RSI Going to Philadelphia

Getting out of town is good! One of my grant application ships came in and now I'll be spending five weeks in Philadelphia this summer doing research.

Tea Party in Washington

And I used to like Victoria Jackson.

Happy Tax Day!

Good day for the RSI household. We haven't paid more than 8% of our income in federal taxes for years and our refund went up at least $2,000 this year. Now we're can think about visiting our ancestral homeland in Cancun.

Or is that Bora Bora?

Well, anyway. I'm sure I'm descended from people who were smart enough to be born on a tropical island.

Digby Doesn't Like Teabaggers

The liberal blogger Digby REALLY doesn't like Teabaggers. But then again, most conservatives I know don't like them early. I hear a lot of "Republicans won't vote for Sarah Palin."

Me? I'm pretty sure that my mother, one of my brothers, and one of my sisters have Teabag sympathies. Maybe my dad too.

So, I'm compelled to cut them a little slack.

A Note on Carl Paladino's Racist/Porn Convergence

This is a note on the racism/porn scandal that's developing around Carl Paladino, a multi-millionaire Buffalo NY businessman and Tea Party GOP candidate for governor of New York.

Yesterday, WNYmedia.net ran a lengthy story on the racist and pornographic e-mails Paladino has been forwarding to his friends, cronies, and political contacts in the Buffalo area.

There was plenty of racism and porn to go around.

Two of the racist e-mails focus on representations of Barack Obama. First, there's an African tribal dance pictured as an Obama inauguration rehearsal. In fact, there was a lot of "African" stereotyping of Obama right after his election. For example, some guy in my town walked into a convenience store on election night and announced that "we've elected a monkey for president." Of course, there's been even more "Obama" racist jokes after his inauguration. There is so much of it at my daughter's high school in Kentucky that dealing with racist joking is another reason to "hate" high school.

By the way, the tribal dance video was supposed to have been a big hit on racist web sites.

The second Obama picture involved Obama and his wife Michelle as a "pimp" and a "ho" in a play on blaxploitation movies from the 70's. This kind of stereotyping goes back to the images of "black dandies" in blackface minstrel songs from the 1830's. In relation to African-Americans, the racist idea in the dandy stereotype is to treat black people as absurd, inept, and incompetent for anything but singing and dancing. The stereotype is especially directed against African-Americans who are determined to shine in politics, business, literature, and the arts because it portrays black accomplishment as fundamentally farcical. In this sense, the picture of the Obama as a pimp and whore represents the election of Barack Obama as a racial absurdity.

The final racist item was a video of an airplane landing amongst a group of black people with the caption "run n-word run." There's a certain way in which this image is just as disturbing as the pornography I'll discuss below. Much like the tribal dance video and the pimp and ho picture, the video of the black men scattering is designed to demean and degrade African-Americans. But the airplane video is more demeaning because it portrays black people as being helplessly subject to white people and white people as getting off on their humiliation. It's a little bit like the scene in "Invisible Man" where a group of white men in a Southern town are entertained by watching young black men scramble for coins on an electronically-charged surface. The image was not only an abject humiliation of the black guys, it also involved the pleasures of white power. The same with the airplane scattering the black guys in the image circulated by Carl Paladino.





I find pornography to be traumatizing in the sense that contact with porn leads me to have post-traumatic stress symptoms. So I abstained from looking at it and limited myself to scrolling through. But there's very kinds of graphic sex clips and a bestiality video.

A couple of quick notes:

1. The Racism is not just Paladino's. It's the racism of the people who forwarded the e-mails to Paladino and the racism of those who laughed at the Obama racial send ups. To Paladino, the racist e-mails were "just humor . . . I'm not sensitive to ethnic humor. dago, spic, wap, polack, whatever we hear it every day. I think the oversensitivity to black/white humor is wrong and in itself demeaning." No surprise there. "It's just humor" is the typical response of racist blowhards when they're called out on their bigotry. In the case of Paladino, it's important to emphasize that he's a focal point for an extensive network of racist blowhards.

2. Pornography and Tradition. Hard-core porn has been at the heart of a number of scandals lately, including the sexting of Tiger Woods and the Jesse James/Sandra Bullock mess. Racism and porn have been linked in the United States since at least the 1830's. Paladino's e-mails bring the racism/porn nexus to the surface in the context of Tea Party politics. One of the things that interesting about the pornography angle here is the extent to which Tea Party conservativism is disconnected from Victorian ideas of tradition and propriety.

Last Week's Grading Orgy

Last week I really got it done on the grading front.

Capstone students turned in first drafts on Monday--back on Wednesday. Feminist theory students turned in research proposals on Tuesday--back on Thursday. Thursday night, I started reading all of my take-home essay exams. They were done by Saturday at noon.

And the papers were great. I got a lot of outstanding work--work that would have been outstanding anywhere.

Count me a happy professor at the end of last week's grading orgy.

Tiger Loses: The World Sighs in Relief

Phil Mickelson won the Masters Golf Tournament today. Good for him. Even better, porn king Tiger Woods lost, therefore enabling us to preserve the idea that there's some justice in the world.

