"Tin soldiers and Nixon's coming..."

A couple of items we thought you might like to know about:

From the Associated Press, by way of Yahoo News:

SEATTLE (AP) — A downtown march and rally in support of the Occupy Wall Street movement turned briefly chaotic as police scattered a crowd of rowdy protesters — including a pregnant 19-year-old and an 84-year-old activist — with blasts of pepper spray.

Protest organizers denounced the use of force, saying that police indiscriminately sprayed the chemical irritant at peaceful protesters.

The Occupy Seattle movement released a written statement late Tuesday expressing support for "a 4-foot 10-inch, 84-year-old woman, a priest and a pregnant woman who as of this writing is still in the hospital." ...

http://news.yahoo.com/pregnant-teen-elderly-woman-among-pepper-sprayed-113054448.html

From the Atlantic Wire, a blog associated with the Atlantic Monthly magazine:

There were reports that both Occupy San Francisco and Occupy Cal (on the Berkeley campus of the University of California) are being raided on Wednesday morning. The week of police crackdown comes amid reports that the federal government and is coordinating with multiple on legal strategies that can shut down the Occupy protests.

The woman in the picture is not just any elderly woman ... she is well known to Seattle residents. Dorli Rainey is a former school teacher who has been active in local politics since the 1960s. In 2009, she ran for mayor, but eventually dropped out by saying, "I am old and should learn to be old, stay home, watch TV and sit still." We guess she didn't learn.

Rainey emailed The Stranger, Seattle's alternative paper, to say she stopped by the march to see what was happening when her group got pinned in by police and nearly trampled in the chaos. ...

http://www.theatlanticwire.com/national/2011/11/84-year-old-woman-becomes-pepper-sprayed-face-occupy-seattle/45035/

Wisconsin's gubernatorial "Vanna White veto."

Like many people, among the political developments I've been following as closely as I can (which isn't always very closely) is the widespread outrage among progressives and labor supporters to the scheme of Wisconsin's new Governor Scott Walker—along with his fellow Republicans in the legislative branch—to, in one fell swoop, strip the state's public unions of their collective bargaining rights. The standoff between Walker and his state's public employees has continued for weeks, with Wisconsin State Senate Democrats having decamped to undisclosed locations in Illinois—a tactic of last resort to prevent their Republican colleagues from ramming their draconian measure through without argument or objection.

A recent article appearing on the Web site of the Atlantic Monthly provides perhaps the most alarming in all of this story's peculiar twists:

Two weeks into the collective bargaining protests in Madison, the interior of the Wisconsin state Capitol feels like a high-traffic liberal website given physical form. It's a world of text. Sheets of paper are affixed to every reachable surface with little strips of blue non-staining painter's tape. Some pages have slogans markered on them, others have columns of dense printing. "Retired teacher from California supports Wisconsin Workers" "One day longer!" "You can't silence Wisconsin." "Why can't we be friends with benefits?" There's a printout of a George Lakoff article, notices of other protests around the state, a lost-kid board, and a flier for somebody's self-published apocalyptic novel. Ranging up and down both sides of a grand marble staircase are printouts of 10,000 e-mails from Wisconsin citizens to Gov. Scott Walker (R), opposing his proposal to strip collective bargaining rights from public sector workers.

But the boisterous messages hide a sobering reality as the stalemate over Walker's budget repair bill deepens. A deal floated by moderate Republican state Sen. Dale Schultz, under which collective bargaining rights would automatically reactivate in 2013, seems to have drawn no interest from either side. One possible reason: the Wisconsin veto makes such a compromise impossible to enforce.

What most people outside Wisconsin don't know is that our governor wields a veto power on appropriations bills so strong as to be frankly comic. It's not just a line-item veto; Walker has the power to veto individual phrases and words (PDF) -- like "not" -- from sentences. If the state Senate returns to session and passes a bill with time limits on Walker's favored provisions, he can strip out the new language and sign his own decompromised version into law. If that sounds crazy, keep in mind that until 2008 governors of Wisconsin could -- and did! -- veto multi-page sections of bills, leaving in place only eight or nine words spelling out a law the governor wanted to enact. And that, in turn, was a much-narrowed version of the so-called "Vanna White veto" power enjoyed by Wisconsin governors prior to 1990, when they could veto individual letters out of words and individual digits out of numbers.

