Shoutingatmytv.com

SOTU - So What?

Almost a week ago, the redoubtable Charles Pierce had an interesting take on last Tuesday's State of the Union speech, entitled The Audacity of Shame. As always, it's entirely worth the read, but in this rare instance, I must disagree with Mr. Pierce's analysis.

The premise of that analysis is that despite mountains of evidence to the contrary, President Obama still believes the Republicans in Congress are amenable to shaming, that they still have a conscience to appeal to. Obama's belief persists (Pierce asserts) despite Republicans having pitched their tents and dug fortifications in the central square of Crazytown at the behest of a variety of certifiable donors, pundits, activist teabaggers, religious bigots, malleable journalists, and other assorted freaks who are in fact, driving the party's very short bus.

Pierce points out the meager requests in Tuesday's speech (asking not for passage of legislation, but simply for votes), and claims that Obama's calls for Congress to behave like a legislature and vote on things means the President believes there is still some vestige of bipartisan interest in governing somewhere deep in the makeup of today's GOP that is struggling to survive.

Pierce's is a plausible assessment, and draws on a first term record that showes Obama appealing to this bipartisan interest in governing again and again, despite getting his head handed to him every time. Nonetheless, I think the assessment is wrong.

I am fully aware that my own biases and hopes may well be coloring my disagreement, but I don't think Obama is as naive as Pierce asserts. I think Obama has given up on the GOP, and may have given up on the Democrats in the house to effectively oppose them (it would be interesting to know what the White House's calculations were about the Senate's proposed rule changes calculated to make the filibuster more difficult, which were so crippled by Harry Reid and a few Senate Democrats as to make them laughably ineffective.)

I don't think the president's appealing to a native GOP interest in governing at all, but to an electorate that shows consistent polling numbers that support the policies he proposed. I think Obama was speaking primarily to that electorate last Tuesday night, and to the extent that he was speaking to those in the House chamber at all, it was to say "I'm done with quiet negotiating in search of bipartisanship. You guys have finally convinced me that it gets me nowhere, and instead, I'm going over your heads and making the case before the voters."

There are reasons to believe this would be a good strategy. First, the appeal to bipartisanship has been a demonstrable waste of time, and shows every indication of continuing to be. The much-vaunted "Republican remix" that's been getting a lot of ink and electrons over the last few weeks, shows no sign of changing any GOP policy prescriptions or inclining the Congress to any action that would make it any easier to deal with.

Second, those polls do show pretty broad support for many of the solutions the president proposed (in some cases, overwhelming support - see background checks).

Third, the GOP has been so consistently batty for the last couple of years that they are slightly less popular than root canal. Not so Obama - see policy polling reference above, and note very solid support numbers for the president.

Finally, it's fairly clear that Obama has learned from experience that he has nobody to deal with on the other side. John Boehner can't control his own caucus, Republicans in the Senate are engaging in unprecedented filibustering of his nominees for key cabinet posts, and there's nobody in the opposition party with the inclination and the nerve to stike a bargain with him.

In short, the Republican party seems so bent on factional self-destruction that it doesn't have time to even attempt to help govern the country. It's been spouting nonsensical rhetotric for so long that it has lost track of the difference between its own press releases and reality. That connection has always been tenuous, and it has grown ever more so over the last few years. The party's leadership (such as it is) has convinced itself that all it has to do to win elections is appeal to the same base it has been feeding a steady diet of paranoid gibberish for the last fifteen years. The problem is that in order to appeal to that base, its rhetoric has gotten steadily more extreme, and it is now so divorced from the real world that even though parts of the leadership have begun to realize they have gone way off the reservation, they can't find their way back.

In such circumstances, there is really only one solution. If you try again and again to stop fighting with an opponent, and yet he still refuses to stop, you have two remaining choices. You can either surrender (a tactic the Democtrats have been using for decades, for reasons passing all understanding), or you can keep hitting him until he can't get up any more. If you can't get him to join you in saying "truce", you are left with forcing him to say "uncle". All presidents are said to have an eye on history in their second terms, and Obama is likely no different. However, he may have made the calculation that he will either force the Republicans to start working with him to enact those parts of his agenda that he wants to leave as a legacy (not out of shame, but out of the shreds of their own instinct for political self-preservation), or he'll sacrifice that legacy for another that may have longer-term benefits to the country - he'll preside over the self-destruction of the current Republican party.

