I love classic capitalist propaganda. Take for example, 1956′s “Destination Earth.” A cartoon produced by the American Petroleum Institute, it shows that oil + competition=getting rid of that dastardly Stalin Ogg, leader of Mars.
CNBC and Fox are pretty lame capitalist propagandists compared to this.
My Catholic friends, I think it is time to go old-school next Lent.
In addition to disease, the European settlers also brought Catholicism with them, and successfully converted a large proportion of the indigenous population. And the native Americans and Canadians loved their beaver meat.
So in the 17th century, the Bishop of Quebec approached his superiors in the Church and asked whether his flock would be permitted to eat beaver meat on Fridays during Lent, despite the fact that meat-eating was forbidden. Since the semi-aquatic rodent was a skilled swimmer, the Church declared that the beaver was a fish. Being a fish, beaver barbeques were permitted throughout Lent. Problem solved!
I’m going to suggest it to the in-laws.
It’s just a coincidence that Robert Stacy McCain’s infatuated with what he’s calling “The Teenage Lesbian Trial of the Century.” There’s nothing prurient about his interest:
[A] sheriff’s department arrest affidavit in the case says the 14-year-old ran away and spent that night at Hunt’s house, where the two teens “put their fingers inside of each other’s vaginas, put their mouths on each other’s vaginas, and both of them used a vibrator on each other to insert it in each other’s vaginas” … Will prosecutors include the vibrator as Exhibit A? If readers want to send me to Florida next month to cover The Teenage Lesbian Trial of the Century, this would be a good time to hit the tip jar.
Nothing prurient at all. But given the attention this case is attracting among ideologically unattractive bloggers, it’s worth noting a few relevant details. Foremost among them, according to the official affidavit, the parents of the 14-year-old conducted a “controlled phone call” with Kaitlyn Hunt, the accused:
The day after that inflammatory phone call, Hunt was arrested. I’m not saying that she shouldn’t have been—statutory rape laws exist for a reason and Hunt essentially confessed to the crime during that “controlled phone call.” But context always matters in cases like this, especially when state laws dictate that while an 18-year-old man can be arrested for having sex with his 16-year-old girlfriend, that same 18-year-old man could legally impregnate his 15-year-old wife. Prosecutions of this sort depend on ignoring the existence of conflicting statutes, and they can do so because the conflict involved privileges traditional marriage.
Meaning that—besides his desire speak openly about fantasizing about the sex lives of teenage lesbians—McCain’s interested in this case because there’s no potential for conflicting statutes. The defense can’t claim that these two could’ve performed this act had they been married because gay marriage isn’t legal. This provides him and the other moral hypocrites linked above with an ostensibly unambiguous position: “This is a clear-cut case of illegal sexual activity because there exist no grounds under which it could be legal.” They have the moral high-ground!
They can claim that any liberal who compares this case to similar ones between consenting heterosexuals supports pedophilia, empowers sexual predators, etc. All those liberals are actually doing is demanding that the same standards be held to this case that apply in similar ones in which the specificity of the law creates situations that ideologues can abuse in bad faith. Will their next demand be that parents who take pictures of their infant children bathing be arrested? Of course not.
But why use that sort of common sense when you could attack liberals while drumming up interest in “The Teenage Lesbian Trial of the Century”?
Damn Obama and his diabolical “court-packing” plan of getting one judge confirmed to the D.C. Circuit (out of 4 vacancies) in 5 years!
And, of course, even that nominee was very much a compromise candidate. I’ve been meaning to discuss Mark Graber’s excellent new article on the implications of elite polarization for the Supreme Court — and I’ll have more on it later –but Srinivasan is interesting case because he tests its limits. An important product of increased polarization between Republican and Democratic elites, Graber points out, is that judges who are part of the same broad “team” tend to be pretty predictable even they don’t have much of a track record. Kagan, a very blank state candidate, has for example a voting record pretty similar to Sotomayor.
