The Distant Ocean

And I mean that most sincerely

Fight!

Late last month, a Web site called the Electronic Intifada reported that Ethan Bronner, the Jerusalem bureau chief of The Times, has a son in the Israeli military. Others, including Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, a liberal media watchdog group, demanded to know if it was true and, if so, why it did not create an unacceptable conflict of interest for Bronner and The Times.

With all due respect to EI and FAIR, I think we can safely assume that Bronner and the Times will have no trouble maintaining the exact same level of objectivity they've always shown when it comes to Israel.

This can't possibly go wrong

It's good to know that in between obliterating Afghan wedding parties and executing children, the US military still has time to dream a little:

In its 2011 budget (PDF, 522 pages), the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency lays out its intention to create "BioDesign," a project to create artificial life, presumably with military purposes in mind.

"BioDesign eliminates the randomness of natural evolutionary advancement primarily by advanced genetic engineering and molecular biology technologies to produce the intended biological effect," the DARPA document states.

The agency says it wants to develop "a robust understanding of the collective mechanisms that contribute to cell death" so as to "enable a new generation of regenerative cells that could ultimately be programmed to live indefinitely."

You know, there are some science fiction stories I wouldn't mind becoming true, but this isn't one of them.  (But then again neither was this, and we're making stellar progress there as well.)

AND FURTHERMORE: This comes in the wake of the Pentagon doing its best to make Terminator 2 a reality:

The Pentagon has unveiled a new "chemical robot" that's half liquid, half solid. [...] The new robot — which scientist are calling a ChemBot — moves by inflating and deflating parts of its body via a process called jamming. This causes its skin to change between semi-liquid and semi-solid states.

(My favorite quote from the story was "It's like the Blob with an attitude"—because the original Blob was really short on attitude, wasn't it?)

BUT: Despite all of that, the most immediately horrifying manifestation of science fiction spilling over into reality for us Californians is Arnold Schwarzenegger promising to veto single-payer health care legislation for the third time.   Y'know, as a kid I never even suspected that when he said "Fuck you, asshole" he was talking to me personally.

Toxically cute pudge

I'm off to see what a volcano is like when it's covered with snow, but I thought I'd leave you with this while I'm gone.  I warn you: if you're prone to cute overload, turn away NOW.  I'm talking Knut+ here, people.

Don't believe me?  Ok, then, don't say you weren't warned:

If your brain is still functioning there's more here.  Also, in related news, don't forget the big sporting event this weekend!

We've tried nothing, and we're all out of ideas

John Feffer bewails the lack of any alternative to the Democratic Party:

We don't have our own party, which would say yes to things we like. True, we have the Green Party and assorted groupuscules. But I'm talking about a viable, national party that secures the votes of the 16 percent of Americans who identify themselves as progressives, and can win a governing majority by crafting arguments that appeal to the two-thirds of Americans who support progressive ideas.

Got that?  We don't have a national party that says yes to things we like, except for the national party that says yes to things we like.  But the Green Party doesn't count because it's not "viable"—meaning it hasn't somehow managed to garner the votes of the 16% of Americans who identify as progressives, but who refuse to vote for it until the 16% of Americans who identify as progressives have already voted for it.

Call me pedantic, but I can't help but sense a subtle logical flaw here.

Liberals like Feffer (and he's far from being the only one) apparently want to see a new "progressive" party spring to life fully formed like Athena popping out of Zeus's skull, somehow instantly gaining ballot access in all 50 states and going directly from non-existence to 16% of the national vote in a single election cycle—though they themselves won't actually vote for this miracle party until the next election cycle, once it's a known "viable" quantity.  And until all of that happens, they refuse to throw their vote away!  On anyone but the Democrats, that is.

I sometimes imagine a dialog with a drowning liberal:

DROWNING LIBERAL: Help!  Help!

ME: You seem to be drowning.  Here, let me throw you this life preserver.

DL: No!  How do I know that life preserver is viable?  It might dissolve on contact with salt water!  I won't grab it unless I see twenty million other people use it first!

ME: Well, that's up to you.  But I have to say that no matter what, I think it'd be better than what you're holding on to now.

DL: You mean this anchor?

ME: Yeah, that.

