Zagrobelny

Pete Hoekstra and the Yellow Peril

2012-02-07T16:28:00.000-08:00

In a 1998 episode of The Simpsons, Krusty the Clown appears at a comedy festival along with some comedians who aren't prehistoric vaudeville throwbacks. Krusty's act is, to him, classic "A material" and it leaves him baffled when it fails to elicit hysterical guffaws, while the audience is dumbfounded at Krusty's juvenile and obviously racist buffoonery.

It wasn't their intent, but the writers of The Simpsons have provided us with a metaphor for looking at some of the GOP's most virulent hate speech. We are the confused and alienated audience confronted with immature bigotry while wingnuts are rolling on the floor laughing at what is, to them, the Funniest Thing Ever. We've seen it again and again: Obama Bucks, a GOP candidate calling Energy Secretary Steven Chu "Steven Chow Mein"... And then there's this:

No doubt you've already heard of this, which immediately became the Most Racist Super Bowl Ad Ever.

Hoekstra's ad is racist, but it's a mistake to write it off as stupid, as it is a brazen act of Machiavellian animal cunning. The ad was, of course, immediately denounced as racist, and attacking as racist won't work, as many commentators have already noted, because that is exactly what he wants. Hoekstra's already refused to apologize and now he gets to play victim and complain about political correctness. It was clearly a calculated act designed to elicit a negative response. He's already sent out fund-raising mail stating "the liberals are doing what they always do - crying racism." And the wingnuts, who are already rolling on the floor laughing at the cleverness of Hoekstra's minstrel ad, don't see what all the fuss is about. They will turn to each other and say things like "the liberals are doing what they always do - crying racism" and nod sagely at each other in agreement. After all, in their world, the only real racism is when Chris Rock can use the n-word and they can't, which is a violation of Martin Luther King's dream or something.

This ad reminds me of the late 80s and early 90s, back when Japan was the terrifying foreign economic enemy. Hysterical complaints about the Japanese buying up American real estate like Rockefeller Center were rampant. Films and books were filled with cyberpunk dystopias of yakuzas and hackers stalking crowded city streets lit with neon Kanji. And conservative reactionary Michael Crichton captured the zeitgeist in Rising Sun by depicting the Japanese as sinister scheming businessmen out to bury our gingers in concrete tombs.

And of course we all know how that turned out. I for one honor our current Japanese overlords. Oh, wait...This suggests another line of attack. Instead of the being drawn into the racism trap, as a number of commentators have already suggested, Hoekstra and his ad should be attacked on the basis of the content, namely his flimsy scapegoating of the Chinese economic menace. James Fallows quotes a Republican strategist:

The more interesting angle is one of hypocrisy. Hoekstra voted for permanent MFN for China in 1999, and China's creditor status vis-à-vis the U.S. simply reflects all those good-paying union jobs Hoekstra shipped there (yes, I know international economics is more complicated than that, but would certainly put Hoekstra on the defensive.)

Instead of playing by the script, hit him hard on sending jobs overseas. Get his position on Solyndra on the record and then hammer him for capitulating to China on green jobs. Of course, all of this will draw complaints about how the Democrats don't support "free enterprise" and are engaging in "class warfare", but those are the complaints you hear when you have a winning message.

Machine of Death: The Cat or the Piano

2011-11-04T12:10:00.000-07:00

First, a word of thanks to the trio behind Machine of Death, David Malki, Ryan North, and Matthew Bennardo. I promise not to vandalize your Wikipedia articles.

When I was younger and had young fever dreams of being an accomplished and celebrated author, I read lots of books and submission guidelines. All of them were realistically discouraging. This is appropriate and necessary, to dissuade the talentless from fooling themselves and the cliched from, well, being cliched. But for the Nick Drakes of the world, the shy but talented who take the worst toll from rejection, it can sap them of their will to create and rob the world of the chance to experience their gifts. What I found at Machine of Death was the opposite of this, the most open and encouraging process to novice creators imaginable. While I have no illusions that I have anything approaching the talent of Nick Drake, this openess helped me get excited about this project and start writing again, something I haven't done in far too long. Regardless of their rejection and whether or not I actually ever write anything worth publishing somewhere, I'll be grateful for that and glad I was part of this process. Rejection is hard, and usually lonely. But, at least for those of us on Twitter, it was a shared experience, and that was exciting and dulled the blow when it finally came. Maybe we can all start a message board somewhere and keep that sense of shared encouragement going.

The Cat or the Piano

     “Welcome back. I’m Charlie Rose, and tonight we’re discussing what has been colloquially become known as The Machine. We’re here tonight with two outspoken critics of The Machine, Rabbi Moshe Telushkin, ethicist at the Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies in Chicago, and Dr. Randall Dobrzynski, physicist at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois. Rabbi, you’ve written extensively about The Machine and its implications for free will.”
     “Yes, free will and personal responsibility. Religions have long wrestled with the question of free will in a world preordained by an all-powerful God, and I do not believe that the question we are discussing today differs significantly in its moral dimensions. It has long been a tenet of many religious faiths that despite their actions being preordained by God or another deity, people are still responsible for their moral choices and their consequences. In Christianity, the most notorious example is Judas, who despite his actions being not only preordained but absolutely necessary for Christianity itself to even exist, is still considered responsible for those actions and as a such is universally reviled and condemned to eternal suffering.
     “So,” the rabbi continued, “when confronted with this Machine which identifies your preordained fate, many act as if their actions have been removed from the arena of moral choice and responsibility. They can react in quite an irresponsible fashion: alcohol and chemical abuse, reckless sexual acts, ignoring their physical safety in a myriad of ways. What they also ignore is their responsibility for these reckless choices and the fact that they still remain moral actors.”
     “Dr. Dobrzynski,” Charlie asked, startling the physicist slightly. “You’ve discussed the scientific aspects of the Machine and the issue of moral choice.”
     “Yes, well,” Randall said, before clearing his throat. “The Rabbi and I differ when it comes to the issue of a preordained fate, but like him I’m also concerned about people removing themselves from making moral choices. In a way, they’re giving up their free will. It’s in a metaphorical way, but I’m concerned that they’re also doing it in quite a literal way as well.”
     “A literal way?”
     “Well, instead of just giving up responsibility for their choices, they’re also giving up their choices, or at least one very important choice. I’m not sure that the Machine is telling people what will happen. I think it’s deciding what will happen.”
     “That’s a bold statement. What’s the scientific basis for that conclusion?” Charlie asked.
     “At the risk of oversimplifying: There are, basically, subatomic particles that exist in multiple states simultaneously and you can’t know what state the particle is until you observe it. There’s a thought experiment that helps explain this, a scenario that serves as a kind of scientific metaphor, something we’ve been using in quantum physics for about a century, devised by Erwin Schrödinger, a German– um, I mean Austrian physicist.
     “So,” Randall continued, gesturing along with his words, “you have a cat in a box. In the box with the cat is a lethal gas that’s activated by particle decay. If the particle is in one state, it releases the gas and kills the cat. If the particle is in another state, the cat is fine. But you don’t know which until you open the box. In a sense, the cat is both alive and dead at the same time, because that choice hasn’t yet been made.”
     “Maybe we should keep the box closed,” Charlie suggested.
     “That’s precisely my point, Charlie. By not opening the box, the fate of the cat is still an open question. It’s the same with the Machine. By opening the box, so to speak, we’re not only learning our fate, but deciding it as well.”
     “But,” the Rabbi interjected, “if this Machine is literally, as you say, deciding our fate, wouldn’t that decision require some action on the part of the Machine? After all, you need the gas to slay the cat, and the particle to activate the gas. So whatever action the Machine is taking, you could measure that, couldn’t you?”
     “Yes,” Randall agreed, “and that’s part of the theory that we’re investigating. It’s why we’ve reopened some of the particle accelerators at Fermilab. We’re hoping to measure particle activity in some way.”
     “Stephen Hawking has theorized that it had something to do with quantum ‘strings’,” Charlie pointed out.
     “Yes, string theory is a definite possibility.”
     “So,” Charlie asked, raising an eyebrow, “have you measured any activity yet from the Machine?”
     “No. No, we haven’t.”

     “So you’ve come down here to see how real science is done?” Randall quipped when Harvey entered the room. Dr. Harvey Doyle was the head of Administration at Fermilab, in charge of money and grants and paperwork and everything else that Randall hated about the practice of science. By all rights, he probably should have hated Harvey too, but despite his best efforts, he was very fond of the jovial administrator.
     “Nah, I gave that up ages ago,” Harvey said with a grin. “That sort of thing is best left to the experts like you.”
     “Flattery, Harvey? Now I know there’s something wrong.”
     “Well, there’s this thing,” the administrator continued, his smile faltering. Whenever Harvey started a sentence like that, Randall knew there was trouble. Hell, there was usually trouble when Harvey did as little as walk in the room.
     “There’s been a bit of...controversy about your appearance on Charlie Rose,” he explained.
     “Really? I didn’t think anyone watched Charlie Rose,” Randall replied flatly.
     “You’re right, probably nobody outside of pseudointellectuals and insomniacs. But there is a short YouTube clip of highlights that’s proven to be quite popular.”
     “Of course there is,” the physicist sighed. There was a Youtube clip of everything these days. “So what’s happened? Is PETA campaigning to save Schrödinger’s cat?”
     “You know, it’s one thing to sternly disapprove of the Machine in abstract like those mothers in the Anti-MoD League or an old fuddyduddy like that rabbi.”
     “Fuddyduddy? Only fuddyduddies use words like fuddyduddy, Harvey.”
     “What I’m saying is the ‘kids these days’ routine is one thing, but it’s quite another thing to say that the Machine literally is a malevolent force. Fox News is running clips of The Exorcist.”
     “The day I pay any attention to what-”
     “I know,” Harvey interrupted, “but it’s gone a bit beyond the lunatic fringe now. We’ve had thousands of complaints. There are even protests.”
     “When the hell did all of this happen? It’s only been three days.”
     “You’ve been in the lab, Randall. You do tend to get a bit absorbed.”
     “True,” Randall conceded.
     “I’m even hearing grumblings from the grant agencies and insurance companies,” Harvey said, his tone becoming more serious.
     “What? What the hell does that have to do with anything?”
     “Let’s be honest, here. You’re already considered an insurance risk - and a bit of a loose cannon, might I add - since you’re one of about seven adults in this country who hasn’t used the Machine yet.”
     “So that’s what it is. Everyone else is so miserable about the quality of their impending demises that they want me to be miserable too.”
     “That very well may be, but if this thing gets even more out of hand and the money starts drying up...You might have to be miserable, too. You might have to use the Machine.”
     “That’ll be the fucking day.”