For much of American history, this hasn’t been true. A Democratic president could appoint both Brandeis and McReynolds, Frank Murphy and Jimmy Byrnes, not because McReynolds and Byrnes were “mistakes” but because southern white supremacists and Jewish and Roman Catholic progressives were all part of the Democratic coalition and were all represented in Supreme Court appointments. Even Souter in a sense was only half a mistake — it’s not exactly that he wasn’t a conservative, it’s that he represented a strand of New England conservatism that no longer has any place in the national Republican Party. It’s very unlikely that Harriet Miers, an even blanker slate than Kagan, would have had a voting record that much different than Alito or Roberts; there’s a big difference between a contemporary Texas Republican and a New England Republican of the 80s.
Particularly as a potential Supreme Court nominee, Srinivasan will be an even more interesting test case than Kagan; the fact that he’s chosen to be part of the Democratic “team” is pretty much the only evidence that he’d be a progressive judge. His tenure on the D.C. Circuit will therefore bear watching. But unlike 40 years ago, it’s very possible that his votes and opinions will be broadly similar to a more clearly liberal nominee. And it’s virtually impossible for him not to be substantially more liberal than the Republican appointees on the D.C. Circuit.
Modern Farmer with a long look at a major problem with the Greek yogurt industry–endless amounts of very gross whey that is quite toxic to riparian ecosystems. New York produced 150 million gallons of acid whey last year from its Greek yogurt industry. Dealing with that stuff is, to say the least, a big problem.
Via this Alternet article, which I thought was an unfair attack on Chobani since it seems that it is a problem inherent to all Greek yogurt companies.
Just another part of our industrial food system and its endless supply of toxic byproducts.
It’s no secret that the United States has an aging and increasingly dangerous infrastructure. An embarrassment compared to Europe or Japan, Americans have decided that it is far more important to fight unnecessary wars and give our plutocrats lower taxes than to act like a modern country, creating a functional train system or repairing our vast roadways. Sinkholes are appearing in Washington D.C. and our state capital cities (not to mention everyone’s favorite winter game in Providence called “Pothole or Archeological Dig.” I felt like I was driving in Costa Rica or Honduras in February and March.) In the wake of the horrifying 2007 bridge collapse on I-35W in Minneapolis, the nation did basically nothing. Here’s a good graph on public construction spending:
Last night, a bridge on I-5 over the Skagit River north of Seattle collapsed. Amazingly, no one was killed. Very lucky. It has been 6 years since the Minneapolis disaster. Some states have prioritized bridge reconstruction but not Washington. The bridge at hand was rated as “functionally obsolete,” which is not the same thing as dangerous, but it was very old, built in 1955. State funding to make bridges safe from earthquakes is going away in 2015. Washington infrastructure gets a particularly poor rating from the American Society of Civil Engineers, especially on roads and transit systems. The ASCE said, “Bridges were awarded a C-, in part due to the nearly 400 structurally deficient bridges in Washington State. 36 percent of Washington’s bridges are past their design life of 50 years.” And last night we saw the effects of the state’s lack of infrastructure spending.
It’s also worth noting Andrew Rice’s essay on the Tappan Zee Bridge over the Hudson River, which will not exactly give you confidence to drive over that thing. Not that you have a lot of choice.
In short, we need a massive federal works program just to keep our infrastructure at a stable, functional, and safe level, not withstanding the need for high-speed rail and other new projects to keep the United States competitive with the rest of the world.
For the most part, after seeing Kinsley’s latest I’m happy to defer to Drezner, Konczal, and Krugman. But I did want to add a couple points.
First, I should note that neither Krugman (nor me, in the linked post) “called [Kinsley] a neocon.” The point was just that Kinsley’s invocation of stagflation is comparable to neocon invocations of Munich to justify various interventions against authoritarians who pose threats that are vastly less serious that Hitler. And, again, the moralism that seems to be doing most of the work in Kinsley’s argument isn’t an invention of his critics; it’s entirely explicit. Konzcal again cites Kinsley’s argument about “we have to pay a price for past sins” and “[t]he problem is the great, deluded middle class—subsidized by government and coddled by politicians.” Even more instructively, consider Kinsley’s earlier concession:
My fear is not the result of economic analysis. It’s more from the realm of psychology….
