The Meryl Streep Era

MSN has an article claiming that Meryl Streep should have won 13 Academy Awards besides the two she's actually taken home.

As I've said before, I just count myself lucky to be alive during the Meryl Streep Era.

Should Be Shunned

Glenn Greenwald points out correctly that Marty Peretz of the New Republic should be shunned by all respectable people.

On the Nuclear Front: The Threat of a Rogue America

In today's statement commemorating the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, President Obama discounted the threat of nuclear war:

Today, the threat of global nuclear war has passed, but the danger of nuclear proliferation endures, making the basic bargain of the NPT more important than ever: nations with nuclear weapons will move toward disarmament, nations without
nuclear weapons will forsake them, and all nations have an "inalienable right" to peaceful nuclear energy.

Sure, there isn't much danger of the U. S., Russia, and China will exchange nuclear attacks. So, Obama's right. The main threat on the nuclear front has changed.

But the danger doesn't lie in nuclear proliferation either.

What's really dangerous is the possibility of a rogue government gaining control in a country that already has nuclear arms and then using its nuclear weapons to threaten or attack its enemies.

And what government is most at risk of such a takeover--Pakistan, India, France?

No! It has to be the United States.

Pakistan may be unstable because "elements" of the Pakistani military and intelligence services are sympathetic to al-Qaeda.

However, the situation is worse in the United States because neo-conservatives have enormous disdain for the United Nations, international law, and anything else that might inhibit its ability to wage total war. Neo-conservatives also speculate openly about nuclear attacks on Iran and the speculation should be taken seriously because neo-cons seem to be aching to break the taboo on nuclear weapons just as they were aching to break the taboo on torture.

Conservative America--the world's most dangerous and unstable political force.

The Sarah Party Split

One of the things I've picked up from talking with conservatives is that many conservatives activists have just as much contempt for Sarah Palin and the tea party types as any liberal. If Palin gets the nomination, there's going to be a simultaneous inflation and deflation of the Republican Party.

Killing Patriotism the Right-Wing Way

It looks like the right-wing is killing patiotism one shooting at a time.

Why not? The right's been destroying Christianity for years now.

According to reports on Pentagon shooter John Patrick Bedell, "Patriot” groups, steeped in antigovernment conspiracy theories, grew from 149 in 2008 to 512 in 2009." If that keeps up, the word "patriot" is going to be more associated with "nut," "weirdo," and "freak" than anything positive--"murderer" as well.

GOP Rebotoxes Obama Speech

I'm still not in blogging form yet, but have to pass along that Miss Teen RSI says that Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell was "botoxed out" for his reply to Obama's speech.

Another Gutless Dem Plays It Safe

Beau Biden decides not to run for his father's old Senate seat, leaving the field open for Republican Mike Castle.

Republicans already have a strong candidate in the race, Rep. Mike Castle, who has held the state's only House seat since 1992, and was governor for eight years before that. With a strong Republican in the race and currently no Democrat, this race has to be seen as a likely GOP takeover for now.

That's the same kind of gutlessness that kept Ben Chandler out of the Senate race in Kentucky. We need our blow-dried politicians to have the same courage as Republican blow-dries like Scott Brown.

The Coakley Debacle: Aftermath

Lots of blame to go around for the Coakley debacle. But there's also lots of ways to get going again. Let's start with the top.

The Obama administration. One message from the Coakley debacle is that President Obama and his people need to realize that they can't stop campaigning and "just govern." In order to govern, they need to embrace "the permanent campaign." If the Obama administration isn't willing to campaign relentlessly for everything they promised, they'll lose it all.

More as the day goes along.

The Triumph of Evil?

With Alabama leading Texas 24-6 in the 3rd quarter, it looks like a smashing victory for evil in this year's BCS college football championship. Too bad.

Revelations from the Conservative Bible

Wow! Is it snowing in Morehead, Kentucky today? I think we're supposed to get six inches. Needless to say, that makes me think of the Bible and the right-wing Bible project. Tired of reading "liberal" translations of the Bible, conservatives have started a Conservative Bible Project so they can have their own "conservatively correct" sacred text.

Let them have at it!

From the conservative point of view, Christianity means that everybody should be able to make a ton of money, kick the crap out of anyone they like, and drop nukes on their enemies.

Why can't they have a Jesus who pronounces these things as the divine "word"?

Conservatives should also revise the Bible so they can finally get the birthplace of Jesus right. It should be obvious by now that there was a white Christmas for the birth of Jesus. When Irving Berlin (certainly a Christian conservative) wrote that he was "dreaming of a White Christmas," he meant that he was dreaming of the glistening white snow that was actually there when Jesus was born. The liberal accounts of Jesus being born in a manger in an ugly desert country can't be true. Mary gave birth to Jesus in a picturesque manger scene with lots of snow as the three wise men drove up in their sleds. It was so beautiful.

