Always A Winner

Kids on drugs:

http://shine.yahoo.com/at-home/dental-surgery-turns-girl-wizard-viral-video-star-213500154.html

From the comments: Super irresponsible, handing out lightsabers all wily-nily like that.

I'm Rubber, You're Glue

Mirror, mirror

You need to go read this piece by John Chait.

My favorite part was this:

Likewise, James Capretta, a conservative pundit and advisor to Paul Ryan, accuses Obama of having no plan. Read carefully to the third and fourth sentences:

And what does the president propose to do about this problem? Exactly nothing.

His plan for deficit reduction can be summed up briefly: tax hikes and defense cuts.

I have inserted no ellipses here. Capretta first accuses Obama of proposing “exactly nothing,” and then — in the very next sentence! — accuses him of proposing to raise taxes and cut defense spending. That’s not “exactly nothing.” It’s not even sort of nothing. It’s something.

I really don't know if I will be able to stand another 7 months of Mitt Romney and the GOP treating objective facts the way a baby treats a diaper.

The whole reason I started blogging was because I was infuriated at the wholesale attack on the Enlightenment ideas of reason and rational solutions.  (And this blog would SOLVE THIS PROBLEM!!)

I may wind up face-palming myself so many times and with such vigor that I give myself repeated concussions.

Not For Chuckles

http://tbogg.firedoglake.com/2012/04/05/andrew-breitbarts-big-stormfront/

Race has been the central preoccupation of Southern politics since Bacon's Rebellion in 1676.  The rest of the country was happy to let the South be until the South started demanding the ability to export its peculiar institution to the trans-Mississippi west.  After that wee fracas from 1861-1876, the nation went back to letting the South be until the 1940s, when millions of African Americans moved north.

Suddenly race was everyone's issue.  And then African Americans in the South made sure the rest of the world knew what it was like to be black in the South.

Every since then there has been slow but steady progress for African Americans.  It has not been perfect; it has not been uniform.

But judging from the comments that tbogg links to, I think it is safe to say it has driven some people stark raving insane.

For Chuckles

http://textsfromhillaryclinton.tumblr.com/

This Is How You Know You're Winning

Obama's trial balloon to Kennedy goes astray.

Pretty much every conservative mouthpiece has now picked up the idea that Obama saying that he believes the Supremes will uphold ACA because it would be unprecedented (at least since Lochner) to overturn it is an "assault upon the judiciary".  We also have that wingnut justice who asked a DOJ lawyer to explain whether or not the Obama Administration believes in judicial review at all.

So to recap, Obama says he doesn't think the Court will imperil its legitimacy by handing down a partisan 5-4 decision to upend a historic piece of legislation.

Conservatives wet their collective pants in outrage.

Of course, even a cursory understanding of conservative politics since Goldwater demonstrates that the modern GOP built its entire raison d'etre over "judicial activism".  They wanted to impeach Earl Warren.  The entire edifice of the Southern Strategy was based on activist judges.  There are plenty of people up and down the internet collecting these nuggets of conservative Republicans attacking the courts.  Here's a sample.

The squeals of outrage are a sure sign that this has the GOP worried.  First of all, they know how effective attacking the clergy judiciary can be.  Second, Obama's line of argument is designed especially to jab a dagger in the soft underbelly of Kennedy and perhaps Roberts.

My suggestion?  Keep doing and saying exactly this.  Don't back down.

R-Money's Only Shot

Mitt Romney is now gone from "presumptive front runner" to "presumptive nominee".  I still hope the Sweater Vest of the Blessed Virgin wins his home freaking state and makes a go of it across the South anyway.  Keep the clown car rolling along.

But we are beginning to see sign of the "shaking of the Etch-A-Sketch" as Romney begins to shift to campaigning both against Obama and the version of himself that he presented to the GOP base.

One of the key issues - to the degree that we elect Presidents on issues -  will be the Ryan/GOP budget.  The House GOP voted down the line for this extreme piece of radical right wing social engineering and Romney called it "marvelous".  Obama went after the budget in his speech the other day and if the American people understand the budget properly, then Romney loses by double digits and the Democrats retake the House.

I'm completely serious.

No one really likes Romney and no one really likes the GOP, beyond the usual 27% crazification factor.  There is no reservoir of goodwill towards the GOP; there is some for Obama.  Dude had bin Laden shot in the face and saved GM and Chrysler.  The economy is finally chugging back to life and Obama is a likable guy.