[...]
But this cure has been one ice-cream sundae after another. It can’t be that easy, can it? The puritan in me says that there has to be some pain. That’s not to say that there hasn’t been plenty of economic pain. But that pain has come from the recession itself, not the cure.
It’s not name-calling to say that moralism rather than economic analysis seems to underpin Kinsley’s belief in austerity. It’s just an accurate description of his explicit argument.
What makes this argument offensive, though, is Kinsley’s implicit assumption of shared sacrifice. It seems important to note that Kinsley and people similarly situated to him are going to keep eating “ice-cream sundaes” no matter what fiscal policies are implemented; the pain being inflicted in the name of austerity is being inflicted on others. Cutting the welfare state during a time of mass unemployment, however, as Kinsley concedes has devastating effects on the less well-off. If you’re a liberal advocating policies that are certain to inflict immediate pain on people who are already in dire straits, you’d better have a damned good argument that this is justified by a clear long-term payoff. Boil off the puritain moralism, though, and Kinsley’s only substantive argument is the invocation of stagflation. And this argument is transparently wrong: there’s no sign of significant inflation, and many of the conditions that led to stagflation (most notably a labor force with the leverage to extract higher wages) don’t exist in 2013. Which is presumably why Kinsley is unwilling to defend his claim on the merits and would prefer to discuss the purity of his motives. It’s also far from obvious why higher inflation would be so bad that it would justify higher-than-necessary unemployment even if there was any evidence that it was happening.
So, fine, let’s stipulate that Kinsley is a good liberal and that he sincerely believes that austerity will be better for all in the long run. It just doesn’t matter because he doesn’t have any kind of serious argument to make in defense of austerity.
Roy Hogsed’s 1948 version of “Cocaine Blues”
Country Music History 101 teaches everyone that Johnny Cash did not write that song, though he did a good version of it. I will save most of my Johnny Cash rant for now, which in brief is that Cash was awesome in the 50s, declined rapidly after about 1963, was a washed-up has been putting out bad album after bad album (see Christgau’s review of 1978′s Greatest Hits Volume 3–”who today would think of ranking him with George Jones, Willie Nelson, or Merle Haggard?”) until Rick Rubin brought him back with 1 great album, 1 fine album, and a few meh albums with a good song or two on them, and that many of the people who think he is the ultimate in country music are in part falling for a marketing campaign.
Which isn’t to say that Cash wasn’t one of the finest artists in the history of country music or that his version of “Cocaine Blues” isn’t one of the very best. But given the centrality of the song to his popular image, it’s worth noting that not only is it not a Cash song, but that he built upon dozens and dozens of earlier versions of this popular song in its various and sundry iterations. The Hogsed version is much closer to how Cash played it than many others.
Mr. Obama rejected the notion of an expansive war on terrorism and instead articulated a narrower understanding of the mission for the United States. “Beyond Afghanistan, we must define our effort not as a boundless ‘global war on terror’ but rather as a series of persistent, targeted efforts to dismantle specific networks of violent extremists that threaten America,” he said.
The president’s moves stirred immediate skepticism among Republicans, who have long questioned whether he was playing down the continuing threat of terrorism for political reasons, as in the case of the attack on the diplomatic post in Benghazi, Libya, last year.
Speaker John A. Boehner, Republican of Ohio, issued 10 questions to the president in reaction to previews of his speech. “Is it still your administration’s goal to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat Al Qaeda?” he asked. “If you are scaling back the use of unmanned drones, which actions will you be taking as a substitute to ensure Al Qaeda’s defeat? Is it your view that if the U.S. is less aggressive in eliminating terrorists abroad, the threat of terrorist attacks will diminish on its own?”
Senator Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, the top Republican on the Intelligence Committee, was sharper in reaction. “The president’s speech today will be viewed by terrorists as a victory,” he said. “Rather than continuing successful counterterrorism activities, we are changing course with no clear operational benefit.”
