Populism: Just like racism!

Matt Taibbi gets it. How many times in the last few weeks have you heard the word populism used by the mainstream media to describe the desire to reform our financial system? It takes a completely valid argument and uses that word to make it trite.

I also like how Taibbi calls bullshit — and actually uses the word bullshit. Favorite quote:

That’s basically Brooks’s entire argument here. Yes, the rich and powerful do rig the game in their own favor, and yes, they are guilty of “excesses” — but fucking deal with it, if you want to eat.

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The Party of Assholes

I am loath to blog about the worst of the worst wingnuts like Pat Robertson, Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, Lynn Cheney and Glenn Beck. I mean what’s the point? Their assholeishness is hardly something so subtle that it needs a blogger (let alone thousands of them) to point out.

Nonetheless what is truly disgusting lately is the glee with which these assholes seem to treat human tragedy. Can there be any doubt after the attempted bombing of an airliner on Christmas Day how much these jerks want a terrorist attack to happen? They treated the attempt as a Christmas Day present to themselves and their ideology. They jumped right away with how Obama couldn’t keep us safe and launched a coordinated effort of historical revision regarding attacks during the Bush presidency. One wonders how much more excited they would be if this guy succeeded?

And now we have a human tragedy of catestrophic proportions. A poor country that has suffered for so many years gets kicked while it is already down with a natural disaster. And how do these guys react? What compassion do these “saviors of family values” give us? You have to know that Pat Robertson woke up to the news excited that God had finally put the nail in the coffin of this heretic country. And how about Limbaugh? Don’t give any money in aid to Haiti because we already do that through income tax. It’s not enough that you are an asshole Limbaugh, you have to try to influence others to behave like you.

What is there to say to all this? I apologize for this rant but these guys are truly evil. How else to explain their utter joy at so much tragedy around us.

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Two short observations

Pat Robertson on NPR speaking about Oral Roberts’ 1987 plea to his supporters that they donate money to his church or God would kill him:

It was unseemly. We all have a mole or a wart somewhere in our lives.

What do you mean it was unseemly? He said God told him that he was going to kill him if he didn’t raise the money. Are you insinuating that Oral Roberts was lying? Is it so common for televangelists to lie that you can use that word unseemly instead?

Second observation of the day.

A new provision being rolled into the unified House health care bill would allow young adults to stay on their parents’ health care plans until they turn 27, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told reporters Tuesday.

I think it says a lot about the state of this country’s health insurance problems that reform involves infantilizing adults in order to get them covered. And how classist is this anyway? This is a big benefit for upper middle class families who sent their kids off to college when their kids have not yet found work that includes benefits. Baristas anyone? What about poor 27 year olds? Chances are their parents don’t have insurance either. What a bunch of crap. Full disclosure: I was on my parents’ insurance until I was 23 years old.

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Todd Willingham

Ever since reading the heartbreaking New Yorker article about Todd Willingham’s execution, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about him. I haven’t talked about it, because what can you say? What can say about something so evil as the execution of an innocent man? It challenges our beliefs in a way that isn’t comfortable to think or talk about.

Since I read that article, Governor Rick Perry of Texas has done everything in his power to sabotage an investigation of his conviction and execution. While I can’t transfer my own feelings into words, I feel that John Cole and DougJ at Balloon Juice are really on target.

Pointing out a comment on a Megan McCardle post, DougJ cites the following user comment:

Well Megan, I really don’t see any smoking gun in this case. We know you’re anti death-penalty but this is grasping at straws.

And then says this:

There is no smoking gun that the guy is innocent, so the state was right to execute him.

I totally agree with his sentiment. We’ve come to a point in this country where “innocent until proven guilty” is meaningless. We have guilty until proven innocent. We see that in the indefinite detention of Americans in America, and we see it here in Willingham’s case.

