amor mundi

Norquist Is Raving In the Bunker

2012-01-29T17:05:00.000-08:00

There is something truly unhinged and desperate and pathetic in Grover Norquist’s recent interview in the National Journal. This is especially so, when he is handwaving about a Republican White House and Senate and House extending the ruinous Bush tax cuts for the rich for five years more and implementing Paul Ryan’s couponification of Medicare and so on in a dreamy screamy hundred-day inversion demolishing FDR’s New Deal and rewriting America in the image of Somalia and Galt’s Gulch over the objections or possibly the dead bodies of two hundred million Americans who want no such thing.

I mean, at least Karl Rove was sitting on a toypile of apparent accomplishments when he talked this way, and had a plan to re-orient the GOP to appeal to palpably changing demographics when he bragged about a permanent Republican majority and all the rest, and yet even with something to back it up you could clearly hear the Chorus upstage portentiously muttering, “famous last words.” But hearing Norquist singing the same surreal arias amidst the Occupied ruins of market fundamentalism in a wholesomely browning secularizing planetizing American multiculture with an enormously likeable and well-liked Democratic President struggling against high odds and ugly obstruction for people who work for a living, Norquist's words seem more than just hubristic or hollow but honestly hysterical.

When his interviewer gently prompts how Norquist would respond instead to a world in which Obama remains in the White House and Democrats gain in the House and remain a force in the Senate, the level of lunacy with which he responds seems to me quite instructive:

Obama can sit there and let all the tax [cuts] lapse, and then the Republicans will have enough votes in the Senate in 2014 to impeach. The last year, he’s gone into this huddle where he does everything by executive order. He’s made no effort to work with Congress.

You know, nobody in their right mind is falling for the line that Obama has made no effort to work with Congress, everybody knows the Teabag Congress wants nothing but to Shut It All Down (except for the parts that police lady parts) and that McConnell’s “first priority” is not governing but bringing down Obama. And, Impeachment is it? Oh, my dear! Again, nobody, nobody, nobody in their right mind is buying the threat that Obama could be impeached -- of all things! -- for letting tax cuts expire on schedule. Remember that pesky bit about High Crimes and Misdemeanors all ye tricorn hat wearing Constitutionalists? Not everybody would agree with my own spin on the specifics of the political scene, by any means, but nobody this side of sanity would credit Norquist's fantastic pronouncements.

The simple reality is that whatever his limitations, Obama and the Democrats simply outmaneuvered Boehner and the rest of the dumb-dumb GOP last year, over and over again despite their wave-election numbers and crazytown energy, so that at this point he really can do literally nothing while counting on Congress continuing doing nothing and just let tax rates return to a semblance of sanity and Defense budgets get slashed in the direction of sanity all the while demagoguing the GOP refusal to carve out an exception for middle class tax-rates (making him the tax-cutter even as taxes rise precisely as he wants them to do) and touting his various splashy bloody military accomplishments (making him strong on Defense even as he cuts the Defense budget and shifts the emphasis to “soft power” and multilateral diplomacy).

The truth is that Obama and the Democrats have too many of the facts on their side and far more talent on their side and are simply incomparably better attuned to the spirit of the country as it is, rather than as a few whiny white guys and old bigots want it to be, than racist dimwits like Jan Brewer or Mr. One-Percent, Mitt Romney.

More painful still, the truth also is that Norquist already got what he wanted, he already got what he has fought for all his life: he already built his daydream Congress, and it is America’s nightmare, with every poll to prove it in spades. Movement Republicanism was consummated in the Gingrich Contract Hit on America and W’s Killer Clown administration and 2012 (whatever a handful of bigoted assholes in South Carolina say) is turning with a decisive shudder of revulsion from the legacies of both. Obama is almost certain to regain the White House, and even if Democrats were to lose the Senate and Republicans keep the House, it is clear that neither result looks to be a GOP triumph, and the Democratic presence in both chambers will certainly remain substantial, while prospects for regaining the House and retaining the Senate are far from impossible, even though the odds look steep on paper and the necessary result remains an achievable hard-won triumph given the national mood and demographic trends. Either way, Norquist’s anti-civilizational anti-tax pledge is about to die on the altar of realpolitik, at least as an unchallengeable axiom of GOP politics (and once that dam cracks there follows the flood), his vision has been falsified and repudiated.

Just another mean broken flim-flam McCarthy or Nixon or Gingrich of the debased Republican Right is Grover in his corner. And you can be sure, Norquist can already taste the punchline he is about to become and which will be the lousy legacy of his whole life, and you can see the darting-eyed desperation, you can hear the shaky bluster in his voice, you can smell the horror on his breath

Wait And See

2012-01-29T15:48:00.000-08:00

I'm still slow and sleepy-eyed, putting off various school related chores, reading a Terence Rattigan biography desultorily in the bath, actually maybe feeling mildly depressed about who knows what, but I can't say there is much to blog about that is sparking my attention anyway. I'm hopeful about the pieces coming together with Richard Cordray and Eric Schneiderman that maybe some assholes will go to jail and more folks with underwater mortgages may get relief, but I can't say that I'm ecstatically hopeful by any means, and so too I'm disgusted by the ongoing GOP scrum as The Artificial Man sews up the nomination to strains of the usual, if unusually relentless, hate and idiocy, but I can't say I'm epically disgusted by any means, just generally worn down and ambivalent I guess. It's awfully early in the silly season to feel this way, but I'm feeling -- as the title suggests -- very Asquithian about the whole thing for now.

Bleary

2012-01-28T16:09:00.000-08:00

Given yesterday morning's post, you will be unsurprised to hear that I slept thirteen hours last night, and woke up with a rat's nest on my head, no good for anything but watching Cranford DVDs all day.

Long Night's Journey Into Day

2012-01-27T04:42:00.000-08:00

Ended up pulling an all nighter editing thesis drafts from my MA cohort, and now face a long teaching day at the Dogpatch campus, teaching the quarrel of the ancients and moderns, thinking Hobbes as precursor to Mill's homo economicus and talking about Rochester and the Man of Mode in my graduate seminar and then meeting individually with my MA students all afternoon. I'm not feeling too tired at the moment but expect I'll be fending off exhaustion on the train back home hours and hours from now. It would seem that college life simply imposes these follies on one occasionally, however one plans or prepares. I've been turning in all-nighters since I was an undergraduate, writing papers and later grading them, nearly thirty years now, even though I'm a veritable geezer ill-suited to their exactions these days, I'm afraid.

Atheist

2012-01-27T04:34:00.001-08:00

Personally, I do without god. Isn’t that what "a-theist" means, anyway?

“I’m Running for President, for Pete’s Sake, I Can’t Have…”

2012-01-26T14:53:00.000-08:00

I’m the furthest thing from surprised that an American multi-bazillionaire like Mitt Romney employs transparently inequitable but legal tax dodges and loopholes and shelters to insulate his ill-gotten gains from being taxed in a way that would make such a beneficiary of American norms and infrastructure pay his fair share to support them. Obviously, all these rich guys do most of that crap. But I must say it really is a little perplexing that when such a multi-bazillionaire also happens to spend more than a decade running for President he doesn’t polish and prune and fumigate the most damning details of these financial shenanigans long before they would attract the inevitable scrutiny of actual primary contests as his party’s frontrunner.

I mean, quite apart from the hypocritical unpleasantness of caring so conspicuously and so opportunistically about optics over substance every single moment, from moment to moment, whatever the soul-pretzeling demanded by that in the first place, what the hell was Romney thinking just leaving all these blatantly obvious landmines lying around all this time? Have all the competent professionals just left the GOP in despair, preferring to work with people who, you know, appreciate science and aren’t bigots? Is Romney just so insulated by privilege that he dismisses efforts to connect him to the perceptions and problems of people who work for a living without whose votes he cannot win the Presidency he so covets?

And if I can be forgiven a sudden topical veer, since I’m pointing out perplexities rather than the usual disagreements about policy and facts, just why is it that Romney so covets the Presidency anyway? Why keep fighting for it famously in the face of so much antipathy from his colleagues? Why invite so much scrutiny, especially given how obviously uncomfortable it makes him personally? It’s not that he’s on some kind of crusade, given his flabbergasting flip-flops on issue after issue. I’ve still yet to understand why he even wants the job so desperately… because it’s there? To kill time? To check off a box on his superrich white guy bucket list? Is it like W. again, some sick rich asshole inflicting his Daddy issues on the whole world via the GOP party apparatus? Honestly, what is it with this guy?

Scientist Discovers Deathly Hallow...

2012-01-25T20:26:00.000-08:00

...but cautiously urges the sensationalist press that even with the Invisibility Cloak in hand two more Hallows must still be found before she can reasonably expect to be considered for a Nobel Prize or declared Master of Death.

Newt’s Loony Lunar Promise

2012-01-25T18:23:00.000-08:00

Presumably, Newt Gingrich’s futurological declaration today abouta MoonBase within a decade was not meant as an admission of his eagerness to frak anddrill and deforest the earth into a dead moonscape dotted with military bases, butwas just a symptom of his usual grandiosity as he became momentarily distractedwith daydreams of a Glorious Gingrichian Golden Age within his grasp at last, at last! This becomeseven clearer when we discover that Gingrich offered up a number of other futurologicalpromises in the speech which remain as yet under-reported, among them apromise to migrate the White House into an L5 torus from which asteroids wouldbe tossed to smite his enemies, a promise to end the recession by unleashingprogrammed nanobotic swarms that will transform America’s Blue States at a molecular level into self-regenerating multi-ton layer cake archipelagos that can be had and eaten, too, and a promise that all who believe in him willhave everlasting life once he uploads what he described as their "data-souls" into cyberspace (which he also promisedwould be heaven and not hell despite bugs, crashes, surveillance, and spam).

More Evidence That Both Sides Are Equally Crazy!

2012-01-25T15:27:00.000-08:00

It has been widely discussed that Republican State Senator Ralph Shortey of Oklahoma City introduced Bill 1418 yesterday, prohibiting "the sale or manufacture of food or products which contain aborted human fetuses." But less well known so far, no doubt due to Liberal Media Bias, is that here in the Bay Area Democrats have expressed their San Francisco Values by introducing a Bill the very same day to reclassify aborted fetuses as vegetables so that even vegetarian liberals can continue to eat the fetus flesh we all so desperately crave.