     The day came. Randall found himself in the Machine’s room, muttering to himself while rolling up his sleeve and glaring at whatever he could get his eyes on. “You don’t have to do that, sir,” Suresh, the Machine operator, told him.
     Randall ignored him.
     “And all those goddamn grant boards can go fuck themselves. They’ll come back begging to give me cash when I crack the entanglement problem.”
     Harvey just nodded, silently.
     “And those fucking insurance companies that are running our lives a lot more than this fucking Machine does. All those assholes on Fox are gonna crow that I’m going back on what I said, that I’m a fucking flip-flopper. I’m only doing this for the insurance. I want everybody to know that. Harvey, make sure everybody knows that.”
     “We know, Randall,” Harvey replied. “I’ll make sure everyone knows.”
     “My son needs that insurance. My fucking ex-wife sure as hell won’t be able to give it to him.” Randall pointed at the administrator angrily. It wasn’t Harvey’s fault, he knew, but he had to find somewhere to direct his fury. “Makes sure my son gets all of it. I don’t want a fucking penny to go to her.”
     “They don’t make pennies anymore, Randall.”
     “You know what I fucking mean!”
     “Don’t worry, Randall,” Harvey replied, attempting something close to a soothing tone. “It’s all taken care off. The paperwork’s done and the trust fund is already set up.”
     There was silence, before Randall let out a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding. “Okay, let’s get this over with.”
     Suresh wheeled the bulky black mass of the Machine closer and pointed to a small round opening. “Just stick your finger in there,” he stated and wiped down Randall’s index finger with an alcohol pad. There was a moment of hesitation and then Randall plunged his finger inside. He winced as the needle pricked him and yanked his finger away. The sooner he was far, far away from this goddamn machine, the better.
     All three men were silent as the Machine did its work. A green light appeared in the blackness, and a white card spit out of a slot on the side. Randall glanced at the other two men, and slowly reached for the card.
     “Oh, what the fuck is this?” he roared, resisting the overwhelming urge to rip the paper to shreds by handing it to Harvey. The other men looked at the small, crisp white card, which read in bold black lettering: THE CAT OR THE PIANO.
     “Is that a band name?” asked Suresh. Harvey caught himself before he laughed.
     “This doesn’t even make any fucking sense,” Randall raved, beginning to pace back and forth. “There must be some kind of malfunction. The Machine tells you what happens; it doesn’t give you a fucking choice. That’s the whole point of the damn thing! You get an answer. No one’s ever gotten a question before.” Before he had even finished, Suresh had the back of the Machine open and was already preparing a diagnostic test.
     After a few minutes of uncomfortable silence, Harvey spoke. “It’s not a question.”
     “What?” Randall glanced up from the spot on his shoes he’d been studying intently, in an effort to not walk out the door immediately.
     “Look, there’s no question mark. So it’s not a question, it’s a statement.”
     “I doubt the Machine is a fucking stickler for grammar.”
     “Why not? We know that some of the time it issues results that are cryptic, even ironic. Results that are ambiguous enough to be interpreted incorrectly by the recipient– a message with a twist, you might say. Maybe you think it’s a question, but it’s really not. I think it’s a statement.”
     “A statement of what?”
     “I don’t know, maybe it’s identifying a particular cat?” Harvey proposed with a shrug.
     “A particular cat? Who the fuck would name their cat ‘Or the Piano’?”
     “Salvador Dalí?” the administrator suggested, fighting back a wry grin.
     Randall glared. “I’ll tell you who would name their cat ‘Or the Piano’. Fucking liberal arts majors, that’s who. In fact, I bet they’re behind this whole Machine thing. Who the hell else would relish ironic deaths except for people who were force fed a diet of ancient Greek drama? They’re just mad because they can’t get real jobs.”
     “And quantum physicist is a real job?”
     “Real fucking funny, Harvey. Now when Suresh is done hooking this thing up to electrodes, let’s try it again and see if we can get a sane result this time.”
     hey did. The result was the same.

     Randall didn’t visit downtown Batavia very often; there was little to see and even less that interested him. But grant money was still hard to get and he was making little progress in the lab, so he had taken to long walks to see if he could puzzle out things in his head. On one of these trips, about two years after his Machine reading, on a downtown sidewalk he walked past two delivery men pulling on a rope which led to a piano suspended in the air next to a second story window.
     Three thoughts went through Randall’s head in rapid succession. First was a burst of equations he hadn’t used in years, filling his head with torque and strain and vectors. Then, he thought that it was odd that they still delivered pianos this way, like you might see in an old Warner Brothers cartoon. With the third thought, his eyes went wide.
     He was no longer under the piano, but he instinctively turned the other direction and found himself faced with a fat orange cat strolling across the sidewalk as if it were his own little feline kingdom.
     Randall ran straight into the street, cackling both in fear and in pleasure at his own cleverness in rejecting the choice presented to him. There was a third option, one free from pondering the cryptic message on that little white card every time he saw a fucking Steinway or his neighbor’s little grey kitten. He’d be free from the goddamn question the Machine had given him. The Machine would be wrong.
     Randall didn’t feel what happened next, but he heard the screech of tires, the shattering of glass, and the sound of his own body hitting the pavement with a sickening thump. The last thing he saw was that orange cat staring at him from the sidewalk with what he swore was an unmistakable grin.
     You fucking bastard, he thought.

This week in awesome: Cookie Monster, heroin, corn dogs, and soulless employers

2011-08-20T08:21:00.000-07:00

Perhaps the most perfect mashup ever:

Pictures of politicians eating:

The last episode of This American Life featured Cole Lindbergh, perhaps the most enthusiastic amusement park games manager in the history of time. Lindbergh's preposterous enthusiasm is infectious, but you also emphasize with Lindbergh's dilemma about having a job you thoroughly enjoy and are amazingly good at, but that job offers no opportunities for life or career advancement and your employer is institutionally incapable of recognizing or rewarding your efforts and skills. If there was any sense at all, this guy would be a vice president or at least a regional training manager.

Also first heard on This American Life may be what is a perfect joke by comedian Kumail Nanjiani. It holds up on repeat viewings and I still marvel at the craftsmanship of it. Hopefully we'll see a lot more of this guy.

Remembering Robert Novak, Douchebag of Liberty

2011-08-18T16:24:00.000-07:00

Robert Novak was a rumpled, absent-minded political reporter in the late 50s and early 60s, frequently seen forgetting to shave or tie his shoes or even sticking lit cigarettes in his pockets. He teamed up with button-downed reporter Rowland Evans to become the Laverne and Shirley of political commentators, running an inside baseball column and political report together from 1963 to Evans' death in 2001. So eagerly they printed leaks and fresh information that didn't turn out so well they were nicknamed "Evans and No Facts". Novak later became a frequent presence of dyspeptic misogyny in the early days of cable news, at one point even declaring that the sight of homeless people on television news ruined his Thanksgiving dinner. It's not for nothing that he was nicknamed "The Prince of Darkness".

Novak will likely be best remembered for revealing the identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame in 2003. Members of the Bush administration leaked her identity to Novak in retaliation for her husband Joe Wilson publicly demolished the line pushed by the administration that Iraq was seeking uranium from Niger. Despite the fact that this revelation outed Plame, her CIA cover organization, the other CIA operatives working for that organization, and all of their informants, no one was charged or convicted of this crime, excepting Scooter Libby's perjury conviction. Novak doubled down and insisted he'd done nothing wrong because "left-wing critics" were meanie pants to him. One persistent critic was Jon Stewart of The Daily Show, who awarded Novak the "Congressional Medal of Douchebaggery."

In 2008, Novak hit an 86 year old pedestrian with his black Corvette convertible. Despite the fact that the poor guy (who thankfully escaped with minor injuries) bounced off Novak's windshield, Novak claimed he never saw him. After a lifetime of reckless driving, speeding citations, douchebaggery, and not giving a shit about anyone, many concluded he was lying. But a few days later, Novak was diagnosed with a brain tumor. He died a little over a year later, on August 18, 2009.

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Nevermore to the Edgar Allan Poe House and Museum?

2011-08-08T17:57:00.000-07:00

The New York Times reports that The Edgar Allan Poe House and Museum faces possible closure. The House has lost its $85,000 annual subsidy from the city of Baltimore and is limping forward by draining its reserve funds. It would be a loss, to be sure, but I'm wondering how much we'll really lose here.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a steadfast advocate for saving and archiving as much as we can, and for the government providing as much funds as are necessary to accomplish this. But I'm wondering if it's really feasible to save every house lived in by every prominent writer? Poe is most associated with Baltimore and died there, but at the end of his life he was living in New York and that house is preserved. His childhood home in Virginia is a successful museum and a Pennsylvania home is operated by the National Park Service.

It would be a loss to Baltimore's heritage, but let's look at precisely what's being lost. Some early key works like "Berenice" were likely written here, but none of his famous works. Do we really need to see where Poe may have written "The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall"? And there are no artifacts of note in the House. Much of what is on display are reproductions alongside authentic artifacts of dubious significance such as a lock of his hair and a telescope that he may have used.

The problem is that the museum is not and likely can never be self-sustaining. It's in an out of the way location in the middle of a housing project. (The Times has a wonderful photo of a Poe reenactor in front of the house juxtaposed by some residents on the stoop in the background.) New exhibits won't cut it, you're not going to drive traffic into the middle of The Wire without a more serious and safer draw. Unless they can get an adjoining property (like that vacant lot you can see across the street on Google street view) for event space and parking, self-sufficiency will never be an option. And given that they can't even get funding to stay open much longer from donors or the city, I doubt that kind of investment, as smart as it may be, will be forthcoming. Baltimore has more pressing things to spend its money on these days, unfortunately.

One of the Poe society officers said that a hope is that "the city comes to its senses and realizes they’re not saving a lot of money, so they might as well keep running it." Even if the museum closes its doors, the house will still have to be preserved. Future renovations will cost a lot more in the future, and hopefully the city will be sensible enough to take appropriate steps to make sure the house remains intact. It might be cheaper just to keep the place open and let the volunteers do all the work of keeping it up.

Vince Foster and Travelgate - 18 Years Later and Nothing Has Changed

2011-07-20T12:26:00.001-07:00

In his autobiography My Life, Bill Clinton wrote of his childhood friend Vince Foster:

And I used to play in the backyard with a boy whose yard adjoined mine. He lived with two beautiful sisters in a bigger, nicer house than ours. We used to sit on the grass for hours, throwing his knife in the ground and learning to make it stick. His name was Vince Foster. He was kind to me and never lorded it over me the way so many older boys did with younger ones. He grew up to be a tall, handsome, wise, good man. He became a great lawyer, a strong supporter early in my career, and Hillary's best friend at the Rose Law Firm. Our families socialized in Little Rock, mostly at his house, where his wife, Lisa, taught Chelsea to swim. He came to the White House with us, and was a voice of calm and reason in those crazy early months.

Hillary Clinton recalls him as well in her autobiography, Living History:

Vince was one of the best lawyers I've ever known and one of the best friends I've ever had. If you remember Gregory Peck’s performance as Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird, you can picture Vince. He actually looked the part, and his manner was similar: steady, courtly,. sharp but understated, the sort of person you would want around in times of trouble.

“Those crazy early months” is a bit of an understatement. Back in 1993, David Shaw of the Los Angeles Times wrote "but perhaps never in our nation's history--certainly not in its recent history--has a President so early in his term been subjected to a greater barrage of negative media coverage than Bill Clinton endured in his first 239 days in office" and quotes an earlier Washington Post story: "The pundits have stuck a fork in this Administration and decided it's very nearly done." In this time of permanent Republican obstructionism and the Teabagger Days of Rage, it’s easy to forget how relentless and unprecedented the assaults on the Clinton administration were, and how they created the template for what’s happening to the Obama administration.

One of the opening salvos was the Travelgate scandal, which seems pretty small potatoes, and in retrospect astonishing in how much coverage this story, which affected a whopping seven federal employees, received in the press.

The White House Travel Office is responsible for making travel arrangements for the members of the media who follow the President around, then bills the media organizations accordingly. For years, it had been in a state of disarray; as far back as the Reagan administration financial misdeeds were alleged but nothing had been done. Vince Foster ordered an audit by the firm KPMG Peat Marwick. The firm investigated but was unable to actually do an audit since the Travel Office barely had anything that you would recognize as bookkeeping and piled a decade’s worth of records in the closet. A KPMG representative called it an “ungodly mess”. There was no competitive bidding and the Office’s director, Billy Dale, relied on a single charter company. Office money was going in and out of his personal bank account and some five figures were unaccounted for. The Clinton administration asked the FBI to investigate.

What happened next seems perfectly obvious and reasonable. New presidential administrations typically clean house (the Obama administration is still trying to get positions filled!) and any organization or business in any field would also typically clean house when confronted with such mismanagement. So the seven employees of the White House Travel Office were all fired.

Unfortunately, what should have been clear cut was muddied by the involvement of two Clinton supporters in the travel business who agitated for reorganization of the travel office: Catherine Cornelius, a distant cousin of Bill Clinton whose World Wide Travel briefly took over the Travel Office, and Harry Thomason, a Clinton friend and supporter who was a partner in the air charter company TRM. This gave the GOP the opportunity to create a scandal out of this, which they took with relish. But for this to be a scandal you have to first insist that no person or business ever lobby the government for personal gain. You might think that’s a positive goal, but that goal certainly isn't what motivated the GOP, who expertly and constantly indulge that practice. (One of many examples: John Boehner handing out checks from tobacco lobbyists on the floor of the House of Representatives.) The GOP generally claims to be in favor of eliminating government waste and financial impropriety and for opening up government operations to competitive bidding. All of which was achieved by the Clinton administration in this case. Nothing was rigged as the winning bidder was American Express Travel Services. So what was an outcome that should have been pleasing to the GOP instead prompted them to move in for the kill.

