Frankly, I don’t find all that much to get upset about in the Chris Bowers Open Left post to which Lambert refers here. Okay, the post has a slightly condescending tinge to its tone, but why shouldn’t Democrats be proud that now more than ever the Democratic base looks like America? Bill Clinton himself once noted the same, and pledged that his administration would too, one pledge among many, many that Clinton kept.

While I’m on this subject, I want to remind everyone that neither any particular African-American nor the African-American community as a whole needs to apologize for voting for an African-American candidate for President, or any other office, for that matter. Black folks have been voting for white folks for decades now. And it isn’t as if Obama got their support automatically. It was only when he convinced many of them that he was viable, and presented a vision they obviously found inspiring, as is true for a large swathe of the electorate, that they have flocked to him. So, we are not talking about identity politics here. Remember, it was Obama who has been running as a post-racial candidate, for which many of us here at Corrente criticized him, rightly so, in my opinion.

Back to Bowers. It’s this stunning post that should be the focus of our incredulous ire, although I do realize that in Lambert’s majestic takedown, of Matt Stoller’s chilling foray into Obama triumphalism, this Bowers post is mentioned along with the fact that Bowers starts with an admiring nod to the Stoller post.

In his post, Bowers is imagining/predicting what kind of changes in Democratic governance we might be seeing from an Obama presidency. Fasten your seat belts.

Cultural Shift: Out with Bubbas, up with Creatives: There should be a major cultural shift in the party, where the southern Dems and Liebercrat elite will be largely replaced by rising creative class types. Obama has all the markers of a creative class background, from his community organizing, to his Unitarianism, to being an academic, to living in Hyde Park to shopping at Whole Foods and drinking PBR. These will be the type of people running the Democratic Party now, and it will be a big cultural shift from the white working class focus of earlier decades. Given the demographics of the blogosphere, in all likelihood, this is a socioeconomic and cultural demographic into which you fit. Culturally, the Democratic Party will feel pretty normal to netroots types. It will consistently send out cultural signals designed to appeal primarily to the creative class instead of rich donors and the white working class.

I’m not even sure what that means. Who the hell are the creative class?  Read more 

Photo by Jennifer Zdon / The Times-Picayune

Friends and family gather for the funeral of Alvin Thomas on March 17. Thomas returned to New Orleans from Katrina-induced exile in Charlotte, N.C., and was living in his parents’ flood-damaged home. Home From Katrina Exile, Man Who Lived Alone Died Alone  Read more 

(hat tip to Cab Drollery)

So the entire 109th Congress advised America re: Bush’s actions, BOHICA. But in the 110th, two Senators when confronted with Bush’s order to the states not to let S-CHIP coverage “crowd out” private insurers — and neither of the two is now a candidate for President, please note, though one is from each party — wondered, “Can he really do that?”

Being Senators, they went looking for an answer — except instead of a junket to China they chose an inquiry to the Government Accounting Office. On Friday the GAO issued its answer.

Bush can’t do that. He’s breaking the law.

Of course, this doesn’t make the mainstream news.  Read more 

Well, a blog is really good for people who like to play economist, like me. So I’m reading this post and two things occur to me.

1. Costco up 7%, Penny’s down 12%, Wal-mart down .7%. That’s good news. Costco pays a living wage and tries to sell stuff made in the US. Proving they are profitable in a recession is one way to help frame the argument to get rid of the idiots who got us into this mess, the ones who hate unions and working people.

2.  Read more 

We make a lot of jokes here, and around the blogosphere, about what “hard work” it is to blog. In truth, it is. No, really! I won’t bore you with the emotions and thoughts I have about the burdens of blogging, or not, but let me say that I can totally understand why it is these “for pay” type bloggers are dropping like flies. And frankly, I think it’s a future many will unhappily come to appreciate. This is what life is like, when the entire “economy” revoloves around poor, desperate people selling junk from somewhere else to other poor, desperate people who also need to convince someone to buy something. All so a few rich people can be richer.

We all disapprove of prostitution for a reason. Not because it’s “dirty,” but because it’s dehumanizing. When will we apply the same logic to our ’legit’ work environment?

