Onyx Lynx

Fred Clark (Slacktivist) quotes St. John Chrysostom (who is problematic in other areas) on the gulf between rich and poor:

… On the other hand, you question very closely the poor and the miserable, who are scarcely better off in this respect than the dead: and you do not fear the dreadful and the terrible judgment seat of Christ. If the beggar lies, he lies from necessity, because your hardheartedness and merciless inhumanity force him to such cheating. … If we would give our alms gladly and willingly, the poor would never have fallen to such depths.

(I admit I am not as good at this as I should be.)

Via Sen. Sanders' email newsletter and website, this article in the Wall Street Journal:

While all of this is going on in Washington, the American people have consistently stated, in poll after poll, that they want wealthy individuals and large corporations to pay their fair share of taxes. They also want bedrock social programs like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid to be protected. For example, a July 14-17 Washington Post/ABC News poll found that 72% of Americans believe that Americans earning more than $250,000 a year should pay more in taxes.
In other words, Congress is now on a path to do exactly what the American people don't want. Americans want shared sacrifice in deficit reduction. Congress is on track to give them the exact opposite: major cuts in the most important programs that the middle class needs and wants, and no sacrifice from the wealthy and the powerful.

It's not as if no one is saying these things; it's that the audience won't listen. Either that, or pitchforks and torches aren't an appropriate fashion statement.

Renegade Evolution on an inconvenient truth.  (No, not that one.)

You read some of this stuff and its like gee, no wonder you are lonely, and ya sure as hell ain’t nice, and when ya got that attitude about women-all of ‘em- its no fuckin’ wonder you’re dating yer hand. True enough, there may be sometimes where being a nice guy isn’t gonna get ya far. Like when yer really a bitter whining douchebag claiming to be a nice guy, or only nice to hot chicks who may in fact actually BE outta your league, or when you figure being nice is some sorta strategy game to land yourself a woman. I mean, a pretty basic theory would stand to be- if ya fuckin’ hate women even though ya think they are good lookin’ and would like to fuck them? Ya ain’t nice, and most people, even us evil bitches who are so mean to all those lonely nice guys, well, if its thinly veiled to fuckin’ obvious that you think we are shit? Chances are, we’re not gonna figure you are worth a damn second glance, let alone a relationship. Not sure how that is some great mystery to some of these fellas really. And sure enough, I may be a far cry from the typical modern gal in the current dating scene, but Jesus H. Christ and all his associates, I don’t reckon being a whiny, needy, bitter, petulant woman-hating jackwagon is something too many gals are gonna find an attractive quality

Probably their lack-of-self-esteem is dependent on not realizing that they're actively repelling women; privilege is a lot like tunnel vision that way.

Hideki Irabu, pitcher.

Senator Sanders, via links on this page, explains why Americans are angry.

My inner Hulk is...not happy.

Driftglass.  Of course.

From Senator Bernie Sanders' newsletter:  What the cuts really mean.

Also, Paul Krugman on the Nut Cult.

• At Brilliant at Breakfast, some bangers, no mash, with money shot:

  Kyle Leighton demonstrates that the when Boehner talks about Social Security and Medicare being the biggest contributors to our debt, it's because our biggest debtor isn't China, it's ourselves. Boehner's owners went on a bender using that money and now don't want to have to pay it back to elderly, disabled, and sick people who can either pay the rent this month or eat, but not both.

• Via Mills River Progressive, political theater with sleeping critics and lots of stagecraft.

  And remember the hysteria that accompanied the TARP sales job in 2008? Remember the overwhelming and nearly universal public opposition? One legislator commented that constituent calls to his office were split: 1% NO, 99% HELL NO.
  
  Recall how it was framed as a "must pass", or the world economy would (further) collapse? Naturally there was no time to insert language of regulation and controls to prevent this from happening again, because it was a CRISIS - the public had to pay billions to save the very important Wall Street banksters and grifters - but the public wasn't even allowed to know who got all their money!

