Library Grape - The Best in Politics, Culture and Delicious Snark

Seriously, Just Shoot Me In The Head And Get It Over With

Metavirus — Wed, 19 Jun 2013 00:09:42 +0000

I really don’t understand why I even bother anymore:

NYC Police Commissioner Ray Kelly: “I think the American public can accept the fact if you tell them that every time you pick up the phone it’s going to be recorded and it goes to the government. I think the public can understand that.”

Put me out of my misery already…

2 comment(s) for this post:

Matmos:
18 Jun 2013 See, this is why a broad-based liberal arts education is necessary to the future of the Republic. Because "1984", and because "should we" vs. "can we".
Metavirus:
19 Jun 2013 The Republic is dead, long live the Republic.

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by Metavirus @ Library Grape - The Best in Politics, Culture and Delicious Snark

It’s Always A Special Time Of The Year For Me

Lev — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 22:57:09 +0000

When my senator, Dianne Feinstein, forgets to take her medication and forgets that it isn’t 1984 anymore, and decides to start sounding as hawkishly belligerent as John McCain on a bad day. Does seem as though it happens about once a year, whenever there’s some kind of non-security threatening leak actually, though now that she’s a committee chair, it sorta matters.

To be sure, the most tragic outcomes in the Moscone/Milk murders were the deaths of those two essentially decent men. But wouldn’t the third have to be the elevation of Feinstein to a position of authority? Absent that, I find it very hard to see how she would ever have become a political force of any sort. As conservative a mayor as San Francisco could possibly have had in her day, constantly behind every public opinion curve, still sucking up to the military-industrial complex as though it were still the days when Michael Douglas’s character from Falling Down was gainfully employed. What if Dan White had entered into a Twinkie coma instead of going on a murder rampage? Feinstein would have had to follow Moscone–the bigger star in the party–every step of the way, so in all probability she’d have ended up one of the half-dozen statewide office musical chair acts that everyone in here knows about, the people my father would always angrily insist should get a real job already, people with enough of a profile to get elected to be State Treasurer or Controller (more like then rather than or), but with crippling unlikability that would prevent them from going any higher. That would have actually been pretty fitting. But she lucked out and succeeded much more than she had any right to, in a way that only a small number of people (William Shatner, Christian Slater, the guy from Quiet Riot, and pick your European Royalty) have been able to. It’s quite frustrating, though at least the odds of her service continuing into the roaring (twenty-)twenties are probably not all that great.

Until then, let’s celebrate the season appropriately.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5Pfl3I7_2Q

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by Lev @ Library Grape - The Best in Politics, Culture and Delicious Snark

Lawd! Ah Thunk Up A Gud Thawt!

Metavirus — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 19:15:14 +0000

Bear witness to the bright young minds at Liberty University who are trying to make conservatism hep and happnin’ for the YouTube generation. They got real good idears, they do:

Travis Korson… suggested framing marriage as an economic issue. “Gay marriage undermines that basic family unit,” he said, and that, in turn, hurts the economy.

Um, what?

4 comment(s) for this post:

Matmos:
18 Jun 2013 That's right up there with "let's make abortion funny". Also too, doesn't gay marriage *boost* the economy? Like, with wedding planners, caterers, florists and the like? I mean, right? I am right, right?
Metavirus:
18 Jun 2013 hey! don't you try them logicks on me, you commie hippie mooslum homo! gays = bad. boogah.
Lev:
18 Jun 2013 I love the lack of basic logic here. The public, and young people in particular, have roundly rejected the notion that gay marriage hurts straight marriage. To use that as an ASSUMPTION to trot out the Ross Douthat/Rick Santorum argument that government needs to save our families because of the economy...that's brilliant, in an absurd way.

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by Metavirus @ Library Grape - The Best in Politics, Culture and Delicious Snark

Georgia

Lev — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 20:54:14 +0000

I’ve been generally skeptical of efforts to turn Texas into a blue state. Don’t get me wrong, that would be pretty awesome, but it seems like a task whose rewards would be wildly out of sync with the spadework that would have to be done to make it happen. This is, after all, a state which just about invented governing by lobbyist, a state which has in the past 100 years had two truly progressive governors: Jimmy Allred back during the early days of the New Deal, and Ann Richards, who mainly got in because the GOP candidate was a proto-Todd Akin. It’s the state where the New Deal opposition centered, the state that is damn proud of its regulatory negligence. Sure, on paper, the dynamics of Hispanic growth could make things interesting, though it hasn’t come close to materializing yet, and the state GOP has put a uniquely strong priority on not alienating Hispanics. Could happen, but the history, the fundamentals of the state (i.e. money), and the politics of the state make me think it’s going to be hard to backdoor it away from the GOP, and if we were able to do so, it probably wouldn’t matter anyway, as it would mean that there would have to have been some kind of precipitous collapse in the Republican Party to make it happen.

On the other hand, Florida has seemed like a very promising target, as it’s pretty much evenly divided and a big push could make it more solidly in the Democrats’ favor. What would make things interesting is if Georgia (which along with Florida would about equal Texas’s electoral vote total) were gettable too. It just might be:

Reflecting these changes, Obama carried the Atlanta metro in both 2008 and 2012, by 4 points and 1 point, respectively. That’s a 21 point Democratic swing from the 1988 Presidential election. The changes—and the improvements for Democrats–are generally even gaudier in the metro area’s (and the state’s) most populous counties: Cobb (138 percent of growth from minorities, 34 point margin shift toward Democrats since 1988); DeKalb (143 percent of growth from minorities, 55 point shift toward Democrats); Fulton (94 percent of growth from minorities, 16 point shift toward Democrats) and Gwinnett (118 percent of growth from minorities, 42 point shift toward Democrats).

With figures like this, it’s not hard to see a blue Georgia taking shape in the near future — probably nearer than Texas, despite its slightly higher Democratic support among whites and slightly higher minority share of voters. The secret ingredient: Georgia’s minority voters are dominated by extremely pro-Democratic African-Americans. That pushes overall Democratic support among minorities in Georgia about 20 points higher than in Texas. That makes a huge difference and explains why Georgia has been so much closer in the last two elections than Texas.

Georgia is more likely than not to become competitive, Florida is more likely than not to move in the Dems’ direction as Cuban Republicans are replaced in the population by younger, less rightist voters, and Texas remains an outside chance to turn into something. Democrats sure appear to be making strides on the electoral map. Meanwhile, what states are Republicans moving aggressively to lock down? It’s interesting because a similar shift is occurring here in California, as the state GOP continues its neverending death spiral, Democrats are becoming competitive in more and more areas and previous battlegrounds have become safe territory, while the GOP’s only gains have been in tiny rich enclaves (Romney’s biggest success story in the state was in Laguna Beach, where he cut Obama’s 2008 margin in half) that have few votes. The overall climate, both here and nationally, seems ominous for them.

4 comment(s) for this post:

Matmos:
17 Jun 2013 From Nate Silver, re: Georgia, pre-2012 election. This stood out, which I was unaware of:
The Democratic fall in Georgia has been deeper and more complete than in Virginia and North Carolina. For instance, while Mr. Obama won large majorities of young voters in North Carolina and Virginia in 2008, he lost voters ages 18 to 29 in Georgia. According to exit polls, the proportion of votes cast in Georgia by non-Hispanic whites has dropped over the last two decades, from 79 percent in the 1992 presidential election to 73 percent in 1996 and 2000 to 70 percent in 2004 to 65 percent in 2008. But it has not yet dropped enough for Democrats to rely so exclusively on minority support.
Metavirus:
17 Jun 2013 Re: Florida: lets not forget the perpetual dying off of calcified, bitter, racist, homophobic Olds.
Matmos:
18 Jun 2013 You know, I want to say the olds skew Democratic at least in the Miami and Tampa areas -- not in the panhandle -- because of people moving there for retirement, but maybe that's just a stereotype I have floating around in my head. A quick googles for voting stats didn't bring up anything broken down by age, but I haven't looked very hard at all. To hear a friend of mine who grew up there, "calcified, bitter, racist, and homophobic" described a large swathe of the folks there, not just limited to the life-alert-bracelet set. But that was just her experience.

