Ramblings of an Idle Insomniac

On Dreams

2012-01-17T01:26:00.001-05:00

I think that one of the best Martin Luther King day tributes came from Jon Rosenberg, creator of Scenes from a Multiverse. The premise of the comic is that there are an infinite number of universes inhabited by sentient beings, all of whom are pretty much exactly as fucking stupid as we are.

MLK was assassinated during a push for worker's rights, part of a social justice initiative that went beyond the call for de jure equality and made the case for a more equal society. In today's America, Martin Luther King's name is one embraced by people of all backgrounds, creeds, and political persuasions. But if you share his goals, you get beaten in the streets just the same as his followers did at the time.

Many, on air and off, have asked the question: "What would Martin Luther King Jr. say if he saw today's America." Obviously none of us know, but whatever it is, it would without a doubt be painful to hear.

Requiem

2011-12-20T08:12:00.001-05:00

I would have posted a memorial of the late, great Christopher Hitchens earlier, had I not been wrapped up in reading-- enviously-- the words of those lucky enough to have known him personally. To say that I admired the man is a massive undersell. He was unafraid to challenge any position, however well-accepted, that tripped his keen bullshit detector. He didn't shy away from showing his anger where it was warranted, though he tempered it with humor. He didn't let his work get in the way of his lust for life, nor his fun keep him from producing brilliant work. All of those are qualities that I aspire to embody (and seeing how long it's been since I've last written anything, I have plenty of work to do) As it happens, Kim Jong Il has fallen now as well. The reflex to check Slate to get Hitch's take was still there when I first heard the news. Luckily, Slate readers were thinking along the same lines and the most recent piece on North Korea was trending.

The North Korean regime has been grinding its people to dust for over 60 years now in the service of its military machine, in the hope that one day they may reunite the peninsula by force, and help themselves to the prosperity won by their cousins to the South. Or at least, that's the tale told by those who hold the whips. The real grift lies in leveraging that military might-- combined with legitimate concern that the batshit supervillain calling the shots is just sick enough to like his chances against the combined forces of South Korea and the United States-- into food aid to keep alive the slaves who toil every day to keep the Inner Party in golden waterslides and congac. And we give them food despite knowing the game-- despite knowing that each bag of rice stamped with the stars and stripes is being distributed to the people as it were a tribute paid by a conquered foe. We do this because that's the only fucking thing we can do for those unfortunate enough to be born in what I'm sure Tolkien would recognize as a modern Mordor. If the prison camps where dissidents are sent to work until they die aren't persuasive, the overhead view of the peninsula at night ought to be.

It's impossible to know how sincerely the North Korean people are mourning the pathetic, vain, and evil man who they called Dear Leader, or "Highest Incarnation of the Revolutionary Comradely Love," or any of the other 50+ titles his personal army of press flacks came up with for him. For now, the disposition of Kim Jong-un, the nominal Great Successor, or his uncle and probable regent Chang Sung-taek is equally unknowable. If the acts of state terrorism perpetrated on South Korea were the artifact of a regime desperate to show strength as its leader's health deteriorated, then there is much cause for concern in the ascendance of a young novice to the seat of power. But even if no more shells fly in the near future, and even if the North's nuclear capabilities never become a credible threat, the enormity of the regime's grip on its people remains a seemingly immutable fact.

Our soft power has been hampered by the feckless self-interest of the Chinese government. Using our hard power would doom millions to the benefit of no-one but those paid to make the bombs and the body bags. There is no Korean Spring in the offing. It is difficult to imagine what the path to a better future for the people of North Korea would look like. But what is certain is that we of the Free World cannot forget their suffering. We cannot allow the world to ignore the plight of the denizens of the dark half of the Korean peninsula, as well as those suffering similarly unforgivable atrocities. And in the absence of Hitch, the rest of us have a lot of slack to pick up. Amid the heartwarming anecdotes of his dear friends, the Youtube videos of particularly brilliant polemics, and the exhortations of the lame-brained fundamentalists-- too timid to have contended with the man while he still drew breath-- shouting triumphantly that the outspoken atheist has now been chastened in the presence of their Invisible Man,what ought to ring most clear is this: The mind is a weapon, and the call to arms is eternal. One cannot do justice to the memory of a man like Christopher Hitchens without answering it.

So, that happened

2011-10-28T11:46:00.000-04:00

For many of my generation, the War in Iraq was the catastrophe that catapulted us into political awareness. It has cast a shadow over the entirety of American life for the past eight years, though it seems almost trivial to talk about the impact it's had on the people who didn't go there. 4,468 American troops dead. 150,000 or more Iraqis. Many thousands more wounded. A generation of veterans who feel more detached from the rest of us than any other before them. An effort in Afghanistan that was allowed to deteriorate through neglect, at the cost of who knows how many soldiers and civilians.

Even when the last American soldier crosses the border between Iraq and Kuwait at the end of the year (as my badass cousin will be doing, in fact) we won't be done. We still are under great obligation to people of Iraq to ensure that the sacrifices that brave people from both countries have made aren't in vain. We still need to find a responsible way out of Afghanistan. We still need to find work for the thousands of uniquely qualified people who are nonetheless not getting nearly as much respect as they ought to be, despite how bloody impressive they are.

Still, it gave me a profound sense of relief to hear that news the day after Moumarr Ghatafi was probably executed by the Lybian rebels who captured him. In general, I'm with Cooper on the "not really giving a shit about what happened to that guy" front. But it's had me wondering what happens to the legacy of a nation if the messy business of its inception is captured on video.

I believe that future generations will be embarrassed by the way they treated Ghatafi. When the Redcoats massacred our civilians, we put them on trial, and they were defended by a peerless attorney in John Adams, who later said it was the best thing he'd done for his country. It spoke volumes for the ideals upon which we wished to build a nation. The fact that said ideals were inconsistently applied-- to the tune of innumerable dead and tortured innocents whose only offense was the color of their skin-- is not lost on me. But I believe that there is an enormous benefit to the narrative provided by Adams' example. In Libya, that's a story that they don't get to tell. And with the Ghatafi family now considering filing a war crimes complaint, the narrative suffers even more.

I know that the rebels are products of their environment-- an entire generation living under the thumb of a brutal dictator, with no self-determination -- and that they have none of the understanding of rules of war that comes with military training. But still, I think that future generations of Libyans will be embarrassed by this. Even if it was crossfire that killed Ghatafi, by parading him around the way they did while he was wounded, they killed him just as surely as if the earlier reports about someone shooting him in the forehead with his own pistol were true.

Don't get me wrong. What Ghatafi experienced was a very small sliver of what he deserved. But this isn't about him. This is about the Libyan people who have to build a nation from scratch now that the war is over. It's about what they're going to have to tell to their kids when they're old enough to understand this. And by that measure, this was an enormous missed opportunity.

All told, we're seeing an end of a war that cost almost 5,000 Americans their lives and will probably wind up costing taxpayers $1.9 trillion dollars, and the end of a war that claimed no American lives and cost taxpayers about a thousand times less. And oh yeah, they actually like us over there now. Sorry neo-cons, it turns out that it was possible to use American military might as a tool to positively impact the world order after all. You guys just suck at it.

In Response to Mr. Hitchens (better late than never)

2011-10-13T15:49:00.001-04:00

Christopher Hitchens argued last Monday that those who are alarmed about the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki are under heavy obligation to say what they would have done instead.

It's pretty much just the sort of thing Christopher Hitchens would say. And I sort of agree. I don't necessarily see it as an obligation, but I absolutely am far less likely to take someone seriously if they haven't at least thought about alternatives.

If it doesn't bother you at all, you can fuck right the hell off.

An American citizen has been killed in our name, with no due process of law. This should be a crisis of conscience for all of us.

This isn't to say that I don't think it's utterly appropriate to target an enemy commander during a time of war, regardless of the circumstances of his birth. But this is about precedent, and that means doing the paperwork. And the rationale given for the hit's legality is flimsy at best.

For the past 10+ years we have been engaged in a global conflict against a transnational enemy whose troops have no uniforms, who don't amass at the border, who regard success in terms of how many, not how few civilian casualties are inflicted, and who reside in places where they are not the state or of the state but are under some level of protection.

The rules of war were not written with this sort of conflict in mind; that much is obvious. The rational response to this realization would be to work with the international community craft new rules that impose limits on the use of military might in accordance with the spirit of existing international law but without the outmoded language.

Our response instead has been to do whatever is easiest, and create a post hoc justification for it based on tenuous interpretations of existing law. It's a disgrace, and as Americans we were taught to expect better than this.

It should absolutely be legal to take out a man who has betrayed his country to a transnational death cult, and with apparent lethal result, who is holed up someplace inaccessible to any agency able to capture him.

But under current law, it doesn't appear to be. We have only our own laziness to blame for this.

What would I have done instead? I'd have worked to establish a judicial process for targeted overseas killings that isn't just a bunch of lawyers putting their heads together to try and find a way to call something legal. I'm going to favor a drone strike over boots on the ground any day, and I'm going to favor a drone strike over an insurgent attack that kills civilians any day. But if people are going to be killed in my name as an American, I want an assurance that they're the right people. This isn't merely a moral concern. Whenever we misfire, whenever we shoot into a crowd, whenever we target the wrong person, we are potentially creating new enemies who see the killing of their loved ones not as collateral damage but as murder. The ethics and the cost-benefit analysis are grey under the best of circumstances. To say that this is distressing is an understatement. But it ought to be distressing, or else we find ourselves as we do today where the ethical implications of covert action are the result of anything but the best of circumstances.

This isn't about whether or not it was right to kill that one man. It's about how the justifications used for the killing can be abused in the future. Even if one trusted the Obama administration fully to discharge this newfound (and as of yet unchallenged) power, it's still unconscionable to let it stand when it could one day fall into the hands of, oh, I don't know... a presidential candidate who has all but called for the lynching of Ben Bernanke

As we watch the American Spring begin to take root, we should keep in mind that Wall Street isn't the only place in the world operating with a massive moral hazard. Unaccountable power is a cancer on our society no matter who wields it.

The Mad Dog of the Near-East Falls

2011-08-28T14:39:00.000-04:00

I wrote, then deleted, a triumphalist piece about Libya, which now that I think about it I never went on the record about in the first place.

Because, you know, everyone just needs to hear what I, of the chattering underclass, have to say about it.

I'm going to make a confession here. In my heart of hearts, I'm an interventionist.