Nancy Pelosi's Secret Plan to End the Whore

2012-01-25T14:22:00.000-08:00

Contrary to right-wing conspiracists -- who seem to have a dread of Nancy Pelosi bordering either on the psychotic or the supernatural, depending on the flavor of their particular wingnuttery -- everything that the once and future Speaker of the House "knows" about why Newt Gingrich will never be President is knowable by anybody who cares to spend ten minutes skimming the public record, as Greg Sargent patiently elaborates, and not for the first time, here.

The Grumpy Old Piss-ants Party Is Mourning In America

2012-01-25T13:59:00.000-08:00

As far as the nation is concerned, it would seem that the Republican contribution to the President's stirring practical fair-minded State of the Union Address last night amounts to the image of Eric Cantor's supremely sour facial expression throughout the speech together with the decline and fall narrative and austerity for all but the already rich prescriptions of Mitch Daniels' dreary Republican Response providing the caption.

While critics deride the conspicuous exhaustion of the GOP's Gipper Pep and delusional can-do Zazz (Is that weepy John Boehner I hear in the background, with his "Hell, no you can't!" banshee howl?), I think it is only fair to point out that Republicans are not demoralized by phantoms, after all, but by palpable realities: the wholesome demographic diversification of the nation has stolen the racist Southern Strategy and gay bashing culture war flogging away from them at last.

With less hate to divide the people who work for a living from one another and provide cover for their pro-plutocracy activism the GOP finds itself at the margins of an ever more secular multiculture, and is forced to appeal precisely to the most desperate dwindling dead-end extremists and know-nothings in their coalition for organizational energy at the cost of ongoing accelerating self-marginalization. When Republicans rail about decline it is not America's but their own they are testifying to, and the decline is real, as is their pain.

The Republicans have plenty to be grumpy about. You see, they are right: the mean parochial white racist America they love is going, going, gone for good, and they are not ever going to get it back. They lost the culture wars, they are losing the political wars, they are on the verge of losing the social wars, and either they will lose or in winning we will all lose the sustainability war.

I'll Give Daniels This, Though --

2012-01-24T20:40:00.000-08:00

His little speech was less robotic than Mitt Romney would have been, and less demonic than Newt Gingrich would have been, while differing from neither of them very much on the likely substance -- if substance is a word one can apply to such nonsense.

Pick One UPDATED

2012-01-24T20:32:00.000-08:00

In the official Republican response to President Obama's State of the Union address, embattled Indiana governor Mitch Daniels said we can no longer afford to fund the safety net and yet called for more tax breaks for the rich. Quite apart from how obscenely skewed are the priorities expressed in such a vision, how does it make any kind of sense to declare we can afford to blow trillions giving handouts to the already rich while we cannot afford providing basic security to the vulnerable majority who work for a living to the benefit of all? America is an unimaginably rich nation and Democrats know we can indeed afford to provide security and equity for our people in our diversity. Republicans say we cannot afford anything while at once bellowing to lard billionaires with more of the money they say we cannot afford. For heaven's sake, pick one! Daniels revealed that even at their most reasonably modulated, Republicans in this moment of their utter debasement offer nothing to the country but incoherence in the service of injustice.

UPDATE: Steve Benen patiently elaborates the deceptions and absurdities in Daniels' address.

Emma Lazarus

2012-01-24T05:51:00.001-08:00

But Al Gore Is Fat

2012-01-23T14:37:00.000-08:00

Frakking is bringing earthquakes to the mid-west, and carbon pollution is bringing tornado swarms to the South in January. Sounds like it's high time for more tax cuts for the rich!

Law and Order

2012-01-23T13:37:00.000-08:00

Always there, on some channel, in some incarnation, stalwart, steady, and true, when you sit down on the couch with your sandwich. Easy to figure out even if you arrive in the middle of the episode, always easy to turn off when you’re done whether the episode is over or not, always engaging enough while you munch away when MSNBC is in prison mode or Joe Scarborough is on.

Dueling Pedants: Vulture Capitalist Edition

2012-01-23T13:23:00.000-08:00

I realize that vultures actually perform a vitally important role in the ecosystems of which they are a part and that, hence, describing enterprises like Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital -- which swoop in on local communities, engage in leveraged buyouts, shut down plants, ship jobs overseas, sell everything that isn’t bolted down, restructure businesses often deliberately into bankruptcy, sometimes devastating whole communities so that a handful of already filthy rich predators can take the money and run -- as “vulture capitalists” is deploying a metaphor which ecologists know to be, stricto sensu, inapt. However, as a rhetorician (who also happens to teach environmental politics) I must say that what matters at least as much as this particular mismatch is that “vulture capitalist” sounds almost the same as the “venture capitalist” Mitt Romney falsely claims to be, a serendipitous euphony that provides a rare occasion for a lethal and memorable pun, instantly replacing Romney’s self-congratulatory fraud with the image of a very scary skinny predatory bird not exactly dissimilar in appearance from Romney himself and redolent with precisely the associations of gorging on death one would want people to think of when they think of Bain Capital. While one must concede the ecologist their point, I daresay it is not unreasonable to propose they focus on the wholesome project of doing justice to the ecological role of the vulture at some other time than the entirely unrelated moment when pundits and politicians are trying to score quick points against evil assholes who are destroying lives with predatory financial schemes and then expecting to be celebrated for it as job creators? So, I see your Nelly Olson and raise you one Henry Higgins.

Mahjong

2012-01-23T12:33:00.000-08:00

I realize I've gone more than a whole day without blogging at this point, and you deserve to know that the entire reason is that I've been obsessively playing Mahjong Titans on my new computer instead. Confessing this in public is my penance for lamely blowing my weekend in this way.

Newt! Newt! Newt! Newt!

2012-01-21T16:33:00.000-08:00

For anybody who wants Democrats not only to keep the White House in 2012 but wants a Democratic administration that can actually implement the agenda it has a mandate for with Democratic partners in the Senate and Congress, today is a very good day. Stupid bigots of South Carolina, I salute you!

Who Is Gingrich Really Putting In Their Place?

2012-01-21T16:28:00.000-08:00

Newt Gingrich is surging right now because a whole lot of Republican racists think Gingrich is putting black people “in their place” through his slurs against the work-ethic of hard working Americans like Juan Williams (whose betrayal by the GOP serves him right and which he was quite foolish not to expect) and through his misleading sloganizing against food stamps, an indispensable program in hard times like these on which more struggling white Americans than black ones currently depend.

Newt Gingrich is surging because a whole lot of Republican patriarchal pricks think Gingrich is putting women “in their place” when he calls his ex-wife a liar because she pointed out that he is a serial philanderer who has demonstrated a distressing tendency heartlessly to divorce his wives whenever they become sick or vulnerable and actually need him, despite his pious grandstanding about his family values and his leading the charge against a popular sitting President for philandering even while he was doing so himself (the Clinton marriage, by the way, remained intact).

Newt Gingrich is surging right now because a whole lot of Republican crybaby paranoids (the same ones who think themselves to be relentlessly tortured victims in their perfectly normal unchallenged Christianity just because different people than them also happen visibly to exist) think Gingrich is putting a phantom liberal media “in its place” through his declarations that it is outrageous to point out perfectly well-substantiated and already widely known instances of his misconduct, hypocrisy, deception, and corruption.

Newt Gingrich is surging right now because a whole lot of stupid Republicans think Gingrich is smart just because he is shameless and unscrupulous (Republicans do this a lot, it is the reason Karl Rove is considered a genius rather than simply a sociopath for example), and because they fantasize that he will deploy his stunning genius in debates to “put in his place” an African-American President they think to be a Teleprompter-dependent welfare-case rather than the consummately brilliant, accomplished, competent, inspiring, likeable reality of Barack Obama.

All this is just to say that right now, right before our eyes, an ignorant inept mean-spirited hysterical out of touch white racist woman-hating gay-hating war-mongering Republican base is putting itself in its proper place… as an utterly ugly dysfunctional neo-confederate rump at the margins of a nation that is wholesomely promisingly browning, secularizing, democratizing, socializing, ecologizing more and more with every passing day.

The GOP Is Not Re-Staging the 2008 Obama-Clinton Primary Contest

2012-01-21T15:43:00.000-08:00

Many GOP consultants are now trying to spin this recent turn of their primary contest from coronation to bloody slog as a positive development, comparing this toxic train wreck with the 2008 competition between Obama and Clinton. What I have to assume is that these consultants are hoping nobody notices the difference between a competition between two brilliant, talented, historically epochal, base-mobilizing candidates like Obama and Clinton whose skirmishes sharpen their abilities and strengthen their organizations, as against a competition between profoundly (even shockingly) flawed candidates whose skirmishes highlight differences that also happen to expose and exacerbate deep (and demographically soon to be fatal) fissures in their party’s coalition and between its base and establishment.

Does anybody in their right mind imagine that a President Romney or Gingrich would invite their palpably despised rival into the highest imaginable place in their own administration and with a comparable expectation of the finest service, as Obama rightly expected of Clinton? Of course not. But, then, nobody really expects any of these killer clowns actually to win the White House either, now, do they? Nor should they. Emperor, meet your new clothes.

Obama Is the Big Winner Three for Three

2012-01-21T15:41:00.000-08:00

A week ago I was feeling rather disappointed that South Carolina looked to represent a three and three coronation for Mitt Romney as the Republican nominee for President. Today I am rather pleased to see South Carolina as the state that looks to be the threshold into a months-long primary competition, with three different winners in the first three states, and the prospect of the still-inevitable nominee Romney arriving at his convention bloodied beyond recognition and resented beyond bearing because of attacks and critiques from other Republicans which Obama surrogates will go on to reprise devastatingly in the general, but now with the imprimatur of bipartisanship and without any implication of “going negative” in an already entirely negative environment. Heck, if in the general Obama continues to draw the contrast with Romney in the deft and understated manner being previewed so far even his negativity may read as positivity compared with the ugly toxicity of the GOP knife-fight and festival of resentment.

Long Teaching Day

2012-01-20T07:27:00.000-08:00

Fridays are my long day this term. I'm off to the Dogpatch campus to teach my graduate seminar (What Now? Aesthetics and Politics Between Past and Future) from nine to noon, then a bit of a break followed by workshopping three hours with my MA Thesis cohort. Shouldn't be too bad, tho', I'll usually manage to be home before dark at any rate. I can already tell that the greatest hurdle in the way of my Fridays is the one-two punch of sweet distraction that is Project Runway All-Stars followed by 24 Hour Catwalk the night before to interfere with course prep...