Hitler began the Holocaust by confiscating Jews' guns? Think again...

We've seen a lot of assertions recently (from the NRA, Glenn Beck, batshit insane radio host Alex Jones, and a wide variety of gun rights absolutists) that our freedoms are at risk if we place any controls on gun ownership, and these assertions are "supported" by claims that various dictators began to opress their people by taking away their guns. Stalin and particularly Hitler are cited as exemplars of this risk. It's nonsense, and it deserves a response, so here it is:

The “argument” that Hitler began the Holocaust by disarming the German people is taken from a book written in 1994 by the NRA’s Wayne LaPierre called “Guns, Crime, and Freedom”, in which he said; “In Germany, Jewish extermination began with the Nazi Weapon Law of 1938, signed by Adolf Hitler.”

That statement may be intuitively plausible, but it’s as wrong now as it was when it was written. All private firearms in Germany were banned and confiscated by the Weimar government in 1919 in order to comply with the conditions of the Treaty of Versailles. In 1928, the Weimar government relaxed that ban, but placed strict licensing and permitting requirements on all firearms, including separate permits required to: own, privately sell, carry, manufacture, or professionally deal in firearms and ammunition.

Please remember that the Nazis came to power five years later, in 1933. The 1938 law that LaPierre referred to did pretty much exactly the opposite of what he claimed it did. It completely deregulated the ownership and transfer of long guns and ammunition, lowered the minimum age of purchase from 20 to 18, and dramatically increased the numbers of people, including Nazi party members, who were entirely exempt from any gun regulations. A subsequent law did prohibit Jews from owning firearms, but very few Jews owned firearms anyway, or had since 1919. What’s more, the law wasn’t passed until after Kristallnacht and years of other beating and lynching of Jews, and after five years of anti-semitic legislation which banned Jews from participation in a wide range of professions, prohibited intermarriage between Jews and other Germans, stripped German Jews of their citizenship, and ordered forced sterilizations in the hundreds of thousands. With that history preceding it, to say that the firearms law was what started the Holocaust is dangerously wrong and frankly ridiculous.

Apart from the factual historical inaccuracy in LaPierre’s assertion, it relies on a premise that’s also widespread in today’s argument – that a persecuted subgroup could make an effective stand against an army determined to destroy it by virtue of having guns. A few moments careful consideration will reveal this premise to be tenuous at best. In the case of the Jews in Germany, one historian has observed that the Russian army lost 7 million men fighting the Wehrmacht, SA, and SS, despite having tanks, planes, artillery, and an alliance with several other world powers. To imagine that German Jews, armed with pistols, rifles, and shotguns, would have done better, is absurd on its face.

Frankly, the same is true in the US today. Despite the mythology that we are so fond of steeping ourselves in, what protects our freedoms is public vigilance, not armed individuals. If the US military was ordered to take up arms against some subgroup of our citizens, with or without the acquiescence and support of the American public, and agreed to follow that order, that subgroup would be in a world of trouble. Anyone who tells you differently either has an agenda that makes them uninterested in the factual basis of the arguments they are presenting, has no idea about the value of actual military training, weapons, and tactics, or has been watching waaay too many Rambo movies.

<Correction: The argument that Hitler started the Holocaust by disarming German Jews is actually older than LaPierre's book, dating at least to 1989, when a gun rights group called Jews for the Preservation of Gun Ownership used it to argue against the imposition of a handgun ban in Chicago.>

Is Intolerance "welcome in the public square"?

This article on HuffPo describes the very public musings of some evangelical leaders about the greater meaning of Rev. Louie Giglio's removal from the list of performers at Barack Obama's second innaugural. Rev. Giglio was scheduled to deliver a blessing, and that schedule was changed after homophobic and condemnatory quotations from the bible were found in a sermon he taught in 1996. The leaders in question have been concern-trolling about whether this means that we as a people are intolerant of those with deeply held religious convictions, and that they are unwelcome to share those convictions with the rest of us at a secular and political event.