When people are out of work, I want my tax dollars to put them back to work. When they don't have health insurance, I want to give it to them. And when they're suffering under the yoke of a cruel and repressive dictator, I want to free them, whether they live overseas or in Michigan. Or at least, such is my aspiration. Some undertakings, however noble the intent, can be ignoble in any conceivable attempt at their execution. As such, I was against the war in Iraq, glad the United States didn't intervene in Egypt, and sadly cognizant of the fact that if any moment existed where a nation-building mission in Afghanistan could have worked, it ended when we became occupiers rather than liberators.

In Libya I was for intervention the moment it became clear that Moummar Ghatafi was going to slaughter all who opposed him otherwise. There is, as I see it, a moral imperative to act when one has a good-faith basis for believing that one can favorably influence the outcome. Going in with allies, not Americanizing the conflict, and waiting for a UN mandate for action were all evidence that this action would be the closest thing to a responsible use of military power in recent memory.

Which is why I was more than a little pissed to hear so many people on the left--some of whom I respect a great deal-- declare American participation in this conflict to be proof that Obama is no different from George W.Bush. And moreover, that those supporting action in Libya who opposed it in Iraq were fascinated solelt by the politics of personality. I'm reminded of a Yakov Smirnov joke: "In America, people are free to go to Washington and tell comrade citizens president of the USA is idiot. In Russia, people are free to go to Red Square in Moscow and tell comrade citizens president of USA is also idiot. Russia is just like America!"

I'm used to intellectually dishonest bullshit coming from the likes of Eric Cantor, Michelle Bachmann or Max Baucus. Getting yourself elected to Congress diminishes one's ability to speak frankly. But to see the left-wing narrative that this President is insufficiently progressive (however true it may be in the general case) overwhelm honest reporting of the facts is infuriating. This wasn't another unwinnable war. It wasn't an enormous waste of resources. It wasn't the United States terrorizing the Middle East with its military might.

It was, of course, "hostilities," and while I agree that the Administration did something genuinely dishonest and unfortunate in skirting the War Powers Act without raising any of the very real questions as to its Constitutionality, I have a hard time believing that the people who wanted him to break the law in order to unilaterally raise the debt ceiling are seriously bothered by this. What, from a legal perspective, is the difference between saying that you're not following a law because it isn't Constitutional and saying that it doesn't apply? Anyone looking to challenge the decision would have to go through the same legal channels and the arguments would take the same shape.

I find it enormously regrettable, but it seems to me that Obama's motives are clear. He didn't want to deal with the whims of a Congress whose sole purpose for the past year has been to oppose him at every turn, regardless of the implications . He also didn't want to provoke a Constitutional crisis, which could well have ended in the evaporation of the War Powers Act. As it stands, he's merely weakened it by precedent, and not irreparably. Under his admittedly ludicrous interpretation, a President still wouldn't have the unilateral power to put boots on the ground, or to take military action without the support of the international community. And even that precedent may not hold.

It was, without a doubt, a weak move. It's not something I would have ever done if I was in charge. But I'm not certain that it wasn't for the best.

In any case, reasonable minds can disagree about the War Powers Act and the President's handling of it. As it stands, a dictator has fallen and there are no American flags burning in the streets of Tripoli. Those incapable of seeing the significance of that fact-- and the fact that the only NATO casualty of the struggle was a robotic helicopter-- ought to be looked at with skepticism when they comment on other political and geopolitical matters.

As for the ones spouting that BS from an elected office? I want to know if they've been lobbied by the Ghatafi regime.

I will say that I'm not impressed with a lot of the news coverage on the war. The press is dropping clear hints at the true nature of the rebel soldiers without connecting the dots. The rebels' premature victory celebrations that take place as soon as the loyalists and mercenaries are driven into retreat were described as being reminiscent of Bedouin tribal warfare. That this would suggest a brand of soldier prone do things more atrocious than fire their guns into the air inches away from their comrades' heads does not enter discussion, despite the near-certainty of severe abuses perpetrated by these undisciplined revolutionaries Possibly worse ones than have been reported. It's true that there would likely have been greater and worse under an unchecked Ghatafi reprisal, but if we're going to applaud the result of the conflict, we ought to be aware of the unintended consequences.

The events in Libya may yet have a profound positive impact on the Arab Spring, and how the nascent democracies arising from it view the United States. As such, I have been following them with cautious optimism. One can't help but be happy to see a scene like this:

Here's hoping that the most is made of this great opportunity.

Come On and Grab Your Friends...

2011-08-17T17:01:00.007-04:00

So uh... Rick Perry huh?

All I'm saying about him right now is that I'm mortified to share a biographical bullet point with him that I consider to be important-- we're both Eagle Scouts.

Though when I got Eagle, I had to demonstrate that I gave a shit about my fellow human beings, and also that I had any clue how America works. But then again, I come from lib'rul Massachusetts, where most people (referred to colloquially as non-subscribers of the Boston Herald) think that we should expect adults to read above a fourth grade level.

In any case, one could be forgiven for wanting to talk about cartoons instead of the brutish realities of this foul month in the American experiment. Lately, it's been impossible for me to get enough Adventure Time.

Set after what is known colloquially as the Great Mushroom War, which caused fundamental changes in the rules that govern Earth (now known as the Land of Ooo), it follows the adventures of Finn, a thirteen year-old human believed to be the last of his kind, and Jake, a 28 year-old magic dog whose parents raised Finn as their own.

The land is full of lifeforms unlike any on pre-apocalyptic Earth. Sentient candy people, floating purple clouds who speak like androgynous Valley girls, small elephants with faces like Peppermint Pattie, monsters, wizards, flying unicorns who speak Korean, and all manner of anthropods that aren't quite human, but who may have descended from humans. Littered about the landscape are artifacts of the world's previous inhabitants, none of which are fully understood by the current ones. Technology is of the cargo cult variety, as while Finn carries a portable phone, he also carries a sword.

The world's operating mechanics are familiar to anyone who's played Dungeons and Dragons.

Yeah, big surprise that I watch this show. It's deliciously absurd, playfully disturbing, and above all, smart.

And I feel a strange sort of kinship to Finn. He's literally one of a kind, living in a world that doesn't always make sense, with no direction home and few who he can truly relate to. He gets by (gets high; tries) with a little help from his friends, who are many, but few of whom actually get him. Indeed, even his adoptive brother-cum- hetero lifemate Jake sometimes has trouble understanding what it's like to be Finn.

He's brave, clever (though not as educated as might be desired), unfailingly loyal, and inexhaustibly curious. Which serves him well in this strange world, which contains monsters and barbarians and dungeons and quests enough to keep the existential angst at bay.

He spends a non-trivial portion of his time rescuing princesses from the Ice King, a sorcerer who seems to have gotten the idea that kidnapping and imprisonment in a frozen cage is a normal part of courtship. But even when they aren't in need of rescuing, Finn takes it upon himself to tend to the needs of all princesses, whether that includes throwing a movie night to stave off boredom, or helping them record a new song. Princesses seem to make up about 85% of the female population in the Land of Ooo, and they all love Finn.

He's happy to help anyone (even non-Princesses) at any time, but he's the most devoted to Princess Bubblegum, the eighteen year-old ruler of the candy kingdom who seems to have some human DNA but whose biomass is made up of candy. At the end of Season 2, he underwent the struggle of his life in a quest to save her from the grips of an ancient and terrible Lich. He succeeded, but only just, and the wasting sickness that came as a result of her exposure to all of that nastiness reduced her biomass, having the result of (somehow) reverting her to a thirteen year-old. Which brings us to this episode, the first one in which Finn interacts with the thirteen year-old Princess Bubblegum.

The episode is here, should you want to check it out. I had it embedded, but Cartoon Network doesn't seem to get the point of it being the future. It's just over ten minutes.

This episode aired last Monday, when I was still out for blood over the S&P downgrade, which I took as a declaration of war. But the ending took my mind off of it, because something about it struck me close to home.

Finn had been in love with Princess Bubblegum since the day he first met her, but as an eighteen year-old princess with grown-up responsibilities, she's not exactly approachable. She cares deeply for Finn, and indeed it was the power of her affection for him-- imbuded in the sweater she knitted to protect him from the cold of the Lich's lair-- which allowed him to break the curse that threatened her very existence. But there was a barrier between them because of their difference in age and circumstances.

Now that she's thirteen, Finn isn't quite so alone in this strange land. And they both seem to be at their happiest. Naturally, it doesn't last. For the good of her people, the Princess needs to be her eighteen year-old self again. With the donated candyflesh of he loyal subjects and a massive love-hug from Finn to act as a catalyst, she manages to age five years in a matter of seconds. In one instant, she's being revived by the warm glow of his affection, and in the next, she's shrugging him off because she has better things to do.

And the real kicker is, she can't really be blamed for it. Princess Bubblegum experienced the past five years in an instant, and is thus rightly puzzled as to why that weird little kid (cute though he is) thinks that they're still a Thing.

TV and movies tend to depict messy breakups, wrought of anger and betrayal, but my experience tends to line up more with Finn's. I've never really had a "breakup" per se; just cessations of intimacy. Often abruptly and without obvious cause. It's jarring. It leaves some questions that are never answered, and some that feel too stupid to ever ask. And even though I'm more than happy with my current situation, the dull thud of each unheralded departure continues to echo faintly in my mind, years after the fact.

For Finn, there are still adventures to be had, monsters to fight, and princesses to champion for (including Princess Bubblegum). Indeed, there are for me too, if not literally. But I couldn't help but feel a bittersweet melancholy wash over me as I saw Finn gaze longingly at the turret at near top of the Candy Castle whence Princess Bubblegum overlooked her domain.

It's a quality seen in the finest art, whatever the medium. I owe Pendleton Ward a beer.

I, for one, was rooting for the $4 trillion coin

2011-08-02T23:33:00.004-04:00

The Rev. Al Sharpton may have said back in the day that he won't criticize Obama (which ought to disqualify him from his newfound role at MSNBC as much as I love the man), but he was absolutely right about one thing the other night: the blind cowardice in the Democratic caucuses after passing the ACA made this debt ceiling defeat-- or one like it-- inevitable. However you feel about how the President dealt with the first threat of a government shutdown in this Congress, it came because Congressional Democrats were too scared for their seats to pass a budget. In so dodging, they not only forced a showdown over a continuing resolution, but they also lost the ability to use budget reconciliation for FY 2011, which would have made passing wprogressive deficit reduction measures a walk in the park. Raise top rates? Alright! Get rid of corporate tax loopholes? Sure! Stop subsidizing big oil and big corn? Why not? Carbon tax? OK! Plus, any method of economic stimulus that can pass the Byrd test can come along for the ride.