Even the humblest Party member is expected to be competent, industrious, and even intelligent within narrow limits, but it is also necessary that he should be a credulous and ignorant fanatic whose prevailing moods are fear, hatred, adulation, and orgiastic triumph. In other words it is necessary that he should have the mentality appropriate to a state of war. It does not matter whether the war is actually happening, and, since no decisive victory is possible, it does not matter whether the war is going well or badly. All that is needed is that a state of war should exist.
We apologize for missing last week’s episode, but Google Plus had updated its “Hangouts” feature and we couldn’t find the new button. But it’s been found! Also, in this podcast we have a first: I’ve finally figured out how to incorporate images without making the resulting file too large for Youtube. So now if you’re watching the podcast, you’ll see the visuals we’re describing while we’re describing them. (At least mostly. I’m still experimenting with keeping the size down and the audio quality high. This is tougher than it looks.) In this episode we discuss making my students weep uncontrollably; the dynamics of the relationship between Tyrion and Sansa; the similarities between Dany and Walter White; the politics of Stannis Baratheon; and many other things beside. Enjoy!
Enjoy this fine podcast without the images I painstakingly inserted into it just for you.
Our very civilized discussion of the premiere (S03E01).
Fancy-talking about “Dark Wings, Dark Words” (S03E02).
Here we are blathering on about “Walk of Punishment” (S03E03).
Don’t watch — because you can’t — us discuss “And Now His Watch Has Ended” (S03E04).
The rudely interrupted first half of our discussion of “Kissed by Fire” (S03E05).
The second half of our discussion of religion in “Kissed by Fire” (S03E05).
In which we discuss “The Climb” sans spoilers (S03E06).
“The Climb” with spoilers (S03E06).
UPDATE: In case anyone’s curious as to the spontaneous fits of intemperate profanity.
Mike Elk has a really great piece on the 1-day federal contract workers strike. It’s simple. First, our government should not be allowed to contract with employers who have a history of labor law violations. Second, all workers toiling for the federal government, whether directly or through subcontracts, should make a living wage. An excerpt:
“I work at Quick Pita in the food court of the Ronald Reagan Building. I work nearly 12 hours every day serving lunch to the thousands of people who work in the building. But I am not here to tell you how hard I work. I am here to tell you that my employer does not follow the law,” testified Antonio Vanegas before a hearing of the Congressional Progressive Caucus yesterday.
Vanegas is one of 100,000 low-wage workers in the Washington, DC area, according to Good Jobs Nation, many of whom are employed by federal contractors or in federally owned buildings like Union Station, the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, and the Ronald Reagan Building. He and about 100 of his colleagues went on a one-day strike yesterday in order to draw attention to their low pay. Despite provisions in the federal Service Contract Act stating that federal contract workers like Antonio Vanegas should make at least the local prevailing wage, up until a few weeks ago Vanegas was making $6.50 an hour–less than the federal minimum wage of $7.25 and well below the D.C. minimum wage of $8.25. Additionally, Vanegas works 60 hours a week, but claims he receives no overtime pay for hours he works past 40, in violation of the Federal Labor Standards Act.
“There are many workers in the food court who are like me, who don’t make enough to pay the rent, put food on our tables and take care of our families,” said Vanegas in his testimony. “That’s why I’m here and why so many workers like me are on strike today. We want the federal government to be a good landlord and rent prime retail space to employers who follow the law. We want the government to lead by example and guarantee that all workers who do work on behalf of the federal government earn a legal and living wage.”
This strike has made an impact within the Democratic caucus. Whether Nancy Pelosi’s vow to bring it to Obama leads to the president actually doing something about it, I don’t know. But he needs to. Again, raising the working standards of federal workers is something he can do without congressional approval, so there are zero good reasons why he should not act.
Allow me to also note how subcontracting is a malignant plague upon the working conditions of all people. Whether it is the Gap subcontracting in Bangladesh to avoid any responsibility to the workers making its products or the federal government looking to cut costs by outsourcing labor, subcontracting hurts working-class people. There is no good reason why it should exist. Corporations and governments can employ people directly.
Paul Campos, Above the Law 2011 Lawyer of the Year
Erik Loomis, HNN Cliopatria 2011 Best Series of Posts
