I need the whip of the thunder, and the wind’s dark moan.
The Rev. Al Sharpton steps into the rain:
I am tired of seeing ministers who will preach homophobia by day, and then after they’re preaching, when the lights are off they go cruising for trade… We know you’re not preaching the Bible, because if you were preaching the Bible we would have heard from you. We would have heard from you when people were starving in California—when they deregulated the economy and crashed Wall Street you had nothing to say. When Madoff made off with the money, you had nothing to say. When Bush took us to war chasing weapons of mass destruction that weren’t there you had nothing to say.
But all of a sudden, when Proposition 8 came out, you had so much to say, but since you stepped in the rain, we gonna step in the rain with you.
[…]
There is something immoral and sick about using all of that power to not end brutality and poverty, but to break into people’s bedrooms and claim that God sent you. It amazes me when I looked at California and saw churches that had nothing to say about police brutality, nothing to say when a young black boy was shot while he was wearing police handcuffs, nothing to say when they overturned affirmative action, nothing to say when people were being relegated into poverty, yet they were organizing and mobilizing to stop consenting adults from choosing their life partners.
Who are you going to believe, me or your own lying language?
I know I shouldn’t be surprised by the truth-eaters, but damn:
Like Lincoln’s plain manner of speaking, Joe [the Plumber]’s commentary is still unvarnished; it still “has the bark on” as the phrase was applied to Lincoln. And if anyone reading this immediately jumps to the conclusion that I am comparing Joe Wurzelbacher to Abraham Lincoln, you have a perfect example of the dynamic I am talking about.
What was Whittle thinking? —I suppose maybe if somebody called him on it, he could always point to this and this and say Obama says he doesn’t “compare” himself to Lincoln, but we know better, so QED?
Insecurites.
It’s a sad state of affairs when, in today’s pluralistic, post-racial society, a rich white man still feels the need to play let’s you and him fight.
It’s a chick thing; thank you so much!
Sometimes it’s nice to take a couple of disparate things from your daily media rounds and just sit ’em down next to each other. You know?
No wonder so many men are becoming gay, I mean really. You listen to women today. They’re afraid of ’em! It’s not that— A lot of guys become gay out of default. —There’s another epidemic that we’re not talking about: the lack of grandchildren epidemic. I’m gonna do a whole show on that, which is separate from the gay thing. But why so many white families don’t have grandchildren.
—Michael Savage, noted swimming partner
of Alan Ginsberg
—Jim Balent, noted writer and artist of Tarot,
Witch of the Black Rose
It took its toll on all of us.
Is it just me, or is the Beast’s 50 Most Loathsome of 2008 a little more… tired, than usual?
What Mads Gilbert said.
In case you’ve got less than half an ear on what THEY’re saying about the Gaza and you’re wondering Mads who?—
I am appalled by the terrorists attacks, but I am just as appalled by the suffering the USA has inflicted on others. It is in this context the deaths of 5,000 people must be viewed. If the US government has the legitimate right to bomb and kill civilians in Iraq, those who are oppressed also have a moral right to attack the USA with whatever weapons they can create. Dead civilians are the same, whether they are Americans, Palestinians or Iraqis.
Which is from the bad mad days of November 2001, which is when Solveig Torvik of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer said this about what Dr. Gilbert said:
Yes, dead civilians are the same. But are the reasons they are dead always the same? I think not. That’s where critical distinctions must be made. When civilians die, it matters whether they die as intended or unintended targets. To me, it matters whether you die in the service of liberty or tyranny.
Hear, hear! More light less heat, we always say. But how does one ensure the world shall know one’s aim is ever toward liberty? Perhaps a leafletting campaign?
Will no-one rid us of this truculent pundit?
I want to be good; I want to live up to the koan. But then I hear something so willfully, viciously stupid, so areal, something that does such violence to our already shredded discourse, something like this—
The New Deal—everybody agrees, I think, on both sides of the spectrum now, that the New Deal failed. The debate is over why it failed.
—and I get all Lewis Black again.
The trouble with Holbo’s Complaint (“I realize it is really a quite serious matter than the right-wingers have gone around the bend and apparently aren’t coming back”) isn’t that it’s hard on US to read their stuff without a sunny heart. It isn’t even that THEM ain’t coming back from around the bend ever at all. —To each their own, you know? If that’s what floats their boat, who am I to judge?