Instead, they went so far as to hand the decision as to whether to take the vote before the 2010 elections to extend only the middle class tax cuts to Senators facing re-election. And when they finally caved and voted to extend them all, nobody (including the President) thought to get a debt ceiling increase along with it. Even though the TPers were telegraphing their punches on pushing that envelope.

As a Spartan might have said, may they live forever.

What I find positively amazing is that while President Obama has taken quite a bit of flak for his capitulations, there is little mention that the untenable positions he's found himself in have been handed to him directly from blue dogs who didn't do their jobs as legislators and the People who voted in candidates eager to use the debt ceiling as a cudgel.

Unfortunately, Beltway media narratives cannot accommodate such truths. Indeed today, the same hacks who chided Austan Goolsbie for decrying the insanity of not raising the debt ceiling (saying that it was irresponsible to speak as if not raising it were something that could plausibly happen) are now saying that Obama didn't properly communicate the risk of default early on. One thing is for certain. The DC press will run ''dog bites man'' on page one before they admit that sometimes its the so-called moderates who fuck it up for everyone.

None of this is to say that Obama has been playing his hand especially well. He should have declared that if he didn't get guaranteed revenues, he'd take one of extraordinary measures afforded him by the powers of the executive branch to raise the debt ceiling himself. But it's not like the reasons his advisors gave him for eschewing those options were invalid. Any action the administration took unilaterally would have spooked the hands holding the levers of our economy. This is especially evident given the markets' response to the evidence of government dysfunction shown in the leadup to this shitty deal. Who knows? Maybe it would have been worse.

What's clear is that as the remnants of the Blue Dog caucus wither away, we're stuck with the consequences of their failures of conscience and intestinal fortitude. I wonder what Evan Bayh would say. Maybe it would be the same as another imposter in the guise of a public servant once said on an episode of the Simpsons:

"The politics of failure have failed. We need to make them work again."

Fuck You, the Economist

2011-07-18T05:45:00.003-04:00

The fact that world news from other countries tends to be better than what we get over here may sometimes lead one to expect that when a foreign publication comments on America, that they'd understand us better than we do them.

The Economist has seen fit to remind me that I ought to jettison that expectation just as soon as I can manage.

You can tell right away that the author(s)' concepts of political science are stuck in the UK. Despite clearly stating that the crisis is entirely a political one, they continue on to state that the House GOP was acting reasonably within its electoral mandate from 2010 in being the first American majority caucus in history to refuse to raise the debt ceiling.

What, pray tell, is this mandate? According to The Economist, it's "to hold the government of Barack Obama to account."

Yeah, we get it. They have Parliament where you live and you don't know how a proper democracy works. Here's a hint-- politicians are supposed to be elected to do the will of the People, not to play Thunderdome with other politicians. We don't have a paradigm where there's a coalition whose job is, officially, to oppose the majority. It has to do with the fact that our system of representative government was designed on purpose, not retro-fitted to a constitutional monarchy. And while we've made plenty of our own mistakes, a lot of what we got right are things that we recognized were horribly wrong with the British system, one of which being the fractious nature of the British Parliament.

Nowadays, the phrase "Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition" gets floated as a justification for the GOP's chauvinistic obstructionism by American pundits who are too piss-scared of being seen as a part of the Liberal Media to speak honestly about the Republican Party. It's bullshit. That's not how the system was built to work; there are far too many mechanisms built in that grind everything to a halt. Operating our government like it's a Parliamentary system has been nothing short of disastrous for the American People, and the Economist's failure to grasp that basic fact ought to disqualify any commentary it offers on American politics.

When we send politicians to Washington, it's to do the job that the prior incumbents aren't doing well enough. And in 2010, that was create jobs. Which the polls confirm. The electorate is concerned overwhelmingly with jobs and the economy.

You'll notice that "just fuck with Obama a lot" isn't on that list.

The Economist is claiming, essentially, that a populace whose top 6 priories were (in descending order) The Economy, Jobs, Terrorism, Social Security, Education, Medicare, issued a mandate to Republicans to betray five of them in the service of their sixth priority, deficit reduction, while leaving tax cuts--which only 42% rated as a top priority-- alone

It's pretty easy math, The Economist. Isn't math supposed to be a feature of your discipline?

The math gets easier when you consider that those medicare cuts were originally part of a budget plan that also slashed taxes, and only would have significantly reduced the deficit if you assume quite a lot of nonsense. The Ryan plan was quite clearly not about the budget. In order to support the thesis that government is bad, evidence to the contrary must disposed of. It's only natural to target the nation's most popular government program.

The thing is, all of this has been available to anyone with a cheapass computer and the ability to find a WiFi hotspot somewhere. Does part of getting an Economics degree necessitate having the part of your brain capable of parsing this shit get cut out? Did Paul Krugman just not show up that day?

Was it a burning need to break out the "pox on both your houses" that persuaded the Economist to chide Obama for not finding a way out of the deficit crisis in the same breath that it had proclaimed said crisis to be a politically manufactured one?

I didn't even have to get into the utter lack of precedent for the debt ceiling vote being tied to ten-year budget outlooks to demonstrate just how clueless these wankers are.

And yeah, plenty of American outlets have been this fucking idiotic or worse in their coverage of the debt ceiling talks too, and none of them have resulted in me taking to the blogs.. But if the Economist is going to look down over the rims of its glasses at America without actually understanding what's going on, they've opened themselves up to ridicule.

Will You Idiots Please Stop Crying?

2011-07-06T06:24:00.004-04:00

I was on break, stealing wifi from the hotel across the street from the store where I work when the 30-minute warning for the Casey Anthony verdict was issued. I walked back in and told my coworkers that the news was coming, and that there was no way that Casey was going to jail.

Nobody believed me, which was hardly surprising, and part of the reason why I bothered to tell them. After the verdict came back I spent a good portion of the rest of my shift explaining the American criminal justice system to the two coworkers of mine who had an excuse, not originally being from this country.

Later I took one of them bowling for the first time, cultural ambassador am I. But I digress.

What made me absolutely certain of the not guilty verdict was the short deliberations-- establishing reasonable doubt doesn't take nearly as long as exhausting reasonable doubt. But the only reason I wasn't certain beforehand was because I'm not brimming with trust in my fellow Americans to pull their end of the rope where phrases such as "beyond all reasonable doubt" are concerned, let alone"air of reality"

If you watched the news coverage of the Casey Anthony trial, you were bombarded with how many fun things Casey did while her daughter was supposedly missing and what an incalculably cold, evil woman Casey must be. Also, we might kill this one, who's excited? If you watched the trial, you saw the prosecution lean heavily on the above while utterly failing to make its case. Their first boneheaded mistake was not charging involuntary manslaughter as a lesser included for a case where the actual event of the victim's death was never established. And it didn't get a whole hell of a lot better from there.

It was kind of surreal watching the esteemed members of the legal commentariat assembled on MSNBC's live team do Orwellian backflips to explain how the short closing argument by the prosecution had to be some trap so that it fit their Official Casey Anthony Narrative, designed seemingly to entice their viewers into believing that this was a done deal and if they tuned in next week they'd get to see live footage of a young woman discovering that the possibilities for the rest of her life have been narrowed down to the long one or the short one. They were too busy speculating how Jose Baez would react if it were a movie to notice that he'd knocked his closing out of the park without the cheap theatrics they described. He simply explained in clear and uncertain terms that function of the jury wasn't there to solve a mystery. If after the prosecution rests there remains a mystery as to the facts of the case, then the function of the jury is to acquit, no matter what they think might have happened.

News is, for most proprietors of it, a revenue-driven enterprise. And you can't help but notice that the outrage that has resulted at least in part from the media's role in shaping expectations is a neat and tidy consolation prize for not being able to use any of the catchy slogans they'd come up with for the death penalty hearings. Here's what you won't hear from many of them: Even if the worst is true about Casey Anthony, it's unequivocally a good thing that she was found not guilty, as any standard of proof that would have lead to her conviction would put many, many innocent people behind bars. Everyone crowing about how justice wasn't served can fuck right the hell off. Justice was never on the damn menu.

Caylee Anthony is dead. Nothing can change that. It may confound the chest-thumping law and order set for me to say this, but the purpose of our criminal justice system isn't to punish criminals. It's to remove dangerous people from the public and place a deterrent on criminal behavior. Punishment isn't an end unto itself; It's a method of deterrence. Nancy Grace can talk all she wants about how the devil is dancing. I'll take her word for it as a subject matter expert-- when Nancy Grace dances with the devil, she leads.

One person who you can trust to get it right when countless others get it wrong is Chris Hayes, who was music to my ears on The Last Word last night when he spoke about the greater implications of the verdict and the public and the media's reaction to it.

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

Not for nothing, but I'd absolutely watch that anti-Nancy Grace show.

Piddle, Twiddle, and Resolve- Happy Fourth

2011-07-04T06:59:00.002-04:00

Happy Independence Day, everyone. I don't have much to say, but merely offer this clip as a token display of patriotism, if patriotism tinged by the same familiar horror that afflicted John Adams some 235 years ago

And from a different Adams soliloquy:

The croakers all say we'll rue the day
There'll be hell to pay in fiery purgatory
Through all the gloom, through all the gloom
I see the rays of ravishing light and glory!

Is anybody there? Does anybody care?
Does anybody see what I see?

I see fireworks! I see the pagaent and
Pomp and parade
I hear the bells ringing out
I hear the cannons roar
I see Americans - all Americans
Free forever more

This Fourth of July we should remember that there was a time in our country's history when we knew how to overcome the forces that bade us be less ambitious. Yes, I'm being partisan as fuck on the Fourth, but only because it has suddenly become partisan to say that rather than sit around talking about how America ought to be building more, innovating more and discovering more, we should actually be doing the things that we know we need to do to bring about that reality. Here's a hint: bankrupting Planet Earth isn't going to help.

More about that later. For now, let's eat tasty food (more on that later as well), get drunk (ditto) and watch some shit blow up.

For Freedom

Is this thing on?

2011-05-26T17:32:00.002-04:00

Apologies for my (unfortunately characteristic) absence. This time it's because I got an almost-full-time job for a company that forbids me from identifying myself as their employee online. They're apparently very sensitive about who knows who touches their flowers.

I've been out of my parents' house for about three months now, which has done wonders for my sanity. Not doing wonders for my sanity is the fact that John Ensign may never go to jail.

If you only give a shit about one political sex scandal this year, please make it this one.

Usually what makes these stories relevant to the political discussion is the extent to which the politician in question gained their status by pimping their morals. Hence the entirely justified disgust at the revelation that at the same time that Arnold Schwarzenegger was decrying the scourge of single-parent minority households, he may have already helped to create one.