I Would Rather Fight Romney

2012-01-19T18:02:00.001-08:00

I understand why Democrats rub their hands together in glee contemplating a Gingrich or Santorum nomination. Like the imbecile Cain, the secessionist Perry, the dot-eyed loon Bachmann, Gingrich and Santorum are so damaged, so inadequate to the Presidency, so utterly divisive the prospect of a race between any of them and Obama inspires visions of a Goldwater style landslide victory with the kind of coattails that can deliver the House and Senate and give Democrats another bite at the apple of enacting the policies the Obama mandate already afforded but which the unprecedented obstructionism of incompetent, deceptive, traitorous, bigoted, bought and paid for Republicans has restrained.

The thing is, apart from his Mount Rushmore of a head, it is hard for me to see why anybody thinks the universally disliked, awkward, flip-flopping, liberal Massachusetts, serial political failure, richy rich vulture financier, Mormon, creator of the healthcare reform on which was modeled the healthcare reform detestation of which defines Republican hostility above all else is by any available measure a better or stronger candidate than any of the other killer clowns on offer this time around.

I personally prefer Romney as the candidate with whom Obama competes for the Presidency, simply because Romney is so conspicuously the candidate representing the 1% that his nomination best ensures Obama runs more explicitly as he should as the candidate representing the 99%. This means that the 2012 Presidential Campaign can actually provide a tutorial on the utter failure of the neoliberal paradigm and an opening for a renewal of the social democratic impulse imperfectly discerned in the New Deal, the New Frontier, and the Great Society.

The other candidates with whom Obama might otherwise spar all provide juicy target-rich environments of bigotry, know-nothingism, extremism, and volatility that might dilute the message that the conspicuous contrast of Mr. One Percent Romney versus President Obama of the People Who Work for a Living makes well-nigh inevitable.

Obama will still win as surely as he would with Santorum or Perry, indeed, we may still be granted our righteous empowering landslide. But above all a battle with Romney continues the lesson begun in Wisconsin through Occupy Summer, and that is a lesson America needs to learn if we are ever to take up in earnest the necessary national task of collaborating with the rest of the world in the building of a sustainable, equitable, diverse, democratic planetary civilization.

I Agree With Kos

2012-01-19T16:54:00.000-08:00

Politico on PIPA and SOPA:

Leo Hindery [has warned] Obama might have reason to worry about his entertainment industry fundraising base... The television, movies and music industries donated more than $9 million on Obama last election, according to Center for Responsive Politics, and more than 70 percent of the industries’ donations to federal candidates from employees and political action committees have gone to support Democrats in recent years.

dKos replies:

[H]ow many people are lining up behind the pro-PIPA/SOPA forces? How many regular Americans are fighting alongside the studios? How many petition signatures has the MPAA and RIAA gathered from its customers? The answer is none. There isn't an industry more disdainful of its audience than these self-styled "content producers" (as if they're the only ones producing content). And [when] they aren't busy trying to kill new technologies like the VCR (and the internet), or pre-accusing their customers of being criminals by flashing that insulting FBI warning before every video that they've bought, or suing teenagers and parents for posting videos of their babies dancing to commercial music, then they're working the congressional backrooms to screw the broader public.... Here's the deal, Mr. Fucking Hollywood—don't donate more money. Take your $9 million and shove it up your ass.... Hollywood dinosaurs can whine and cry about how "unfair" it is that everyone hates your fucking guts, and you can weep about how the issue has become "political," as if it wasn't already political the moment you demanded PIPA and SOPA in exchange for millions of dollars in political contributions. Hollywood isn't alone in demanding services for campaign contributions. The Republicans, after all, are owned outright big Big Oil, Pharma and other major corporate interests. But I don't expect good responsive government out of the Republicans. I do expect it from our side.

Here's to the real content providers, the internet Occupied the Media ages ago, peer to peer! All the creative people, all the funny people, all the imaginative people are already on the side of the Democrats, who gives a shit what the suits think in their sinking ships? dKos can raise nine million in a couple weeks, fer cryin out loud! I agree with Kos, it's high time for the Democrats to tell the self-appointed elite-incumbent "content providers" (skimmers, censors, middle-men, vulgarizers, falsifiers all) to shove it if their contributions come with the usual corrupt strings attached. Contact your congress critters if you have not already done so and insist they repudiate PIPA and SOSA. Believe me, even Big Media will be fine without it.

Syllabus for My Graduate Seminar This Spring at SFAI

2012-01-19T11:47:00.001-08:00

What Now? Aesthetics and Politics Between Past and Future

Critical Studies 500-1, Spring 2012

Third Street Lecture Hall, Fridays, 9.00-11.45

Instructor: Dale Carrico; dcarrico@sfai.edu

Course Web-Site: whatnowbetweenpastandfuture

Approximate Grade Breakdown: Attendance/Participation 25%; Precis/Co-facilitation 25%; Symposium Presentation 10%; 25pp. Paper 40%

Provisional Schedule of Meetings:

January

Week One | 20 Course and Personal Introductions.

Week Two | 27 Fontenelle Digression on the Ancients and the Moderns | Hobbes, excerpts from Leviathan on Power, Wit, Equality -- Poems by Rochester, all posted on the blog | George Etherege, The Man of Mode

Supplemental: William Temple, On Ancient and Modern Learning, Jonathan Swift, "The Battle of the Books," Luc Ferry, Rights: The New Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns

February

Week Three | 3 Kant Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View, What Is Enlightenment? | Willian Congreve, The Way of the World

Supplemental: Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy, J.B. Schneewind, The Invention of Autonomy

Week Four | 10 Schiller, Aesthetic Education of Man | Richard Sheridan, The School for Scandal

Supplemental: Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism

Week Five | 17 Engels "Marx as the Darwin of History" on blog, Marx on the Fetishism of Commodities | Adam Smith: excerpts from Wealth of Nations and John Stuart Mill on Homo Economicus, all on the blog | John Gay, The Beggar's Opera

Supplemental: Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature

Week Six | 24 Oscar Wilde, "Soul of Man Under Socialism," and The Importance of Being Earnest, including the cut "Grigsby Episode" on the blog; Preface to Dorian Grey, Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young, Transcripts of the Wilde Trials.

Supplemental: Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process

March

Week Seven | 2 From Aesthetics and Politics, Presentation I, Ernst Bloch Versus Georg Lukacs, Presentation II, Bertolt Brecht and Walter Benjamin, pp. 9-99; Fredric Jameson, Reflections in Conclusion, pp. 196-213 | in class screening of Noel Coward, "Hands Across the Sea"

Supplemental: Gayatri Spivak, Death of a Discipline, Paul Gilroy Postcolonial Melancholia

Week Eight | 9 From Aesthetics and Politics, Presentation III, Adorno Versus Benjamin, pp. 100-143 | Benjamin, Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility | Horkheimer and Adorno, Culture Industry; Adorno Culture Industry Revisited | Marinetti, Futurist Manifesto | Joe Orton, The Good and Faithful Servant

Supplemental: Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing, Dreamworld and Catastrophe

Week Nine | 16 Spring Break

Week Ten | 23 Louis Althusser, Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses | Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future, "Preface: The Gap Between Past and Future," pp. 3-14, Human Condition: Action (handout) | Kafka Before the Law, and on the blog "Give It Up!"

Supplemental: Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish

Week Eleven | 30 Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, and also the Preface to the Third French Edition | Joe Orton, "Entertaining Mr. Sloane"

Supplemental: Roland Barthes, Mythologies

April

Week Twelve | 6 Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style | Susan Sontag, Notes on Camp

Supplemental: David Lloyd, Paul Thomas: Culture and the State

Week Thirteen | 13 MFA Reviews

Week Fourteen | 20 in-class screening of Todd Haynes' "Velvet Goldmine," videos on blog by David Bowie, Pet Shop Boys, Marilyn Manson, Lady Gaga, and others.

Supplemental: From Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, from Jameson,Postmodernism, Bruno Latour We Have Never Been Modern

Week Fifteen | 27 Naomi Klein -- Introduction to No Logo One and Two, and Patriarchy Gets Funky | Claire Bishop Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics -- in-class screening of AbFab episode, "Doorhandle"

Supplemental: David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, Saskia Sassen Territory, Authority, Rights

May

Week Sixteen | 4 Symposium
Hand in Final Essay no later than May 8.

Course Objectives:
1. To think the "now" as a modernity substantiated in serial quarrels of ancients and moderns, as a vantage from which offer up aesthetic judgments, and as a provocation to change implicating the aesthetic in the political.
2. To think the relation of aesthetics and politics -- in our own "now," construed as the consummating moment of Neoliberalism -- via a survey of mostly post-marxist aesthetic and cultural theory.
3. To contemplate some of the ways in which cultural/political subjects have made spectacles of themselves for audiences of themselves, especially on stages and screens, roughly concurrently with the ways in which they have struggled to think themselves along the way.
4. To grasp some of the fraught relations of the cultural and the social to one another through the indispensability to each of the state and of the state itself to the states of culture and society.

I'm Not Saying Much These Days

2012-01-18T14:36:00.000-08:00

...back to school, bit busy, back soon, boo SOPA, boo PIPA, here's Nico.

Back to School!

2012-01-17T07:52:00.000-08:00

First day back teaching, a critical theory survey (here's the syllabus if you're curious). Friday is my intense teaching day this term, today should be quick and painless, administrivial mostly. Still, blogging may be low today -- especially if, as I hope, my new desktop arrives today (my first new computer in over a decade, not counting the hand-me-down Eric gave me a few years ago when he upgraded). No, if you're wondering, I'm not a Mac.

Fuel for the Frothmentum! Totally Fucked Up Shit Edition

2012-01-16T16:22:00.001-08:00

I don't know what is more fucked up, the fact that crazytown anti-gu'ment-except-for-my-pet-police-state anti-gay anti-abortion anti-contraception crusader Rick Santorum's partner in madness lived in sin in her twenties with a partner who was an abortion provider and outspoken liberal and pro-choice crusader, or the fact that this partner of hers, apparently forty years older than she is, was actually the obstetrician who delivered her! Who delivered her!

The Radical King In His Own Words

2012-01-16T14:10:00.000-08:00

For those who think the ferociously brave, profoundly disruptive, absolutely radical King was indeed the thoroughly domesticated postage stamp now beloved by all and feared by few, I recommend this year, as every year on this day, you watch or listen to or read the transcript of this fine Democracy Now! Special.