Prank call reveals Wisconsin governor as stooge of corporations with nationwide anti-labor agenda.

This is our time to change the course of history!
— Wisconsin's newly elected governor, Scott Walker

I'm not a huge fan of the idea of journalists pulling pranks like this, and I don't think that this conversation yielded any important new insights. The audio clip of a prank call that a journalist, posing as a rich businessman, made to Wisconsin's governor Scott Walker nevertheless makes for fascinating listening. It's especially important to keep in mind that Governor Walker believes himself to be talking on the phone to a 'conservative billionaire'. The Gov sure sounds more than a little chummy (specifically, the kind of chummy wherein one is also sycophantic). More explanation in this clip from the AP:


Who says this ain't a new Gilded Age?

On Wisconsin!!!

I have no idea how you managed to elect this despotic thug named Scott Walker as your governer, but don't give up the fight against his unprecedented and draconian assault on workers' rights!

Mubarak's thugs remind us that neocons & repressive dictators speak the same language: violence.

In the wake of Mubarak's announcement to the Egyptian people that he will resign from office at the end of his current presidential term (they have "terms"?!), we are reminded of Max Weber's famous observation in Economy and Society: "legal coercion by violence is the monopoly of the state."

We citizens of the modern bourgeois, cosmopolitan West ignore this relationship between violence and the state at our peril. A hundred years after the First World War, the fundamental premise of statehood remains unaltered: it is a form of social organization in whose name the use of violence is accorded legitimacy. It's through this lens that I've begun to view the recent eruptions of violence in Cairo, Alexandria and elsewhere in Egypt.

Weeks of remarkably peaceful anti-Mubarak protests culminated yesterday in the collegial, civilized march of a million (or, anyway, a whole hell of a lot of) demonstrators. This was the moment Mubarak chose to make his LBJ-like announcement. And, within moments of his television address, he gave the signal to his police thugs, to paid-off petty criminals (the same criminals who'd previously been given free reign to loot stores, etc., all to increase the public's sense of chaos and instability), and to camel-riding mercenaries—apparently summoned from the tourism industry(!)—to confront the anti-Mubarak throng.

 The result? Violence and chaos. But this time, instead of operating behind the scenes, to cultivate an atmosphere of unease—a strategy that had failed—the incitement happened right in front of the television cameras of the international press. Some of the supposed Mubarak-lovers riding camels onto the scene! As blatant a coordinated provocation as can be imagined.

My first reaction to this orchestrated provocation from the obviously phony "pro-Mubarak protesters" was: How could Mubarak be so ham-fisted? I quickly realized that, of course, there was nothing ham-fisted about it: Its obviousness is the whole point.

Paying off petty criminals and/or plainclothes policemen to loot stores was a genuine attempt to generate a sense of chaos, undifferentiated violence, economic uncertainty, and a yearning for the 'law and order' among the civilian population (this yearning being Mubarak's—or any repressive dictator's—political trump card).

By contrast, the coordinated "pro-Mubarak" incitement of violence represents a deliberate and ostentatious flexing of the state's muscle: an example of 'legitimate' state violence. The message to the protesting masses is simple: "Okay, you've extracted the best concession you're gonna get from us; now go home."

There is a separate message simultaneously being beamed to the heavy-weights in the Egyptian business community (and members of the middle class whose livelihood depends upon the smooth functioning of the latter), which is: "You still need us to keep the order." In this sense, the contrast between the ruling regime's highly uncharacteristic use of restraint over the past week and the volatility of recent developments is being used as an illustration of what happens when the state does not maintain the order with its iron fist.

The army plays an interesting role in this process. Its restraint, over the past week, has served as a way in which to preserve its popularity with the Egyptian public. Now, when Mubarak's thugs have been dispatched to the scene—by the busload, apparently—in order to spill some blood, the Egyptian army's restraint and 'impartiality' takes on a particularly sinister quality.

