The Hackenblog

“Obama may have caught a glimpse of what a general election campaign might bring during a recent debate on ABC TV. Badgered by anchors Charles Gibson and George Stephanopoulos about arcane (yet predictable) trivia such as U.S. flag pins and his relationship with former Weather Underground terrorist William Ayers (who hosted his first political fund-raiser in 1995), Obama came across as startlingly unprepared.

“‘Playing gotcha with Democrats and patty-cake with Republicans,’ Joe Conason explained on salon. com, ‘will remain basic operating procedure for the mainstream media this year, no different from the past half-dozen presidential campaigns…. [T]he same fuzzy but obsessive focus on “character” that plagues Bill and Hillary Clinton will be turned on him with equal or greater ferocity by those who once claimed to admire him. He is now subject to the ‘Clinton rules,’ which have long permitted pundits, editorialists and reporters to indict the former president and first lady for sins that other politicians, mostly Republican, may commit with impunity.’

“Conason compared the hullabaloo over Hillary Clinton’s exaggerated account of her landing in Bosnia to the free pass that Ronald Reagan was granted for his purely imaginary account of liberating Nazi concentration camps, and President Bush for his unexplained ‘lost years’ in the Texas Air National Guard.

“Obama’s inexperience left him vulnerable. If he didn’t want to talk about flag pins, he ought never have explained why he doesn’t wear one. (False patriotism, basically.) Dumb symbolic issues have a way of looming large in November. Obama ought to have purged himself of potentially embarrassing Chicago figures long ago, i.e., Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Ayers and political fixer Tony Rezko. That he hasn’t suggests a certain softness Republican smear artists are sure to exploit mercilessly.”
Superdelegates shouldn’t ignore the odds, Gene Lyons, April 23, 2008

An entire generation of the MSM might have to die out before we get decent press again. Too bad I won’t live to see it. Oh well.

This is a tough choice. I like Hill’s feisty savvy, but I think Obama would get us out of Iraq quicker. But, as I have always said, I’ll vote for whoever gets the nomination.

(and because I’m a bad person, heeeeere’s… (more…)

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April 19 - Finally, photographic proof I was in Texas.

April 14 - I’m back, it was great, and I’m very tired. I’ll post a link when the video of the whole show is up. I was very pleased with everything they did. It was amazing. Also, Texas bbq is fabulous.

To see a theatrical interpretation of “Darkness at Sunset and Vine.”

I’d like to thank the fabulous Dr. Kelly S. Taylor for bringing my angry novella to the wider world and Arkansas, where, I am told, it was a big fucking hit.

Also of interest: The production concept and the Darkness at Sunset and Vine Trilogy (Kelly’s only doing part I, but doing it extremely well) if you run out of things to read while I’m gone.

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“2. Issa Weeps Over Premature Withdrawal from Gubernatorial Race

“In the film, A League of Their Own, Tom Hanks proclaims, “there’s no crying in baseball.” If that same standard applied to American politics, Darrell Issa’s career would have ended long ago.

“In 2003, Issa led the effort to recall California Governor Gray Davis. (Davis was undone by the energy crisis which crippled the Golden State thanks in large part to market manipulation by Enron.) But part two of the Issa plan - to capture the Governor’s office himself - abruptly ran aground when Arnold Schwarzenegger decided to get in the race.

“On August 7, 2003, Issa shocked supporters and announced he would not continue his candidacy. Comically claiming, “It had nothing to do with Schwarzenegger’s decision,” Issa at times wept uncontrollably as he made his premature withdrawal. (This video shows Issa’s pathetic performance as he concluded his gubernatorial ambitions had been terminated. The water works start around the 7:30 mark.)”
op 10 Darrell Issa Hall of Shame Moments, Perrspectives, April 4, 2008 (via)

Having bought the recall for himself and then having it whipped out from under him, I tried to make the word Issa synonymous with sucker, alas, it never got much traction.

