Month: August 2010

The Republicans of Louisiana just nominated David Vitter to be their U.S. Senator for another six years. He got 88% of the vote. How’s that for family values? Cheat on your wife and have a prostitute dress you up in a diaper, and the social conservatives give you 88% of their votes. The only sign of weakness for Vitter is that about an equal number of people voted in the Democratic primary as in the Republican one, and that breaks a recent pattern of significantly higher voter turnout for the Republicans. Also, in Louisiana’s Third District, it appears that another teabagger beat the GOP Establishment’s chosen candidate. Teabagger Jeff Landry is hovering right at the magic 50% mark that would allow him to avoid a runoff against GOP-choice Hunt Downer. It’s highly unlikely that Downer could win a runoff though because the third candidate is a teabagger, too, and their votes will probably transfer to Landry.

So, the insanity continues with no break in sight.

Offered without comment:

Olga Sanchez, 79, of Tampa, had never been to a rally in Washington. But Sanchez, a retired administrative assistant, watches Beck on television every day. And when she heard him announce plans for the rally, Sanchez called her younger brother, a trumpet player in the National Symphony Orchestra, and said she wanted to come.

“I’m a big fan of Glenn Beck,” said Sanchez, a registered Republican, sitting in her walker in front of the memorial’s first step. “He is opening our eyes, teaching us the history we didn’t learn in school.”

I never realized what a scoundrel Theodore Bilbo was until I read his Wikipedia page. And, yet, Mississippians just get kept electing and promoting him anyway.

Accepting bribes? No problem. Hiding in a barn to avoid being served a subpoena? No sweat. Firing all the state’s college presidents and replacing them with “a realtor, a press agent, and a recent B.A. degree recipient”? Bravo. Losing the accreditation of those schools as a result? Who cares? Bankrupting the state? Let’s make him our senator.

When the Senate refused to seat him for a third-term (a feather in the cap of the Republicans who led that fight) he returned home to publish his racist manifesto: Take Your Choice: Separation or Mongrelization. A couple of choice quotes from the book should suffice to give you an idea of what Bilbo was all about:

If we sit with Negroes at our tables, if we attend social functions with them as our social equals, if we disregard segregation in all other relations, is it then possible that we maintain it fixedly in the marriage of the South’s Saxon sons and daughters? The answer must be “No.” By the absolute denial of social equality to the Negro, the barriers between the races are firm and strong. But if the middle wall of the social partition should be broken down, then the mingling of the tides of life would surely begin. It would be a slow process, but the result would be the same. And though the process be gradual, it would be none the less irresistible and inevitable. The lower strata of the white population would probably feel the first effects, and within the foreseeable future the middle and upper classes would be invaded. Then, the Southern White race, the Southern Caucasian, would be irretrievably doomed.

What is the real issue at stake? Why this determination on the part of the South to maintain the color line and to fight back with all her strength against the combined efforts of certain groups in our Nation, white and black, to break down segregation and to destroy Southern ideals and customs ? The answer is simple. The South stands for blood, for the preservation of the blood of the white race. To preserve her blood, the white South must absolutely deny social equality to the Negro regardless of what his individual accomplishments might be. This is the premise – openly and frankly stated – upon which Southern policy is based. This position is so thoroughly justified in the minds of white Southerners that it is sometimes difficult for them to comprehend the reasoning of those who seriously dispute it.

This book was written and published in 1946-47, when the horrors of the Holocaust (the logical outcome of National Socialist ideology) were freshest in the minds of Americans. Yet, Bilbo was unashamed to talk nakedly of “the blood of the white race.” But this shouldn’t really surprise us:

Most white Americans in the 1950s were opposed to interracial marriage and did not see laws banning interracial marriage as an affront to the principles of American democracy. A 1958 Gallup poll showed that 96 percent of white Americans disapproved of interracial marriage.

That is why laws banning interracial marriage outlasted all other Jim Crow prescriptions. So, this is the context in which Barack Obama Jr. was born in August of 1961. That he was able to be elected president is a minor miracle. How much has Mississippi changed? This is from yesterday.