This was aided and abetted by the press, who narcissistically over-covers any story having to do with themselves. Some members of the press also had a personal fondness for some of the fired employees (prominent ABC anchor Sam Donaldson and other journalists even testified as character witnesses at Billy Dale’s trial) and enjoyed perks provided by the Travel Office like primo accommodations and how easy they made it to bring back stuff through customs. David Shaw highlighted an example illustrating how obsessed the press became with this story:

At one briefing, they asked 169 questions about the travel office firings. Neither Bosnia nor the President's deficit-reduction package, both major news stories at the time, received a fraction of that attention that day.

Out in front with knives drawn was the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page. Even before Rupert Murdoch bought the paper, the editorial pages of the WSJ served as a prototype for Fox News-style character assassination. They personally targeted Foster in a series of editorials in the summer of 1993, starting with “Who is Vincent Foster?”, a two column whine, long on text but short on substance, which consisted of mostly sinister insinuations and snide complaints that he didn't jump to attention every time the newspaper called him on the phone.

Targeting lone individuals for character assassination is one of the most distasteful aspects of what we call today, thanks to former right-wing character assassin David Brock, the right-wing noise machine. There’s plenty of examples: pro-lifers stalking and harassing (and occasionally quite literally assassinating) doctors who provide abortions, twelve year old Graeme Frost and the obsession with his parents’ counter tops, Bernard Goldberg singling out some obscure teacher for an obscure book about teaching children she wrote and holding her up as one of the 100 People Who Are Screwing Up America in a bestselling polemic. These people don’t have large media platforms and can’t fight back effectively. Even supposedly powerful presidential appointees like Van Jones, hamstringed in what they can say by their positions and lacking access to a 24-hour news channel, are relatively powerless in the face of this.

Vince Foster was a powerful corporate lawyer with decades of experience, but even he was unprepared for this relentless hate machine. He was also suffering from depression and anxiety; he started taking Trazadone, but too late for it to be effective. He wrote a letter, which was later found torn into 27 pieces in his briefcase:

I made mistakes from ignorance, inexperience and overwork

I did not knowingly violate any law or standard of conduct

No one in The White House, to my knowledge, violated any law or standard of conduct, including any action in the travel office. There was no intent to benefit any individual or specific group

The FBI lied in their report to the AG

The press is covering up the illegal benefits they received from the travel staff

The GOP has lied and misrepresented its knowledge and role and covered up a prior investigation

The Ushers Office plotted to have excessive costs incurred, taking advantage of Kaki and HRC

The public will never believe the innocence of the Clintons and their loyal staff

The WSJ editors lie without consequence

I was not meant for the job or the spotlight of public life in Washington. Here ruining people is considered sport.

On July 20, 1993, Vince Foster shot himself in Fort Marcy Park.

Even after his deaths the attacks continued, and hacks like Al D'Amato (once called "The Worst Senator in America" by Playboy) and Dan Burton, who had no concern for Foster as a person, claimed that his suicide was "suspicious" and used it as a pretext to conduct bizarre investigations into the Clinton administration. Burton even shot a pumpkin or watermelon in his backyard to prove some kind of point about Foster's death. ("It was nutty," Bill Clinton later wrote. "I could never figure out what Burton was trying to prove.") Investigations by the United States Park Police, the Department of Justice, the FBI, the United States Congress, Independent Counsel Robert B. Fiske, and Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr (who obviously was not inclined to be friendly to the Clinton administration) all concluded that Foster committed suicide, but that didn't shut up anyone on the right. Even today, conspiracy theorists who couldn't care less about Foster are manipulating his tragic death for their own ends.

Obituaries: Gene Colan (1926-2011) and Peter Falk (1927-2011)

2011-06-25T14:50:00.000-07:00

A pair of obituaries for June 23, 2011:

Gene Colan was one of the best artists of the heyday of Marvel Comics, known for his moody, fluid, expressive drawings. He worked on many titles, but he's best remembered for his work on Daredevil, Howard the Duck, and The Tomb of Dracula.

Peter Falk had a long career as an actor and is most beloved for his role as the rumpled idiosyncratic detective Columbo. The video below is from his role as the grandfather/narrator in The Princess Bride.

Weinergate and the unfortunate erection of Andrew Breitbart

2011-06-06T14:13:00.000-07:00

So Anthony Weiner has a hobby.

Is this the first political sex scandal of the internet era? Perhaps it is the first virtual political sex scandal, where no sex was had and only pics were exchanged (a/s/l?) and even the participants are unsure of who each other is. (The most uncomfortable moment in what was already a ridiculously uncomfortable press conference was when Weiner admitted that he could not know for sure that the women he interacted with were of age.)

What a bizarre sideshow. The media asked their usual penetrating questions. Was he wearing boxers or briefs? (To be fair, this was crowd chit-chat prior to Weiner's remarks.) Are you a sex addict? (Someone please punch that guy.) Will you apologize to Andrew Breitbart? (Also punch this guy.) Were you fully erect? (Especially this guy.)

Weiner brought this on himself, but it's never fun to watch a man cry on live television, unless than man is Andrew Breitbart. We all have strange pleasures and needs, even popular witty Congressmen with beautiful wives, that we don't want to admit in public, and the internet allows us to indulge many of them. In the grey of the morning in front of that flickering screen, we've all likely done something we regret. As Amanda Marcotte points out, many of the people attacking Weiner, including that female reporter haranguing Weiner about the ages of his Twitter flirts, almost certainly have regrets of their own. Most are less public figures and most are more cautious about it, but only Echelon knows how many dark secrets of theirs are preserved in servers around the world.

This is still a disappointment. It's disappointing becuse we thought Weiner was better than this, morally, and less bereft of intelligence and common sense. It's a disappointment because such a vocal advocate for the progressive cause has been silenced. And make no mistake, that's what is going on here. Weiner brought this on himself, but that doesn't make this any less of a political attack, one which may have been specifically timed to distract from Justice Clarence Thomas' ethical issues, which Weiner has taken the lead in highlighting.

Andrew Sullivan writes "this is the result of raw culture war with no scruples or principles, designed purely to destroy." And that's what this is. The message here is that if you stick your neck out for progressive causes, they are going to chop your head off. You'll have stalkers on Twitter hounding you and your followers, waiting for a slip up they can use against you. You'll have ludicrous professional charlatans like Breitbart manipulate the story and then claim to be the victim. You'll have Fox News attack you all day and the "liberal" media will cheer them on, while largely ignoring the John Ensigns and the David Vitters of the other party.

The worst part about Weinergate is that this may legitimize Andrew Breitbart. I'm now convinced that Breitbart, not the cockroach, may be the only thing that survives the Armageddon. What should have happened is that the press conference should have ended with Weiner (or better yet, his wife) punching Breitbart in the mouth, but instead he grabbed the spotlight and the assembled reporters sprang to his defense, demanding an apology on his behalf. Somehow Breitbart has survived being exposed again and again as a manipulative liar and professional libel artist, and now he has the audacity - no, because he is completely made of slippery, amoral audacity - to claim victimhood and vindication because he was sort of correct about a story he manipulated into being. Now viciously attempting to ruin the life of an innocent Department of Agriculture employee, sponsoring the junior pseudo-pimp so he could pseudo-seduce a CNN reporter, and everything else he's ever done may be all wiped away and Breitbart may become a professional, respected journalist and pundit because someone sent him a picture of a Congressman's dick.

Gil Scott-Heron (1949-2011)

2011-05-27T22:02:00.000-07:00

Gil Scott-Heron, Spoken-Word Musician, Dies at 62

Obituaries

2011-05-04T21:23:00.000-07:00

William Campbell (1923-2011)

Jackie Cooper (1922-2011)

Madelyn Pugh Davis (1921-2011), I Love Lucy writer

2011-04-21T22:41:00.000-07:00

Madelyn Pugh Davis, Writer for ‘I Love Lucy,’ Dies at 90

Elisabeth Sladen (1948-2011)

2011-04-19T13:31:00.000-07:00

My (positive) ode to tax day. No, seriously.

2011-04-15T14:38:00.000-07:00

It's annual tax day, which means it's also time for annual ritual cultural displays expressing angst and dismay. For example, on the way to work today I listened to the tax day theme show from Sound Opinions. Some of the songs were just about not having enough money in general, but there's quite a bit of musical rage directed at the tax collector. This is, of course, the most famous example:

Despite the protests in this country, we're relatively lightly taxed, all things considered. George Harrison's rage was directed at a much more onerous tax rate of 95% for the highest tax brackets in the UK at the time. Many of them fled the country seeking havens. While 95% seems completely unreasonable, even for the super rich, it did spur investment. Of course, the GOP claims that it's tax breaks for the rich that spur investment, though there is little evidence of that. There's plenty of evidence that the high UK tax rate spurred the rich to stick their money in every available venture. In George Harrison's case, it was the movies. Harrison's good taste and willingness to put his money down deserve the credit, but without that ridiculous tax rate, we might not have Time Bandits or Monty Python's Life of Brian.

However, a couple of movies aren't really an argument in favor of a particular tax program, or taxation in general. Judging from the songs I heard this morning, musicians seem to agree. Rage is easier to get across musically than wonkish arguments, so I understand why there aren't any pro-taxation songs. But what is the pro-taxation argument?

It occurred to me that I was driving on it. Tax money built the roads. Tax money built my employer. Tax money built the police headquarters and airport I drove past. Tax money keeps planes in the sky and cars on the road. Tax money built the Hoover Dam and preserved the Everglades and Yosemite. Tax money created the Internet. Tax money put men on the moon. Tax money defeated the Nazis.

You might say it took people to do those things. Yes, it did. It took courageous and clever people whom we rightfully celebrate, many of whom gave up their lives doing so. But it also took a government to spend the money, to coordinate the people and materiel. Only in some libertarian fantasy can we pass the hat around and all chip in our couch change to fight the Nazis. It takes a government to give soldiers guns and training and tanks and boats and planes to do the shooting with before those individual soldiers can do any shooting of Nazis. We like to imagine ourselves rugged individualists, but it takes banding together in groups and organizations to accomplish large, meaningful tasks. That's pretty much the definition of civilization. Those libertarian fantasists should try living in a hunter/gatherer society some time and see how that works out for them.

I'm not elevating government over the people who did these things, but it's worth pointing out that it did take an organized government to accomplish all of these things. In this culture - largely thanks to decades of anti-government drumbeating by conservatives - we're quick to criticize the negatives of government without acknowledging its accomplishments. It's why people can carry to a protest a sign reading "Keep Government out of Medicare" and honestly not know how stupid they are. It's also why people don't direct their anger at, say, giant corporations who pay absolutely no taxes while shipping jobs overseas. Deflection is the key word: Rich Fox News anchors and morning DJs are in those high tax brackets and want to insure their taxes are as low as possible. They're going to deflect people's anger somewhere else, like "big government".

Now, none of this means that government doesn't do bad things with our money or that you can't complain when it does. But the conservative "big government" drumbeat isn't about targeting particular spending. The anti-government crowd isn't complaining about money going to drone strikes or the Guantanamo prison; these people are the political heirs of the people who put anti-Vietnam War tax withholders in prison for tax evasion. This drumbeat is about targeting spending for anything other than conservative preferences– things usually referred to as "essential".

I don't know if I'd say I like tax day, but honestly I don't mind it so much. These ritual denunciations puzzle me. Shouldn't we be proud of the things we've accomplished as a nation and proud to contribute to those accomplishments instead of grumbling about it? I'm glad to contribute. I'm proud (and angry) that I contribute more than those tax cheats at GE.

This year I'm getting a small refund from my withheld taxes. I think I'll frame the check instead of cashing it. It's only one dollar, and one dollar out of trillions might not seem significant, but hey, it's still a dollar more than GE paid.

Sidney Lumet (1924-2011)

2011-04-09T08:55:00.000-07:00

Sidney Lumet, Director of American Film Classics, Dies at 86

Scaife paper cracks the master's whip at the Carnegie Museum

2011-04-08T15:12:00.000-07:00

I'm a bit late responding to this, but I don't have the time to blog daily. I'm part of the amateur left, not the professional left.

Last week the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review published an editorial excoriating an exhibit at the Carnegie Museum of Art. An unsigned editorial means it is the opinion of the paper, and the opinion of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review is likely the opinion of its owner, Richard Mellon Scaife.

