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Not Paying Attention

[ 0 ] March 17, 2007 | Robert Farley

Hey, statements like “I probably deserved this” make me feel bad about vicious. personal critiques of Mickey Kaus. On the other hand, statements like

U.S. military deaths in Iraq have apparently declined by about 20% since the “surge” began.

display what can only be described as an extraordinary level of ignorance about the US occupation of Iraq. Since the beginning of the Occupation, casualities have unsurprisingly fluctuated from month to month. I’m not sure when Mickey dates the beginning of the “Surge”, but US killed for January were 2.77/day, for February were 3.0/day, and for March thus far have been 2.94/day. November and September 2006 deaths were 2.57 day, and August 2006 2.13/day. Since December 15, 2005 US deaths have run 2.45/day.

Obviously, it’s absurd to claim that US deaths have dropped 20% since the beginning of the “surge”. But this is hardly surprising; Kaus’ assaults on the Left have never required evidence, while his attacks on the Right… well, if he made one, I might have something to say about it…

Aw….

[ 0 ] March 17, 2007 | Robert Farley

Deepest condolences to Mike “Leo” Strausz on the defeat of his Michigan State Spartans. Sadly, Mike made the cardinal error of confusing his rooting interests with a rational assessment of the odds. I would never make such a mistake…

Worst American Birthdays, vol. VIII

[ 0 ] March 17, 2007 | davenoon

John Wayne Gacy — restaurant manager, building contractor, Jaycee, birthday entertainer, Democratic party precinct captain, and serial killer — was born 65 years ago today in Chicago.

Although his father was an alcoholic and Gacy himself suffered a head injury and heart problems as a youth, his childhood was more or less uneventful. As a young man he meandered his way into the world of business, becoming a successful shoe salesman in Illinois and the manager of a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant in Iowa. After enduring a divorce and serving a brief prison term for child molestation — a crime that stemmed from his days managing the KFC — Gacy returned to the city of his birth in 1971. He remarried, becoming a stepfather to two children, and during his free time — when he wasn’t impressing the community with his volunteer work as an amateur clown — began raping and strangling young men and boys. Dismayed by her husband’s erratic behavior and his peculiar reading habits, Gacy’s second wife left him in 1976; he was less than devastated by the divorce and continued about both his work and his hobbies. At the time of his confession in December 1978, John Wayne Gacy had murdered 33 people, most of whom he buried underneath his house and garage, which he famously described as an unlicensed funeral home.

Four days before his 38th birthday, Gacy was condemned to death by the state of Illinois. He spent the next 14 years at Manard Correctional Facility outside Chester, Illinois, where he passed much of his time painting clowns. In May 1994, Gacy was injected with a lethal dose of sodium thiopentol, pancurinium bromide and potassium chloride after reinforcing his arteries with a final meal of fried chicken and french fries. His last words, according to legend, were “kiss my ass.”

A cultural icon, John Wayne Gacy has been the subject of dozens of books, numerous documentary films, and countless songs. Of the latter, this is the only one worth a damn, even though it understates Gacy’s actual body count:

. . . better video (longer loading time, though) here:

“>

Ownership Foreclosure Society

[ 0 ] March 17, 2007 | davenoon

File this under “Depressing but Not Surprising”:

From 2000 to 2005, homeownership rates increased significantly only among households in the top two-fifths of the income distribution, those earning more than $46,883, according to the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey.

Homeownership declined for families in the bottom two-fifths of the income scale. In the lowest fifth — where families make less than $20,180 — homeownership was only 42.4 percent in 2005, which was 3 percentage points less than it was 25 years earlier and 26 percentage points below the national average.

Part of the reason is the structure of government subsidies, which are worth very little to low-income families but quite a bit to families with big incomes. Those well-off families typically do not need government support to buy a home but use it to buy bigger places than they would otherwise purchase.

June, according to the article, has been declared “National Homeownership Month” by President Bush. By that time, it appears that well over half a million homes purchased with sub-prime mortgages will be in arrears or foreclosure. Thank goodness we’ve maintained our bankruptcy laws so that people facing difficult economic circumstances can start ov– oh, wait. Never mind.

Friday Cat (Power) Blogging

[ 0 ] March 16, 2007 | davenoon

Missed Opportunities

[ 0 ] March 16, 2007 | davenoon

Goddammit.

Oh, well. Looks like Assrocket was there.

That’s right. He actually wrote that “[a]nyone willing to criticize Gandhi, the most overrated man of the 20th century, is worth a second look.”

The Coming Misogyny of Campaign ’08

[ 0 ] March 16, 2007 | Scott Lemieux

What Garance said. Beck’s attack on Clinton is no less objectionable than Coulter’s attack on Edwards.

…see also Echidne.