While there remains a certain bias towards the GOP in large sections of the country, Obama beats Romney on personality and incumbency.  All Romney can run on is issues.  He presumed he could run on a bad economy, but that might not pan out so he's shifting to gas prices.

The Ryan/Romney budget - if properly understood - would gut social spending, increase defense spending and cut taxes on the rich.  It would transfer taxes downwards onto the middle class.  When you ask the people how they want to balance the budget the two most popular answers are "raise taxes on the rich" and "cut defense spending".  The Ryan/Romney budget goes in the opposite direction.

But Romney's best hope is that budgets are just too durned complicated to be explained by Chuck Todd and Luke Russert and people won't realize just what this budget will mean.

Which is why Obama tried to lay out exactly (or as exactly as he could considering how vague the budget is) how draconian the Ryan/Romney budget is.

The Ryan camp basically shot back with "Oh, no it's not!"

Opinions differ.  Both sides do it.  Let's be bipartisan.

When Ezra Klein writes on policy, I trust him.  He's smart enough and articulate enough to comprehend and explain complexities.  So I read with interest his take on Ryan's take on Obama's take on Ryan's budget.

And even he has trouble not getting lost in the weeds.  Ultimately, he says that, Yes, I was right, Ryan doesn't dispute Obama's numbers.  But in taking the time to explain this, he just lost anyone who isn't committed to understanding these issues.  In other words, 99.9999% of the population.

People - especially those craven, bubble headed ignoramuses we call undecided voters - need to understand things in the same way a reasonably intelligent golden retriever does.  "Sit!"  "Stay!"  "Freedom!"  "Equality!"

Budgetary politics are incredibly complicated, and as Ryan has demonstrated, easy to fudge.  The GOP needs to hope that they can continue to fudge things through November.

Despite my cynicism about the American electorate, I do think that people see through the "cut taxes for the rich and everyone benefits" line of BS that the GOP adheres to as an article of canonical faith.  I think they are fed up with the 1%, and I think R-Money is a damned poor messenger for a budget that slashes taxes on the superrich.

But, it's the only card he has to play, and he's going to play the living hell out of it.

OK, THIS Is Awesome

Your Lines Of The Day

Moving along, Reince Priebus, the obvious anagram from Wisconsin who runs the Republican National Committee, and writing in Politico because the security guard obviously got drunk there last night and passed out, has a deep empathy for all those young Obama supporters from 2008 who are so disappointed with what the president has done that they are obviously looking to support a plutocrat with the political equivalent of multiple personality disorder:

Read more: http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/orrin-hatch-mitt-romney-mormonism-7842893#ixzz1r6uAjk1I


Pierce goes on to quote Joe Scarborough:


Nobody thinks Romney's going to win. Let's just be honest. Can we just say this for everybody at home? Let me just say this for everybody at home. The Republican establishment-- I've yet to meet a single person in the Republican establishment that thinks Mitt Romney is going to win the general election this year. They won't say it on TV because they've got to go on TV and they don't want people writing them nasty emails.  I obviously don't care. I have yet to meet anybody in the Republican establishment that worked for George W. Bush, that works in the Republican congress, that worked for Ronald Reagan that thinks Mitt Romney is going to win the general election.

Finally, an area of bipartisan agreement!

Customer Service.... IS A COOKBOOK!

As I mentioned, I spent Saturday tearing up the kitchen subfloor as fast as I could so the guy could come back and install the new floor.  Only, of course, he didn't install the new subfloor on Saturday.  He had mentioned coming back on Sunday.  That didn't happen either.

I bet you're thinking that they came on Monday, but that's silly isn't it.

So the crew finally showed up yesterday and installed the new floor.

Today, the finishing crew was to come in and sand and put the first finish coat on the floor.  And wasn't I just adorable to think that they would?

I had to make several belligerent phone calls to make sure that the company - Dilley Floors of Southbury, CT - showed up tomorrow, Friday and Saturday so that we can get our kitchen and dining room back.  You see the stove is in the family room, the dining room table is in the small office and the refrigerator is on the deck.

Our backyard looks like Appalachia.

The fascinating thing to me in my interaction with contractors, is that a little customer service goes a long, long way.  If you just show up when you say you will show - which I think we can admit is a pretty low bar - you're aces.  For the most part, everyone we've hired has done solid work.  But it's the guys who show up - or at least CALL when they can't make it - that I will hire again.

Dilley Floors of Southbury, CT?  Never hiring them again.