Needs More Rehab

Disgraced former New York Governor Eliott Spitzer muses about getting back into politics. I'd probably vote for Tiger Woods first.

Duke Anti-Christs Win! Apocalypse Begins

Oh God! The Devil's favorite team, the Duke University Anti-Christs won the NCAA basketball championship. Fire and Brimstone start tomorrow. The survivalists are right. The world is coming to an end.

Jamie Dimon: Most Dangerous?

As part of their coverage of the politics of financial reform, Huffington Post published an article last week by Simon Johnson calling Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon the most dangerous banker in American history.

But it's not a strong case.

Johnson's main reasoning is that Dimon is dangerous because he has a lot of credibility stemming from the fact that he steered Morgan Chase away from all of the speculative strategies that led to the last crunch.

That means that Dimon could have a big role in influencing financial reform to the interest of big banks like Morgan Chase.

That may be the case.

But the most dangerous bankers in America are still trying to leverage CDO's and other bad debt into huge bonuses.

How to Be a Manichean Catholic?

NPR has an article by a writer named Elizabeth Scalia on why she remains a Catholic despite the pedophilia scandal.

Through 2,000 imperfect — sometimes glorious, sometimes heinous — years, the church has contemplated and manifested the truth that dark and light, innocence and guilt, justice and injustice all share a kinship, one that waves back and forth like wind-stirred wheat in a field, churning toward something — as yet — unknowable.

That sounds a lot like Manichaeism to me. One of the interesting things about early and medieval Christianity is the many ways in which pagan religions like Manichaeanism continued to subsist within the all encompassing embrace of the Catholic Church. Catholicism took up the gods of polytheism in the concepts of saints and angels. It looks like the Catholic Church took up the dualism of Mani as well.

If I were religious, I would personally prefer a religion which was not associated with the greed and brutality of the Roman Empire.

Sarah Palin for Fake President

It appears that Sarah Palin's interview special for Fox might be a fake in that Fox is broadcasting old interviews on the program rather than any kind of current sit-down with Sarah Palin.

According to a spokesperson for fake interview subject Toby Keith:

"We were never contacted by Fox. I have no idea what interview it's taken from. They're promoting this like it's a brand new interview. He never sat down with Sarah Palin."

Does this mean that Fox would be broadcasting old footage of Ronald Reagan if Palin ever gets elected president?

All This Science, I Don't Understand

That was the Elton John "Rocket Man" lyric that I was thinking about last night while I was helping Miss Teen RSI with DNA and RNA.

Shelby Steele Gets Obama Wrong Again

For Shelby Steele, all of the problems that President Obama now has or will ever have are caused by the self-importance Obama derives from being black.

Well, suppose you were the first black president of the United States and, therefore, also the first black head-of-state in the entire history of Western Civilization. You represent a human first, something entirely new under the sun. There aren't even any myths that speak directly to your circumstance, no allegorical tales of ancient black kings who ruled over white kingdoms.

Of course, Steele offers no credit to Obama or anyone else for the accomplishment--no acknowledgement of the generations of civil rights activists, everyday African-Americans, white liberals, or other minorities who made Obama's presidency possible.

And none was expected. Shelby Steele is a salaried conservative at the Hoover Institute who has exactly as much intellectual freedom as David Frum had at the American Enterprise Institute.

In other words--none.

Sour grapes might play a part here as well. Steele wrote a book predicting that Obama could not win the presidency because of his connections with the black community.

Anyway, Steele's argument is that the monumental character of Obama's accomplishment in getting elected has created an enormous self-importance that pushes Obama to push "big ideas" like health care reform.

Does this special burden explain Barack Obama's embrace of scale as vision (if I don't know what to do, I'll do big things)? I think it does to a degree. It means, for example, that a caretaker presidency is not an option for him. His historical significance almost demands a kind of political narcissism. For him the great appeal of massive health-care reform—when jobs are a far more pressing problem—may have been its history-making potential.

Here was a chance for Mr. Obama not just to be a part of history but to make history. Here he could have an achievement commensurate with his own historical significance. To have left off health care and taken up jobs would have left him a caretaker rather than a history-maker. So he hung in with health care and today it can be said: Barack Obama has signed the most significant piece of social legislation in 45 years—achieving something that has eluded every president since FDR.

That idea might have some credibility if Obama's had been the first Democrat to pursue health care reform or his health care proposals had been any kind of surprise. But Democratic presidents have been pursuing health care reform going back to FDR and all Democratic presidential candidates who even pretended to being serious contenders in 2008 had to have a detailed health reform plan. Obama, Hillary, and John Edwards all had big health reform proposals. I bet Joe Biden and Bill Richardson had them too. Even Joe Lieberman had a big health care proposal when he was running for president in 2004.

Barack Obama didn't have to be black to have big ideas on domestic policy, he had to be a Democrat. Of course, one can argue that the Democrats have been heavily influenced by the African-American wing of the party since the heyday of the civil rights movement and that all Democrats have something of an African-American optimism concerning hope for social reform.