DL: Well, it's very easy to say that, but how can I be sure?  That life preserver may never have been tested in the water, whereas this anchor is obviously a viable seafaring device!  Sure, in some ideal world the life preserver might be better, but this anchor is serving its intended purpose in the actual ocean right now!  And furthermore <glub glub glub>.

You might be tempted to feel sorry for poor DL, but don't worry—there are millions more exactly like him.

Shadow puppies

In case you noticed an article come and go for a few hours yesterday, that was me mucking up the target date when I republished a puppy posting from 6 months ago that I'd been hiding from the Google image indexer (just the latest in a series of tricks I've tried to keep it from rising to the top of the puppy image search and filling up the access logs).  I've sent it spiraling back through time again now.  So no, you weren't seeing things.

ADDING: If there's anyone out there who happened across this site thanks to this Google image search and is now a regular reader, I'd love to hear about it...but I can't help but suspect that most of those people are just using me for their cute animal fix.

Ilk

While I was reading Howard Zinn over the past few days, I happened across Adolph Reed's take on Obama—from January of 1996:

In Chicago, we've gotten a foretaste of the new breed of foundation-hatched black communitarian voices; one of them, a smooth Harvard lawyer with impeccable do-good credentials and vacuous-to-repressive neoliberal politics, has won a state senate seat on a base mainly in the liberal foundation and development worlds. His fundamentally bootstrap line was softened by a patina of the rhetoric of authentic community, talk about meeting in kitchens, small-scale solutions to social problems, and the predictable elevation of process over program--the point where identity politics converges with old-fashioned middle-class reform in favoring form over substance. I suspect that his ilk is the wave of the future in U.S. black politics.

Reed quoted this himself (and probably does at every opportunity, annoying his mechanic, his dentist, and friends at faculty parties to no end), since he's apparently pleased with it.  And justifiably so; that's some serious perspicacity.

I found this interesting because people whose opinions I respect have somehow waded through Obama's books and concluded that he used to be more than the grasping, soul-dead imperial roach he is now.  I more or less took their word for it, in large part because I couldn't possibly care less about his past (and I only pay attention to his present unwillingly, because of the position he holds); I just assumed that his abandonment of this core humanity was a recent development, necessitated by his single-minded pursuit of power.  But it did give his story a cut-rate tragic dimension.  So it's reassuring to hear that no, he's actually been sucking the life essence out of every authentic movement he's been around—cynically co-opting their language while tossing aside their genuine concerns, in service to his own ambition—from the very beginning of his political career.

Unfortunately we're going to have to traverse "the point where identity politics converges with old-fashioned middle-class reform in favoring form over substance" at least two more times, with our first female and first gay presidents.  But on the bright side, if we play our cards right we can cut the pain in half by electing a neoliberal lesbian!

Irreplaceable

I think Noam Chomsky got it exactly right when he said that Howard Zinn is "irreplaceable".  I enjoyed A People's History of the United States, though it wasn't formative for me, but it was a landmark book—and critical in that it offered a more honest (and therefore more radical) view of history in a style that made it accessible to people who might not normally be open to a left viewpoint.  What came through so clearly for me was Zinn's sincerity and humanism; he never seemed like he had an ideological axe to grind, but rather like someone with a deep commitment to the basic dignity and worth of each of us, and I'd say that's exactly why his work has had such broad and lasting appeal.  It was a comfort just to know he was out there, and it's hard to believe he's not anymore.

This was a pretty crappy way to start the year, and before the decade is out I'm afraid we'll be losing a few more irreplaceable people.

White also black

I had to share this sparkling jewel I happened across in my research for the last posting:

By the "radio clowns" I mean all of those salesmen who go on the radio and pretend to be conservatives, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Mark Levin and so on.

These guys are not conservatives. Conservatism, in either its paleo- or libertarian forms, recognizes natural elites. And these radio clowns spend most of their time braying against elites. That's because they're populists. And populism is a form of liberalism.

And in case you were too dumbfounded to absorb that, he repeats it:

...why don't these wannabe conservatives get it? Because they're populists. And populism is a form of liberalism.

I take this to be one of those "anything bad is liberal" arguments—you know, the kind that says the Nazis were not the Platonic ideal of right wing fascism but actually far-left liberals, or that Jesus was a rock-ribbed conservative.  And of course political descriptors like "liberal" and "conservative" are imprecise at best.  Still: gosh.