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“With 10 states and territories left to vote, Clinton can definitely pull ahead. Never mind all the ‘Who shot John?’ arguments over the DNC’s screwball decision to penalize those two crucial swing states for moving their primaries up (although New Hampshire, Iowa and South Carolina were permitted to do so ). The fairest solution would have been a re-vote, but Obama supporters have prevented that from happening. Tell me again what a ‘transformative figure’ he is, because on this score the politician Obama most resembles is George W. Bush. Wilentz also points out that if the Democrats used the state-by-state, winner-take-all standard used in Republican primaries and the general election, Clinton would now have approximately 500 more delegates than Obama and have the nomination locked up. That’s because she’s won almost all the big, Democratic and swing states necessary to prevail in November. Finally, there’s this puzzler: Evidently, it’s hunky-dory for Massachusetts superdelegates like Sens. John Kerry and Ted Kennedy and Gov. Deval Patrick to pledge their votes to Obama, even though Clinton won the state’s primary decisively. How, then, can Obamaphiles call it an anti-democratic outrage for other superdelegates to support Clinton, even if she wins their states, too? See what I mean? Let the voters speak, then decide.”
Let Obama-Clinton contest play itself out, by Gene Lyons, April 9, 2008

I don’t care who wins, just Get. Us. Out. Of. Iraq. Now.

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“Which doesn’t, in that poll or others, mean Obama would lose—that poll shows him winning (and take all such polls with grains of salt; many things could happen between now and November). But it does suggest he would win with a different mix of votes than Clinton. In choosing a nominee, primary voters and convention delegates are choosing between different historical and future versions of the Democratic party, in which different mixes of people identify as Democrats, going forward.

And as with all Batman v. Superman matchups, the question is inevitably, which one is more powerful? Why?”
Superman vs. Batman, Edge of the American West, March 21, 2008

Comics! There’s no escape!

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“But as strange as that is, a stunning revelation came from a very senior Japanese executive, who sent these notes from a meeting with a top Japanese financial official:

The depth of the problems at Bear Stearns which led up to the buyout are not clear. Mr. X wondered why they did not try to use committed credit lines before agreeing to the JPM Chase deal. These lines were significant and included large amounts committed by Japanese banks, who are now relieved that they did not have to extend the credit.

“Maybe Bear assumed at the rate of its cash depletion that it would burn through those credit lines quickly and being more leveraged might make other solutions more difficult, but the tone of the Japanese notes is that the credit lines were large enough in aggregate to have made a difference.

“And even odder: those credit lines are still in place. Why did the Fed stump up a whole $30 billion? This seems a tremendous oversight on its behalf. Of course, those lines probably terminate upon a change in control, but the Fed probably could have leaned on the banks to keep them in place (after all, they are lending against a better balance sheet with JPM, although adding the Bear lines to whatever credit facilities they now have with JPM might put them over their limits for exposure to any one bank. But the Fed could have offered to backstop the excess, which would be a smaller commitment than the one it made).

“Stranger and stranger….”
Why didn’t Bear use its credit lines?, Naked Capitalism, March 21, 2008

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“LOS ANGELES — If Barack Obama is elected president, his speech on race in America will be remembered as one of the greatest in the country’s history. If he loses, it will still be remembered as a terrific speech, an astonishing display of grace under pressure.

“Those who care about the American dilemma — a racial history that contradicts our stated beliefs — will filter their perceptions through their own life experience, their own political bias, their own emotional stake in this particular election. Whatever the political effect, however, the man obviously said what he really thought.

“He told the truth: We are all racists. That does not mean that we are all prejudiced, but it does mean we notice the color of the people around us, and that affects the way we think and talk and act. And he was probably right about most of us, black and white, when he asserted that our racism is generational, that old men like Pastor Wright and me have more trouble dealing with race than do our children and, I expect, than our grandchildren will.

“That’s the way it is. We are on a long trail to a post-racial society — we may never reach the end — and this election will give some indications how far along we really are.”
Hearing the Obama Speech, by Richard Reeves, March 19, 2008

Yes, I bet even Bill and Hill would be proud to vote for Obama after that speech. This is not an Obama endorsement, but if America has to face it, really face it, on race, all the races, then that can only be good for us and the world.

I think Reeves is wrong about one thing here: whether Senator Obama wins or not, this is going to be remembered as one of the greatest speeches on race in America. It’s a tough subject, I thought he did a stellar job with it.