And so, when we witness the pro-Mubarak stance of some prominent neoconservatives, we should not see it as a sudden, surprising neoconservative embrace of Realpolitik—a posture that these same figures so often claim to despise (take their supposed belief in 'democracy-building' in Iraq, for example).

Instead, the neoconservatives are showing a tendency that has consistently been at the very heart of their system of values: the neocons, just like Mubarak, just like Ahmadinejad, believe in violence.

The neocons, like these repressive dictators, are suspicious of messy, unpredictable things like political and religious liberty, the rule of law, intellectualism, political discourse, and democratic deliberation. Although the neocons might occasionally speak the language of democracy, in fact they they understand only the language of violence.

See also: Slavoj Žižek on the cynicism and hypocrisy in the attitudes of many Westerners toward democratic revolutions in the Middle East.

LIAR!!!: GOP stance on Medicare vs. "Government Health Care"

By way of The Huffington Post:

Excerpts from the accompanying article:

Lawrence O'Donnell interviewed Rep. John Culberson (R-Texas) in a devastating segment on "Hardball" on Friday, implying that the conservative congressman was a hypocrite for opposing a public option yet refusing to cut government-run health-care programs such as Medicare and Social Security.

O'Donnell repeatedly pushed the conservative Congressman to give a straight answer about what federal entitlements he would cut. Culberson refused to give a response for several minutes before finally admitting that he would have voted for Social Security and Medicare despite the fact that they are government-run health-care systems.

[...]

O'Donnell [asked] Culberson: "If Medicare is not socialism, why don't we just delete the over-65 part of Medicare and make it available to everyone? What's your argument against that?"

[...]

An exasperated O'Donnell asked the Congressman: "You know that Medicare is a completely government-run health care system and yet you're saying you would have voted for it."

Culberson's response: "Yes"

By the end, O'Donnell accused Culberson of hypocrisy and more:

"You lie to America about the evils of government-run health care because you people, not one of you liars about government health care is willing to repeal Medicare, to stand up and be consistent... 'I hate government health care so I want to repeal Medicare'... That is a lie that you perpetrate every day."

Has the Obama administration already sold us out to 'Big Pharma'?

According to a document apparently leaked to The Huffington Post, it looks like a definite possibility.

So, as I've been saying repeatedly: It's kind of hard to galvanize enthusiasm among those on the Left for health care reform (or "health insurance reform" as the Dems have now decided to characterize it -- not a very good sign...) if in the end we're really just talking about some piece of shit neoliberal industrial re-shifting.

If there turns out to be no public option on the table, that's basically the straw that will break the camel's back as far as I'm concerned. I'll still be quick to point out what a bunch of liars and hacks the Republican so-called response is, but that's about it.

To his credit, Obama is doing exactly what he said he would be doing, which is forging compromises and getting the ball rolling on matters that are way way way overdue. But if this reform plan ends up doing nothing to lower the costs of prescriptions and care and to finally stick it to the 100% parasitic health insurance industry, then I'm basically just going to retreat back into my world of bleeding heart utopian daydreaming and soporific 12-string acoustic guitar arpeggios. That'll be it for giving a shit about politics. At least until the fascists start taking over for real......

Maybe I'm in a bit of a down mood. Gotta go watch some House.

A heroic moment in conversation with the Deranged Right on health care.

Anecdote time.

Gypsy Sun and Rainbows, a longtime friend of Crib From This, recently found himself at one of his local watering holes, engaged in a political conversation with his

good friend who also happens to be rightist ideologue, who claimed that there was a provision in the Congressional/Obama Health Care reform proposal that allows for abortions of people up to fifteen years old. Whew!

Whew, indeed! But that's the kind of dissembling that is so incomprehensible that even the person who believes he believes it can't actually, at the end of the day, believe it.

I mean... Cause, how would that work, exactly? Kind of difficult to picture... That's what happens, Republicans, when you simply memorize talking points without actually thinking through what (or, for that matter, whether) they mean!!

