Election 2012 - candidates

Newspaper endorsements

http://www.tampabay.com/opinion/editorials/article1255399.ece
http://www2.tbo.com/news/opinion/2012/oct/23/naopino1-our-ballot-choices-ar-541104/

UPDATE:  If you are curious about the amendments, I concur with the conclusions here: http://cltampa.com/tampa/no-no-eleven-times-no/Content?oid=3452072#.UJLLPmd1GSo

President

If you haven't made up your mind by now, maybe you should skip this one.

Senator


Bill Nelson's done a reasonable job as a centrist Senator since 2000.  He hasn't become a preening Blue Dog using his position as a means for self-promotion and self-aggrandizement.  Connie Mack IV brings nothing to the table other than his legacy admission to politics as son of another Florida Senator.   An easy choice, even if you don't factor in potential party control of the Senate. 

US House District 14


Kathy Castor is one of my favorite politicians, a Democrat who takes reasonably liberal positions instead of lukewarm ones.   I'm tired of having to vote for the lukewarm ones.  A campaign worker for her opponent, "EJ" Otero, came to my door and while I listened politely I tried to explain that he wasn't telling me anything that would make me switch, and wasn't telling me much of anything about Otero other than he's conservative and Latino. 

Sheriff

David Gee is running unopposed.  I'm skipping this vote because I'm opposed to unopposed races. 

Property Appraiser

Ronda Storms has long been an  embarrassment to Hillsborough County and to sentient life.  She has long flaunted her inexperience, lack of knowledge, homophobia, and power in public and private settings.  Yet East Hillsborough has elected her again and again because Jesus.  If you are not familiar with her work, there's plenty of examples in the local newspapers.  The conservative Tribune reluctantly knocks her "self-discipline", but the subtext speaks loudly and hilariously. The Times is more blunt: "Storms regularly belittled people outside her circle — from urban residents to gay residents. Her slash-and-burn style was a principal reason the commission was described as dysfunctional by other elected officials — and by commissioners themselves. And her demeaning approach would hardly instill a culture of teamwork". I suspect she will win because the name of her opponent, Bob Henriquez, is foreign sounding to those fine, salt of the earth eastern voters, but I will relish finally being able to vote against her.  

Supervisor of Elections

This is an office I've long thought should be a professional post and not an elected, partisan one.  Here's the chance to vote a non-politican in, or at least as close to that as we are going to get.   Craig Latimer is the obvious choice.  He runs the office now as chief of staff and is widely praised and endorsed for his job of turning the office around from the dark days of that self-promoting charlatan  Buddy Johnson.  Rich Glorioso,  a State Representative, is endorsed mostly by other party politicians, supports right-wing voter suppression efforts, and is one of those Florida Republican politicians who jumps from public office to office to office, complaining about government the whole time.  An easy choice here. 


County Commission District 6

Kevin Beckner is a first term incumbent who defeated the widely-hated Brian Blair.  Now that we've finally gotten rid of Blair, here comes Blair-endorsed Tea Party nut Margaret Iuculano, bringing a history of homophobia and personal tax problems.  Beckner's done a reasonable job, so this is an easy choice too.

Supreme Court and District Court Judges

There is a right-wing effort to oust these judges and replace them with far-right Rick Scott/wingnut acolytes.  Regardless of your political orientation, a political effort to sway the justice system in either direction should be opposed by voting to retain all of these judges and justices.

School Board

In the primary election, incumbent Carol Kurdell faced four challengers of varying degrees of competence and sanity, including a former teacher.  So who do the voters pick to face her in the run off?  Tea Party bigot Terry Kemple.  Good show, Hillsborough.  Kemple has gained attention for his anti-Muslim crusades and his claims that CAIR has terrorist ties.  The Times says: "He has distracted the district from its mission with bigoted campaigns against gays and Muslims, and he made the county a laughingstock in the process. He shows no genuine commitment to public education."  Couldn't have said it better myself.  The choice of Carol Kurdellis an obvious one. 