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“When we do talk about the production concept (and generally we don’t) the cast talks about it in terms of movies like ‘Escape from New York’ and the ‘Die Hard’ movies. In my production concept statement that I’ve just written and posted, I talk about the production as if it were a futuristic version of ‘The Big Sleep.’ This disparity is fine by me. ‘Escape from New York’ is essentially a futuristic version of ‘The Big Sleep.’ (And if my cast wonders why I never just told them that I think we’re doing ‘The Big Sleep’ it’s because that if I did, you (and I) may have never been motivated to think about the many ways it’s like ‘Escape from New York’ and the ‘Die Hard’ because traditionally the director dictates the interpretation of the script to the cast… And we might never have thought up that cool motorcycle battle at the end.) However, these differing genre models may go far to explain why the cast didn’t really care if we cut Fyodor Chandler or not and I wake up thinking about it at 4 am.

“The scene with Fyodor Chandler provides a moment where Nellie at least momentarily finds her moral compass. It makes what she does afterwards make more sense. In the modern action-adventure film, actions don’t necessarily have to have moral motivation… or even make sense, for that matter.

“I still worry that I’ve just become the studio hack who cut the scene from ‘The Big Sleep’ that explained who committed the murder Phillip Marlowe was supposed to be investigating. I think my cast knows everyone will be too busy listening to Bogart and looking at Bacall to care.”
Darkness at Sunset and Vine Director’s Log, The Ides of March, 2008

Oh, man, dystopian linguists don’t get no respect. But this Director log thingy is way cool. And there’s video, too!

Click here for a better idea of what the hell I’m on about. Some of you might remember the enraged anti-bush novellas from 2003-2005 that are the Darkness at Sunset and Vine trilogy. Many cool bloggers of those years ended up in those stories, or at least plays on their names did. The first novella is being produced as a theater piece in Denton Texas, and performed there, Savannah, Georgia and somewhere in Arkansas in March and April. Hey, if Hillary can win Texas and 9 inches of snow can fall in the Metroplex, then Darkness at Sunset and Vine can be performed in the Southland. Oy.

By the way, Fyodor Chandler came out of a conversation I had with Jane Seaton about how I felt like the story was a cross between Dostoyevsky and The Long Goodbye. So of course the next logical thing was to name a character Fyodor Chandler. Isn’t that what anyone would do?

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I like Senator Obama as much as I like Senator Clinton and I will gladly vote for either of them.

Either will be a fine president, and certainly far better than what we have now, which ain’t saying much, but there you have it. And as soon as we have a candidate, by God or whatever, I will be behind that person 110% 25/8.

Is it November yet? I don’t enjoy election years, but I might enjoy a few more speeches like this one embedded above. Full text off the Obama’08 website behind the jump if you’d rather read it.

(more…)

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“Regarding Asian American voters, the biggest story was that in California, they voted for Clinton by a surprisingly large margin of 3-to-1. These particular results have led many to ask to what extent did racial prejudice against Blacks (and therefore, against Obama) play in their decisions to overwhelmingly support Clinton.

“Fortunately, others have argued quite convincingly that rather than racial prejudice, the main reasons why Asian American voters in California voted in large numbers for Clinton more than likely included a preference for more familiar, ‘establishment’ candidates, and those who are currently more associated with being powerful and influential, both of which Clinton personifies more than Obama.”
Asian Americans and Super Tuesday results, by Dude, C.N. Le blog, February 10, 2008

Is it November yet?

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Behind the Caracture, Washington Post, um, February 8? maybe, 2008

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NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana (CNN) — Former Sen. John Edwards dropped out of the race for the Democratic presidential nomination on Wednesday.

Damn. Oh well.

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And says it so much better than I would have:

“I don’t know what to think about the American elections - a black President would be a good thing, and so would a woman President.

“What I do know is that a husband and wife team is not a dynasty, and that people whose supporters go on and on inaccurately about dynastic politics should not be seeking out the endorsement of actual dynasts. Ted Kennedy is an admirable man whose opinion I respect - but not when he is acting as part of a dynasty rather than as a distinguished senator. Caroline Kennedy is wholly and solely a member of a dynasty, and her endorsement of Obama is a dynastic one.

“‘A President like my father’ - by which I take it we are not supposed to understand a man who will nearly cause nuclear holocaust, who will get the US into another disastrous war, who will stand aside from important social causes.

