A Look Askance

Why we can't win

2009-08-13T11:49:00.002-04:00

Newt will keep moving the football.
What Dems can't seem to learn is that no matter how many concessions the make, no matter how many market-based compromises they include in whatever bill, a party concerned more about power than governing will always have more incentive to kill that bill than any modifications to align it with their stated ideology can overcome. Just another reason we should be talking about single payer instead of this watered down crap.

Our Media

2008-10-07T12:19:00.001-04:00

I'd blog about the election, the financial crisis, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, or something else of great substance and import, but CNN says that there's another missing white woman, so I'll wait.

Bullshit

2008-09-22T00:26:00.004-04:00

I've been silent the last few days because the news around our financial meltdown and subsequent plans for recovery have blown away all the crap I was going to ruminate on before.

And boy is this a lot of news. We're being told that we need to fork over somewhere near a trillion dollars (that's $1,000,000,000,000.00) Further, we're told that unless we give this money to the treasury (which intends to give it all to Wall Street) without oversight or preconditions, we'll doom the economy and all our savings to certain ruin. Even further, we are not to encumber this gift with any provisions that might soften the blow to those outside Wall Street, like allowing bankruptcy judges to change the rules for those mortgagees who took out unsound loans. No, we are just to take it as written.

Eff. That.

There have been a lot of good things written recently about this USA PATRIOT Act for banks, this Authorization of Treasury Force. In the words or one anonymous lawmaker, it is a "blank check for $700 billion for those mother fuckers" who have given us the Iraq war, Katrina, and, yes, the current financial collapse. Robert Reich lays out the kinds of reforms that should be tacked on to any bailout. Krugman remains a useful skeptic.

And it looks like the Democrats are paying attention. Pelosi may actually have a spine. That's encouraging, but I think we need to dig a bit deeper.

This failure is not about some handful of mistakes made by a few bankers that somehow lead to catastrophic failure. This is about structural failure, about a systematic destruction of those safeguards meant to defend us from this kind of bullshit, traded for the wealth of a few. If there is anything that should come from this massive scandal, it should be the death of Conservative, Laissez-Faire economic ideology, the final evidence of the moral evil of Thatcherite deregulation. Obama has surprised me with his frontal assault on the Ownership Society lie, and it is now more than at any other time that this kind of challenge to the ideology of unadulterated Capitalism must be given voice. We kill this beast now or we live and die by it for who knows how many more decades.

Enough.

Branded

2008-09-10T19:03:00.003-04:00

Susan has an excellent post up about the true nature of the McCain-Palin campaign. Go read it.

On a side note, she links to a definition of maverick that actually surprised me:

mav·er·ick (māv'ər-ĭk, māv'rĭk)
n.
1. An unbranded range animal, especially a calf that has become separated from its mother, traditionally considered the property of the first person who brands it.

So, question is, who was the first one to brand McCain? I just know it definitely wasn't me.

Insane

2008-09-09T18:56:00.002-04:00

Bob Herbert ate his wheaties this morning:

The idea that Republicans are proud of Ronald Reagan, who saw Medicare as “the advance wave of socialism,” while Democrats are ashamed of Lyndon Johnson, whose legislative genius made this wonderful, life-saving concept real, is insane.

Time to get proud, left-wing activists. This is our time to shine.

Hard Work

2008-09-08T18:13:00.002-04:00

David Sirota over at Open Left has an interesting, if longish post about the class-based value sets of the major parties and how that impacts the Democrats' designs on working-class votes this season. Go read it all.

Done with that? Good.

I think what this gets at that really irks me is that a lot of the rhetoric floating around lately seems to denigrate outright the accomplishments of working-class voters who haven't ascended to the mighty heights of presidential candidates. Namely, all this talk about how the Obamas' parents worked hard, and due to that hard work they ascribe their own opportunities and success.

First, yay to acknowledging parents' role in establishing their children's social status. Really, I don't see how we can have an honest discussion of privilege without recognizing the role that historical factors and inheritance have in shaping our experience of the world and our relative difficulties getting through it.