Good morning and happy Spring, everybody! Just a reminder: a blog isn’t a person’s whole life; it’s probably a mistake to think you “know someone” or what they think, entire, based on (some) blog posts. Jes sayin, as I was skimming the blogosphere this morning and read some strongly worded but rather incorrect stuff about various bloggers I happen to know in RL, including myself. It’s always amusing to learn “what I’m thinking” from people who have no idea what else is happening in my nonblogging life, nor the process by which I choose to (not) post on topic(s).

Hey y’all. Sorry to be dark so much recently, but it’s that time of year and I’ve been ramping up for Major Labor under the sun and stars. I want to build something like this, but prettier. That’s my rub with growing houses- it’s so spendy to make them look nice. I’m house-vain like that, I guess. Still, I don’t want an ugly plastic shack on my lawn. At the same time, using recycled and reclaimed materials really appeals to me/my wallet.

Political, botanical, environmental, beautiful. What more can you ask for in a site?

Feeling snooty? I’m realizing just how snooty the gardening classes can be. But in this country at least, that’s going to change. Can you eat that 40$ cultivar, honey?

They may or may not be snooty, but they are pretty hardcore about their plants: I was over at Monticello the other day and gosh! You can see how a grrl could love Jefferson, what a whiz with plants he was! And speaking of things to look at, anyone know any good sites for garden design? With lots of pics? Most places I’ve come across are only trying to sell me a book or magazine and that’s not what I want/can afford. Oh, yes- I am very, very disappointed with all of you. Medium is the best we can do? Fuck. That’s pathetic.

Sorry again for the short and infrequent posting, but this is what happens in an economy where some of us are realizing it makes a lot of sense to have a plot that will provide…oh, let’s avoid polemic and hysteria this morning and just say 30% of my diet.  Read more 

They get it. I’m really proud of them for having such a professional-looking effort put together to go with the results. Those numbers won’t surprise you, Good Reader, but they do make for probing questions for candidates, don’t they? please, don’t tell me whom the unions have endorsed; I honestly don’t know and it has nothing to do with this post. Thank you. And for in discussions with neighbors and coworkers, as we all think about what we are going to do to solve this problem. It’s rather clear it’s going to take the clown squad in the Village a long time just to get on the same page as the rest of us.

Does anyone have any experience with, gosh, I don’t even know if they exist, but I’m thinking of small scale “health care collectives?” The New Depression won’t be like the other one; doctors are too harrassed these days to fall back into the house-calling, country gentleman model. So how do small units of people find ways to work together to improve the quality of the health care they receive? Pressure local governments? Business cooperation? Buying hospitals? Help me out here.

Major insurance companies drop on sector woes

Although UnitedHealth Group reported a positive fourth quarter—including a 62% increase for its Ingenix database system business—the company’s stocks have since plummeted, partially because of an ongoing investigation by New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo. On March 12, shares fell to a 52-week low, bottoming out near $36 after seeing prices as high as $60 in December 2007. …  Read more 

Dadburn it, I can’t find the story I was reading the other day about this now. But there’s an extra layer here: the guy in this case is a gay man, and had the help of a bunch of gay-rights groups to get this case as far as it did. His argument was that as a gay man, the streets are extra unsafe for him. He was chased by a gang of kids while walking down the street with his partner. He claims if he’d not brandished a gun, they would’ve severely beaten or killed him. What do you think? Is this a useful argument to make, for anyone gay or str8? Anyway, Here’s the story about the SCOTUS decision and its implications.

The court has not conclusively interpreted the Second Amendment since its ratification in 1791. The amendment reads: “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.”
The basic issue for the justices is whether the amendment protects an individual’s right to own guns no matter what, or whether that right is somehow tied to service in a state militia.
A key justice, Anthony Kennedy, seemed to settle that question early on when he said the Second Amendment gives “a general right to bear arms.” He is likely to be joined by Roberts and Justices Samuel Alito, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas - a majority of the nine-member court.
Gun rights proponents were encouraged.  Read more 

Whiskeyfire notes that Klein is now admitting he was “stupid” to support the invasion and occupation, and gets mean enough to say that “willful blindness” probably played a greater role. To me, this hardly goes far enough.