Scaife was the Koch Brothers of the Clinton years, funding the notorious Arkansas Project targeting President Clinton and many other far-right initiatives. Many are convinced that the suicide of journalist Steve Kangas was a Scaife ordered murder. (I doubt this conspiracy theory - if you are going to kill someone, why leave him in your own bathroom?) When quizzed about funding right-wing causes by journalist Karen Rothmyer, Scaife notoriously replied "You fucking Communist cunt, get out of here." (That particular incident seems to have disappeared down the Wikipedia memory hole.)

The editorial is a complaint about Diver, a retrospective of the work of underappreciated artist Paul Thek. This New York Times review of the show at the Whitney Museum will give you a good overview of his work.

The editorial itself is largely an unremarkable piece of right-wing agitation with large helpings of snide commentary. An artwork is taken out of context and described disgustingly, another (pictured above) is taken as liberal and socialist propaganda, and there's couple of shots at the liberal elite mentioning biscotti and cappuccino. One banal editorial is nothing at all compared to the uproar surrounding the Smithsonian's Hide/Seek exhibition and the pulling of David Wojnarowicz's A Fire in My Belly. And judging by its Twitter feed, the Carnegie Museum isn't taking this attack lying down. Two days ago it even held a panel discussion and screening of A Fire in My Belly.

What's going on here isn't an attempt to destroy the exhibit or the museum. Scaife has enough money and enough media to probably make a good attempt at that, but what's happening here isn't so much an attack as a warning shot. The real message of the editorial is this:

Pittsburgh's supposedly pre-eminent gallery for all things art has forgotten who butters its bread.

It's money we're talking about here, or the prestige that money buys, and in Pittsburgh the money is really old. The show is in the Heinz Gallery of the Carnegie Museum and Scaife himself is heir to the Mellon fortune. Those three names are about half the money in Pennsylvania right there. And being old money, it demands respect and fealty. It doesn't care about dirty pictures, but it won't countenance an attack on its ideology, not even in the form of one painting by one artist in one show. If it doesn't get what it wants, it will take its money elsewhere.

This is a message, and the message is "respect your betters, or else". It's a call for self-censorship, and there's plenty of evidence that people in the art world are getting the message. Self-censorship is the most insidious type of censorship and many institutions are reluctant to put on shows that challenge anyone: their audience, their patrons, or the right-wing noise machine. It was a (figurative) crime to remove the Wojnarowicz video from Hide/Seek, but the hidden crime was the fact that many institutions shrank from the idea of hosting the challenging show. Hide/Seek curator Jonathan Katz points out:

It’s hard to say two thing at once, but I’m going to. I’m going to say that I could not disagree more with the stupidity of the removal of the video. At the same time, I’m also absolutely convinced that the Smithsonian has been heroic in breaking this blacklist. In fact, what I’m finding very troubling about some of the reaction to what happened is that it tends to demonize the Smithsonian to the delectation of the very right-wing fringe that inaugurated this conflict in the first place.

What I think we need to remember is that the Smithsonian is courageous and that other museums were not. I’m increasingly getting concerned that the activist response targeting the Smithsonian loses the bigger picture, which is that it’s been 21 years since Mapplethorpe and no one has done a damn thing in that time, that museums have been sitting on their hands and that this incident confirms the wisdom of so doing.

We need to be outraged about incidents of censorship like the one committed by the Smithsonian. But we also need to be outraged by incidents of censorship and demand the institutions charged with preserving and representing our cultural heritage do so fully and completely and don't leave out gays or progressives or unions or whatever displeases the Sciafes of the world. We should demand that they challenge us and fight these battles instead of heeding the crack of the master's whip and abandoning these fights before they even begin.

Covering the Beatles: Please Please Me (part 4)

2011-04-03T10:28:00.000-07:00

Track eleven: "Do You Want to Know a Secret?"

Lennon was inspired by this song from Snow White which his mother sang to him as a child:

Here's an instrumental cover by Count Basie. Yes, that Count Basie. Apparently everybody has done a Beatles cover album.

Track twelve: "A Taste of Honey"

"A Taste of Honey" always seemed out of place in The Beatles' oeuvre, a bit of saccharine oldies bombast amongst the rocking 60s tunes. It's not that simple, of course, as The Beatles weren't simply influenced just by proto-rock stuff, but this tune does stick out. Case in point: the most famous version of this song isn't by the Fab Four, but an instrumental two years later by Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass. This is a hysterical parody of the song by Allan Sherman of "Camp Grenada" fame.

Track thirteen: "There's a Place"

This project is taking me in some odd places, but that's the magic of serendipity. One place is the blog Swedesplease, dedicated to Swedish indie music. (Yes, there's a blog about everything now.) There I found a mesmerizing cover by Ossian Ekenger of Gothenberg, about whom I otherwise know nothing, and the blog isn't particular forthcoming, other than this picture which looks like it belongs on a 1920s passport.

Covering the Beatles: Please Please Me (part 3)

2011-04-01T22:14:00.000-07:00

Track seven: "Please Please Me"

The recording of this song was a turning point for The Beatles. George Martin was set to have them do another cover tune as their next single, but they turned up with an up tempo, rollicking version of this song, so Martin released this instead and it became their first #1 hit. So by way of contrast, here's a languid indie rock cover by Will Phalen.

Track eight: "Love Me Do"

Here's a bluesy cover by Dallas Hodge.

Track nine: "P.S. I Love You"

It was hard to find a cover of this song I liked. The problem is that this Paul McCartney tune shares its name with a great 1934 Johnny Mercer tune, which is why The Beatles' song was relegated to a B-side. Everyone has covered the Mercer tune: Frank Sinatra, Billie Holiday, Bing Crosby, Mel Torme... But I couldn't find many Beatles covers and even resorted to listening to shitty covers by a bad Japanese girl group and an weird Slovakian singer. I finally found this one by Scottish singer Barbara Dickson from her 2006 Beatles cover album Nothing's Gonna Change My World. Dickson has been covering The Beatles for decades: she performed their music in the 1974 Willy Russell musical John, Paul, George, Ringo … and Bert. George Harrison loathed it:

I saw it up until the intermission and then — I saw it with my friend Derek Taylor, who's a writer who used to work for Warner Bros. and Apple — I said to him we either have to leave now or I'm gonna jump on that stage and throttle those people. It was awful stuff. All these idiots acting out people — it's like I say in "The Devil's Radio," talking about what they don't know. It's like a rumor. It's like those Beatles cartoons, and it was so inaccurate it was nauseating, having been one.

When Harrison left, he took with him permission to use his song "Here Comes the Sun", which the show replaced with "Good Day Sunshine".

Find more Barbara Dickson albums at Myspace Music

Track ten: "Baby It's You"

A tune by Burt Bacharach and friends, it was originally released as a single by The Shirelles and became one of two Shirelles covers on Please Please Me. It reached number 5 when later covered by white blues rock band Smith in 1969. This cover is by Elvis Costello and Nick Lowe.

Covering the Beatles: Please Please Me (part 2)

2011-04-01T18:00:00.000-07:00

Track four: "Chains"

This song was originally released in 1962 as a single for The Cookies, the backup band for Little Eva of "Locomotion" fame. Can't find a version of this song that really works for me, even the one by The Beatles. Maybe no one has done it justice, or maybe it's just a slight song. Here's a version by The Everly Brothers. The sounds of actual chains are a bit much.

Track five: "Boys"

This was originally released by The Shirelles as the B-side of "Will You Love Me Tomorrow", the first #1 hit for a girl group. Paul McCartney recalls covering the song live:

Any one of us could hold the audience. Ringo would do "Boys", which was a fan favourite with the crowd. And it was great — though if you think about it, here's us doing a song and it was really a girls' song. "I talk about boys now!" Or it was a gay song. But we never even listened. It's just a great song. I think that's one of the things about youth — you just don't give a shit. I love the innocence of those days.

Track six: "Ask Me Why"

And here's some random guy on the internet with a ukulele. Is it me, or does he look like Robert Patrick?

Covering the Beatles: Please Please Me

2011-03-31T22:52:00.000-07:00

Track one: "I Saw Her Standing There"

In 1964, Motown guru Berry Gordy put together an album called A Bit of Liverpool featuring The Supremes covering British Invasion tunes. Critically regarded as a disappointment, it featured five Lennon/McCartney tunes and even two Motown songs covered by The Beatles. This Beatles cover, featuring Florence Ballard on lead vocals, was left on the cutting room floor, however, until a 2008 compilation album.

On tour in January 1963, The Beatles wrote this song for a planned country album by tour headliner Helen Shapiro called Helen In Nashville, but it was rejected. Also on the tour was singer Kenny Lynch, who recorded his own version, the first ever cover of a Beatles song. The Beatles, needing material for their debut alubm, recorded it themselves. Lynch's version was issued as a single the same day that Please Please Me was released, March 22, 1963.

Track three: "Anna (Go to Him)"

Soul singer Arthur Alexander deserves to be a lot less obscure than he is, and after you hear this you may agree. Penned and released by Alexander in late 1962, the song became a favorite of John Lennon's and The Beatles regularly covered it in their early shows.

Unpacking the crazy: Larry Klayman's Clinton Birther/Assassination Theory

2011-03-25T14:06:00.000-07:00

There's right-wing stories that you should pay attention to because Fox News or chain emails or Brietbart will inject them into the mainstream. There's right-wing stories that you can safely ignore because they are so preposterously stupid as to be self-refuting. And then there's Larry Klayman.

Klayman is the founder of Judicial Watch, an organization of legal trolls which spent the 90s suing the Clinton Administration eighteen times and even, amusingly, Dick Cheney's notorious energy task force. So lawsuit happy was he that he sued Judicial Watch itself, ending up in a long legal battle with them after he left the organization. He's also columnist for that wretched internet hive of scum and villainy called World Net Daily.

Klayman's writings are almost certainly worth ignoring if one is looking originality or someone grappling with ideas of some weight, or any ideas at all really. But they can be taken a good representation of the wingnut zeitgeist, and if nothing else it's always an amusing intellectual exercise to unpack the crazy contained within one of his columns.

Case in point is this recent contribution to the wingnut gutters of the internet, where Klayman breathlessly informs his readers of the latest nefarious secrets and schemes of that femme fatale, Hillary Clinton. (Don't worry if you don't want to give WND any clicks or expose yourself to that kind of nuttery, I'll tell you everything you need to know here.) Amusingly, he even calls her a "femme fatale" in the piece, helpfully informing his slower and less literate readers (i.e., all of them) that it is a "French expression". For a dash of added classiness, he even seasons his article with some French language phrases, leading one to imagine a beret-wearing Klayman sitting in some Left Bank bar with a cigarette listlessly dangling from his mouth.

But before we get the lastest news, Klayman recycles a bunch of two-decade old conspiracy theories about Clinton. He hits all the notes, packing them into a couple of paragraphs: Vince Foster, John Huang, Bill Clinton's promiscuity, a masculine Hillary feminizing men, backhanded praise of her ruthlessness, the Clinton "death toll", etc. Then he moves on to Obama, "Barack Hussein Obama", of course, even as he only refers to the Secretary of State as "Hillary". The usual suspects have been rounded up: Jeremiah Wright, Louis Farrakhan, and Bill Ayers. Some new memes have been thrown in: Obama has been dithering on ESPN, supports the Muslim Brotherhood, won't act on Libya (soon to be, I'm sure, replaced Newt Gingrich-style by complaints about his actions in Libya) and Iran. He even works in a sales pitch for his book, the charmingly-titled Whores. "C'est la vie," Monsieur Klayman might sigh.

Finally, finally, Klayman saunters to the sensational revelation: Hillary's plot to run for president in 2012 by assassinating Obama. He reveals it not as a stunning new development, but mentions it as if you already knew, and to Klayman's readers, it's already a matter of faith. This isn't a surprise, as many of his geriatric readers spent the 90s devouring myths about the Clinton "body count", concern trolling over lists of "victims" headed by clinically depressed Vince Foster, and buying conspiracy videotapes hawked by Jerry Fallwell. So of course Hillary plans to kill Obama! Hillary's reputation as a murder of suicide and plane crash victims is so well established that Klayman writes "In 2011, it may be passé for Hillary to get rid of people by having them disappear." He doesn't explain that passé is a "French expression" or why Hillary didn't knock Obama off the first time she ran for president, or back in 2004 when he first burst onto the national stage and became a threat to her ambitions.

