

and

Is something wrong with New Jersey’s teachers? It isn’t easy to say, of course. But on the NAEP, statewide test scores have risen from 1992 to 2009. As a matter of fact, Garden State scores have risen a lot, and they exceed the national average among all major groups. But don’t expect to hear such twaddle when you watch Williams strut and fret his tailored suits across the stage. In an earlier era, Williams and his gruesome network were devoted to trashing the Clintons, then Gore. Now, the network is trashing the teachers.

Daisy has already slapped Mr. Taibbi around (deservedly so) so I'll forbear except to note that Mr. Somerby's sarcasm does occasionally get up my nose.  And I am sarcastic enough to shrivel lemons when I get going.  The second quote is from his series of essays on why comparing the US to Finland doesn't work very well.