After 30 years of barring black students from running for class president, a Mississippi public middle school, reversed a Jim Crow era policy today and announced students of all races would be allowed to run for student government.

Students at Nettleton Middle School looking to run for class president, previously needed to maintain a B average, obtain 10 signatures from their classmates – and be white.

Rules issued last week outlined the school’s rules for seeking office. Students could run for president, vice president, secretary-treasurer and reporter, but some positions were off-limits depending on race.

In all three grades, only white students could run for president. In eighth grade black students could run for vice president and reporter. In seventh grade blacks could only run for secretary-treasurer, and in sixth grade only for reporter.

There were no assigned positions for students of other races and no mention of students who are mixed race.

The President of the United States is now eligible to be a class president in this public school in Mississippi (provided he can maintain a ‘B’ average), but he wasn’t eligible two days ago.

Mississippi has come a long way, but this country still has a long way to go. And it isn’t an accident that the modern day Bilbos share with him certain characteristics, like an uneven and undistinguished scholastic record, problems with the law, and even substance abuse. America seems to produce hucksters like Bilbo, Limbaugh, Beck, and Palin on a regular basis. The frightening thing is how easily they find success, both financially and electorally.

These people are who we thought they were.

by watching YouTube videos of Martin Luther King’s speech and going about my daily routine. I feel sorry for anyone who feels compelled to watch The Beckoning, for to me it means they are a lost soul, damaged by the drumbeat of disinformation that is the sole reason for the existence of Fox News, Beck’s true homeland.

For someone to watch the 8/28 rally by Beck and Palin and whomever else is attempting to “restore honor” to America and then send in money to help our Veterans (after all the costs of the Restore America rally are recouped first, of course) has to be willing to suspend the disbelief necessary to swallow the fear and hate filled message that a cheap carnie huckster is selling. A man who is a modern day version of Elmer Gantry, using religion to empower his own lust for political power and monetary gain:

Speaking at an event at the Kennedy Center Friday night, Beck emphasized the religious aspect of his message, The Washington Post reported.

“We are 12 hours away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America,” Beck said, according to the Post. “It has nothing to do with this city or politics. It has everything to do with God almighty.”

“This is the beginning of the great awakening of America … We must give voice to what God says we must do,” he added. “My message to you tonight is stand where He wants you to stand and trust in the Lord. If He tells you to do it, do it. If you can’t figure it out, He will. Just do it.”

Watch this video from Media Matters of Beck’s Kennedy Center performance last night. Zero in on how Beck uses the idea that people of faith were behind all the great movements in America from ending slavery to the Civil Right movement.

Of course, what Beck fails to mention is that most of his followers had ancestors whose faith preached that slavery was correct and biblically approved. Some representative quotes:

Every hope of the existence of church and state, and of civilization itself, hangs upon our arduous effort to defeat the doctrine of Negro suffrage – Robert Dabney, a prominent 19th century Southern Presbyterian pastor

… the right of holding slaves is clearly established in the Holy Scriptures, both by precept and example – Richard Furman, President, South Carolina Baptist Convention

For it was the faith of the abolitionists in the North, whose descendants are the Unitarian-Universalists (indeed, Ralph Waldo Emerson was a prominent abolitionist who began as a Unitarian Minister) and the United Church of Christ (i.e., liberal churches) that opposed slavery and led the fight to bring an end to its atrocities. The same churches who later helped lead the movements for female suffrage and women’s rights, and in the modern era gay rights. The people of faith who see equal value in all God’s children regardless of color, gender or sexual orientation.

On the other hand it was the Southern Baptists and other white churches of the South who supported slavery that are the forerunners of today’s Christian Fundamentalist Movement.

By the late 1970s and in particular by the 1980 campaign of Ronald Reagan for the American presidency, fundamentalists entered a new phase. They became nationally prominent as offering an answer for what many regarded as a supreme social, economic, moral, and religious crisis in America. They identified a new and more pervasive enemy, secular humanism, which they believed was responsible for eroding churches, schools, universities, the government, and above all families. They fought all enemies which they considered to be offspring of secular humanism, evolutionism, political and theological liberalism, loose personal morality, sexual perversion, socialism, communism, and any lessening of the absolute, inerrant authority of the Bible. They called Americans to return to the fundamentals of the faith and the fundamental moral values of America.