But if we paused to examine such logical flaws, we couldn't get to the next revelation: Hillary's embrace of Birtherism. Apparently she's on the trail of the fake birth certificates again, and tells us the whole Birther conspiracy theory isn't a result of wingnuts like him relentlessly attempting to de-legitimize the citizenship of an African-American, but Hillary's relentless ambition, an altar upon which all sins can be laid, apparently. Birtherism, not assassination, will be the weapon Hillary chooses from her arsenal to knock off Obama. Why not assassination, since the Clintons are apparently so effective and practiced at it? Why employ Bitherism now? Why not in 2008 or earlier? I guess that mythical long-form birth certificate is pretty illusive.

So what foundation of pseudofact is this house of conjecture built upon? Klayman claims that this revelation comes from "sources close to Hillary". Seriously? This may be the most far-fetched assertion in the piece. We are supposed to believe that Klayman, who is no Bob Woodward or Seymour Hersh, has cultivated sources in Hillary's camp, a group he build an entire career out of attacking and blaming for everything from the black plague to the cancellation of Firefly. Perhaps the lives of many Bothans were lost to bring Klayman this crucial information. Perhaps some disgruntled Clinton flunkie was forced into a gay marriage or to have an abortion thanks to Obama's imposition of Sharia law and has formed a heroic fifth column inside the administration.

We have no time to digest this world-shattering news before Klayman winds up his column. And you can't conclude a column of wingnut cliches without the de rigueur quoting of a bon mot from Saint Reagan, this time by way of Bachman Turner Overdrive: "You ain't seen nothing yet!"

Mot juste, Monsieur Klayman! Au revoir!

Boing Boing gets it wrong on Wikipedia deletions

2011-03-04T16:20:00.000-08:00

Boing Boing today has an item about the deletion of a Wikipedia article on the seminal gaming website Old Man Murray. Like much outside coverage of Wikipedia deletions it is hysterical and inaccurate.

A lot of people don't seem to grok the idea that you can delete things from Wikipedia. People who can largely grasp the concept of "the encyclopedia anyone can edit" choke on the idea that those same people can delete things too. But it's not that simple; any single person can edit, but a single person can't delete an article, they can only suggest that an article be deleted. This is done on a page called Articles for Deletion. When the article is submitted to this page, a discussion begins, with references to Wikipedia policies and guidelines and reliable sources about the subject of the article. For some reason, the idea that, on an encyclopedia anyone can edit, anyone can suggest something be deleted makes them go absolutely apeshit. Someone who would never blame Wikipedia as an entity for something like an eight-grader changing George Washington's occupation to "ass pirate" reacts like a hysterical lunatic to a deletion discussion: OMG THOSE WIKIPEDIA BASTARDS WANT TO DESTROY MY FAVORITE THING AND ALL THAT IS GOOD IN THE UNIVERSE. Sometimes, a specialized blog or message board gets wind of the discussion and the fans descend like locusts on the discussion, armed with profanity and little else.

Look, anybody can edit. Anybody can suggest things be deleted. Some guy even proposed that the article on Jean-Luc Picard be deleted and he was laughed out of the virtual room. And yet, somehow, Wikipedia and the universe survived. Deal with it.

It's bad enough for random forums and blogs to perpetuate this, but it's unfortunate and bizarre for the tech-savvy Boing Boing do so as well. Rob Beschizza of Boing Boing takes it one step further into insanity and instead of blaming some anonymous mass of Wikipedians, he specifically name one person, some poor schmuck named Ben Schumin. By following Wikipedia's proper procedures for suggesting an article for deletion and having a bunch of other Wikipedians agree with him in a public discussion open to all, he has "quietly orchestrate[d]" the elimination of this article.

There's a bunch of problems with this piece, primarily the focus on Schumin. The title of the piece is "Did an old grudge get Old Man Murray deleted from Wikipedia?" But the question of the title quickly becomes a statement of fact - Beschizza calls it "a fact not disclosed in the nomination" by Schumin in the third sentence. What is this grudge? Beschizza quotes the blog Rock Paper Shotgun: "It is claimed in the discussion page on Wikipedia that Schumin has a long-running dispute with OMM." What is the grudge? What is the dispute? No one seems to know or is willing to spell it out, but anonymous comments on a website anyone can edit have made their way to a becoming statement of fact on one of the internet's more popular websites.

This is the height of irresponsibility, not just because of the dubious factual inaccuracy, but also because of the asymmetric warfare going on here. Beschizza has access to one of the most prominent platforms on the internet and when he presents allegations about Schumin as fact, Schumin has no similar platform with which to respond. (I suspect Beschizza would be willing to print or excerpt a response from Schumin, but Beschizza would be the gatekeeper.) Wikipedia may be one of the most used websites on Earth, but that doesn't grant any particular Wikipedian any piece of that traffic. It's not like Schumin can post a response on the front page of Wikipedia, right under the latest news from Libya. The best he can do is post a message on his user page, where few will likely read it. This bizarre mix of visibility and powerlessness makes individual Wikipedia editors particularly vulnerable to people with large platforms and/or persistent insanity. The website, to its discredit, does little to protect individual editors of the consequences of pissing someone off and there are plenty of examples of victimization at the hands of everyone from random internet trolls to a vengeful Hollywood producer. It's sad to see Boing Boing participate in that sort of thing by passing off anonymous allegations about some random editor as fact.

Those sorts of allegations are distressingly quite common on Wikipedia and are one of the least fun things about editing there. For a large percentage of trolls and combative editors, allegations of "bias" and "conflict of interest" are thrown out as an opening gambit. It is distressing to see so many evidence-free allegations thrown at Schumin in the deletion discussions and it was irresponsible of Wikipedia editors and administrators not to remove them. So does Schumin have a grudge against OMM? He may very well have one, but it doesn't matter. The proposed deletion should have been decided on its merits, and a bunch of Wikipedians did and decided they agreed with Schumin.

Beschizza writes "a useful resource is history" as a result of this discussion. You may agree because you know that OMM was a genuinely important website. But the discussion wasn't so much "Is OMM important?" but "Does this article demonstrate that OMM is important?" and "Does this article establish that using reliable sources that belong in an encyclopedia?" Many of the people attacking Schumin in the discussion merely asserted the importance of OMM, self-evident to them but not to someone who never heard of it. Others claimed that sources were provided by the dissenters, but most of those "sources" were passing mentions of OMM. At the time of its deletion, most of the references in the OMM article were to the website itself or message board posts. This clearly wasn't enough to support an encyclopedia article, which should not rely on message board posts, anonymous allegations, or self-interested assertions.

The article has been restored through the deletion review process and is now full of proper references. If half the energy devoted to attacking Wikipedia and demonizing Schumin had been devoted to improving the article, it never would have been deleted in the first place. Deleting the article was the wrong decision in the long run, but this mistake (one easily corrected through deletion review) isn't an excuse for the opprobrium directed at the website and largely defenseless individual editors. Based on the evidence available at the time, it was the right decision.

Mark Kirk - so much for one of the few adults left in the GOP

2011-02-04T14:08:00.000-08:00

The blogosphere is abuzz with a recent pronouncement by Senator Mark Kirk (R-Asshat), the holder of Barack Obama's old seat. Kirk blamed his recent flip-flop on climate change on... the personal life of Al Gore.

The consensus behind the climate change bill collapsed and then further deteriorated with the personal and political collapse of Vice President Gore.

TPM puts it succinctly:

He's probably referring to this: in 2009, a massage therapist in Oregon went to the police and accused Al Gore of sexually assaulting her three years previously. Gore ultimately wasn't prosecuted. Soon thereafter, he and his wife ~~divorced~~ separated. Still it's hard to figure how whatever happened that night in 2006 has any bearing on the greenhouse effect.

That last sentence should be sufficient to prevent this from being an actual reason for any sane adult, much less a sitting US Senator. But we don't live in sane times, thanks to the GOP, we live in a time where a large group of lunatics are taken seriously and the rest of us are "shrill" if we point out that not only is the emperor not wearing clothes, he needs to be wearing a straightjacket.

I would expect this sort of pronouncement from the lunatic caucus of the GOP, like Mike Pence or Jim Inhofe or Tom Coburn, but this is coming from Mark Kirk, wildly hailed as a leading member of the sanity caucus of the Republican Party, such as it is. To quote the great political philosopher Oscar Martinez, "The coalition for reason is extremely weak."

It's a sign of these times that a statement like Kirk's is not immediately self-refuting, that you must point out that the validity of a scientific theory does not depend on the personal life of its most prominent public advocate, one who played no role in its discovery or formulation. But this is an old game with the right-wing, attacking the messenger and ignoring the message, tagging their enemies with a label like "liberal" or "socialist" instead of engaging with their statements and ideas. Their well-trained followers immediately discount anything said by those people labeled. You could also point out that Kirk, recently divorced amid rumors of homosexuality, shouldn't be discounting someone else because of his separation from his wife. But we learned long ago there are different rules for GOP behavior when a man who ripped apart someone else's marriage at age 41 and chalks it up to a "youthful indiscretion" impeaches another man for getting a blow-job. And today, of course, Congress is full of GOP members who frequent hookers and bribe mistresses who are gleefully voted into office by members of the "religious" right.

This isn't the first time that Kirk has flip-flopped on climate change. Once hailed as a moderate on the issue, he got heat from the teabaggers about it. In 2009, he told a crowd:

Briefly about cap and trade: I voted for it because it was in the narrow interests of my Congressional district. But as your representative, representing the entire state of Illinois, I will vote No on that bill.

What exactly is he saying here? Is he claiming that the residents of the 10th district of Illinois, whom he represented for nearly a decade, would be especially affected by climate change? Perhaps they would be inundated by floodwaters from a rising Lake Michigan. But now that he represents the whole state? Fuck the 10th, let 'em drown.

This sort of behavior is glossed over as Kirk is repeatedly praised as a moderate, intellectual force in the GOP. A representative example is this David Brooks encomium from October 2010, which starts in full tongue bath mode:

Mark Kirk has had a brilliant career. He graduated from Cornell, obtained a master’s degree from the London School of Economics and a law degree from Georgetown. He worked at the State Department, the World Bank and the law firm of Baker & McKenzie before becoming counsel to the House committee on foreign affairs.

Bobo goes on to praise Kirk's naval career and his intellectual gifts and concludes that this is the sort of man that we need in politics, the great white centrist hope that the Village salivates over. He glosses over Kirk's history of lying about his teaching experience and his military career and is butthurt that Kirk's Democratic opponent, Alexi Giannoulias, had the audacity to make an issue out of Kirk's mendacity. He ignores that Kirk was disciplined twice by the military for violating rules regarding political activity on the job and lied about that too. He also doesn't mention that this great centrist was campaigning for the endorsement of Queen Wingnut Sarah Palin.

Brooks is obviously most enamored of Kirk's intellect:

He is interesting to interview because he still acts like an intelligence officer in search of data. Everybody talks about the deficits, but Kirk went into the bowels of the Treasury Department to interview the civil servants who actually do the borrowing to understand how a fiscal crisis might start. When the stimulus bill was released, Kirk pulled an all-nighter to read it and emerged as an early critic of the way it was structured.

On the issue of climate change, does Bobo think that Kirk is still acting "like an intelligence officer in search of data"? Did Kirk dive into the countless scientific papers and data substantiating climate change? Who are the scientists he interviewed? Here, instead, the great intellect is insulting our intelligence, putting forth explanations for his shifting positions that explain nothing, preposterous explanations that not even a teabagger would find credible. Does he think anyone will buy this? It doesn't matter, as long as he gets enough votes to squeak by another 48-46 victory, and as long as Bobo still loves him.

Kirk isn't alone, of course. Paul Ryan is being hailed as some kind of economic wizard, Eric Cantor is called a policy wonk, Rand Paul has become a brave intellectual contrarian, and all of these labels are applied with a straight face by the Bobos of the Village. Of course, they offer little more in the way of serious policy contributions than the Mike Pences and Jim Inhofes, but since they have more mainstream accents, are more handsome and vaguely bookish-seeming, and say slightly fewer obviously crazy things, they have been cast in the role of moderates in the black comedy that is our current political discourse. Until we can effectively attack the fake personas they've managed to create, these faux-moderates will continue to drag our discourse rightward and our country downward.

