An Urban Legend Grows: My Daughter "Stood" for Obama

While I was conducting an event at the Honors House tonight, I heard from a colleague that Miss Teen RSI had stood up during a high school class and said that it was time to listen to President Obama's speech. I was also told that the teacher had told her to sit down and that the class wasn't going to hear the speech.

Yes, I had a brave daughter who was willing to stand up to authority in the name of all that was good and true.

But it turned out to be an urban legend.

When I got home, the daughter in question said that she had sort of stood to make her hand visible but that she forgot what the teacher said and that it hadn't been any kind of put down or anything like that anyway.

All very mundane.

It turned out that about half of the high school teachers didn't show Obama's speech in their classes.

Not much of a surprise.

High school teachers are pretty conservative--especially in a Bible-belt area like this.

I'm just glad that they're not teaching the "Answers in Genesis" line in the science classes.

A New Perspective on Glenn Beck

Doesn't the new species of giant rat in this picture remind you of Glenn Beck?

Obama's "I Walked Through Five Feet of Snow" Moment

In a way, conservatives are right about President Obama's speech to the nation's schoolchildren being indoctrination. It's indoctrination into the dominant ideology of individualism. But it's hard to see why conservatives object. They believe in individualism just as much as Obama.

What I found charming about Obama's speech was this "standard parent moment of telling kids how tough he had it when he was a kid. Every parent gives this speech hundreds of times while their kids are growing up and every kid ignores this speech every time their parents give it. In our house, it's called the "I Walked Through Five Feet of Snow" Speech.

I know that feeling. When I was young, my family lived in Indonesia for a few years, and my mother didn't have the money to send me where all the American kids went to school. So she decided to teach me extra lessons herself, Monday through Friday - at 4:30 in the morning. Now I wasn't too happy about getting up that early. A lot of times, I'd fall asleep right there at the kitchen table. But whenever I'd complain, my mother would just give me one of those looks and say, "This is no picnic for me either, buster."

For that matter, I did walk through five feet of snow to go to dances in a neighboring town while I was in high school. Or was it "I walked five miles through the snow?" I forget now. And maybe Obama didn't really take classes at 4:30 in the morning. Maybe it was 3:30 in the morning before he went out for his pre-school job in the oil fields.

Whatever it was, I pulled myself up by my own bootstraps just like President Obama. See, I still have the bootstrap scars to show for it.

Sympathy for Legarrette Blount

After yesterday's Boise State win over Oregon, Oregon senior tailback Legarrette Blount sucker-punched a Boise State player and then went beserk before being pushed into the Oregon locker room. Here's the video. There was some provocation. The Boise State player taunted Blount and slapped Blount's shoulder pads. But the provocation was nothing compared to what Blount did. Upon seeing the incident on video, University of Oregon officials quickly decided to suspend Blount for the rest of the 2009 season and effectively end his college football career.

It appears that they are going to keep him on scholarship though.

I agree with the punishment.

For his own good, Legarrette Blount needs to get out of big-time football for awhile.

But I also have some sympathy for Blount. High level athletes are expected to play with enormous intensity, reckless abandon, and testosterone-fueled aggression. But athletes are also expected to keep their emotions under rigid control at all times when they're not playing football and serve as role models for good citizenship.

It's an impossible demand and I'm surprised more athletes don't just go berserk like Blount did yesterday.

Anyway, I hope Legarrette Blount gets things worked out.

He certainly has my good wishes.

Where Have You Gone, Marion Motley?

I was shocked by this report on Shawne Merriman of the San Diego Chargers being arrested for choking his girlfriend. I always kind of hope these things aren't true, but they almost always are.

Who Was More Obsessed with Tea-Baggers?

E. J. Dionne argues that the mainstream media was obsessed with loud-mouthed teabaggers at the health care townhalls during August.

But what if our media-created impression of the meetings is wrong? What if the highly publicized screamers represented only a fraction of public opinion? What if most of the town halls were populated by citizens who respectfully but firmly expressed a mixture of support, concern and doubt?

There is an overwhelming case that the electronic media went out of their way to cover the noise and ignored the calmer (and from television's point of view "boring") encounters between elected representatives and their constituents.

But it's hard to believe that CBS, NBC, and ABC were any more focused on townhall disruptions than HuffPost or TalkingPointsMemo. The progressive media might have had a different agenda in covering the townhall protesters, but progressive outlets were just as obsessed as the mainstream media.

More Like "Heck" than Hell

An Alternet headline screams that "Obama Is Leading the U.S. Into a Hellish Quagmire." I'd say Afghanistan is more like "heck" than hell right now.

Olympia Snowe: Most Important Woman in the World

According to Ezra Klein, the White House has decided to make a deal with Republican senator from Maine Senator Olympia Snowe. In effect, that makes Snowe has become the new health reform czar. Back in the 1920's, there was a saying that "as goes Maine, so goes the nation." Now, it's really true.

Pat Buchanan and the Facts of Conservative Life

Yesterday was the 70th anniversary of Hitler's invasion of Poland and Hitler apologist Pat Buchanan is in full "Sympathy to Our Pal Adolf" mode. According to TPM:

According to Buchanan, Hitler's invasion of Poland -- which led to Britain's declaration of war on Germany, and the start of World War II -- was motivated merely by Germany's desire to regain the city of Danzig, which had been given to Poland in the Versailles Treaty. Had Poland simply negotiated with Hitler, war could have been averted. In fact, Hitler wasn't bent on world, or even European, domination. He would have been happy with just Danzig, Austria, and the Sudetenland, you see. Hitler "wanted to end the war in 1940, almost two years before the trains began to roll to the camps." It was only thanks to the aggression of Britain, Russia, and the U.S. that the conflict was expanded. So, goes the implication, any deaths that occurred after 1940 -- including the 6 million that comprised the Holocaust -- are on the Allies' heads.

But Buchanan is just being an honest conservative here. Every conservative defense of tyranny, domination, cruelty, or oppression begins with the premise that the stronger party is provoked into aggression by their targets. That's true of wife-beating husbands and rapists. It was also the case with conservative justifications of slaveholders and segregationist lynch mobs. The Bush administration used the fact of Iraqi resistance as a justification for the destruction of Iraqi cities like Fallujah. The only thing that Pat Buchanan is doing here is extending a core conservative view to a previously taboo subject in the form of Adolf Hitler.

Otherwise, defending the cruelty of the stronger party is just a fact of conservative life.

Good News on the Book Proposal Front

Moving one step forward--I got a very favorable reaction from a series editor at a very good academic press. Now, I just have to avoid the two steps back thing.

Jenna Bush as Royalty

Glenn Greenwald criticizes NBC's selection of George W. Bush's daughter Jenna Bush Hager as a Today Show correspondent as an example of the media stockpiling "American royalty."

Greenwald points to plenty of other examples as well.

They should convene a panel for the next Meet the Press with Jenna Bush Hager, Luke Russert, Liz Cheney, Megan McCain and Jonah Goldberg, and they should have Chris Wallace moderate it. They can all bash affirmative action and talk about how vitally important it is that the U.S. remain a Great Meritocracy because it's really unfair for anything other than merit to determine position and employment.

He could have mentioned Maria Shriver and just about any Kennedy as examples of royalty on the Democratic side as well, although there's still the conundrum of why the Kennedy's are the only Democratic side accepted as American royalty.

Which brings us to Jenna Bush.

It's curious to me that NBC is bringing Jenna Bush on board as a royalty hire. Given that George W. Bush has just about as much clout after leaving office as Richard II, the hiring of his daughter has to be seen more as an act of "royalty defiance" than anything else.

For her sake, I hope Jenna Bush is better at being a reporter than dad was at being president.

Ted's Replacement?

Victoria Kennedy sounds almost as good for the Senate in Massachusetts as Caroline Kennedy sounded for the Senate in New York.

Conservatives Should Give Up on Christianity

I've always been surprised that more conservatives don't convert to some sort of "Looking Out for Number One"--"God Wants You To Make Tons of Money"--"Screw People Over As Much as You Can"--"Torture Anybody You Please"--kind of religion.

Wait a minute. That's what conservatives have made of Christianity.

But Jesus objects.

Even an atheist like myself can see from the New Testament that Jesus and the authors of the New Testament gospels had enormous contempt for the wealthy and powerful and he hated the Pharisees mostly because he saw them as self-righteous pricks.

People like James Dobson.

Jesus thought of the poor as blessed and headed for heaven. In the Luke version of the Sermon on the Mount from Luke 6:20-24, Jesus proclaims "Blessed be ye poor for yours is the kingdom of God." That sounds nice and well-intentioned. But it's also part of the core of Jesus' theology. The poor are "blessed" and are saved whether they believe in Jesus or not because the human condition of being poor, abused, deprived, and suffering prefigures the sacrifice of Jesus himself. In other words, the poor are like Jesus while the wealthy and powerful are cursed and condemned to eternal suffering because they're a lot like the people who end up crucifying Jesus. Also in Luke 6:2024: "But woe unto you that are rich! For ye have received your consolation. (quotes from King James Version)

But where Jesus really nails the analogy between the poor and suffering and himself was in Matthew 25:31-46. I'll quote this at length.

"Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye did it unto one of these my brethren, even these least, ye did it unto me. Then shall he say also unto them on the left hand, Depart from me, ye cursed, into the eternal fire which is prepared for the devil and his angels: for I was hungry, and ye did not give me to eat; I was thirsty, and ye gave me no drink; I was a stranger, and ye took me not in; naked, and ye clothed me not; sick, and in prison, and ye visited me not. Then shall they also answer, saying, Lord, when saw we thee hungry, or a thirst, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not minister unto thee? Then shall he answer them, saying, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye did it not unto one of these least, ye did it not unto me. And these shall go away into eternal punishment: but the righteous into eternal life."

Jesus is already in those who are hungry, thirsty, naked, sick, imprisoned, and living in strange lands. That's why those who minister to the "truly disadvantaged" are blessed and welcome in heavy and those who refuse aid are damned and "shall go away into eternal punishment."

What the religious right is doing in the health care debate is "refusing aid" to the working poor, uninsured people, and illegal immigrants in the United States who need help assistance the most. People on the right could say that they just don't want "government" to provide that aid. Given the ferociousness with which Jesus damns those who refuse such aid, it's hard to imagine that he would accept such a lame excuse.

That's why it's hard for me to see why conservatives remain Christians. Who would want to be part of a religion that condemns people like themselves to eternal punishment?

An End to State Funerals

I have to admit that I just hate the kind of "state funeral" that's been mounted for Ted Kennedy today. The monumentality of the wrongfulness and absurdity of this kind of event is beyond my literary ability to conceive and describe. But let's call it depressing, ugly, morally sick, bad democratic theory, bad politics, and bad history for starters.

A state funeral is also a horrifying way to honor Ted Kennedy's real accomplishments.

---

For the purposes of this post, I'm just going to stick with emphasizing the depressing character of it all though.

Starting with the church in the above picture--the "Basilica of Our Lady of Perpetual Help." In the picture taken from the high angle, the basilica itself looks like a tomb just as much as Ted Kennedy's casket. I'm not a religious person and have not been in a church for a religous purpose for 34 years. But I know enough church language to know that the room where the service was being held is called a "sanctuary." At Kennedy's funeral, the sanctuary looks like a mass grave and the participants look like they're already dead but still under the illusion that they're alive. What happens when Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and the Clintons leave the basilica. Are they going to spring back to life? I doubt it. There are enough images in our culture of the dead having a kind of life as vampires, werewolves, the undead, or whatever Bruce Willis was in the "Sixth Sense" that we can't really tell who's living and dead anymore. The people at Ted Kennedy's funeral look like they're already navigating the line of being dead but not really knowing it.

--

The effect of living death is enhanced by the fact that the men at Ted Kennedy's funeral are dressed almost uniformly in shades of blue and charcoal-gray. The surface thought is that the "somber" colors are appropriate for a funeral and don't have any significance beyond that. But the thought is mistaken. These are the suits that elite men wear every day of their working lives. What the suits represent in the basilica is what they represent at the White House, in Congress, in business, and in the media. And what they look like to me is little blue and gray caskets for the ashen-faced men within them. Like Diogenes carrying around his coffin with him, all of the important men at the funeral look like they're encased in coffins. But where Diogenes was joking (at least I think he was), the men at Ted Kennedy's funeral look like they live their "undeath" every day. Or maybe they view their everyday lives as an on-going funeral.

--

What makes this depressing is to think that these men (and women) are the cream of "our" elite, the Democratic, liberal, progressive, socially conscious, rational, caring, thoughtful elite, and that they are just as much the undead as the Dick Cheney's and Rupert Murdoch's of the world. Even if Barack Obama isn't as fully committed to being a war criminal as Dick Cheney, he's still cut from the same blue and grey cloth, still pulled to the undead existence that characterizes the elite, and still pulling the rest of us into the sphere of the undead ourselves.

Broncos: The Path Down Loser Road

The Denver Broncos appear to have given up on playing Pro Bowlers. Quarterback Jay Cutler got out of town as soon as his little legs would carry him after new head coach Josh Marshall tried to trade him. Evidently, Cutler didn't like the idea of being dangled as trade bait after his first Pro Bowl. Now, they've suspended Brandon Marshall and his 206 catches over the last two years for being vocal about his desire to be traded as well.

Actually, I'm not sure that's right. Now that new head coach Josh McDaniel has introduced the "New England Way" of not giving a damn about players, it might be that the Broncos have decided to eliminate all of their professional football players--not just the Pro Bowlers.

Hmm, maybe I should call them and see if I can get a tryout.

Unfortunate About Billy Gillispie

I was disappointed to see that former UK coach Billy Gillispie was arrested on suspicion of drunken driving a couple of days ago.

Lawrenceburg Police said Gillispie was driving a white 2009 Mercedes with Texas
tags around 2:45 a.m. on US 127 when a call went in to 9-1-1 reported seeing the the car driving erratically. Gillispie was arrested and charged with DUI. In Gillispie's arrest report, the arresting officer stated that Gillispie "had a strong fruity smell coming from his person (possibly wine) and had red glassy eyes and slow slurred speech."

What's unfortunate here is the possibility that Gillispie is slipping into alcoholism after being fired from the UK job. From the minute Billy Gillispie arrived in Lexington, KY, there have been rumors about him being such a bad alcoholic that he was booted out of bars and had to be driven everywhere. I'm not in position to either confirm or disconfirm those rumors and I've certainly ridiculed Gillispie for his cluelessness as a basketball coach.

But still, I don't like the thought that he might be deteriorating at this point. Now that Gillispie has no job, it's likely that he has lots of money and lots of time on his hands. If he indeed does have alcohol problems, that's not a good combination.

A Weak Nostalgia Moment

I have to admit it. I finally gave in to Woodstock nostalgia and caught Joni Mitchell singing "Woodstock" on YouTube. I'm "weak, weak, weak."

Great tune though. Surprised that Joni Mitchell was ever that young though.

Even Bigger Banks and the Coming of Finance Socialism

According to David Cho of the Washington Post, big banks like Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo have become considerably bigger as a result of last year's financial meltdown.

J.P. Morgan Chase, an amalgam of some of Wass Street's most storied institutions, now holds more than $1 of every $10 on deposit in this country. So does Bank of America, scarred by its acquisition of Merrill Lynch and partly government-owned as a result of the crisis, as does Wells Fargo, the biggest West Coast bank. Those three banks, plus government-rescued and -owned Citigroup, now issue of of every two mortgages and about two of every three credit cards, federal data show.

A year after the near-collapse of the financial system last September, the federal response has redefined how Americans get mortgages, student loans and other kinds of credit and has made a national spectacle of executive pay. But no consequence of the crisis alarms top regulators more than having banks that were already too big to fail grow even larger and more interconnected.

It almost goes without saying that a higher level of concentration in the banking industry means that the next financial meltdown is going to be even worse--much worse. The Obama administration and the Federal Reserve Board were able to get through the last crisis because there was some margin for error. When BearStearns went belly-up, it could be absorbed by Morgan Stanley. The same with Merrill Lynch being absorbed by the Bank of America.

But there not going to be any Plan B for failed big banks next time. Last year, the "big banks" were "too big to fail." Next time, the even bigger big banks will be "too big to save" within the framework of private corporations. Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo are plenty big, but they're not big enough to absorb teetering monstrosities the size of Citigroup or Bank of America. The only answer to the failure of "bigger big banks" will be to nationalize them.

Whether we like it or not, "finance socialism" has almost arrived.

A Note on Ted Kennedy

I've always been very ambivalent about Ted Kennedy and remain so after his death. The negative is hard to shake off. The booze, the womanizing, the hard partying late into his 50's, the death of Mary Jo Kopechne, and the William Kennedy Smith rape case all created an impression of profligacy and waste that can't be forgotten. Kennedy had a lot of embarrassing moments as a politician as well. When Kennedy ran for president in 1979, he couldn't come up with a coherent question to Roger Mudd (then of CBS News) when Mudd asked Kennedy why he was running for president. Kennedy's last two speeches to the Democratic Convention have been painful to watch as well. If George W. Bush wasted his inheritance, the story of Ted Kennedy's life can be seen as wasting a much bigger inheritance.

But I also view Ted Kennedy as a story of personal redemption. After the William Kennedy Smith case in 1991, Kennedy seemed to realize that he was blowing all his opportunities and really became the outstanding senator everybody's now saying he was. That says something very positive about Kennedy's character as a human being and his devotion to the causes of poverty, health reform, education, and immigration reform. Swimming against the conservative tide of the 1990's and early 2000's was tough but Kennedy proved to be more than up to the task. My own opinion is that Ted Kennedy could only come into his own as a political figure after the politics of the 1960's had played out and the era of the Kennedy family's Camelot was completely dead.