Leaving aside the whole issue of whether it's appropriate to have blessings offered by anyone at a secular celebration such as the innauguration of a president, it's specatularly rich that those whining about intolerance of their beliefs have been shoving the intolerance in their beliefs down everyone's throat for the last thirty years or so. For those "wondering" if that bigotry is still "welcome in the public square", no, it's not, and good riddance.

It's a cute rhetorical trick to bemoan disapproval of intolerance as intolerant, but it's transparently nonsense, and it has finally begun to stop working. As others have said, believe whatever bronze-age gibberish you like, but don't expect the rest of us to take those beliefs as sacrosanct or worthy of special consideration just because somebody thousands of years ago wrote them in your magic book. Your bigotry is exactly as "welcome in the public square" as the idea that the earth is flat and has dragons around the edge of it.

Mike Huckabee's feeling picked on again...

This demands an answer. Very few people have called for Huckabee to be silenced. They're wrong, though it's a bit rich for a guy watched by millions to complain about how he's being censored. A great many more have called for recognition that what he said was hateful and stupid. In his piece above, he thoroughly conflates those two, as people so often do when they are called out for saying hateful and stupid things.

Huckabee has every right to say what he said, just as I have the same right to point out that it is wrong, and trades on tragedy to make a point unsupported by the facts. If Huckabee and his followers need a belief in God to recognize that slaughtering innocent children isn't OK, he and they are welcome to that belief, but saying that belief is necessary to act morally and sanely is offensive and wrong. I would point out that the Westboro Baptist Church also claims their beliefs to be informed by God's commandments, as do any number of other vicious demagogues, now and throughout history. One of the reasons the Taliban did so well in Afghanistan was that they railed against the "secular corruption" in Afghani society - does he approve of their solution to that corruption? The Inquisition sought to purge society of its sins by demanding adherence to holy scripture. How'd that work out?

Does our society glorify violence too much? You bet, but not doing so doesn't rely on God. Does Huckabee really believe that only liberals are responsible for creating Halo 2, World of Warcraft, or any one of a dozen first-person shooter-video games, endless Chuck Norris movies, or any of the other violent fantasy outlets commercially available on our stores' shelves? Are all of those things which twist our culture done exclusively by people who don't believe in God?

Huckabee knows better, and since he does, using the slaughter of innocents to sell a Christianist agenda is not only wrong, it's dishonest. Behaving sanely doesn't have to do with belief in God, it has to do with being sane. Adherence to a social contract has nothing to do with belief in God, it has to do with belief in the social contract. I would argue that one part of that contract is dealing honestly with one another and not opportunistically demonizing those we disagree with.

Granting Cert.

In honor of the Supreme Court's granting certiorari on the Prop 8 case, here's a link to an editorial by Michael Morford in the SF Chronicle the day after the CA supreme court ruled it constitutional. And here's the nut:

"Head on down to your local high school -- hell, make it a junior high or even an elementary -- and take yourself an informal survey. Ask the various wary, bepimpled youth of Generation Tweet what they think about those scary gay people getting married.

Ask them, in your most panicky, alarmist, Mormonified voice: Aren't they horrified at the very idea? Aren't they shocked at the very thought of two people in love having their union officially recognized and validated by the state?

...

Please note the response. Please observe how the kids merely look at you as though you're more than a little bit deranged and prehistoric, so out of touch you might as well be Dick Cheney talking up the diesel-powered rectal thermometers he so loved back in World War I.

Watch carefully as they sigh and roll their eyes, then whip out their Nokias to text their friends about how this creepy elder just tried to convince them that the harmless, yawningly commonplace homosexuality currently saturating the popular culture all around them, from fashion to Facebook, movies to "American Idol," is not only wrong, but so wrong that the law should ban it forever because... well, no one really seems to know exactly why.