Soil and Water Conservation Board

This one is tough, because the newspapers didn't bother to endorse or cover these races this year and two of the candidates don't even have web pages.  I'm voting for Shane Holman over Sharon Collins because at least I can read about his stands on the issues and he is endorsed by the Sierra Club.  Judging from LinkedIn, Sharon Collins has experience, but she's also endorsed by numerous wingnut voting guides, and that makes me nervous.  The same thing with nursery owner Roy Gene Davis, who is in the Florida Agriculture Hall of Fame and obvious has a lot of background in agriculture.  But I also dug up newspaper articles with him regurgitating the typical right-wing complaints about bureaucracy, regulation, federal "harassment", etc. No web page or stands on issues I can find, but lots of wingnut endorsements.  So I'm going with Joe Wendt's quixotic libertarian crusade to abolish the very board he's running for. 

My Picks for Tuesday's local primary

Every election I plan to dig into all of those down ticket races and make intelligent decisions about judges and school board posts, etc. Now that I am gifted with some free time on the eve of the election, here goes.

Times endorsements: http://www.tampabay.com/opinion/editorials/article1240701.ece
Tribune endorsements: http://www2.tbo.com/news/opinion/2012/jul/30/5/our-endorsements-ar-446525/

US Senator

Bill Nelson has been a decent enough Senator. Far too conservative for my tastes, but you need to be conservative in Florida, and he’s nowhere near as conservative as he could be. He could easily have become a preening Joe Lieberman Blue Dog type, but he didn’t, and for that alone he’s pretty much earned my vote. Regardless, I looked into his primary opponent, Glenn Burkett, anyway. He describes himself as a “Hybrid Democrat” willing to take ideas from either party. A nice idea, but it seems an empty one as he’s given no indication of what kind of ideas he would take or where he stands on most issues. His website doesn’t give much info about that, and he doesn’t appear to have held any public office. The throw the bums out strategy may get you lots of nods of agreement, but won’t get you many votes. I’d vote for him for something like state senate, though, so he might set his sights a bit lower.

Supervisor of Elections

According to both local papers, current Supervisor of Elections Office Chief of Staff Craig Latimer deserves a lot of the credit for rebuilding the office after the tenure of self-promoting narcissist Supervisor Buddy Johnson. It’s an office that shouldn’t be a political one in any case, an opinion that was definitely cemented in my mind after Jeb Bush inflicted that sower of human misery Johnson on our county.  Thomas Scott served ably on the city and county commission, or at least I don’t recall any particular scandals. But I’m going with Latimer because I don’t think a politician should be in that post.

13th Circuit Judge 

Mark Wolfe is an experienced judge whom both papers describe in flattering terms. Johnnie Byrd is a former Speaker of the state house who was the most divisive, polarizing, controversial, and scandal ridden figure in that office until the next guy the GOP installed. This one is a no brainer.

County Court

Both papers describe incumbents Ann Ober and Matt Lucas as able justices whose opponents offer no compelling reason to replace them. Ann Ober’s opponent also has a history of DUI arrests. The other Judge race features three non-incumbents who appear to all have quality resumes. Both papers endorse Frances Maria Perrone but neither one really puts together an open and shut case for her, so I’m undecided.

School Board

I’m not sure where to come down on the Susan Valdes/Eddy Calcines race. Susan Valdes has popped up in the news frequently during her three terms, but I’m not sure if she’s blameless or a drama queen. Calcines seems like a decent fellow but there doesn’t seem to be a lot of difference between them, policy wise. I don’t like this potentially burdensome guest speaker notification policy that Valdes is supporting recently but I’m not sure that minor issue is enough to justify booting out an experienced incumbent.

The other Board race on my ticket is a six-way, with five challengers against incumbent Carol Kurdell. First to cross off the list are Terry Kemple, a homophobic and Islamophobic Tea Party-type, and Carl Kosierowski, a former bus driver who calls himself Captain Carl. Robert McElheny is a truck dealer who promises to bring business solutions to the school board, which always spells trouble. Both papers describe Joe Jordan-Robinson as an activist, but in unflattering terms. There is an actual teacher (and former CIA agent), Michael Weston, in the race, so I decided to give his platform a closer look, and I’m impressed with what he has to say about testing, technology, the arts, and extracurricular activities, so I’m going to vote for him. Both papers endorse Kurdell and describe her in very flattering terms, so you probably couldn’t go wrong voting for her instead.