Ayn Raelian Update

2012-01-16T13:30:00.000-08:00

My documentation and explorations of key reactionary figures and organizational nodes in the Robot Cult archipelago The Ayn Raelians, has been considerably expanded. I'm beginning to think this bit of muckraking needs a place in the book I've been piddling around with over break based on the pieces in the Condensed Critique.

So, Presumably We're Pretending We Thought Huntsman Was Actually In the Race?

2012-01-16T02:28:00.001-08:00

Sure, fine.

Futurological Brickbats: Thinking Person's Guide

2012-01-15T12:18:00.000-08:00

In coming to terms with the present, especially in grasping the meaning of what has taken us by surprise, we understand and, better still, become understanding. In predicting the future, especially in proposing coinages that would work as spells to dispel being taken by surprise, we become ever more susceptible to fraud and, worse still, become frauds. Where thinking is concerned, this is a variation on the difference between investment and speculation.

More Futurological Brickbats here.

Mean Mitt's Dog-On-A-Roof-Gate Draws Comment Across the Blogipelago

2012-01-15T11:51:00.000-08:00

Buzzfeed surveys some of the most piquant parodies so far.

Dispatches From Libertopia: Acton Edition

2012-01-15T10:56:00.001-08:00

If it is usually true that command corrupts, it is absolutely true that only the corruptible covet command.

More Dispatches from Libertopia here.

Randroid Kreme Sundae

2012-01-15T10:55:00.001-08:00

I Was Shitting You People -- A Message From Ayn Rand

Behind the Music: Atlas Shrugged

When Alan Met Ayn: Atlas Shrugged and Our Tanked Economy

Audio of Sam Seder (adorable!) on Ayn Rand's Hypocrisy.

Ozymandias Shrugged, read it for the comments -- here's mine.

Implausible Characters, Vacuous Foundations

Dispatches from Libertopia: Envy Edition

2012-01-15T10:54:00.000-08:00

That the greedy decry all judgments of their misconduct as expressions of envy is hardly surprising, since in giving in to greed one has first of all to give leave to judgment the better to give oneself over entirely to envy.

More Dispatches from Libertopia here.

Four Freedoms

2012-01-15T10:49:00.000-08:00

Detail from the FDR Memorial in Washington, DC.

MundiMuster! Corporations Are Not People! Endorse America's Senator Bernie Sanders' Constitutional Amendment Overturning Citizens United

2012-01-15T10:47:00.001-08:00

via Democracy for America:

Today, as a result of the absurd Citizens United Supreme Court decision, corporations and billionaires can spend unlimited sums of money, without disclosure, in political campaigns. And that is exactly what they're doing.

Last month, Senator Bernie Sanders introduced a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United.

Join Sen. Sanders and tell Congress that --
* Corporations do not have the same constitutional rights as human beings.

* The people have the right to regulate corporations.

* Corporations are prohibited from making campaign contributions.

* Congress and states shall have the power to set reasonable limits on election spending.
Add your name now.

When Gays Are Not Being Bullied To Death It Makes Muscular Baby Jesus Cry

2012-01-15T10:46:00.000-08:00

via TPM:

A proposed bill in Tennessee would create a loophole in the state’s anti-bullying laws to protect those expressing religious, philosophical or political beliefs, which one proponent says would ensure that people can still express their “views on homosexuality.”

As if bullying the vulnerable were a kind of prayer or philosophical proposition, a poem! To say that the queer people in their communities are not people at all is not to express a view but to engage in a violence against those people, against their community, and as such against themselves though they will not know it.

The intolerant always demands tolerance for his intolerance. The bigot always decries as violence and as bigotry the restraint of his bigotry from the worst of its violence. The racist always declares racist the exposure and denunciation of his racism. How righteously they demand the rights they violate, how convinced and smug they are in their hypocrisy, how sure they are of the unassailable logic of their self-contradictions! It is a demoralizing game the moralizers play, endless and enervating, and the only winning move for those who would oppose their mean parochialism and energetic cruelty is simply never to play it on their terms.

What We Aren't Talking About When We Talk About Our Soldiers Desecrating the Bodies of the Dead

2012-01-14T23:21:00.000-08:00

While I obviously agree with those who point out that American soldiers desecrating corpses in Afghanistan isn't making Americans any safer or more free, indeed quite the contrary, still it seems to me all the while we are arguing about this we are neglecting the no less obvious prior point that soldiers making corpses in Afghanistan in the first place isn't making Americans any safer or more free either, if it ever did. We shouldn't be occupying Afghanistan and we shouldn't be killing its people year after year to no purpose -- that we shouldn't also desecrate the bodies of those we kill in this endless bloody idiocy, while patent to anybody who isn't utterly dead to decency or sense, is surely a supplementary consideration?

Rachel Maddow Documents Mean Mitt's Animal Cruelty

2012-01-14T16:47:00.000-08:00

Just in case you thought Romney's callous cruelty was confined to his treatment of human animals who work for a living...

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

For more information, I recommend the website Dogs Against Romney, which has apparently been active since 2007 and knows where all the, er, bones are buried.Among other things, like reading blog updates with lots of good information for those of us who already have plenty of reason to think Mitt Is Mean, one can purchase from the website adorable shirts and hoodies, like this one declaring that, indeed, "Mitt Is Mean." So true, so true…

As a cat person, I appreciate enormously the availability as well of this protest tee from the affinity "Cat's Division" of Dogs Against Romney. "Hiss!"

Also, too, spread the terror! Google bomb, away, you know, for kids -- and all the little puppies and kittens.

Countries Are Not Companies!

2012-01-14T15:28:00.000-08:00

Paul Krugman clearly, patiently, insistently makes the obvious, indispensable, endlessly ignored basic political point yet another time:

...America is not, in fact, a corporation. Making good economic policy isn’t at all like maximizing corporate profits. And businessmen… do not… have any special insights into what it takes to achieve economic recovery. Why isn’t a national economy like a corporation? For one thing, there’s no simple bottom line. For another, the economy is vastly more complex than even the largest private company. Most relevant… is the point that even giant corporations sell the great bulk of what they produce to other people, not to their own employees -- whereas even small countries sell most of what they produce to themselves, and big countries like America are overwhelmingly their own main customers... six out of seven American workers are employed in service industries... largely insulated from international competition, and even our manufacturers sell much of their production to the domestic market. And the fact that we mostly sell to ourselves makes an enormous difference when you think about policy. Consider what happens when a business engages in ruthless cost-cutting. From the point of view of the firm’s owners (though not its workers), the more costs that are cut, the better... But the story is very different when a government slashes spending in the face of a depressed economy. Look at Greece, Spain, and Ireland, all of which have adopted harsh austerity policies. In each case, unemployment soared... [and] the reduction in budget deficits was much less than expected, because tax receipts fell as output and employment collapsed… Mr. Romney is… claiming that his career makes him especially suited for the presidency…. [T]he last businessman to live in the White House was a guy named Herbert Hoover… [u]nless you count former President George W. Bush… Like many… I was somewhat startled by [Romney's] latest defense of his record at Bain… [claiming] he did the same thing the Obama administration did when it bailed out the auto industry, laying off workers in the process. One might think that Mr. Romney would rather not talk about a highly successful policy that just about everyone in the Republican Party, including him, denounced at the time. But what really struck me was how Mr. Romney characterized President Obama’s actions: “He did it to try to save the business.” No, he didn’t; he did it to save the industry, and thereby to save jobs that would otherwise have been lost, deepening America’s slump. Does Mr. Romney understand the distinction? America certainly needs better economic policies… [M]ost of the blame for poor policies belongs to Republicans and their scorched-earth opposition to anything constructive… [and] we’re not going to get better policies if the man sitting in the Oval Office next year sees his job as being that of engineering a leveraged buyout of America Inc.

E-mails Between Oakland City Hall and Police Reveal Deception and Collusion About Crime and Violence to Justify Scandalous Crack-Down on Peaceful Constitutionally Protected Occupy Oakland

2012-01-14T11:50:00.000-08:00

KTVU:

Ktvu obtained more than 1,000 internal emails between Oakland City Hall and police through a public records request that show just how stressful of a situation it was for leaders.

Before you devote too much energy empathizing with the "stress" created for Oakland's public servants by peaceful Constitutionally protected demonstrations among the citizens who voted them into their positions and in whose names they govern, presumably with some expectation that the fraught business of governing in a democracy will indeed be a stressful business -- which is why we tend to honor and respect such difficult service, after all -- I hope you will remember that the protestors were in the Plaza precisely because theirs, too, was a "stressful situation," a situation of deep and profound suffering, distress, exploitation in reaction to injustices far more profound.

In one message written Oct. 13, a sergeant said he'd been confronted by protesters camping at Frank Ogawa Plaza and that one implied they would remove officers by force if they entered the camp without permission. Five days later, Deputy Chief Jeffrey Israel told Chief Howard Jordan, "We can either wait for a riot, or order them to cease their night time occupation." Soon after, images of the protest began making national and international news.

You did notice, there, that the, er, "let's actually wait for a riot or something bad actually happening" option was disregarded.

In the days leading up to the Nov. 2 march on the Port of Oakland, city leaders warned about the drain on police resources. When Jordan received an update that crime was actually down 19 percent in the last week of October, he wrote an email to one of Mayor Jean Quan's advisers. "Not sure how you want to share this good news," he wrote. "It may be counter to our statement that the Occupy movement is negatively impacting crime in Oakland." Police and the city said Occupy has had an ongoing impact on their ability to respond to crime.

In other words, the surreal armed confrontation with peaceful protestors in the streets of my Oakland, images of which have been seared in the minds and memories of millions, introducing overwhelming force and destruction where there was none, simultaneously drained the resources and so undermined the capacity of the police to do their jobs elsewhere in the city where there were actual crimes and acts of violence to attend to. I do hope we are all clear, by the way, about the strategy the City adopted for "shar[ing the] good news" that crime was down considerably during the protests. They lied about it. They knew they were lying. They used the lies to justify their own criminal violence against their own citizens peacefully protesting in their own City about injustices that concern us all.

All Blogged Out

2012-01-13T15:39:00.001-08:00

...for the moment. So, go read this, ya ingrates.

Incipient Sanity In Crazytown?