Strike the root

I'm sure I won't be the only one quoting Paddy Chayefsky in the wake of the Supreme Corporate's idiotic decision, but here you go:

There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs. There are no third worlds. There is no West. There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multivariate, multinational dominion of dollars. Petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars, reichmarks, rins, rubles, pounds, and shekels.

It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things today. That is the atomic and subatomic and galactic structure of things today! [...] There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and ITT and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today.

(If you haven't seen the movie, you really should see the movie.  And be sure to see the other movie too.)

This also seems like a good time to remember this:

1. Of the 100 largest economies in the world, 51 are now global corporations; only 49 are countries.
2. The combined sales of the world's Top 200 corporations are far greater than a quarter of the world's economic activity. 
3. The Top 200 corporations' combined sales are bigger than the combined economies of all countries minus the biggest 9; that is they surpass the combined economies of 182 countries.
4. The Top 200 have almost twice the economic clout of the poorest four-fifths of humanity.

That data is from the year 2000; below are some updated stats from 2005:

Of the world's largest 150 economic entities, 95 are corporations (63.3%) according to data released this month by Fortune Magazine and the World Bank. Wal-Mart, BP, Exxon Mobil, and Royal Dutch/Shell Group all rank in the 25 largest entities in the world, above countries that include Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Norway, Denmark, Poland, South Africa, and Greece.

But even taking all that into account, I'm not particularly bothered by this decision.  It ultimately does little to change the reality of corporate control of our political system, and in a sense it's an improvement because it makes that reality clear and undeniable.  The mask is gone.  Also, this will be the first time many people have heard (or fully understood) that our legal system treats corporations as persons, with all the rights that entails—and that's a good thing, because only the clinically insane believe that it's desirable for immortal and amoral profit-driven entities to have more power over our lives than they already do.  Even hardcore conservatives will usually agree on this point if you talk to them about it one on one, with specific examples.  I would never have imagined at the beginning of this week that by the end of it the phrase "corporate personhood" would be on so many lips, yet here we are.  Thanks, Supreme Thwart!

And the fact that this makes it impossible to pass laws limiting corporate brainwashing is also arguably for the best.  McCain-Feingold was never more than a half-assed palliative that left corporate domination over the system essentially intact—the illusion of reform, not the real thing.  In its breathtaking, overreaching arrogance, this decision forces us toward the only real solution to ending corporate dominance not only of our political system but of every aspect of our lives: passing a constitutional amendment to put an end to the offensively absurd fiction of corporate personhood.

So now that the Supreme Snort has made it illegal to waste our time hacking at the branches of evil, maybe we can finally start striking at the root.

ADDING: Conservative sites have shown an impressive dedication to hypocrisy as they've studiously avoided condemning this decision as "judicial activism", but National Review Online deserves special recognition for choosing yesterday as the perfect day to decry liberal judicial activism.  Way to go, NRO!

Wheels within wheels, man

In comments, redcatbicycliste pulls back the veil:

Conspiracy theory (?): I think that Obama [secretly] wanted that woman to lose the Senate race in Massachusetts. Por quoi? Because, it lets him off of the hook of having to deal with, to sign into legislation, the so-called health care (although, what both houses of the Congress has drafted is a turd; and I think it should be called "access to medical services", and it should be free to all citizens) reform.

Now, I had the same thought last night when I read this article.  But I took it one step further: maybe Barack Obama had Ted Kennedy bumped off.

Makes perfect sense, right?  Think about it: they got rid of Kennedy because he was the most prominent voice in the Senate for health care, and they knew he'd not only push for provisions they didn't want but was a guaranteed yes vote.  Then with Kennedy out of the way they tried to stall until after the Massachusetts special election, so they'd have their too-many-Republicans excuse in place.  When the delay started becoming too obvious they asked Joe Lieberman—Obama's mentor, don't forget—to stop the whole process in its tracks (remember what a "surprise" it was when he switched his vote?).  And that plus the holidays gave them enough time to get another Republican elected so Obama could immediately roll over, thus completing Operation Health-Care-Pretend.

Crazy?  Maybe.  But maybe that's just what Barack Obama wants us to think.

And it doesn't stop there.  Was Obama also behind Paul Wellstone's so-called "accident"?  C'mon, people, the question answers itself.  The guy's not playing 11-dimensional chess, he's playing 11-dimensional MULTIPLE ASSASSINATION.