Milton Babbitt (1916-2011)

2011-01-29T12:49:00.001-08:00

Creationism and Google Scholar - and why it matters

2011-01-28T14:05:00.000-08:00

There's a petition currently going around the intertubes directed at Google which reads:

We, the undersigned, call for Google Scholar to remove the works of Answers in Genesis, Creation Ministries International, and the Institute for Creation Research from the Google Scholar search engine because they do not produce scholarly work.

Those three organizations are the leading groups who use the Internet to spread creationism around the world. Specifically, they spread an especially literal interpretation of the Bible and a particularly anti-scientific brand of creationism, Young Earth creationism, which goes beyond quibbling with Darwin and attacks everything we know about biology, geology, astronomy, history, archeology, and a dozen other disciplines by insisting the Earth is only a few thousand years old. In essence, they are using 21st technology to spread 16th century doctrines.

Answers in Genesis in particular you may have heard of, as they are responsible for the notorious atheism=murder billboard in Texas and the Ark Encounter boondoggle in Kentucky. The Institute for Creation research was the outfit whose plan to offer creationist-oriented master's degrees in science education was nixed by Texas.

So why are they showing up in Google Scholar? The unofficial word is that Google doesn't index scholarly sources, it just looks around the Internet for things that look scholarly. Creationists have decades of experience gussying up their doctrines in scientific trappings, so this kind of thing is old hat to them. So, given how Google Scholar works, this was inevitable.

But wouldn't removing these results from Google Scholar be censorship? No. No one is saying these materials should not be accessible at all. Removing them from Google proper or other search engines would be censorship. Removing them from a group of resources advertised as scholarly is truth in advertising.

But who gets to decide what is scholarly? Shouldn't people be allowed to decide for themselves? If this is true, what is the point of differentiating between Google and Google Scholar? What is the point of having a separate search engine dedicated solely to scholarly work if it's just going to give you all the same crap you find in a regular internet search?

Scholarly isn't just a positive adjective. It refers to a set of qualities expected from such work by students, teachers, researchers, and, well, scholars: adherence to the scientific method, respect for the standards of a field of inquiry, peer review, etc. But why does the scholarly community get to decide what is scholarly? Despite the myth (which occasionally turns out to be true, admittedly) of a bold loner who challenges consensus by building a perpetual motion machine or a car that runs on water in his garage, the fact is that this self-policing community insures that quality work adhering to a set of standards is produced, and is largely successful at this. Creationism's decades of attempts to simultaneous enter this community, defy and topple it, and mimic it with a shadow faux-scholarly apparatus show not that they are being unfairly barred from the party, but that they're the drunks who should be kept outside lest they pee on all the furniture and steal the silverware.

Shouldn't people learn to distinguish between genuine scholarly work and the fake stuff? If they do, then we can stuff whatever junk we want into Google Scholar and it won't matter. Ideally, yes, people should learn to do this, but the fact is that they don't. And is Google Scholar really the proper vehicle for people to learn how to do this? It's a resource that people go to expecting to find scholarly sources. The more non-scholarly stuff you add to it, the less useful it becomes in finding what it is advertised to find. Even worse, the danger is that students and others untutored in distinguishing the gold from the straw would be misled into thinking that these creationism resources are genuine - exactly the goal of creationists. You should be wary of what you find on the internet, but you shouldn't have to be a scientist to be able to find an actual scholarly paper in a resource designed to find scholarly materials. Isn't the whole point of Google Scholar to open up scholarly resources to non-experts who don't have access to expert databases and journals? So why should you have to become an expert just to use it competently?

Google Scholar is an amazing resource in a number of ways. In addition to opening up these resources to the world, it combines multiple types of materials into a single search: books, journal articles, web pages. This usefulness is hindered by the fact that it fails in many basic ways as a scholarly database. Unlike most scholarly databases, it doesn't provide a list of what sources it is indexing and it doesn't provide an option to limit your source to peer-reviewed works or any other way to separate the dubious from the reputable. Often when you do find a genuine peer reviewed article, it is a link to the Jstor database. Potentially useful, but you have to log into Jstor through a library or school, so you might as well have used one of their databases in the first place. If you searched a real scholarly database for, say, creationism, you might find articles by scholars debunking creationist pseudoscience or examining creationism as a sociological phenomenon. If you search Google Scholar for creationism, the first hit is the book Scientific Creationism by Henry Morris, founder of the Institute for Creation Research. Google also provides its cover, which makes it look like one of those ancient astronaut books so popular in the 70s, and content-wise it isn't so far removed from them.

Why does any of this matter? Because science, education, and truth matter. Because if we allow creationist pseudoscience to include itself among actual scholarly works, then those things are eroded. We can't simply wave this issue away by saying that people will be able to tell the difference when they use Google Scholar. A recent report about evolution in science classrooms shows that 72% of students are not properly exposed to the workings of evolution in school. So how are these people going to be able to sort through scholarly works picking out the ones that represent science they were never taught? Creationists have yet to win a court victory allowing them to teach their doctrines as science, but 13% of teachers go ahead and do it anyway. About 60% of science teachers muddle their way through teaching a watered-down version to avoid "controversy". To be fair, if they wanted to wade into controversies and fight religious nuts, they'd become scrappy bloggers instead of science teachers. Their responsibility is to actually teach this science, of course, and they are letting their students down by not doing so. But Google legitimizing creationist pseudoscience on the Internet isn't exactly going to embolden these teachers and is another in an endless series of strikes against getting this material to students. As long as the culture in the US legitimizes creationism - the media presenting "both sides" and framing science and nonsense as two equal opposing sides of an issue, for example - then science teachers will never be emboldened to actually teach science.

Goodbye to another accidental hero

2011-01-21T22:28:00.000-08:00

I heard the news today, oh boy.

I guess there isn't any point in writing about anything else tonight.

From the outside it looks like liberals deify media figures they admire. There may be some of that going on, but what I actually think is going on is that these figures become symbolic of all the aspirations and frustrations that liberals have.

If you are a conservative, you can flip the dial and there's something for everyone. Want a faux-blue collar "independent"? Bill O'Reilly! Want a tearful conspiracy theorist? Glenn Beck! Want a mouth-breathing lunatic? Michael Savage! Want a namecalling pseudo-intellectual? Mark Levin! I'm not sure what Sean Hannity is, but you've got him too. But liberals don't make it into the mainstream through the normal channels. They become milquetoast moderate centrists parroting Village cliches or they become strident, fire-breathing conservatives.

Liberals aren't invited to these parties, so they have to break into the mainstream in other ways. Al Franken was, of course, a comedian. Paul Krugman was hired by the New York Times to write about economic matters and never would have been hired if they'd known he'd be so "shrill". Rachel Maddow was an academic who stumbled into broadcasting by winning a local radio station contest. And Keith Olbermann was a sportscaster who was hired to do one of those lame snarky (and not particularly partisan or strident) pseudo-news shows that were so popular in the early 2000s. Since they don't come up through the normal channels and aren't bred by established interests, these accidental heroes recieve an outsized share of liberal attention and admiration. Even if you don't particularly like one of them (personally, I barely ever watched Olbermann), they were still important, if only because they were so few in number.

Lazy thinkers and partisans claim that MSNBC is the "liberal" alternative to Fox because some of these accidental heroes appear there, another example of the stupid false equivalencies that poison our political discourse. A few prominent media personalities does not make a channel liberal, especially one that promotes a three-hour daily morning show hosted by a former Republican Congressman. A few prominent media personalities are not the equivalent of an entire network of conservatives unified around an agenda issued via a daily memo to its employees by a corporation that donates millions to the GOP. A few prominent media personalities who criticize both left and right are not the equivalent of the coordinated attack on liberals by an entire network.

The evidence that MSNBC is far from liberal is abundant, starting with the firing of Phil Donahue in 2003. He hosted the channel's highest rated show, but he was a liberal and a critic of the war, so he had to go. This isn't a conspiracy theory, there's a memo that proves it, stating that they worried that Donahue would provide "a home for the liberal antiwar agenda at the same time that our competitors are waving the flag at every opportunity".

Then there's Ashleigh Banfield, groomed by MSNBC as some kind of glasses-wearing Action Barbie and hurried into every picturesque sand dune in the war zone they could find. That is, until she made a speech criticizing Fox News and she was taken to the woodshed. She disappeared from the air and even took away her desk in the office.

And now Keith Olbermann, who suddenly disappears from MSNBC right after the FCC approves the NBC/Comcast merger.

I'm baffled by those people who assert, in the face of all evidence, that the media in general and MSNBC is liberal. It's a great talking point and will continue to be repeated by those who parrot talking points and believed by those who believe talking points. And if you aren't exposed to a wide range of media, perhaps you actually believe that Alan Colmes is truly representative of the far left. But if you are a progressive, then it's a sad day. Not because of Keith Olbermann in particular, but because there's one less strident voice in the mainstream media representing something left of Alan Colmes.

Things are getting better in some respects. There's the internet and the blogosphere, more access to information so we can more easily get the real facts and debunk right-wing lies. But in other respects it's just as hard as it's ever been. You have to seek out those sources, and if you are one of those people who don't or can't, you're left in the clutches of Fox News, under-informed and victim to the agenda of Fox and corporate America. The fewer accidental heroes like Keith Olbermanns we have in the media, the more likely this is to happen.

I don't really have any great conclusion I've reached here. As the Clash would say, it's just another story. The same old story it's always been.

Student trolls university, nobody cares

2011-01-16T21:35:00.000-08:00

The New York Times reports that this Friday a student named Nic Ramos paid his tuition at the University of Colorado, Boulder in dollar bills: "all $14,309.51 of it — using dollar bills, a 50-cent piece and a penny."

Ramos did this, he said, because "I wanted to give the school a different way to look at tuition." But I doubt that anyone in the administration is going to give Ramos' stunt a second thought once the inconvenience and press attention have disappeared.

The Times rightfully made the comparison to last month's "violent protests" in the streets of the UK following tuition increases there. Here, they point out, such things are greeted with "shrugs". Is Ramos' protest going to make anyone look at the issue in "a different way"? How? Is Ramos voting for office holders who will support higher education and actively working to get others to do so? If he is, then he has my thanks, support, and apologies, but I doubt it. If not, then he's merely doing what so many apathetic people in the US do, lashing out at the nearest "authority figure" in an empty gesture that doesn't even merit the label "symbolic" given to it by the Times.

If Ramos had given this matter some thought, perhaps he would have realized that his protest wouldn't reach any actual authority figures. He has merely inconvenienced a group of public employees during their job's busiest and most difficult time. To be sure, having been a university and college employee in a number of different jobs, I encountered plenty of people who needed to be reminded that their purpose was to assist students, not themselves, but I also encountered many others who needed no such reminder because they were dedicated to that task. Ramos' immature protest makes no distinction between the two.

This sort of attitude has been successfully exploited by politicians and pundits who have actual power to influence decisions about higher education that directly affect Ramos' tuition rates. Lots of people have a bad experience, either from a genuinely bad employee or because they are just angry they didn't get their way, with a public employee, a teacher or somebody at the DMV or the IRS. Those politicians and pundits have successfully made those public employees the target of public anger, shifting the blame for all their budget cuts and bad decisions onto people who are just as much victims of those decisions as the general public. They're members of the general public too. Their children go to the same schools, they get their licenses at the same DMV. It's those politicians and pundits whose kids are in private school, who have aids to run their errands at the DMV for them, who drive away from the blame in their limos while the public lashes out at itself.

An annual tradition

2010-12-24T20:09:00.001-08:00

"May all my enemies go to hell.
Noel, Noel, Noel, Noel."

- Hilaire Belloc

Captain Beefheart (1941-2010)

2010-12-17T16:02:00.000-08:00

Trout Mask Replica is the most fucked up, most avant garde, most indescribable album to ever enter the rock and roll canon. I've been listening to it for years and I still have yet to figure out what the hell it is. The track that sticks with me the most, "Orange Claw Hammer", can be heard above. It comes up so often on shuffle that I think it's haunting me.

Alternatively dissed (Christgau: "Very great played at high volume when you're feeling shitty, because you'll never feel as shitty as this record") and praised to the skies by critics, I think John Peel said it best: "If there has been anything in the history of popular music which could be described as a work of art in a way that people who are involved in other areas of art would understand, then Trout Mask Replica is probably that work." I think the dissonance and delusion and disregard for the audience are things that maybe you can only latch onto if you are an artist or have experience with that sort of postmodern frenzy. This isn't to say that you can't think it sucks. After a decade or so of listening to it, I haven't figured out whether or not it's any good myself. But it's compelling and I keep coming back to it, so that's something.