Welcome to the party, Eric Cantor

No, not the Democratic party, of course.

First, some background. A few weeks ago we learned that House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Virgina) was in the doghouse with his own party. Cantor donated $25,000 to an anti-incumbent PAC to support Republican primary challenger Adam Kinzinger in his race against longtime House incumbent Don Manzullo. (Kinzinger went on to win the primary.) The was quite a bit of squawking about this because the only thing House Republicans hate more than Obama are those who challenge their incumbencies, and it was quite odd for the House leader to be working against his own rank and file. Cantor, of course, dodged and weaved, appeared to lie about it, and blamed it on another Republican, Aaron Schock. We enjoyed a bit of schadenfreude at Cantor's expense, chalked it all up to court intrigue, and went on with our lives.

Now things are getting a little more interesting. Politico reports that Cantor may have had a personal motive for unseating Manzullo:

Manzullo — according to more than a half-dozen Republican sources — once said Cantor, a devout Jew, would not be "saved." The remark occurred several years ago, when Cantor was serving as chief deputy whip, the sources said. Cantor allies were put off by the comment, Republicans said.

And here is Cantor being asked about antisemitism by Politico's Mike Allen. He hems and haws about it but does acknowledge that antisemitism and racism exist in America, contrary to pretty much everyone else on the right-wing, who have long and loudly insisted that racism is nonexistent, other than "reverse racism", of course.



Cantor is widely known for his stupidity, but he clearly knows he's in a tight spot. The GOP tent is wide open for minorities, as long as they know their place and tow the GOP line. But when a minority even acknowledges some concern of his or her racial or religious group that runs contrary to the GOP white ideology, the knives come out. Herman Cain was the great black hope of the GOP, until he reminded the GOP that it was "insensitive" to casually throw around the n-word. Colin Powell was once the GOP's darling and longed-for presidential candidate, a faithful right-wing soldier for decades who threw away his credibility to support Bush's fraudulent war, but when he stepped out of line none of that kept him from becoming a wingnut punching bag. There are, of course, plenty more examples of this phenomenon, and Cantor surely must know he will become one of them if he too steps outside the bounds of acceptable GOP discourse on race and religion.

Frequently, some thick-headed conservative will write something lamenting the fact that blacks or Latinos or women or Jews or even Muslims aren't clamoring to get into the GOP's big tent. After all, they write, this group would find a natural home with the GOP because of one or more of their core beliefs matches up with the GOP platform. The ideology of these myopic conservatives prevents them from discovering the cause of this phenomenon, which is stunningly obvious to everyone else. If they can't even acknowledge that racism exists, then they obviously can't see that their own big tent is segregated.

In the GOP's big tent, and in America, no matter how loyal or assimilated you are, eventually you will be reminded that you do not belong. Cantor may think that it's limited to a few idiots like Manzullo, but the only difference between Manzullo and the others in the House GOP is that Manzullo was the one who opened his big fat mouth. In public, conservatives insist that racism is dead while keeping most of their racism private, when they think the ears are receptive and in agreement. I see this all the time in the small town where I work. Many times, young employees who grew up here tell me about the things they hear from other employees or even strangers when people like me are out of earshot and it's just the folks in the Secret White People Club. Today's conservatives give lip service to diversity in public and they keep their racism private. But eventually, nothing remains behind closed doors. There's always a Manzullo to remind you that you are not one of them.

Obama's election was a wake up call to a lot of people who thought that racism was a thing of the past, wiped out like polio and smallpox everywhere except for pockets of rednecks lurking in the hills of Appalachia and or the mountains of Montana. But we haven't cured the disease yet; Obama's election was just a reminder that it's still an epidemic.