How about this from John Cole:

No, we will not have a serious discussion about the death penalty. In fact, if you want to be exceptionally horrified, check out this Kay Bailey Hutchison statement referencing Rick Perry’s actions:

Cole then quotes Hutchinson:

“As hard as Rick Perry’s office and his campaign may try to divert from the issue, this is not about one man or one case. The issue is Rick Perry’s heavy-handed politicization of a process and Commission established by the legislature to provide critical oversight. First, Rick Perry delayed the formation of the Texas Forensic Science Commission, then he tried to ensure it didn’t have funding and when all else failed, he fired everyone he could. The only thing Rick Perry’s actions have accomplished is giving liberals an argument to discredit the death penalty. Kay Bailey Hutchison is a steadfast supporter of the death penalty, voted to reinstate it when she served in the Texas House and believes we should never do anything to create a cloud of controversy over it with actions that look like a cover-up.”

And provides this commentary:

She’s not concerned that an innocent man might have been killed by the state. She’s concerned that evil liberals might get in the way of killing more people.

This is truly a low point for America.

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“You lie”

It’s amazing how low the stakes are with the Republicans. Outrage over illegal immigrants getting health care? I might add that the President said it wasn’t true.

I would have paid good money — campaign contribution money — to hear anyone — ANYONE — say “you lie” during one of the George W. Bush speeches in Congress. I mean how many lies did tell? How many people died because of the lies he told?

I wish this were a trend. I propose yelling out “you lie” at all sessions of Congress where a politician blatantly lies.

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In the Loop

I saw In the Loop last night and I can’t recommend it enough. The film is an offshoot of the British television series “The Thick of It” which I have only seen a couple of episodes of. The series and film have a sort of docu-drama feel although the actors don’t confront the camera at any time and you don’t get the idea that what they are saying is made for public consumption, but it has the shaky camera the quick cuts that are normal in such films.

The premise is to take the events that led up to the UN Resolution to attack Iraq and to show them through lower level cabinet officials of both the British and the American governments. What’s fascinating about this film is that each major point is fact. We know that the British supported America in their endeavor to declare war on Iraq. We know that the reasons were inexplicable to a large percentage of the British and American public. Tony Blair’s inexplicable unconditional support of the Bush Administration led many to characterize Blair as being the lap dog of the Americans. We know that British intelligence was used by the Bush Administration as justification to the war. We know that opposition was squashed despite very serious reservations about the quality of such intelligence.

So in this film, we see a fictionalized account of how all of the above came to be. The characters are fictional, but again I think the major points of the film are accurate. The film is funny. Depressing. How can so many people put their careers above the common good in such a callous way? It’s hard to swallow. The dialogue is great though I think the dialogue of the American characters is somewhat off. I think Americans are more likely to smile to your face and tell you what you want to hear than stab you in the back, so I guess what I’m saying is the Americans talk a little bit too much like the Brits. The Brits swear with such foul relish. It’s poetry really and very clever. And very funny. But not so American which is why it sounds odd when the American characters do it. I suppose we’ve heard of politicians like Cheney throwing fuck yous out there, but that’s not really so clever and funny. Just foul.

I loved Peter Capaldi’s performance. Just like on the television series he is fantastic. I wasn’t so taken with James Gandolfini but again I think that’s because the words coming out of his mouth just didn’t quite sound right. A little too British and not so American. It’s certainly an uncomfortable film to watch at times because the humor is so incredibly dark. This is an incredibly dark subject and very smartly done. The next day I’m still thinking of what a tragic clusterfuck this all was.

Update: I’ve just been looking on google for what other clips they show of this film. Ignore all the trailer clips. The film’s charm is the swearing which sadly is not included in any trailer.
I enjoyed the crossest man in Scotland: “http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wa3eoMnMC80”

And the Steve Coogan clip: “http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b5kdOvsyv98”

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The man who would be Emily Dickinson

With all of this talk about someone forging a Kenyan birth certificate for Obama, I was reminded of a fascinating article I read many years ago in the Guardian.

Mark Hofman was a really good forger. He conducted careful research and he chose his victims well. They were people who bought the forgeries because they wanted to believe they were real. Or in the case of the Mormon Church, the church wanted to destroy “real” documents which contradicted existing Mormon Orthodox. They made their purchases to destroy the documents. Here is an excerpt. The whole article is a great read.