Did you see it? That big, sighing shrug of what-the-hell-is-wrong-with-you, combined with lots of who-the-hell-cares? Because that's the reaction to note most of all.

Here is what it tells you: Gay marriage is a foregone conclusion. It's a done deal. It's just a matter of time. For the next generation in particular, equal rights for gays is not even a question or a serious issue, much less a sinful hysterical conundrum that can only be answered by terrified Mormons and confused old people and inane referendums funded by same. It's just obvious, inevitable, a given."

Here's hoping the Supremes can re-record "Everybody's Got a Right to Love", and put this behind us. Yes, marriage equality initiatives are beginning to win at the ballot box, but this shouldn't be a matter of public opinion, it should be a matter of rights.

A Hedge Fund Republic? - NYTimes.com

My point was that the wealthiest plutocrats now actually control a greater share of the pie in the United States than in historically unstable countries like Nicaragua, Venezuela and Guyana. But readers protested that this was glib and unfair, and after reviewing the evidence I regretfully confess that they have a point.

That’s right: I may have wronged the banana republics.

via www.nytimes.com

The wealthiest 1% of Americans own 34% or our national wealth. The next 9% own 37%. The other 90% own the 29% that's left.

We've tolerated this inequality because of two important pieces of our national identity; we are supposed to have greater social mobility than other countries, and supposedly, "a rising tide lifts all boats".

Here's the problem - neither of these components of our national mythology is true.

This isn't the first time this has happened in the US - it has happened before most of our economic disasters, and for the same reasons. FDR faced the same forces in 1932, and his intention was to save capitalism from itself. His cousin Theodore had already noted the same forces, and made one of the country's greatest speeches about it, in Osawatomie, Kansas, in 1910:

"The true friend of property, the true conservative, is he who insists that property shall be the servant and not the master of the commonwealth; who insists that the creature of man’s making shall be the servant and not the master of the man who made it. The citizens of the United States must effectively control the mighty commercial forces which they have called into being.

There can be no effective control of corporations while their political activity remains. To put an end to it will be neither a short nor an easy task, but it can be done....

The absence of effective State, and, especially, national, restraint upon unfair money-getting has tended to create a small class of enormously wealthy and economically powerful men, whose chief object is to hold and increase their power. The prime need to is to change the conditions which enable these men to accumulate power which it is not for the general welfare that they should hold or exercise.... We grudge no man a fortune in civil life if it is honorably obtained and well used. It is not even enough that it should have been gained without doing damage to the community. We should permit it to be gained only so long as the gaining represents benefit to the community. This, I know, implies a policy of a far more active governmental interference with social and economic conditions in this country than we have yet had, but I think we have got to face the fact that such an increase in governmental control is now necessary."

There's more, and it could have been written yesterday. Read it!

‘Environmentalism’ can never address climate change | Grist

Environmentalism: The word is not enough. In my opening statement at the debate the other night, I had 60 seconds to reach a half-drunk, half-interested crowd. In those circumstances, you realize pretty quickly that you have to cut straight to the core of things. I hadn't really thought it out in advance, but I realized just before I went on stage that the first thing I wanted to say is simple: I'm not an environmentalist and these aren't environmental challenges.

via www.grist.org

This is a great article by Grist's David Roberts, in which he points out that the issue of climate change requires too broad a change in our society to allow it to be pigeonholed as a purely "environmental" concern. He points out that environmentalists have taken an early lead in pointing out the perils of continuing on the course we have been on, but says the mindset of the environmental movement has been shaped by the movement's early successes as a purely regulatory issue (find polluters and prevent them or make them pay for polluting).

Roberts' article revisits a discussion from 2004, spurred by an article by Ted Nordhaus and Michael Schellenberger, entitled "The Death of the Environmental Movement", in which they too argued that the environmental movement has become moribund by getting lost in the tactics that brought it early success, and that it has consequently been weak at dealing with the backlash that has been stirring in the American public for the last thirty years. They too argued that the climate crisis is too broad and too important to be stuck with the same myopia. That article caused a lot of fuss when it was published, but it's an interesting discussion, and as Roberts' article indicates, one that deserves revisiting.