Leading this phase was a new generation of television and print fundamentalists, notably Jerry Falwell, Tim La Haye, Hal Lindsey, and Pat Robertson. Their base was Baptist and southern, but they reached into all denominations. They benefited from three decades of post World War II fundamentalist and evangelical expansion through evangelism, publishing, church extension, and radio ministry.

Beck distorts the truth again when he appropriates the legacy of the Black Southern Churches and their allies from the North, Jewish and Liberal Christian congregations, who led the fight against segregation and discrimination against African Americans during the Civil Rights era, while the white Southern Churches still defended Jim Crow and the right to discriminate against Blacks in all aspects of life.

These are the same churches that remain predominantly segregated today:

Sociologist Michael Emerson estimates only 5.4 percent of U.S. churches are racially integrated, meaning no one group makes up more than 80 percent of the congregation.

“If you go back historically, the leaders of denominations have been denouncing racism and separation for at least 100 years, and the people in the pews have been ignoring those pronouncements for at least 100 years,” he said. “There’s a complete disconnect.”

Just as the nation’s sanctuaries are segregated, many of the nation’s denominations remain relatively racially separate. A look at statistics for some of the nation’s predominantly white Christian denominations indicates there sometimes has been only a 1 percent or 2 percent increase in the number of African-Americans in the last decade or so. Officials of predominantly black denominations say white membership remains a mere “sprinkling.”

Beck wears his religion as a cheap suit, just as he uses his lies about the nature of his “movement” being a revival and a renewal of the cause of “civil rights.” His appeal is predominantly to conservative whites, and his idea of civil rights excludes Hispanics, atheists, Muslims and other non-Judeo-Christian religions, LGBT communities, liberals and most African Americans (i.e., those who don’t vote Republican). In short, Beck is a modern version of that classic American archetype, the snake oil salesman, the con man up on cheap stage whose real product is himself.

More than his rivals, Beck has led the way in turning himself into a multifaceted brand. Besides the radio and TV shows, he goes on concert tours, he write books, he sells fans access to an “Insider” account for $74.95 a year and he sells his own advertising on his website.

“He’s a model for a 21st century talk show host and businessman,” Harrison said.

Well that and Goldline.

It has become almost universally accepted in Washington that government needs to work with the private sector in various capacities in order to function effectively.  The track record from recent years suggests exactly the opposite.

For more on pruning back executive power see Pruning Shears.

No Associated Press content was harmed in the writing of this post

On last Sunday’s “Meet the Press” Michigan governor Jennifer Granholm discussed the economy, and did so with an unmistakable emphasis:

smartly, strategically, surgically intervening to invest with the private sector
[snip]
smartly intervening with the private sector to be able to do the breakthrough technologies that the private sector doesn’t have the funds to be able to do
[snip]
the government has to partner with the private sector to create jobs
[snip]
we have 16 companies now in Michigan just in the past year because we partnered with the private sector

And with perhaps unintended accuracy:

Strategic investment with the private sector is what works in the 20th century.

That one of the more prominent Democratic officeholders in the nation took such pains to emphasize the need to partner with the private sector is very revealing.  It goes way beyond, say, offering tax breaks to encourage outcomes that policymakers favor.  In many cases (Granholm’s illustration included) it means providing glorified bribes to get entrenched industries to ostensibly support goals it is openly hostile to.  If government is going to get involved so directly, wouldn’t it make more sense to identify promising new actors that have embraced those breakthrough technologies – and help them get across the valley of death?

Her comments are of a piece with the larger belief that government needs to have a warm and fuzzy relationship with large corporations.  The reasoning for it usually goes something like this: If we cozy up to them and find out what they really want, they will be extra productive.  They in turn will hire lots of new people, pay higher wages and return handsome profits to shareholders.