2012-01-12T10:35:00.000-08:00

Upgraded and adapted from the Moot, my reply in conversation with "jollyspaniard," for your consideration:

Of course, nothing could be clearer than that the GOP does NOT prefer Romney, hence their almost hysterical affirmation of not-Romney after not-Romney. That even much of the Establishment neither likes nor trusts Romney any more than the Base does is well documented (and following the money confirms this). However, his quick consolidation of front-runner status through the primary contests (which I certainly expected, given the alternatives) is quite interesting nonetheless.It is important to remember that what you appropriately call the "busload of clowns" (Palin, Trump, Bachmann, Perry, Cain, Santorum) are actually reflecting and catering directly to the real attitudes and assumptions that drive the GOP Base, so that when they "fall in line" as they are for Romney on the grounds of electability as they are (setting aside for the moment that I honestly regard him nearly as unelectable as the rest of clowns in the clown car, not just as likely to lose but as structurally nearly incapable of winning, with nothing but lots of money and his Base's rancid rather race-based hatred of Obama on his side) it is useful to notice that this choice of "electability" over their own core convictions is premised on their recognition that they are a marginal minority in a browning, secularizing, planetizing, democratizing nation -- that whatever their boasts about being the "real Americans" and "the American people have spoken and what they want is... voucherized social security! more austerity for the undeserving poor! zero taxes and regulations for our rich overlords! climate change denialism! creationism in biology class! jezebels hanged birth control!" and so on, they actually are starting to make political decisions based on changed assumptions. The unconscious realization that the right lost the culture wars has long driven the disciplinary fervor of the GOP (as well as accounting for their weird declarations that a blandly average Christian majority seems really surreally to feel themselves embattled and discriminated against and hanging by their nails at the edge of a precipice or something), but the emergence of a more pragmatic politics premised on the un-electability of candidates reflecting their actual views may be the first step toward recognizing that their views have been tested and found wanting. This may be the beginning of the self-awareness that will eventually redefine the Republican party into a version of conservatism that can partner in the fact-based administration of a diverse sustainable multicultural multipolar polity/world (their loss to Obama again, and the loss of most of their mid-term gains would drive that lesson home further still). Definitely the old dysfunctional coalition you rightly describe of "business plutocrats with christian[ist]s and teapartiers [eg, more or less the Bircher contingent -- various mixes of libertopian neo-confederates] as useful idiots" has not survived the p2p-democratization of base voters any more than the faux-centrist Clinton/DLC left survived the p2p-democratization of the Democratic Party from MoveOn through Dean to Obama's triumph (whose second term will reflect that transformation even better than the first if we manage to swing the Congress in my view).

Obama 2012: If the Supreme Court Skews We Are Supremely Screwed

2012-01-11T10:54:00.001-08:00

Dahlia Lithwick:

For anyone considering the 2012 election’s importance to the future of the American judiciary, one fact stands out: next November, Ruth Bader Ginsburg will be seventy-nine years old. If a Republican wins the presidential election, he or she may have an opportunity to seat Ginsburg’s successor, replacing the Supreme Court’s most reliably liberal jurist with a conservative. That would mean that the Court -- currently balanced almost elegantly between four liberals, four conservatives, and the moderate conservative Anthony Kennedy -- would finally tilt decisively to the right… A 2008 study by Richard Posner, a federal appeals court judge, and William Landes, a law professor at the University of Chicago, examined the voting records of seventy years of Supreme Court justices in order to rank the forty-three justices who have served on the Court since 1937. They concluded that four of the five most conservative justices to serve on the Supreme Court since 1937 sit on the Supreme Court today. Justice Clarence Thomas ranked first. Kennedy, who is ranked tenth in that study, will be seventy-six next November. If a Republican successor of Obama gets to replace both Kennedy and Ginsburg, it’s fair to predict that the Roberts Court may include five or even six of the most conservative jurists since the FDR era.

Needless to say, these so-called "conservative" jurists would surely be better denoted radical plutocrats with profoundly reactionary social and cultural views and an urgent activist agenda in mind.

American See Saw Seen

2012-01-11T00:48:00.001-08:00

When Americans trust their government more than corporations things always get better, when Americans trust corporations more than their government things always get worse.

Top Ten Plutocratic Mitticisms So Far

2012-01-10T17:54:00.001-08:00

Go to TPM for the whole list and its hilarious annotation (also including evergreen "who let the dogs out" video):

1. “I’m also unemployed” (June 16, 2011)
2. “Corporations are people, my friend” (August 11, 2011)
3. “I’m running for office for Pete’s sake, we can’t have illegals” (October 18, 2011) ...
5. “I like being able to fire people” (January 9, 2012)
6. “There were a couple of times I wondered whether I was going to get a pink slip” (January 8, 2012) …
8. “I’ve always been a rodent and rabbit hunter. Small varmints, if you will.” (April 5, 2007)
9. “Don’t try and stop the foreclosure process. Let it run its course and hit the bottom.” (October 17, 2011) …

And counting.

To Be Anti-Establishment Is Not the Same Thing As To Be Anti-Government -- In Fact Anti-Governmentality Is Almost Inevitably A Crypto-Establishmentarianism!

2012-01-10T16:49:00.000-08:00

BooMan has been expressing exasperation about how otherwise perfectly commendable lefties like Glenn Greenwald and Matt Stoller seem unable to shake off the Randroidal siren song of so-called "libertarians" like Ron Paul. His exasperation is understandable, and his suspicion that this libertopian blind-spot in some progressives is a symptom of a deeper and quite important problem is absolutely correct in my view. His own answer to the problem is pitched at the proper level of abstraction, but I think his analysis is missing a crucial distinction. BooMan writes:

[P]rogressives need to act like they are the natural leaders of this country again. But we can't do that because we have too much distrust of power. We're so busy standing on the outside critiquing the Establishment that no one is going to hand us the keys to become the Establishment. And too many liberals don't want that responsibility because it would tarnish their purity. Stoller doesn't have an answer to Ron Paul because he's decided the system is so rotten that it is not only indefensible, but irredeemable. That leaves him with no solutions. And a progressive without a belief in progress is just a crank.

I think this is right and important, but I do fear that in putting the point in terms of the Establishment BooMan is inviting misunderstanding. I think it is important to distinguish Establishment (which seems to me inevitably to have conservative connotations) from Government.

The critique of tendencies to corruption, sclerosis, unaccountability, inertia, insensitivity, orthodoxy, authoritarianism in incumbent-elite orders is a vital, inevitable, and necessary dimension in most progressive, democratizing struggles and movements. Democracy is in a sense inherently anti-establishmentarian. Given the role of peer-to-peer network formations in the revitalization of the American left (the dKos "crashing the gate/keepers" figures this nicely concisely) this isn't a point to which you want to seem insensitive. But it is also true that to the extent that democracy is more than simply an uncritical assertion of good will, amounting to a kind of moralizing or aesthetic sentiment, democracy is also indispensably connected to an espousal of Government. And it is here that I think the real force of BooMan's critique is to be found (this indispensability of good government is what his focus on assuming "leadership" and taking "responsibility" both ultimately depend on).

At the heart of any proper democratic left outlook must be an insistence on the desirability of good, accountable, responsible government. And such an insistence demands a prior insistence on the possibility of such government.

I quite understand why BooMan wouldn't want to write as pedantically as I do (who would?), but I don't think this is the flaccid logical truism it may appear to be, but an enormously important insight of those who are truly devoted to politics of progressive democratization. After a generation of Movement Republicanism driven by (sometimes crypto, sometimes assertive) anarcho-capitalist pieties, crafted by Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman, and then implemented in the fervor of the Reagan Counter-Revolutionaries, the Gingrich Contract on America, the Killer Clown Administration, and the Tea Party's Death Penal Summer and Mid-Term Debacle, it is not surprising that even those with the good sense to recognize the catastrophe of Movement Republican ideology and policy have accepted as their own at least some of the deeper premises from which that very Movement Republicanism takes its own energies (Clintonian and DLC neoliberalism is attributable in an important measure to the same self-defeating assimilation of anti-governmental premises to democratizing temperaments).

Republican anti-democracy in its anarcho-capitalist Movement Republican epoch has depended on a confusion of anti-establishmentarianism with anti-governmentality that Stoller and Greenwald may not have managed yet entirely to shake, and which BooMan and the rest of us cannot help them shake unless we explicitly dispel it as BooMan has not quite managed yet in his response. It is no accident that it is the discussion and reaction to Ron Paul, who depends so assertively on precisely the conflation of his idiosyncratic anti-establishmentarianism with a more general anti-governmentality, that brings out these doctrinal tensions among progressive advocates. What these "defeatist" progressives (in BooMan's phrase) need to grasp is that it is not paradoxical, it is not ironical, it is not accidental that Paul's own anti-establishmentarianism is in fact a stealthy advocacy of a neo-confederate re-establishmentarianism (I justify that term "neo-confederate" in another anti-Ron Paul jeremiad). So-called "individualist libertarians" or "market libertarians" always count on precisely the false conflation of Government with Establishment, and hence always advocate reactionary anti-democratization under the colors of progressive democratization.

Not to put too fine a point on it, you cannot champion civil liberties without first affirming the civic. This isn't a minor quibble, it is a fundamental point from which a whole swarm of consequent confusions inevitably arise: So-called "libertarian" isolationism is actually profoundly different from principled anti-militarism, "libertarian" indifference to diversity as anything but a potentially profitable niche markets is actually profoundly different from principled celebration and facilitation of diversity, "libertarian" advocacy of a radical neglect of the sufferers of drug abuse or exploitative sex work or gun violence is actually profoundly different from a principled opposition to the racist war on (some but not all) drugs and puritanical sex panics and advocating the regulation, taxation, and education of their responsible consensual adult use. Good government has an indispensable role to play in the advocacy of an actually principled progressive stance on each of these issues, and whatever their superficial similarities with certain "libertarian" positions, in every case their anti-governmentality renders the similarities completely insubstantial.

This is not the proposal that all governments are good, or that governments that have done good things are justified in the bad things they have done by those good things, indeed, one would expect that those who believe in the possibility and desirability of good government would be all the more ferocious in their denunciations of bad government (and often, naturally enough, in the form of anti-establishmentariansims). But it is actually quite crucial to grasp that these denunciations of bad government propound a profoundly different proposition from the declaration that government is bad as such. The latter proposition, even if it has occasionally provided a vantage from which progressive anti-authoritarian movements and reform have derived some of their strength, is at its heart a regressive and reactionary viewpoint, and more often than not it has produced regressive and reactionary politics.