The early 1960's was a high tide of political liberalism in the United States and first John and then Bobby Kennedy rode that wave for all it was worth. But Ted Kennedy couldn't show his virtues to their fullest extent until the conservatives took over and started to roll back the Great Society, the Warren Court, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the safety net, abortion rights, and the rights of criminal suspects. Ted Kennedy was at his best in fighting a rearguard action on behalf of the liberal accomplishments of the post-WWII era and pushing a liberal agenda forward despite the prevailing winds of conservativism.

But events move quickly and Ted Kennedy had already become a man of the past even before he was diagnosed with brain cancer. The time for rearguard actions on behalf of liberalism is over and progressive America is looking at an opportunity to advance "the general welfare" rather than just protecting the country against the right. As full of faults as they are, Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Dick Durbin, Joe Biden, and Hillary Clinton are the men and women of this moment. We need to ensure that they get it right.

Does the GOP Have Much Choice But To Oppose Health Reform

Digby claims that Congress actually might pass a decent health reform bill because the GOP refused to give them cover for legislation loaded with corporate goodies. The moderates and Blue Dogs wanted compromise but the Republicans wouldn't budge.

The sell-outs are almost begging the Republicans to help them pass the terrible,
insurance company giveaway bill they want so badly --- and the Republicans just
won't cooperate.

I believe the Democrats are going to get health reform enacted with a "public option" that will serve as competition for the insurance companies. But I don't think the Republicans ultimately had any practical option but refusal to cooperate. The conservative activist core has gone teabagger and they're carrying Republican politicians with them. Any Republican senator or House member who defies the conservative consensus is going to be in trouble. It's easier for senators like Charles Grassley of Iowa to toe the line and pass out Glenn Beck books to the yahoos than compromise with Obama. That's why Grassley indicated that he wouldn't vote for health reform even if the Dems gave him everything he wanted.

If the Democrats want to govern, they'll have to govern without the cooperation of the Republicans on health care or any other issue of substance.

And, like Digby, I don't think that's such a bad thing.

Rudy Giuliani and His Skeletons for Governor

Former NYC mayor Rudy Giuliani is thinking about running for governor of New York and is planning on running a classic whistle-stop railroad campaign on Amtrak. Of course, Giuliani will need the full train to carry all the closets with all the skeletons that accompany him wherever he goes. He'll also need somebody to guard his wife while she walks the dog.

I'm all for a Rudy Giuliani gubernatorial campaign. Rudy needs to be in a higher office before my dream of an American Idol type show entitled "Rudy's Next Mistress" can become a reality.

The First Four Theses Against Progressives

Talk about being fed up--the big names of the journalistic left have been firing at the Obama administration with everything they have. Paul Krugman, Glenn Greenwald, Frank Rich, and Digby all speak with one mouth even as they condemn President Obama's approach to health reform. Obama's "weak" and getting "rolled" by the blue dogs and their corporate allies. Obama's betraying progressives on health reform the same way he betrayed progresives on the financial bailout and secrecy. Obama's going to abandon the "public option" and turn health reform into a bonanza for the health insurance companies. Obama's betraying the "progressive base" that drove him to victory over Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primaries and John McCain in the general election. Finally, progressives condemn Obama for losing the initiative because he's not as ideological and partisan as they are.

Actually, I should say as partisan as "we are." I count myself as a progressive blogger, read the better-known progressive bloggers, and admire their smarts, passion, and talent. I also agree with them on most issues. Like Greenwald, I'm disappointed that Obama has maintained most of the secrecy policies of the Bush administration. Not unlike Krugman, I think the bank bailout is a set-up for the next financial crisis, and want to see Obama aggressively employ the tax system to reduce wealth differentials. Yesterday, I blogged yet again about the criminal culpability of Dick Cheney and the other major figures of the Bush administration. I also want to see socialized medicine in the United States just as much as Dennis Kucinich or anybody else on the left.

But I'm also starting to think that progressive commentators are way off base about the Obama administration. Worse, there are certain ways in which the progressive commentariat is making it more rather than less difficult to enact fundamental health reform.

In other words, I'm starting to get fed up with some of the rigid ways in which progressives are fed up with Obama.

Here's my four theses on progressives.

1. Progressives Are Not "the Base." The Democratic Party has a diverse voting base among largely white progressives, African-Americans, Hispanics, gays, and union members. Those progressives who view themselves as "the" Democratic base are deluding themselves. Obama won the nomination primarily by appealing to moderate and conservative Democrats in caucus states. Obama won the election because he was able to keep moderate and conservative Dems in the fold while appealing to independents. Progressive Democrats may have been necessary to Obama's victory, but other Democratic constituencies were even more necessary. Just like the Republicans, Democratic progressives have a hard time internalizing the extent to which minority support was crucial to Obama's victory.

2. Progressives are One-Trick Ponies. Progressives are primarily playing the defensive role of maintaining the “public option” as part of Obama's proposals. That means attacking the Obama administration, Max Baucus, Ben Nelson, the Blue Dogs, Tom Daschle, the mainstream media and anybody on the Democratic side who's wavering on the public option. By they're so focused on that one point that progressives are doing very little if anything to actually promote the public option concept to the broader American public. Maybe I'm missing something, but I find almost nothing in TPM, HuffPost, or other progressive outlets about how the public option would work, what kind of federal agency would be set up, why (beyond "it won't need to make a profit") the public option would drive down costs, and why the public option doesn't necessarily lead to "socialized medicine." The Obama people have tried to discuss the public option, but their ideas are falling on deaf ears in the progressive as well as the mainstream media.

3. Progressives keep the health care debate "white." Outside the Obama people and the Congressional leadership of both parties, the three main poles of debate are the right, the Blue Dogs, and progressives. Outside that one guy with the AR 15 in Phoenix, the right is monolithically white; the Blue Dogs even more so. Needless to say, progressives aren't that white. Bob Herbert, Eugene Robinson, and Clarence Page come to mind as well-known op-ed writers who are progressives. Pam Spaulding of "Pam's House Blend" also gets considerable play on the big progressive blogs. But the fact is that African-American, Hispanic, and gay perspectives only have token representation (if that) in the progressive media and there are times when I think the progressive media is about as interested in minority views and interests as George Bush was interested in astro-physics. The health care debate has become a debate among the white population and the progressive media bears significant responsibility for keeping the health care debate "white."

4. The Progressive Media Has No Self-Awareness. It almost goes without saying that progressive outlets like Media Matters, ThinkProgress, HuffPost, and TPM are saturated with media criticism. This is so much the case that well-traveled media figures like Chuck Todd and Jake Tapper are probably better known in some progressive households than in their own. But the progressive media shows almost no awareness of its own growing impact. There's no little or no analysis in the progressive media of its general significance as a media voice, it's impact on specific issues like health care or torture, which progressive outlets have preponderant influence, or what influence the progressive media has on the mainstream media, the Obama administration, and the Congressional Democrats. In other words, the progressive media shows almost no self-awareness. By comparison, conservative media shows like Limbaugh's and Hannity's are bastions of self-understanding.

My Last Cookies at Root-A-Baker's

Driving by Root-A-Baker's bakery on Rt 32 (the "Connector" in Morehead-ese), I saw that they had a sign in their yard saying "THIS PIECE OF THE NATION/IS STILL UNDER GOD."

Root-A-Baker's is an excellent bakery and Mrs. RSI and I have patronized them for years.

They're nice people too.

However, as far as I'm concerned, the yard sign was an announcement that "WE'RE A RELIGIOUS RIGHT BUSINESS AND WE'RE MAKING OUR CONSERVATIVE AFFILIATION PART OF OUR ADVERTISING."

They're also saying that people who don't share their politics can't be "Under God."

Of course, the Root-A-Baker's ownership has every right to announce their political affiliations and promote their political views.

But I have rights to political expression as well, and I'm going to exercise my rights by refusing to buy cookies, cinnamon rolls, and birthday cakes from Root-A-Baker's as long as they're a right-wing business.

And I'll urge my friends and colleagues to do the same.

All that sweet stuff probably isn't good for us anyway.

Mrs. RSI Says Good-Bye

After six hours of Smallville, Mrs. RSI has decided to leave me for Lex Luthor. I thought I made a convincing argument that I was just as evil as Lex. But she apparently prefers evil to be hairless.

My Lai's William Calley Emerges

William Calley of My Lai massacre fame emerged to apologize for the Vietnam War massacre in a speech in Columbus. “There is not a day that goes by that I do not feel remorse for what happened that day in My Lai . . . I am very sorry.”

Actually, I was surprised that Calley was still alive. It turns out that he had been living a quiet life in Ohio and Georgia.

It's probably useful to remember what happened. Here's a version from the "apology" story.

Calley explained [at his court martial that] he had been ordered to take out My Lai, adding that he had intelligence that the village was fortified and would be “hot” when he went in. He also said the area was submitted to an artillery barrage and helicopter fire before his troops went in. It turned out that it was not hot and there was no armed resistance. But he had been told, he said, that if he left anyone behind, his troops could be trapped and caught in a crossfire.

Not leaving "anyone behind" was a euphemism for killing hundreds of unarmed people. Event though Calley didn't serve nearly the time he should have for the horrific crime, the commanders and politicians who put Calley in that position are the ones who should have been punished more severely.