But wait: It gets better! I give you, the Crib From This community, courtesy of Gypsy Sun and Rainbows, the Deranged Dixiecrat Right in its full glory:

Also, we were at a bar and a random drunk dude came to our table and my friend and he struck up a conversation and he happened to also be a rightist ideologue who predicted (with my friend) that Obama was leading the United States into the worst depression in history AND that we would have another Civil War within the next two years. Whew!

Yes, you read correctly. This man thinks that there's going to be another CIVIL WAR within the NEXT TWO YEARS! To which our correspondent, Gypsy Sun and Rainbows, responded, in the heroic moment to which our title refers:

When the guy brought up the Civil War thing, I said: "Yeah, if it happens, it will because of people like YOU."

YYYYEEEEESSSSS!!! And Gypsy Sun knocks one clean out of the park!!!

I think that I am not the only one for whom the Rightist rhetoric is increasingly alarming/disconcerting: Where does this venom and hatred come from? Why are so many people making themselves impossible to talk to? What's behind all this? Just incoherent hatred of taxes?

(Incoherent because Medicare, Medicaid & Social Security combined are currently by far the biggest national expense, and we are borrowing trillions of dollars from China to pay for it, instead of just taxing the Viagra-addled dicks off of those crusty old bastards!!! ["Greatest Generation," MY ASS!!!!?])

Just racism? Just propaganda about "socialism" and whatever? What the hell is behind this out-of-control turn that Rightist rhetoric has taken?

A few Right-wing apologists say: "These health care protests are no worse than the Left-wing protests during the lead up to the Iraq War!"

But that's a bit of a stretch, don't you think?

Why is it a stretch? Because nobody took those war protesters seriously. Tell me I'm crazy, but that seems fairly obvious to me.... Was there any moment during the run-up to Iraq upon which you recall thinking: "Maybe we're not really going to go to war??!!!"

No. The Iraq War was a done deal, long before it was even mentioned to the American People, and we all knew that at the time. The Right-wing anti-health care astroturf campaign, by contrast, threatens to derail the entire debate.

But, I repeat: What the hell is behind the disturbing militarization of Rightist rhetoric?

Gypsy Sun and Rainbows weighs in:

Yeah, kind of brings us back to our Sarah Palin debate. Since this health care stuff began, I think I am beginning to understand your concern [about the Right's increasingly ominous and irresponsible rhetoric]. Death Panels? It's been debunked, but people still believe it. Same with Obama's birth certificate thing.

Right. What I personally find alarming is the sheer number of people who seem to be obsessed fanatically with these kinds of bizarre things.

Now, admittedly, I've never exactly met these people, but from what you and some others have said, it seems like a lot of the people saying this type of thing are people of whom you'd expect different -- more sober and less hysterical -- behavior.

Fortunately, unlike the health care nut jobs, I gather that the "birthers," as people seem to be calling them, are not exactly ever going to have the numbers to make anybody have to care about their bullshit, which I think makes it unquestionably a GOOD thing for the Democrats and for Obama: Even though all of the rhetoric and posturing is extremely unsettling, it definitely helps keep the Republican't Party* submerged in its present untrustworthy/uneducated/fanatic/non-mainstream cesspool.

By the way, although by no means do I wish to legitimize these so-called 'birthers', I would like to point out that there is so much evidence out there at present of Obama's having been born in Hawaii that it is almost unbelievable that anyone -- even mentally unbalanced people -- could actually continue to harbor doubts about this.

Specifically, in addition to all of the other evidence, there are numerous clippings from different Hawaii newspapers announcing Obama's birth!

Click here to see one of them. Ha ha ha!! Are there people who actually see stuff like this and STILL BELIEVE that he wasn't born in Hawaii??



___________________
* I just thought this up as I typed it. I'm sure I can't be the first. It's just too obvious.

HYPOCRITES!! (Part I): Health care, ideology and rhetoric.

The elegantly monikered and frequently brilliant blog Phuck Politics brings to our attention a highly entertaining and singularly infuriating exercise in Far-Right talking points.