It is crucial to grasp that there are some outcomes indispensable to the creation and maintenance of an arena for the free expression of diverse viewpoints, to the nonviolent adjudication of disputes, and to the provision of equal recourse to law and a scene of informed nonduressed consent to the terms of private and commercial life (eg, to form a more perfect union and establish justice), to the reliable and equitable maintenance of the security of the our persons, households, and communities (eg, to ensure domestic tranquility and provide common defense), to the responsible and sustainable administration and investment in common and public goods (eg, to promote the general welfare) for which legitimate government is the indispensable agency. Anti-governmental "libertarianism" declares itself dedicated to secure the blessings of liberty through the abolition of the very agency without which those blessing cannot be secured, and hence is a contradiction in terms.

As I said elsewhere (yes, in yet another recent anti-Ron Paul post):

Democracy is the idea that people should have a say in the public decisions that affect them, but this is best understood not only as an affirmation of individual dignity as it is part of a larger commitment to the elimination of violence from public life (that people must also have a say in the decision as to what will count as violence in public life yokes these commitments ever tighter together, even while rendering the experimental implementation of these commitments interminably dynamic). Democrats defend the widening of the franchise and accountability of election to public office to provide an alternative to the violent transfer of authority over public institutions, they defend the law to provide alternatives to the violent adjudication of disputes otherwise, they defend welfare programs to secure a scene of informed nonduressed consent to the terms on which we deal with one another in our commercial and private relations, and defend the public administration and investment in common and public goods to overcome tendencies toward structural violations that inevitably attend other administrative arrangements of such goods: nonviolence and equity-in-diversity suffuse the democratic vision across all of its layers. Ron Paul, like all market libertarians, declares market exchanges and contractual arrangements "non-violent" by fiat, whatever the misinformation and duress that actually prevail over their terms; he believes that the contingent historical artifact of regulations, treaties, pricing conventions, provincial customs, norms, infrastructural affordances that passes for "the market" here and now is somehow an eternal and natural and spontaneous order; and he believes that the contingent historical artifact parochially construed by him as a reasonable responsible resourceful possessive individual subject is likewise given and natural. Like all market libertarians (and I do suspect all libertarians, always, even those who imagine themselves to be of the left) his is a vision of freedom and dignity that requires the treatment of key assumptions and institutions of the status quo as natural and inevitable rather than as artificial and historical, and hence his is a profoundly reactionary viewpoint at its base. It is from this reactionary base that arise all the reactionary details, from the racism of his defense of segregation to his rejection of public health, safety, education, which those who view him as a paradoxical figure seem to want to regard as accidental or incidental to his "civil libertarianism." Not to put too fine a point on it, one cannot properly be civil anything if one repudiates civics as such. For Ron Paul individualism means isolation, liberty means neglect, free to choose means free to lose (even when the loss is an avoidable one and a loss to us all). There is nothing paradoxical about his worldview -- except perhaps the usual Republican paradox of those who declare their detestation of government scrambling to find a comfortable home in government all their lives long. But I daresay that is better described as hypocrisy than as paradox. Like all libertarians, Ron Paul's point of view is an essentially pre-political one. Democrats who discern paradox in Ron Paul's positions would do better to grasp the consistency that unites Ron Paul's anti-democracy as well as unites the democratic commitment to nonviolence and consent, to equity-in-diversity.

Books of poetry by young writers are usually promissory notes that are never met.

Weirdgate Debate! Is Romney a Weird Mormon Guy Or a Weird Rich Guy?

2012-01-05T14:58:00.000-08:00

Efforts to put a finger on what it might be that just seems so darned weird about Willard Romney have been dismissed by Romney's Hu-mon surrogates as nothing but coded signals of anti-mormon bigotry. Indeed, BooMan raises a few questions of the ways in which Willard might be weird in a weird mormonic mode. I freely admit as a crusty atheist that I find all the various UFO cults rather weird, Trekkers, Raelians, Scientologists, Mormons, Roman Catholics and so on. I am of course highly informed on such matters, having studiously watched South Park for years.

But, I also have to say that for me personally it is Willard's long inhabitation of a bubble of moneyed hyper-privilege that yields that abiding strange stiff inhumanity of his. Think of Glinda the Good Witch descending on the Emerald City, bathed in pastels, smiling vapidly like an anti-depressant commercial, clearly strung tight as a banjo string. Watching Romney interact with average Hu-mons in group settings is like observing a social variation of the uncanny valley. I am reminded of William Gibson's insight expressed in the gooseflesh inducing phrase from Count Zero:

And, for an instant, she stared directly into those soft blue eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human.

Weirdgate Goes Viral

2012-01-05T14:42:00.001-08:00

The Colbert Report
Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,Video Archive

Romneybot say, "oh beautiful for spacious skies bbrrrap! oh beautiful for spacious skies bbrrrap! oh beautiful for spacious skies bbrrrap! oh beautiful for spacious skies bbrrrap!" for the all the nice voting Hu-mons.

Can't Stop the Weirdness

2012-01-05T14:37:00.001-08:00

Back in August, David Axelrod declared that calling Romney weird was a firing offense. But Weirdgate cannot be stopped!

Sullivan Sounds Willard Weirdness Warning

2012-01-05T11:13:00.001-08:00

Andrew Sullivan:

We've been so used to the weirdness of the island of misfit toys that is the GOP primary season that we may have missed the real story: the weirdest man in the whole race might actually be ... the one not supposed to be weird.

I don't like linking to him particularly, but I thought this was promisingly suggestive and also figured Sullivan would be one to know from his wingnut grapevine if where there is smoke there really is fire when it comes to Romney's brand of robotic rich-guy mormonic weird. I agree that Romney with his stiff awful gawky failed efforts at "joking" and otherwise "connecting" to Hu-mon voters is easily as substantially clownish as all the other clowns in the clown car even while the media casts him as the straight man of the bunch or at least the driver of the clown car, but I think the even bigger story is that Romney's endorsement of Paul Ryan's Medicare dismantlement via voucherizing and his anti-abortion stance and his healthcare repeal and replace (with nothing) promise and his more tax cuts for the rich job-creators who got Bush tax-cuts without creating any jobs but rich guys like me deserve more money anyway policy and his terrifying bellicosity toward Iran shows that he is also substantially extremist as all the other extremists in Crazytown even while the media casts him as the "moderate" or at least as the Mayor of Crazytown.

MSNBC Weekend Shifting From Prisons to Progressives

2012-01-05T10:51:00.001-08:00

Reuters:

MSNBC has added another new show to its weekend lineup, handing contributor Melissa Harris-Perry a two-hour program on Saturdays and Sundays.

Excellent! I enjoy Chris Hedges at once somehow laid back and frenetic weekend show very much (which is being stabilized at 8-10 both Saturdays and Sundays), and Harris-Perry will be following it starting the first weekend in February. Suddenly, there is a four hour block on weekend mornings -- and one that isn't a prison block -- to supplement the solid Sharpton, Shultz, Maddow, O'Donnell prime-time block. We know from Hayes' refreshing panel show that the longer-format allows for more thoughtful and freewheeling discussions that productively go unexpected places, but Harris-Perry has shown from her guest-hosting gigs on MSNBC that, like Hayes and Maddow, she will keep things going at an entertaining clip and with a fine sprinkling of quip. I would still be enormously well pleased to find weekday mornings jettisoning that superannuated boy-bully Joe Scarborough and replacing him with Frangela or Fugelsang or their like, but one cannot have everything, or at any rate not all at once.

Alea iacta est!

2012-01-05T07:50:00.000-08:00

When everything is a casino everybody loses everything.

More Dispatches from Libertopia here.

Today's Fool Me Tee Vee

2012-01-05T07:46:00.000-08:00

Online University is now offering advanced degrees in "technology"! "numbers"! "words"! Also, mopping and filing!

More Fool Me Tee Vee here.

Today's Random Wilde

2012-01-05T07:43:00.001-08:00

There is no truth comparable to Sorrow.

Anti-Capitalist

2012-01-05T00:45:00.000-08:00

Mine is an anti-capitalism that will be quite content with the equity-in-diversity of an environmentally sustainable social democracy in which universal healthcare, education, income, expression, recourse to law and franchise is funded by steeply progressive taxes even if everybody decides to call that "capitalism" for whatever reasons perversely appeal to them.

More Dispatches from Libertopia here.

Ron Paul's Army of One

2012-01-05T00:34:00.000-08:00

BooMan gets this just about right:

I'd like to see the Republicans take some of Ron Paul's ideas more seriously. If a third of Republicans thought we ought to end the drug war, I'd be pretty excited about that. But, that's not even close to be being the case right now. The Republicans are experiencing some signs of disunity, but they're still pretty much united in their dedication to being greedhead assholes. Everything else is just details.

BooMan makes this point in a post responding to Norm Ornstein's false belief that Ron Paul's Neo-Confederate viewpoint is shared by a third of the Republican electorate just because he is the beneficiary of widespread but disorganized anti-Romney sentiment (as he is the beneficiary as well, no doubt, of the low inchoate pleasure Republicans take in contemplating anything they think liberals will dislike without giving much in the way of sustained thought to why they should substantially approve it themselves or not, especially if it is offered up in cadences that sound ornery and gim-crack).

I have noticed that Rachel Maddow seems to over-estimate the extent to which Paul represents some sizable GOP constituency in much the same way as Ornstein has (she did it on her show just last night in a discussion with that circus barker Michael Steele, for example). And, you know, I really do think it is important to disabuse people of this nonsense. Few, and ever fewer, people still believe the awful things the angry scared old white dimwits of Movement Republicanism so loudly do, but far fewer still believe the nonsense Ron Paul talks, perhaps only his son comes close to his particular mix of crazy.

In many ways, discussion of the "libertarian" strain among Republicans is just of a piece with the same kind of marketing BS that lead so many journalists to pretend the "Tea Party" was something new rather than the same klatch of John Birch, Silent Majority, Moral Majority, Family Values, Values Voters as it always was, exactly the same white-racist patriarchal-prick fundy-authoritarian know-nothing gun-nut greedhead war-mongering assholes as it ever was, only every year a little diminished by die-off amidst the wholesome browning and secularizing demographics since the Southern Strategy.

But I also think there is a bit of wrongheaded wishful thinking in such attributions, an effort on the part of center-left figures like Maddow and Ornstein to find sense in what remains after all the only viable party apart from the Democratic one and hence a real and abiding force in our public life, where there simply isn't any or much hope of any anytime soon (a radical course correction borne of many defeats will likely be required for that).

I think all this rationalization is not just wrong but dangerously so, especially when it comes to the appalling Pauls.

Ron Paul is not a civil libertarian because, not to put too fine a point on it, he doesn't approve of civics itself, to which in its modern form the legitimate function of a national state dedicated to the administration not only of law but of welfare is absolutely an indispensable precondition before any kind of intelligible political conversation is the least possible.