It’s that they’re determined to drag all the rest of us around the bend with them.
The site, with its ever-present Wikimania for lists, lists many scholars who have given up on the site, many more who are discontented, and only two who are happy with the status quo. The vandalism problem has received a lot of publicity, but that one’s actually fairly minor, or at least relatively fixable. More aggravating is “edit creep,” the gradual deterioration of a polished article by well-meaning but careless edits, and, even worse, “cranks,” which are classified with typical Wiki-precision as “parasites, scofflaws or insane.” And a crank can single-handedly destroy an article’s usefulness.
The problem is that Wikipedia forces its contributors to come to a consensus, and building consensus with a crank is a fool’s errand. Many of the departing scholars note the incident that finally brought them to leave; mine was a truculent teenager who refused to acknowledge that minimalist music was considered classical, because, as he put it, “it sounds more like Britney Spears than like Merzbow.” Let that sink in a minute. A person who insists that Einstein on the Beach, or Phill Niblock’s Four Full Flutes, or Tom Johnson’s Chord Catalogue cannot be considered classical because it sounds like Britney Spears is not a person one can seek consensus with. Because of that and his flippant rudeness I refused to argue directly with him, and appealed to the Wiki editors. Yet because of the Wikipedia policy about consensus, I couldn’t get around him, either. And when I checked the “Expert retention” page, I realized that this was not an isolated bit of bad luck, but that this recurring problem bars the dissemination of knowledge throughout Wikipedia.
Kyle Gann gave up on Wikipedia because of it. But giving up the body politic is a bit more difficult. A lie gets halfway around the world by the time the truth gets its shoes on, and that was before a professional corps of altheaphagei took up their stations outside its door, forks aloft. What do we do to beat it back? Must we each of us Epimenidean soldiers take up steel-edged rulers and station ourselves at the palaces of the pundits and whack their knuckles as they wax stupidic—
Oh. Hey. Army of Davids. Self-correcting blogosphere. Wikitopia.
—We will never be done with the long slow slog of the koan: word for word, person by person, dismantling the stupidity, alleviating the ignorance. The wood to be chopped, and the water carried; the dishes washed and the laundry done.
Still. It’s hard, seeing intellectual violence like this, wolves outside the door the way they are, not to want to punch someone in the face. (Or at least spit in their coffee.)
Otto’s rede.
John Judis is worried that Obama doesn’t realize just how bad things are. Me, I think he has some idea. (The signs are all about us.) —I think Obama’s fetishizing Otto Von Bismarck: “Politics is the art of the possible.” And, yes, I know:
Mark Schmitt has some typically wise things to say about momentum and naïvetie:
Bush’s mistake [in attempting to privatize Social Security after the 2004 election] was an unsurprising one. It is rooted in the naïve idea that presidents get a mandate from their election in the same way a gyroscope gets its spin. The bigger the victory, the bigger the mandate, and as time passes, the mandate diminishes. Bush didn’t have a big victory in 2004, but it was at least a solid, uncontested affirmation, and he decided that with a little extra spin and some abuse of power, he could get more out of it.
For all the romance of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first 100 days, history suggests that presidents do not get a mandate as a mechanical function of their electoral margin, but in fact they build it over time. They earn it not by winning but by governing. They assemble coalitions and use them again and again, and build institutions and make them work. While many good policies and necessary emergency measures were passed in the first 100 days of the New Deal, the innovations that lasted—those that defined politics until Reagan—came later, after FDR had consolidated power, forced the Supreme Court to accept a new set of assumptions about government’s role in the economy, and won the 1934 mid-term election.
Yes but well you see, as Rick Perlstein points out—
Progressive political change in American history is rarely incremental. With important exceptions, most of the reforms that have advanced our nation’s status as a modern, liberalizing social democracy were pushed through during narrow windows of progressive opportunity — which subsequently slammed shut with the work not yet complete. The post–Civil War reconstruction of the apartheid South, the Progressive Era remaking of the institutions of democratic deliberation, the New Deal, the Great Society: They were all blunt shocks. Then, before reformers knew what had happened, the seemingly sturdy reform mandate faded and Washington returned to its habits of stasis and reaction.