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by Lev @ Library Grape - The Best in Politics, Culture and Delicious Snark

Why I Don’t Read Sullivan Anymore*

Lev — Fri, 14 Jun 2013 19:19:27 +0000

Via Balloon Juice, it appears that Sully is on the warpath again. He’s factually right, but on some level, it leaves me cold. Obama has been able to rely again and again on personality politics in selling policies that the left and center simply do not want, and a large part of that is due to mostly uncritical boosters like Andrew Sullivan. To hear him complain about the edifice he actually has had a large part in building…it galls me. To give the man credit, he bitterly opposed Obama’s Libya experiment when it happened, which shows that Sullivan is capable of learning lessons. He pretty clearly is chastened by his Iraq boosterism. Problem is…he’s not capable of learning all the lessons, and he’s far too forgiving. Let’s go through these:

Politicians should never be hero-worshipped. Andrew Sullivan continues to put politicians into two categories: let’s just call them Thatchers and Hillarys. The latter needn’t be clarified. The former–well, he’s able to intellectually see their flaws, but on an emotional level, there’s no capacity for nuance. Obama has largely fallen into the first category for Sullivan. Every questionable decision is part of a grander strategy, every seeming failure pointing toward a grander success. Meep meep, muthafucka! Of course, we now know this not to be the case. Looking back, while sometimes Obama was working a larger strategy, oftentimes his failures bespoke his own limitations, or a lack of will in trying to push some priority or other, or (often in budget issues) a complete misreading of the situation and/or priorities nobody else wanted. And yes, that includes a grand bargain.
Politicians should not be personally identified with. I hardly think Obama has been a terrible president. I think he could have done better, and that his particular ambitions and principles have made progress unnecessarily harder in many cases. But I learned some time ago not to assume that he in any way shares my priorities or point of view, and I think not assuming that of any politician is wise. I do find certain politicians admirable, it is true, but expecting them to do anything more than what they can politically accomplish is folly. At this point, looking at his conduct of foreign policy, Obama has behaved as a hawk. Sure, he hasn’t bombed Iran, but he did intervene in Libya with no real point to it, and his use of drones so aggressively definitely counts. That he would start providing arms to the Syrian rebels is wildly in character for Obama, but not to Sullivan, who has been indispensable in turning Obama into a Rorschach blot when, really, his record is amazingly easy to read, and predicts his actions quite well. But you have to be able to accept people as they are, rather than as you want them to be. And, fundamentally, politicians are different from the rest of us. They have power that we don’t have. Which leads to…
You built it. Frankly, people like Sullivan (and Sullivan in particular) were instrumental in creating the mirage of this postpartisan politics that Obama was supposedly going to bring about. Obama has usually seemed out of his depth on budget disputes, unable to make the bareknuckled moves that such disputes often need. But the “be nice” approach always seemed to me to be reaching out to erstwhile bipartisan fetishizers like Sully himself, who once wrote**: “The president has been more muted in his response [to Ryan's Budget]. But the onus is on him now to provide a plan that matches the impact on the budget that Ryans’ does, with different emphases. So where is that plan? Or does the president have none?” So, rather than just telling Republicans to shove it on entitlements, or hawks to shove it on foreign interventions, Obama is almost forced to be wishy-washy because that’s what he’s been built up as, and Sully himself has attacked him for not living up to it. And let’s not underestimate Sullivan’s power here. He managed almost singlehandedly to turn a mediocre debate performance by the president into a campaign-threatening disaster. Sure, Obama himself doesn’t like to play hardball, but how can he with people like Sullivan who will judge him for not being as forthright as Paul Ryan?

Right as Sullivan is about Syria–I literally disagreed with nothing he wrote–I feel I’ve gotta shoot the messenger this time. Anyway, until he gets a handle on these things (which are all basically the same point, that he can’t just put power in perspective), I’m…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVfiMFoCl3k

* Actually, the reason I stopped reading him was that he fell for Paul Ryan’s Snake Oil Budget. Hard to trust someone after that. But that’s not the reason I haven’t gone back, per se…

** Seriously, it’s right here.

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by Lev @ Library Grape - The Best in Politics, Culture and Delicious Snark

And Just How Do We Feel About Cory Booker?

Lev — Thu, 13 Jun 2013 17:45:16 +0000

The Guardian has a brutal, though not really all that unfair, take on the soon-to-be-senator. I must admit that Booker inspires a lot of ambivalence in me. He’s an impressive person in many ways, and obviously we know all about the minuses. I doubt he’d be a Lieberman-esque embarrassment, and his voting record would most likely not differ much from his opponents’. However, he seems especially unsuited for the long, incremental building of power and influence that is how one rises in the U.S. Senate, which makes me think that his decision to make this race was due entirely to Chris Christie’s political strength and his desire to rise to the next level, rather than a sincere belief that the Senate was the best place to bring his abilities. As a matter of fact, I suspect Booker’s Senate tenure will be dedicated mostly to self-promotion before running for Governor of New Jersey in 2017. After all, he’ll have won two statewide elections by then, more likely than not by large margins. Since the New Jersey GOP has nobody beyond Christie, I suspect that contest would be a slam-dunk for Booker too. And it would set him up for a 2020 White House run quite nicely, if a Republican wins in 2016. Of course, I could be wrong, and then he’ll end up there for forty years. Certainly the Senate offers plenty of opportunities for self-aggrandizement. But Booker seems like someone who needs the spotlight to be on himself to a large degree, and that’s not really how it often works as a junior senator. Merely an opinion here.

2 comment(s) for this post:

Matmos:
13 Jun 2013 I don't know too much about him, but your analysis matches the impression I formed during Booker's maneuvering for Lautenberg's seat back in...January?
Metavirus:
13 Jun 2013 i have the same ambivalence. but really i fall on the side of remaining suspicious of him. he seems like his heard is in the right place but i also see in him too much receptivity to being bought off for expediency's sake. and yes i agree that he is very much more the executive type, rather than a legislator. so he will definitely spend most of his time preening

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by Lev @ Library Grape - The Best in Politics, Culture and Delicious Snark

Little Children Walking With the Wind

Matmos — Thu, 13 Jun 2013 06:54:34 +0000

Too much nonsense today; need something to cut the suck. At the risk of getting shill-y, here’s a blurb from TopShelf Productions for March (Book One) by Congressman John Lewis, Andrew Aydin, and Nate Powell, forthcoming August 13:

March is a vivid first-hand account of [Congressman John Lewis (GA-5)]‘s lifelong struggle for civil and human rights, meditating in the modern age on the distance traveled since the days of Jim Crow and segregation.
Rooted in Lewis’ personal story, it also reflects on the highs and lows of the broader civil rights movement.

Book One spans John Lewis’ youth in rural Alabama, his life-changing meeting with Martin Luther King, Jr., the birth of the Nashville Student Movement, and their battle to tear down segregation through nonviolent lunch counter sit-ins, building to a stunning climax on the steps of City Hall.

Here’s an interview with Congressman Lewis about the novel on HuffPo (from which I stole the quote for this blentry title); and here’s a BookExpo panel with Congressman Lewis and Jason Mott (author of The Returned).

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by Matmos @ Library Grape - The Best in Politics, Culture and Delicious Snark

My Brain Being a Man’s Brain

Matmos — Thu, 13 Jun 2013 01:36:36 +0000

Republicans now making with the man-brains, for crying out loud. From Lawmaker Says Man’s Brain More Concerned About Costs on PoliticalWire:

Maine State Rep. Ken Fredette (R) declared that he and most of his Republican colleagues oppose accepting federal funds to expand health care coverage because the genders think differently. Said Fredette: “From the other side of the aisle I hear the conversation being about ‘free this is free, we need to take it and it’s free and we need to do it now’ and that’s sort of the fundamental message that my brain receives. Now, my brain being a man’s brain sort of thinks differently, because I say, well, it’s not if it’s free is it really free because I say in my brain there’s a cost to this.”

Via. I swear, they’re a bunch of Funkes, all of ‘em.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=usuFBk2YqZg

1 comment(s) for this post:

Matmos:
13 Jun 2013 (Whoops. Posted this in the wrong place, originally.) Now that I’m re-reading Franks’…utterance, I’m thinking somebody really oughtta auto-tune it up. It’s the best tone-poem I’ve read since Mooseburgers: “Now, my brain being a man’s brain sort of thinks differently, because I say, well, it’s not if it’s free is it really free because I say in my brain there’s a cost to this.” Now, obvs, it’d be better if he threw in a rhyme in that last line, but maybe it can be massaged post production.

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by Matmos @ Library Grape - The Best in Politics, Culture and Delicious Snark

RAPE! the Musical

Matmos — Thu, 13 Jun 2013 00:54:14 +0000

Certain quarters keep spoutin’ the same ol’ song. From GOP congressman: Rate of pregnancies from rape is ‘very low’:

“Before, when my friends on the left side of the aisle here tried to make rape and incest the subject — because, you know, the incidence of rape resulting in pregnancy are very low,” [Rep. Trent Franks (R-Ariz.)] said. Franks continued: “But when you make that exception, there’s usually a requirement to report the rape within 48 hours. And in this case that’s impossible because this is in the sixth month of gestation. And that’s what completely negates and vitiates the purpose for such an amendment.”

Via Laura Clawson onna DailyKOS, with some follow-em-ups — Gabriel Gomez Calls Rep. Trent Franks A ‘Moron’ For Rape Remark, Trent Franks Walks Back Claim About Pregnancy From Rape– on tha TPMs. I’d like to think “Report: Flake Apologizes For Son’s Offensive Slurs On Twitter” is a totally unrelated story, but one suspects it is not.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uS2nWLz-AbE

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by Matmos @ Library Grape - The Best in Politics, Culture and Delicious Snark

Quote of the Day: All We Have To Do Is Convince Our Customers They’re Wrong

Metavirus — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 23:24:09 +0000

Here’s an Xbox rep addressing the controversy over Microsoft’s decision to require an internet connection for its new Xbox One console and hobble used game sales:

“This is a big change, consumers don’t always love change, and there’s a lot of education we have to provide to make sure that people understand.”

Translation:

“[Our heavy-handed efforts to overhaul the used game market and fuck over potential Xbox players who don't want to connect to the internet] is a big change. Consumers [are being whiny little bitches about it]. [All we need to do is tell them they're being stupid and make sure they] understand [that they're wrong].”

Fixed! You have to appreciate the bullshit genius.