Our Political Discourse Is So Stupid

That's Chuck Todd on the right.

Go here for video: http://www.c-span.org/Events/President-Obama-Speaks-on-Budget-at-Associated-Press-Luncheon/10737429590-1/

Obama gave a speech today in which he excoriated the odious Ryan/GOP budget.  It was apparently "one of those speeches" that he gives where you just stand back and say, "Damn."

In it, he described the GOP budget as "radical" and "Social Darwinism", which it is.

At the end, he wanted to tie the budget to the Etch-A-Sketch, and he mentioned that the Metamorphomitt had called it "marvelous".  He then made a joke about how "marvelous" isn't a "word you don't often hear when it comes to describing a budget.  It's a word you don't often hear generally."

So Chuck Todd - maintaining the high standards that have come to define a generation of political journalists - used a word search engine to search all of Obama's speech to find out if he ever used the word "marvelous".  Indeed, the President has used the word three times, Chuck Todd told us.

I suppose a discussion about whether the Ryan budget actually does cut billions of dollars in spending on popular programs, while further bloating the Pentagon's budget and showering tax cuts on the rich would be JUST TOO DARNED COMPLICATED for the fifteen second sound bites that typify the network news casts.

(On a side note, I used to take part in this Harris Polls and they would ask a question, "How many times have you watched a nightly news show in the last month?"  Presumably they intended this question to determine how plugged in I was to current events.  But I wonder if they slyly were asking whether or not you were a shut-in or somehow unable to control what channel was on at 6pm.  I think the fact that I AM well informed about current events is precisely because I DON'T watch the evening news with Brian Williams and his whole body melanoma.)

What was I saying....?

Ah, yes, Chuck Todd wasting precious seconds of prime news to speculate about how many times Obama used the word "marvelous".  This is so stupid, so banal, so beneath contempt that I seriously want to find Chuck Todd and slap him in the goatee.  I want to shake him and yell, "You used to be smart!  You used to try and figure things out!  Now you're engaged in the same stupid "character" nonsense and junior high sniggering that comes from spending too much time with Peggy Noonan and Maureen Dowd after they've gotten into the cooking sherry."

If Chuck Todd is going to be THIS stupid, what hope is there for Luke Russert?

To their credit, NBC left the discussion of Sarah Palin on the Today show to the godawful entertainment show that came on next.

I mean, that's just marvelous!

You Better Run, Better Run, Outrun My Gun

Tampa - where the GOP will come to anoint Metamorphomitt with oil and Aqua Velva, as was written - is trying to come up with some rules for protests, because in the 21st century, all protests must be polite and rule abiding.

Anyway, they decide that you can have Super Soakers or poles beyond a certain length.  And they also decided that in today's overheated political atmosphere it would be a good idea to ban guns.

Only they can't do that.

Remember, this is the state reeling under the vigilantism in the Trayvon Martin case.  The Stand Your Ground bullshit is compounded by the fact that you really can't ban guns anywhere at anytime.

I can see a day where the Supreme Court says, "No, you can't mandate health insurance coverage, but you can mandate gun ownership in preschools."

There have been a few school shootings recently.  Not Columbine, but pretty bad.  I wonder what level of outrage it would take to mobilize people against the unbalanced power of the gun lobby.  At this point, I can't imagine what sort of outrage it would take, because the Gun Nuts have a feedback loop that allows them to avoid the consequences of their policies.

Did someone just walk into a school and start executing people?  Well, if those people had guns, they could have protected themselves!

Ask Trayvon Martin about that.  Does anyone think that if Trayvon Martin had "stood his ground" he wouldn't have been arrested?  Or even shot by the police?  Plus, Zimmerman was presumably one of those gun owning private citizen militias they talk about in the Second Amendment.

Crime is actually down in America.  Despite the economic pain, we've seen a drop in many violent crimes.

But if the crazy people that we briefly deterred from getting guns suddenly start packing heat again, maybe we will have a sane moment on guns.

But I doubt it.

Wait. This Is Still Going On?

You mean there's a primary tonight?

The nation's longest running and worst reality show broadcasts episodes from Wisconsin, Maryland and the Place That Dare Not Speak Its Name.  The Metamorphomitt will win Maryland by a country mile and presumably will in DC, as the fifteen Republicans who actually live in DC are very "savvy" and would not deign to vote for the un-cool Santorum.

Santorum's only chance is for an historic upset in Wisconsin.  And that is just not likely to happen.  The Etch-A-Sketch is outspending him 55-1 on TV up there and it's a winner-take-all primary, so Santorum is looking at a long night (or a short one, depending on how you look at it).