But seriously, I don't care. The possibility that the Governator's misadventures may suck up what ink may have otherwise been alloted to Ensign's rankles me. Because Ensign is more than your garden-variety Republican hypocrite. He was a made man. Groomed for a future run at the Presidency by a theocratic fundamentalist cult known as The Family that has its hands up more Washington asses than a cross between Vishnu and Jack Abramoff. So in his capacity as a deacon and a gynecologist (or at least, claiming those capacities in order to claim privileged information), Senator Tom Coburn recommended a 1.2 million dollar payout to the Hampton family (wound up being less), and an illegal lobbying gig for the cuckolded husband.

That's what we already knew. What has become clear since the report by the Senate Ethics Committee is that Ensign tricked his parents into committing perjury on his behalf. It has also become clear that at least at first, his advances toward Cindy Hampton were unwanted. Ensign continued them anyway, pressing his leverage over her as her boss and as the man footing the bill for her kids' pricey education.

And this is where it's hard for me to continue, because when I describe this behavior I'm not quite sure whether I should be referring to it as sexual harassment or as rape.

We haven't come to expect a whole lot out of our politicians lately, and frankly we've come to expect far less from those with an R in front of their name. But this shit is beyond the pale. And there's an explanation for it. From Jeff Sharlet's reporting on the support system in place for John Ensign at the Family's C Street house:

David Coe, Doug Coe's son and heir apparent, calls himself simply a friend to men such as John Ensign, whom he guided through the coverup of his affair. I met the younger Coe when I lived for several weeks as a member of the Family. He's a surprising source of counsel, spiritual or otherwise. Attempting to explain what it means to be chosen for leadership like King David was -- or Mark Sanford, according to his own estimate -- he asked a young man who'd put himself, body and soul, under the Family's authority, "Let's say I hear you raped three little girls. What would I think of you?" The man guessed that Coe would probably think that he was a monster. "No," answered Coe, "I wouldn't." Why? Because, as a member of the Family, he's among what Family leaders refer to as the "new chosen." If you're chosen, the normal rules don't apply.

It was David Coe who rang Ensign's cell phone at the hotel room where he and Cindy were meeting for what would be the last time and said "I know what you're doing. Put your pants on and go home."

He wasn't calling because Ensign's pursuit of Cindy Hampton was an abuse of his power, both as her boss and as someone upon whom her family depended on for a great deal. He wasn't calling because it was high-octane hypocrisy. He was calling because as the future head of the elite fundamentalist movement and all its sinister clout, he really wanted his John Ensign project to yeild a "god-controlled" presidency.

The Family protects far worse men (and they're all men) than John Ensign on the global stage--indeed the anti-gay legislation written by their Ugandan protege David Bahati may any day now put the death penalty on the books for "aggravated homosexuality"-- but he's the high water mark for this side of the Atlantic, at least since the Nixon era.

Whether or not rape is an accurate descriptor for John Ensign's actions couldn't have mattered for his groomers. Their former pet "new chosen," Siad Barre used it as an interrogation tactic when he ruled Somalia. In all cases, their status as important people; "key men" in the struggle against socialists like Castro or FDR or Obama, exempts them from normal morality.

I've been involved in a lot of arguments on the Internet where the phrase "rape culture" has been invoked and I've at times been critical of the circumstances in which it's applied, but Jesus fucking Christ the fact that neither John Ensign nor his co-conspirator Tom Coburn are currently facing indictment for their actions is prima facie evidence of the persistence of rape culture.

As is the paternal bullshit of the Toronto cop who declared, before a group of law students, that if one wanted to avoid being raped, the best thing to do is not to dress like a slut.

Thus began the Slutwalks. First in Toronto, and in several cities since, including, on May 7, Boston. Thousands turned out dressed, well, however the fuck they felt like dressing.

Many carried signs that said things like "Sluts Say Yes," and "My Thong is Not an Invitation." There were a few unfortunate assholes dressed as pimps who told reporters that were there looking to get numbers, who mistook my glaring at them as wondering if they were hollering at me, and conveyed, crudely, that they were not.

Like they were ever going to get any of this even if they begged.

Taken after the event, but this is totally what I looked like at the time.

It was a rowdy, sexy, meaningful good time that ended in Boston Common (or at least the one in Boston did) with speeches. Here's the one that stuck out for me

There’s a word for all of this. And that word is bullshit. But there’s also a phrase for it: social license to operate. What that means is this: we know that a huge majority of rapes are perpetrated by a small minority of guys who do it again and again. You know why they’re able to rape an average of 6 times each? Because they have social license to operate. In other words: because we let them. Because as a society, we say “oh well, what did she expect would happen if she went back to his room? What did she expect would happen walking around by herself in that neighborhood? What did she expect would happen dressed like a slut?”

Jaclyn Friedman. Full transcript here

There's the key phrase. Social license to operate. John Ensign is not in jail. Tom Coburn is still in the Senate, and may have been granted immunity from prosecution. Because their cabal and our society has given them social license to operate.This is the defining feature of rape culture.

It's a sickness that crosses ideological lines. Whether or not the facts will show him to be guilty of rape, the angry reaction by many on the Left to the mere suggestion that something might be wrong with Julian Assange was appalling, as was Assange's dismissal of the accusations as being "just about a broken condom." Say even that in a comment on the Huffington Post and you're bound to get smeared. What, pray tell, makes Assange so credible that people will believe that the Swedish government collaborating with the CIA to take him down was a more likely proposition than the accusations leveled against him being true?

Privilege.

Who knows if the Senate holds anyone with a secret quite so felonious as John Ensign's. Being a United States Senator confers upon one a sense of privilege that's hard to properly describe. When you have the power to single-handedly cripple an economy by placing a hold on unemployment extensions over a beef regarding earmarks going to your state, you have the power to get away with a whole lot of shit. The Senate Ethics Committee is a small deterrent, but at least it represents a potential downside to foul play-- Indeed, without their investigation, Ensign would likely have wound up going unpunished, as the deceptions the Committee uncovered had previously fooled both the Justice Department and the Federal Election Commission. But if Tom Coburn goes unpunished, and if the new information made public by the Ethics Committee doesn't result in an indictment of John Ensign and possibly Senator Coburn, then there will be that much less to persuade a future John Ensign not to sexually harass his employee. Or to persuade a future Tom Coburn not to help his friend cover it up.

And it's bad enough in the United States Senate as it is.

PAX East: A Modest Success

2011-03-17T12:53:00.002-04:00

Editor's Note: There is much to say about the disaster in Japan, but as I'm still playing catch-up, I'll wait on that post and give an update on that thing I've been working on

I hope that next time [Team Respect] goes to a con, there are more of us to hit up the panels and hand out swag, because for as much fun as I had at PAX East, I do wish I'd gotten the chance to play some more videogames.

To that note, I did get the chance to demo the new Mortal Kombat, which was more fun than I've had playing a fighting game in a couple of years (and more fun than I've had playing a Mortal Kombat game since the franchise launched).

I also got to demo Twisted Pixel's The Gunstringer, which is truly fucking astounding. Using the Xbox Kinect, you control the story's hero, who just so happens to be a marionette! As you fight your way through the barren landscape, a narration plays that adapts to the action on screen. It is to puppet theater what Rez was to music.

None of this is to suggest that I regret the other purposes for which I attended PAX. As it stands, [TR] is garnering still more followers on Twitter, with a major spike since the con. We distributed pink wristbands with our twitter name and our URL, collected business cards from a fair number of developers. I was also approached by a teacher from my high school, who was interested in organizing an event there about ethics and hate speech and wanted to know if I'd be interested in giving a talk.

Considering that one of the long-term goals we had from the getgo was doing precisely that sort of thing, I'm pretty fucking psyched.

When we started out, we weren't quite sure what we could accomplish at PAX East with such little time to organize and so few resources. The bar we set for ourselves was thus: Make it absolutely fucking clear that at this con, in this city, the people who are interested in helping greatly outnumber the trolls.

The douchetrucks behind @teamrape managed to stage a "flashmob" consisting of between 15 and 18 people outside a nearby UNO's. They also managed to get us to give them handfulls of bracelets before we knew who they were, and get themselves kicked out of the Gender in Games panel. They've been at this for a couple of months longer than we have, and are followed by 60 people on twitter.

As of this writing, we've distributed around 2000 wristbands, are followed by 192 twitter users-- including the great and powerful @Themiscyra, who on Sunday became the first woman to take the stage for the final round of the Omegathon, and did so proudly displaying a [Team Respect] wristband-- and have made significant content with the press, the industry, and activists in the community. We also met with the brilliant minds at MIT's Gambit Lab, who in addition to their great work in gaming, created the Hate Speech Project as a reaction to the hostility surrounding the dickwolves debacle. It was put on display at the back of their booth at the expo hall.

A full report will follow over at the Team Respect blog, but in short: [TR] is WINNING. This started as a response to a specific mishap in the gaming community, but it won't end there.

As gamers, we're sick of merely saying "games aren't bad for you." Games are GOOD for you. They keep soldiers deployed in combat zones from wanting to kill themselves-- in fact the only behavior more effective in decreasing risk of suicide is 5 hours of daily exercise. They treat depression. They improve confidence and self-esteem, and channel positive energy. If you don't overindulge, they make you a more productive, more considerate, more helpful member of society. But the catch is, none of that shit works if you're an asshole, or are playing in a space that's dominated by assholes.

We can't sanitize the Internet or online gaming as a whole--nor do we want that power-- but from what we've learned at PAX, it's quite clear what our mission from here on out ought to be: To carve out a space where people can expect to be treated respectfully, and to encourage people to take that attitude out to the gaming community as a whole. To encourage others to lead by example and in so doing change the fucking world. The limits of what can be accomplished by our efforts have yet to be fully defined, but what we already know commands us to press forward.

Food Interlude

2011-03-05T15:06:00.000-05:00

For reasons I won't go into in this space, I've been unable to go home for the past month. There has, in short, been some bullshit, and to say any more would likely be a bad call.

I will say that I got to take my socialist health insurance for a spin, and was seen at the ER almost immediately without a co-pay, and was able to get prescription pain meds for three dollars a bottle.

Thanks, Mitt. Too bad for you the fact that I wasn't SOL may be the only thing keeping you from taking the nomination.

Anyway, I thought I'd do a recipe post, because they're always fun (for me at least) and it's been awhile.

Here's an idea I got from watching Iron Chef America. Things are served up in smaller portions than I'd normally concoct, because the judges need to eat their way through two five-course meals in the space of an hour.