“I think better of Obama than that he is the over-rated JFK’s natural heir.

“What I do think is that I would rather have a battered pragmatic public servant than an untried personable spinner of wonderful empty words; I see the idealism that has focussed on him and I remember how many of my friends had real hope from Blair as opposed to voting for him because it was important to get the Tories out.

“A Clinton Presidency is going to be unexciting, not especially idealistic and only better by comparison with Bush. But it will break no one’s hearts.

“I look at my friends list and see a lot of wonderful ideals and I worry that Obama will break your hearts if he attains power.”
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, and so on and so forth, by RozK, January 28, 2008

‘A President like my father’ - by which I take it we are not supposed to understand a man who will nearly cause nuclear holocaust, who will get the US into another disastrous war, who will stand aside from important social causes.

Thanks, Roz, this saved me the trouble of writing a post on these very subjects.

I like Caroline Kennedy, but I did not like her Obama Op/Ed.

Is it November yet?

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“Economists teach that if the economy is going into a recession, lower interest rates and give people money. That wisdom is so conventional that the only quibbling seems to be over timing, amount, and who gets the money.

“But this recession has one very special feature: Never in history have we hit a recession with the American consumer so loaded down with debt. Shouldn’t that cause someone to pause before concluding that more consumer spending is the way out of this hole?”

~snip~

“There’s another implication to this huge debt load: interest. Interest operates just like a tax–it has to be paid month after month, in good times and in bad. Unlike a tax, however, interest isn’t calculated on something good like income; it is calculated on debt loads. For the average family carrying credit card debt, interest payments alone have become a more significant household expenditure.

“In 2006, credit card companies collected about $90 billion from American families in interest, fees, late fees, penalties and the like. That’s $90 billion that didn’t go to buying socks or movie tickets or Big Macs. The American consumer can’t keep it up.”
Same Solutions, Different Problems, by Elizabeth Warren, Credit Slips, January 27, 2008

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“Certainly its Polish viewers know how it will end, long before they enter the cinema. Katyn, as its title suggests, tells the story of the near-simultaneous Soviet and German invasions of Poland in September 1939, and the Red Army’s subsequent capture, imprisonment, and murder of some 20,000 Polish officers in the forests near the Russian village of Katyn and elsewhere, among them Wajda’s father. The justification for the murder was straightforward. These were Poland’s best-educated and most patriotic soldiers. Many were reservists who as civilians worked as doctors, lawyers, university lecturers, and merchants. They were the intellectual elite who could obstruct the Soviet Union’s plans to absorb and ‘Sovietize’ Poland’s eastern territories. On the advice of his secret police chief, Lavrenty Beria, Stalin ordered them executed.

“But the film is about more than the mass murder itself. For decades after it took place, the Katyn massacre was an absolutely forbidden topic in Poland, and therefore the source of a profound, enduring mistrust between the Poles and their Soviet conquerors. Officially, the Soviet Union blamed the murder on the Germans, who discovered one of the mass graves (there were at least three) following the Nazi invasion of Russia in 1941. Soviet prosecutors even repeated this blatant falsehood during the Nuremberg trials and it was echoed by, among others, the British government.

“Unofficially, the mass execution was widely assumed to have been committed by the Soviet Union. In Poland, the very word “Katyn” thus evokes not just the murder but the many Soviet falsehoods surrounding the history of World War II and the Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939. Katyn wasn’t a single wartime event, but a series of lies and distortions, told over decades, designed to disguise the reality of the Soviet postwar occupation and Poland’s loss of sovereignty.”

~snip~

“The real test of Katyn, of course, is whether it remains a part of the Polish national conversation over time, as a handful of Wajda’s earlier films have indeed done. This is not just a question of the film’s quality. Its endurance will also depend on the continued existence of an audience that shares Wajda’s knowledge of twentieth-century Polish history, and that understands the symbols and shortcuts he uses to evoke his national and patriotic themes. Fifty years after it was made, a significant number of Poles still know that when the two young men in Ashes and Diamonds start listing names, setting a glass of alcohol alight for each one, they are talking about friends who died in the wartime underground and the Warsaw uprising, even if they never say so. If, fifty years from now, there is still an audience in Poland that understands Wajda’s characters and references— an audience that intuitively draws its breath when the general tells his men that without them ‘there will be no free Poland’—then Katyn, the movie, will still matter.”
A Movie That Matters,
by Anne Applebaum, NY Review of Books, February 14, 2008

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Dan Savage goes down to South Carolina and lives!