A lot of us have had their personal revelations, too. As a light-skinned Latino who was born in this country, speaks perfect English, college educated, and hidden behind a desk in a suburban library, I thought I was insulated from the problem of racism in this country. After all, cops weren't pulling me over and tasering me every day, so everything's okay, right? Obama's nomination of Sonia Sotomayor was what reminded me that things were far from okay. She was everything I was and far more: she went to Yale and Princeton on full scholarships, graduated summa cum laude, was widely published and accomplished in her field. And yet she was widely slandered as an unaccomplished, temperamental, radical "Affirmative Action Baby". At the time, Matt Ygelsias, who is an even whiter Latino than I am, had similar thoughts at the time:

But for all that, I have to say that I am really truly deeply and personally pissed off my the tenor of a lot of the commentary on Sonia Sotomayor. The idea that any time a person with a Spanish last name is tapped for a job, his or her entire lifetime of accomplishments is going to be wiped out in a riptide of bitching and moaning about “identity politics” is not a fun concept for me to contemplated. Qualifications like time at Princeton, Yale Law, and on the Circuit Court that work well for guys with Italian names suddenly don’t work if you have a Spanish name.

The Sotomayor outcry from the right showed me and many other Latinos that no matter what accomplish or how you act, they will always remind you that you are not one of them and that you do not belong in their version of America.

Eric Cantor seems to have had something of a similar revelation. We'll find out the full extent of what happened one day when Cantor publishes his memoirs. Susie Madrak wonders if Cantor will have "the guts" to leave the GOP. He's not going anywhere. He's too stupid and rich to switch sides, and the left is too far ideologically removed from his brand of wingnuttery. This is, after all, the guy who wants to raise taxes on the poor. Instead, one day we'll read about his regrets in that memoir, which will be about as useless as Lee Atwater's deathbed apologies. Like Atwater, Cantor will keep making money making this country a worse place for everyone. But at least he sees something of what the rest of us are going through. And to that, I only have one thing to say:

In the heat of Mark Judge's night

You probably have already heard about the horrific travails of Daily Caller writer Mark Judge, which were firing up the blogosphere early this week until the arrest of another great conservative martyr, George Zimmerman. Judge sets the stage for us:

I was at the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, D.C., for the Stations of the Cross — the pre-Easter Catholic ritual of recounting the events that happened to Jesus on his way to crucifixion.

Like Jesus, Judge made a great sacrifice, losing a treasure of great value and significance to him, so we could learn the many errors of our ways as we have strayed from the path of righteousness and truth. What was this traumatizing event that happened to this brave, selfless man?



If you don't recognize the above image, and you might not unless you have lots of online time to waste on cat pictures and amusing YouTube videos, it is a famous internet meme. The image is from an innocuous training scene from the video game Mike Tyson's Punch Out!!!, coupled with a fake caption and transformed into a racist stereotype. Like the meme, Judge transformed an otherwise normal and everyday event into a racist parable, casting himself as a two-wheeled Rosa Parks, riding into the sunset of racial justice.

Of course, racism for conservatives is "reverse racism". "Black pain is no different than white pain," Judge writes, which really means "I'm so tired of hearing about Trayvon Martin, let's talk about me and my bike some more."

But his bike, "a sharp silver-blue hybrid from L.L. Bean", wasn't the only thing Judge gave up on that brave Good Friday. Just like Jesus died on Good Friday, so did Mark Judge's "white guilt". His piece is called "The End of My White Guilt".

Okay, hold on a minute. "White guilt?" The white part is true, but I don't believe a word of the rest of this. Most of the bloggers reacting to this have focused on how offensive Judge's piece was, but I don't think anyone has challenged the veracity of the claims he makes about himself. This guy is a conservative Catholic writer for Tucker Carlson's wingnut online magazine, and I'm supposed to believe he had white guilt? This guy, who has hit every conservative dog whistle from the Amistad (slavery, angry blacks killing whites) to Touré (elitist media figures) in this piece, grew up on a diet of Norman Jewison movies? If he still clung to any white guilt, he gave it up pretty quickly. Last year he wrote this piece imagining the deathbed conversion of militant atheist Christopher Hitchens. In it, he mentions he's working on a biography of Whittaker Chambers. I doubt you could find a dozen young Republicans who even know the name Whittaker Chambers, but Judge aspires to be his biographer. Judge's conservatism is fervently religious and it is old school. And yet, we are to believe that he has white guilt?