There never seems to be any consideration for what happens if instead they lay off people due to the productivity gains, drive their existing workforce harder, perhaps even endangering them, and funnel the profits into executive compensation.  In a way it compares to trickle down economics:  In both cases those at the lower end of the economic scale are supposed to be beneficiaries, and in both cases that end is achieved by showering the privileged with largesse and assuming they will share it.

The eager-to-please attitude extends to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), where its site proudly proclaims it “is interested in partnering with the stakeholders to further its public health mission.”  The latest revelations about the egg recall are just additional confirmation that the agency subordinates regulation to happy relations with an industry it is supposed to be monitoring.

These problems are not new, either.  Perhaps the most egregious recent example came several years ago when then-Deputy Commissioner Lester Crawford testified: “Referring to the industry as a client or as a customer is sort of part of the new emphasis on stakeholder involvement.”  Crawford then went on to a brief but revealing stint as FDA head.  The conflicts and perverse incentives that characterized his tenure can be seen at state and local levels too, with similarly unpleasant results.

There is sometimes a sinister aspect to these kinds of “collaborations.”  Even before 9/11 the government leaned on telecommunication companies to assist them in spying on citizens.  Telecoms are free to hand their data over to the government – and the government does not need a search warrant.  Clearly it is much more convenient for a private company to hand all its records over than to go in front of a judge and argue for the right to get a single individual’s data.

Now that it is clear that there will be retaliation if they do not play ball, phone companies are downright eager to provide authorities with terribly useful tools for digging in to people’s lives.  The courts have pushed back in some cases, but the White House is aggressively moving to widen the pipeline of information flowing to the federal government.  The continuity with the previous administration is unmistakable, and it suggests one of those dynamics that is not so much Democrat versus Republican but establishment versus outsider.  After all, it makes life easier for everyone inside the Beltway if the lobbyists, regulators and politicians all get along splendidly.

Government should not have any kind of official position towards the private sector, and it certainly should not have the kind of solicitous stance it has so energetically cultivated in recent years.  It should simply set up the rules, expect them to be followed, and regulate with all appropriate energy.  Its stance should by default be neutral; for businesses and industries with a pattern of bad behavior it should become increasingly antagonistic.  The risks of the friendlier approach are all too plain.

Hello again painting fans.

This week I will be taking a one week sidetrip from the shingled Cape May house.

In the past week I’ve been lucky to spend some time in Santa Fe.  It’s been many years since I was last there.  While there, I was able to visit many art galleries as well as the Indian Market stalls.  And I was inspired to do my own small painting.

As in years past, I carried a small canvas in my carry on bag as well as a single brush.  This year I also carried a few small tubes of paint.  Fortunately, TSA showed no objection.  I painted this 4×4 inch canvas in about 3 hours with HGTV on in the background one evening.  (My cable package doesn’t include HGTV, so this was something novel for me.)  The result of my efforts is seen in the photo directly below.

 

That’s about it for now. Next week I’ll have more progress to show you on the Cape May painting. See you then. As always, feel free to add photos of your own work in the comments section below.

Earlier paintings in this series can be seen here.

While Newt Gingrich is clearly wrong that Nazis could be legally precluded from putting up a sign or billboard near the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC, I think it’s a valid question whether that ought to be the case. If I were to argue in favor of the government’s right to ban Nazi signage (near the Holocaust museum, or anyplace else) I would do so on the grounds that Nazi messages and symbols are obscene, just like graphic sexual images or images of grisly violence. In general, I am First Amendment absolutist, and I begrudgingly support the right of people to say anti-Semitic or white supremacist shit. So, I wouldn’t ultimately argue such a case on the behalf of anti-Nazis, even though I hate Nazis as much as anyone. But I think an argument can be made. I know Europe has laws against promoting Nazi ideology, although I confess that I am not familiar with those laws in any detail. Whenever I have read about them I have been grateful that our courts haven’t gone down that slippery slope.