Cognitive dissonance anyone? Are there enough voters like this in the country to get Huckabee elected? This is scarier than anything I can think of right now. Of course, I haven’t had any coffee yet, so I might be back later with something more horrifying.

Thanks, Logan, I needed this.

Oh, man, ya gotta love Dan Savage! And we did at J LHLS in this 2003 interview. Did it all seem so much simpler then? Or was it just not an election year?

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I, for one, have had enough of Hill and Obama:

“Edwards, however, stuck to the facts, and his powerful argument for why he should be President. He offered the same policy shifts on Iraq (all combat troops out in 12 months), health care (universal coverage mandated for every American, mental health, preventive and long-term care included), global warming (80% reductions in emissions by 2050, no new nuclear or coal-fired power plants), defending the Constitution (ending Guantanamo, torture, rendition, and illegal spying), poverty (expanded social aid and an increase of the minimum wage to $9.50 indexed to inflation), and labor (fair trade and tax policy, the Employee Free Choice Act, no scab hiring, strong support for unions). But I want to cite two moments that deviated from the script.

“First, Edwards has been discussing the sad case of Nataline Sarkysian, the 17 year-old from Glendale who was denied a liver transplant by her health insurer CIGNA, and died shortly after the company reversed the decision. This time, Sarkysian’s parents were on stage with Sen. Edwards, and when he related that tragic story, I couldn’t help but watch Nataline’s mother choke up. It was affecting, it hit you right in the gut. And when Edwards said, in respect to the health insurers, “Are you telling me we should sit down at the table with these people? Never! I don’t want to be their President,” it was undeniably moving.

“Second, Sen. Edwards obviously did his homework before the rally. He brought up the California budget crisis, and the austere across-the-board cuts proposed by Gov. Schwarzenegger. It’s fair to say that he wasn’t a fan. Here’s his comments (a paraphrase):

“‘I spent a day earlier this year with an SEIU health care worker… the people she cares for need her. The last thing this or any state needs are cuts to that kind of health care. The last thing you need are cuts to K-12 education. Does anybody believe that we are spending too much on K-12 education in this country?’”

John Edwards Rocks Downtown LA, Calitics, January 17, 2008

Let’s let him rock the world. Vote Edwards.

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“The 42-count grand jury indictment alleges Mr Siljander lied about lobbying senators on behalf of the Missouri-based Islamic American Relief Agency (IARA).

“The indictment alleges the charity sent about $130,000 (£66,000) in 2003 and 2004 to accounts in Peshawar, Pakistan, that Gulbuddin Hekmatyar had access to.

“It alleges the charity paid Mr Siljander $50,000 that was stolen from a US development agency.”

“Mr Siljander was a congressman from 1981-1987 and served one year as a US delegate to the United Nations.” Appointed by Ronald Reagan, too.
US politician on al-Qaeda charge, BBC News, January 16, 2008

The jokes practically write themselves on this one.

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“Everyone from Sullivan to Martin Kettle is talking about him as a conciliator, who will bring the US back together. I don’t for a second think that the culture wars can be solved that simply or that people who believe in killing queers and Muslims and are waiting to disappear into the sky and back the state of Israel whatever it does because someone they read claims to have read that in the Bible are going to say ‘gosh, we have a nice middle of the road African American president so we don’t have to be mean and nasty any more’.

“What worries me is that, if there is no clear closure on the Bush years, and the truly evil stuff that came out of the Right during the Clinton years, Obama will make nice with everyone, forgive everyone and in four or eight years, after everyone has been lulled, the crazy wing of the Republicans will be back trying to fix elections, declare war on random people and generally making a nuisance of themselves.

“Personally, I would like to see Names Taken and Arses Kicked even if it meant you had to put up with Hillary to do it - woman does have a vindictive streak and has bottled up a lot of anger because her triangulators told her to…

“If people really really want conciliation, it is not enough to just announce that the war is over and we can all sing ‘Kumbaya’. I have a certain history of forgiving people who have done pretty terrible things to me and it is not as easy as that - you have to make a solid accounting to yourself of just what it is you are letting go of. And not forget, even if you decide that the people who did those things have really changed, because you need to watch out for other people doing the same stuff, including yourself.