Academy of the Overrated: T.V. Edition

[ 0 ] March 16, 2007 | Scott Lemieux

Shakes asks about the most overrated shows ever to appear on the teevee. (Fortunately, I’ve never seen Lost and can avoid her wrath.) Doing this with television can be tricky, especially since so many series go on after being exhausted (because critics seemed to catch up with Six Feet Under only after it became not very good, for example, it could plausibly be on a most underrated and most overrated list.) So I’m thinking of shows in their “prime.” And I also strive to bracket out questions of mere genre taste; I find The X-Files overrated not so much on aesthetic grounds as that I find the entire premise too intensely irritating to get beyond, which I don’t think is really with the spirit of the category. Anyway, here we go:

  • Sex and the City: It was a critical darling and cultural icon. And it was also a show with C-grade broadcast sitcom writing and (Cynthia Nixon excepted) barely-adequate-to-horrible acting about exceptionally uninteresting characters learning fundamentally sexist lessons. In other words, the easiest choice on the list.
  • 24: The recent discussion about its right-wing politics obscures the real problems with the show, which is that it sucks, something that was quite evident before its politics became clear. In the immortal words of the Editors, “Here’s the plot of “24″: there’s a bunch of terrorists, Kiefer stops them, oh wait no he didn’t, but now he did really, and just in the nick of time! Because even the cruelest TV executive couldn’t stretch this over more than 4 hours, the rest of the show has to be padded out with subplots, mainly involving his daughter getting kidnapped. Oh, Lord, can that girl get kidnapped. Most people can live a good long life without ever getting kidnapped; an unfortunate few do get kidnapped once; there are probably a few examples through history of people getting kidnapped two, or maybe even three, times. Kiefer’s daughter gets kidnapped like seven times a day. She gets kidnapped from people who kidnapped her from kidnappers. If she makes it to dinner time without being kidnapped at least twice, that’s a cause for celebration in the Kiefer household.” And the fact that Keifer Sutherland can win a best actor Emmy tells you all you need to know about the value of those awards.
  • The West Wing: It may seem strange to put what is, I guess, Sorkin’s best show on the list, but that’s the overrated/bad distinction. Even if most critics only saw the glaring suckiosity of Studio 60 after it became a ratings fiasco, it’s hard to call it overrated at this late date, and SportsNight wasn’t long-running enough. Between its wholly unearned reputation for political acuity and the fact that it was a mediocre show discussed as if it was comparable in quality to The Sopranos (hint: in an actual great show, all the characters don’t sound like the script’s author), I found it essentially unbearable despite the good actors. I’ll admit that the 9/11 episode was anomalously bad, but when I saw those students trapped in a room so that a “character” could read–complete with blackboard!–trite moderate-liberal position papers about the Political Implications Of Terrorist Attacks at them, I could identify strongly with them because I had seen an Aaron Sorkin show.
  • Law and Order: SVU Granted, the all-pervos-all-the-time premise does largely pre-empt the “I’m putting the Iraq War on trial!!!!!!!!!!!!!” moments that make many late episodes of the mother show unwatchable. Still, there’s something about the DeMillian simultaneous exploitation and moralism that’s very annoying, and as a procedural it’s pretty lame. Plus, Mariska Hargitay isn’t that good.

Hey if you need a new stand for your tv then look no further we have the TV furniture you need. Whether its Food Network TV shows you want to watch on you’re new big Plasma TV or if you want to hide your old tv in a new tv entertainment center we can help.

How Can Students Understand Whether Xenophobia is Good Or Bad Without Reading Rising Sun?

[ 0 ] March 16, 2007 | Scott Lemieux

Shorter Dr. Mrs. Ole Perfesser: “The fact that listening to a fourth-rate pop novelist can cause people to change their minds about the consensus of actual scientists proves that science needs to be balanced with fiction more frequently.”

Blog War!!!!!

[ 0 ] March 16, 2007 | Robert Farley

Bloggingheads freaks out my computer, and watching Mickey Kaus freaks out my eyeballs, so I typically tend to avoid it. Apparently, however, Mickey uses his pedestal to assail Ezra, who seemed, when I met him on Wednesday, to be the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being etc. etc. The point of attack is Ezra’s assertion that neoliberalism is both dead and wasn’t really all that much anyway.