The man he was describing is no ordinary murderer. Poetry and literature were the accomplices in his crimes; parchment and ink the tools of his trade. His name is Mark Hofmann and, until he was incarcerated, he was America’s greatest literary forger: a man who combined obsessive historical research, extraordinary craftsmanship and an unerring instinct for what his customers wanted. Two years ago, one of those forgeries, a masterfully-executed poem by the much-loved American poet Emily Dickinson, who died in 1886, turned up at Sotheby’s, New York, where it was sold for $21,000 to the Jones Library, in Dickinson’s home town, Amherst, Massachusetts.

“I thought: this is just extraordinary,” says Daniel Lombardo, the former curator of special collections at the Jones Library, recalling the moment when he first saw the poem in Sotheby’s catalogue for its June 1997 auction of fine books and manuscripts. “A complete poem, not a fragment of a poem. In my recollection, it had been decades since a poem came up this way.”

And part two is here.

Update: It occurred to me that an excerpt of the Mormon bit of the article might stir some interest.

Forging coins had taught him two lessons: that things have no intrinsic value, and that people will believe what they want to believe. The Church of the Latter Day Saints was the perfect victim. Since its beginnings, in 1863, it has been a religion in search of authentication. The hundreds of thousands of dollars-worth of documents that Hofmann sold to the church were faith-promoting documents of the highest order. They included the earliest known Mormon artefact – a letter from the mother of the church’s founder, Joseph Smith – and the last: a letter written by Smith from jail just before he was murdered.

Hofmann’s real intention, however, was to destroy the faith he despised. Like a virus planted in a computer, he began to feed the Church of Latter Day Saints with documents that called into question some of the fundamental tenets of the faith. His most famous forgery came to be known as The White Salamander Letter. In it, Hofmann portrayed the Mormon church’s prophet, Joseph Smith, as a money-grubbing gold prospector who dabbled in black magic. Instead of angelic inspiration, he invented a diabolic, talking lizard. The Mormon Church bought the document for $250,000, and locked it away so that no one would see it.

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Jon Stewart vs. the “birthers”

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OMFG!

I don’t see any clicks on my stats for the article in the post below. Which is understandable. It’s a long article and quite an undertaking to read it. But let me just say that after reading it, I am as pale as a ghost.

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The Great American Bubble

I haven’t read this myself yet, but Jake highly recommends this Rolling Stone article on the Goldman Sachs influence in various bubbles in the U.S. economy.

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Don’t listen to philosophers

No really, don’t. Remember Nietzsche, Marx? Not a good idea.

Besides, lack of government intervention is what got us in this mess.

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A sucker is born every minute

There is so much going on in this story; it’s hard to keep track. An art collector is suing Louis Vitton and the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art for selling him what he thought was original art, but was actually leftover material from LV handbags. If he knew that the $6,000 he paid for the art was really a $1,000 handbag he would have prudently purchased the handbag and mounted it in a frame himself.

Can we really feel sorry for a man who buys a logo mounted in a frame and then is disappointed when he finds out it isn’t “art”? Can we really feel sorry for anyone who buys an LV handbag for thousands of dollars full stop? And perhaps more importantly why on earth is the LAMoCA selling handbags mounted on frames anyway? Read about the ridiculousness here.

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Lord what fools these mortals be

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Quote for the day

I’m not sure whether this quote was Hayden’s or Mukasey’s.

Disclosure of the techniques is likely to be met by faux outrage, and is perfectly packaged for media consumption. It will also incur the utter contempt of our enemies.

Perhaps you should have thought of that before you tortured people.

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Historical revision of the day

It’s interesting how photographs create history. We’ve all seen the Ken Burns’ affect in countless documentaries, but what if the photographs are deliberately misleading? Will anyone remember and revise the historical record?

My sister brought this story to my attention. A Japanese-American battalion liberated the concentration camp of Dachau during World War II but no photographic evidence exists. How do you explain to the American people that the liberators of a concentration camp look just like the enemy you are fighting in the East? You don’t. You instead pretend it never happened.

A new book entitled “Dachau, Holocaust and US Samurais – Nisei Soldiers first in Dachau” by Pierre Moulin tells the story of “the role played by very special liberators coming from 10 Concentration camps in USA: The US Samurais of the 522nd Field Artillery BN who were the first to reach the camp of Dachau.” However, the U.S. Army does not recognize any Japanese-American soldiers as the liberators of Dachau.

