cheese it, the cops!

group memberships are multiple

if it makes you feel better about throwing some richly-deserved criticism/abuse at barack obama, let me point out that he's not only black, but male, heterosexual, a lawyer, and makes like 400k. the minority of people who control vast military and intelligence establishments is rather a privileged minority, though occasionally they do get lynched. however, they also lynch people all day. feel better about the whole thing now? alright, let my tuffy go.

Despair versus boredom versus making getting it right

The Times has an interesting article this morning on the conflict between the Japanese concept of lifetime employment and the whole Milton Friedman "Shareholder value is not the most important thing, it's the only thing!" approach.  The UAW had negotiated a similar package for its members in the 50s and while it cost money, it did keep the social fabric in places like Detroit and Flint and Gary and other places devastated by the goat rodeo that was the auto industry in the 70s, 80s, and early 90s. As that program was downsized and ultimately eliminated by through contract negotiations, bad situations got worse. Similar approaches were used by other firms, including professional firms, where "excess" engineers, planners, business managers and so on would be assigned to social programs or to nonprofits to help the recipient organizations cope with their challenges. I assume the corporation was able to write off that time on taxes as a charitable contribution, although I do not know. It certainly showed community involvement and was effective PR.

tuffy and racial immunity

this column by kathleen parker, whom i often admire, goes for a straight endorsement of a completely wack position. so, there's nothing really wrong with clowns ridiculing political leaders, on her account. obviously, it's constitutionally protected and more or less harmless. that's true unless the leader is black, in which case ridiculing him on any grounds or in any way is a horrible enactment of our long national nightmare. in other words we're going to immunize the most powerful person on earth from the effects of free speech because he's a member of an oppressed group. let's just say you're going to need to think this through again. you're going to need to see that the arsenal and the universal surveillance sort of outweigh the ways obama is being oppressed right now. you're going to need to see that this is an unbelievably racially condescending approach; the argument, i propose, is straight-up racist: these helpless victims need our coddling. so thorough is this condescension to every member of the black race that we'll be coddling the most powerful person in the world, helping to keep him safe from the criticism of rodeo clowns half a continent away. tell you what, let's find out about tuffy's life and then try to figure out who has it easier, who makes more money, who has more prestige, to whom the public attributes more credibility, who has more power, who has more privilege, and so on. continuing the argument, tuffy is entirely above criticism, because he doesn't have enough privilege.

high crimes; forget the misdemeanors

i just want to say clearly that no president has ever been as obviously or urgently impeachable as barack obama. he oversees a massive criminal enterprise and has systematically engaged in an entirely fundamental betrayal of the liberties the american republic was founded to preserve. perhaps he studied and taught constitutional law in order to figure out how best to go about dismantling the already-disintegrating old edifice brick by brick, and then how to hammer each brick to a reddish dust. why aren't congresspersons talking about this? well, just possibly he's got their emails, web activities, text messages, phone calls, etc in a nice chunky hard-drive in the oval office. at any rate, i'd assume that were i congressperson. they'll be engaged in rituals of submission right about now. seems like a nice guy, though. and, as uncle joe says, so clean and articulate!

a rod indeed

it is indeed bizarre that the insanely disgusting alex rodriguez is playing professional baseball. i would like to point out that no one is forcing joe girardi & co to put him in the lineup, and that it is really wrong for him to be on the field, or really anywhere here in the human world. at this point i'd be scanning the stands and, in particular, the dugouts, for snipers. when he goes to take a leak and shoot up he might just get jumped and rodneykinged by his own teammates; you might want to keep him in hiding for his own protection. at least we wouldn't have to watch that fuckhead play. 

what we're actually dealing with

recommending abombazine on a nice event of censorship of the washington post re: nsa. here's the slate piece. i think that the washington post should simply publish the interview with delong in its entirety right now. the white house 'redacted' the interview. that makes it sound like they reached into the post computer system and started deleting, which i hope is unlikely. i suppose it means they sent back a redacted version. alright, he gave you the damn interview and said what he said. publish it. we're going to need some defiance here, because we are under the thumb of a profoundly oppressive and, by the standards of our own basic law, criminal regime or junta. the post has often been a little mouthpiece for various administrations, but surely it's dawning on them along with rest of us what they're actually dealing with.

you should watch fox every so often

here's shepard smith, kicking ass on surveillance

(link because the embed function on fox videos does not work.)

it's science, bitch

oh my god. 'science' has been back and forth and up and down on coffee every ten minutes for decades. one thing i really hate is irrational people who don't accept science as the only arbiter of human belief. in this case as in so many others, rationality consists in changing your mind all the time and believing contradictions. well, believing what 'science' tells you at least requires a healthy continuous deferral to evidently arbitrary authority, which, as all obama supporters acknowledge, is the key to a future of relentless and extremely unfortunate progress, understood here as chronic confusion that makes you run around in circles.