5 comment(s) for this post:

Matmos:
12 Jun 2013 Dude, I knew somebody that worked for Microsoft, and your translation was *almost word-for-word* something that she told me -- although in regards to some other product. (On the plus side, the Redmond campus had free soft drinks and arcade video games in the hallways. Got me a soda monkey on my back that it took *years* to get rid of.)
Lev:
13 Jun 2013 Microsoft's corporate behavior here is utterly typical. But people I know who worked there have universally raved about how it's a great place to work and how they treat employees well. Usually makes those lists of best companies to work for. Which I always found odd, almost schizophrenic, is how that differs from how they perceive of their customers...
Matmos:
14 Jun 2013 "HR screens applicants for jerks, then immediately hires them." The employees are smartypants, and the customers are perceived as dumb. Also too, a little bit of stockholders feeling their oats vs the plebs; dweebs getting a little of theirs back at a perceived hostile world; and pseudo-Seattle royalty vs the hoi-polloi. (You sure do get used to the perks that MS ID tag gets you around town -- eg, free public transportation.)

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by Metavirus @ Library Grape - The Best in Politics, Culture and Delicious Snark

Will Someone Just Give David Brooks His F*cking Reader’s Digest and Metamucil Already!?

Metavirus — Tue, 11 Jun 2013 20:34:33 +0000

I don’t usually comment on David Brooks columns because, well, res ipsa loquitur. But — fucking hellll — did he shit out a doozy this morning…

Two points.

1. “The kids today!; with that awful hippity hop music and their sagging pants and loose morals…”

Though thoughtful, morally engaged and deeply committed to his beliefs, [NSA leaker Edward Snowden] appears to be a product of one of the more unfortunate trends of the age: the atomization of society, the loosening of social bonds, the apparently growing share of young men in their 20s who are living technological existences in the fuzzy land between their childhood institutions and adult family commitments.

If you live a life unshaped by the mediating institutions of civil society, perhaps it makes sense to see the world a certain way: Life is not embedded in a series of gently gradated authoritative structures: family, neighborhood, religious group, state, nation and world. Instead, it’s just the solitary naked individual and the gigantic and menacing state.

Jesus tapdancing chriiiiist. Is it even possible for someone under the age of 105 to be this crotchety about their view of our horrifyingly venal, degenerate post-nuclear-winter civilization? Roving bands of disaffected, “atomized” individualists – freshly loosened of “social bonds” – wandering about in a “fuzzy land,” bereft of “civil society,” mumbling to themselves conspiratorily about a monolithic, “menacing” super-state? Really? Where did all the moral panic about loud rock music, hair hoppers and the rising tide of Satan worshiping go?

2. ”Boo hoo; people are becoming mistrustful and cynical about our national institutions FOR NO REASON AT ALL!”

This one really takes the cake. After clutching his pearls over degenerate youngsters, miniskirts and reefer madness, Brooks leaks out a gushing torrent of stupid when he bewails the rising levels of unpatriotic anarchists starting to actually – GASP! – become worried about the implications of our sweeping 21st century national security state:

Big Brother is not the only danger facing the country. Another is the rising tide of distrust, the corrosive spread of cynicism, the fraying of the social fabric and the rise of people who are so individualistic in their outlook that they have no real understanding of how to knit others together and look after the common good.

This is not a danger Snowden is addressing. In fact, he is making everything worse.

For society to function well, there have to be basic levels of trust and cooperation, a respect for institutions and deference to common procedures. By deciding to unilaterally leak secret N.S.A. documents, Snowden has betrayed all of these things.

One would think that all this breathless bewailing would be accompanied by some kind of disdain for, you know, all of the awful shit going on lately that is making people mistrustful of government…? Nope! One would be completely, 100% wrong.

Stupid, crass American traitors are just spontaneously being infected with unprovoked cynicism pathogens - for no earthly reason that David Brooks can discern (perhaps the “atomization of society,” amirite?). After an incessant spray of words about Edward Snowden’s “betrayal” of integrity, honor codes, self-gratification, morals, privacy, baked goods, ethics, open government, fine art, proper procedures, accountability, penmanship, trust, punctuality, the Constitution, aesthetic sensibility, democratic structures and, presumably, Baby Jesus — not to mention his friends, family, pets and doubles partner! – never is heard a discouraging word about what might cause otherwise quiet, Gawd-fearing, patriotic “real Americans” to suddenly come down with a case of Mistrustfulness. Call the CDC!

… -_- …

I’ve had it. The massive swells of upwelling Stupid gushing out from the collective festering mind-wounds of our leading “reasonable” conservative commentators are mixing too quickly with the neverending thunderstorms of Fail precipitating down from Washington; and it’s creating a toxic acid rain that is eating away at my staggeringly beleaguered brain.

via

1 comment(s) for this post:

Matmos:
11 Jun 2013 Blanket trust in covert groups whose jobs it is to deceive? Beyond the Star-Trek-anti-evil-computer paradox loop that sets up, the "American Experience" is rife with examples of Americans getting a raw deal from authority: Hoover's FBI; McCarthy's witchhunt; union busters in Appalachia; the bonus army getting trampled by Ike and MacArthur; the African American experience; the pre-Utah Mormon experience.... In fact, the only folks who would *not* question authority are those combining assumed (and unexamined) social privilege with the minimum imagination it takes to suppose they might be on the receiving end some day. Beria, also too. Does Godwin cover Beria? Maybe some kinda codicil?

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by Metavirus @ Library Grape - The Best in Politics, Culture and Delicious Snark

NSA Snooping and Public Opinion

Lev — Tue, 11 Jun 2013 18:27:21 +0000

This seems like a pretty reasonable take on public opinion and national security. I find personality obsession and tribalism to be endlessly disappointing when it comes to U.S. politics, though I take this partly as another low-information problem. Democrats who trust Obama more than Bush (definitely the right viewpoint, within limits) and are therefore less bothered by the spying led by an Administration led by the former are kidding themselves, as it’s not as though it’s an Obama-Eyes-Only program. It’s the same defense agency staffers and contractors doing it regardless of the Administration. On some level I think people realize this, but you do have to think about it for a second. Which is not so common.

Also, our ongoing embarrassment of a Senator continues to show just why she shouldn’t be chairing any committees relating to defense, national security, foreign policy or civil liberties. (Environment or HELP would have been acceptable.) Low-info voters at least have an excuse. It’s as though Dianne is still trying to fend off that possible challenge from Pete Wilson or something.

1 comment(s) for this post:

Metavirus:
11 Jun 2013 fuck people:
A 62% majority believe it's more important for the government to investigate terrorist threats, even if those investigations intrude on personal privacy. Support drops when it comes to government monitoring of emails, but even here, the public is evenly split.
just fuck em. i'm actually surprised that we're getting STUPIDER over time. i thought we'd at least evolve past the barely sentient caveman stage sometime before the year 2500 A.D.

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by Lev @ Library Grape - The Best in Politics, Culture and Delicious Snark

I Know You Are, But What Am I?

Matmos — Tue, 11 Jun 2013 05:33:58 +0000

From ‘Proud wacko bird’ Ted Cruz calls Obama biggest obstacle to immigration reform on Yahoo News:

As the immigration debate begins before the full Senate for the first time, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, has become one of the most vocal opponents to the current bill. But Cruz says the true obstacle to immigration reform is not him, but President Obama. “The biggest obstacle to passing common sense immigration reform is President Barack Obama,” Cruz tells The Fine Print, going on to say that the White House’s “insistence” on including a path to citizenship is standing in the way of the bill’s ultimate passage.

Obama the biggest obstacle to immigration reform, eh? That sounds…like the exact opposite of what’s going on there, Cubby. Via.

2 comment(s) for this post:

Metavirus:
11 Jun 2013 we're living in quite the post-truth era
Matmos:
11 Jun 2013 From Kos on the Great Orange Satan:
The whole point of the bill is a path to citizenship. You get rid of that, there is nothing left to pass, idiot.

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by Matmos @ Library Grape - The Best in Politics, Culture and Delicious Snark

We Are All the Messenger, Now

Matmos — Tue, 11 Jun 2013 04:25:43 +0000

From I Am So Fucking Over This Already by John Cole onna BJ, in re: the citizenry of these United States acting all surprised at getting what they voted for, state-surveillance-regime-wise:

And for the record, Obama is not the villain here, he’s just dealing with the laws as they were passed, and it looks like they did everything correctly and followed the letter of the law. If he hadn’t done everything to the extent of the law to implement the patriot act and something happened, they same jackasses now feigning outrage on the right would be flaming him for being soft on terror. Snowden is not the villain here, he just felt this needed to be out there, and if one more jackass all-in Obama supporter tells me he endangered national security, I swear to ALLAH I will start punching babies. The only thing he endangered were the talking points for the permanent security state. The NSA is not the villain here- they are just doing what we allowed them to do. Glenn Greenwald is not the villain here, he’s a civil libertarian who has warned about this and is now reporting the excesses of the program. No, you want to see the villain, look in the mirror. It’s the pants-wetting populace of the United States, who votes for these assholes who pass bad laws in moments of crisis, because we have to do something and because Americans, unlike every other nation in the world, have a god given right to be safe at all times from all things.