The photo above, which purportedly shows the liberation of Dachau by the 522nd Field Artillery Battalion, 100th Division, 442nd Regimental Combat Team, is from this web site: http://www.hirasaki.home.att.net. This photo was obviously not taken at the main Dachau camp, and it was not taken on April 29, 1945 when Dachau was liberated, judging by the amount of snow on the ground. The photo appears to have been taken after May 1, 1945 when it snowed in the Dachau area. One prisoner is holding a bed roll which indicates that these prisoners were on a march out of the main camp when they were discovered by Japanese troops, probably on May 2, 1945.

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Forget everything you’ve read about Dubai

It’s much much worse. I’ve been keeping up with the news about this strange place. I read the National Geographic article. I read about people abandoning luxury cars at the airport in order to get out of Dubai without being thrown in debtors prison. But nothing prepared me for this. There are so many human tragedies, it’s hard to keep track.

The most famous hotel in Dubai – the proud icon of the city – is the Burj al Arab hotel, sitting on the shore, shaped like a giant glass sail-boat. In the lobby, I start chatting to a couple from London. They have been coming to Dubai for ten years now, and they say they love it. “You never know what you’ll find here,” he says. “On our last trip, at the beginning of the holiday, our window looked out on the sea. By the end, they’d built an entire island there.”

Doesn’t the omnipresent slave class bother you? The woman replies: “That’s what we come for! It’s great, you can’t do anything for yourself!” Her husband chimes in: “When you go to the toilet, they open the door, they turn on the tap – the only thing they don’t do is take it out for you when you have a piss!” And they both fall about laughing.

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It’s mental illness

With the recent trend of senseless massacres in the U.S. (seven in the past month according to AP), the MSNBC headline reads “Experts: Many motives drive mass murder.”

Mass murderers are as different as their killing field — be it a nursing home or a suburban home — and as diverse as their reasons for killing — whether it’s spousal betrayal or the loss of a job.

But experts say most people who embark on such wholesale slaughter share certain key characteristics: A catastrophic event that triggers a suicidal rage and an unquenchable thirst to get even.

And there is often no way to see it coming.

The article would have you believe anyone — anyone at all — is capable of these horrific crimes. Kind of makes you eye that neighbor a little differently.

Meanwhile at The Stranger, Charles Mudede is actually making sense.

What is missing in each of these reports of recent killings is as any mention of mental illness. What’s the meaning of this hole in the reporting? Why is mental illness something that is unspeakable or is transmuted into its opposite: a man just dealing with unemployment, a man just dealing with infidelity, a man just dealing with the current economic crisis? Meaning, these killers were only dealing with normal problems and nothing else. As a consequence, there is no real difference between the killers and any other person in society. Why this insistence on normality and this resistance to causes that might be medical or biological?

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Keep copies

This is a nail-biter of a story from Salon about medical malpractice. I’d post an excerpt, but I don’t want to give away the dramatic ending.

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Madoff investors want fabricated money

The agency liquidating Bernard Madoff’s brokerage says the $2.6 billion it has on hand is enough to satisfy all legitimate claims by victims of the money manager’s $65 billion Ponzi scheme.

This is good news, right? I was flabbergasted by the following:

Some Madoff investors are up in arms about SIPC’s decision, announced by Picard at a Feb. 20 creditors’ meeting, to limit victim claims to “net equity” — cash invested minus sums taken out. That formula ignores profit reported on customer brokerage statements for the past 20 years, gains that were fictitious because Picard found no evidence Madoff had made any trades or profits going back decades.

I can’t think of any reason why the victims should be compensated with the money that never existed. Am I cold-hearted? I am not in any way saying that the Madoff victims are responsible for their victim-hood, but let’s be honest there were many people who invested and lost money in the past year from completely legitimate investment funds. Rewarding people who participated in a scheme, granted unwillingly, makes no sense. Why should they profit when many others didn’t.

A lot of people have blamed the victims of Madoff for being greedy. I think that is unfair to people who have clearly suffered quite a bit by the selfishness of this man. Now, I’m thinking that maybe they are a little greedy.

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What the Republicans do that the Democrats don’t

If we were to do the Pepsi challenge and decide one party is “better” than another, I think we’d have trouble – obviously aside to particular issues that interest an individual. It’s often difficult to differentiate the two since both parties are political machines often beholden to special interests. There’s nothing that makes a Republican inherently more corrupt than a Democrat. There’s nothing to say that Republicans have greater morals than Democrats and so on and so forth.