tasting tuffy

timothy egan today, like so many, refers to tuffy's amazing obama-getting-run-over-by-a-bull performance as 'tasteless.' this leaves the impression that tuffy was trying to achieve something tasteful - something sophoclean, maybe; something that sounds like mozart or looks like a nice flower arrangement - and failed. that wouldn't be my speculation about the goals of tuffy's approach, which is not to say he doesn't have better taste than paul krugman, e.g. i wonder if egan and such think that tastefulness is the goal of jokes, or poliical commentary in general, or that the bounds of tastefulness are the bounds of legitimate expression or human fun, or that tastelessness is a great form of moral evil.

i still have a dream, though, but i'm not telling you what it is

while i'm hanging myself, i want to say that i am so entirely tired of 'the i have a dream speech' that even little bits of it make me scream and flip the off switch. right. great speech. but you can't hear the same thing 18 billion times and still get anything out of it (the only exception is billie doing 'you go to my head'). over the last couple of decades, to be honest, i've been liable to use it in parody: the extreme preacherly emoting, the giant phrases of inspiration, the patterns of repetition. oh you know, it's the last day of class for my preppies. i take this approach: IN THE WORDS OF THE GREAT NEGRO SPIRITUAL: FREE AT LAST, FREE AT LAST, THANK GOD ALMIGHTY WE ARE FREE AT LAST. alright, have a great break, and let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream. every american can produce the inflections at will. i figure it's possible that other people gave other speeches at the lincoln memorial that day; let's let them shine for a mo. 

 

knock the little jockeys

i'm sure eugene allen, the white house butler, buttled excellently, and was a dignified person and a sort-of friend to presidents, in that 'help' kind of way the races used to interact. he was also a jockey on the white house lawn. i wouldn't blame him for that, but i wouldn't make a movie about it either. you might imagine to yourself what malcolm x might say about this project.

 

i forgot how great that song is.

 

what is our actual form of government?

an obvious entailment of the nsa situation is that, in fact, we have no idea who is running our government and hence, more or less, our lives. indeed, we have no idea what our actual form of government is or who holds the real power, like egyptians who were under the delusion that they'd elected their president. this should please liberals, for example, who regard the constitution as a ridiculous anachronism that keeps us from helping everyone through universal coercion. well, the constitution and the form of government it prescribes has been a joke for a long time, as anyone can now see thanks to snowden; certainly it has no resemblance whatever to the Thing currently running our lives: they leave some little institutions and phrases in place as a kind of show or historical re-enactment: that capitol, white house, supreme court in dc: it might as well be colonial williamsburg.

anyone who in fact controls a system of universal surveillance - i mean who has day-by-day management of the thing - can control anyone they please and make them do what they like. if keith anderson is in the mood, he's riding obama as in a performance of dressage. he controls who is in or out in the joint chiefs, the state department, justice, congress. he's in control of what limitations other branches of government impose on him. whoever or whatever the fisa rubber-stamp system is, it will end up doing precisely what he tells it to do. i'd recommend violent insurrection if it didn't seem entirely hopeless. so what i'd say is: just go limp, cultivate radical passivity: give up. this america thing was never going to work out anyway. people don't want to be free. and even if they do, they definitely don't want anyone else to be.

if you think the item below (skipping one) is fantastical, i want to point out that someone last year was reading the cia director's email, and they used it to end him. now you might just speculate that there might have been a little inter-agency rivalry going on. but the point is: put a bureaucracy in charge of universal secret surveillance and you have constituted a secret power that runs the country.

my contribution to counter-factual history

what if kennedy had lived? one conclusion we can definitely reach: he would have fucked everything by now. one thing the warren commission didn't fully explore was the possibility that the grassy knoll was crowded with cuckolds.

intelligence junta

one thing the ongoing disaster in egypt shows: the military never stopped running the government. (also, they run the economy in a nice version of squishy totalitarianism). well, i figure the nsa runs the government here. if they don't, it's a sheer act of charity, because for one thing they could destroy anyone at any time, don't care if you're a ceo, senator, president, and so on. indeed, they don't have to come up with substantive threats: a cocked eyebrow or barely-detectable sideways smile would make any of these people change course on a dime. next time you hear someone defending the nsa programs as essential to our national security, don't figure you should generate reasons on the other side - which are achingly obvious anyway. just ask yourself what the nsa has on him. start with mike rogers, say. this is an ad hominem i can get behind: if you are on the other side of the argument on this one, i figure it's very likely that you're not at all sincere - which is good, because if you were, you'd be profoundly evil. no, the only reasonable explanation is that keith anderson's minions are operating you like a marionette. maybe you think i'm kidding. imagine that j. edgar hoover had achieved omniscience.

WTF....Seriously, WTF was wrong with these people...