  Chicken Little, call your agent. There's a billionaire with a hangnail about to panic.
  
  Also, *ahem*.

• So, with air carriers no longer required to levy a federal tax, U.S. travelers should see a drop in ticket prices, right? Isn’t that what the righties are always telling us? That these burdensome federal taxes for things like the FAA are just passed on to the consumer, and if we lower these taxes and make the government smaller everything will miraculously get cheaper for consumers?

  You laugh.
• Fred Clark on Rick Warren's un-Christian tweet.
• Republic of T on Amy Winehouse.
• I could go on about right-wingers' embrace of the No True Scotsman fallacy regarding the Norwegian murderer, but I'd have to link to them or mention their names, and there's enough toxic crap on the Internet as is.

Musicians dead at 27.

1. The suspect in the Oslo bombing/shooting is a right-wing extremist.  A white, Christian, anti-Islam right-wing extremist.  In fact, most terrorism these days that isn't suicide bombers is right-wing (and largely white and Christian) extremist terrorism. As Ren of Renegade Evolution points out:

   But every extremist NEEDS a boogy man, and unfortunately they are not too hard to find. Every rad fem can find a violent rapist or serial killer of women, every MRA can find an abusive mother, every white hate monger can find a gang banger, every black extremist looking for a horrible racist can find a Grand Wizard, and every major religion has some less than stellar moments and figures…there are plenty of examples out there that back up an extremist view….
   
   But they are never the majority. They are a minority used to paint the rest of whatever group the extremist hates. A simple fact is, by chemical make up and biology- we ARE pretty much all the same. So hating on someone for a chromosome difference, a skin color difference, a regional difference, a religious difference- when so much else is exactly the same…it’s extreme, and actual proof? It won’t ever be on your side.

   Pundits in the wild need to swap out bogeymen.
2. There is no number two.
3. In memoriam:  Amy Winehouse.  Her being 27 is a coincidence.

The only way that the American police state will start withering is if we, the American people, start taking political action. We have to start electing politicians who are behind the idea of reducing the footprint of our police state and we have to start throwing out those politicians in favor of having a police state.

Read the rest. Why, yes, we are.

Brought to you by Comrade Misfit.

Southern Beale showcases Rep. Bachmann exhibiting her posterior:

Pigford, of course, is not a “project,” efficient or otherwise. It’s a class-action lawsuit filed against the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture in 1997 and settled in 1999. So the money is a legal settlement. Are we sure this woman went to law school?

And I love all the crying about the need for flood control along the Mississippi and Missouri rivers. Back in February 2009, Republicans released their list of “wasteful spending” in the Democrats’ economic stimulus bill. Guess what made the list? If you guessed $500 million for flood control projects on the Mississippi River, you’d be right.

Jill at Brilliant at Breakfast to Alan Greenspan:  Accept your irrelevance and go away.

Far be it for me to pick on what increasingly looks like a senile old man. But this obviously senile old man has been wrong about just about everything that led up to the financial crisis. In 2008, in the depths of the financial crisis, he had to admit in front of a Congresisonal committee that he had been wrong about the self-correcting mechanism of free markets.. This is a guy who never outgrew his adolescent fascination with Ayn Rand. Even the tweens who avidly wait in line for the "Twilight" movies will outgrow them and not try to turn them into a kind of lifelong religion. But Alan Greenspan has grown to very old age still worshipping the ironically anti-religion author of the book of his adolescent fantasies.

Also, he seems unaware of history; and he's wrong about the causes of what he decries.

1. So Michelle Bachmann's husband Marcus runs counseling clinics which accept federal funding (to treat low-income clients) and offer "reparative therapy" (but only if someone requests it) and:
   
   • Melissa McEwan at Shakesville picks up the funding portion and supplies an alternative:

     ... I'd like to note the dichotomy Bachmann sets up here: Their clinics can either take federal money, or turn low-income patients away. There is, of course, a third option, which is to treat low-income patients on a sliding scale of what they can afford, without any government subsidies.
     