Somewheres else in the multiverse, I had contemplated that IMO one of Obama’s biggest jobs after getting elected first time around was to re-educate the electorate on the responsibilities and duties of a democratic government, because what with one thing and another we had all forgotten. Can’t hear; must feel.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3TSLdtWCJU

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by Matmos @ Library Grape - The Best in Politics, Culture and Delicious Snark

All Books About Italy by Americans Are Crap…

Matmos — Sun, 09 Jun 2013 00:47:16 +0000

…and other sweeping partially-true assertions.

I’m currently fighting my way through “Two Nuts in Italy“. It’s…horrible in its predictability, awful in its banality. It’s the sort of book that puts the “eye” in “Italian”, and the glottal-stop in “Italy”. Rick Steeves was mentioned repeatedly in the first part of the book. Chief among the reasons I don’t just chuck it against the wall: I ordered it through interlibrary loan and wasting the gas would kill me.

Tha gist: a middle-aged teacher from Texas writes about her three-month Odyssey winging it in Italy with (mostly) her daughter. It started losing me six pages in when the author quoted the following from Wayne Dyer:

Good morning!
This is God.
I will be handling all of your problems today.
I will not need your help, so
Have a miraculous day!

Holy shitcakes, but that’s some hard-to-take bollocks for so early in the morning.

Anyways, in the book thus far Tuscany was visited, tomatoes were smelt, the American rat-race was commented upon, dah-do-run-run. Besides making me jealous at how some folks seem able to fall ass-first into daisies whilst I’m more of a nettle-thicket in a ditch man — true story — the book reminded me of nothing so much as Beppe Severgnini’s comparision of Italy versus Italia in “La Bella Figura“:

Your Italy and our Italia are not the same thing. Italy is a soft drug peddled in predictable packages, such as hills in the sunset, olive groves, lemon trees, white wine, and raven-haired girls. Italia, on the other hand, is a maze. It’s alluring, but complicated. In Italia, you can go round and round in circles for years. Which of course is great fun.

As they struggle to find a way out, many newcomers fall back on the views of past visitors. People like Goethe, Stendhal, Byron, and Twain always had an opinion about Italians, and couldn’t wait to get home and write it down. Those authors are still quoted today, as if nothing had changed. This is not true. Some things have changed in our Italy. The problem is finding out what.

Almost all modern accounts of the country fall into one of two categories: chronicles of a love affair, or diaries of a disappointment. The former have an inferiority complex toward Italian home life, and usually feature one chapter on the importance of the family, and another on the excellence of Italian cooking. The diaries take a supercilious attitude toward Italian public life. Inevitably, there is censure of Italian corruption, and a section on the Mafia.

By and large, the chronicles of love affairs are penned by American women, who display love without interest in their descriptions of a seasonal Eden, where the weather is good and the locals are charming.

Word. I mean, I just got to the bit in the middle where the crazy guy in Siena tries to drop them off at an insane asylum for the night, and even that was horrible. Not the situation, but the writing — she described the scene as some kind of psychic struggle wherein Signore Pazzo was putting tha gris gris on her and giving her the agita. Oy vey.

The fact that she ended up defending George Bush to the nutcase wasn’t terribly endearing, either.

Even Severgnini’s words on the subject are too overwrought, too poetic, I think. It all comes down to “there is no land of milk and honey,” there is only what there is, not a felt fable stapled onto a drywall life.

A couple of years ago, I thought my Italian friend’s story about crying in front of Botticelli’s Birth of Venus because it was so beautiful was borderline insane, until I walked where the Doge padded around in his, I assume, slippered feet — although the Doge probably didn’t have a English language self-tour mike clamped to his ear and a zip-locked wad of cash sweatin’ it up in his shoe.

The same friend’s stories about unemployment, and nepotism/patronage, and mind-numbing beaurocratic nonsense — well, those stories are true too.

Is there something about us Americans that believes bedtime stories are real, more so than other folks? Is it that we’ve got two weeks tops to spend and airfare ain’t cheap, so bigod we’re gonna have an experience? Is it that we’re an inch deep and a mile wide (only not so much with the wide thing) and can only view the world in slices, like the square talking to the apple in Flatland? From The Xenophobe’s Guide to the Americans:

Americans are friendly because they just can’t help it; they like to be neighbourly and want to be liked. However, a wise traveller realises that a few happy moments with an American do not translate into a permanent commitment of any kind. Indeed, permanent commitments are what Americans fear the most. This is a nation whose fundamental social relationship is the casual acquaintance.

Maybe nobody’s “like” anything. Dunno. Seems that maybe if you’re looking for an experience like Shirley Maclaine walking to Santiago, you’re missing the point, or getting conned — the Camino oughtta be where-ever it is you’re at. If that’s not getting too treacley-Oz.

Ma all’ays said I shoulda been born before the Great War.

In closing, I find it just wonderful and much more closer to the bone that there’s a word in Italian for the concept “crazy cat lady”. From “The Seasons of Rome,” by Paul Hoffman, pg. 105:

For their livelihood, the stray cats depend almost exclusively on the charity of a gattara. A specific Roman character, a gattara is a woman, often elderly, who has chosen to take care of one of the many tribes of homeless cats scattered around the city, delivering to it a daily supply of fish heads, chopped liver expressly bought at the butcher’s, or spaghetti and meat sauce. The idiom lacks a term gattaro for male benefactors of the cat republics, although I have seen a few of them in action, too.

If “Two Nuts” gets better, I’ll let you know.

1 comment(s) for this post:

Matmos:
11 Jun 2013 It didn't get any better. One brief shining moment in which the author described a drunk guy walking in on her in bed (his roommate had lent her the room thinking he was away for the day) was more than offset by the author referring to herself as a "food slut". Jumping Jesus on a pogo stick.

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by Matmos @ Library Grape - The Best in Politics, Culture and Delicious Snark

On The Subject Of Woody Allen

Lev — Fri, 07 Jun 2013 20:46:36 +0000

I happened to catch Midnight To Paris this past weekend (it was Woody Allen’s biggest grossing movie ever as a director a few years back, for whatever that does to you), and it’s now official: Woody Allen has now been lapped by his forty year ago self artistically. If you haven’t seen the movie, this classic bit is pretty much the premise of the movie:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEsFbeqiD8w

Actually, it’s not even fair to say he turned a stand-up routine turned into a movie, since the movie manages to strip out all the edgy business (and humor) and turn it into straight-up wish fulfillment. The stand-up bit is much better as art, since there are actually some ideas in there. I mean, you wouldn’t want to get punched in the face by Ernest Hemingway, because it would hurt, but then again, it would also be kind of an awesome story, so you’d want to, right? The movie–which explores the same idea that Mr. Allen adequately covered in two and a half minutes initially–has no plot, barely any tension at all in fact, there’s nothing much but the Allen stand-in (Owen Wilson this time) hanging out with famous people from historical times. Being as vanity projects don’t typically come around with such little concealment of the vanity in question, I’m kind of amazed it did the business it did, though I guess the sheer number of famous people hanging out in Paris at that time could serve as something of a hook to the egghead crowd.

To me, though, there’s nothing sadder than people still working hard long since they’ve forgotten anything they had to say. I think it’s fair to say that Lou Reed has done his legacy no favors in recent years, and had Rod Stewart quit the music business in 1976, he’d be immortalized as one of the all-time greats rather than having been pilloried (mostly correctly) for the succeeding 37 years, which is about 30 longer than his amazingly good hot streak lasted. It’s fairly likely that both of these guys, and probably Allen as well, will only start to see their general reputations improve after they’re dead a few years and people forget about the years of garbage, since it seems nothing short of that will make them stop working. Allen in particular is an oddball though, as he’s grown more and more prolific despite having less and less to say. Midnight In Paris is a stand-up bit stripped of humor, and expanded into a two-hour movie with lots of generic padding. The fact is that the last good (not great, but good) film of his was released nineteen years ago. Before then, Allen’s work generally struck a nice balance. Despite the reputation of pessimism and cynicism, a movie like Annie Hall makes the inevitable sad ending seem more worldly and wise than merely cynical. And Manhattan pulls off the same trick, balancing the enchantment and fun with hard-won wisdom. But his post-1994 work is both much sourer–living up exactly to the stereotypes of his work–but also more nakedly sentimental. Rather than finding that nice balance, it’s only in the furthest extremes where he can work, though obviously sentimentality and cynicism are two sides of the same thing I suppose. One has to wonder the extent to which his personal life has soured his outlook, while also awakening his nostalgia and a desire for redemption with “the masses.” I don’t know this for sure, but it fits, especially when you see him trying to be a crowd-pleaser in his own way more and more. Ugh, Small Time Crooks.

It’s beginning to get tiresome, though, especially when you consider that Hollywood only makes a bit more than 100 movies a year, and that Allen refuses to surrender just one of those for anything new. It would be a different story if he were self-funding jazz records or whatever, since that’s not taking up anyone else’s spot! For whatever reason critics seem to have his back–they did on Paris, but the less forgivable overrated film was Match Point. The “Woody’s Back!” accolades were so plentiful back then, and they were oh so wrong. The movie itself was about half Hitchcock imitation and half a remake of Allen’s own Crimes and Misdemeanors, but it was all product, and that product sold. Generic stuff so often does. Even schlock like Manhattan Murder Mystery was truer to Allen’s own self, because it at least dealt with Allen’s love for New York and for old time forms of entertainment. Match Point was utterly generic, I saw it and can’t remember any particular plot point, which is of course a sign of the utmost quality. And after he gets tired of traipsing from one European city to the next in order to tell some generic story, he’ll no doubt return to New York, and the reaction will no doubt be, “He’s back in New York, where he belongs!” All the prior wastes of time thus forgotten, he can go back to being a guy with nothing to say, whose name is still good enough to make a movie a year. Nice work if you can get it!