While bits of it may be true, I don't think what Judge has written here is strictly a factual account. Instead it is a conversion narrative, a Christian genre which tells how once wicked and wayward souls make their way onto the path of goodness and right, like Paul falling off his horse on the road to Damascus. No doubt Judge, who mentions he studied at nearby Catholic University, is familiar with this genre. Conservatives have also transformed it into a political genre. They're fond of the saying "A conservative is a liberal who has been mugged", and Judge's bike mugging is his conversion narrative, detailing how he fell off his bicycle of lingering white guilt, abandoning it for the true path of righteous conservatism. Never mind that any self-respecting modern conservative likely abandoned any white guilt after the third viewing of Sean Hannity's show.

We all know that Fox-era conservatives are not shy about bending the truth, and conservative narratives bend the truth all the time to further their goals. One example that I remember fondly was a message board discussion about Pat Buchanan's presidential run. Now this was a message board we had started up to accompany an alternative campus publication, and it was brand new so there couldn't be more than twenty or thirty people on this board. When I argued that no black people were supporting Buchanan's candidacy despite his odd selection of obscure African-American activist Ezola Foster as running mate, suddenly a black Reform Party voter appeared on this obscure message board on an obscure college campus to accuse me of racism. That was about as plausible as Judge's narrative.

In a particularly implausible section, Judge writes:

When I got home I vented to my friends. I told them I was going to scour those neighborhoods until I found the bike. In reply, a liberal friend gave me a lecture about profiling and told me to just forget about the bike. “That person needs our prayers and help,” she said. “They haven’t had the advantages we have.”

I'm skeptical for several reasons. I don't know much about how Washington works, so maybe Daily Caller wingnuts actually do have liberal friends. If this liberal friend actually said this, however, I think Judge has misinterpreted his friend's remarks. It doesn't seem to me that the alleged liberal friend meant that blacks have blanket permission to steal from whites or that whites should be "leaving valuable things like a bike in a vulnerable position in a black part of town because you didn’t want to admit that the crime is worse in poor black neighborhoods." Maybe there are some extreme Quakers who feel like this, but I haven't met any of them. Instead, it strikes me as a statement of acceptance, trying to find a silver lining and rationalizing things when the universe has violated you in a meaningless way. It was a way of telling Judge to move on with his life instead of dragging himself through the negro streets at dawn looking for his missing bike.

Having things stolen from you, especially things you prize, is hard. I emphasize with his anger while I mock and criticize his misdirected overreaction. And this is where a lot of racism comes from, misdirected anger. Many people become racists when they are the victims of a violent crime at the hands of a person of another race. (Though in Judge's case, of course, the crime was non-violent and he only assumes the perpetrator is black.) I still remember when my house was broken into when I was a kid, but it was the stoner next door who did it, and I didn't start hating whitey as a result.

Racists like Judge don't differentiate between people of other races. They're all one dangerous undifferentiated mass to them, while white people are divided into friends and enemies, good people and assholes. It would be nice if a supposedly educated professional like Judge could realize a simple fact: the guy who stole his bike, if he was black, wasn't a representative of the NAACP, he was just some random asshole. In that, Judge and the thief have something in common.

Hey liberals, Mississippi is all your fault!

March 9, 2012 Clip: Alexandra Pelosi

Today I’ve been reading the back and forth on Andrew Sullivan’s blog about the above video by filmmaker Alexandra Pelosi which recently aired on Real Time with Bill Maher, where the citizens of the poorest state in the nation flaunt their prejudices and their lack of teeth. According to Sullivan, the wing nuts are going “ape-shit” over this. I don’t need to go dumpster diving in the right-wing blogosphere to verify this. After all, this is just the perfect storm to set right-wing spittle flying: the daughter of San Francisco Liberal Nancy Pelosi and that atheist Hollywood libertine Bill Maher making fun of the poor, humble, hardworking folk of the American heartland.