     But that, naturally, requires cutting into profits.
     
     Now, it's fair enough if the Bachmanns don't want to give away their services for free, or for lower cost. The clinics aren't being run as a charity. But it's mendacious in the extreme to pretend that option doesn't even exist so that you can imply it would be "evil" to not accept government funds because you'd have to turn patients away without it.
     
     And once again, the conservative theory of governance is undermined by conservatives.
     
     The conservative philosophy of limited government (i.e. no social safety net) asserts that charity, philanthropy, faith-based orgs, and business should take care of people in need rather than the government. There are a lot of problems with this idea (starting with the fact that conservatives frequently determine that certain people aren't deserving of charity), but the biggest problem is that the very people who espouse this idea in theory tend to be unwilling to support it in practice.

   • Jon Carroll pokes it from the "therapy" side:

     Anyway, I was thinking - maybe it would be fun to be gay for a while. If sexual orientation is something that can be changed, then maybe I should change mine. I'd make new friends, have new experiences and, best of all, have a fabulous new trove of slang words I could toss about. And, as I understand it, I would not be required to go to parties and stay beyond 2 a.m.

2. Comrade Misfit rails against American failure of nerve:

   Fifty years from Alan Shepard's flight in Freedom 7 to the end of the Shuttle flights. That's less than a lifetime. Hell, there are people under the age of sixty who remember Shepard's flight. And we're just going to stroll away from flying into space because it's hard, man and because we'd rather give more tax breaks to corporations and the wealthy?
   
   [...]
   
   The walking away from space by this country could be construed as further evidence that we have degenerated into a large pack of very short-sighted people. I hope that is not the truth of the matter. But it may be. The Republicans clearly do not give a fuck about anything that does not put money, today, into the pockets of the rich and the corporations. The Democrats would seem to be little better.

3. Guess who got searched?
4. Two from Driftglass:
   
   • The death of blogging:

     I mean, how am I -- a mere scribbler of transient words in the Wet Sand of Time -- a mere pisser of ephemera on the Urinal Cake of Eternity -- supposed to bear up under this disaster having already been shattered by the death of conversation, the death of the novel, the death of the short story, the death of radio, the death of live theater, the death of the rock and roll, the death of a salesman, the death of irony, the death of Ivan Ilyich, the death of stand-up, the death of the Republican Party, the death of retail,the death or portraiture, the death of Superman, the death of the disco, the death of the Democratic Party, the death of the LP, the death of the newspaper, the death of the Western, the death of cities, my death of cold, the death of the essay, the death of Pets.com, the death of the cool, the death of science fiction, the death of the Hired Man, the death of the symphony, the death of traditional marriage, the death of Marat, the death of the essay, the death of the metric system, the death of the bar scene, the death of the Ball Turret Gunner, the death of abstract expressionism, the death of outrage,
     and of course sad stories of the death of kings[?}

   • Paul Krugman recapitulates Driftglass, with examples of the latter.  
5. Proving that the most interesting stuff comes up when I think I've finished the post:  Southern Beale on the drooling slobbering fascination of the media with Sarah Palin (TW for ablist language):

   Look, most Americans don’t care about Sarah Palin. We don’t. The only reason she’s in the news is because you assclowns keep foisting her on us, and then you whine and cwy and tamp your widdew feet when she disses you and calls you “lame.” Hey, she’s right, you are lame!
   
   [...]
   
   I mean seriously, it’s reached a stage where I’m starting to wonder if Sarah Palin isn’t a satirical character created for the sole purpose of poking fun at our news media. Yes, exactly like Stephen Colbert.