Mickey’s point is fairly simple; the primary enemy of the Democratic Party remains on the left, and Ezra is a twerp for not being able to understand that. The attack on Ezra is only a minor manifestation of Mickey’s larger approach to politics. This approach includes, of course, an effort to purge the Democratic Party of all evident Democrats. Ezra’s suggestion that neoliberalism is both dead and that it failed is a challenge to just about everything Mickey stands for, both personally and politically. Now, my own position on this question is closer to that of Matt; neoliberalism had its place, but at this point in time the “Left”, such that it is, has internalized the most important critiques and has rendered anti-leftists purges of the sort that Mickey is demanding rather pointless and quaint. For Ezra, a young, popular writer with hair to suggest that not only Mickey’s political stance but, essentially, his entire career has been a waste of time must be particularly irritating. Mickey, along with so many young men of his generation, fought and died face down in the mud, in the jungles of the New Republic, trying to kill unions and other pro-Democratic interest groups in the 1990s. And now, does anyone appreciate the sacrifice? Does Mickey get a parade? Of course not; rather, some young kid like Ezra Klein comes along and spits in his face, and tells him it was all for nothing.

The biggest problem, of course, is that Mickey remains essentially clueless about most anything that took place after 1998. Even after seven years of George W. Bush, he thinks it more important to assail relatively trivial groups on the left wing of the Democratic Party than to challenge anything (foreign policy, economic, social, etc.) that the Republican Party has done. He is so ignorant of the left half of the blogosphere that he declares Ezra to be on the “far left”, an argument that’s utterly untenable if you’ve ever, you know, actually read Ezra Klein. Really, what has to be wrong with someone to assert that “neoliberalism is needed more than ever” in the wake of the Bush administration?

Kaus is a cartoon figure, which Robert Wright tries to point out in polite terms in their Bloggingheads (“you’re kind of a neoliberal…icon”). He combines puerile insight with absolutely the worst writing of any blogger I’ve ever encountered. Without the Slate link, he’d be getting about 40 hits a day. I still find it valuable to launch the occasional attack against him, largely because he’s not self-aware enough to render his arguments in less than transparent terms. I’m sure that other “neoliberals” find gays icky, hate unions, and get stiffys from Ann Coulter, but only Mickey fails to understand that these are things that reasonable people ought to be ashamed of.

Treason-in-Defense-of-Slavery Heritage Month

[ 0 ] March 15, 2007 | davenoon

When Loomis attacks!

Responding to Georgia’s move to declare April “Confederate Heritage Month,” Erik throws the crackers into the horse trough:

The bill’s sponsor State Senator Jeff Mullis wants to honor “all those millions of its citizens of various races and ethnic groups and religions who contributed in sundry and myriad ways to the cause of Southern Independence.” Meaning those millions, of whom approximately 3 were not white, who tore the country in two in order that they could enslave black people. These treasonous Confederates are clearly worth honoring. After all, not only did they leave the union in order to rape and kill blacks with impunity, tear their families apart, and take their labor for nothing, but they also caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans! Go Confederacy!

It strains credulity, of course, to hear Southern apologists insisting that they’re merely trying to “honor” the contributions of a multiracial, multiethnic, ecumencial Confederacy. As David Blight’s Race and Reunion argues with great eloquence, the Civil War was as much a struggle over memory as anything else. After the war ended, there were essentially three modes of historical available to account for the origins and brutality of the war — the white supremacist romance of the Lost Cause; the freedperson’s narrative that clearly identified that origins of the war in the inhuman system of chattel slavery and saw the war as an opportunity to vindicate and reconstruct the nation’s mission (and its Constitution); and the reconciliationist narrative that urged quick “reunion” between warring brothers.

Blight demonstrates that by the 1890s (and unquestionably by World War I) the reconciliationist memory of the war acquired hegemonic status — and it did so by throwing the cause of black equality under the wagon and, indeed, accomodating key aspects of the white supremacist narrative, including its willful denial of slavery’s centrality to Southern nationalism. In films like Birth of a Nation, for example, we can see elements of both accounts working quite successfully together to make an argument against black freedom. African American historical perspectives are obviously inadmissible, because they would undermine the totality of that racist fable.

My point here is quite simple — in any public recollection of the American Civil War, there is simply no way to “honor” the Confederacy without reinforcing a sense of satisfaction with the cultural and political victories it miraculously achieved in the half-century that followed the war. The memories that Georgia’s legislature seeks to honor were instrumental in the longer project of racist subordination that guided that state well into the 20th century. Not to acknowledge that is, as Loomis points out, to basically admit to being an asshole.

(On a more personal note, I’m already irritated beyond measure that Georgia celebrates Confederate Memorial Day on my daughter’s birthday. Now they have to go and potentially spoil the entire month.)

But…That’s Where Howard Dean Lives!!!!!!

[ 0 ] March 15, 2007 | Scott Lemieux

Congratulations to regular LGM commenter Matt Weiner, who will be leaving beautiful Lubbock, Texas for a new position at the University of Vermont; I have to say that sounds like an excellent move, plus he will be more likely to attend unfogged meetups. Bobby Knight is probably happy to get another damned northern liberal off campus…

[via NYE]

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