And yet there is one major difference I believe between the two. Republicans have no sense of hypocrisy. It’s not to say that the Democrats couldn’t be hypocritical. They just aren’t.

Take for instance this ridiculous notion that Obama has sullied the office of the President by not wearing a jacket in the oval office. A Democrat would never make such a claim knowing that it would quickly be disproved. Or pointing out that the opposition needs a teleprompter as if no politician in the history of politicians ever used a teleprompter.  Or wearing a flag pin. No Democrat in their right mind would criticize someone for not wearing a flag pin while not wearing a flag pin.

Is it lack of reflection? Is it a complete disconnect between fact and reality?

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A truly fascinating peek into the Madoff’s office

How does such a large Ponzi scheme work without attracting attention? For insight into the inner workings of a highly functional yet dysfunctional office, this article is an amazing read detailing the Bernard Madoff scandal. I’ve worked in an office with an eccentric CEO, and I know Jake has too. What if all the weirdnesses actually add up to outright fraud? It blows my mind.

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Want to read an angry post on the travesty of Guantanamo Bay?

Oh, it will make you angry.

There are several dimensions to the debate over the U.S. prison facilities at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba that the media have largely missed and, thus, of which the American people are almost completely unaware. For that matter, few within the government who were not directly involved are aware either.

The first of these is the utter incompetence of the battlefield vetting in Afghanistan during the early stages of the U.S. operations there. Simply stated, no meaningful attempt at discrimination was made in-country by competent officials, civilian or military, as to who we were transporting to Cuba for detention and interrogation.

This was a factor of having too few troops in the combat zone, of the troops and civilians who were there having too few people trained and skilled in such vetting, and of the incredible pressure coming down from Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and others to “just get the bastards to the interrogators”.

It did not help that poor U.S. policies such as bounty-hunting, a weak understanding of cultural tendencies, and an utter disregard for the fundamentals of jurisprudence prevailed as well (no blame in the latter realm should accrue to combat soldiers as this it not their bailiwick anyway).

The second dimension that is largely unreported is that several in the U.S. leadership became aware of this lack of proper vetting very early on and, thus, of the reality that many of the detainees were innocent of any substantial wrongdoing, had little intelligence value, and should be immediately released.

But to have admitted this reality would have been a black mark on their leadership from virtually day one of the so-called Global War on Terror and these leaders already had black marks enough: the dead in a field in Pennsylvania, in the ashes of the Pentagon, and in the ruins of the World Trade Towers. They were not about to admit to their further errors at Guantanamo Bay. Better to claim that everyone there was a hardcore terrorist, was of enduring intelligence value, and would return to jihad if released. I am very sorry to say that I believe there were uniformed military who aided and abetted these falsehoods, even at the highest levels of our armed forces.

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Please monitor this volcano 54 miles from Seattle

It’s kind of important.

Info on Mt. Rainier, here. This excellent photo is via Seattle rainscreens photostream.

Update: CNN article, here.

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A little late

It seems that now Republicans all of a sudden care about preserving white house emails.

A California Republican congressman has called on President Obama to put in place a system that ensures all White House emails be preserved even if official business was done through private e- mail accounts.

Rep. Darrell Issa, the senior Republican on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, made the request in a February 18 letter to White House Counsel Greg Craig.

Issa specifically mentioned the new administration’s brief use of Gmail accounts after Obama was sworn in last month, as they waited for the official White House e-mail accounts to become active.

“As you know, any e-mail sent or received by White House officials may be subject to retention under the Presidential Records Act (PRA),” Issa wrote Craig in the letter.

“The use of personal e-mail accounts, such as Gmail to conduct official business raises the prospect that presidential records will not be captured by the White House e-mail archiving system. Consequently Gmail users on the President’s staff run the risk of incorrectly classifying their e-mails as non-records under the [Presidential Records] Act.”

This is the problem Republicans face today. Even when they bring up a perfectly reasonable idea, they have absolutely no credibility whatsoever in the matter. And it will be like this for a long time.

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Impressive

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