6. Jill Psmith of I Blame the Patriarchy cuts to the heart of Palin/Bachmann hypocrisy:

   Take Michele Bachmann. She hates gays and fluorescent light, and loves Jesus and compulsory pregnancy, but has no qualms whatsoever about enjoying an influential, self-determined career outside the home as she flits about the political sphere.* It’s almost as though she fancies herself a liberated woman with some personal agency. She has used the feminist springboard to swan-dive into prominence, from which spot she can proceed to gay-bash, suck up to Dude Nation, and demand constitutional amendments prohibiting abortion.
   
   Now one hears all this absurd murmuring about Bachmann (and her creepy godmother Sarah Palin) having turned themselves officially into something called “evangelical feminists.”
   
   You know, like Jews for Jesus, or Baby Seals for Canadian Seal Clubbers.
   
   Apparently there really is a movement of evangelical feminists, and they’re cheesed. They appear to actually grasp the idea that women are human, so they’re voting Bachmann and Palin off their island ... .

As I've mentioned, I randomly click on other people's blogrolls.  This time, it was The Sideshow's, and it yielded this gem.

And now I'm hungry.

Happy Bastille Day to you.

(This should have been in French.)

"Swing voters" with something in common.  From Driftglass.

From Roundfiled:  TV characters, beliefs, empathy, and art.

Go on and do it, but admit a little thing, first: You are not atheists. You believe in gods. Your gods are as capricious and vengeful as any gods have ever been, but they are always on the side of white. They have that much in common with the European old gods–yeah, even the ones who frown on abortion and enthusiastic consent and women who show ankles and whatever all else warmed-over Victorian-ladies shit y’all claim to care about: Your gods are not that different. Your gods are not renegades. They do as much harm, and the reason you don’t care is that they do it to people who are not you. This does not make you better.

[8]Now there arose a new king over Egypt, who did not know Joseph.
[9] And he said to his people, "Behold, the people of Israel are too many and too mighty for us.
[10] Come, let us deal shrewdly with them, lest they multiply, and, if war befall us, they join our enemies and fight against us and escape from the land."
[11] Therefore they set taskmasters over them to afflict them with heavy burdens; and they built for Pharaoh store-cities, Pithom and Ra-am'ses.
[12] But the more they were oppressed, the more they multiplied and the more they spread abroad. And the Egyptians were in dread of the people of Israel.
[13] So they made the people of Israel serve with rigor,
[14] and made their lives bitter with hard service, in mortar and brick, and in all kinds of work in the field; in all their work they made them serve with rigor.

Exodus, chapter 1, RSV, © National Council of Churches of Christ in America.

Sound familiar?

I have to love (and you know that I mean the opposite) the way anti-immigrant ostensible Christians ignore passages like this in favor of indulging their xenophobia.  Because that's what it really is:  Sheer unmitigated fear of the foreign-to-them.  "They don't speak our language, they don't worship our God (as Tom Lehrer put it, 'Money'), they don't look like Us (and, y'know? on that score, Wrong!), and they contaminate with their Not-Usness!"

(We've evolved a little bit.  A very, very little bit.)

More and more, it seems to me, most of the conservative agenda is bent on the repeal not only of the New Deal, but also World War II.  World War II was (we thought) the graveyard of Fascism as an ideology (never mind it hung on in Spain and Portugal and cropped up in Central and South America, largely in American-allied states).  A lot of the impetus toward being less officially hateful was that many combat veterans had seen the results of hate-as-official-policy up close and personal and took that home.  A lot of them got elected to Congress and to state legislatures in the '50s and '60s.

People like, oh, let's not mention names because I'd have to disinfect this blog, think World War II is an old movie.  Nazis are guys with funny accents who are always thwarting Indiana Jones.  Couldn't be anything wrong with their ideas; why, their ideas were very popular!

Their ideas are poison.  All of their ideas are poison.

(Yeah, well, Godwin.  Not that I'm arguing with anybody.  If I were, I'd bring up Stalin and Pinochet.  And possibly Mao Zedong.)

When I was 21 or so, I registered to vote.  There were nice people at a table across the street from my workplace signing up workers and shoppers.  I think there was a form to fill out.  I got a voter certificate in the mail and I believe I used that as ID when I visited Montréal later that year.