Let’s role-play. Imagine one day, a bomb falls on your house. Half your family is killed, including all your children and your grandmother. The people who bombed you were complete strangers with whom you’d had no interaction or relation, and they did so for political purposes that had nothing to do with you. If a few years later, Joe walked up to you and said, “gosh, I was stupid to support bombing you!” you would likely punch him in the face, or worse.

It seems as if most Villagers have no imagination nor compassion. They are truly inhumane, and times like this I’m reminded of that. The list of the true reasons for the invasion and the wide support for it at the time is a long one: greed, racism, bloodlust, insecurity, lack of vision, ignorance, arrogance, local/domestic political posturing, greed…

“Stupid” is too kind. It’s disengenuous, it undervalues the true degree of the sin and crime. It’s like a frat boy turning up his hands when the arresting officer comes by to pick him up on the charge of rape, saying, “Sorry, I was drunk” and expecting to get away with it. It’s the ’liberal’ element of the Unity meme. Republicans will always deny they made a mistake and blame someone else, but ’liberals’ like Klein will have the ’good grace’ to admit to some wrongdoing. Minor, of course. Just enough to make them seem different than their Republican co-cronies and apologists and criminals. “Stupid” is like “silly” and “sorry.” It’s unlike “bloodstained” and “warmongering” and “war criminal.”

That’s what Klein really is. And millions are dead, homeless, shredded in mind and body, because of people like him. I don’t forget that. Fuck him. And his “stupidity.”

Very good, almost enough to make me want to care about rock and roll again. Seriously, let me highlight some of the scarier parts. Myth isn’t strong enough to describe what the bobbleheads in the Village are obsessing over, the truth of what is happening in Iraq is stark, and damning:

He dreams of returning to the days when the Iraqi army served the entire country. “In Saddam’s time, nobody knew what is Sunni and what is Shiite,” he says. The Bush administration based its strategy in Iraq on the mistaken notion that, under Saddam, the Sunni minority ruled the Shiite majority. In fact, Iraq had no history of serious sectarian violence or civil war between the two groups until the Americans invaded.

Some time ago I realized we’d all been giving them too much credit. Rovian Maths, Rummy’s Unknown unknowns…they are and were always as stupid and arrogant as they seemed. Only the Mightiest of Wurlitzers has been able to keep that fact from being baldly obvious to a great majority. They can do nothing right.

his is what “victory” looks like in a once upscale neighborhood of Iraq: Lakes of mud and sewage fill the streets. Mountains of trash stagnate in the pungent liquid. Most of the windows in the sand-colored homes are broken, and the wind blows through them, whistling eerily. House after house is deserted, bullet holes pockmarking their walls, their doors open and unguarded, many emptied of furniture. What few furnishings remain are covered by a thick layer of the fine dust that invades every space in Iraq. Looming over the homes are twelve-foot-high security walls built by the Americans to separate warring factions and confine people to their own neighborhood. Emptied and destroyed by civil war, walled off by President Bush’s much-heralded “surge,” Dora feels more like a desolate, post-apocalyptic maze of concrete tunnels than a living, inhabited neighborhood. Apart from our footsteps, there is complete silence.  Read more 

This wonderful discussion we’re having around our remaining two fine, upstanding presidential candidates has provided an exchange through which we may, when done, have learned that Hillary Clinton is not a cold-hearted opportunistic scumbag but a good, decent, warm, substantial, thoughtful and interesting woman and that Barry Obama is not a vacuous opportunistic scumbag but a good, decent, warm, substantial, thoughtful and interesting man.