You know what talking points are, right? They're these bullet-pointed 'arguments' circulated among Far-Right activists, politicians, Fox News-"personalities" and, of course, the Brownshirts that have been doing their inbred, mouth-breathingly thuggish best to carry out the bidding of demagogues and insurance industry brass alike. Their goal?: to interrupt 'town hall meetings' that are being held by congressmen in their home districts in order to discuss health reform.

This is a phenomenon to which we may refer as "astroturfing," or perhaps with still greater accuracy as "astroweeding."

Anyway, Phuck Politics shares with us the talking points that are being advanced by something called the Liberty Counsel (sounds friendly enough: Who doesn't like liberty??!!), which is apparently the Joseph Goebbels-like misinformation-propagating arm of Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University:

Sec. 59B, Pg. 170, Line 1 – Any NONRESIDENT alien is exempt from individual taxes. (Americans will pay for their health care.)

Sec. 1177, Pg. 354 – Government will RESTRICT enrollment of special needs people! “Extension of Authority of Special Needs Plans to Restrict Enrollment.”

Sec. 1233, Pg. 425, Lines 4-12 – Government mandates Advance (Death) Care Planning consultation. Think Senior Citizens and end of life. END-OF-LIFE COUNSELING. SOME IN THE ADMINISTRATION HAVE ALREADY DISCUSSED RATIONING HEALTH CARE FOR THE ELDERLY.

Sec. 2511, Pg. 992 – Government will establish school-based “health” clinics. Your children will be indoctrinated and your grandchildren may be aborted!

The late, windy Jerry "Tushy-Faced" Falwell. May he rest in piss.

The reader will observe that Phuck Politics has some astute and howlingly funny things to say about this, including an imaginative description of the type of dialogue that must have gone down among the Liberty Council staffers when they were cooking this stuff up.

I wish to weigh in specifically on the fourth item listed above, which for my money is the most ermm...side-splittingly hilarious. The idea of referring to health clinics as "health" clinics... Wow!

Let's have another look!:

Sec. 2511, Pg. 992 – Government will establish school-based “health” clinics. Your children will be indoctrinated and your grandchildren may be aborted!

This takes the idea of seeing the world through the prism of ideology to its paranoiac limits.

I mean...really. Were the (il)logic of this statement to edge a fraction-of-an-inch further in the direction of mechanical-pre-judgment of empirical reality, it would represent a brand new pathology, wherein bigotry, myopia, resentment and rank stupidity begin to chew away not only at its believer's capacity to relate to the world around him -- which clearly is already on the skids -- but at one another.

The myopia begins to resent the bigotry, the bigotry looks askance at the myopia, and all the while, the stupidity reproduces itself like a cancer, slowly reducing the entire thing into a kind of droopy incoherence.

There is something so reprehensible about this rhetoric, something so completely offensive and prejudiced and pathetic and self-serving and self-undermining and willfully dumb, that it becomes almost beautiful. The sheer absurdity of questioning the very notion that health clinics are concerned with health!

The nerve displayed in this deployment of the word "indoctrinated," which reads not so much as a shocking revelation, but as a casual aside. Like: Oh yeah, of course these supposed "health" clinics are actually no more than "indoctrination" clinics!!! Indoctrinated into what? Into viewing the practice of medicine as based upon empirical science?

And then, to top it all off with what could only be called an astonishing feat of transgression-for-transgression's-sake: "your grandchildren may be aborted"!

Round of applause, please!!!

Think about this for a moment.....while keeping in mind, of course, that it is not the sort of provocation that is designed to make people think. The fear that's being expressed here is that the reader's son's and daughter's daughter's yet-to-be-conceived-unborn child may be aborted.

This begs the question: What kind of children are the reader's sons and daughters raising? Don't they learn about abstinence at their Bible Camp??? Are America's preteen Evangelicals having wild parties with the close-dancing and the listening to that race-music?