The same way that Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, and the people behind the Iraq War should be punished.

Death Struggle Near the Bottom of the Height Pool

As regular readers of Red State Impressions probably know, the beautiful Miss Teen RSI has been severely height-challenged all her life. When she was two and three years old, I would take her in for annual check-ups and I could see that her height wasn't even making the low end of the growth charts. I was always touched that kind-hearted nurses would fudge the numbers to make me feel better. But my daughter was short, short, short.

And it wasn't all the cigarettes we had her smoke as a baby either. Miss Teen just has short genes. Mrs. RSI is only 5' 2 1/2" inches and Grandma Marlene is barely 5'2." Once when Miss Teen was about seven, I explained to Miss Teen why she was doomed to a Randy Newman life by having Mrs. RSI and Grandma Marlene stand together.

But denial was strong. Miss Teen still felt like she was going to have the big growth spurt that would get her up to 5'5."

Fortunately for Miss Teen, her best friend E-Teen is even shorter than she is. Because Miss Teen hit puberty relatively early, she had a little growth spurt that got her up to 5'0." This was the height of her dad's ambitions for Miss Teen and I'll always been grateful to the gods of genetics for letting Miss Teen get to five feet. But now that E-Teen has hit puberty herself, she's been catching up and looked like she was getting ahead when she wore the right shoes and had the right hair-style.

But yesterday, Miss Teen and E-Teen had the short girls version of the shoot-out at the OK corral when they stepped on the scales with their other friends watching. The competition was tough and the results had to be verified several times. Personally, I'm just glad that blood wasn't spilled.

However, it turns out that Miss Teen is still one "silly centimeter" taller than her rival. Congratulations to Miss Teen. She always had it in her.

The Big Health Reform/Civil War Analogy

There's a good chance that I'm engaged in wishful thinking here, but my gut feeling is that health reform is going to pass with a public option. What makes this extraordinary is that Obama has been fighting the health care battle the same way Shelby Foote said the Union fought the Civil War--with one hand tied behind his back.

Obama could be doing rallies with 70,000 plus people. He could also be taking the fight to the Republicans and the teabaggers in a highly partisan manner. But Obama hasn't taken those weapons out of his holster yet.

And it doesn't look like he's going to either.

To me, it looks like Obama and the Democratic leadership in the House and Senate are grimly determined to win the health care fight on Obama's terms of reasonable discussion and reaching out to the other side.

And I think they're going to win it on their terms.

I Read Robert Novak

Right-wing journalist Robert Novak died from cancer today. Novak was a super-asshole of the highest order, but his column was a good read and Novak was one of the few conservatives who had some skill in dealing with facts. I was thinking about him yesterday and wondering if his cancer had gone into remission. It's sad to see him go.

No Surprise! Gun Guys Have Militia Ties

No surprise here. The guy who organized the gun display at the Obama townhall in Phoenix is a talk-radio host with ties to members of the Arizona Viper Militia who were convicted of plotting to blow up government buildings during the 90's.

What's been happening is that the activism of the Glenn Beck/teabagging/super-small government "near fringe" has inspired the really dangerous people on the right to come out of their caves.

I hate to be pessimistic, but it doesn't take a genius to see that one of these militia idiots is going to use spraying an Obama rally with his AK 15 as his suicidal "exit strategy."

Oh No! Tiger Lost!

Maybe the Tiger slump will go on forever now. I can't believe Tiger Woods lost the PGA tournament to a nobody like C. E. Yang from somewhere on the Korean peninsula. Talk about choking. It must have crushed Tiger's confidence to go from one shot ahead of Yang to three--yes, three--shots behind at the end.

I'm not saying that Tiger's career is over yet. But we have to face facts. Tiger Woods has entered thirteen tournaments this year and has only won five. That's not even 50%. If he was coaching the LA Lakers and had that kind of record, Woods would have been fired by now.

Tiger also entered four major tournaments and didn't win a single one of those.

None! Nada! Zilch!

And the way Tiger choked away the PGA tournament was particularly sad:

This time, Woods made one mistake after another over the last four holes, mostly with his putter.

"I did everything I needed to do, except for getting the ball in the hole," Woods said. "Just didn't make the putts when I needed to make them."

"Just didn't make the putts"--what an obvious euphemism for "I choked big time."

Obviously, Tiger's career as a major league golfer is over. I just hope he retires before he starts embarrassing himself like that Michael Jordan guy.

Republican Apologies Not Forthcoming

Steve Benen of the Washington Monthly would like the Republicans to apologize to the rest of the country for the disastrous eight years of the Bush administration.

Bush/Cheney policies failed so spectacularly, Republican candidates and officeholders are generally reluctant to associate themselves with the tarnished name of the previous administration. But Bush/Cheney policies are still those of the contemporary Republican Party. Nothing has changed. Failure and defeat haven't chastened the GOP at all, and if given a chance to govern again, Republican leaders are quite anxious to return to the exact same agenda they embraced when they were in the majority.

Benen is an outstanding blogger, but he's off track here. For the Republicans, it's a matter of being themselves. And a lot of times that means being assholes. From the GOP point of view, the Bush administration and McCain campaign were not aggressive enough about promoting conservativism, insufficiently willing to push wedge issues, and altogether too prissy about things like truth, fairness, and effective government. What mainstream Limbaugh conservatives value most highly is constant aggression in the their never-ending war against liberals, gays, and minorities. Name-calling, fear-mongering, and race and gay baiting aren't just political tactics (although they are that), they're also expressions of conservative identity.

Paraphrasing Bill Parcells (who knows a lot about being an asshole), the Republicans are what they are. If the Obama administration, Democrats, and progressives want to govern effectively, they're just going to have to acknowledge the reality of Republican intransigence and resolve to fight just as hard as the Republicans fight.

Otherwise, we're going to lose . . . again.

I'm So Happy for Tiger Woods

I can't begin to express my happiness over the fact that Tiger Woods is leading the PGA championship by four whole strokes.

Like billions of people the world over, I was worried that Tiger's life would have no meaning whatsoever if he did not win a major championship this year.

Of course, Tiger did lose all three of the other majors. But winning the PGA would make it possible for him to get through the off season without thinking of himself as a total loser.

Concerned golf fans can also put their "Don't Jump Tiger" buttons into storage.

Rick Pitino--Pro-Choice

Who knew that basketball coach Rick Pitino of the University of Louisville was pro-choice in his self-centered prick kind of way?

Now I Just Have To Leave My Shirt Untucked

Today, my 92 year old mother-in-law told Mrs. RSI that I looked "sexy" with my shirt untucked. What can I say? The woman has taste.

Grassley Chooses the Dark Side

Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa has been a member of the Gang of Six on the Senate Finance Committee who have been negotiating on health reform legislation.

But it should be obvious now that he's decided on the dark side rather than working with Obama and the Democrats.

Here's Grassley on the thoroughly debunked idea that "end of life" care is equivalent to euthanasia.

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) continued the thoroughly debunked right wing euthanasia/death panel meme today, telling a town hall crowd, "You have every right to fear....a government run plan to decide when to pull the plug on Grandma."

He also said, "There are some people who think it is a terrible problem that Grandma is laying in a bed with tubes in her... and that the government should intervene. I think that's a family or religious thing that needs to be dealt with."

This is choosing "the dark side" because Grassley knows perfectly well that he's lying, but has decided to commit himself to the lie. One of the things that's interesting about the health care reform issue is whether the Republicans are going to be able to work with a new health care system if they lose. There have been at least a couple of comments on this blog indicating that conservatives will go along with a new system. I'm not so sure.

Meetings Today

It looks like one of those semesters. I skipped convocation. Needless to say, the provost noticed. Oh well. At least I got through the initial set of meetings without needing another shot of blood pressure medication.

On the bright side, I've started working on a proposal for a grad class on race for education students. Hopefully, I'll be teaching it in the spring.

Give Arlen Specter Credit

I usually don't give Arlen Specter a lot of credit. Mostly because he's never deserved much credit. But I have to give him props for sticking it out through that hostile townhall meeting in Lebanon, PA this afternoon.



Dick Cheney certainly never had guts like that.

Digby on Taser Torture

Digby is one of the few white bloggers who closely follows the police abuse of tasers. Here's an extended quote from her article on Glenn Greenwald's blog today.

Tasers were sold to the public as a tool for law enforcement to be used in lieu of deadly force. Presumably, this means situations in which officers would have previously had to use their firearms. It's hard to argue with that, and I can't think of a single civil libertarian who would say that this would be a truly civilized advance in policing. Nobody wants to see more death and if police have a weapon they can employ instead of a gun, in self defense or to stop someone from hurting others, I think we all can agree that's a good thing.

But that's not what's happening. Tasers are routinely used by police to torture innocent people who have not broken any law and whose only crime is being disrespectful toward their authority or failing to understand their "orders." There is ample evidence that police often take no more than 30 seconds to talk to citizens before employing the taser, they use them while people are already handcuffed and thus present no danger, and are used often against the mentally ill and handicapped. It is becoming a barbaric tool of authoritarian, social control . . .