That means that Jesus had to be born well north of the town of Bethlehem in the Romanized Mediterranean. Maybe Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.

George Will Bloviates; RSI Responds

George Will has a pointless little op-ed out on the cosmic significance of the event that wiped out the dinosaurs and most other species 65 million years ago. It turns out that there is an underwater mountain in the Indian Ocean that could have been the result of the massive meteors that created the Mexico's 110-mile-wide Chicxulub and brought about the "worldwide collapse of the climate and ecosystems" leading to the mass extinctions of the dinosaurs and two-thirds of marine animals, and the destruction of much of the planet's flora."

Awesome.

But have no fear, the American Constitution "still constitutes, and the fact that flora and fauna have survived Earth's episodes of extreme violence testifies to the extraordinary imperative of life."

What's amazing about Will is that he still gets it wrong. It's unconstitutional to think that the Constitution "constitutes." It's the people who "constitute" the government and the Constitution says so. According to the Preamble:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

It's the people of the United States who are constituting the Constitution as the governmental arrangement through which they will seek to attain the ends of forming "a more perfect Union," establishing "Justice" and the like. Framers of the Constitution like James Madison were very suspicious that the vast majority of the people would act to dispossess the wealthy of their property and therefore created a system in which it was difficult for majorities to either form or engage in major legislative enterprises. But it's always the people, their elected office-holders, and the judges and subordinate office-holders appointed by the elected officers who act to achieve the ends of government--not the Constitution itself.

Ironies abound with the American Constitution. The Constitution was designed to ensure that Presidents and Senators were subject to elite choice rather than popular choice. And failed spectacularly in doing so. Presidential elections were popular affairs from the beginning and U. S. Senators were chosen by the ultimate political hacks--state legislators.

The American Constitution was also designed to ensure the continuance of the slave system and failed even more spectacularly in accomplishing that. In fact, the Constitutional system was so inadequate to the task of dealing with slavery that it took four years of bloody civil war to create a "more perfect Union" without the slave system.

The Constitution is being tested again. What the right-wing essentially wants is a Constitutional system under which people like Sarah Palin can pretty much do whatever they want and never get challenged. I don't think they'll succeed, but it won't be the Constitution that determines the outcome, it will be the processes which determine the will of the American people as a whole.

Resolution One: Re-establish Blogging Hobby

My resolution last year to "drink more" was such a success that I have a lot of New Years Resolutions this year.

1. More Blogging. The first resolution is that I need to do more blogging. By the end of the year, my unhappiness with my work situation had led me to reduce my blogging to one post a week. Given that "happiness=blogging," I need to do more blogging.

Displays of Degradation I

I haven't mentioned yet that I got a fairly good response from the University of Pennsylvania Press about my book proposal. They didn't give me a contract, but they did tell me that they would send a full manuscript out to readers when I submit one.

So, now I'm working on completing a full manuscript and one of my jobs is to write a chapter on blackface minstrelsy in Philadelphia during the 1840's.

Toward that end, I'm reading William J. Maher's, Behind the Burnt Cork Mask. In the intro and first chapter, Maher's core argument is that blackface minstrelsy was more about establishing a particularly American form of popular culture than it was about African-American cultural forms or racism more generally.

Although it's a very good book, I'm not convinced.

In the first chapter, Maher convincingly argues that performers like the Christy minstrels focused more on burlesquing European imports like Italian opera than satirizing plantation life or northern black Dandies. I'm not very familiar with the operation of Italian opera in 19th century America, but I'm not very surprised that blackface minstrel performers were working with a variety of "white sources." The African-American references in the minstrel songs of the 1840's often look rather token. White performers are talking primarily about themes from white life.

But that doesn't change the fact that minstrel performers were dressing up as black men and women and that they were using European sources to portray blacks as buffoonish, lazy, dependent, and sentimentally attached to slavery. If anything, working with the European sources gives the racial imagery of blackface minstrelsy a new flexibility as white performers learned how to articulate their images of blackness through different kinds of materials.

That still leaves the question of why white performers found blackface such a compelling medium for the presentation of their own concerns about romance, family, politics, race, and masculinity. So far, Maher hasn't addressed that question.

Limbaugh in Hawaiian Hospital

Talking Points Memo is carrying an item about Rush Limbaugh being taken to a Honolulu hospital in "serious condition" with "chest pains."

I hope he's okay.