Not swearing that will be true, not saying it for certain, but I am hoping it will be. What I am certain about is that while we work through this process it is critical that we not lose sight of the most important task ahead of us – the defeat of John McCain and the Republican Criminal Conspiracy he represents.  Read more 

Inspired by the lovely responses in this post, I’ve made up my mind after much discussion, thought and sleep on it. I’m done. I’m not going to write or comment on the Democratic candidates anymore, not until there is a real need. Right now, there’s too much poo-throwing, I’m tired of it and it’s ruining all the good blog parties. I am afraid of my email boxes, I can’t speak frankly in mixed librul company, and I’m bored. So go ahead: fight it out, pick one, tell me when it’s time to be Unified. There are plenty of other stories that matter that are happening, right now. If blogs ever had a job, it is to cover that which affects us all, but the SCLM ignores. The next Dem prez will be in a world of hurt, so I won’t wish it on either of them even as I’ll vote for whomever I’m told is the nom. Who else is with me?  Read more 

A May 2005 report by Lieutenant General Kevin Kiley confirms that each interrogation at Guantánamo was videotaped. Lieutenant General Randall Schmidt issued a report the following month stating that more than 24,000 interrogations of detainees took place at Guantánamo over a three-year period. In the meantime, the Bush administration has announced it will pursue the death penalty for six detainees who will stand trial for crimes related to the attacks of September 11, 2001.
Professor Mark Denbeaux, Director of the Center for Policy and Research at Seton Hall Law, commented, “Our students proved that Guantánamo interrogations were videotaped, which impacts the impending trials of the six detainees. We all want to see the perpetrators of 9/11 punished. But if the tapes of those interrogations still exist, it is imperative that we understand, before these trials start, whether the information was obtained through standard interrogation procedures or through torture.”

Why videotape a torture session?  Read more 

I’ve diligently read the posts here at the Mighty Corrente Building regarding Senators Clinton and Obama over the last months. And, until now, I’ve kept my trap shut. Please allow me to open it once again and say, “Enough!”  Read more 

So Big Blue and lots of other number-inclined bloggers have been telling us all about the housing market crash, or I guess I should call it “multiple markets crash” because it’s affected banks, Wall Street, insurance and credit card companies, and a whole lot more. Been to Home Depot lately? So many looking so suicidal. I came across a term I didn’t know, and so I went off and did a little casual reading about “undevelopment.” Now, before I say anything, read this:

When I was a child I went to school in Kalemie. It was a great honour for one from our village to go to the big town and I was chosen because I was the son of the chief. My family walked with me through the forest to the place not far from here where the bus passed. I will never forget that first bus journey.” He fell silent for a moment, staring into the fire.
“I was still at school when independence came in 1960, and in Kalemie I remember almost all of the white families fled across the lake because they were scared. I came home and since then I think I have been to Kalemie maybe two times.

“Our village here, the one you are sitting in, used to have cars come through it every few days. Just a few kilometres away is one of those guest houses the Belgians built. They called them gites and they were always open for travellers coming through by car. But all of that went with the fighting.

“Now when we hear the fighting coming our way, my people and I just flee into the bush. We have learned it is the safest place for us. We know how to survive there. And when we come back, our village is almost always destroyed and we have to build it again.

“Over the years, things have got worse and worse. We have lost the things we once had. Apart from what we can carry into the bush, we have nothing. I think the last time I saw a vehicle near here was 1985, but I cannot be sure. All these children you see around you are staring because I have told them about cars and motorbikes that I saw as a child, but they have never seen one before you arrived.”  Read more 

Liquid pain. The war against women starts young.

Studies have shown that in some parts of Indonesia, female circumcision is more ritualistic — a rite of passage meant to purify the genitals and bestow gender identity on a female child — with a practitioner rubbing turmeric on the genitals or pricking the clitoris once with a needle to draw a symbolic drop of blood. In other instances, the procedure is more invasive, involving what WHO classifies as “Type I” female genital mutilation, defined as excision of the clitoral hood, called the prepuce, with or without incision of the clitoris itself. The Population Council’s 2003 study said that 82 percent of Indonesian mothers who witnessed their daughters’ circumcision reported that it involved “cutting.” The women most often identified the clitoris as the affected body part. The amount of flesh removed, if any, was alternately described by circumcisers as being the size of a quarter-grain of rice, a guava seed, a bean, the tip of a leaf, the head of a needle.