America's torture problem is much bigger than Gitmo or the CIA or the waterboarding of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. The government is torturing people every day and killing some of them. Then videos of the torture wind up on Youtube where sadists laugh and jeer at the victims. It's the sign of profound cultural illness.

Actually, there are a number of "profound cultural illnesses" at work in the tasing phenomenon. Above everything else, there is racism and the contemporary workings of racism. African-American bloggers like African-American Political Pundit follow police abuse of tasers very closely and find a great deal of racism in the abuse. In my own blogging, I've explored the idea that tasing represents a generalization of the police treatment of African-Americans to the whole population. Another sickness is the close association of freedom with the exercise of authority in the U. S. Even after the election of Barack Obama, the most important images of American freedom are not authority figures like the police and the military as opposed to dissenters like Martin Luther King. In this context, tasing is a manifestation of the kind of police freedom that is widely admired in American society. Finally, tasing is yet another manifestation of the paramilitarization of American policing. Cops like the Boston racist Justin Barrett are just like the contras or Columbian paramilitaries in viewing themselves as judge, jury, and executioner for any behavior they don't like. In this way, tasing is just another way for the police to mete out summary justice.

Forty Years of Charles Manson is Enough

For the last couple of weeks, there's been a lot of media publicity about the fortieth anniversary of the Manson killings.

But America doesn't live in a "post-sixties" world any more. Whether we like it or not, things have changed. Not that we've forgotten the sixties, but the major events of that decade--the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, the anti-war movement, the counter-culture, and second-wave feminism--have lost the sense of tangible immediacy they had for so long.

It's the eventfulness of our own era that's pushing the events of the sixties to the back reaches of the public mind. Much as the sixties pushed WWII out of immediate awareness, the sixties are now being pushed back by 9-11, the Iraq War, the failures of George W. Bush, and the Obama presidency. Given that our time is so urgent, the sixties is now looking more like WWII, the Depression, and the Jazz Age. Yes, the sixties were highly significant, but the major events, personalities, and trends of the sixties no longer have much immediacy.

And that includes Charles Manson and his killings.

Manson's crimes continue to evoke a strong reaction long after public obsession over other high-profile cases has faded. He was the bogeyman under the bed, the personification of evil, the freaky one-man horror show. For years, when prison officials still allowed it, he gave television interviews, never failing to shock. The interviews kept memories of him fresh long after he was locked up.

The memories may have been fresh, but Charles Manson is no longer the model American mass murderer. That belongs to Columbine killers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. Columbine was the model for the Virginia Tech killings, Northern Illinois University killings, the rash of school shootings in Kentucky, and threatened school killings everywhere. The Columbine model of guys who viewed themselves as outside the magic circle of success and were determined to "go out in style" was still active in last week's Pittsburgh shooter George Sodini.

Of course, Charles Manson is titillating because the Tate/LoBianca murders were so monstrous. But sensation and titillation are not the same as cultural importance. Like the rest of the sixties, Charles Manson is not nearly as important as he used to be.

And why should he be? Isn't forty years of Charles Manson enough?

The Tiger Slump: When Will It Ever End?

Tiger Woods won the Bridgestone Invitational today by four strokes.

It was his fifth victory in the twelve events that Woods has played this year while continuing his recovery from knee surgery. But the really important thing is that Tiger Woods has LOST seven whole tournaments. THAT'S SHOCKING!!! Who's ever heard of a major golf icon like Tiger Woods losing seven tournaments in only a year. And Tiger has lost all three MAJORS this year. That's right, Tiger Woods hasn't won a MAJOR all year. He's been stuck on 14 MAJOR tournament victories for almost eighteen months.

And Woods STILL hasn't won as many majors as Jack Nicklaus.

What's happening? What's Tiger doing wrong? I'm not a golf expert, but I'm worried. It's been so long since his last victory in a MAJOR that people who really know golf are beginning to wonder if Tiger has the cajones needed to break out of this horrible slump.

But I'll never lose faith.

Hang in there through this trying time Tiger.

We feel your pain.

What About Testing Humans On Dog Skills!

I'm not an animal rights person and I eat meat, but I'm still annoyed by research that ranks animals according to their performance on scales in relation to human skills. Why isn't there any research that ranks us in relation to the specific skill sets of birds, dogs, pigs, and fish?

Here's a summary of some research into the math skills of dogs.

The canine IQ test results are in: Even the average dog has the mental abilities of a 2-year-old child.

The finding is based on a language development test, revealing average dogs can learn 165 words (similar to a 2-year-old child), including signals and gestures, and dogs in the top 20 percent in intelligence can learn 250 words.

In my opinion, what's amazing here is that dogs can pick up that much of a skill like using human words. I wonder if human beings would be flexible enough to pick up very many of the dog skills connected with smell and hearing. I'm not so sure.

I'm Old and I Look It!

Today, the counter person at Shoney's asked me if I wanted a senior citizen discount. That was the first time I had gotten THAT question. But after recovering my composure, I owned up to being 55 and received a $1 discount.

Now that didn't exactly make my day. Five years ago, I was 50 and could still pass for 35-40, at least with those friends who were interested in flattering me. Now, I'm 55 and can pass for . . . well, 55.

My mother used to say that 70 was the new middle age and, who knows, maybe I'll eventually start looking at things that way as well.

But right now, I'm thinking that I'm old and I look it.

I did feel good that I could add another buck to the tip though.

The Upcoming Big Pharma Ads: Will Harry and Louise Change Their Minds?

Actually, my title doesn't have it right. The famous Harry and Louise ads that scuttled the Clinton health reform plan in 1994 were produced by the insurance companies instead of the drugmakers.

But that was still the impression I had when I read about Big Pharma's plans for a $150 million ad campaign on behalf of Obama's health reforms.

The drug industry has authorized its lobbyists to spend as much as $150 million on television commercials supporting President Obama’s health care overhaul, beginning over the August Congressional recess, people briefed on the plans said Saturday.

And it turns out that Harry and Louise did change their minds. The actors for the original ads have appeared in several pro-reform ads over the last few years.

Good for them.

The Best Republican Argument Against Health Reform

I'm not sure why the Republicans are comparing health reform to Hitler, Stalin, and Joseph Mengele, or why they're talking about euthanasia and "death panels."

What the should be talking about is themselves.

By far the strongest argument against Obama's health reform plan is that the Republicans might win another presidential election someday. If somebody like Mitt Romney or Bobby Jindal wins the presidency, that means there will be more determined lawbreakers like Dick Cheney and David Arrington and more incompetents like Mike Brown of Katrina fame or Doug Feith ("the dumbest fucking guy on the planet" according to Gen. Tommy Franks). There will be more Grade B GOP activists choking off research that offends the religious right.

And that's nearly not as bad as Sarah Palin becoming president. Then, we'd be getting her classmates from Wasilla or James Dobson coming out of retirement to run the health care apparatus.

If the Republicans want to scare people about health care, the best thing they could do would be to put Sarah Palin's face on a poster with "Do you want this woman in charge of your health care?"

That would certainly make me think twice.

Finally, a Republican president means that the people running Government health insurance will be people opposed to government health insurance. It will mean that the government will start looking for a variety of ways to raise prices and deny coverage in order to drive people back to private health insurance.

In other words, a Republican president means that the Government will become just like the private health insurance companies--

Only Much Worse.

And that's the best argument the Republicans could make against health reform.

Starbucks: The Anti-Fast Food?

According to MSN Business, Starbucks likes to think of itself as the anti-fast food.

Starbucks (SBUX, news, msgs) built its business as the anti-fast-food joint. Now, the recession and growing competition are forcing the coffeehouse giant to see the virtues of behaving more like its streamlined competitors.

I've always thought differently and remember my nephew on the West Coast telling me that all the fast food places had been moved out of downtown Seattle.

But I've never been sure what makes Starbucks different from McDonalds or Taco Bell other than they're selling more upscale kinds of products.

Obama's 200 Day Triumph

The Obama administration has been in office for 200 days and Obama is carrying through on his campaign promises concerning energy legislation and health care. RNC chair Michael Steele is surprised and disturbed that Obama is not governing like a Republican president.

Obama's first 200 days in office should be seen for exactly what they are: a clear indication of where he intends to direct America during his presidency. It is a direction that rams massive spending bills through Congress in the name of economic stimulus and job creation, it is a direction that masks a costly job-killing national energy tax in environmentalism, and it is a direction that looks to put federal bureaucracy between patients and their doctors all in the guise of reducing costs and expanding coverage. America simply can't afford the president's experiments.

Of course, if Obama wanted to act like a real Republican leader, all he would have to do is resign on a whim, seduce his best friend's wife, or spend quality time with a mistress in South America.

Otherwise, he'll just have to struggle through.

A Query

Does anybody have an idea of the best way to get a lawyer to call back. If so, let me know.

Grievance Work Day Today

I spent most of today working on my grievance concerning the "letter of warning" sent to me by Dean Rudy in relation to my July 7 post on my office.