“South Africa made a decent stab at the process with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Obama shoud bring in Desmond Tutu and let him loose on the situation. If we can’t have Rove and Cheney in the hoosegow, we can at least have them answering some awkward questions.”
Untitiled, RozK, January 5, 2008

Hear, hear!

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I got to wake up with a sore throat, but that just means I’m getting it out of the way for the rest of 2008.

And since it IS 2008, I can post this again!

Journal of Bloglandia, because Blogtopia (y!sctp!) was taken.

and

The Journal of Women on Comics, women read comics and write great things about them.

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Even if it’s Hillary, even though Bill recently said the US should leave some troops in Iraq to protect the Kurds from the Turks (also here), which is one the worst ideas I’ve heard in a long time. Nothing against the Kurds or Turks, but I’d rather leave diplomats and NGO aid and development agencies and money we can more or less keep track of there and work with the rest of the world on it. I mean, hopefully next year and beyond, the US can become a country in the world and not a world in a country.

However, if a Republican is inaugurated next year, we can just kiss everything that matters good-bye anyway:

“The religious right—in the form of its umbrella organization the Arlington Group, formed in 2002—is certainly split and unenthusiastic about the presidential candidates. Pat Robertson has endorsed Giuliani; Richard Land, the head of the Southern Baptist Convention, has said he could never vote for Giuliani and would consider backing a third-party candidate if Giuliani is nominated. So the unanimity on Bush’s behalf we saw in 2000 and in 2004 will likely be gone. But as far as policy is concerned, the Christian right has only one overriding goal: a promise from candidates that they’ll appoint ’strict constructionist’ judges. And every one of the candidates, Giuliani included, has made that promise resoundingly and repeatedly, in public and presumably in private. As recently as November, Giuliani told the conservative Federalist Society that ‘we need judges who embrace originalism’ and vowed that he would appoint justices in the mold of Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas.[8]

“That, above all, is what the Christian right needs to hear. It is well worth remembering that when the next president is sworn in, John Paul Stevens will be three months shy of his eighty-ninth birthday. It seems unlikely that he would be able to outlast a Giuliani or Romney or Huckabee or McCain presidency. One more judge like John Roberts or Samuel Alito will mean not only the probable end of Roe v. Wade but of affirmative action (sharply curtailed already), efforts at school desegregation (school systems have resegregated to a surprising extent in recent years), and many other progressive social goals. All of the four major Republican candidates have vowed to see to these outcomes. Paradoxically, the personally pro-choice Giuliani, if elected, could go down in history as a hero to the Christian right—the president who finally ended Roe—in a way that even Ronald Reagan has not.”
How the Republicans Have Become Prisoner of Their Own Ideology, Naked Capitalism, December 29, 2007

Gah! C’mon, Dems! It’s crunch time! (It has been for awhile, but that’s moot now.)

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Remembering Molly Ivins.

And it might never stop hurting.

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“Each one of those cases is a person who had insurance and got sick. They filed for payments authorized by their coverage and Blue Shield said no and attempted to cancel their policies. These sick people then had to fight tooth and nail to get the payment to their doctors so they would not be liable for the bill. In over 200 of those cases they lost and the companies dropped them completely from coverage. Of course that means that they then have a pre-existing condition and thus would have a next to impossible time getting coverage from another company.

“It is a disgusting practice that is all about trying to squeeze out a few more dollars in profits. It is illegal and I am glad to see the state launching the investigation and moving to fine them. It sure would be nice if that dissuaded the companies from trying this in the first place, but I don’t hold out that much hope that it will.”
Blue Shield Illegally Canceling Policies, Working Californians, December 13, 2007

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Journal of Bloglandia (ISSN1950-7645)

Journal of Women on Comics (ISSN1940-7637)

Please cross-post, thanks!

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Huckabee’s son
was packing a gun.
A carry-on Glock
at Little Rock
airport.
Huckabee’s Son Arrested With Gun at Little Rock Airport, AP on FoxNews, April 26, 2007 (via Jill at Skippy’s)

Mad Kane is so much better at this than I am. Really.