Anyway, Woody, I think it’s about time to call it quits. If you do, it’s entirely possible that people will forget all the subpar stuff and go back to the classics, and realize the actual good work you once did. As for your personal stuff, how quickly did people forget about it after Michael Jackson died? No shame in putting your legacy in order, since if you wait too long, that shit will get taken out of your hands…

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by Lev @ Library Grape - The Best in Politics, Culture and Delicious Snark

Pay No Attention To The Man From The NSA Behind The Curtain

Metavirus — Fri, 07 Jun 2013 00:12:16 +0000

Dust off your memories and think back to that long-ago time when it was revealed that the NSA was indiscriminately hoovering up phone call metadata from Verizon. You know, like, yesterday.

Remember how our beneficent overlords told all of us to stop being such fainting pussies because…:

White House spokesman Josh Earnest said Fisa orders were used to “support important and highly sensitive intelligence collection operations” on which members of Congress were fully briefed… He pointed out that the order only relates to the so-called metadata surrounding phone calls rather than the content of the calls themselves. “The order reprinted overnight does not allow the government to listen in on anyone’s telephone calls,” Earnest said.

So, guess what!? Today we learn that U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies have a direct pipeline into the servers of some of our biggest tech companies, giving them access to the full contents of email, chat logs, skype calls, etc.:

The National Security Agency and the FBI are tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies, extracting audio, video, photographs, e-mails, documents and connection logs that enable analysts to track a person’s movements and contacts over time… The technology companies, which participate knowingly in PRISM operations, include most of the dominant global players of Silicon Valley. They are listed on a roster that bears their logos in order of entry into the program: “Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple.”…

The highly classified program, code-named PRISM, has not been disclosed publicly before. Its establishment in 2007 and six years of exponential growth took place beneath the surface of a roiling debate over the boundaries of surveillance and privacy. Even late last year, when critics of the foreign intelligence statute argued for changes, the only members of Congress who knew about PRISM were bound by oaths of office to hold their tongues…

Analysts who use the system from a Web portal at Fort Meade key in “selectors,” or search terms, that are designed to produce at least 51 percent confidence in a target’s “foreignness.” That is not a very stringent test. Training materials obtained by the Post instruct new analysts to submit accidentally collected U.S. content for a quarterly report, “but it’s nothing to worry about.”…

With a few clicks and an affirmation that the subject is believed to be engaged in terrorism, espionage or nuclear proliferation, an analyst obtains full access to Facebook’s “extensive search and surveillance capabilities against the variety of online social networking services.”

Pick up the phone, it’s Orwell calling.

2 comment(s) for this post:

Matmos:
06 Jun 2013 Here's an *actual* thing to get concerned about with the current admin that the GOP could use to great effect instead of the Darrel Issa BengaziIRSMooslemSoshalistDeathPanels (are we still doing that last one? I'm losing track) jerk-a-thon what we got now. Unfortunately, it falls in the GOP no man's land between "small gubmint/UN world state" and "StrongDaddyArmy CIASupahSpy DukeNukem KeepUsSafe" so they *can't* do anything but hug it tight. This is an instance where loyal conservative opposition would truely help the Republic, but alas no, because brown people and schlong size.
Metavirus:
06 Jun 2013 it reminds me of the Obama/Romney foreign policy "debate". you know, the "me too" debate? TERRRRORISZZZZZM! Boogah!

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Spit-Take Quote of the Day

Metavirus — Thu, 06 Jun 2013 22:22:02 +0000

“Republicans care just as deeply about the environment as Democrats but we also care about jobs,” he added. “We want common sense regulations to be balanced with economic growth and jobs.” — Rand Paul

Um, yeah, how’s that working out? I guess not so well. 5 out of the 10 most polluted states are deep-red Southern states populated with Real Americans.

1 comment(s) for this post:

Matmos:
06 Jun 2013 "Care," "environment," "jobs," "common sense," economic growth": define your goddam terms, Paul. "Care" == A nebulous category of thought somewhat similar to "racist" that the utterer may in all seriousness think he does/does not share, but which is besides the point because the outcomes of his actions put the lie to his imaginings. You can say "care" all you want, and can weep copious tears in the pew on any given Sunday, but how many families do you want to boot out of the country, there, Senator Aqua Buddha? "Environment" == My lawn, my immediate neighborhood, my summer home, and some barely remembered episodes of Mutual of Omaha/2nd grade fieldtrips to tha zoo. "Jobs" == something to say to fool the poors into thinking we're doing something besides symbolically voting to repeal Obamacare for like the 37th time whilst waiting for Bullfeathers to open so's we can drink our lunch. "Common sense" == whatever combines uncomplicated aphorisms with shit that I want to or that I already believe. Pithy fantasy over complicated, messy reality. See ref flat earth, creationism, and other fables of the recent past. "Economic growth" == that which enables a situation wherein what's mine is mine and what's yours is mine to continue.

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by Metavirus @ Library Grape - The Best in Politics, Culture and Delicious Snark

One Of These Things Is Just Like The Other…

Metavirus — Thu, 06 Jun 2013 20:47:51 +0000

Give a man the keys to the kingdom and see how quickly he takes on the same distasteful predilections as the preceding monarch we all despised:

We learned yesterday that the National Security Agency (NSA) obtained a top-secret court order that forces Verizon to hand telephone records of millions of US customers over to the government. [...]

The Guardian, which uncovered and published the secret court order, today detailed the White House’s response. The Obama administration, while declining to comment on the specific order, said the practice was “a critical tool in protecting the nation from terrorist threats to the United States.“ [...]

The court order issued by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court forces Verizon to give the NSA “all call detail records or ‘telephony’ metadata created by Verizon for communications (i) between the United States and abroad; or (ii) wholly within the United States, including local telephone calls.” The order, which covers a three-month period ending July 19, means the government is receiving data such as “phone numbers of both parties, the duration of the conversation, the time of the conversation, location data, telephone calling card numbers, and unique identifiers pertaining to the phones,” as we noted yesterday. [...]

Such call detail collection also occurred during the Bush administration. US officials say it is allowed under the Patriot Act passed in 2001.

Hmm, why does that bolded bit above sound familiar…? Oh, that’s right:

Months after the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush secretly authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the United States to search for evidence of terrorist activity without the court-approved warrants ordinarily required for domestic spying, according to government officials. [...]

The Bush administration views the operation as necessary so that the agency can move quickly to monitor communications that may disclose threats to the United States, the officials said. Defenders of the program say it has been a critical tool in helping disrupt terrorist plots and prevent attacks inside the United States.

For fun, let’s harken back to those halcyon days of the 2008 campaign. Here’s campaigner Obama, talking about Bush’s oh-so-evil warrantless wiretapping program:

Under an Obama presidency, Americans will be able to leave behind the era of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and “wiretaps without warrants,” he said. (He was referring to the lingering legal fallout over reports that the National Security Agency scooped up Americans’ phone and Internet activities without court orders, ostensibly to monitor terrorist plots, in the years after the September 11 attacks.)

And how many of us forgot this gem from last year:

President Barack Obama has signed into law a five-year extension of the U.S. government’s authority to monitor the overseas activity of suspected foreign spies and terrorists. [...] The law allows the government to monitor overseas phone calls and emails without obtaining a court order for each intercept.

Never did any President meet an executive power he didn’t like…

1 comment(s) for this post:

Pay No Attention To The Man From The NSA Behind The Curtain | PcFr.net:
10 Jun 2013 [...] Dust off your memories and think back to that long-ago time when it was revealed that the NSA was indiscriminately hoovering up phone call metadata from Verizon. You know, like, yesterday. [...]

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by Metavirus @ Library Grape - The Best in Politics, Culture and Delicious Snark

All About Eve’s Independent Cash Stream

Matmos — Thu, 06 Jun 2013 03:25:52 +0000

So, via CH and Cottonmouth, we find that Mississippi Governor Phil Bryant (R) agrees with good ol’ e.e. in re: wimmins working, natural order, something or other:

In response to a question about how America became “so mediocre” in regard to educational outcomes, [Bryant] said:

I think both parents started working. And the mom is in the work place.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LS37SNYjg8w

This statement, while committing the grievous sin (or strategic win, depending on who you’re talking to) of alienating/reinforcing preconceptions of bias against your basic non-old white guys, also had the additional problem of being wrong. From Fox News Fact Check: Is it bad for lower-income kids if Mom has a job outside the home? on Scientific American: PsySociety (via):

According to the data (which, again, covers over 100,000 children across almost 70 different studies conducted over 50 years), having a mother who works outside of the home, if anything, might actually be MORE BENEFICIAL for children from lower-income families or single-mother households than having their mothers stay at home. For children from wealthier families, there is either no difference between the children of working and stay-at-home Moms, or the children of stay-at-home mothers fare a bit better.