Also contributing to this idea is the fact that I'm flat fucking broke.

For this, you need

1 clove garlic, minced, crushed, shredded, or whatever
1/4 teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes
1/2 teaspoon rosemary
salt (to taste)
1 egg
1 Russett potato
1/4-1/3 cup shredded cheese (I use cheddar, but take your pick)
butter to taste
2 tablespoons olive oil

First, bake the potato. I ought to be telling you to do this in an oven, but as part of the charm of this dish is that it can be had on the quick, so more often than not I wind up using the microwave. I cover the potato in a microwave-safe bowl and press the baked potato button, which winds up being between 5 and 10 minutes on full power depending on the size of the potato.

While it cooks, toss the olive oil in a frying pan, followed by the garlic, salt, red pepper, and rosemary. Throw some heat under it, and when it looks like the garlic is just on the edge of turning brown, crack the egg and fry it. I usually go over easy, but it is, of course, your call. When the egg is cooked to your liking, kill the heat, throw on the cheese, and cover. The potato should be done soon.

When the microwave goes ding, let stand for about a minute. Then, put the potato on a plate or bowl, split it down the middle, put as much butter on top as won't make you feel guilty, then put the egg and cheese on the potato and enjoy.

What's great about this is that it costs somewhere around a dollar to make, the ingredients are all bulk-purchasable and produced locally, and if you add a glass of orange juice, you've hit all the food groups save for one. Fry up some onions, peppers, and mushrooms before cooking the egg and you've hit the last one, but that, while tasty, would significantly add to prep time.

Tune in next time for some hot, hot ukulele action

[TR] Update and other thoughts

2011-02-17T17:44:00.001-05:00

Six days without a post is the norm for much of my time on this blog, to the extent that I still, STILL have not yet posted my 500th piece on this site. But it's a bit off from my recent posting habits, so let me assure you, I've still been banging my head on the brick wall that is the Internet, but it's been at a different part, and this time I've begun to see deeper cracks appear. Team Respect has been live for six days now, and as of right now we've racked up 92 twitter followers, an entry on the debacle "Pratfall of Penny Arcade" timeline, 25 forum members (who have collectively posted 93 times) and 37 likes on facebook.

To be fair, we haven't really been trying on facebook, because nobody we know has any finesse with it. My twitter chops have the likes of Melissa Harris-Perry and Harry Shearer tossing me @replies. My facebook chops have people in my circle of friends telling me "cool story, bro." If anyone were to offer advice or assistance, that would be killer.

-------------

Valentines Day came and went, but the discounted chocolate remains, as does the bottle of gin my Other of Primary Significance got me for what we refer to as "Hetero-normative Teenybopper Bullshit Day," which rates rather above the "teacher valentine" chocolates I got her and leaves me playing catch-up. It's Rogue Spirits Pink Spruce gin, and having sampled a fair number of juniper-wrought liquors, I have to say this is my favorite. The gin has been infused with spruce oil and seasoned in Oregon Pinot Noir barrels, which come in along with various citrus elements to strike the first chord. It middles with cucumber which continues to the tail end, where it's joined by the juniper and grains of paradise, a peppery spice famously employed in Sam Adams Summer Ale.

I've yet to use it in any mixed drinks, as it's delicious on its own or with ice, but I suspect that combining it with Lillet at martini proportions with a twist of lemon would yield agreeable results. I shall report back when I've tested this hypothesis. Enjoying it in any form you choose along with the lyrical stylings of Garfunkel and Oates comes with my unqualified endorsement

May we all be spared of our parties taking a turn for the douche.

Peace

Team Respect: A Grand Announcement

2011-02-11T19:49:00.002-05:00

Ever since I was three years old, I've played videogames. It started when I was three years old, and my father's Intellivision allowed for two controllers to control the same character in Advanced Dungeons and Dragons. My father maneuvered the crudely pixelated Ranger whilst I shot arrows. We played that Intellivision until it went bust.

Later, I was hospitalized for asthma. I was breathing out of a tube in the wall, and while my parents visited me, I was often alone. Luckily, they wheeled in a TV with a Nintendo Entertainment System. For sure, I'd rather have been breathing under my own power, but it made my time in the hospital less scary. It's that experience that would later lead me to support Child's Play, a charity that puts toys and games in children's hospitals, so that kids everywhere can feel a little less scared while they're healing.

The charity was the brainchild of Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik, best known as the creators of Penny Arcade. Their action helped redeem the gaming community in the eyes of society at large. Gone now are the frothy-mouthed rantings of Jack Thompson. Indeed, the narrative has flipped completely. Prominent researchers are now saying that games are good for you.

Their other great accomplishment is PAX, which is for many of us summed up in a word: home. Last year, it came to the East Coast for the first time, and I was in attendance. It was, in short, awesome. While many other conventions of its sort are commercial enterprises centered on hyping games and getting gamers to part with their money. Not true with PAX. PAX is a community of gamers who are there to play games with each other. And at that, it's one of the more inclusive spaces in the gaming community.

However, recent events have led many to feel less welcome. Here is a timeline of events. It's not the comic itself that has so many of us upset. It's the boorish response from the creators and their defenders that served to make reasonable critiques invisible. And encouraged some high-grade dickery, taken to the most extreme in those who have vowed to show up to the con wearing shirts that say "Team Rape." As a result, many people-- some of my friends included-- to no longer feel welcome at PAX. Which sucks, because PAX is truly special and everyone should have the ability to enjoy it.

We're better than this. I know because I've been there. I've seen people at PAX receive prizes worth hundreds of dollars only to immediately return them and request that they be put up for auction to benefit Child's Play. There is a culture in PAX-- and in gaming at large-- that is conducive to being changed for the better by the existence of good examples.

It is with this in mind that some friends of mine and I have founded Team Respect.

We're not quite sure what our long-term plans are. As of right now, we're encouraging those in the gaming community who don't like to hear it when their fellow gamers are inconsiderate of others, whether it be defiantly pledging be assholes to abuse survivors, or using "faggot" as a generic insult to stand up and declaim it. To say that we, as gamers-- as human beings-- won't stand for this.

And after that? Who knows? But right now, we're making a hard push to get the word out ahead of the convention on March 11th, and I'd ask everyone who reads this to pass it along to the gamers in their lives. It's time to take our culture back.

Convince one mind at a time to cleave to the spirit of Wheaton's Law, which is to say, "Don't be a dick."

Wherein I Pat Myself Vigorously on the Back.

2011-02-07T17:12:00.005-05:00

AOL has apparently recognized once and for all that its news division, if anyone ever called it that, hasn't really caught on. As such, it has acquired the Huffington Post.

While I'm going to be necessarily skeptical of any corporatization of a once-independent news outlet, I'm glad that the Huffington Post is going to have access to new resources, and by integrating AOL's content with the Huffington Post, it's going to fill major gaps in coverage. If this winds up making it possible to expand the Huffington Post Investigative Fund, I'm all for it. Arianna has said that this will do nothing to change editorial standards at HuffPo (though I would hope that the editorial standards of the media universe that she now helms will increase across the board). For now, I believe her, but I hope we all keep watch. If all is as advertised, this will be a game changer of epic proportions.

Reading Howard Fineman's column on the matter reminded me of something from five years ago.

Here's what Howard had to say:

My best teacher at Columbia was a man with a sly grin, a razor wit and a gift for Delphic utterances. He told us that journalism had one mission and one method: "to go there."
I thought of that epigram - simple, but profound - when I learned what The Huffington Post and AOL were about to do. Now, with more depth and breadth than ever, we will be able to "go there," connecting people to information, ideas, events - and to each other.
The possibilities are exciting, the responsibilities challenging.
...
In one sense, however, everything has changed. These days, my teacher's mission statement applies not just to journalists, but also to us all. EVERYONE is a journalist, or can be. Technology gives us all the ability - digitally - to "go there": to Tahrir Square, to the talk of Cairo streets, to diplomatic cables, to live feeds.
If the 21st century is about "self-determination" - and I think it is - then we all need to be actively informed and engaged. Journalism has become an interactive, communal exercise in self-education.
In that sense, the entire Huffington Post/AOL community is and will be a continuous, individualized and yet planetary exercise in "going there."
And that now is often less about geography in the physical world than navigation - a sea-faring term adapted for our time - in the digital one. "Going there" now means to the virtual world, too.
...
When I succeed in doing anything worthwhile, it invariably was when I picked up the phone to make one last call, or read another document, or went to the Hill or the White House instead of calling, or got on a plane to get outside the Beltway, or drove across Des Moines or Little Rock or Austin for one more interview.
Today it's one more web site or tweet or video clip or email. But I'm still going there. You're welcome to come with me.

Take a look at the bolded part. Now, take a look at this post of mine, from 2005, in response to a since-overturned ruling by a California judge that protections guaranteed to journalists don't apply to bloggers.

A few years ago I stumbled upon a shiny, sexy device. [It was]of slightly lesser dimensions that a sheet of letter-sized paper, and about an inch thick. it opened like a book to reveal two LCD screens, one on either side.

The applications of such a device are obvious. However, what was missing at the time was a means of delivering the data. Today, we have WiFi.

So we have the display device, and the delivery system. All that remains is the implementation, and that is fast approaching. Seatle is in the process of being completely WiFi-ed, and other cities will follow. Wifi is the thing that will render actual, physical newspapers, books, and magazines to be permanently obselete.

Imagine you're having luch with a freind at a restaurant, and he mentions a book he's reading in casual conversation. You get the idea that this is the sort of book that you might like to read, so ... pull out your E-Book reader and ask your friend to repeat the title of the book. You're charged a nominal fee, significantly less than that of an actual paperback or hardcover becuase the publisher no longer needs to pay the fabulous price of printing and distribution.

So now you're reading this book. Depending on how well the writer or publisher is making use of the technology, you may be able to say, tap your finger on a word you don't understand, and have the definition pop up, not just the dictionary definition, but what the word means in context. Also, if it makes reference to a book that you think you might like, all you need to do is go to the bibliography, and follow a link to it. It will do to books what DVD technology did to film.

in terms of online news and magazines, the improvements are dramatic. You now have access to news the very moment it's submitted. Perhaps you even programmed your reader to alert you to new developments in a news story, or breaking news. Maybe you find yourself on the scene. You can use this same device to blog what you see... Maybe you were the first to submit about it.
...

And, to come full circle back to my original point, [this development would] blur the line between blogging and journalism to the point at which defining either as being separate from the other simply won't be worth the bother.