That might seem an unfair circumscription of the field of discussion but look how what I am talking about plays out the ground when we're talking about worldly realities rather than cartoons mistaken for theories: Ron Paul's advocacy of isolationism is not the same thing as the championing of a principled anti-militarism. Ron Paul's advocacy of universal neglect is not the same thing as the championing of the principle of civil rights and liberties. Ron Paul's comfortable approval of inequity and tyranny as authored by commercial enterprises or individual states is far from the same thing as a principled repudiation of federal tyranny. Ron Paul's declaration that all market or contractual transactions are non-coercive by fiat, whatever the inequity, misinformation, or duress that prevails over their terms is not a defense of non-violence but a justification of violence in the name of a fraud of non-violence.

This is to say, Ron Paul is not really the champion of the principles he is credited with, and the discovery of his many infelicitous opinions, his flirtations with white-racists, queer-bashers, heartless Dickensian capitalists, climate change denialists, and the rest are not accidental or incidental but direct expressions of the rot at the core of his worldview.

These things matter enormously, and should not be fudged. Indeed, this is why I say BooMan is not just "right," but only "about right" in insisting on Paul's marginality. Of course I know what BooMan means when he says he wishes more Republicans would reject the racist war on (some but not all) drugs, like Ron Paul does, but frankly I do not trust Paul's rejection of that forever failing, ugly and unjust prohibitionism enough to regard him as a reliable collaborator in the struggle against the Drug War except in a completely tactical, highly circumscribed, case-by-case sort of way. I disapprove the racist war on (some but not all) drugs -- but think there is a key health and safety role for their testing and regulation by the FDA, think some especially dangerous drugs should still be prohibited and young people prohibited from using almost all of them until they are more likely to handle them reasonably well, think they should be taxed the better to fund programs to educate and rehabilitate those who abuse drugs, and so on. Is Paul's rejection really "like" mine at all, then?

By way of conclusion, I confess that I did not really think I could get away with calling Ron Paul's politics (if his views can properly be said to be political at all rather than simply a form of moralizing confused with politics in the way so typical of reactionary worldviews -- why, Schmitt for one famously crafted a whole systematic anti-politics mistaken for political theory on that very error) not "libertarian," as is usual, but "neo-confederate," as no doubt seem needlessly incendiary -- without a word or two of elaboration!

In saying Paul's views are Neo-Confederate I do not mean simply to indulge in name-calling (though I fully approve ridiculing the ridiculous) but to discern in Paul's views their deep continuity with the long-discredited (in the sense of failure not of unfashionableness) anti-governmental theories yielding both the dysfunctional America of the Articles of Confederation prior to the Constitution, as well as to the white-racist patriarchal plutocrats of illegal immoral idiotic Southern secession. Paul's libertopian chestnuts have actually already been tried... and found catastrophically wanting precisely to the degree that they were taken on in earnest, from regressive taxation, to vacuous federalism, to deregulation and self-policing of enterprise, to for-profit administration of public and common goods, to lawlessness in the streets.

Ron Paul and his energetic fanboys may not have learned anything from those catastrophes, but that doesn't mean the rest of us have to pretend we don't see the obvious. Those who advocate "natural" aristocracy/plutocratic "meritocracy" are either greedy or clueless assholes, and those who advocate not the democratization but the smashing of the state are simply fools. There is a very real sense in which such people are not yet sufficiently educated to benefit from or provide benefit in debate. Pretending otherwise does nobody any good.

Willard Winning!

2012-01-04T11:34:00.001-08:00

I daresay Mitt Romney might have preferred a solid second place finish in an Iowa well known to skew far rightward, rather than eke out a pathetic 8 vote "victory" with fewer votes than he resoundingly lost with last time around, winning with the smallest percentage in the history of the caucus, winning with scarcely more Iowans supporting him than supported President Obama the same night -- in a no-stakes non-contest without even facing a challenger.

The weird victory speech launching unexpectedly into bizarre bellicosity toward Iran (after all, what American does not pine for yet another endless war in the Middle East right about now?) and then mopping up with random spoken-word snippets from "My Country 'Tis of Thee" (not making this up) didn't exactly inspire confidence, although I am sure Willard's genuflection to Wal-Mart as a model of job creation won him lots of new fans across the heartland.

It is well known that support for Romney has lodged like a gnat in amber in the precinct of 25% for many years now, since the contest which he lost to Grumpy McAncient, all through the Obama Administration, through every episode so far of the GOP Presidential Reality Show in which a string of not-Romney saviors flavors of the month with little but being not-Romney to recommend them each rising splashily into the stratosphere only to explode upon scrutiny of their stupidity and weirdness (revealing them to be palpably unelectable, but nicely representative of their party in this consummating moment of their Crazytown Movement Republicanism), year after year, month after month, day after day, poll after poll, forever fixed to a little more or a little less than 25%, winning against everybody else in a party in crazy disarray with that little more or little less than 25%, winning, winning, winning right up to the general election in which something like 25% delivers a shattering loss from which these evil greedy ignorant idiotic bigot loons will never recover, let us fervently hope.

Today's Fool Me Tee Vee

2012-01-04T10:41:00.000-08:00

I mean, what reasonable person wouldn't invite radically increased infection risk, suicidal thoughts, and occasional homicidal sleepwalking for a slim chance at clearer skin?

More Fool Me Tee Vee here.

Today's Random Wilde

2012-01-04T10:39:00.000-08:00

The only thing that ever consoles a man for the stupid things he does is the praise he always gives himself for doing them.

Santorum on Birth Control

2012-01-03T23:16:00.000-08:00

Frothmentum, meet vetting...

You know, I like the idea of Crazytown uniting against Romney, drawing out the primary process, flinging feces the stink of which lingers on, making Romney and Rove and other bad people blow lots of their precious money, and so on as much as the next guy... but I honestly don't think there's much chance of it. Because Santorum hasn't been the not-Romney GOP savior flavor of the month like all the other painted ponies on the clown carousel he's never had his splash of vetting (hilariously enough, Santorum is already getting pilloried as fiscally liberal because of earmarks blah blah blah), and very very soon everybody is going to be hearing a lot of this...

Maybe Crazytown will decide a suicidal Santorum crusade is a better way to go out than an acquiescent whimper with Willard, but these clips will say "unelectable" loud and clear and my guess is that even the full-on white-racist Dominionist gun-nut patriarchal prick Fox-conspiracist anti-Obama derangement caucus will take a slim chance on Romney over the obvious loser Santorum. Here's hoping I'm wrong, and the Frothmentum will barrel on and on, but even with bile-belching Gingrich, drunk (or whatever the hell that is) Perry, and crazy-eyed Bachmann in his corner it's hard to believe we could be so lucky.

I Don't Know Which Realization Is Weirder…

2012-01-03T22:53:00.000-08:00

…the realization that Santorum's jobs populism more or less proposed universal enslavement as his employment plan, or the realization that the GOP is now so far to the right that Santorum's endorsement of serfdom* actually still is an attack on Romney from his left!

*Yes, like every other Republican candidate -- and he reminded celebrants of much of this explicitly in his victory speech tonight -- Santorum wants more tax cuts for the rich, wants corporate taxes slashed, wants to deregulate finance and big industry, wants to destroy healthcare reform, wants to voucherize Medicare and privatize Social Security, and when you give literally all the money to the richest of the rich and then make them above the law what you get is serfdom even if you say you feel their pain as you make them serfs.

Onward, Frothmentum!

2012-01-03T21:20:00.000-08:00

Muscular Baby Jesus hungers for the blood of jezebels, uppity negroes, nancy boys, and ungodly scienticians and unleashes this night his frothy instrument upon an astonished world!

Romney Hopes He Can Win the White House With Just Two Lies

2012-01-03T13:19:00.000-08:00

Lie One:

Romney keeps claiming that his profit-taking through leveraged buyouts and downsizing and outsourcing by his vulture-fraudster firm Bain Capital somehow created "one hundred thousand jobs."

Although it is easy to document the job losses Romney profited from, nobody can seem to substantiate the job creation claims and the unaccountable SuperPAC making the claims so far has refused to indicate on what they are based.

Rather than patiently debunking this claim over and over again while tut tutting its hypocrisy -- most of which debunking will be ignored anyway while Romney surrogates will simply repeat the "100,000 Jobs Created" claim over and over until all the so-called "Independent Voters" (very few of whom has ever had an independent thought in his life, and none of whom ever voted on the basis of one) treat it as an article of unassailable faith -- it seems to me the best response will be to show the crying, distressed, angry faces of people (let's make most of them white, shall we?) who have been fired without notice after life-long service to the companies Bain bought out and looted for cash. Teary faces, not facts, will jam the Romney lie. For example:

Ted Kennedy has already done much of the work for us. Although, when it comes to pictures that say more than words can, it must be admitted that Romney has done much of the work for us, too.

Lie Two:

Romney keeps claiming that Obama has lost this country two million jobs.

The left-wonk blogipelago seem enormously excited to debunk this claim by fixing their attention on the term "net job loss" as opposed to monthly job gains since Obama's stimulus and other policies have gone into effect (usually in the face of unprecedented profoundly irresponsible Republican obstruction explicitly designed to make Obama a one-term President no matter how many millions of Americans who work for a living have to suffer needlessly as a result). While all this is exactly true and right, it is also guaranteed on these terms to lull most Americans to sleep, whether they think of themselves as "Independent" or not.

Again, rather than exposing what is misleading about Romney's claim through the patient delineation of a distinction between "net loss" and "monthly gains" it seems to me the best response will simply be say Obama inherited the worst economy since the Depression from the Republicans (which is not only true but also widely believed by Americans, and so should simply be repeated as often or more often than Romney's "Obama lost two million jobs" claim to see to it that they keep remembering what they already know) and then show this simple graph that Steve Benen likes to whip out on a nearly daily basis (as he should and so should we all):

while saying, in exactly Benen's words, although a calliope or ukulele in the background would be a nice addition:

“A” marks where we were when the economy crashed, and the “B” marks were we are now. Why, exactly, does Romney think “B” is worse than “A”?

Romney plans to win the White House by telling two lies and then spending enough money to make the two lies stick.

I think the best way to obliterate Romney's first lie ("I created one hundred thousand jobs") is with empathy for the suffering faces of those whose jobs he callously destroyed for profit, while the best way to obliterate Romney's second lie ("Obama lost two million jobs") is with derision at his facile effort to misread an obvious graph.