The authors have a painfully simple and obvious explanation for this difference, which makes sense as soon as you read it. [Erick] Erickson assumed that children from higher-income families will probably do fine in the world regardless of whether or not their mothers are employed, but children from lower-income families will suffer if both parents are working long hours and then coming home stressed. After all, as Erickson notes, you “can’t have it all,” and mothers who work are “making compromises.”

But the problem here is that Erickson is forgetting one very crucial thing — if there’s anything more stressful than being a single mother with a full-time job, it’s being a single mother without a full-time job.

What? Conservatives’ distasteful talking points and “beliefs” at odds with reality? I know, shocker, right?

I tell you, what with legitimate-rape this and horrors-women-in-the-workplace-where’s-my-fainting-couch that, I am counting the days until what’s left of the GOP says what the hell, and has a big ol’ wet’n'sloppy kiss-em-up with the Quiverfull jokers. From Women’s Liberation Through Submission: An Evangelical Anti-Feminism Is Born at ReligionDispatches.org:

The “countercultural” attitudes that signers [of the "True Woman Manifesto"] support include the idea that women are called to affirm and encourage godly masculinity, and honor the God-ordained male headship of their husbands and pastors; that wifely submission to male leadership in the home and church reflects Christ’s submission to God, His Father; that “selfish insistence on personal rights is contrary to the spirit of Christ”; and, in a pronatalist turn of phrase that recalls the rhetoric of the Quiverfull conviction, their willingness to “receive children as a blessing from the Lord.”

Finally, in a reference to the importance of woman-to-woman mentoring within the conservative church, they affirmed that “mature Christian women” are obliged to disciple the next generation of Christian wives, training them in matters of submission and headship, in order to provide a legacy of “fruitful femininity.”

And you thought that “Eve” reference in the blentry title was just me cracking wise.

All that said — because there’s a limited amount of value added in standing in line at the geek booth — more interesting, and more useful, I think, to talk about/spend time bending neurons around, was this addendum to the SA blog post:

This is actually a great example of why funding for the behavioral sciences is so critically important, and you can’t simply argue that it’s all just an exercise in proving “common sense.” When Erickson first said this, I had not read this paper and I’m somewhat embarrassed to say that I completely bought the idea that this effect was what they had found. I even wrote out a long argument in a comment that I posted on Facebook about why you would expect to see negative effects of maternal employment in lower SES (but not upper SES) households. When I read the actual paper, I felt incredibly silly and immediately understood why the effect could (and does) go the other way. However, let this be a lesson that hindsight bias is a cruel beast, and if you attempt to ridicule social science research by saying it’s simply “common sense,” you’d better make sure that you’re not actually claiming the opposite of what empirical studies have found.

But then, if you spend money on stuff that contradicts your ~~marks’~~ constituency’s preconceived notions, that’d be like cutting your own throat, right? Like, with tha Blacks ‘n’ tha Browns? Where’s the margin in that?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rkRIbUT6u7Q

3 comment(s) for this post:

Metavirus:
06 Jun 2013 so basically "vaginas - ewww", "shameful bitches are sluts", "slave wombs for fetuses", as always, "feminazis". having a Sad over women unshackling their va-jay-jays 50+ years ago is ALWAYS relevant with the kiddos today. oh, and by the way, the governor of Mississippi should know a LOT about the biggest factor in low educational performance: POVERTY. hmm, maybe i should look at some facts. OH NOES! Jeebus-fearing Mississippi, where I'm sure more wimmins than elsewhere tend the brood in the homestead as Gawd intended, has the worst child poverty rate in the country (50th out of 50) AND clocks in at a miserable 50th out of 50 in state math and science education rankings!! Quelle surprise! and, faint! Quite a correlation there, hrmmm?
Matmos:
06 Jun 2013 Yeah. "Once-and-future subjugated people having agency" is bad for at least 2 reasons: 1) How will we know we're worth something if there ain't anybody that's worth nothing in arms reach -- and by arms reach I mean close enough that I can hit 'em, and they can't hit back. 2) People should unthinkingly stick to the rules I make for them, because uncertainty and lack of control scare me. Those two vines wrap around much of modern conservatism like a couple of noxious chokecherries. (Actually, I have no idea what chokecherries look like; it's just got the word "choke" in there, plus, y'know...fruit.) And right on with the cutting-their-noses-off business. Hand-in-hand with refusing Obamacare, even though doing so will a) benefit their citizens and b) *save* money. But then, if they f*ck things up, that proves they were right, right? And also two as well, if they keep people stupid, they'll keep voting against their own interests, and if they keep them poor, they can offer salvation. Or something along those lines.
Matmos:
06 Jun 2013 Oh, and, the whole Garden of Eden thing? Women's fault. Literally.

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Born Leader

Lev — Wed, 05 Jun 2013 22:35:43 +0000

So I heard that Marco Rubio is bailing again for the moment on immigration reform. I get that the GOP has different criteria for choosing presidents than the rest of us would, and hey, it’s a free country and you can adopt whatever criteria I’d like. But to the extent that the criteria are “New Reagan” or “Republican Obama” I just personally wouldn’t get my hopes up. Hard to imagine either one exhibiting the prevarication/whimpiness/flakiness that we regularly see out of old Marco on this topic.

Also, I’m not sure he’s reading the politics right. Passing immigration reform would be beneficial to him in a GOP nominating contest, since doing something about anything is pretty much the liberal position, and the GOP pretty much always picks the relative moderate in the field, since there’s usually only one or two of those and a half dozen or more rabid right-wingers. This is why Romney (barely) won in spite of his godawful primary campaign, and it’s why Chris Christie has a shot in 2016, since the people who hate him the most in the GOP are the people who hated Romney too, and were basically unable to stop him. Rubio apparently would rather be in the middle of the pack with Rick Santorum. I’ve called his basic savoir-faire into question before. This is another time I’m doing it.

2 comment(s) for this post:

Metavirus:
05 Jun 2013 always have to give props to the hombre who has the juevos/cojones/chutzpah to come out against a bill he wrote. dios mio!
Matmos:
05 Jun 2013 > Republican Obama But I repeat myself. I'm having a waking dream right now of a GOP party operative wandering a slightly hilly, treeless plain, sun beating down on his bald, age spotted head, binoculars in one hand and "2016 GOP Presidential Candidate Qualities Checklist" in the other. The checklist is a blank piece of paper, save for a single line: "Must be mostly not a dick." He's been alone out there for quite a while, and needs a glass of water.

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by Lev @ Library Grape - The Best in Politics, Culture and Delicious Snark

Quote of the Week: Darkies Ain’t Gonna Vote Right Anyways

Metavirus — Wed, 05 Jun 2013 19:47:51 +0000

“I’m going to be real honest with you, the Republican Party doesn’t want black people to vote if they’re going to vote 9-to-1 for Democrats.” – Texas Tea Party Jackwad

Also too, remember the past:

At the close of the Civil War … some three-quarters of a million of Negroes, the mass of them densely ignorant and just out of slavery, … were suddenly given the political rights of free citizens. A great many people, and not in the South alone, thought then, and still think, that it was a mistake to bestow the high powers and privileges of a wholly unrestricted ballot–a ballot which is the symbol of intelligent self- government–upon the Negro.

4 comment(s) for this post:

Matmos:
05 Jun 2013 Ni-CLANG. Actually, I was surprised this guy avoided a Ni-CLANG bullseye.
Metavirus:
05 Jun 2013 i'm actually surprised the jigga-what!? bomb hasn't dropped from someone prominent anytime in the last 6+ years. republicans must have a chip installed that senses the word about to drop out and immediately shuts down the part of the brain responsible for speech. now only if they installed a chip that did the same thing on the rape topic.
Matmos:
05 Jun 2013 How much you want to bet that at some level their ability to keep their yaps shut on one topic and not the other is in direct proportion to their perceived likelihood in getting the tar beat out of them by the respective parties?

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by Metavirus @ Library Grape - The Best in Politics, Culture and Delicious Snark

Community Will Be Back With Dan Harmon!

Lev — Mon, 03 Jun 2013 20:19:46 +0000

That was the good news this weekend. It’s a good move, after a disreputable season with a truly disgraceful ending. Putting back the guy who created the show and made it into what it was is a smart choice, especially since his replacements severely misread the psychology of the fans of the show. If this show appealed to the types of people who liked endless callbacks, cutaways and fan service, it would probably have a much wider audience! With Community-philes, it’s all about what the next amazing concept is going to be, not about reliving something over and over again. Because a true Community fan has all the seasons on DVD, has watched them all multiple times, and thus has already relived the best parts many times already.

Anyway, a few days ago I figured that I’d be down to following zero shows next fall, until all of a sudden Community and Hannibal are going to be back. This is good.

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by Lev @ Library Grape - The Best in Politics, Culture and Delicious Snark

Lost Bottles From The Post Cellar

Metavirus — Sat, 01 Jun 2013 16:19:11 +0000

I was rooting around in the dusty Post Cellar and wanted to offer up some delicious vintages of years past.

Read more in the Post Cellar, handily located in the column to your left.

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by Metavirus @ Library Grape - The Best in Politics, Culture and Delicious Snark

Weekend Music Party – Tiga

Metavirus — Sat, 01 Jun 2013 16:08:00 +0000

Ah, retro detached hipster tunes.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lE2B8PfsvGk

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Families Will Continue To Be Devastated By Medical Expenses After Obamacare

Metavirus — Sat, 01 Jun 2013 00:30:59 +0000

I’ve been reading a bunch of stuff lately about the impending 2014 implementation of the remainder of Obamacare.