Mom, Dad, and I used to trot down to the polling place (later we drove because they were getting older) and vote on the old machines with levers (I believe the last time I took Mom to the polling place, they still had those old things) and occasionally schmooze with the poll workers.  My signature changed rather radically between 1971 and 1980, but no one ever questioned that because they knew me and they knew my parents.  And they only saw me once a year, if that.

When I moved to *ahem* the current location, there were voter registration forms on city buses and more people at tables, and when I'd lived there the requisite amount of time, I registered to vote.

I take voting very seriously.  I know my history, and I don't take suffrage for granted.  People died so that I could cast ballots.

That may be why the Republican efforts to restrict voting offend me.  It may be true that Jim Crow is not quite the correct analogy; the literacy test is closer.  (You've been spared a very old joke here.)  That, too, was supposed to be a way of cutting down on voter fraud, except it just happened to disenfranchise even literate voters if the right text was used.  Look at Ohio:

The low-income citizens of Ohio who cannot take time off work to get a photo ID, the elderly who are not able to stand for hours on end waiting for the gears of officialdom to grind out a photo ID -- these are voters who tend to vote Democratic. And of course that's precisely the point.

In the face of ABSOLUTELY NO EVIDENCE that there is any kind of systemic problem with people who are ineligible to vote going to the polls, the Republicans are attempting to disenfranchise as many people as possible who might be unlikely to vote in their direction.

ETA: Daisy Deadhead reminded me in comments that South Carolina requires birth certificates to get state-issued photo IDs which are the only IDs valid for voting (which, as one of the comments notes, violates the 1965 Voting Rights Act):

178,000 South Carolinians without state-issued photo IDs will have their voting rights rescinded under the new law.

Papers, please?  We're pretty close to needing internal passports.  And the police seem a bit...trigger-happy...around minorities as it is.  One should not have to deal with the DMV, join the Army, or do the rigmarole for a passport to vote.

Via Brilliant at Breakfast.

Shooter convicted of the murder of Brisenia Flores and Raul Junior Flores (her father). (From Crooks and Liars, but the news was in a comment in a locked post.)




[crossposted]

I am reminded that I neither linked to Hendrix's "Star-Spangled Banner" (from Woodstock, but not the performance) nor Springsteen's "Born in the U.S.A."

• Ruth Roberts, songwriter ("Meet the Mets" et al.).
• Anna Massey, actress.
• Otto von Hapsburg.  Um, interesting historical figure.

• Seen in various places, but the link used is to Making Light:  The Declaration of Independence.
• Ren's take on the Casey Anthony trial, which may go to the jury as early as today.  Yes, that puzzles me too.
• The recession is not over even if the New York Times swears that it is.
• Shark-fu uses Independence Day and the Battle of the Bulge to recharge for the struggle.
• It's ten o'clock.  Do you know where your country is?
• Someone had an apropos address given by Frederick Douglass, but --wait.  [Rummage, rummage.]  Google and ye shall find, eventually.  (ETA:  Slactivist had it.)
• EFTA:  Sunfell of Live Journal on eroding rights (via stardreamer on Dreamwidth.)

Republicans are always trying to steal liberal icons, because they don’t have any of their own. It’s pathetic, really. Look, can’t you be happy with Ayn Rand and Ted Nugent? No?

The new round of Don't Play My Music. Southern Beale wrote an earlier post on the subject. And yet, no conservatives see this lack of creativity as a message from God.



[crossposted]

1. Reminder (via Avedon Carol).  (Because YouTube videos eventually expire and I'm tired of dead links.)
2. Noli Irritare Leones on austerity, tax increases, and why default is not something you want to happen.
3. Jill at Brilliant at Breakfast quotes Paul Krugman, Bernie Sanders, and M. Scott Peck, and points out that the particular evil under the microscope is greed.

Happy Canada Day!