What I would stress is that we should avoid the effort at patient explanation and debunking that is as much about feeling clever as revealing the truth. Romney's lies will be told in slogans a few syllables long. Their repetition will create the reality on the foundation of which Romney will seek to win the White House. Our responses must be comparably pithy and more visceral. If they are, Romney's defenses and rationalizations and qualifications will become long and convoluted and his innate flip-floppery and flim-flammery will come to the fore.

Our debunking should not be long and patient, his justifications should be. We must short circuit those lies, not engage them on their terms. We can make Romney's lies work for us instead by diverting their energies at the same level at which they are actually circulating -- sloganistically, rhythmically, viscerally.

This will not only make Romney exposed and defensive, but will surely attract endless superficial punditocratic horse-race and gossip-coverage about Romney's perceived untrustworthiness, his unlikeability, his lack of conviction. No amount of money can re-write reality in the congenial terms of Romney's two lies, while at once trying to out-echo the Village echo-chamber. THis is especially so, given the reservoir of distrust in the Republican Base for Romney -- and note: their white-racist and Fox-conspiracist distrust of Obama is a comparable reservoir, but it's going to be one or the other that the media consolidates. Once his lies fail on his own terms, we can then hang the catastrophic narrative of Romney's life of callous predation on the very same lies he is now hanging his hopes on.

As I keep saying, I am not particularly worried about Obama's re-election chances, but I do worry enormously about whether Obama can win re-election with coat-tails that retain the Senate and re-gain the House for the Democrats. Given the unprecedented irresponsibility of the GOP (not to mention its madness and authoritarianism) Obama needs a Democratic congress to accomplish much in the service of solving America's many shared urgent problems in time.

"Culture of Predation upon African-Americans in the City of Utica " Caught on Tape

2012-01-03T11:37:00.000-08:00

As Kathy Griffin would say "--allegedly!" By which she means to say: "Obviously!"

Cassandra Harris-Lockwood reporting in the Utica Phoenix:

The Utica Phoenix is in possession of a Utica Police Department video recording of a traffic stop which occurred on February 11, 2011. In this silent video, an African-American couple have been pulled over in their SUV… It is clear the officers are not aware that the video tape feed was rolling… The occupants, a woman and a man, are out of the car when frisked by the officers… The woman, who is clearly distraught and pleading, is also frisked by the male officer, at one point exposing her underwear… after the search… she too is hand cuffed behind her back… [O]ne of the officers, gestures for the woman to be taken from view… This same officer… returns to the passenger side of the car and is clearly seen reaching for and then removing a pouched plastic bag from his back pocket… It seems he then drops the bag, bends down to retrieve it, then returns with it to the interior of the car. After a few seconds, this officer then exits the car again, this time with a another plastic bag, fuller and larger, that he holds out as evidence as he walks to the driver side of the car.

It has been reported to the Utica Phoenix that the chairman of the Legal Redress Committee of the NAACP, Venice Ervin, brought this video to the attention of Utica Police Chief Williams… It was also learned by the Phoenix, that a copy of this video was recently delivered to the FBI for review... [T]his video has been widely distributed through the Black community, being shown in barbershops, and other public places. Its viewing has fueled the renewal of complaints long charged against the Utica Police of the planting of evidence and other abuses by the local force… Neither the NAACP nor the UPD would comment on other cases with similar disturbing circumstances currently in various stages of litigation. But at the start of 2012 there appears to be cause for great concern over apparent patterns of abuse of power by the UPD and a culture of predation upon African-Americans in the City of Utica.

[T]hough one can dine in New York, one could not dwell there.

2011 Killer Clown Top Ten

2011-12-30T14:44:00.000-08:00

Krugman Is Right

2011-12-30T12:24:00.000-08:00

Keynes Was Right.

Romney's Run Is Gonna Be Ugly As Sin

2011-12-30T12:02:00.000-08:00

So, it seems that Mitt Romney's clone, er, "son," "Matt," is now demanding that President Obama release his birth certificate and grades presumably because Americans have a right to know about how he is a Kenyan Muslim and stuff and how, you know, he may seem all smart and stuff but really he is stupid and owes everything to teleprompters and affirmative action that keeps The White Man down and stuff… oh, wait, actually, all of this material has already been released and endlessly mulled already despite the utterly obvious outrageous ugly racism out of which such demands inevitably originate.

And apparently the NRA's fundraising is mushrooming as the gun-nuts pull out all the stops to defeat the Obama, since he wants to take away all their guns and proposed all that popular commonsense gun regulation in the aftermath of the Giffords shooting… oh, wait, actually he shows no sign of wanting to do anything like that (supremely sensible though it would be if he were to do so) and none of that happened at all.

Of course, Romney actually kicked off his 2012 campaign with an egregiously obvious deception the exposure of which demonstrated Romney was not even particularly interested in the fact that he lied and certainly not apologetic about it, followed by Romney accusing Obama (and a few of his Republican zealot colleagues) of being Communists for not thinking financial fraud and outsourcing is totally awesome… oh, wait, wasn't Romney supposed to be the sensible electable moderate compared to all the fulminating loonies around him in the GOP this year?

There's no way around it: given the unthinking depths to which Movement Republicanism has plunged the GOP, 2012 is going to be full of evil lies and racism and the kind of relentless idiocy that makes everybody with a brain and heart well nigh suicidal.

Today's Fool Me Tee Vee

2011-12-30T11:06:00.000-08:00

Actually, no, your cleaning product isn't in any available sense revolutionary.

More Fool Me Tee Vee here.

Today's Random Wilde

2011-12-30T11:03:00.000-08:00

I never came across anyone in whom the moral sense was dominant who was not heartless, cruel, vindictive, log-stupid, and entirely lacking in the smallest sense of humanity.

Who Would You Save and Who Would You Kill?

2011-12-30T00:40:00.000-08:00

You can go back in history and save one person from untimely death, but then in exchange you must kill another person (also now dead) before they managed their mischief, to right the karmic scale. So, who do you choose?

I'll go first!

Save? Bobby Kennedy.

Kill? Alice Rosenbaum, before she became known as Ayn Rand.

Anybody else want to play?

Obama - Clinton 2012 Nonsense

2011-12-29T13:18:00.000-08:00

Robert Reich is making the latest of many predictions-slash-wishfulfillment fantasies that Biden and Clinton might switch places on the 2012 ticket (I indulged in this very speculation myself, way back on November 15, 2008, as it happens). I think this sort of provocation is harmless enough, rather like watching funny YouTube clips at work when there's nothing else to do. Reich's between terms and wants a little attention now that he doesn't have office hours to hold. The Republicans have been such a loud garish technicolor atrocity exhibition, it's easy to see Dem wonks want to have a little fun, too, blow off some steam.

But, really, people, this is not serious speculation. Why on earth would Obama signal weakness going in to 2012 with such a dramatic shift? Why feed the inevitable White House in disarray narrative, especially when one of Obama's strengths is that the GOP is so palpably... in disarray? But beyond all that... people, people! All the Obama - Biden 2012 swag is already printed up. The buttons, the t-shirts, the stickers, the letter head, the coffee mugs, the baby unitards, the whole nine. That stuff didn't roll out as some clever head fake to set the stage for a Democratic Convention stunner. That's boredom talking. Focus, people. Obama's gonna win, but we've got a Senate to hold and a House to re-take. There's work to do.

Idly Pining for a More Parliamentary Form in the USA

2011-12-29T12:47:00.000-08:00

Upgraded and adapted from the Moot longtime friend of blog "jollyspaniard" writes:

The useful idiots in the GOP base are now the GOPs own worst enemy. Good luck taking control of both houses though. I used to think that America had the best designed Democracy on paper. Not anymore.

It's hard to disagree with you about that! Just look at the catastrophe of the profoundly anti-democratic Electoral College, for one thing. But ugly as was the plutocratic sentiment that inspired the inept Electoral College (and the appointment rather than election of the original Senators) I actually think so many of the Founders' anti-factional fears may have introduced some of the worst blind spots into the Constitutional framework as well. Needless to say, the very factionalism they sanctimoniously bloviated against and refused to account for already had a hand in allotting the electoral votes that made Washington President and by the Adams and Jefferson election full-on party politics already brought the fledgling Republic to the brink of utter dysfunction.

Since we are not just electing "representatives" but "Administrations" (a term that implies a basic capacity to accomplish the actual work of establishing justice, ensuring domestic tranquility, providing defense, promoting general welfare) I must say that the Parliamentary Democracies do seem to have gotten some of it better than us, generally speaking. I do think it would be better, for example, if every four years in electing an Executive Ticket we voted in not only a President and Vice-President of a party with a clear platform clearly contrasted with alternatives and with a real mandate, but also the Speaker of the House and with the Vice-President functioning not just as the occasional tie-breaker but as the Senate's Majority Leader.

The power of the Leaders of the House and Senate over the running of the meetings and composition of committees and so on would give the Party in power the ability to implement, within limits, the program their election mandated, while also giving them powers to check tendencies in the Opposition to abuse rules to create dysfunction. The periodical regularity of elections would check abuses of the Party in Power. In moments of divided government when the Executive presided over majorities of other parties in Opposition, the majority would have the power to force real compromises on the Administration but not abuse rules to grind the people's business to a halt. Especially in a mass media environment, our present system invites dysfunction and disinformation -- and gets it.

By the way, I am still a booster for publicly funded campaigns and instant run-off voting and same-day registration in every state and an Election Day holiday and all the rest of the reforms one tends to hear championed by those who want to get money out of our hopelessly corrupted system and who want to break the present two-party system but in a way that doesn't always render third-parties functional spoilers always undermining our intentions as happens now. But I think your comment referred to even deeper problems in our Constitution that even such wholesomely and radically democratizing reforms would fail to address.

Of course, campaigns for publicly funded elections and instant-runoff are already an incredibly hard slog, as are important ongoing efforts to switch from the electoral college to the popular vote state-by-state. I don't even think campaigns to make our system less dysfunctional and more parliamentary are even on anybody's radar screens, and they could hardly be described as organizational priorities given everything else afoot. So this post should be taken in a completely philosophical spirit with no real practical substance, except insofar as it might usefully illuninate certain structural difficulties we deal with in our dysfunctional notionally-representative plutocratic constitutional republic.

Today's Fool Me Tee Vee

2011-12-29T11:45:00.001-08:00

On crime shows, the most famous guest star did it. It's the law.

More Fool Me Tee Vee here.