I don’t understand why more people aren’t paying attention to the fact that Obamacare really won’t do much to address the financial devastation that catastrophic illnesses will continue to wreak on American families.

Think about it. The health insurance exchanges we’re setting up are going to offer bronze, silver and gold plans. The bronze plans are going to be the most popular because their premiums are going to be the lowest. But these plans will only cover 60% of a patient’s medical expenses. Sure, that’s going to be great for some folks who are hovering somewhere in the orbit of being able to afford the other 40%, but for millions of people in the shrinking middle class with hardly any liquid assets and incomes in the low-multiples of the poverty line, what difference does it make if they only have to pay 40% of a shitload of money they can’t afford, rather than 100% of a shitload of money they can’t afford?

Let’s consider some rough numbers.

A two-parent, two-child family with a total household income of $50,000 clocks in a bit over 200% of the federal poverty line.
For families in roughly that income category, spending on housing and transportation can average somewhere around 50% of total income.
From that, we’ll slice off an additional 15% in total taxes (including income taxes, payroll taxes, unemployment insurance, sales taxes, etc.).
Let’s assume that all of the family’s liquid assets (if they have any) are cancelled out by their debts.
Finally, I’ll just grab 25% out of the air ($10,000) as representing the remaining annual cost of maintaining a household with two kids (!!).
After all that, our example family is theoretically left with only $400/month unspent. Even though I think we can all agree that a family with that level of income and two young kids probably doesn’t have any unspent cash at the end of a month.

Now sit down and ponder what will happen to that family if they get hit with a $25,000 pile of medical bills. Before Obamacare, the sudden need to cough up $25,000 would probably lay waste to the family’s finances for decades — unless they decided to cut their losses and declare bankruptcy. But, now that we have Obamacare, our cash-flush and asset-rich family will only need to find $10,000 under the mattress. Problem solved!

…

And don’t get me started about the thousands of people who die every year because they declined medical treatment due to their inability to pay for it.

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by Metavirus @ Library Grape - The Best in Politics, Culture and Delicious Snark

Pigs On Fox Again Remind Us That Misogyny Is Alive And Well

Metavirus — Fri, 31 May 2013 19:14:56 +0000

Is there a topic that Fox commentators don’t view through a neanderthal lens?

According to a new Pew poll, women are the primary source of income in forty percent of all households with children. In 1960, mothers were the primary breadwinners in just 11 percent of households. [...]

Lou Dobbs says the Pew study finds “that women have become the breadwinners in this country, and a lot of other concerning and troubling statistics.”

Here’s a quick recap of their argument, in case you don’t want to suffer through the clip: working women are “hurting our children” and contributing to “the disintegration of marriage” by “competing” with their husbands.

Also too – with the sour sometimes comes the sweet:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKPXo0ytRZM

2 comment(s) for this post:

Matmos:
31 May 2013 Damn; you beat me to this topic. Addendum: if the above from e.e. can be filed under "women: opinions & actions that *aren't* useful", then this from Patrick Stewart should be filed under "useful". (I really respect the same sort of useful/not useful tack that Ta-Nehisi Coates takes with various things like racism.) Associated article here; both links via LS.
Metavirus:
31 May 2013 always the best captain of all the series

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by Metavirus @ Library Grape - The Best in Politics, Culture and Delicious Snark

Grim Redstate Dada

Matmos — Fri, 31 May 2013 00:11:52 +0000

From 2-Year-Old Boy In Texas Dead After Shooting Himself In The Face on TPM:

Correction: This post originally gave the wrong caliber for the the weapon involved. It was a 9 mm handgun.

But everything else in the story was accurate, I guess. … Are we ready to change how we do stuff yet? In all seriousness, TPM’s continual reports of gun-related dead and wounded children is starting to, y’know, weigh heavy.

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by Matmos @ Library Grape - The Best in Politics, Culture and Delicious Snark

Comey, Definitely

Lev — Thu, 30 May 2013 19:38:09 +0000

(please forgive the horrible pun…)

Anyway, I just wanted to note that I think James Comey is a fine choice for FBI Director, and a somewhat surprising one. I want to believe Jonathan Chait’s theory that the political gravity has moved rapidly to the left on national security issues, but I think it’s just become more complicated over the years without anyone, politicians especially, noticing. What I really think is happening is that, free of electoral constraints, Obama can worry less about a terrorist attack ruining his Administration and think more about where he’ll leave the country in three and a half years, and thus is moving more toward the widespread ambivalence toward perpetual war that a huge chunk of the populace is feeling, even if Obama’s version of “taking us off a permanent war footing” essentially means only a few substantive changes to how we operate overseas. A bit more restraint I guess with teh dronez. But that’s more than he’s given us so far in his entire tenure in office, rest assured, even if Congress (which will have to face voters again) is much more reluctant to scale anything back ever. Truth be told, if Obama was unwilling to roll back the Bush measures during the early going of his Administration, when his approvals were in the 70s, I find it hard to figure how they’re going away now. But anyway…

Comey complements this sort-of shift. The only thing I knew about him before the nomination was that he refused to accede to illegal warrantless wiretapping, leading to the dramatic incident that pretty much everyone has noted. (Side note: it’s easy to forget there were actually debates about these issues within the Bush Administration, isn’t it? I suppose I forget because the Comeys and Jack Goldsmiths and Robert Muellers lost completely and utterly in the long term in getting the GOP to follow their lead.) I have to assume that that story was a principal reason behind the pick. FBI Directors have a checkered history. J. Edgar Hoover, of course, never met a civil liberty he wouldn’t subvert in order to try to catch the commies. The illegal wiretaps and break-ins he authorized were not made public, and indeed the FBI was hardly a law-enforcement agency of any kind under Hoover, but rather a domestic intelligence agency–our KGB, essentially. Tales of FBI involvement in organized crime, for example, were almost entirely made up for television according to Tim Weiner’s Enemies. That stuff rarely happened, spying on suspected commie sympathizers was Hoover’s passion and obsession. And Hoover ran the bureau for roughly half its existence, nearly half a century. For some time after Hoover’s death, the custom was to pick federal judges to run the bureau, on the theory that they would be above politics. However, the skill sets to be a federal judge and a large-scale administrator aren’t the same, and after the disgraceful tenure of Clinton’s choice, Louis Freeh, that custom ended. After Freeh we got Mueller, one of Bush’s better personnel selections, who declined to participate in any sort of torture (George Tenet was not so steely) and has tried to balance intelligence and civil liberties judiciously. It’s unclear if he’s been relatively successful or not, given policies coming from upstairs that he didn’t set. He’s always struck me as a team player overall, albeit one with some scruples and boundaries.

Appointing someone like Comey who is known for a staunch stand on civil liberties and considerable individual initiative and integrity, though, is an interesting symbolic choice and a big departure. Comey is qualified but was nowhere on the radar screen. Rep. Mike Rogers (R-MI) would have also made sense as a bipartisan appointment and a former FBI Agent who knows the bureau, though as a fairly partisan Republican Obama might have had to worry about another Louis Freeh happening, as in the FBI Director regarding the president as a criminal and constantly investigating him with the bureau’s resources. Comey likely doesn’t carry that risk, and as with the Chuck Hagel pick, it signals the direction he wants to take the agency while minimizing (as much as possible) the partisan edge and qualification issues that might otherwise come up. That’s good! Then again, let’s remember that Hagel sounded like an ordinary establishment guy by the end of the process, so it’s entirely possible that Comey will wind up disowning the warrantless wiretapping incident in his confirmation hearings as Hagel did with practically everything interesting he ever said. But Comey is a provocative pick, most definitely, and an interesting raising of the stakes as far as the national security debate goes.

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by Lev @ Library Grape - The Best in Politics, Culture and Delicious Snark

FinReg Update

Lev — Wed, 29 May 2013 22:10:04 +0000

What has our government been up to on the financial regulatory front? Well, there’s this, which is good:

Federal regulators have proposed a crackdown on banks engaged in payday lending-type programs that critics are calling debt traps. [...]

There was a protest outside the Wells Fargo shareholders meeting in Salt Lake City on April 23, 2013. The protestors are upset over foreclosures and Wells Fargo’s lending practices. They had hoped to address those issues at that meeting, but they were escorted out by security before they could speak. Only one protestor remained inside undetected at the meeting — Annette Smith of the Sacramento area.

We first introduced you to Smith back in January. She originally took out a 30-day loan of $500 from Wells Fargo five years ago. She was charged an annual percentage rate equivalent to 91 percent. The loan must be paid in full within 30 days, so she says she’s been forced to continue borrowing every month to keep up.

“Bottom line is she’s paid them $3,000 in fees. So they have made their $500 loan back many times over,” said Andrea Luquetta with the California Reinvestment Coalition.[...]

Since then Wells Fargo has forgiven Annette’s debt. Annette’s story has since caught the attention of the New York Times and National Public Radio and it’s also caught the attention of regulators. Both the office of comptroller and currency and the FDIC have proposed new rules regulating programs like the ones offered by Wells Fargo and U.S. Bank.