But that would have made Bill Clinton the first African-American president and forced hacks like Shelby Steele to blame all of Bill Clinton's shortcomings on the fact that he was black.

Feds Send Message to Michigan Militias

Yesterday, federal authorities launched raids on Michigan's "Hutaree" militia in response to threats allegedly made by militia members against Muslims.

Sources have said the FBI was in the second day of raids around the southeastern
Michigan city of Adrian that are connected to a militia group, known as the Hutaree, an Adrian-based group whose members describe themselves as Christian soldiers preparing for the arrival and battle with the anti-Christ.

WXYZ-TV reports that helicopters were spotted in the sky for much of Saturday night, and agents set up checkpoints throughout the area. Witnesses told the station that it was like a small army had descended on the area. The Department of Homeland Security and the Joint Terrorism Task Force are also involved in the raids.

If those helicopters were black, the whole task force must have been supervised by the federal Department of Irony.

It's going to be interesting to find out if members of the Hutaree were making threats or just engaging in the usual survivalist blustering.

For better or worse, there is a difference.

Given that there is a significant Muslim population in Ann Arbor, Dearborn, and other areas of Southeastern Michigan, threats have to be taken seriously.

At the same time, there is reason to suspect the Feds of sending a message to Michigan militias that they "mean business" this time. Southeastern Michigan was a militia hotbed during the 1980's while I lived in Ann Arbor. The Michigan Militia was best known but was one of many militia/survivalist groups in the heavily white, rural towns in the area. Most prominently, Oklahoma City bombers Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols both had roots in the Michigan militia environment.

In raiding the Hutaree militia, federal authorities might be sending a message to the Michigan militias that they consider all of them to be terrorism threats and that they don't want to see any more Timothy McVeighs coming out of their groups.

Update: Nine members of the Hutaree group were indicted for plotting to kill a policeman and then bomb his funeral. They are also suspected of planning a "covert reconnaisance" of their target in the near future and being resolved to kill “anyone who happened upon the exercise who did not acquiesce to Hutaree demands.” Like the various al-Qaeda wannabes ploting jihad in the United States, the Hutaree's version of Christian survivalism sounds pretty clowinish. It will be interesting to see if the Feds have any convincing evidence of this scenario.

Even Bigger Than Health Care

Miley Cyrus decides to leave Hannah Montana. The world will never be the same.

Duke Still Back of the Pack

George Dohrmann writes for SI that "Duke is Back" after their win over Purdue. But Duke isn't anywhere. The Dukies had no inside presence, didn't have enough athleticism to get separation from midget Purdue defenders, and couldn't make shots.

Oh, I forgot to mention that Duke's a turnover machine as well.

Of course, it could be claimed that I'm biased because I have a couple of North Carolina degrees and root for Kentucky.

I also have to confess that my ex-wife teaches at Duke.

But my bias doesn't make Duke a better basketball team.

Be surprised--be very surprised--if Duke gets much further.

Mrs. RSI Near the Finish Line

Mrs. RSI is almost done with her masters in nursing program. Last night, she turned in her major research paper. Now her editor would like to see her turn in her "Punctuation Randomizer." She could do without her "Grammar Randomizer" as well.

Kathleen Sebelius: Nietzsche Nazi, Socialist Revolutionary

Ack! Fume! Splutter! Scream!

I've decided that the Jonah Goldberg's "liberal fascism" vocabulary doesn't go far enough for what Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius says in the quote below.

Sebelius is not just a Nazi and a socialist. In fact, Sebelius is so far gone into fascism that she needs an adjective to amplify her Nazism. It would be all right to call her an uber Nazi but Nietzsche Nazi sounds way cooler because it's an alliteration.

Didn't Nietzsche used the term uber in one of his books? I'll have to ask my good friend Jeff Goldstein, the smartest most highly educated guy on the internet.

Just ask him

Anyway, I'll call Sebelius a Nietzsche Nazi until I get the authoritative word from Jeff.

So what did Sebelius say anyway?

She promises a hands-on approach, “a sense of urgency” and as much say-so for the states as possible. “We need to be the face of competent government — the face of a help desk that can really respond to personal issues and questions — and make sure we do that well and competently . . .”

"Competent government"--that makes her a socialist revolutionary as well.

I couldn't even type it without shaking a little.

American Exceptionalism in the Obama Years

Indiana Governor Mitch McDaniel baits Obama by saying that Americans are now "good Europeans" after passing health care.

That's ridiculous.

In relation to health care, we're uniquely American in a bad way. Europe has socialized medicine. They're better on almost every measure than us and they're going to stay that way after we adapt ObamaCare.

But the Obama years do hold the promise of a good kind of American exceptionalism. We can remake ourselves into a strongly multicultural society that embraces the full value in all the groups in our mosaic.

We're far from being there and the Tea Parties are a good measure of the white nationalist reaction against Obama.

But if we become a fully multicultural society, we would certainly be distinct from Europe.