It’s not just the right-wing who react when someone shines airs the dirty laundry of the South; moderates and liberals like the dissenters quoted by Sullivan leap to the defense of aggrieved southerners whenever someone besmirches their honor. Because they know a few gays or progressives or minorities and frequent a nice vegan restaurant in town and don’t know a single person in the Klan, they claim that accusations of racism of their fellow southerners are unfounded. Often the violent reaction to Martin Luther King’s visit to Chicago is trotted out as an example of how the North is just as bad, or even worse, than the South. Never mind that this argument is undercut by the fact that the South directed violence against African-Americans for a hundred years prior to King’s visit to Chicago, or that King himself was murdered in Tennessee.

“It is the manifestation of why the Democratic Party, and left-leaning politics in general, are so totally irrelevant to many of the people who should, by all rights, be its base,” one of Sullivan’s dissenters writes about the video. If only liberals would stop being such meanypants about the South! If we would abandon our prejudices against the hard-working, toothless masses of places like Mississippi, then those voters would abandon their prejudices and begin voting in their economic interests. Really? I fail to see how this is anything but fantasy, powered by the perennial American myth in the essential goodness of common folk. Is it the prejudices of liberals that caused 52% of Mississippi GOP voters to think Barack Obama is a Muslim or 46% of them to think interracial marriage should be illegal? Is it the prejudices of liberals that caused members of the Southern Mississippi University band to chant at a Puerto Rican basketball player on the opposing team “Where’s your green card?’



If Mississippi didn’t have the lowest high school graduation rate in the nation, they might know that Puerto Rico is part of the United States.

The dissenters claim that we must respect the South and are ignorant of the ways of its kind, hard-working folk. The dissenters never insist the reverse; that southerners respect and learn about other places, such as knowing that Puerto Rico is a territory of the US.

An anecdote from neighboring Alabama: You may have heard of gifted scientist Douglas Prasher, whose work helped three others win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, while he ended up driving a courtesy van for an Alabama car dealership. A profile in Discover highlighted his interactions with some of those southerners:

“We’ve been teaching Douglas about the real world,” he said. Jim, another body shop worker, listed some of the things they had educated Prasher about. They all happened to be local culinary delights: “mountain oysters” (hogs’ testicles), fried moon pies, Goo Goo Clusters. I asked Jim if Prasher had taught them anything in return—say, about DNA. “DN who?” Jim asked, smiling.

This respect, this learning, this open-mindedness demanded of liberals is not a two way street. While we have to learn about the “real world” of eating pig testicles, they can remain wholly ignorant of the entire world outside their state. We have to endlessly praise them as the “heartland” of this country and listen to them attack the rest of us as wicked, evil, and corrupt. We are subsiding their rural lifestyles with our money while they demand that taxes and government services be cut even further, except for stuff they like, of course, which doesn’t really count.

I’m sure there will be some responses that echo the dissenters above, that I’ve unfairly tarred all southerners with the same brush, that I’m reinforcing mean liberal prejudices, etc. It may surprise you to learn that I live in a southern state that has also often been a national laughingstock. When my state is attacked, I don’t cling to some sort of stubborn regional pride and complain that we’ve been unfairly maligned. I realize that the attacks are accurate. After all, we elected as Governor a guy who defrauded Medicare of millions because his opponent, a former Bank of America executive, was a socialist or something. Yes, there are racists and toothless idiots in Florida and Illinois and Pennsylvania and Oregon, but there are a hell of a lot of them in Mississippi, and you aren’t being unfairly maligned just because we are pointing out what you already knew. Yes, Mississppi is the home of William Faulkner and Eudora Welty and B.B. King too, but you can be damn sure they knew what their neighbors were like, so there’s no sense in you denying it.

Pete Hoekstra and the Yellow Peril

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.

Remembering Robert Novak, Douchebag of Liberty

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

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.

Weinergate and the unfortunate erection of Andrew Breitbart

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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!

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

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.

Student trolls university, nobody cares

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.

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

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.

Pee-wee Herman and the Culture Wars

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

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.