One rather suspects that this particular exercise in Right-wing hysteria is directed against the idea of public schooling in general more than against the idea of having health clinics in those schools. Let us take a look at a few quotations on the subject of public education, from Rev. Falwell, Herr Hitler and President Jefferson:

I hope I live to see the day when, as in the early days of our country, we won't have any public schools. The churches will have taken them over again and Christians will be running them. What a happy day that will be! -- Rev. Jerry Falwell

The idea of separation of Church and State was invented by the Devil to keep Christians from running their own country. -- Rev. Jerry Falwell

Secular schools can never be tolerated because such a school has no religious instruction and a general moral instruction without a religious foundation is built on air; consequently, all character training and religion must be derived from faith.... We need believing people. -- Adolf Hitler

Education is here placed among the articles of public care, not that it would be proposed to take its ordinary branches out of the hands of private enterprise, which manages so much better all the concerns to which it is equal; but a public institution can alone supply those sciences which, though rarely called for, are yet necessary to complete the circle, all the parts of which contribute to the improvement of the country, and some of them to its preservation. -- Thomas Jefferson

A bill for the more general diffusion of learning... proposed to divide every county into wards of five or six miles square;... to establish in each ward a free school for reading, writing and common arithmetic; to provide for the annual selection of the best subjects from these schools, who might receive at the public expense a higher degree of education at a district school; and from these district schools to select a certain number of the most promising subjects, to be completed at an University where all the useful sciences should be taught. Worth and genius would thus have been sought out from every condition of life, and completely prepared by education for defeating the competition of wealth and birth for public trusts. -- Thomas Jefferson

Hmmm... Looks like we have some disagreement here. Between Founding Father Thomas Jefferson in favor of public education and the dynamic duo of Rev. Falwell and Herr Hitler against.

But back to the talking points: Such is their unsurpassed incoherence that the only comparison I can come up with is to a black hole: the vortex at which space and time and light and matter and mass all collapse upon and within themselves. (Or something like that.....)

Come to think of it, doesn't this artist's rendition of a black hole a whole lot like the images adorning the covers of books published by weirdo Right-wing nut-job literalist Southern Evangelical religious people? You know, like one of those ultra-cheesy depictions of the Apocalypse or the Book of Revelation or whatever?

Anyway, in the second part of this discussion, to be titled "HYPOCRITES!! (Part II): Health care, Medicare Part D and generational politics," I shall explain why this ludicrous Republican rhetoric opposing health care reform is truly and deeply hypocritical: Have you considered the fact that the people objecting most strongly to health care reform are precisely those who benefit the most from Medicare?

And Medicare is the single most costly government program in existence, far exceeding anything else, including military spending?

That's right, people over the age of 65, many of whom live in the South, are the recipients of the most expensive public program in existence. The same people who are so fervently opposed to Obama's 'socialistic' proposal for a public health insurance program that would compete with the private insurers....

The expense of this government program increased by several orders of magnitude when George W. Bush signed Medicare Part D, which is the prescription drug benefit, without bothering to figure out how he was going to pay for it, and sandwiched between the two biggest tax cuts for the wealthy in American history??

Iranian election and protests

I have nothing to say except wow. Ahmadinejad is a truly evil dude. It would be nice to see him go down, but it seems unlikely that that will happen. It might not matter, in the long term. For how long can a government -- even a tyrannical, repressive, anti-intellectual, racist and sexist government -- go on ignoring the demands of an entire, highly educated young generation? Sadly, probably for a long time. But who knows...


This stunningly beautiful photograph appears alongside a report in today's Los Angeles Times. An excerpt:

The loyalists' gathering was heavily advertised on state-controlled TV and radio, urging Ahmadinejad supporters to show up in force as a display of popular support for the president and against "looters and arsonists."

Those assembled chanted: "Death to America!" "Death to Israel!" "Khamenei is our leader," referring to Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. It was an impressive crowd, numbering in the tens of thousands, but not nearly as dramatic as the massive unauthorized opposition demonstration that took place a day earlier in Azadi Square.

Mousavi supporters, who had been told by the candidate to stay away from the square, instead assembled in a quiet march in northern Tehran along Vali Asr Street. The crowd, holding green banners and flags, marched in near silence. They held up posters of Mousavi and placards calling Ahmadinejad a "liar." Anti-riot poice stood along the roadways but did not interact with the demonstrators.

The dispute over election results have riven Iran, leading to massive protests, demands for a recount and clashes that state radio said today had taken the lives of at least seven people.