It was too much fun.

Tea Bagging the Townhalls--The Near Fringe Emerges as a Force

Conservative activists have been disrupting townhall meetings held by Democratic politicians like Rep. Lloyd Doggett of Texas, Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, Carl Levin of Michigan, and others.

At the Austin event Aug. 1 with Democratic Congressman Lloyd Doggett (pictured
here, see video), the usual suspects showed up shouting "Just Say No" and waving signs that included the usual symbols of communism and fascism worked into statements against "socialized" health care, in addition to an image of Doggett as Satan. The protestors' continued shouting throughout the event was clearly an effort to disrupt it and to prevent any other voices being heard. The same was the case at an Aug. 2 event in Philadelphia with Republican-turned-Democratic Senator Arlen Specter and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius (see video). Here, wingnuts with bumber stickers on their heads shouted down speakers to the clear annoyance of others around them trying to listen. One woman held up a copy of the New American Bible and said, "This is the only truth," as though that were somehow an argument against health care reform.

My own initial opinion is that the disruptions will rebound somewhat against conservatives and work to the advantage of President Obama in his efforts to pass health care reform.

However, the full significance of the disruptions goes beyond health care. What's happened is that the "near fringe" of teabaggers, Ayn Randers, libertarians, neo-secessionists, and racists has figured out a way to be a real force in national politics.

Ultimately, that makes the disruptions more important than the townhalls.

No More Mr. Nice Right-Wing

Somebody in LA is putting up posters of Barack Obama in both "white-face" and "black-face with the same kind of red lipstick look as Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight.

Of course, the picture portrays Obama in terms of blackface minstrelsy. Minstrelsy was an entertainment form in which white performers corked up in blackface to imitate stereotypes of African-Americans as lazy, buffoonish, and deeply appreciative of slavery. In representing Obama this way, the anonymous sources of this poster are saying that Obama and, by extension, all African-Americans, are slaves by nature and that Obama's occupation of the White House is something that goes against a beneficial natural order.

But that's not all.

The picture also reveals the racist intent of the right-wing's constant accusations of Obama being a "socialist." That's because the picture uses the word "socialism" both above and below the red square framing Obama's minstrelsy face. By associating the word "socialism" with this heavily racialized image of Obama, the people behind the poster are revealing that the "socialist" label was always a substitute for the "n-word."

Given that I hadn't really thought of that, I owe these people a favor.

Beyond Repulsive

John Waters has a HuffPost article on the background for his friendship with Leslie Van Houten, one of the women who carried out the Tate/LaBianco murders for Charles Manson.

I liked Cry Baby a lot, but "beyond repulsive" is the best phrase I can imagine for the sense of commonality Waters sees with the Manson gang.

But I imagine I'll read the next installment as well.

Torture Victim Cedric Benson Lands on His Feet

Today's Lexington Herald-Leader has a good article by sportswriter John Clay about Cedric Benson of the Cincinnati Bengals. Originally a high draft pick out of Texas, Benson was still with the Chicago Bears when he was arrested ostensibly for public drunkenness on a Texas lake. Here's the football part of the story. Benson was cut by the Bears out of a job at the beginning of training camp and out of the league most of last year before signing with the Bengals and finishing strong.

So Benson sat. Training camps opened last season and Benson sat. Finally, a Texas grand jury failed to hand up an indictment for the boat incident, clearing Benson's return to the NFL, and Bengals owner and president Mike Brown did what Mike Brown does — he decided to give Benson another chance.

Only this one showed signs of working. Benson signed a one-year, $520,000 contract with the Bengals on Sept. 30. Featured back Chris Perry had been a huge disappointment.

An opening existed. Benson took advantage.

He topped the 100-yard mark in three of 12 games. As the year progressed, Benson resurrected his career and the Cincinnati running game. By week 16, against Cleveland, he rushed for 171 yards in a 14-0 Cincinnati victory.

But Benson's redemption is more profound than Clay let's on. It turns out that the original offence for which Benson was ultimately not indicted was "boating while black." More accurately, it was "being a millionaire black football player with a big boat the cops didn't like." Benson was hosting about 15 of his friends on an large recreational boat he owned when the police came on board to investigate public drunkenness. Evidently, it was the sixth time that police had boarded Benson's boat that summer. Here's Benson's account of the ensuing events as reported by "AFP:"

There was no resistance on my part," Benson said. "Was I drunk? No. . . They gave me a field sobriety test, told me to say my ABCs and told me to count from 1 to 4 up and down. I'm thinking I passed all the tests, did everything right . . . Then the officer told me we needed to go to land to take more tests. I politely asked him why we needed to go to land to take more tests when I took every test. Then he sprayed me with mace . . . I'm not handcuffed. I'm not under arrest. I'm not threatening him. I'm not pushing him. I'm not touching him. And he sprays me right in my eye . . . Nobody saw what he did to me. I started screaming for my mother to come. That's when they put me under arrest. And the officer threw a life jacket over my head.

Once we got to land, the Travis County police grabbed me and kicked my feet from under me. So I landed on my back while I was handcuffed. They held me down and held the water hose over my face. I couldn't breathe. I'm choking. I'm begging the cops, 'Please stop. Please stop.' Then they picked me up and dragged me backward toward their car. And I'm still being polite, asking them, 'Sir could you please allow me to walk like a man to your cop car?' They just kept dragging me on."

In other words, Cedric Benson got the exact treatment that Justin Barrett thought Henry Louis Gates should have gotten. Under the mistaken assumption that he had rights as a citizen, Benson asked a police officer a question and the police officer responded by spraying him with mace. Actually, the Gates analogy is not quite accurate. Barrett thought Gates should have been hit with "pepper spray" rather than mace. Still, given that Benson was not posing any kind of threat, spraying him with mace was still a form of torture.

Once the police got Benson back on land, other police officers added what Dick Vitale would call "a little French pastry" and got into some proper waterboarding torture by holding a hose to a face.

Poor deluded Cedric Benson.

He still wanted to be treated "like a man" even though the whole exercise looks like it was intended to strip him of any sense of manhood and citizenship he might have had.

The whole affair looked like an exercise in police criminality to me when I blogged about it last summer. It still looks like police criminality now.

After the arrest and attendant publicity, the Bears added further injury to Benson by cutting him, thus putting Benson's professional football career in jeopardy as well.

But then, a Texas grand jury failed to indict him and Benson got his chance to refer to the NFL with the Bengals.

Given the reputation of grand juries for being willing to indict a ham sandwich on a prosecutor's recommendation, the Texas grand jury must have thought that Benson's arrest was egregiously lacked justification to not indict.

But at this point, the story changes from the abuse and degradation of Cedric Benson by the police to Benson's redemption as a football player. It took a great deal of character and maturity for Benson to return from that kind of torture trauma at all. However, by all accounts, Benson was actually a better football player for the Bengals than he had originally been for the Chicago Bears.

He deserves a great deal of credit.

Northern Idaho: The Anti-Diversity Paradise?

There's an interesting article on the efforts of people in the Northern Idaho panhandle to get beyond the stigma of the area's association with Richard Butler and his Aryan Nation compound.
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The good news is that Butler is dead (from natural causes in 2004), the Aryan Nation is gone, and the area around Coeur d'Alene is growing as a result of a healthy tourist trade.
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But Coeur d'Alene still seems to be a bigot's paradise:

Right-wing political attitudes are common. It's not unusual to see people sporting Confederate flags, anti-government slogans or even a swastika tattoo.

Many of the newcomers hail from California, including a large cadre of retired law enforcement officers, of whom O.J. Simpson trial figure Mark Fuhrman is the best known.

"LA cops move up here to get away from diversity," said Rachel Dolezal, director of education for the Human Rights Education Institute in downtown Coeur d'Alene.

Given that the racial attitudes of police officers are somewhat in the news as a result of the Henry Louis Gates case, the comment on LA cops is interesting. Several years ago, one of my students who had lived in LA told me that cops tried to recruit him for the police force as soon as they heard he was from Kentucky. That was because the LA cops figured that guys from Kentucky would have the "right" hostility toward minorities.

Can't be too righteous about the Confederate flags though. There's a lot of them around here.

The One and Only Ric Caric?

According to Intelius.com, I'm the only Ric Caric in the United States. That's hard to believe. I have a sister with the very unusual name of Ryl and she was still able to find one other Ryl.

GE More the Culprit on Olbermann/O'Reilly

Matt Yglesias is on point in viewing General Electric as the main party benefitting from the Olbermann/O'Reilly gag order.

John McCain Knows Blue Dogs

Obviously, John McCain's been reading this blog lately lately because he has about the same low opinion of the Blue Dog Democrats as Red State Impressions. Here's a CNN account of McCain's appearance on CNN's State of the Union.

The “Blue Dogs,” a group of moderate to conservative House Democrats who have worked to limit the price tag of health care reform legislation, are taking a hit from a prominent Republican who is suggesting that the group will ultimately prove ineffectual.