But it sure is a fine line when we’re talking about evoking Nazi history, ideology, or imagery. A Nazi flag is an obscene symbol to a lot of people. Would you feel more violated by seeing a billboard with an erect penis on your way to work or a billboard displaying a swastika in a positive manner?

I refuse to get used to this.

In remembrance:

Obama is doing the functional  equivalent of fighting our economic decline from a foxhole ,i.e., from a defensive position -as opposed to commanding  the battlefield. And worst still , Obama has either chosen or been assigned  an economic team ,whose chief skill-set for reviving the economy ,appears to be ,at best, making the foxhole deeper -if not converting it into a ditch .  

Fullerg

What is being resisted in the words of one Palestinian activist is Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestinian villages in the Jordan Valley. That’s the portion of the West Bank shown to the right in light yellow in the map below. When Netanyahu speaks of ‘no preconditions’ for starting peace negotiations, what he really means is that, not only will settlement expansion resume full throttle, but ethnic cleansing in the West Bank and East Jerusalem will likewise continue.  

The Jordan Valley is located in a stretch of land adjacent to the Jordan river up to the base of a mountain ridge on the eastern side of the West Bank. It runs from the Sea of Galilee in the north to the Dead Sea in the south.
Israel has been slowly confiscating land in the Jordan valley since 1967 by way of house demolitions, evictions, the restriction of water and so on so that village subsistence through agriculture and livestock is made impossible. Now that the Jordan Valley has been openly claimed by Israel on false grounds of security, entire villages are being demolished and their people displaced as in the village of Al-Farisya, which the Israeli army blew awat on July 19, destroying over 76 structures and leaving entire families homeless, half of whom were children. To emphasize the point, the military destroyed their meager belongings such as mattresses, furniture, personal effects, bread ovens, and tents, and anything else of use to them. The whole community was obliged to move once again, but where? We are not told. Since 2000 alone, 30 percent of Bedouin families have been displaced, some as many as four times.

Netanyahu is presently selling a bill of goods that the Jordan Valley is needed for Israel’s security, but its annexation by Israel virtually guarantees that any Palestinian state can only exist in an Apartheid configuration within a Greater Israel (the Likud dream), without its own borders. In the meantime, the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from to-be-annexed areas seems a priority and continues out of sight.

Luisa Morgantini, former vice president of the European parliament, was interviewed by a Ma’an journalist upon her return from a recent tour of the Jordan Valley where she led an Italian peace delegation.

Reporter: You visited to the Jordan Valley twice in one week, just days after the Israeli army once again demolished homes of Bedouin communities in the north. What did you see?

Morgantini: If Area C, 60 percent of the occupied West Bank, is a synonym for expulsion and annexation for Israeli colonization, in the Jordan Valley all this is greatly intensified. A silent displacement is being carried out by Israel, through demolitions, evictions, land confiscation, and denied access to water resources. These policies have promoted the establishment of over 30 illegal settlements.

Even before the [1993] Oslo agreements, Israel had already been aiming to create a seam zone between the West Bank and Jordan in line with the Allon Plan, through the annexation of this 2,400 square kilometers of fertile land extending from the Green Line to the Dead Sea. An area cleansed of its inhabitants today is more easily annexed tomorrow.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has always stated that Israel will never give up the Jordan Valley, and a similar refrain characterized Olmert’s election campaign in 2006. This exact intent to maintain control of the area, beyond being theorized in the Allon plan, was also practiced by Israel during the First Intifada, when Palestinian residents in Nablus under curfew were blocked from reaching their properties and harvesting their fields located in the Jordan Valley. Now this area is a closed zone.

(Read on at the link above)

Morgantini’s interview is extensive and so reality-oriented that it only adds to the skepticism already aroused by the upcoming ‘direct talks’ Netanyahu and Abbas are about to engage in.

Gaza is not the only Palestinian territory where inhumane treatment of Palestinians is the rule. In some cases, it is far worse in the West Bank, in places like the Jordan Valley. But as Morgantini reports, the “silent expulsion” is being countered by “a strong resistance,” in the person of Fathi Khdirat, who leads a non-violent resistance group. As Fathi was quoted saying: “To exist is to resist.”