And I mean it. When Limbaugh was in rehab for his drug addiction, I posted on Slate's Fray that people on the left should respect Limbaugh as a formidable adversary and have the same kind of sympathy for him in adversity that we have for our own friends and allies. That doesn't mean that we should be "soft" on Limbaugh. We should be hitting Limbaugh hard for his conservative positions, showing disgust for his racism, homophobia, and warmongering, and ridiculing him for his pseudo-macho buffoonery.

But people on the left should also extend Limbaugh the same basic human compassion we extend to other people.

Maybe Limbaugh wouldn't have that kind of compassion for someone like me.

But that doesn't make it any less appropriate to have compassion for him.

It's Over Joseph-Beth

When I moved to Morehead in 1990, Joseph-Beth bookstore in Lexington, KY was the place to go for the intellectual glitterati at Morehead State University. The chair of the search committee even took me there during my job interview even though the store was 60 miles away in Lexington.

And then, the owners made Joseph-Beth even better with a dramatic expansion.

But Joseph-Beth gradually got less interesting.

They started focusing more on bestsellers, name-brand authors, and trinkets for the post-hippy set, less on materials that were intellectually interesting. Once upon a time, I could go into the philosophy and history sections at Joseph-Beth and come upon great books and authors I'd never heard of.

Not any more.

The philosophy section at Joseph-Beth has shrunk from a wall to two shelves and the history section looks like its declined as well--too much Civil War and Kentucky history stuff, not enough effort to connect with the history of the rest of the world. It wasn't like there was nothing there. I found a decent looking book about the Romans and Barbarians and bought a couple of other books as well. Joseph-Beth's is not BAD. It's just not all that good.

If I did a survey of my professor friends, I think most of them would still say that they think Joseph-Beth is the best book store in Lexington. But I now like the Barnes and Noble in Hamburg Place better.

Next year, everybody should send me gift cards from Barnes and Nobles.

Pope Robbie I--Robert George Takes Charge of American Catholicism

The New York Times has an interesting article on the influence of Princeton scholar Robert George on American Catholicism. The core of Robert --or "Robbie" as he's affectionately known among conservative circles--George's position is that Catholics should abolish any kind of social justice agenda and focus entirely on sexual issues like abortion, gay marriage, and embryo research.

Last spring, George was invited to address an audience that included many bishops at a conference in Washington. He told them with typical bluntness that they should stop talking so much about the many policy issues they have taken up in the name of social justice. They should concentrate their authority on “the moral social” issues like abortion, embryonic stem-cell research and same-sex marriage, where, he argued, the natural law and Gospel principles were clear.

Actually, "Robbie" is right about the clarity of the "Gospel" on the issues of abortion, embryonic stem-cell research, and same-sex marriage. In fact, the Gospels say absolutely nothing about any of these issues. There can be no clearer statement about the lack of significance of these issues for Jesus than that. Actually, Jesus might have had suspicions of same-sex marriage, but such suspicions would have been derived from his scepticism about marriage and family in general rather than his views on homosexuality. Jesus most clearly formulates his scepticism about marriage in Luke 14:26 where he states that "If any man come to me and hate not his father and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple." Obviously, this passage is not the "politically correct" Jesus of the Good Samaritan story, but it clearly expresses the persistent suspicion Jesus had about the likelihood of family bonds competing with the attachment of potential disciples to Him. In the Gospel accounts of Jesus' life, Jesus himself did not marry or form heterosexual attachments with any of his female followers. Jesus also chose other males as his chief confidantes and apostles for his message. And according to Catholic orthodoxy, it is very important that he did so.

Jesus doesn't address homosexuality anywhere in the Gospels. Perhaps Jesus didn't view himself as competing against homosexuality in the same way that he viewed himself as competing against heterosexual marriage. But Jesus does enunciate principles that apply to many if not most gay people. In the opening passage of the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5, Jesus gives a set of blessings that have become known as "The Beatitudes." By defining the first of those blessings as "blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven," Jesus gives the first (and foremost) of his blessings to people like suicidal gay teens, the thousands of gay people who suffered and died at the height of the aids epidemic and the millions of gay people who feel themselves excluded the mainstream of American society because they are not allowed to get married like "normal" people. Much as Jesus valued tax collectors, lepers, "fallen women," and the outcasts of ancient Israel, he would value contemporary outcasts from social respectability like gay people, drug addicts, alcoholics, and the homeless. According to the Beatitudes, "theirs is the kingdom of heaven."

The NY Times article gives the impression that Robert George has gained influence among the Catholic bishops because of his emphasis on the justification for his social conservatism in the "natural law" ideas of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas rather than divine revelation. For better or worse (worse in my view), that's made opposition to gay marriage and abortion rights into the guiding principles of American Catholicism and Robert George into the real Pope for American Catholics.