But what the f? Can we please cut out this "hard work" crap unless we're recognizing also the hard work of all those that, you know, don't get rich, can't send their kids to college, and don't become members of the political elite? Michelle Obama and Joe Biden and Barack Obama all had parents and guardians who worked damn hard to provide for their families, sure, but so to did millions of other US Americans who nonetheless could not, due to myriad structural factors, provide that same opportunity to their children. What are we saying to those people, when we ascribe the success and position of our leaders only to the false myth of a hard work meritocracy?

Return

2008-09-08T18:10:00.001-04:00

I'm back for election '08, since it seems I won't be able to shut up after all. Also, there seems to be a pretty interesting race going on for president, with some historical implications or something.

The Media love Obama

2008-07-26T23:25:00.003-04:00

Yes, they sure do. That's why, when McCain makes a tiny 3-market ad buy with the ludicrously cynical claim that Obama intentionally snubbed the troops during his international tour, opting instead to go to the gym, all the major news organizations ignore him entirely.

Or not.

CNN, not bothering to fact-check:

Sen. John McCain's campaign lashed out at Sen. Barack Obama on Saturday for canceling a visit to an American military base in Germany on Thursday.

"The most solemn duty of a commander in chief is to fulfill his responsibility to the men and women who serve this country in uniform," retired Lt. Col. Joe Reypya, speaking on behalf of the McCain, said in a statement. "Barack Obama ... broke that commitment, instead flitting from one European capital to the next."

And in a McCain ad that began airing Saturday, Obama is chided for making "time to go to the gym" instead of visiting with wounded troops.

Yep, I'm sure that ad is running nonstop on the networks. Best $10 the McCain campaign ever spent!

Fixing all our development problems

2008-06-20T13:27:00.004-04:00

As I see it, one of the most vexing impediments facing urban planners and sustainability advocates is our horrible built environment, structured as it has been for at least the last 50 years around the car. Hard to make walkable communities when the whole usable area is taken up by roads and suburban-density subdivisions. Residents of Greensburg, Kansas have found a solution:

Last May, an EF 5 tornado hit western Kansas. In Greensburg, the storm leveled every building, picked up cars and tossed them into rooftops, demolished the streets, left more than two-thirds of the town’s population homeless and killed 11 people.

... [T]he people of Greensburg decided not only to stay, rebuild and provide aid but also to take a revolutionary approach to doing so -- the environmentally sustainable way. City leaders saw their chance to change the city into a place where everyone would want to be, an environmentally sustainable place that would serve as an example for towns everywhere.

So, looks like all we have to do is encourage this global climate thing for a bit longer, wait for all of our creations to be ground to dust by tornadoes and floods, then start over. Hurrah!

Freedom of the Press

2008-05-29T15:48:00.002-04:00

Glenn Greenwald has a long but important post up about the absence of journalism in recent years:

The idea that journalists only convey statements from politicians rather than "create debates" is the classic Stenographic Model of "Journalism" -- "we just write down what people say. It's not our job to do anything else." Real reporting is about uncovering facts that the political elite try to conceal, not ones they willingly broadcast. It's about investigating and exposing -- not mindlessly amplifying -- the falsehoods and deceit of government claims. But our modern "journalists" (with some noble exceptions) don't do that not only because they can't do it, but also because they don't think it's their job. That's because, by definition, they're not journalists.

Go read the rest.

Men being idiots

2008-05-14T11:55:00.002-04:00

It's spring again, so expect the usual bump in catcalls and public perverts. CNN has an article, which, while largely fluff, does include a comments section ripe with prime idiocy.

The one upside is that the story led me to Holla Back NYC, a great example of collective blog action.

Delicious Irony

2008-03-08T15:20:00.003-05:00

Neighborhood blighted by overcrowding? In today's housing market, regulating that will likely yield abandoned homes. Thanks, subprime lending!

But on a new color-coded map created by the county to plot foreclosures in Fairfax from January 2007 though the end of last month, two bright orange spots dominate. Both also happen to be the focus of intensive efforts to curb overcrowding: the Springfield neighborhoods that include the Hanover Avenue house, and portions of Herndon. In Herndon's case, the regulatory push has been led by the town government, which has instituted multiple policies aimed at making the community less hospitable to illegal immigrants.

No hard numbers are available to quantify the correlation between overcrowding enforcement and foreclosures. But Supervisor Jeff C. McKay (D-Lee) said the evidence he has seen leaves him with little doubt. Owners unable to subsidize their mortgage payments with illegal numbers of occupants have been unable to keep their houses.