Dead shetland

I was reading the often-essential Stop Me Before I Vote Again a few days ago, and Al Schumann presented some useful terminology he's picked up from the Corrente Wire blog:

[The Corrente Wire bloggers] call the scab liberals "Access Bloggers". I find that term very amusing. It's understated, it can be used when calling someone a scab would give everyone the vapors, and it's pointed right at the heart of the scab liberals' fatuous self-importance.

The access bloggers really believe that their accommodationism creates an implicit obligation. It will be honored because that's what social contracts are all about. It says so right there in the Cliff Notes. If the party of the first part, them, has sufficient merit mojo, which they do, then the party of the second part, Democrats, will cross seas and climb mountains to fulfill the commitments entailed by receipt of the support.

Needless to say, this has never happened and never will. The Corrente Wire bloggers call the belief that it will "Persistent Ponyism". The magic pony will arrive any day. All the scab liberals need to do is stand ready to sign for it.

And what should I see today but Ezra Klein putting the Q in QED:

The fundamental pact between a political party and its supporters is that the two groups believe the same thing and pledge to work on it together. And the Democratic base feels that it has held to its side of the bargain. It elected a Democratic majority and a Democratic president. It swallowed tough compromises on the issues it cared about most. It swallowed concessions to politicians it didn't like and industry groups it loathed. But it persisted.

(In fairness to this lesser Klein, he did threaten that he and others may hold their collective breath until their new best friends finally show up: "If the Democratic Party won't uphold its end of the bargain, there's no reason its base should pretend the deal is still on."  But the Democrats know this storm will pass once the base has had a little ice cream and been tucked in for the night—and if that doesn't work, they'll just read them the bedtime story about Scary Sarah.  That does it every time.)

And in case you've forgotten—or finally managed to wire-brush it from your memory—this would be the same guy who squeezed this one out back in 2008:

Obama's finest speeches do not excite. They do not inform. They don't even really inspire. They elevate. They enmesh you in a grander moment, as if history has stopped flowing passively by, and, just for an instant, contracted around you, made you aware of its presence, and your role in it. He is not the Word made flesh, but the triumph of word over flesh, over color, over despair.

Man, is this scary—it's like he read my mind.  No, really, I'm dead serious here.  Because I cannot tell you how many times I've found myself thinking that Obama's speeches do not excite, do not inform, and don't even really inspire.

(I have to wonder how Ezra's feeling in his most secret heart of hearts about President Fleshword these days; I suspect the elevation is off by a few feet, y'know?)

The surplus population

Give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses?  Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me?  Ha ha, just kidding!  Actually they should rot in the hellhole we've helped to create for them, and if they don't we'll throw them in another one:

United States officials say they worry that in the coming weeks, worsening conditions in Haiti could spur an exodus. They have not only started a campaign to persuade Haitians to stay put, but they are also laying plans to scoop up any boats carrying illegal immigrants and send them to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. [...]

The State Department has also been denying many seriously injured people in Port-au-Prince visas to be transferred to Miami for surgery and treatment, said Dr. William O’Neill, the dean of the Miller School of Medicine at the University of Miami, which has erected a field hospital near the airport in the Haitian capital.

"It’s beyond insane," Dr. O’Neill said Saturday, having just returned to Miami from Haiti.

No, it's beyond immoral, but it's perfectly sane (and just as predictable).  The Obama administration will do just what other administrations have done in similar circumstances: posture as much as it thinks it needs to while the cameras are rolling, while taking as little concrete action as it thinks it can get away with (and reversing itself as soon as it's politically tenable).  For example, Obama's Guantanamo plans are straight out of the Clinton administration:

[In] the 1992 election campaign, Bill Clinton campaigned on a pledge to reverse what he called then-President George HW Bush’s "cruel policy" of holding Haitian refugees at Guantanamo with no legal rights in US courts. Upon his election, however, Clinton reversed his position and sided with the Bush administration in denying the Haitians legal rights. The Haitians were held in atrocious conditions and the new Democratic president was sued by the Center for Constitutional Rights (sound familiar?).