“The Blue Dogs, they always bark and they never bite,” Arizona Sen. John McCain said on an interview that aired Sunday on CNN’s State of the Union. “They almost always – in fact, always, roll over and then play dead.”

And he would know all about moderate impotence because McCain himself was the consummate, barking, moderate media hound before he decided to start pandering to the right-wing base during the 2008 GOP primaries.

Of course, there's still a decent chance that health reform could go down in flames.

But I'm starting to be more optimistic.

Black Anger Should Be Everybody's Anger

In a NY Times column entitled "Anger Has Its Place," Bob Herbert connects the Henry Louis Gates case to the larger police treatment of African-Americans and Hispanics. The Gates case is only a particularly prominent example of the arbitrary police stops, arrests and disproportionate imprisonment that African-Americans face in cities like New York, Boston, and Cambridge, Mass.

Not former bastions of segregation like Montgomery, Alabama, or Jackson, Mississippi, or Breau Bridge, Louisiana--New York and Boston.

New York City cops make upwards of a half-million stops of private citizens each year, questioning and frequently frisking these men, women and children. The overwhelming majority of those stopped are black or Latino, and the overwhelming majority are innocent of any wrongdoing. A true “teachable moment” would focus a spotlight on such outrages and the urgent need to stop them.

I wrote a number of columns about the arrests of more than 30 black and Hispanic youngsters — male and female — who were doing nothing more than walking peacefully down a quiet street in Brooklyn in broad daylight in the spring of 2007. The kids had to hire lawyers and fight the case for nearly two frustrating years before the charges were dropped and a settlement for their outlandish arrests worked out.

Herbert emphasizes that the only check on the outrages involved in the police treatment of minorities is the anger of minority groups.

Most whites do not want to hear about racial problems, and President Obama would rather walk through fire than spend his time dealing with them. We’re never going to have a serious national conversation about race. So that leaves it up to ordinary black Americans to rant and to rave, to demonstrate and to lobby, to march and confront and to sue and generally do whatever is necessary to stop a continuing and deeply racist criminal justice outrage.

That's unfortunately true, but black anger should really be everybody's anger.

Nate Silver Sees Slim Margin in House

Nate Silver sees health care legislation as passing by about 10 votes in the House.

Palin's Back

The blog site Conservatives4Palin fronts this picture of Sarah Palin with her back turned to the viewer gazing out over an oil pipeline and some mountains. It's extremely interesting that the conservatives pose Palin's back. This had to be a purposeful strategy because the web designer sacrificed what the right views as Palin's most important asset--her looks. There's a number of ways the Conservative4Palin design can be viewed, but I'm impressed by the austere isolation of the whole representation of Palin. She's alone contemplating snow-covered mountains unspoiled by environmentalists and an oil pipeline stretching out toward more mountains in the distance. There's no Palin family, no Alaskans, no animals and no invitation from the design to either join Palin in her causes or to participate in her strength. One could say that the viewer is invited to admire or support Palin, but only from a distance that's as breathtaking as the mountains.

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The picture has very little to do with Sarah Palin who has five kids and dives enthusiastically into hunting, fishing, and dishing out food at Alaskan gatherings. Very few politicians pose themselves as lonely, isolated, or contemplative figures and Sarah Palin isn't one of them.

In my opinion, Conservatives4Palin should be seen as using Sarah Palin to represent their own sense of isolation and purity as well as their determination to turn their backs on most other Americans.

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But that's a good part of Palin's strength among activist conservatives. She's a tremendous prop for the conservative imagination. Conservatives are able to represent themselves in the most positive light possible through the images they create of Palin.

Reports of a Sarah Palin Divorce

There are reports out this afternoon that Sarah Palin and her husband are getting divorced.

AlaskaReport has learned this morning that Todd Palin and former Alaska governor Sarah Palin are to divorce. Multiple sources in Wasilla and Anchorage have confirmed the news. A National Enquirer story exposing previous affairs on both sides led to a deterioration of their marriage and the stress from that led to Palin's resignation as governor of Alaska.

The Palins were noticeably not speaking to each other at last Sunday's resignation speech in Fairbanks. Sarah ditched Todd (MSNBC) right after the speech and left without him. Sarah removed her wedding ring a couple of weeks ago.

If this is the case, it's most unfortunate. The Palin's still have four kids living at home and the baby Trigg is disabled. So, a divorce would hardly be good for the family.

A divorce following so closely on her resignation as governor would give Palin a Lindsey-Lohan kind of train wreck aura as well.

My own opinion is that there's no particular need for Sarah Palin to join John Ensign and Mark Sanford in the roster of Republican train wrecks. And I certainly wouldn't want to see anything happen to derail Palin's upcoming career as a gaffe-a-minute conservative icon. So I hope the rumors aren't really true.

But there's certainly a lot of smoke around Palin's personal life.

Update: Sarah Palin's spokesperson came out with a denial.

Yet again, some so-called journalists have decided to make up a story. There is no truth to the recent "story" (and story is the correct term for this type of fiction) that the Palins are divorcing. The Palins remain married, committed to each other and their family, and have not purchased land in Montana (last week it was reported to be Long Island). Less than one week ago, Governor Palin asked the media to "quit making things up." We appreciate that the more professional journalists decided to question this story before repeating it.

The Official Response from Sarah Palin is a no ambiguity, Shermanesque denial that the media is always seeking: "Divorce Todd? Have you seen Todd? I may be just a renegade hockey mom, but I'm not blind!"-- SARAH PALIN

Of course, that's also the kind of denial that Roger Clemens and Rafael Palmeiro made when they were asked about steroids.

I give the Palins marriage another year.

The Unethical Truce Between GE and Fox

Glenn Greenwald has a good run down of the CEO agreement between General Electric and News Corps to end the war between Keith Olbermann and Bill O'Reilly:

In essence, the chairman of General Electric (which owns MSNBC), Jeffrey Immelt, and the chairman of News Corporation (which owns Fox News), Rupert Murdoch, were brought into a room at a "summit meeting" for CEOs in May, where Charlie Rose tried to engineer an end to the "feud" between MSNBC's Keith Olbermann and Fox's Bill O'Reilly. According to the NYT, both CEO's agreed that the dispute was bad for the interests of the corporate parents, and thus agreed to order their news employees to cease attacking each other's news organizations and employees.

There are a number of implications of this story. Among other things pointed out by Greenwald, the GE/Fox deal is strong evidence of corporate control by companies like GE over their news divisions. I would also think that the deal also demonstrates the limitations of any effort to bring progressive ideas and personalities into the mainstream media. If corporate headquarters at GE, Disney, or TimeWarner can decide that a huge right-wing target like Fox is off limits, then it's pretty evident that progressives won't be able to get very far with the corporate-owned media.

The GE/Fox deal also looks like an obvious violation of anti-trust laws that discourage this kind of collusion.

Limbaugh Still in NY

It looks like New York City will have to put off its parade. Four months ago, the right-wing radio host Rush Limbaugh announced that he was leaving the city over the imposition of a millionaire's tax and the City was planning a huge ticker tape parade to celebrate.

Back in March, Rush Limbaugh got a lot of attention when he vowed to sell his New York City apartment and cease broadcasting from Manhattan, in response to a planned tax increase for wealthy New York State residents. "I'm going to get out of there totally, 'cause this is just absurd, and it's ridiculous," he fumed.

New Yorkers were deliriously happy. Gov. David Paterson expressed the convictions of millions of New Yorkers when he said that “If I knew that would be the result . . . I would’ve thought about the taxes earlier." The celebration of Limbaugh's departure was going to be the biggest event in human history. The Thanksgiving-style floats, hundreds of bands, mummers from Philadelphia, and Mardi Gras celebrants from New Orleans and Brazil were going to stretch for at least 10 miles. The City was going to unleash the biggest fireworks in history of mankind and little children as young as age 6 would be allowed to drink all the booze they could get. The "Good-Riddance Rush" celebration was going to be bigger than the victory celebrations after WWII, Neil Armstrong landing on the moon, or the last Yankee World Series. It would have put President Kennedy's funeral to shame.

But it looks like the parade has to be called off. Given that Limbaugh has made no effort to sell his condo or move his second studio out of the New York City, it looks like the city has to graciously accept his presence for at least another year.

But the last word hasn't been spoken. Don't be surprised if New York State tries to force Limbaugh's hand by raising the millionaire's tax again.

Then they can have their parade.

Is America The Country They Were Born In?

Glenn Thrush of The Politico is shocked by the fact that 58% of Republicans either don't believe or are not sure that Barack Obama was born in the United States.

Shocker poll from Kos/Research2000 today.

A whopping 58 percent of Republicans either think Barack Obama wasn't born in the US (28 percent) or aren't sure (30 percent). A mere 42 percent think he was.

That means a majority of Republicans polled either don't know about -- or don't believe the seemingly incontrovertible evidence Obama's camp has presented over and over and over that he was born in Hawaii in '61.

I'm not sure why. Participation in the "birther movement" has become part of the political identity of "near fringe" conservatism best identified with Glenn Beck and the tea parties, the kind of conservatives who are more strident than Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter but haven't moved to the "far fringes" of neo-Nazism, Ann Randism, or the KKK.