(Wow this story is old. Anyway. These stories have a bad habit of disappearing, so there’s a pdf of it here.)

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“We need organizations who aren’t afraid of what is politically possible and talk about was is morally right. Today the CNA placed a full-page ad in 10 Iowa papers arguing strongly for not-for-profit health care, Medicare for All, taking the example of Dick Cheney’s multiple heart problems, and noting that if he wasn’t receiving the finest in government-run health care, he’d be dead by now.”
Give It Up For The California Nurses Association, by David Dayen, Calitics, December 10, 2007

Whee! California Nurses rule so hard!

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“President Bush, seeming very much the clown-in-chief, led the way last week by proposing a mortgage crisis bail-out that would appear to have no chance whatsoever of working as advertised. He called it, arrestingly, the New Hope Alliance. It blithely assumed that those ’servicing’ mortgages — that is, collecting the monthly payments — have the ability to suspend scheduled upward re-sets of adjustable mortgages for five years for certain select homeowner payees — so that theoretically said homeowners could avoid foreclosure.

“What might have worked in 1934, when the originators of mortgages were local banks that also ’serviced’ them (i.e. collected the monthly payments) is unlikely to avail today since the mortgages have been sold off in bunches to pension funds, hedge funds, money markets, and foreign investment funds — none of which have an interest or the ability to renegotiate loans with millions of schlemiels from Cleveland to Denver to Fresno — while the companies ’servicing’ these contacts are mere errand boys, with no say over the terms of anything they collect on.”

~snip~

“Anyway, this argument is academic because the New Hope Alliance is just a political sham. The purpose of it is not to save the hapless occupants of over-leveraged houses, but first to buy a little more time so that the worker bees in the financial industry can justify awarding each other multi-million-dollar Christmas bonus packages, and second, to postpone the ‘workout’ of all this bad investment as far into the future as possible.

“I have been wrong in the past about timing things, but I don’t see any way on God’s green earth that such a workout of mis-investment can be put off until somebody else is sworn in to lead the government in January 2009. The capital allocation system is already listing and groaning like a leaky ship in a hurricane.

“Maybe all the players really know that keeping the ship afloat until Christmas is really the best they can hope for. Christmas means a lot in this country. It represents all Americans’ old hope that miracles can happen. Bums turn out to be Santa Claus. Old curmudgeons are transformed overnight into loving uncles. Angels save us when we jump despairingly into icy torrents. And Goldman Sachs executives pass out multi-million-dollar checks to the wizards who ‘innovated’ an ingenious way for the rest of their country to commit financial suicide.”
Spirit of the Season, James H. Kunstler, December 10, 2007

A Christmas Clusterfuck, brought to you by JHK.

Why don’t we just nationalize…oh wait, that would really freak everyone out. Never mind.

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“After a whirlwind highly-qualified-contrition tour of the media, the man who credits himself with convincing Karl Rove to move all the way to the right because the center no longer exists has landed at ABC News. Predictably, he’s going to be providing us with his bipartisan view from the center.”
ABC’s “Man in the Middle” isn’t, Julia, FDL, December 9, 2007

Anyone who convince Karl Rove to do anything isn’t a) human or b) anywhere near the center. Did Michael Eisner go out into a swamp somewhere and sell his soul to the Republican devil? He sure has his minions do weird shit for them way too often.

Julia! at FDL! I’m so proud! She probably can’t remember who I am anymore. Oh well.

You readers are probably having a hard time remembering who I am, too, I’ve been pretty scare. Sorry, but I have good excuses:

The Journal of Women on Comcis - J WOC (ISSN1940-7637).

The Journal of Bloglandia - J Bloglandia (ISSN1940-7645).

And still promoting Chase and Other Stories, (ISBN 978-0-6151-6846-3) but most of the production work is done, now it’s just promo and admin.

And then sleeping and my 9-5 day job take up a little of my time…

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“In the early 1980s, Gray, who teaches European thought at the London School of Economics, was the most capable defender of Friedrich von Hayek as a social philosopher rather than just a propagandist for free-market policy. But he later became decidedly critical of any notion that the future belonged to liberal democracy. In 1989, as the Soviet Union was reforming itself out of existence, he wrote that this would not inaugurate ‘a new era of post-historical harmony’ but rather ‘a return to the classical terrain of history, a terrain of great-power rivalries, secret diplomacies, and irredentist claims and wars.’ Over the following decade, he advanced a critique of globalization that sounded, at times, profoundly anticapitalist, if by no means Marxian.