In which Crusader AXE bitches about the events, all preceeding the Wikileaks disclosures to Julian Assange, in Bradley Manning's case and echoes Joseph Welch, Attorney for the US Army who asked Joe McCarthy "Do you have no shame, sir!" and bets even money on a sentence of ten years or less. 

 

tuffy rocks

everyone's apologizing and resigning about rodeo clown tuffy gessling's performance as obama, getting run over by a bull. here's the deal: clowns like tuffy get a pass. you should have seen what we did to tricky dick on the streets of dc when i was 14. i don't see this as any worse than a thousand political cartoons. look seventeen movies that came out last week depicted in loving slow motion the entire destruction of the white house. really we're in the second golden pc age, but this time no one even seems to have any reservations. i like the idea of hurling ridicule and abuse at our leaders. it's an egalitarian expression. did that performance hurt someone (i mean other than tuffy, who no doubt is a pain professional)? he's been banned for life from the missouri fair.

 

telling stories

this, representing a dispute between npr and its ombudsman over a piece on the foster-care system in south dakota,  is pretty interesting.
 

 But Schumacher-Matos says he decided to approach this story as a case study in how NPR offers investigative findings in a narrative form.

"It's too easy to let form get in the way of the substance," he says. "That if we're going to do investigative storytelling, we still have to state clearly what it is we have found and what it is we have not found."

i think this is an obvious and important point. i have been on npr here and there and i do remember that there was an actual assertion - it may have come from margaret low smith - that atc and morning edition are in the business of telling stories; every piece of whatever sort had to have a narrative form. now this was part of a whole fad - against which i actually wrote a book - according to which everything is a story and we are stories, and stories are the only way to the truth and so on, all of which is just obviously false if you'd bother to think for a minute. well, it's good someone thought about it for a minute!

it's completely obvious that one temptation of journalism is writing a compellingly or cliche-riddenly well-shaped narrative as opposed to an accurate one. and if stories can sometimes tell the truth, they always represent various simplificactions and distortions.

tied to the whipping post

few can have more ambivalence on the washington post than me. let's try a few dips. my father's father was, among other things, nightclub columnist and editorial page editor for the washington times-herald, which the post bought in 1954, becoming for a time the washington post and times-herald (i still remember the t-h shrinking on their masthead); well my boy was more or less dead of alcoholism by then (i have some of his white house and capitol press credentials). after that, the fam was evening star. my dad was a copy boy/reporter there starting in the fifties. i was a star paper boy, and my brother adam delivered the tabloid daily news, bought out by the star in '72 to create in the customary shrinking way the star news. 

so i was a 'copy aide' at the star, working the 6PM-2AM shift in '80-'81 for a new morning edition that was supposed to save the last rival to the post, but which never worked at all. soon after i started, time, inc., bought the star. they had deep pockets, supposedly, and they were going save us and fold us in. like six months later they announced The End. so, by that time, there was only one daily newspaper in dc: the post killed everything. i interviewed for a couple of different jobs at the post but didn't get them; they didn't take the same interviewing approach the star did: 'you spell that s-a-r-t-w-e-l-l? can you start tuesday?' though we did place many stars out of our newsroom everywhere, including the post.* honestly? the post hasn't been as good since it lost all competition.

so the post kind of laid waste to my terrain, like mr. peabody's coal train did to muhlenberg county. but on the other hand, it really is always a great newspaper. honestly i have read it every day, more or less, since i was a small child. that was the thing about the star; even there, everyone read the post. and it has been my homepage since i first got a browser (well, partly for redskins). i think they desperately need a transition away from being folded into the washington establishment, articulating all and only mainstream positions. but there is much great journalism at every level in that newsroom still.

 

* Writers who worked at the Star in its last days included Nick Adde (Army Times), Stephen Aug (ABC News), Michael Isikoff (Newsweek), Howard Kurtz (The Washington Post), Fred Hiatt (The Washington Post) Sheilah Kast (ABC News), Jane Mayer (The New Yorker), Chris Hanson (Columbia Journalism Review), Jeremiah O'Leary (The Washington Times), Chuck Conconi (Washingtonian), Crispin Sartwell (Creators Syndicate), Maureen Dowd (The New York Times), novelist Randy Sue Coburn, Michael DeMond Davis, Lance Gay, (Scripps Howard News Service):Jules Witcover (The Baltimore Sun), Jack Germond (The Baltimore Sun), Judy Bachrach(Vanity Fair), Lyle Denniston (The Baltimore Sun), Fred Barnes (Weekly Standard), Kate Sylvester (NPR, NBC, Governing Magazine) and Mary McGrory (The Washington Post).

really, the russian aspect of l'affaire snowden is too damn bad. it somewhat pollutes the whole thing, and one assumes that he is no fan of vlad. but the man had few or no options: i don't think he was ever going to make it to latin america. it's good that he's alive, and i pray he can keep working with greenwald etc.