Ha. Ha. Ha.

Chris Matthews is a tool

2008-01-12T15:54:00.001-05:00

And seems to be in 7th grade. Media Matters takes him on:

Chris Matthews has been treating female guests as sexual objects for years. He has been judging women -- senators, presidential candidates, the speaker of the House -- on their clothes and their voices and their appearance for years. He has been referring to women as "castrating" for years. He has been applying double standards to male and female candidates for years.

This is who Chris Matthews is. He is a man who thinks that men who support women politicians are "eunuchs."

He isn't going to stop unless you make him stop. Chris Matthews uses his voice to marginalize women. Use yours to tell MSNBC you've had enough.

There's a long list of transgressions in the linked article, and I'm sure it's only a partial one. Matthews is the sort of talking head i find most grating, not only because he's such a backwards idiot, but because he's so self-assured in his oppressive behavior. Time to give the good old boy the boot.

Irony

2007-09-04T20:29:00.001-04:00

All those mcmansions the suburbanites built seem not to keep the undesirables out, but actually, due to their outsized capacity, have become all the more attractive for many-person occupancy. How delicious.

technorati tags:development, mcmansion, ironic

Jambo sana

2007-08-08T11:57:00.000-04:00

Very hello from Kenya. I don't have much that makes sense to blog, especially in this forum since I haven't been paying attention to the non-local news. Yeah, Nairobi doesn't have a beltway, so it's weird to watch coverage of the happenings there and care about it, but it is the closest thing to political gossip that they show on the local TV. Party politics sound much more complicated when it isn't a two-party system, but I don't really have to understand much for conversation because all anyone here asks about is Kenyan homeboy Obama anyway.

I've escaped the noise and cold and dust and crime (ok, only some of the dust and crime) of Nairobi for the tropical beach paradise that is Mombasa. Our hotel is the best bargain around, perhaps because it is just past the back lot of the Nakumatt (think Walmart but with furniture and an attached mall). The beach is beautiful, and aside from the sunburn I'm sporting I have no complaints. Well, that's not quite true - internet here is universally slow, and the driving on the left thing is bound to kill me sometime as I fail to look in the right direction. But otherwise, hakuna matata.

Geek break

2007-07-02T20:08:00.000-04:00

Blogging this from an iphone, which prooves to be rather awkward. The keyboard has no carrots, so html would be difficult.

Lousy Democrats, doing what the people want

2007-06-18T14:13:00.001-04:00

James Gilmore in the Post:

I reject the Democrats' policy of an immediate withdrawal or a withdrawal on a timetable. Unfortunately, they are playing to the polls to obtain political advantage at home, to the detriment of the United States.

What exactly are the democratically elected representatives of a people supposed to do but respond to the pressures of the majority that placed them in office? Reacting to what the public seems to want is what politicians do, or they quickly cease to be employed as politicians. And it isn't like scheming Democratic politicians invented the idea of a withdrawal from Iraq - that's been a very popular sentiment for years now, and Democrats just finally wised up sooner than their Republican colleagues have. If Glimore's looking for a scapegoat for anti-war sentiment, he'll have to blame all the people who oppose it (or perhaps just the combination of empirical fact and reason) rather than some evil Democrats.

I think this is one of the more frustrating things about politics right now - we're told very often that we should oppose a policy not on its demerits, but because our partisan opposition supports it. Party platforms might be a quick guideline for which way you're likely to come down on an issue, but they shouldn't serve as evidence in reasoned debate of a policy's appropriateness.

technorati tags:Gilmore, democracy, Iraq

More stuff to fear

2007-06-12T09:50:00.001-04:00

CNN's top article right now is a scare piece about $2 "Cheese Heroine" aimed at teenagers. It's especially unsafe, and 21 people have died since 2005, says the article. Wow, 21. An Epidemic. Wonder how that compares to another story that's not on CNN's front page right now?

technorati tags:fear, drugs, cnn, journamalism

And the localblogging begins...