Holy shit, right? I posted that entry on March 3rd, 2005. I was about to turn 19. Huffington Post had been around for less than a month. Facebook had been around for a year, and had yet to expand beyond colleges. Twitter wouldn't be around for another year. The tablet craze was four years away. AOL was attempting to create a social network that extended beyond its instant messaging service and failing hardcore, but part of the attempt was AOL news, which will now fall under Huffington's purview.

There's a reason why I shat on the iPad when it came out. I already knew that what it represented was inevitable, and didn't want Apple to get it's filthy hands on my future. I agree with Howard. The 21st Century is about self-determination. As such, we need to support open systems and let everything else fall under its own weight. This new development is crucial: There is now a worldwide news organization with a scope just as broad as any in print or television whose sole method of distribution is the Internet. It is now an organization worthy of being seen as a peer with CNN, the New York Times, or Newsweek (whose recent acquisition by The Daily Beast is now dwarfed by this news). The new Huffpost Media will be the first entity of its kind to be wholly born of the Internet Age, and speaking as a futurist, that's a welcome sign.

The only part of my vision that hasn't caught on is universal WiFi, which was going to be a part of the Obama administration's National Broadband Plan, but got scrapped in part because the coverage would have only been equivalent to that of a DSL line, and it was decided that there were better ways to expand access. My response would have been to kick it up a notch, but the expense is likely prohibitive. As such, we're going to need to do this from the ground up, municipality by municipality, until the model has proven itself workable enough to expand to a national model. The upcoming merger between NBC and Comcast makes such effort all the more important. It's achievable, and if done correctly, it'll put people to work.

But for today, I wonder if any of my other predictions are going to turn out right. Stay tuned folks. Keith Olbermann is announcing a new venture tomorrow.

I'm going to be announcing a new project too, though when exactly I can't say for certain, other than "soon."

A lighter note.

2011-02-04T04:28:00.003-05:00

The great and wonderful Pia Savage has posted her second Psychology Today piece. In it, she describes her first panic attack, which took place during notebook inspection day in the second grade.

As someone to whom notes were superfluous and taking them was like trying to throw with my off hand, I personally appreciate her sharing her own experience.

I'm going to go ahead and assume that if anyone reading this doesn't already know what's going on in Egypt right now, they can damn well find out on their own and I don't need to speak on it with an unearned air of authority.

I will say this. During the day while I was taking a break from rather dusty housework, I was glued to twitter. among the tweets about the clashes between protesters and brownshirts, something hilarious happened.

The National Organization for Marriage linked this cartoon from Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal on their blog.

Naturally, they didn't get the joke. For thinking people, culture shock is a source of humor and/or discomfort. For Defenders of Marriage, it's evidence that something is well and truly wrong with the Universe.

SMBC is authored by Zach Weiner, who in addition to having a surname uncannily appropriate for the brand of humor that he has elevated near to the level of High Art, is about the last person who is going to let you get away with subverting his work to fit your message of hate. The thing about hotlinks is that you only control the name of the file that they display. Usually, that's enough. However...

For me it was a welcome break from hearing about how Anderson Cooper, Katie Couric, Brian Williams, Richard Engel, Nicholas Kristoff, and all of the other reporters out there whose names I can't immediately bring to mind but who are no less worthy of mention are in real danger. Some have said that the attention they've gotten is a distraction, but I disagree.

I warrant that there's a danger of people from the West focusing their sympathies on the people who look like them who came late to the nightmare rather than the people who have lived their whole lives under the conditions that created this crisis, but that's not the only force at work These are the people we invite into our homes every day to get a better understanding of how the world is working. In the United States, their efforts are routine; expected. In Cairo, during this time of crisis, it gives some cause to threaten their lives. If we think only of the faces we know, then we indeed have missed the point.

I am infinitely grateful both for the reporters who shine a light on the darkest moments of human history, and the smart, funny people who make those dark moments easier to bear. Double points for each if they can manage to stand up for the powerless while doing so.

I would be remiss if I didn't call your attention to this man

2011-02-02T23:20:00.003-05:00

Editor's note: this post was originally intended to contain only one sentence about the situation in Cairo, but it got away from me. If you're looking for content that better fits the title of this post, skip down to the bottom.

I've been almost completely unable to divert my attention from coverage of the protests in Tahrir Square in Cairo. I just got through watching a group of anti-government protesters rip a man who seems to have been a pro-Mubarak provocateur from his truck and beat him. They attempted to dismantle it for the scrap metal, which was all too important earlier in the day when whatever chunks of metal were available were used as improvized tower sheilds, linked together like the Roman legion, in order to drive back the thugs hired by the ruling party to transmute what was originally a non-violent protest into a violent one.

over 750 people were injured in a battle that has been described by witnesses as "medieval" At least four were killed. The morning call to prayer has been drowned out by gunfire.

Journalists and Westerners have been especially targeted by the pro-Mubarak thugs, with Anderson Cooper and his crew-- to give only one example-- having been attacked when they tried to get a better vantage point.

The work of the People has become this: hold the square at all costs, even unto death. They have been going home in shifts for food and supplies, and have taken responsibility for securing the perimeter, which had previously been the Army's task. Tanks have laid down smokescreens hoping to interfere with the ability of both sides to hit each other with stones and petrol bombs, and giving cover so that anyone wishing to leave unharmed was given the opportunity to do so.

This isn't the post I set out to write, so I'm going to leave it at this: Our brothers and sisters in Egypt started this movement out of a yearning for democracy, but now they are in this fight for their lives. The ruling party is out for their blood, and if they remain in power when all is said and done, there is no reason to believe that they'll put this shit behind them, if past is prologue. Those of us watching this revolution from the comfort in our homes have an obligation to not be idiots about it when we talk about Egypt. The reporting of Al Jazeera as well as this brilliant post at Sarthanpalos--which I urge everyone to read-- have been invaluable resources toward this aim.

Ahem.

Now for something a bit closer to home, and indeed closer to having anything to do with the title of this post. This is Zach Wahls, a college student and fellow Eagle Scout, speaking at the Iowa State House-- where a Constitutional amendment banning gay marriage is being considered-- in defense of his two moms.

Preach it, Zach

2011-02-01T03:33:00.008-05:00

Al Jazeera English: Live Stream
- Watch more Videos at Vodpod.

The final Egyptian broadband ISP has been disconnected. While some are still getting some access through a Google workaround that allows Egyptians to tweet from their phones and Free World Dial-up (33172890150, username and password are both "toto." This information is of course utterly useless to anyone who can read it), most are unplugged.

For the people of Egypt, this amounts to a boot on the face of freedom of expression. Over here, it's a ray of hope that we may yet hear the end of insipid "news" stories about how Twitter is single-handeldly bringing democracy to the brown people.

Social media may have played a role in organizing early protests, but the solipsistic focus on the impact of an American invention on the movement was pathetic during the failed Green Revolution in Iran and it's pathetic now. Clearly it's been an important tool, but probably not more than the signs carried at marches or the loudspeakers dispersed about the crowd. That shutting down the Internet served to focus the demonstrations on Tahrir Square (a single central location being the best way to manage them without net access) should kill that narrative, but I'm not optimistic.

Of course, it ought to be said that without social media, the rest of the world wouldn't know about it, and there would be far less pressure, for instance, on President Obama to support the uprising. But the rest of the world doesn't go away when we have our eyes closed.

Here's my contribution to the second draft of history, now that we've gone and fucked up the first one:

The movement took to the Internet, with a frenzy of activity on social media, striking terror into the heart of the Mubarak regime. Acting in a panic, the government shut down the entire Egyptian Internet, which only served to strengthen the protesters' resolve.

See that? That's how you write about the impact of social media in human history without losing the bigger picture. Free of charge, motherfuckers.

Seriously though, the United States have been elbow deep in the Middle East for more than fifty years now. How is Al Jazeera English not one of the five hundred channels on cable? You know, the news organization that the White House is using to monitor the situation in Egypt?

The wires that carry TV signals to our homes are the same ones that carry the Internet. They can go anywhere and everywhere, and yet we let the corporate hive mind decide what's on. Today what that means is that the world is changing and most people in this country are finding out fourth-hand. Tomorrow, the Egyptian people are going to take another step towards controlling their representation on the world stage, and Americans don't even have the vague, theme park-ish concept of Cairo that they have of Paris.

In this country, access to information is considered to be a basic human right, and foreign heads of state have called us "Information Imperialists" for it. In Egypt, the Internet has been killed with a flip of the switch.

You know what I'm going to say here. Do me a favor and pretend I said it in a way that didn't sound like your mom talking about starving kids in Somalia when you wouldn't finish your vegetables.

Practical Magic

2011-01-28T18:58:00.004-05:00

Found a pretty neat blog called Paleofuture. It's a fairly extensive log of past predictions of the future. Including what the Thomas Edison Park thought the world would look like in 2011. My favorite prediction is that we'd be able to carry entire libraries in our pockets-- printed on wafer-thin leafs of nickel. As is true of his entire professional life, these predictions are brilliant forward thinking with some key flaws. The man who failed to predict that the phonograph would be used to listen to music (and despite the contemporaneous popularity of the player piano) was, in fact, mortal. And yet, what he created (or took credit for creating) was so new and wonderous that nonetheless he was dubbed the Wizard of Menlo Park; a Merlin of his own time.

I've been reading through Terry Pratchett's Discworld series, and it's had me thinking about what the word "magic" means in the real world. In the series, economics is referred to as "the reflected sound of underground spirits," and much of practical witchcraft relies on herbalism and what is known as "Headology," or the practical effects that a known practitioner of magic can acheive without uttering a spell when amongst non-magic users. Witches and wizards do, in fact, posess "real" magic, but that's because the Discworld is a world where magic is a real, physical force. But the word "magic" is still idiomatically used to describe, well, the sort of things that involve the same kind of deception as a conjurer's act, or the same kind of dexterity and creativity that Harry Houdini became famous for. It differs from superstition only in that it actually works.

Arther C Clarke said that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, and I think it extends further than that. In earlier times the shaman would take you in to their yoda-style living spaces and serve you a strange tea that would send you into a different state of consciousness and it was magic. Today the active chemicals are crystalized and used for the same effect and it's called pharmacology.

The difference? Science is an open process. Magic is cloaked in mystery, whether by coercion or lack of deeper understanding. It consists of disguised invention as well as manipulation of forces that one cannot adequately explain. The economically measurable impact of an extension of unemployment benefits is science. The known predictive nature of an original NFL team winning the Super Bowl is magic. The known impact of antibiotics on a bacterial infection is science. The known impact of antibiotics on a viral infection is magic (As is the similar effect of a sugar pill, but in the case of antibiotics, the consequences of antibiotic overuse make it dark magic).