The Oval Office’s most effective inhabitants have always understood this. Franklin D. Roosevelt hurled down executive orders and legislative proposals like thunderbolts during his First Hundred Days, hardly slowing down for another four years before his window slammed shut; Lyndon Johnson, aided by John F. Kennedy’s martyrdom and the landslide of 1964, legislated at such a breakneck pace his aides were in awe. Both presidents understood that there are too many choke points — our minority-enabling constitutional system, our national tendency toward individualism, and our concentration of vested interests — to make change possible any other way.
Taking the long view, building on the nines, this is without a doubt important, and FDR did win big after those 100 days. But one of the ways he built institutions to allow him to govern lastingly was by nailing some damn thing to the wall and saying there, see? We’ve done that. What’s next?
I don’t know. My hopes were never that high. But I’m starting to worry that in his chilled and admirable pragmatism Obama’s fallen far far short of what we need, far further than I’d feared. “The art of the possible,” after all, isn’t the art of what is possible.
It’s the art of making things possible.
New frontiers in the passive voice.
BART officials have said only that his handgun discharged at about 2:15 a.m. Thursday at the Fruitvale Station in Oakland and that the bullet struck the unarmed Grant, who had been detained with several others.
—the San Francisco Chronicle, on an incident in which a BART police officer may have fatally shot an unarmed man lying on a station platform with his gun instead of his Taser®
“I can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, Communist subversion and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.”
Forget the Quakers: those zealots in the Maryland State Police labeled cycling advocates as terrorists! [via]
Our demon lover.
These people willingly send their own children to their deaths simply to make a statement—to accomplish nothing but the murder of two Israeli civilians and signal their commitment to the fight. The fight against Islamic radicals always seems to come around to whether or not they can, in fact, be deterred, because it’s not clear that they are rational, at least not like us. But to wipe out a man’s entire family, it’s hard to imagine that doesn’t give his colleagues at least a moment’s pause. Perhaps it will make the leadership of Hamas rethink the wisdom of sparking an open confrontation with Israel under the current conditions.
That’s Michael Goldfarb, an editor of conservative organ The Weekly Standard, expressing his full-throated support of terrorism: so long, of course, as the victims of terror are people who do not reason like us, and willingly send children to their deaths, simply to signal their will to fight. —Can we do the right thing, and add his name to the ultra-top-secret terrorism watch list, along with those Quakers from Maryland? Can we train our BDOs to recognize and react to such dangerous levels of blind self-righteous smugness?
Not so sharp as a serpent’s tooth, perhaps.
RedState’s own Erick Erickson on Greg Sargent’s move from TPM to the Washington Post—
Well, we really don’t need any reminder as to the liberal bias of the mainstream media, but I’ll remind you anyway.
Greg Sargent was with the left-wing Talking Points Memo. Now he is with the Washington Post.
I’m sure Greg Sargent is good at what he does, but I’m also sure the Washington Post would not even consider hiring someone directly from the right-of-center blogosphere.
Of course the Washington Post is connected to both Newsweek and Slate, so its biases are pretty well established and no doubt considers TPM to be right in line with the mainstream.
Apparently, former WaPo blogger Ben Domenech, one of the and I can’t stress this enough founders of RedState, was therefore himself to the left of the ever-lovin’ center. Who knew? (The title of his storied WaPo blog, Red America—perhaps it was some devilish trick to conceal the MSM’s well-known liberal bias?)
But I really shouldn’t be too hard on Mr. Erickson; he is, after all, the mastermind behind Operation Leper. —Which means we share the same goal: I, too, dream of a day when the Republican Party is cut down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.
Stay toasty.
I’ve got to share with you, it’s like kinda providential, yesterday what happened to me. I can use this today, after that introduction from Shelly. I’m reading on my Starbucks mocha cup, okay, the quote of the day? You’ll never believe what the quote was. It was Madeleine Albright, former Secretary of State and UN Ambassador, and Madeleine has as her quote of the day for Starbucks—now she said it, I didn’t—she said, “There’s a place in hell reserved for women who don’t support other women.”
—Gov. Sarah Palin, Carson, California rally, 4 Oct. 2008
Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s hometown required women to pay for their own rape examinations while she was mayor, a practice her police chief fought to keep as late as 2000.
Former state Rep. Eric Croft, a Democrat, sponsored a state law requiring cities to provide the examinations free of charge to victims. He said the only ongoing resistance he met was from Wasilla, where Palin was mayor from 1996 to 2002.