Captain Beefheart is the nom de art of Don Glen Vliet, a child prodigy at sculpture who soon turned to painting and the blues. He was a high school friend of Frank Zappa, and makes Zappa look square, so that should give you an idea of what we're dealing with here. What I've heard from earlier albums from His Magic Band was more blues-oriented and traditional compared to what they recorded in 1968. He had accomplished musicians play unfamiliar instruments in unfamiliar ways and created melodic and rhythmic patters almost randomly but assembled the parts in deliberate ways that were performed exactly. The end result was a tension between skill and naivete and formal construction and improvisation. Plenty of people dismiss this potent stew as the work of tripping hippies banging away at instruments, but then they level that sort of tired accusation at anything more complex and unfamiliar than Thomas Kincaid. Think whatever you want, as long as you think about it. Let me know when you figure it out.

Happy Birthday Wayne Thiebaud (or, The allure of tiny, tiny cakes)

2010-11-22T12:17:00.000-08:00

I was catching up on Tyler Green's indispensable modern art blog and learned that a week ago today was the 90th birthday of painter Wayne Thiebaud. Widely celebrated in the art world as a painter and key member of the Pop Art movement, his name isn't known to the general public who may know Warhol or Lichtenstein. In the midst of a pretty bombastic art movement - Lichtenstein's exploding missiles and dramatic exclamations, Warhol's bright portraits, gigantic Rosenquist murals - Thiebaud became famous for quiet celebrations of desserts, intricate groups of cakes and pies that recalled Precisionism. He's still at it too. This week he's on the cover of the New Yorker. Compared to a similar work from 1963, he's still in command of the canvas, though with a shakier hand which reminds me of the later strips of Charles Schulz. Hopefully we will have more years of tiny cakes to come.

The boundless stupidity of S.E. Cupp (or, Sarah, I am disappoint)

2010-11-19T15:08:00.000-08:00

I don't make it a habit of reading wingnuts. Sure, I have some thoughtful conservatives on my RSS reader, and I pay attention to the more crazy things they say when they make news, but I don't make a ritual of enraging myself by exposing myself to regular doses of crazy. So I don't often read S.E. Cupp, but whenever I do find myself following a link from some blogger or forum post, I find myself stunned at how she manages to be mindbogglingly shallow and ridiculous while simultaneously being astonishingly dull and mundane. It's a potent cocktail and I'm getting to the point where I'm dreading the sight of those ridiculous glamour shots of hers. (This one looks like a parody of Lynda Carter.)

In that spirit I stumbled across this recent column and while my expectations were not disappointed, my faith in literacy and intelligence were. It's a love letter (one of many, presumably) blatantly sucking up to the Palinista movement, so she can keep getting page clicks and invitations to Palin pep rallies like the one she describes in the opening of the piece. She attempts to describe the mood of the gathering and the movement as one of ecstatic happiness to reinforce her thesis - which we'll get to in a second - but her prose is so leaden and clumsy instead of describing the excitement of good-hearted folk, it reads like a horrific frenzied bacchanal.

After a couple paragraphs of this - which reminded me of the long windups I'd read from the mass communications majors I worked with at the college newspaper who ponderously attempted to insert local color and florid prose into their pieces - we finally get to her thesis:

And then it hit me. The reason Palin has become
such a lightening rod, a kingmaker and a punching
bag, a celebrity and a power player, is simple. It's
because she's so gosh darn happy.

My first reaction is to wonder if the New York Daily News still employs any copywriters because "lightning" is spelled wrong. My second reaction: That's it? That's what you come up with?

It's been over two years since McCain selected Palin in a temper tantrum because his advisers told him he couldn't pick Joe Lieberman. Two years of near constant media coverage, numerous books, millions of words speculating on the Palin phenomenon. While I wouldn't expect anything in the way of serious research from her, surely she has encountered some of this work, if only accidentally. And after two years, this professional commentator, who during those two years was paid to write books and columns offering her opinions, observation, and analysis, presents this flimsy epiphany and expects us to be greeted with agreement, praise, and a nice check from the Daily News.

While back in the reality-based community, we greet it with incredulity. This is the best you can do?

Let's take her thesis seriously for a moment, which is more than it deserves.

But for her detractors, nothing raises the ire of
cynical liberals more than a happy-go-lucky, totally
unburdened, freethinking and self-assured
conservative woman who has everything she wants
and then some. And without anyone's help.

Why this would raise "the ire of cynical liberals" is not explained. It never is. It is just assumed. Why would we want to keep people down? Why would we advocate "big government" and social programs if we didn't actually want to pull people up? The real cynics are those who are unable to understand empathy and selflessness and project their cynicism onto others. They assume every issue and program has some kind of conspiratorial agenda, usually some kind of scheme to purchase votes.

What really raises the ire of this cynical liberal is not that Sarah Palin is happy-go-lucky, but that she happily and cynically goes around trashing people and issues held deal by liberals. This doesn't just happen with programs and issues liberals advocate, but she trashes fundamental concepts: intelligence, literacy, expertise, language, spelling, and truth. And she does it all with a wink while she rakes in the money of those ecstatic rubes that Cupp attempts to praise in the opening of her piece.

In all this I've given Cupp's piece more credit then it deserves. Her "thesis" isn't an argument proposed and explained in the column, it is merely a reference to arguments made and assumptions held by other conservatives. It's a set of tropes and cliches: good-hearted happy people, cynical unhappy liberals, big government, etc. It's not so much a coherent argument as the lengthy equivalent of a series of slogans or a bunch of blather serving merely as a carrier perpetuating a meme. The best response to this nonsense would be, of course, another meme:

Sarah, I am disappoint.

Double rainbow all the way

2010-11-10T13:54:00.000-08:00

So at lunch I'm reading Wallace Stenger's Angle of Repose. I'm pretty far into the book and reading a dramatic scene (minor spoilers ahead) where one character is about to give birth to a child in the remote mountains of Idaho in the 1880s. No midwife or doctor in sight, of course, so her son, who is around eight or ten or so, has to rush across a rickety bridge over a dangerous stream, then take a mule ride down the mountain. Dramatic stuff. He manages to meet up with his father after retrieving a neighbor to midwife. They all arrive back at the family's cabin when the father looks up:

In the northwest the sun had broken around the lower slope of Midsummer Mountain and was sending a last long wink across the Sawtooths, straight into the black mass of rain cloud. Clear across the stone house, bridging from mountains to river bluffs, curved two rainbows, one above the other, even the upper one as bright as colored glass, sharp-edged, perfect from horizon to horizon.

Oh God. What does this mean?

After I stopped laughing, I couldn't take the book seriously anymore so I spent the rest of the day watching Double Rainbow parodies. Enjoy.

Pee-wee Herman and the Culture Wars

2010-10-29T14:11:00.000-07:00

When I read yesterday's New York Times article about the "redemption" of Paul Reubens, the creator and embodiment of Pee-wee Herman, I couldn't help but think that it was, in some small way, a sign that we were winning the culture wars. That seems crazy when the Teabaggers are about to gain control of the House of Representatives by reigniting a lot of those culture war conflicts that we've discovered never went away in the first place. But I think, if we can keep those idiots from dragging us back into fascism or the Pleistocene, we can keep winning.

At this point, Reubens' comeback has been longer than the time he was at the pinnacle of his creative and popular success. Following Tim Burton's Pee-wee's Big Adventure, the movie that gave me the lifelong goal to visit San Antonio and find the basement of the Alamo, was the Saturday morning television show Pee-wee's Playhouse. Unfortunately, I scorned the show (and most other children's programming) because, at the time, kids abandoned cartoons and comics and other things that seemed too childlike for budding adults. Today, with prime time cartoons and superhero movies, kids carry those things into adulthood and the diving line has been erased. For those kids younger than me or not foolish enough to rush into some facade of adulthood, they were blessed with a wonderfully surreal television show that had a huge budget, little creative interference, an amazing cast, and, of course, the imagination of Paul Reubens.

For five seasons, anyway. The show had wrapped up (Reubens was weary of the character and the grind) but reruns were still airing on CBS. But in July 1991, Reubens was arrested for masturbating in a porno theater in Sarasota, Florida. In a stunning waste of time and police and legal resources, cops would prowl porn theaters looking to enforce morality and rack up easy arrests. Of course, public wanking should be illegal, but it also shouldn't be a police priority. How much money and manhours were wasted on this case? One article puts a cost of $2000 just on police protection for Reubens' courtroom appearance.

There was another cost as well, a cultural cost. Reubens went into seclusion and his evidence of his work immediately started disappearing. CBS stopped rerunning his show and toy stores around the country stripped Playhouse merchandise from their shelves. I remember reading about this in my local newspaper and went back to a newspaper database today to verify my memory of this: a local toystore, like stores in most in the country, removed all their Pee-wee merchandise, but accidentally overlooked two lunch boxes, probably because lunch boxes would have been in a different aisle. An "indignant" customer found them the next day complained about their presence, saying they "shouldn't be displayed for children because he was sick and perverted.'' It's helpful to look at the timeline of this. Reubens was arrested on a Friday night and a reporter noticed his arrest record the next day. The beginning of the next week that particular toy store chain ordered their stores to remove Pee-wee merchandise, and that store did so on Tuesday night. The outraged customer was at the store on Wednesday.

I remembered this incident for 19 years because to me it became emblematic of the culture wars. I exaggerated it slightly in my mind, but not by much. I imagined a permanently-clenched evangelical rooting behind boxes the next morning trying to find the last, misplaced Pee-wee Herman doll so he could harangue the poor manager, spit flecking from his open mouth while he screamed about "sick perverts" because all trace of Paul Reubens hadn't disappeared fast enough for his liking. This happened a thousand different ways over a thousand different things during the 80s and 90s.

It was tempting to think that in the 21st century this had gone away, but it hasn't. Things like the George Tiller killing and the Janet Jackson wardrobe malfunction proved that the culture wars hadn't left us even before the Teabaggers went full retard. Even Paul Reubens had another culture war incident in 2002 when he was arrested over a handful of objectionable items in his 70,000 piece pornography collection. (The charges were dropped in 2004.) Cops may have stopped raiding adult theaters - which largely died out anyway due to home video and the internet - but they are still busting people for owning porn despite its ubiquity on the internet. But this served to be merely a speedbump on his long comeback trail, nothing like the consequences of his 1991 arrest. Sure, moralizing culture warriors are still with us and people see pedophiles under every rock thanks to Dateline, but in the age of Lindsey Lohan and Britney Spears, masturbating to porn seems decidedly tame. The culture warriors would say we've degraded as a society, but are Lindsey Lohan's antics so much worse than Clara Bow's or Tallulah Bankhead's?

The difference is that I think we've become a lot freer and more open about things than we were in 1991. Technology has helped. The same internet that I used to find that old newspaper article preserves the memory of Pee-wee Herman through video clips, Wikipedia articles, fawning blog and message board posts, and a thousand other ways. We can't stuff Paul Reubens down the memory hole for masturbating because the internet will remember him, and we're all wanking to things we find on the internet anyway so we're not going to ostracize someone else for it. We can't be outraged about Janet Jackson's nipple when we've seen 2 Girls 1 Cup. We can keep the memory of George Tiller alive through internet activism. More and more homosexuals are stepping out of the closet at younger and younger ages, and the internet (most recently with Dan Savage's "It Gets Better" project) is helping them. Popular support for DADT and prohibiting gay marriage is collapsing. The pace might be slow, but we are winning the culture war.

How the right is wrong on Rachel Maddow's Steve Stockman comments

2010-10-23T18:41:00.000-07:00

This Monday, Rachel Maddow began her show with a powerful segment about the extremism of the current crop of GOP candidates and made connections to the extremists last GOP "revolution" in 1994. She discussed the ties to the racists and extremists in the militia movement of two '94 legislators in particular:

Yes, this has happened to a smaller degree before. In 1994, in the first midterm election after the last Democrat president was elected, we got a slate of candidates that included Helen Chenoweth of Idaho, Steve Stockman of Texas. These two were so close to the militia movement in this country that Mr. Stockman actually received advance notice that the Oklahoma City bombing was going to happen.