“Such an ideological itinerary seems like a calculated effort to lose friends. But whatever its twists and turns, Gray’s thought has in fact been remarkably consistent, with his journalistic writings simply framing, in the most provocative possible way, theses that have accumulated in more sedate works like ‘Enlightenment’s Wake’ (1995) and ‘Two Faces of Liberalism’ (2000). His latest book, ‘Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia,’ treats fundamentalist Islam and Western triumphalism as similar and related phenomena. This argument revisits themes Gray developed in ‘Straw Dogs,’ a volume of pensées originally published in 2002 and now reissued in paperback by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

“‘Humanity’ does not exist,’ he announced in ‘Straw Dogs.’ ‘There are only humans, driven by conflicting needs and illusions, and subject to every kind of infirmity of will and judgment.’ This may be the key to all of Gray’s thought, and it is no accident that he echoes Margaret Thatcher’s famous statement that there is no such thing as society. (As she put it, ‘there are individual men and women, and there are families’ — but nothing else.) The irreducible plurality of human ‘needs and illusions,’ Gray argues, means it is utopian to imagine that any single kind of political or social order could ever be good for everyone. ‘If there is such a thing as spontaneous social evolution,’ he writes in ‘Black Mass,’ ‘it produces institutions of many kinds.’

“Alas, conservatives have completely lost track of this crucial point, at least by Gray’s lights, which is why ‘traditional conservatism ceased to exist’ at some point over the last few decades. What has emerged instead is a faith that the marketplace and the values of liberal society are universal in principle, if not yet in geographical distribution. Resistance is futile. And if people in benighted lands resist anyway, the use of military power can force the pace of progress.”
What Price Utopia?, by Scott McLemee, NY Times, November 25, 2007

Progress? What progress?

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“Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and television news reporter Mirthala Salinas have ended their romantic relationship, two sources familiar with the situation said Friday.

“Months after revelations about the affair damaged the mayor’s political standing and devastated Salinas’ broadcasting career, the two sources said the relationship disintegrated weeks ago.

~snip~

“Villaraigosa and his wife, Corina Villaraigosa, separated in June, weeks before he confirmed that he was romantically involved with Salinas. From the moment it became public, the affair between the mayor and the rising media star had a largely harmful effect on both parties.

~snip~

“A rising star in Spanish-language television news, Salinas read on the air the news of Villaraigosa’s marital breakup on June 8 without disclosing that she had been romantically involved with the mayor for several months.

“Salinas received a two-month suspension for her handling of the situation. At the end of that suspension, she was reassigned from her post as temporary anchor to a Telemundo bureau in Riverside County. Instead of returning to her job, she quit.

~snip~

“Revelations about the affair damaged the mayor’s credibility in the eyes of some voters, particularly women, said Jaime Regalado, who heads the Edmund G. ‘Pat’ Brown Institute of Public Affairs at Cal State Los Angeles.

~snip~

“The affair even raised questions about the mayor’s name. ‘Villaraigosa’ is a merger of his name, Antonio Villar, and his wife’s maiden name, Corina Raigosa. Although the mayor’s wife filed divorce papers in June, Villaraigosa said he would not change his name back.”
L.A. mayor, reporter end their affair, sources say. Villaraigosa’s political standing was affected, and his wife has filed for divorce. Salinas was suspended, then left her job at Telemundo, by David Zahniser, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer, November 23, 2007

Has the LA Times absolutely nothing better to do? On the other hand, I’m glad he’s not changing his name since I worked hard to learn how to pronounce it correctly.

Guys, Gavin, Bill, Antonio, all of you, please, just control yourselves until you’re out of office. You’ve worked so hard for this, you’re on the right side of history, you can make a better world for all of us if you just stay smart and take it home to your wife, okay? Please. You can do what you want when you retire, and frankly, I think should, but when you retire. Have a harem, I couldn’t care less, but not when you’re still in office. Men, don’t be ninnies. Thank you for your attention.

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