All hail Pope Robbie I.

Joey Lieberman Doesn't Like Anything

It looks like Joe Lieberman might be able to unravel health reform. He won't support a robust public option, won't support a public option opt out, won't support a public option trigger, and won't the medicare opt in that he supported last week.

Lieberman and Ben Nelson of Nebraska are the last of the 1980's DLC dinosaurs. The DLC (Democratic Leadership Council) rose as a corporate-funded trojan horse in the Democratic Party to ensure that the Democrats became less of a reform party. It's primary object was to defeat liberals within the Democratic Party and make the Democrats more friendly to a corporate agenda.

But the DLC idea of treating progressive Democrats as their worst enemies lost steam in the face of the surge of progressive surge in response to George Bush. There are still lots of moderate and conservative Democrats, but Lieberman and Nelson are the last of the Democratic senators who make it a personal point to oppose progressive agendas at every turn. In Lieberman's case, there's a huge element of spite toward progressives as well. Anti-war sentiment ensured that Lieberman's 2004 presidential campaign went nowhere. Even worse, Connecticut progressives beat Lieberman in a 2006 primary and forced him to win re-election as an independent.

Now, its payback time for Lieberman and he's using his leverage as the 60th vote to do his best to either force progressives to give up everything they value about health reform or ensure that the whole effort fails.

Let's see how Harry Reid and the White House respond.

Harry Potter the VI on the Small Screen

I started watching Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince at home tonight and fell asleep twice. Hopefully, it was more compelling on the big screens.

Taxing Financial Transactions--Not exactly the Heart of the Matter

Paul Krugman proposes a tax on financial transactions as a way to discourage the day to day churning of accounts on Wall Street.

Tobin’s idea went nowhere at the time. Later, much to his dismay, it became a favorite hobbyhorse of the anti-globalization left. But the Turner-Brown proposal, which would apply a “Tobin tax” to all financial transactions — not just those involving foreign currency — is very much in Tobin’s spirit. It would be a trivial expense for long-term investors, but it would deter much of the churning that now takes place in our hyperactive financial markets.

This would be a bad thing if financial hyperactivity were productive. But after the debacle of the past two years, there’s broad agreement — I’m tempted to say, agreement on the part of almost everyone not on the financial industry’s payroll — with Mr. Turner’s assertion that a lot of what Wall Street and the City do is “socially useless.” And a transactions tax could generate substantial revenue, helping alleviate fears about government deficits. What’s not to like?

I don't have anything against raising money by taxing Wall Street, but a transactions tax doesn't get to the heart of the matter with the American financial system. The financial system was driven by the high profits from the derivatives markets, but that the derivatives markets were so speculative and unstable that they almost brought down the whole world economy. I haven't seen any proposal that either liberates the financial system from dependence on the derivatives markets or regulates the derivative markets in ways that makes them more stable. The problem is that whatever stability the current financial system affords might be completely contingent on the high profit margins of derivative transactions. The derivative markets might themselves by highly unstable, but any regulation effort that reduced derivative profits might also be de-stabilizing.

It's a nasty conundrum that isn't addressed by a financial transactions tax.

To his credit, Krugman admits this.

What about the claim that a financial transactions tax doesn’t address the real problem? It’s true that a transactions tax wouldn’t have stopped lenders from making bad loans, or gullible investors from buying toxic waste backed by those loans.

But bad investments aren’t the whole story of the crisis . . . As Gary Gorton and Andrew Metrick of Yale have shown, by 2007 the United States banking system had become crucially dependent on “repo” transactions, in which financial institutions sell assets to investors while promising to buy them back after a short period — often a single day. Losses in subprime and other assets triggered a banking crisis because they undermined this system — there was a “run on repo.”

In other words, bad derivative investments ("toxic waste") still triggered the financial crisis. They just did so "indirectly" by undermining the system of short-term transactions (churning) on which the banking system was dependent.

So, sure--put a tax on financial transactions as a way to discourage churning and reduce the crush of pointless trading.

But other measures are going to be needed to prevent the next big meltdown.

Health Reform--Out of Harry Reid's Office

A Health Reform bill finally got out of Harry Reid's office today. I still think it will be passed with a public option--probably a public option with an opt out clause.

But it looks like conservative Dems are going to take out every last pound of flesh they can.

Conservatives think that health reform is a kind of Rubicon and that America will be a different kind of society if Congress passes a public option.

Maybe that's the case.

But, really, the Rubicon was crossed when Barack Obama was elected president. The question is whether Obama is going to maintain his position on the new side of the river.