2007-06-12T02:41:00.001-04:00

Shooting tonight in Shaw, so the murder lamp is out, and of course I can't sleep. Whenever someone unloads some rounds, MPD likes to bringin its big generator-powered floodlamp to light up the block; problemsare that (a) it's a little late to do much good as a deterrant, and (b)it makes it impossible to sleep if you have either ears or eyes(honestly, I sleep fine after gunshots, it's just the damn light thatkeeps me awake).

If you want some background and sparse details, check out rocklobster's continually updated shaw crime watch. It also seems to be the place to go for loonie theories on the causesof gang violence. Deterioration of the family my ass. Plus, were thateven the root cause, I'm not sure parenting classes could compensatefor having to work two or three jobs to make rent. Looking for a realculprit? Out-of-control gentirfication housing prices are putting theeconomic pressures on parents that keep them disengaged from theirchidren's lives. If these kids' lack of parenting is to blame, it'sbecause gentrifiers (aka newcomers, aka Whitey McCracker) are willingto pay the insane prices for housing that keep those parents fromhaving time to raise their children.

technorati tags:shaw, violence, shooting, dc

Eschanomics

2007-05-31T00:04:00.001-04:00

Atrios has been on an econ kick lately. Not sure what's up with that.

technorati tags:Atrios, Economics

We'll stop your cola

2007-05-31T00:01:00.001-04:00

Interesting article in the Post about the diplomatic sparing over genocide in Darfur - aparently the ambasador of the Sudan is threatening our cola supply:

What's more, the good and peaceful leaders of Sudan were prepared to retaliate massively: They would cut off shipments of the emulsifier gum arabic, thereby depriving the world of cola.

"I want you to know that the gum arabic which runs all the soft drinks all over the world, including the United States, mainly 80 percent is imported from my country," the ambassador said after raising a bottle of Coca-Cola.

A reporter asked if Sudan was threatening to "stop the export of gum arabic and bring down the Western world."

"I can stop that gum arabic and all of us will have lost this," Khartoum Karl warned anew, beckoning to the Coke bottle. "But I don't want to go that way.

It's been a while since I've heard of such retaliatory sanctions, at least as far as they don't relate to oil. Though I do know someone who will tell me that we're all suffering from a terrible dearth of North Korean cold noodle dishes.

technorati tags:Darfur, Sanctions, Coke, Sudan

Blogging

2007-05-28T14:27:00.001-04:00

Just realized that as I while away my time waiting for an AIM discussion to resume, I may as well return to the blog. I'm somewhat inspired by Interested Soldier's brief resumption, though I assume he's since been silenced again by the man.

Most of my friends have fled the district for different time zones, so I guess it will be up to me to hold down the fort until they return. My former housemate will also be abandoning his Shaw blog as he's headed back to the burbs, so I may have to take that mantle. It strikes me as important to offer some counterballance to the dominant blg discourse here, which focuses mostly on crime and racial tensions.

And while we're talking about discourse, yesterday I picked up a copy of Al Gore's new book, The Assault on Reason. It has been calling my name ever since I read an excerpt in Time, but the clincher was finding out on Saturday that he delves more deeply into neuroscience in the book. Advancements in neurology have brought us to the brink of understanding that, as my brother puts it, social science is the real hard science. We've had numerous discussions about the physiology of the brain as it relates to socil behavior, and I wanted to see what Mr. Gore had to say. So far, it's pretty good. Check it out if you have the chance.

Moyers

2007-04-27T01:15:00.001-04:00

You need to watch this.

technorati tags:Media

Gentriblogging or blogifying?

2007-04-24T00:51:00.001-04:00

Outside In has a ranking of local-blogging activity, and my lovely neighborhood of Shaw comes in second. As Steven Berlin Johnson points out via Boing Boing, the list is made mostly of gentrifying areas.

What he doesn't mention is that, if the Shaw blogs are examplary of the rest, it's pretty much just the gentrifyers doing the blogging. I'd bet the anonymity of the blogosphere insulates these bloggers from the larger community discussion, allowing this minority to give voice to sentiments that might otherwise be shouted down as racist or unwelcome. Gentifying areas bring together lots of these interlopers, and at some point the critical mass makes for a viable blog community.

Or maybe they're just hipsters.

technorati tags:Shaw, Gentrification, Blogosphere

Kurt Vonnegut is dead

2007-04-12T00:18:00.001-04:00

So it goes.

The times has a good piece.