After R-Money sweeps tonight, it's a long three weeks of "inevitability" talk and how R-Money has clinched the nomination.  Then on the 24th, Santorum has to win his home state, where the people there already know him and kind of hate him.  The other primaries are in R-Money's backyard: Connecticut and New York (Wall Street), Rhode Island (the "sewer of New England") and Delaware (The State That Gave Us Christine O'Donnell).  Santorum has to win Pennsyltucky and then hope to be competitive in Delaware.  Because after that, things get better for him: Indiana, North Carolina and West Virginia, Nebraska and Arkansas, Kentucky and Texas.

In early June, California probably puts the Etch-A-Sketch over the top.  But the longer the Sweater Vest of the Blessed Virgin can keep this race going, the better.

In Case You Are Keeping Score

If you have been arrested, but not convicted of a crime, you may be stripped search.  This is permissible.

If you want to try and help millions of Americans get health insurance by eliminating the free rider problem, this is an intrusion on liberty not seen since the redcoats left New York harbor in 1783.

Thanks for clearing that up "conservatives".

Right, Left, Right, Left

Just help yourself...

E.J. Dionne took some flack from the Left because of his tepid acceptance of the Catholic hierarchy's attack on contraception.  But he's still a pretty good columnist when he's not genuflecting towards the fossils who run Rome.

Here he lays out the central dynamic of the last 30 years.  This is a dynamic that in many ways has been beaten to death on the Blogosphere.  In it, the basic idea is that of the "Overton Window" of acceptable discourse.  That there are only a limited spectrum of ideas that are possible within a given political context.  For instance, opening an embassy in Iran and lifting sanctions on the Iranian government is simply not within the "window" of possibilities when dealing with that country.

What the Right has done has been to drag the country not just to the Right but to the Extreme Right.  There is nothing conservative about today's Republican Party.  The proper term is reactionary.

If the reactionary judges on the Supreme Court prevail over the conservative judges (Kennedy and maybe Roberts), then the court will have dragged American constitutional law BACK to before the New Deal, just like they did with Citizen's United.

If the reactionaries in Congress win control of the Senate and White House, then we will roll back the government at before the Great Society and probably much of the New Deal.  I was struck by the quote from Robert Taft - archconservative of the 1950s - about the role of government.

“If the free enterprise system does not do its best to prevent hardship and poverty,” the Ohio Republican senator said in a 1945 speech, “it will find itself superseded by a less progressive system which does.” He urged Congress to “undertake to put a floor under essential things, to give all a minimum standard of decent living, and to all children a fair opportunity to get a start in life.”

What Republican can you imagine saying that today?  And Taft was the spokeman of the party's conservative wing.

Conservatism basically understand the world in terms of change.  Their attitude towards change is: "Best leave well enough alone."  Suspicions about the ability of people to make significant and positive changes means that you should only change things when absolutely necessary, and if possible those changes should be slow and gradual.

In this light, ACA is a conservative piece of legislation.  Health care delivery is broken in this country.  It must be changed.  ACA attempts to change it gradually and without overthrowing the current system in favor of single payer.  But to the reactionaries in the GOP, it's not enough to get rid of ACA, they want to get rid of Medicare as a single payer, guaranteed system.  They would privatize Social Security if they could.  Repeal or essentially defund all laws for minimum wages, food stamps, aid to families with dependent children, environmental and worker safety protections... You name it.

The current GOP as typified by Paul Ryan is a revolutionary reactionary force in American politics.  And right now they control the party that controls the House.

If they control the entire government, we are all so seriously screwed that I fear for the future of the country.

And I don't think I'm being melodramatic about that.

Ronald Reagan - it has been noted - was too liberal for today's GOP.  But until America really wakes up to this fact, we're going to continue to get a dysfunctional government whose only agenda is to funnel wealth upwards to the top 1%.

UPDATE: This is another good example of how far to the right the GOP has gone.

Lest The Old Traditions Fail

Congrats kid, you're in.

An old friend of mine sent me a link to a Rolling Stones article about hazing at Dartmouth.