“It was one of those things everyone could agree on except Wasilla,” Croft told CNN. “We couldn’t convince the chief of police to stop charging them.”
Alaska’s Legislature in 2000 banned the practice of charging women for rape exam kits—which experts said could cost up to $1,000.
—“Palin’s town charged women for rape exams”
Andy, are you goofing on Reagan?
I swear to God, between the Sarah Palin pick (and its resulting flop-sweat fall-out) and the majestically unrepentant “Message: We Care” approach to Gustav, I’m fully expecting John McCain to accept his nomination on Thursday or whenever by reaching up and pulling off his full-face latex Tony Clifton mask to reveal Andy Kaufman, wide-eyed, blinking cherubically at the culmination of his decades-long masterstroke. —Or maybe he’s Dick Cheney. Explains a lot, don’t it.
Class warfare.
The last stop in Fareless Square on the west-bound MAX line is a city-owned Smart Park parking garage. There’s a convenience store on the first floor of the garage—one of three Peterson’s in downtown Portland.
Over across the street there’s one of those renovations where they tried gutting an old office building and turning it into a downtown shopping mall; never all that terribly successful, it recently landed a Brooks Bros. outlet as an anchor store—something hailed as genuinely “rejuvenating” by downtown business types.
Ever since, the downtown business types have been pressuring the city to evict the convenience store.
It’s a successful convenience store that makes a pretty penny for the city, holding its space for years now while other spaces about it have been rented out to fly-by-night shoe and luggage outfits and the sort of art galleries that subsidize those massive art-by-the-foot shows in Shilo Inns out by the airport. (To be fair, the Japanese restaurant and the arty-crafty gallery have been around as long as the Peterson’s.) —But in a spectacular confusion of correlation and causation, the downtown business types (who’ve hired their own private police force, and who back the reprehesible Sit-Lie Ordinance) looked at the yes, colorful and yes, occasionally noisy welter of folks that congregate about the convenience store under a parking garage at the edge of free-ride Fareless Square on the main light-rail line, and rather than—
- realizing that gutterpunks and shiftless kids and those between engagements and even the housing-deprived (among other types similarly declassé) will naturally tend to congregate in semi-public un-chaperoned roofed-over areas (like a parking garage) on or near public thoroughfares (such as a light-rail stop on the edge of a free-as-in-beer–travel zone)—where they might also purchase soda or jerky or a magazine or a newspaper, should they be so inclined;
—the downtown business types have instead decided that—
- the yes, colorful and yes, occasionally noisy welter of folks must congregate here solely for the soda and the jerky and the reading selection that’s not quite as impressive as Richardson’s or that of the public library just across the street, and the parking garage and the MAX do not factor at all in this equation, so: if the convenience store is evicted, then the colorful welter etc. will follow, and all will once more be well for the rejuvenatin’ Brooks Bros. and co.
—How heartening to discover that this “troublesome convenience store” is all that has stood between the Galleria and success. Would that all our economic woes could be salved so readily!
In addition to such spectacularly faulty logic, the downtown business types have completely forgotten everyone else who shops at Peterson’s: everyone who rides the MAX in from Goose Hollow and the west hills to shop or work downtown, and who picks up some refreshment or something to read on their way in or out. —Rather literally and demonstrably forgotten: an assistant manager of the aforementioned Brooks Bros. wrote an email to the mayor, from which we lift the following quote:
I fail to see why a disgusting store such as Peterson’s is allowed to stay open. . . . They cater to the dregs of the streets of our city.
What’s sad is, despite the money made for the city by its successful lessee, and despite the unsurprising lack of specificity in the recent flurry of complaints listed against Peterson’s (which cite only “various dates,” “various times,” and, yes, “various complaints”), the city actually seriously contemplated kicking them out—until all those “dregs of the streets” stood up and said, rather pointedly, “Hell no.” (What would the city have done had they kicked out the convenience store and noticed no drop in the noisy, colorful welter? Would afternoon commuters have sighed and blown five hundred bucks on a new blazer when they could no longer blow five bucks on a Snapple and a Wired?)
So the good guys won one, with a concession or two. Yay! —Meanwhile, if you’ve ever stepped off a bus or a subway or a trolley line and bought something at a bodega or a Plaid Pantry or a 7-11, be sure to write to Brooks Bros. and let them know what a dreg of the street thinks of their general attitude.