The fields of economics, diplomacy, medicine, psychology, political science, artwork, music, drama, comedy and sex, among others, are mixed practices.

Home field advantage was magic until it was discovered that while its measurable impact didn't vary based on era or distance of travel or method of travel, it did vary based on the distance of the crowd from the officials. Another clue dropped when the Seattle Seahawks-- whose fans were outnumbered to the tune of an away game in Super Bowl XL-- got fucked over by the refs. As it turns out, while the impact of the crowd on the players may anecdotally be a psychological boost for the home team, it's far more evident that the officials are more likely to swallow their whistles when the home team is doing its thing. They don't want to be seen as deciding the outcome, and by their inaction, they influence the outcome.

It's also important to note the significance of the word "witchcraft," as the meaning of the word has a similar twang. When you examine the context of its usage in history, from the Dark Ages to Salem to Pat Robertson declaring feminism to be "a socialist, anti-family, political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians," to the signs featuring President Obama as a witch doctor. the meaning that emerges is "women with ideas above their station." Merlin was the picture of wisdom in the Arthurian legends, but a woman who practiced the same arts as he (and indeed, as those of that era who were styled as "wizards" historically) did was assumed to be up to no good. Come the age of Christianity, it all was verboten by an authority that wanted a monopoly on spiritual healing.

I've been thinking about this quite a bit in the past couple of days, because despite the fact we're at 9.4% unemployment that a solid State of the Union address does not statistically increase the political capital of the President delivering it, and despite the fact that the party that has any ideas that can statistically increase the number of jobs in this country has less power than it did two years ago, the 91% of respondents who agreed with the President's policy proposals have me feeling bullish about the coming year.

Because among many other things, that dude is magic.

Overdue notes

2011-01-25T18:31:00.005-05:00

As has been noted elsewhere, my good friend Pia Savage is now a writer for Psychology Today. Her first piece is here, and it comes with my recommendation. Ms. Savage is welcome to test how much money one must add to that to pay for a cup of coffee.

What's remarkable about Pia's case is that despite having been raised in a family with the means to pay for mental health issues, it was only very recently that she had a diagnosis to go with her problems. A sign of the times, sure, but while medical world has made leaps and bounds in understanding mental health, how have the rest of us been doing?

This is the point in the post where I make an uncomfortable logical step between someone I love and respect and a deranged madman. Please mind the handrails.

Four years ago I had this to say about the response by some to the classification of Virginia Tech shooter Seung-Hui Cho as a victim. Or even, more mildly, as someone who fell through the cracks. These days I don't listen to talk radio even by accident, so I don't know how similar remarks about Jared Loughner have been taken, but I've gotten the general sense that the loudmouth morons haven't been pushing back on the mental illness angle this time around, save with the facile supposition that mental illness is in and of itself an explanation for violence. It pretty evidently isn't.

Clearly we need to do better by our more vulnerable citizens, including the mentally infirm, but unless we're aggressive in dismantling outdated notions and misconceptions regarding mental health, those efforts are in danger of taking the shape of "how can we protect ourselves from the mentally ill" rather than "how can we, as a nation, become more mentally healthy?"

The political climate that many-- myself included-- have claimed made the Tuscon shooting more likely may have a silver lining. The pushback against any sense of responsibility amongst political figures for the potential impact of their political rhetoric has satisfied the Right's need for knee-jerk bloodlust, and in an attempt to cover their own asses, have admitted that we have a mental health problem in this country.

That's a first step. Pia is now helping us out with the second: understanding that the nature of that problem doesn't solely extend to the lack of support structure for the mentally ill. Our society as a whole needs to change its attitude, and stop treating mental health as the concern for "other" people.

Bravo, Pia..

For tonight:

There have been many guides circulating on the Interwebs suggesting State of the Union drinking game rules. My construction is rather simple: Drink once on every fifth applause line, twice on every use of rhetorical balancers (eg "keep employment high and taxes low"), twice on every metaphorical use of the word "call," and drink thrice if anyone heckles. Rules can be added mid-speech provided that a consensus exists. Each player has ten exemptions, and the last person to run out of them (or run out of coordination or consciousness) wins.

For this speech in particular, drain your cup when Obama says the word "Sputnik"

A note here: When I say "drink," I don't mean, "take a shot." There were over a hundred applause lines last SotU, and I'm inclined to believe that this one will have more. Keep that in mind when altering this framework for your own purposes, and when deciding what it is you're going to fill your cup with.

Also, I hope the Disqus comment boards work for everyone. It scored over other options, including the default blogger, in that it integrated well with my template, it allows for non-Google registered commenters, and that it didn't charge me to set it up.

Enjoy

Good Night and Good Luck

2011-01-22T16:08:00.003-05:00

About midway through the evening last night I realized that it was a Fuck You Friday. This morning I thought differently about it. It was still a Fuck You Friday, but one differently intoned.

Midway into his show on Friday, Keith Olbermann was informed that that edition of Countdown would be his last. The agreement to end the show had been more or less finalized late in the week, but for when his last show would be. Clearly, MSNBC didn't want to give him time to prepare a last show. He even had to carve out Fridays with Thurber in order to say goodbye.

I know not everyone who reads this is a fan, but I'm still smarting a little bit. Keith's been on the air for eight years, which is as long as I've had this blog. I've been watching him for 5, and he helped me cope with some dark times, both in our history and for me personally. He also introduced me to Rachel Maddow, who has been a similar influence to me.

Jonathan Turley, a Georgetown professor of Constitutional Law, and himself a big thinker, had this to say:

I have known and worked with Keith since the 1990s and his first news show, The Big Show with Keith Olbermann. He has held a number of positions on different networks — all with equal success. The public has always connected with Keith’s wit and sometimes wacky style. He is one of the smartest individuals I have ever known. He also genuinely cared about the issues addressed on his show.

...

Those characteristics that are so central to his success with viewers often led to conflicts with his respective networks. He is the ultimate lone wolf in an industry known for its pack mentality.

There are certain classics in American culture. They include the 67 Mustang, Wrigley Field, and every John Wayne film. For many news junkies, they also include Keith Olbermann. Intense, irreverent and insightful, Keith is unique. For that reason, his fans and friends will not allow him to be gone from the airways for long.

I see Keith as sort of a Bob Dylan of anchormen. Between his reading of Thurber and his opening music is style is firmly rooted in the forties and the golden age of television. It has the familiar feeling of Edward R. Murrow and Peter Jennings, but less dry. What he does with it is unique; the first of its kind.. The Bush era created a need, and he filled it. When he threw off the veneer of objectivity with his first special comment about Rumsfield and the Bush administration's response to critics of the Iraq War it was like Dylan going to Newport with Al Kooper, the Butterfield Blues Band and a Stratocaster. Many thought it was a betrayal, but it was more honest. More appropriate for the time.

Like Dylan, he's brilliant, but occasionally goes off in a direction that doesn't quite make sense. Despite that, he kept a good number of people sane during a dark time.

In this metaphor, Rachel Maddow, Lawrence O Donnell, Chris Hayes, Melissa Harris-Perry, and Ezra Klein are sort of like The Band. Each of them was already talented, and in ways that go beyond Keith's strengths, and he gave them all a stage that raised their profile and made them shine.

MSNBC says that his departure has nothing to do with the merger with Comcast, and I think that they're being honest, but they're wrong. The corporate culture that led the people in charge to even think for a moment that it was acceptable to sell a news network to Comcast is the same one that causes friction with Keith.

There has been a lot of wild speculation on Twitter about where he should go next. What follows is an open letter to Keith Olbermann.

Keith, you've got millions, and you likely have been barred from TV for two years. Want to deliver a final Fuck You to the sell-outs at 30 Rock? It's time to break another old rule and put your money in the show.

Get some investors together (maybe team up with Howard Dean) and buy The Nation, and with Chris Hayes still acting as political director, expand it into web video. It would be stupidly inexpensive to put Countdown on the net. Three Cannon 7Ds, some lights, some servers, Cisco Telepresence, and a desk would just about do it.. That shit I described? Under forty grand plus $25 per month per Telepresence unit. In cable, you need the access to infrastructure to support 61.6 million viewers in order to service a million viewers. On the Internet, you only need the servers to be able to support a million (but you'd have enough to support 2 million).

I've been thinking about those logistics for some time and I'm utterly surprised that it hasn't happened yet. With Google TV just around the corner, the time for the Internet to take over the visiual media has come. Now is the time to push your chips to the center.

Offer contracts to Sam Seder, David Shuster, Dave Weigel, Ezra Klein, Chris Cilliza, David Wolffe and Ana Marie Cox (me too plz) and establish a fund for investigative journalism with Seymour Hirsch at the head. Maybe try and poach Rachel and Lawrence, but they'd probably stay where they are (as would, doubtlessly, a number of the people I just mentioned). Be a mogul.

If there's one thing you and Rachel have shown me, it's that it's time to get into the game. Whether or not the Comcast takeover had anything to do with you splitting with MSNBC, it serves as a reminder that the future of journalism is walking on a razor's edge. Many said that you were partly responsible, but they were wrong and it's time for you to prove it. You have the opportunity to make it a tightrope walk.

And just as an added bonus, MSNBC would have to pay your company in order to get your people on its shows. And if you made the move, the cable networks would put your face on the air, embargo or no embargo, end there'd be nothing MSNBC could do about it.

Not for nothing though, if Obama offers you the press secretary job, just forget everything I said and take it.

Blogging for Choice: 38 Years Later

2011-01-21T13:41:00.002-05:00

Tomorrow marks the 38th anniversary of Roe v Wade, the landmark Supreme Court decision that held that all women have the right to an abortion, provided that the fetus isn't viable outside the womb.

It wasn't the end of the fight. It was the beginning. Thirty eight years later, we're somewhere in the middle.

Despite that crucial guarantee of a right to sovereignty over one's own body, notification laws, limited access, a lack of facilities, and the failure to enforce laws designed to protect the practitioners of abortion from threats and intimidation have deigned to pull those rights out from under those to whom they were guaranteed.

In many ways, the entirety of the struggle can be illustrated by the life of one doctor. George Tiller didn't set out to become an abortion provider. He graduated from Kansas School of Medicine in 1967. He went on to hold a medical internship with the US Navy, serving his country as a flight surgeon. Upon leaving the Navy, he had intended to become a dermatologist. That same year, tragedy struck his family. His sister died in a plane crash, along with his parents and his brother-in-law. He found himself responsible for both his sister's child and his father's family medical practice, which local women sometimes relied upon for abortions. He changed his mind about closing the facility when he learned of a woman who died of complications resulting from an illegal abortion.