I read it through and at first I become defensive.  Many of the hazing incidents went far beyond what I experienced as a pledge.  There wasn't the same level of depravity described in the article, though some of it seemed true.  The "drink until you boot" phenomenon was a standard part of pledge period.  It wasn't a big part of my pledge period, because I had mono that spring and couldn't drink.  When I ran into a former brother  - whose job it was to make the pledges recite their "names", drinking until they vomited - he mostly remembered that I drank water instead of beer.  He had assumed I had opted out of drinking because that was something you could do.  He was surprised to find out I had a medical reason for not drinking.

There was indeed many gross things about pledging.  Sink night - described in the article - is especially rough, or it was for me because I had mono and started shivering uncontrollably.  I can remember Ernest Hemingway's grandson throwing up on me and thinking, "Oh, good, at least it's warm."

But the general atmosphere of pledging was of mostly verbal abuse combined with binge drinking.  I don't remember any real acts of barbarity.

And so the article at first left me cold.

But then I remembered the conflicting feelings I had about my fraternity.  While I had few conflicted feelings about the rugby club, my feelings about Dartmouth have always been conflicted.  I bought into a lot of the fraternity sense of besieged entitlement.  When I went to a banquet to honor last year's national championship rugby team, I was struck by how aggressively anti-college many of my contemporaries (all fraternity members) remain.

The "whistle blower's" fraternity - SAE - was always one of the most egregious hazers, along with the African American fraternities.  And while I was there, SAE was always one of the lamer fraternities.  I can't recall ever going there for a party.  And I also remember that the brothers who got "into" harassing pledges the most were usually the biggest losers in the house.

If anything the hazing experience tends to draw cruelty not from the strong but from the weak.  

My own memories of being a brother during pledge period were that after the first year, when sophomores tended to lay it on, I really withdrew from pledge hazing.  I remember from my own sink night, when I was shivering uncontrollably, the Vice President of the frat stayed up with me to make sure I was alright.  He kept checking in on me until the sun came up.  

I'd like to think I learned more about brotherhood from him than from the various acts of shared misery that usually makes up pledging a fraternity.  

But I think what happened instead was that I simply withdrew a lot.  Part of that was in my nature.  I just wasn't very out going.  And I know now I suffered from depression on and off from my time in college until I began teaching.  Mostly it was a depression brought about from idleness and a lack of direction.  But now I wonder how much if any of it was caused by my experiences in my fraternity.

I returned to my high school to teach.  About every other week I run into my best friend from high school; our kids do scouts together.  When I went in to the rugby banquet I stayed with an old girlfriend from high school.  Every New Years I see another old friend from here (and before).  

I don't keep in touch with anyone from Dartmouth.

When I was being hazed, I didn't think much of it.  As it began, I tried to think of myself as a samurai, someone immune to pain and degradation - I was watching a lot of Kurosawa movies back then.  I remember trying to sit like a samurai in front of a huge phalanx of beers we had to drink.  One of the brothers kept shoving me down as a tried to sit on my haunches.  I kept popping back up.  To me the whole thing was hard, and hard was OK for me.  I had wrestled, done a NOLS course, played rugby.  I liked hard.  I ate hard.  The fact that I was being yelled at and made to vomit was not a problem (except for the mono thing, that sucked).

But I can't help but wonder now how my time might have been different.  Jon Bigelow was one of the best rugby players I ever played with.  Legs like oaks, massive boot, was selected to the US national team after senior year, but chose not to go because he was tired and beat up.  Bigs was in a frat but then dropped out.  He was still captain of the team, active in the outdoor club and when I see him on occasion, I am genuinely happy to see him.

I think maybe he had a secret I could have used.  

I had friends in my house and others.  I spent a ton of time in my house.  I drank, but maybe because I never became inured to vomiting I rarely got sickeningly drunk.  I did not have a "bad" experience in my fraternity.  I was not traumatized by the hazing that went on (and it was hazing).

But was my essential disconnect from my Dartmouth experience tied up in my experience in a fraternity?  Maybe it was.  I can't be sure.  It wasn't like after graduation my life became sun-kissed and awesome again.  

As a teacher and a father, I know that hazing is wrong.  But I also know that shared hardships build bonds.  My friend who sent me the article played for our arch-rival Harvard.  But we also played together for three years in Santa Monica.  We were in each other's weddings.  Rugby is hard.  And that hardness brings teammates close together.

There isn't anything wrong with hard.  But there is something wrong with cruel.  And the problem with hazing is that hard becomes cruel in a split second; it's inevitable.  The logic of hazing is that the weakest people being hazed inevitably become the harshest hazers themselves.  

There is no escaping that logic, which is why hazing can't really be reformed, and why efforts to reform it are ultimately doomed.