It's hard to forget the crazy that was the late Helen Chenoweth, who was, with help from The X-Files, responsible for mainstreaming the black helicopter paranoia of the militia movement. Steve Stockman was not as flamboyant, but just as nuts. This Texas Monthly story (free registration required) contains many of the lowlights of Stockman's short congressional career. Stockman was the author of a manifesto published in Guns and Ammo declaring Bill Clinton and Janet Reno murderers and that the Waco siege was staged to push an assault weapons ban. (This kind of conspiracy theory is echoed in the current right-wing claim that the BP oil spill was staged by environmentalists.) He claimed a secret operation at Fort Bliss spied on the militia movement. He got into a public tussle with the mother of a murder victim when he wanted to use his name for an anti-gun control bill. He called for a government investigation of the Kinsey Report, 47 years after its publication. The Texas Monthly estimated he generated an ethics investigation once every two months. When asked about his interest in ceramics, he replied "don't say that or they'll think I'm a fag for sure. '' Thankfully, Stockman was sent home after a single term.

It was for the honor of this distinguished legislator that the right-wing blogosphere sprung into action after Maddow's report. Stockman is most notorious for receiving a fax notification the day of the Oklahoma City bombing. Unfortunately, Maddow was either the victim of a misstatement or sloppy research as Stockman didn't receive the fax until after the bombing. To her credit, Maddow issued a prominent correction during her show on Wednesday.

On Monday, I said that Mr. Stockman's notice from the militia movement about the Oklahoma City bombing was advance notice. It wasn't in advance, it was right after the bombing. I apologize for the misstatement. It was an editing error and it was mine alone.

Still, the right-wingers were unforgiving. The trolls at Newsbusters claimed that Maddow implied "Stockman consigned 168 innocent people to death". Reason accused her of "mistakenly accusing someone of being an accessory to the worst act of domestic terrorism in this country's history". And most over the top, according to Outside the Beltway, she knew she was making a false claim on Monday because she gave the correct information about the Stockman fax in an earlier broadcast in March, the same broadcast she cited in on Wednesday in the above clip.

I don't get it. I know that as a liberal, I'm inclined to give Maddow the benefit of the doubt, but I can't come up with a reasonable interpretation of her comments that would make any of the above statements accurate. There seems to me a clear difference between, to take a recent turn of phrase, palling around with domestic terrorists and being directly involved in an act of domestic terrorism. Even Maddow's most thick-headed critics know this, but only the wildest extrapolation of her remarks would place Stockman in the latter camp. And if Maddow was doing this - purposely according to OTB - why was she so subtle about it? Wouldn't it drive home her thesis even more to play up Stockman's supposed involvement? Why make such a dramatic accusation in passing and then immediately drop it?

The conspiracy theory is too tempting to pass on, but to reasonable people who have no axe to grind and don't have a need to cram Maddow into the paradigm of a partisan crank, it seems much more plausible that this was simply an error, that they were correct in March but sometime in the last ten months the busy staff and host of a daily commentary show forgot the details of a 15 year old incident involving an obscure one-term congressman.

This (feigned?) outrage about Stockman's lack of responsibility for the Oklahoma City bombing allows Maddow's critics to ignore what Stockman was actually responsible for: peddling conspiracy theories and contributing to an atmosphere of paranoia and hate. If anyone in Congress got a fax from Bill Ayers at any time in the last half-century, those same critics of Maddow would be absolutely outraged. But the terrorists who killed 168 people felt that Stockman was such a kindred spirit that they singled him out for notification, and Maddow's critics think that's just Stockman standing up for the heartland.

Two black Fox News commentators: one gets rich, one gets fired

2010-10-22T14:03:00.000-07:00

Liberals (or alleged liberals) tend to fill, with a few exceptions like the occasional appearance of The Nation's Katrina vanden Heuvel, two roles on the Fox News Channel. One is the obvious foil, usually a milquetoast liberal like Alan Colmes who plays the foil to and is easily overcome by a heroic conservative. Sometimes the foil is someone they think will appear buffoonish to the audience, like a blustery Nation of Islam spokesman.

The other role is the validator, the liberal who lets conservatives feel that their ideas and claims are accurate and/or widely held across the political spectrum. In print that role is filled by a certain publication which has inspired the phrase "Even the liberal New Republic..." On television that role is played by "Fox News Liberals" like Kirsten Powers and Mara Liasson. The most notorious of these FNL liberals is the minority liberal who validates conservatives' worst impulses and unfounded paranoias about other races and religions, who tells them that their secret dark impulses are just good sense:

"I mean, look, Bill, I'm not a bigot. You know the kind of books I've written about the civil rights movement in this country. But when I get on the plane, I got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they are identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried. I get nervous."

Juan Williams has been at this for a while. Before this, he was most notorious for his "Stokely Carmichael in a dress" comment about Michelle Obama that prompted NPR to forbid Williams from identifying himself as part of NPR while on Fox. After that, Fox had to be content with having a black liberal instead of a black liberal from liberal NPR validating conservative race paranoia. Such a service is quite valuable; for being the Fox News audience's black best friend he will now get a $2 million payday under his shiny new Fox contract.

Given the recent firings of Rick Sanchez, Helen Thomas, Octavia Nasr, and Dave Wiegel - Glenn Greenwald adds to this list past incidents with Eason Jordan, Peter Arnett, Phil Donahue, Ashleigh Banfield, Bill Maher, Ward Churchill, Chas Freeman, and Van Jones - this would obviously seem part of a trend of news organizations jettisoning personnel who cross certain lines with their public comments. Instead the right-wing has, in a display of hypocrisy that is stunning even for them, charged to defend the "free speech" rights of Williams, including many of the same pundits and organizations who called for the firings of the people listed above. In retrospect, should we really be surprised by this? It's long been a trend for the right to demand the scalps of outspoken liberals while arguing for consequence-free "free speech" for even the most noxious of conservative bile.

And thus the Fox audience gets to imagine themselves champions of free speech who accept viewpoints from all over the political spectrum, a fantasy worth the $2 million that Roger Ailes just dropped for Juan Williams' new contract. But to see how true that fantasy really is, look at the case of Marc Lamont Hill. Dr. Hill, an African American Columbia University professor, was a regular on The O’Reilly Factor, prompting outrage from the likes of Accuracy in Media, who called him "cop-killer apologist", and David Horowitz, who called him an "affirmative action baby". This is, of course, the same Accuracy of Media and Horowitz who are currently getting the vapors over Williams' firing and are virulently defending him. Hill was abruptly fired from Fox News almost a year ago to the date of Williams' new Fox contract. Hill wasn't even told and had to find out via a Google alert.

I guess Fox News will defend the "free speech" rights of their employees to defy orthodox thinking as long as they are only defying the liberal orthodoxy.

How James O'Keefe finally went too far

2010-10-03T21:27:00.001-07:00

James O'Keefe thinks he is a victim.

I've been approached by CNN for an interview where I know what their angle is: They want to portray me and my friends as crazies, as non-journalists, as unprofessional and likely as homophobes, racists or bigots of some sort....
Instead, I've decided to have a little fun. Instead of giving her a serious interview, I'm going to punk CNN. Abbie has been trying to seduce me to use me, in order to spin a lie about me. So, I'm going to seduce her, on camera, to use her for a video. This bubble-headed bleach-blonde who comes on at five will get a taste of her own medicine, she'll get seduced on camera and you'll get to see the awkwardness and the aftermath.

Let's take a look at the context for a second. A 26 year old whose only accomplishment is a string of fraudulent videos was being courted, so to speak, by a professional journalist who flew to Maryland at his request not to interview him, but merely to persuade him to consent to be interviewed. With this kind of red carpet treatment, to insist on personal victimhood requires one to be either a con artist, a sociopath, or possessed of a high degree of cognitive dissonance. Or perhaps all three simultaneously. It would take the proverbial army of psychologists to suss out which is which in the current conservative movement and their collective fantasy of victimization.

The reason that this particular stunt of O'Keefe's is getting significiant pushback - despite abundant objective evidence of his perfidy - is because this time that fantasy of victimhood has collided with mainstream journalism's fantasy: its self-image of doing serious, important work.

Sure, conservatives have mounted a decades-long assault on journalism and instead of pushing back, time and time again mainstream journalism has accepted the non-existent charge of "liberal bias" and dutifully moved rightward. But in a perverse way, conservative attacks actually validate the mainstream media's sense of self-importance. They reassure journalists that they have an effect on the public, that their work really does matter. And they don't have to do any real reassessment of journalistic institutions, they just have to tweak the content a bit, quote more conservative talking points, add more right-wing correspondents and columnists. The liberal critique of journalism is more substantial, raising basic questions about the methods of journalism and its role in society and attacking the core assumptions of the mainstream media. In other words, liberals aren't just saying you are leaning too far in one direction from the center, they are saying that you are doing your jobs incorrectly in a very fundamental way. This is, I think, why while the reaction of journalists to liberal criticism ranges from being dismissive to going completely apeshit, conservative criticism is meekly accepted.

In the past, the media has completely embraced criticism from this particular conservative, perhaps most famously exemplified by the ombudsman of the Washington Post asserting that the media should pay more attention to the already overhyped ACORN story. But this time the reaction is an immediate pushback. You can see it in this tellingly defensive remark buried in CNN's story on O'Keefe's latest prank:

Boudreau, who has won multiple awards for her investigative reporting, called the comments "ridiculous."

You can just hear it, can't you? "How dare you question that we're doing serious journalism here? We've won awards."

It is even more blatant in Boudreau's first person account of the incident, which is astonishingly defensive about her nine years as a professional journalist. Since I rarely watch CNN these days, I can't judge how good of a journalist Boudreau is, but if you're going to assert your seriousness as a journalist, perhaps you should mention some of the actual journalistic work you've done instead of merely proclaiming your work ethic. "But I got blood on my shoes! I'm a serious journalist!" This is the kind of bland, content-less "journalism" that substitutes showing up at the crime sense and walking in blood for actually investigating a crime, the kind of "journalism" that congratulates itself and gives itself "multiple awards for investigative reporting" without tackling or questioning issues in any substantive manner. For this kind of journalism, O'Keefe's crime wasn't to be a partisan activist trafficking in fraudulent videos, it was to question this self-congratulatory fantasy, and journalism isn't going to let him get away with it.

Space Battleship Yamato

2010-09-26T21:16:00.000-07:00

Oh, hell yes.

Just found out about this: a live action film based on the anime Space Battleship Yamato. It was one of the first anime series to receive widespread television broadcast in the US and was a staple of my childhood that I knew by its English title, Star Blazers. It was sanitized a bit for American kids, but was still obviously more mature than pretty much anything for kids on television at the time, which is why it, and later the similarly themed Robotech, became two of my favorite shows. And those two shows, probably more than anything else prior to the 1990s, are responsible for sparking interest in anime in the US. So now you know who to blame for Pokemon.

The gist of it is that Earth is doomed due to radioactivity caused by attacks from the villainous Gamilons. A message from the planet Iscandar tells us of a cosmic MacGuffin that will cleanse the radiation before mankind is doomed in a year. Instead of including plans for said McGuffin, the message included plans to build a spaceship to go get the McGuffin. So the crew of the Yamato (Argo in the English version) has to battle its way through hordes of Gamilons to get that device, and they are able to do so because the entire ship is basically one giant motherfucking space gun and the inevitable firing of that Wave Motion Gun (and recycling of the relevant animation) was the climax of most (every?) episodes.

The more historically minded of you may have noticed that the Yamato shares its name with the famed Japanese battleship Yamato, the pride of the Japanese navy that was sunk off Okinawa in World War II. In fact, the space battleship literally is the original Yamato, as it was constructed in the ruins of that vessel to hide it from the Gamilons. Many years later, I learned from the work of Frederick Schodt, American author of many books about manga, that a popular manga trope is rewriting or revenging World War II. In the case of Yamato, it was merely symbolic, but some manga like Nihonjin no Wakusei feature Japan winning the war, nuking us, and beheading Douglas MacArthur (who was in charge of the occupation of Japan following the war) with his famed aviator sunglasses still on his head as it flies from his body.

Of course, I was ignorant of all of this watching afterschool cartoons as a kid. Please ignore the awful song by Stephen Tyler, who has unfortunately gifted this film with his first solo work, and enjoy the badassery of a giant fucking space gun. Now I just need to find a Japanese movie theater somewhere in Florida.