The fact that 58% of Republicans have at least some sympathy for the birther movement is a sign of the extent to which the GOP has shifted farther to the right in response to the election of Barack Obama.

Thrush wonders when people are going to "start a serious dialog about the Birther movement being a proxy for racism that is unacceptable to articulate in more direct terms?"

But I wonder if there aren't other fundamentals of conservatism at work here. For example, I wonder how Republicans would respond to a question like this:

"Is America still the country you were born in?"

I think a lot of Republicans would answer "no" or "not sure."

That's a real issue as well.

The Rage of Justin Barrett, Part I

One of the limitations of contemporary political discourse on race is that guys like Justin Barrett don't get more sustained attention. A police officer and National Guard member, Barrett wrote an e-mail to the Boston Globe's Yvonne Abraham that exploded with racial and gender rage, revealed the extent to which police officers think they're laws onto themselves, and formulated a dangerous view of the military as the foundation of American society.

But almost all of this is going to be swept under the rug.

Because Justin Barrett used a racist monkey image in relation to Henry Louis Gates, he will be fired from the Boston Police force and removed from the National Guard. He'll also have a difficult time finding an equivalent job in a tough economy (will the Boston Fire Department want him?). Indeed, Barrett might not be able to find any kind of position that involves working with people who aren't committed racists.

Barrett claims to have black friends. I imagine he'll also lose all of his black friends not named Clarence Thomas.

But Barrett will be forgotten after he either loses or gives up his appeals to keep his job. He'll have his fifteen minutes of infamy and then the incident will be swept under the carpet of American public awareness. That's the way the media works on race. It focuses attention on "racial incidents" primarily as a way to reassure everybody--well, whites anyway-- that America is not a racist country. When that comforting thought is achieved, people like Justin Barrett are then dropped from the collective memory.

Still, it's important to fully illuminate Justin Barrett's views. Barrett is a racist, a misogynist, and an advocate of police tyranny. But he's not just an immoral person. He's also somebody who ties these views together into a violently authoritarian system of political thought. Given the hostility toward democracy that's become more prominent in some circles over the last three years, t's necessary to understand how Barrett's thinking works. It would also be important to figure out whether Barrett's ideas are shared among conservatives, members of police forces, and the various branches of the military. There's not much hope there though. Given the desire to sweep Justin Barrett under the carpet of history, it might be a long time before anyone knows how widely held his views are.

Barrett, the Racial Analogy, and Police Power.

An important kernel of Justin Barrett's world view is the justification of the tyrannical rule of police through the analogy of Henry Louis Gates to a "banana-eating jungle monkey."

Your defense of Gates while he is on the phone being confronted with a police officer is assuming he has rights when considered a suspect. He is a suspect and always will be a suspect. His first priority of effort should be to get off the phone and comply with police for if I was the officer he verbally assaulted like a banana-eating jungle monkey I would have sprayed him in the face with OC (pepper spray) deserving of his belligerent non-compliance.

I won't hide my bias. Given the history of white racism in this country, it's sickening to see a black guy like Gates analogized to a "banana-eating jungle monkey." I'm nauseous even typing it. It's even more disgusting that this analogy is so important to Barrett's view of the power of the police. Barrett starts his presentation by seeking to disabuse Abraham of the view that Prof. Gates should be considered a citizen of the United States. "Your defense of Gates while he is on the phone being confronted with a police officer is assuming he has rights when considered a suspect. He is a suspect and always will be a suspect."

Barrett's second sentence here explains the meaning of the first. To Justin Barrett, Prof. Gates is not and can never be a citizen who can claim "rights" according to the Constitution. For Barrett, Gates "is and will always be a suspect" in the sense that Gates is permanently under suspicion for committing crimes and therefore always subject to police action. This is where the circular reasoning connected to the monkey analogy begins to take effect. In the world according to Justin Barrett, any claim by black persons to have rights reveals their racial essence and constitutes proof that they are sub-human and therefore do not deserve rights. By complaining to Officer Crowley, Gates revealed his essence as a "banana-eating jungle monkey" who did not deserve the rights he claimed to have and merited his status as a police suspect.

Because he does not view black people as having any rights, Justin Barrett assumes that police officers have a right to do anything to a black person like Prof. Gates they want. Barrett claims that he would have sprayed Gates in the face with OC or pepper spray for his "belligerent non-compliance" in claiming his rights. This is a startling claim. Gates was not committing a crime and he posed no danger or other impediment to Officer Crowley (who could have arrested him at any time). As a result, Barrett is posing himself as having a right to pepper spray Gates simply because Gates was demanding to know the officer's name and badge number. Therefore, Barrett was presuming a right to consider Gates "non-compliance" to be a crime and to serve as judge, jury, and agent for executing punishment in relation to that crime. It's important to emphasize that Justin Barrett is claiming the right for himself and other police officers to decide themselves on punishment for black guys like Gates. In Barrett's mind, police officers would have been well within their rights to club, tase, beat up, or even shoot Gates for his non-compliance. If Gates has no rights as a citizen, how cops punish them is a matter of whim and Barrett only chooses OC because that's the particular way he enjoys the thought of Gates' suffering.

For Justin Barrett, the supposed racial inferiority of blacks justifies an assertion of total police power over black people.

Next Time--Justin Barrett and the Military as Foundational

Joey Harrington's the Man

Pete Schrager of FoxSports is catching onto something that I wrote about on this blog last year--that journeyman quarterback Joey Harrington of the New Orleans Saints is one of the more sympathetic figures in the NFL.

If you're a fan of redemption stories, you might want to check out what [Joey Harrington's] up to down in New Orleans this August. Harrington, known as "Joey Blue Skies" in Detroit, is currently with the Saints — his fourth team in five NFL seasons . . . Drew Brees is the starter in New Orleans, but there's a shot Harrington outdoes (Mark) Brunell and gets the nod as the Saints No. 2. Taunted by Detroit fans for years, stuck on horrendous Lions, Dolphins and Falcons squads, and owner of a career losing record that would make Jamal Crawford and Archie Manning blush — perhaps it's time to root for Joey Harrington. Older, wiser and on the outer edges of NFL relevancy, a career revival would be one to rally around.

Given the horrible teams he's been on, Harrington also deserves credit for conducting himself in a mature manner and not doing anything to make bad situations worse.

Here's hoping that Joey Harrington is a good enough quarterback that his patience can be rewarded.

Malcolm Gladwell Simpers Over Bear Stearns

Malcolm Gladwell's not my favorite writer--he's Thomas Friedman without the deep reflections on his rides from the airport-- and Gladwell's New Yorker article on the Bear Stearns failure is an exercise in simpering. According to Gladwell, Bear Stearns CEO Jimmy Cayne was "over-confident" and Cayne's over-confidence has something to do with the over-confidence of the now-forgotten British generals at Gallipoli.

Bear's failure also had something to do with playing bridge even though the now-forgotten British generals at Gallipoli didn't seem to have played bridge.

Give Gladwell credit.

He showed that he knew a couple of obscure references even if he didn't write anything that helped us understand the failure of Bear Stearns.

The Problem with Brett Favre

The Minnesota Vikings announced today that NFL legend, icon, and retirement specialist Brett Favre will not be returning to play football in 2009.

So why can't Favre stay retired?

There are a lot of theories, but I haven't seen anybody mention just how dull and boring life can be in Kiln, Mississippi. Like a lot of guys who've seen the bright lights and the big cities, Favre can't get used to living in an area that really gets dark at night.

Who can blame him?

What Favre needs to do is move to New York, LA, or Chicago, get involved in some sort of sports related commerce, and go out and enjoy the adulation that goes with being a recently retired football legend.

That would keep him retired.

Michael Vick: The Dick Cheney of Sports

Having followed the Atlanta Falcons fan since their first year of expansion, I used to be a big fan of Michael Vick.

However, those days are over even if Vick does catch on with another team. I know Vick didn't start any wars, torture anybody, carry a gun, or steal anything. But anybody who executes failed fighting dogs has to be a super-asshole. That makes Michael Vick the Dick Cheney of the sports world.

Tom Friedman Must Take Dumb Pills

Today's NY Times op-ed shows once again that Tom Friedman is the Doug Feith of journalism. I owe an apology to the Slate writer I once called "the dumbest guy to ever put his hands on a keyboard."

A Couple of Thoughts on the Police Threat

I haven't gotten it together to write the definitive post on the Skip Gates situation. But one of the things I've noticed in the media is that every one considers encounters with the police to be a threat to their health and safety.


As one of the commenters on RSI pointed out, "many believe if a cop tells you to do jump, you should simply ask, "How high, officer?"


Cops are armed to the teeth and a certain percentage of them are so provocative and belligerent that the only reasonable conclusion is that they're looking for confrontations.

Given that nobody can know which cops are looking for confrontations, it's reasonable for everyone to see cops more as potential threats than anything else.

Actually, I wonder about the extent to which the cops are seen as bigger threats than the criminals.