I’m keeping in mind that this is at the proposal stage at this point, but it would be welcome. Payday loan reform was one of those things that was part of Dodd-Frank until it wasn’t, so it’s good to see the modern-day equivalent of loan sharks get a little sunlight thrown in their direction.

On the other hand, there’s this:

Under pressure from Wall Street lobbyists, federal regulators have agreed to soften a rule intended to rein in the banking industry’s domination of a risky market.

The changes to the rule, which will be announced on Thursday, could effectively empower a few big banks to continue controlling the derivatives market, a main culprit in the financial crisis. [...]

Making such decisions on regulatory standards is a product of the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010, which mandated that federal agencies write hundreds of new rules for Wall Street. Most of that effort is now complete at the trading commission. But across several other agencies, nearly two-thirds of the rules are unfinished, including some major measures like the Volcker Rule, which seeks to prevent banks from trading with their own money.

The deal over derivatives was forged from wrangling at the five-person commission, which was sharply divided. Gary Gensler, the agency’s Democratic chairman, championed the stricter proposal. But he met opposition from the Republican members on the commission, as well as Mark Wetjen, a Democratic commissioner who has sided with Wall Street on other rules.

This is exactly what I was expecting, and continue to expect on the Dodd-Frank front. At the time, it was clearly something that was passed merely so that certain politicians could say they’d passed strict new rules on Wall Street, without hurting that perennial source of campaign cash all that badly. (Which went ahead and gave a fuckton of money to Mitt Romney, of course). When all’s said and done, the only think worth keeping about it will probably be the Consumer Financial Protection Board, which might or might not ever have a permanent chair.

Not that it’s a simple story, of course, but if you’re convinced that we’ll never have another 2008-style meltdown, then you’re either a CNBC pundit or some kind of low-information voter. But I am hopeful that the next time the financial sector cripples the economy using pretty much the same methods, maybe we’ll finally get a government with even a modicum of interest in reining in these people. That ought to be enough to get the low-infos off the couch. The CNBC types are pretty much hopeless I think.

1 comment(s) for this post:

Metavirus:
29 May 2013 the hard thing about stuff like payday loans and wal-mart for me is that they're propping up (/preying on) a destroyed middle/working class . real inflation-adjusted wages have stagnated/dropped over time due to the hyper-financialization of our economy and one of the key reasons (IMHO) why the people haven't revolted is that it happened gradually and things like payday loans and super-cheap shit at wal-mart kinda/sorta filled in the gaps. so the frog sits in the slowly warming cauldron until the water finally boils - and the reason a lot of them got boiled to death is that they were worrying about muslim commie negroes stealing their white daughters away, rather than paying attention to the grifters who were adding wood to the fire.

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by Lev @ Library Grape - The Best in Politics, Culture and Delicious Snark

If I Had Some Ham, I’d Make a Ham and Cheese Sandwich…

Matmos — Wed, 29 May 2013 03:34:22 +0000

…if I had some cheese. Via AB, the Slog quotes WA State Representative (R-Kalama) and apparently Zen Master Ed Orcutt‘s latest email-koan:

The bridge would indeed be standing today had the truck’s load NOT rammed the super structure of the [I-5/Skagit River] bridge. In fact, 11 of the 12 sections of the bridge are still standing.

If the truck hadn’t rammed the bridge, the bridge would be fine. Yep. I was going to wait until I found another source confirming the above quote before posting this but…maybe that’s not necessary at this point:

Rep. Ed Orcutt (R-Kalama) said in an email to bike shop owner Dale Carlson that, “since CO2 is deemed a greenhouse gas and a pollutant, bicyclists are actually polluting when they ride.”

Yep.

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by Matmos @ Library Grape - The Best in Politics, Culture and Delicious Snark

I’m Thinking There’s Something Symbolic About That Volcano What Is Erupting There

Matmos — Wed, 29 May 2013 02:40:28 +0000

So the Michelle Bachmann lustbuch has already been making the rounds — Jezebel, Wonkette, Balloon-Juice — but I couldn’t resist quoting the blurb on the e-book’s own cover graphic:

He touched the void inside her, pollinating her pink flower like a master bee.

Far be it from me to doubt there’s a rich dark chocolatey nothing at the center of Michelle Bachmann, but is this thing even for real? Rather than trying to wrap your mind around what the f*ck “master bee” means, watch this by Isabella Rossellini — if only to hear the term “waggle dance” in a pleasantly mellifluous accent:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPzVbbzc5Aw

Via.

3 comment(s) for this post:

Matmos:
29 May 2013 And.....end scene.
Metavirus:
29 May 2013 the jeebus worketh in mysterious ways
Matmos:
29 May 2013 That she does.

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by Matmos @ Library Grape - The Best in Politics, Culture and Delicious Snark

No, No, No! I Not Do It ‘Til Daddy Tells Me To! …Waaaah…

Metavirus — Tue, 28 May 2013 18:35:18 +0000

Surprise! Conservatives are tribalistic, easily manipulated, slaves to “big daddy” authority propaganda – so says Science!

Recently we covered some research that suggested pro-environment messages don’t just fall on deaf ears when it comes to people on the conservative end of the political spectrum (and even some moderates)—pro-environment messages actively discourage those people from making decisions they’d otherwise be perfectly content with. So, what happens if you actually want to convince people to do something good for the environment, like recycling? Is it terminally hopeless? Not according to research that’s being published by the Journal of Consumer Research.

The work focused on the fact that some messages resonate more with political conservatives, and others messages resonate with liberals. By targeting the pro-recycling message in those terms, the authors managed to change real-world behavior based on measurements of the amount of material recycled by families. Once the message was received, the generally positive attitude towards environmentally friendly actions spilled over into other areas.

The work was based on past studies that showed people’s political leanings tie into other areas of their personality. To grossly oversimplify, conservatives tend to favor maintaining loyalty to the cultural groups they belong to and feel a strong sense of duty to those groups [ed: reptilian tribalism; surprise!]. Liberals, in contrast, tend to focus more on their feelings about what’s ethical and fair and make decisions based on that. So, the researchers reasoned, it should be possible to take a single activity—recycling, in this case—and craft messages that resonate with these different groups. To take some specific examples they used, the authors’ messages to conservatives included phrases that focused on duty and authority (“do our civic duty because recycling is the responsible thing to do in our society” and “follow the advice of important leaders”). They also emphasized group membership by suggesting people could join in recycling “with those like you in your community.”

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by Metavirus @ Library Grape - The Best in Politics, Culture and Delicious Snark

Future Footnote To A Footnote

Lev — Fri, 24 May 2013 21:12:21 +0000

I’d heard that Massachusetts’s “Next Scott Brown,” Gabriel Gomez, was less a candidate than the public face of a welfare program for Romney staffers. In fact, I’ve heard this more than once. So while the ridiculously strident nature of his campaign might shock people who were expecting the next Scott Brown, a folksy, moderate-ish, smiling phony asshole nice guy GOP candidate, as someone who personally expected the next Mitt Romney it’s not at all shocking to me. Specifically, this is sort of like 2012 Mitt Romney, with the combination of “out of touch liberal elitist” and vitriol, as well as their, ahem, damage control strategy.

Still, it’s not as though the Romney team was known for their brilliant strategy. Really, they were this close to pulling a Hillary ’08, only if Hillary had lost to Mike Gravel, in a field of people considerably less compelling than Mike Gravel. Like if Hillary had been given a scare by Evan Bayh (Newt Gingrich), then maybe got worried about Cynthia McKinney’s (Michele Bachmann’s) progress, then maybe Ed Begley Jr. (sorry, trying to find an equivalent to Herman Cain among liberals is tough!) had a couple of moments in the lead. Hard to imagine, not even Mark Penn was that bad. But at least Romney was responding to the incentives within the GOP base. There’s a Wurlitzer that needs constant maintenance, dammit! Is there such a demand in Massachussetts? We’ll see, but I doubt it. And even if there were some demand for ad hominem attacks on Ed Markey, why would a political rube whose only experience is as a bankster and a spokesman for a PAC whining about Obama leading on stuff be in any position to make them, against a respected three-decade Congressional veteran? We’ve often heard of Republicans running for president on a “business plan” to get enough exposure for FOX gigs, talk shows, book deals and so on. Rarely have I heard of this being done in a mid-profile Senate race, though it would explain this bizarre tone. Or maybe his team actually thinks this is what Bay Staters secretly want to hear? Or that they’ve watched so much FOX they’re unable to pretend to be civilized men, “Mirror, Mirror” style!

Bet you didn’t see an Original Series reference coming, eh?

1 comment(s) for this post:

Metavirus:
24 May 2013

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by Lev @ Library Grape - The Best in Politics, Culture and Delicious Snark

Who Could It Be?

Lev — Fri, 24 May 2013 20:42:31 +0000

Saw this headline in the RSS reader, with no additional information:

Lawmaker Says Woman Should Carry Brain Dead Fetus to Term

And my immediate thought was Louie Gohmert, then I second-guessed myself and said it was Steve Stockman. Shoulda trusted my instincts!

2 comment(s) for this post:

Metavirus:
24 May 2013 He's only looking out for the future of his party. If women aborted brain-dead fetuses, we'd have no more republicans! {zing!}
Matmos:
24 May 2013 Kudoes. Totes.

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by Lev @ Library Grape - The Best in Politics, Culture and Delicious Snark