Google and Verizon carve up the internet...

Google Turns Its Back on Net Neutrality | Save the Internet.

Please read the whole thing, but here's the nut:

But blaming Google for finding ways to deepen their own pockets is like blaming a tiger for eating a goat. We can hold them to some modicum of social responsibility, but at the end of the day, they're a corporation - it's what they do.

It's ultimately up to the FCC to protect Net Neutrality, and we need to hold them and our lawmakers accountable to us. We need to fight back and speak up to tell the FCC that we want a completely open Internet.

If you value the innovation on the internet, as well as your ability to choose what you read, listen to, and watch, please follow both links and tell both Google and your legislators that you care what they do about this issue. Telecom companies are spending millions in lobbying money to get Congress and the FCC to allow them to control this public resource. Those lawmakers need to know there will be political costs if they get bought by this lobbying money, anmd Google needs to know there will be economic costs that are too high. They've gotten rich on the innovation on the web, and pulling up the ladder behind them to stop other innovators is not acceptable.

Rachel Maddow Shreds the White House for Getting Sucker Punched by Breitbart & Fox News - Again!

Before I saw Rachel Maddow's show last night, I was ranting about Andrew Breitbart's complicity in the mugging of Shirley Sherrod, who was fired from her job as a regional director of the USDA's development program yesterday for being a racist, after a videotape of her was posted on Andrew Breitbart's "Big Government" site that ostensibly showed her voicing a bias against white people (Ms. Sherrod is black).

In an utterly unsurprising development, it turns out that the tape was carefully misleadingly edited and the accusation was wholly false (Ms. Sherrod was telling a story about how she came to see that the problem she was confronting had nothing to do with race). Before the lie had a chance to be revealed, though,  Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack sacked Sherrod - within hours of the story breaking (if this sounds familiar, it's because Breitbart also had a hand in the ACORN story, which has also been revealed as a complete fraud):

The NAACP has now released the full video of the speech that got Ms. Sherrod fired, and it's clear that Breitbart is complicit in a vicious hatchet job on an innocent woman who was describing an incident 25 years ago that changed her perspective about race. It's telling that Breitbart felt no need to see the rest of the video before passing his judgment that Sherrod and her audience are racists, and it speaks volumes about the quality of that judgment. Sherrod should be apologized to and immediately rehired by the USDA, which got stampeded by a cheap con, and the next time Breitbart claims to have damning evidence in support of his peculiar theories, we should remember this lie and his part in it.

Breitbart now claims that he was making the case that the racism of the NAACP audience, not Sherrod, was the reason he posted the videotape, and that he feels sorry that "the media has misconstrued" the story to make it about Ms. Sherrod, and not her audience. Leaving aside the laughable implication that Breitbart isn't part of "the media", you'd have to be really naive to believe that anyway, but even if you did, the point Breitbart says he's making is completely unsupported by the unedited tape.

Naturally, I didn't do as well as Maddow did in summarizing the story - here's a clip from her show last night:

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

Amen, and apart from the editorial comments (with which I couldn't agree more), it's a breath of fresh air to see some actual journalism being practiced on TV. Once again, the administration needs to right this wrong, now, and remember this and other lies the next time it gets harangued by these propagandists about some "damning evidence" they claim to have. Shoveling the sort of propaganda Fox does is execrable journalism, and falling for it repeatedly is terrible, spineless politics.

"Balance"

Bill Maher had a little fun with Al Gore over the end of his marriage at the beginning of last night's show, but at the end of the show, as part of his "New Rules" segment, Maher produced a rant that no doubt made Gore smile (or will, if he hasn't seen it yet). Read the whole thing (or wait for the clip to appear on Maher's web site), but here's what I thought was the central quote:

"Media, could you please stop pitting the ignorant vs. the educated and framing it as a "debate." The other day, I saw a professor from the Union of Concerned Scientists face off against a distinguished expert on Tea Partying, whose brilliant analysis, recently published in the New England Journal of Grasping at Straws, was that we shouldn't teach climate science in schools because kids find it scary. As they should. I hope they're peeing in their pants."