And during the US attack on Yugoslavia the Clinton administration initially tried to defuse growing criticism of its refusal to take in any Kosovo Albanian refugees by announcing a plan to temporarily relocate 20,000 of them to Guantanamo, which administration officials admitted was "selected to eliminate the possibility that some of the refugees might be able to claim political asylum in the United States."  Clinton eventually abandoned the Guantanamo plan and allowed some Albanians into the continental US, in part due to public outcry over the blatant hypocrisy.  We'll see if Obama's "cruel policy" of corralling traumatized Haitians at Guantanamo meets with a similar reaction (and a similar fate), but I think it's likely that Haiti will drop off the front pages soon enough that he'll be able to get away with it.

Clinton wasn't our first black president, but Obama is most definitely our first black President Clinton.

Lam it, runt gherkin!

It's the second annual National Brain-Searing Irony Day (which I earnestly hope will only be a four-part series).  And I can't think of a more appropriate way to commemorate Martin Luther King, Jr. than to quote a pasty white Jewish female meticulously trashing our first black President:

[Obama] favours the grand symbolic gesture over deep structural change every time. So he will make a dramatic announcement about closing the notorious Guantánamo Bay prison – while going ahead with an expansion of the lower profile but frighteningly lawless Bagram prison in Afghanistan, and opposing accountability for Bush officials who authorised torture. He will boldly appoint the first Latina to the Supreme Court, while intensifying Bush-era enforcement measures in a new immigration crackdown. He will make investments in green energy, while championing the fantasy of "clean coal" and refusing to tax emissions, the only sure way to substantially reduce the burning of fossil fuels. Most importantly, he will claim to be ending the war in Iraq, and will retire the ugly "war on terror" phrase – even as the conflicts guided by that fatal logic escalate in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

This preference for symbols over substance, and this unwillingness to stick to a morally clear if unpopular course, is where Obama decisively parts ways with the transformative political movements from which he has borrowed so much (the pop-art posters from Che, his cadence from King, his "Yes We Can!" slogan from the migrant farmworkers – si se puede). These movements made unequivocal demands of existing power structures: for land distribution, higher wages, ambitious social programmes. Because of those high-cost demands, these movements had not only committed followers but serious enemies. Obama, in sharp contrast not just to social movements but to transformative presidents such as FDR, follows the logic of marketing: create an appealing canvas on which all are invited to project their deepest desires but stay vague enough not to lose anyone but the committed wing nuts (which, granted, constitute a not inconsequential demographic in the United States).

And furthermore:

Obama's election and the world's corresponding love affair with his rebranded America came at a crucial time. In the two months before the election, the financial crisis rocking world markets was being rightly blamed not just on the contagion of Wall Street's bad bets but on the entire economic model of deregulation and privatisation that had been preached from US-dominated institutions such as the IMF and the WTO. If the United States were led by someone who didn't happen to be a global superstar, US prestige would have continued to plummet and the rage at the economic model at the heart of the global meltdown would likely have turned into sustained demands for new rules to rein in (and seriously tax) speculative finance.

Those rules were supposed to have been on the agenda when G20 leaders met at the height of the economic crisis in London in April 2009. Instead, the press focused on excited sightings of the fashionable Obama couple, while world leaders agreed to revive the ailing IMF – a chief culprit in this mess – with up to a trillion dollars in new financing. In short, Obama didn't just rebrand America, he resuscitated the neoliberal economic project when it was at death's door.

That's Naomi Klein, who seems to be genetically incapable of writing anything that isn't informed, insightful, and worth the time to read in its entirety (increasingly rare for me these days when it comes to political commentary).  And this is just a sample; by all means, read the whole thing and save me from further fair use violations.

You get what you pay for

Quid...:

A new figure, based on an exclusive analysis created for Raw Story by the Center for Responsive Politics, shows that President Obama received a staggering $20,175,303 from the healthcare industry during the 2008 election cycle, nearly three times the amount of his presidential rival John McCain. McCain took in $7,758,289, the Center found.

...pro quo:

Pressed by industry lobbyists, White House officials on Wednesday assured drug makers that the administration stood by a behind-the-scenes deal to block any Congressional effort to extract cost savings from them beyond an agreed-upon $80 billion.

Drug industry lobbyists reacted with alarm this week to a House health care overhaul measure that would allow the government to negotiate drug prices and demand additional rebates from drug manufacturers.

In response, the industry successfully demanded that the White House explicitly acknowledge for the first time that it had committed to protect drug makers from bearing further costs in the overhaul.

I'm not sure exactly how this is Ralph Nader's fault, but I'm confident there's a liberal out there somewhere who could explain it to me.