From then on, George Tiller found himself in the cross-hairs of a dedicated, relentless, hateful movement deadset on stopping abortions by any means necessary. For those who believe that violent political rhetoric doesn't lead to violence, I need only say the name Operation Rescue. The rabid picketers, the wanted posters with his picture, the speech by Congressman Robert K Dorman on the floor of the House where he was referred to as "Tiller the Baby Killer"... I defy anyone to say with a straight face that they had nothing to do with the fact that in 1986 his clinic was firebombed. That in 1993 he was shot five times while sitting in his car. Or that last year he was shot through the eye while serving as an usher at his church.

Even gang bangers respect a Sunday morning.

That is the epitome what it means to stand up for a woman's right to choose. To persevere knowing that people want you dead. To contend alike with misguided protesters and those who fall directly within the realm and sphere of domestic terrorism, and never knowing for sure which are which. After the firebombing, Tiller posted a sign outside his clinic that read "hell no, we won't go." as it was being rebuilt. After he was shot the first time, he went right back to work as soon as he could. He was well aware what he was doing. He was laying his life before women in need because nobody else would do the work. In the midst of all manner of heated rhetoric surrounding the abortion debate, his message was simple.

And Tiller wasn't the only one. Only the most notable.

Today, even after progressives were forced to make a sadistic choice between a woman's right to choose and a step towards universal healthcare, and managed to find a third way around it, the House of Representatives has decided to go after abortion rights.

It never ends.

It never. fucking. ends.

And so we can't stop either. Not until there isn't a single woman in America who needs to carry a pregnancy to term if she doesn't want to. Not until there isn't a single pharmacy that refuses to dispense contraception-- to anyone. Not until there isn't a single hospital that will turn away a rape victim seeking EC.

Roe v Wade, as strange as it may seem, wasn't just about women's rights. The abortion debate as a whole isn't just about women's rights, though obviously that's what's most important. Roe v Wade was the first blow struck for an idea whose time still hasn't fully come. The notion that every one of us has the right to sovereignty over our own bodies, no matter what that means. There is a bright line that can be drawn between Roe v Wade and Lawrence v Texas. Who knows? Maybe one day that same principle will put this senseless, regressive, destructive War on Drugs to an end once and for all. One day soon it will grant us the right to marry whomever we wish.

The moral arc of the Universe is long, and it bends towards Justice.

But we have to bend it.

Assange, Liberals and the Reality-Based Community

2011-01-20T13:28:00.008-05:00

I had this post in the can when Tuscon happened, and decided not to put it up at the time. If I'd written all of it today, the focus would be less on Julian Assange, but here we are.

Julian Assange is not a terrorist.

Let's just get that out of the way. While we're at it, he's also not somebody who we should be trying to lock up in prison as a spy, because he would love nothing better. He's not a journalist either.

Most importantly, he's not a hero.

Incidentally, nobody should be surprised by this. There may be real heroes in the world, but they are vanishingly few. And we progressives are used to being led by false ones.

There is no math that will tell you that a 2000 Presidential election without Ralph Nader would have produced a President Bush. Not only did he campaign aggressively in pivotal states, he spread the obscene lie that there was no significant difference between Bush and Gore. Four years later he has the chutzpah to claim that the significant amount of donor cash he was collecting from Republicans had nothing to do with this. Lately he's been a guttersnipe, who has unrepentantly referred to Obama as an Uncle Tom. which puts into perspective his 1996 refusal to come out against the referendum in California on ending affirmative action

This is the same man who founded PIRG, which in addition to its invaluable advocacy work employed yours truly for... part... of a summer in '04. If it weren't for Ralph Nader, I would never have been invited into the home of a mostly-dressed middle aged beatnik couple from Wilmington, MA-- who had clearly been fucking when the doorbell rang-- to discuss energy efficiency standards. It was one of the few days I exceeded my donation quota.

I'm sorry, I got lost there for a moment.

The impact of Ralph Nader's life's work is unquestionable. Imagine, for a moment, how different your life would be today if cars weren't required to have seatbelts. It's hard to even contemplate. But as was said by Harvey Dent in that crowning political work of our time, Batman, the Dark Knight: You either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.

Some of our country's worst moments are--and mind you not without accomplices-- causally linked to the fact that so many progressives mistook 2000 Ralph Nader for a hero. We ought to know better by now.

Of course, you probably don't actually support Julian Assange's politics, because he's an anarchist. He believes that government secrecy in and of itself bespeaks an authoritarian conspiracy. Apparently this includes not wanting Russian diplomats to know that our diplomats see Vladimir Putin and Dimitri Medvedev as a kleptocratic Batman and Robin.

Assange isn't doing what he's doing so that you know what your government is up to and are informed as a voter. He's doing what he's doing so that people who work in governments no longer trust each other, and become ineffectual to the point of international diplomacy crumbling and governments falling under their own weight. He sees the world as a series of nails, and himself as the wielder of a hammer that would make John Boehner blush, if bronzefolk are capable of blushing.

Julian Assange is also, apparently, a Rorschach test. Conservatives have been waiting for some time for an intellectual they could pound their fists about and call a terrorist. Speaking of which, I'd like to take this time to thank Joe Liebermann for his invaluable support in getting DADT repeal over the goal line, and declare "good riddance" re: the entire rest of his career. He and others have pounded their fists on the table and called for, among other things, Assange's assassination. Because what we really need are more people gathering under Assange's banner.

In any case, the response from conservatives is easily predictable. The last two years in conservative commentary and politics have consisted of lies, damned lies, and a total lack of statistics. But what of the so-called "reality-based community" that we Progressives participate in? Why are so many on the left demanding that Julian Assange be thought of as something that he's not? They say he's for transparency, and if that were true, there wouldn't be an entire Wikileaks splinter group that split off precisely because he isn't. They say that the accusations of sexual assault in Sweden are trumped up, but if that were true, wouldn't he have something more to say about it than "this is all just about a broken condom," which couldn't be true, as that would imply that he was only being accused by one woman.

The extent to which Assange's defenders in the United States have dismissively parroted the phrase "sex by surprise" and the distortion about the condom without once considering that maybe-- just maybe-- his accusers are telling the truth is appalling. Instead of taking a step back when the police report was leaked, many criticized the Guardian for running it.

This break with reality doesn't stop there. Many prominent progressives lost their shit when Obama administration officials touted the bill that extended the Bush tax cuts as a second stimulus. They said that Obama had swallowed the trickle-down economics Kool-Aid, despite the fact that the compromises exacted from Republicans in the Senate have proven stimulative effects. The mantra that tax cuts don't create jobs was more important than the truth. Similarly, Keith Olbermann and Arianna Huffington recently decried the Obama administration's announcement of a year-long study of government regulations with an eye towards simplifying some and cutting others. They said he'd swallowed the Tea Party Kool-Aid that regulation kills jobs, and in so doing, at least Arianna seemed to imply that regulation could never kill jobs.

I was put off by it at the time, despite being a huge fan of Keith's. (Arianna Huffington has never impressed me, and I think it's telling that her first foray into politics was to call for Bill Clinton to resign over the Lewinsky scandal), but the next day, the CBS Evening News ran with this:

(Available also in HTML flavor)

Redundancy is great for computer systems, networks, and point defense, but it's rubbish for rulewriting.

Does this suggest that there's something to it every time a Republican goes to the House or Senate floor and decries the newest Democratic bill as being 'just more burdensome, job-killing regulation'? Of course not. For some time now, Republican politicians have come to town claiming to want to overhaul regulation, and then wind up only focusing on the good ones. Are we really going to get outraged because Obama might suggest that frozen cheese pizzas and frozen pepperoni pizzas be regulated by the same fucking agency? Did he not thoroughly demonstrate, in the fights for both Healthcare and Wall Street reform, that he believes that regulation done right is a good thing? Are we so pissed off that he didn't tilt at windmills over the Public Option that we take every chance to say that he's just the same as the other guys?

We have said that it's time for our political discourse to change. This is undeniable. But we'd be fools to only focus on the intensity of partisan rhetoric. I call on anyone of any political inclination about to write a column or a blog post, or appear on cable news to do their research first. If you can support your argument, declaim it with passion but with restraint. If you can't, say something else. It's time for us all to stop being salesmen and start being teachers.

A brief, terrifying thought

2011-01-16T23:49:00.004-05:00

So, for this past week I've been trying to think past what could have stopped the Tuscon shooting, because we don't get another shot at that one. There's something that bothers me quite a bit.

In 2009, Senator John Thune sponsored an amendment to the defense appropriations bill that would have made it legal for any person permitted to carry a concealed weapon in any state to carry one in every state. In states with less permissive gun laws, residents would have had fewer rights than out-of-state visitors from states with more permissive gun laws. And from everything I can tell, under that legislation, Jared Loughner would have been permitted to carry concealed in New York City. It failed by two votes.

Yeah, it's really kind of remarkable where the states rights conservatives stand where the chips are down.

We may be able to ban thirty-round extended magazines (not likely), but this shit isn't going away. Republicans control the House, and they picked up more than two votes in the Senate. And while you and I may be shocked by the sheer gall of the gun lobby here, what they're looking to replace is only more sensible by a hair. Massachusetts, for instance, more or less reserves CCW for people who need handguns to do their jobs and people who are receiving death threats. If CCW reciprocity between the states were based on compatibility of standards, a permit holder from Massachusetts would be able to carry a concealed weapon in most states. But because recognition is based on reciprocity agreements, in many cases, the less restrictive state's left with a choice between, for instance, Massachusetts citizens having fewer rights in Massachusetts than those visiting from other states, and Massachusetts citizens having fewer rights in other states. It's usually a no-brainer. But if someone's life is being threatened in Massachusetts, and there's an actual threat of danger, It's naive to think that the threat would disappear when they go to another state.

Here's an interactive infographic-map that explains how CCW reciprocity works. It may not be not be a particular priority of yours or mine, but whatever you think about gun control, it's against the spirit of the Fourteenth Amendment, which means that even the most moderate gun rights advocates aren't going to stop wanting to do something about it.

This isn't to be taken as an endorsement of expanding concealed carry... There's a fully fleshed-out policy piece that I'm working on, because I ain't got shit else to do, which will no doubt wind up here or on Blogcritics after every place I submit it ignores me. What I'm suggesting is that unless we change the law in a way we can deal with-- it may one day wind up the other way.