At the Assalaam Foundation, traditional circumcisers say they learn the practice from other women during several years of apprenticing. Siti Rukasitta, who has been a circumciser at the foundation for 20 years, said through an interpreter that they use a small pair of sterilized scissors to cut a piece of the clitoral prepuce about the size of a nail clipping. Population Council observers who visited the event before the 2003 study, however, reported that they also witnessed some cases of circumcisers cutting the clitoris itself.

I’m going to warn people, many of the links that follow have graphic images, because seeing isn’t just believing.  Read more 

I’m being glib in the title of this post, but if I’ve ever felt the need to use “slaughtered” and “destroyed” in a sentence after reading a blog post, this is it. No, silly, not physical violence, but in the intellectual sense: I think NO’s comment at the bottom sums it up best:

…why in hell should any politician deliver for unions? implied “ever again?”

One will have a very difficult time defending some decisions and leadership in the unions after reading this devastating post. Don’t read it as about Edwards. Take out his name and insert the candidate of your choice; it could’ve happened to any of them.

Unions in America have been in a decline for over 60 years. Union membership has dropped from almost 35% of all workers in 1945 to less than 15% today. In fact, union membership has declined to almost exactly the same percentage as it was in 1930 before FDR took power and encouraged the growth of unions. The first crucial battle the unions lost came after FDR died, when over Truman’s veto the Taft-Hartley Act was passed in 1947. Truman called the Taft-Hartley Act a “slave labor bill”.

Since then unions have lost critical battle after battle  Read more 

I was out at the grocery store today. I shop for others, so I have to go down aisles that have things I would never buy for myself; candy and cookie and potato chip and meat sections. There I often see people different than me, and it pains me to see how many sick and obviously economically distressed people exercise the most foolish of the consumerist impulses with what little money they have. But in the produce section, I saw a thing I’ve not seen in a while. Two aspects of it made my hamsters frollick.

You know the ’day old’ displays or racks? Those foodstuffs that are on the verge of being tossed away (or, donated to shelters, if it’s a better store) by the seller? I mean deeply discounted food that doesn’t look so good, and you probably shouldn’t eat unless you eat it that day, cooked thoroughly, perhaps masked with a little heavy spice or other strongly flavored foods. Normally, those racks are pushed off to the side, they don’t compete with “top shelf” displays of more expensive, fresher/better/prettier food. Today, it was out, not exactly in the center of the produce area, but Right There in your face. Not next to the loading dock walk-out door, like I’ve seen before.

Further, the food on the rack looked…really gnarly.  Read more 

Praise Be to the FSM, that we still have McClatchy:

WASHINGTON — Ten years ago, a Canadian icebreaker was parked in an ice pack 300 miles north of Pt. Barrow, Alaska, the northernmost point in the United States, and allowed to drift so scientists could study the Arctic environment and global warming’s effect on it. The icebreaker drifted with the ice for a year and more than 1,800 miles as researchers tracked changes in the Arctic ice pack.

Top-secret U.S. spy satellites were among those tracking the icebreaker. With the approval of a little-noticed government body known as the Civil Applications Committee, the National Imagery and Mapping Agency released nearly 60 photos to scientists.

The committee, under the jurisdiction of the U.S. Geological Survey, reviews civilian requests for classified reconnaissance information and makes recommendations to the intelligence community, which has the final say about what gets declassified. Such intelligence data can be helpful to scientists studying everything from volcanoes, forest fires, earthquakes and landslides to climate change, hurricanes, flooding and pollution.

Now, however, the Bush administration plans to abolish the committee and create a office in the Department of Homeland Security to review such requests and others from law enforcement agencies.  Read more 

100,000 dead. For no good reason except the executives at Aetna need another home in Gstaad. This number probably doesn’t include people who “have health care” but not the kind that actually provides them with the care that will keep them well. Be proud, America, we’ve slipped to dead last on the list of industrialized nations when it comes to providing citizens health care.

Mandatory insurance won’t cut it. “Working with insurance companines” won’t cut it. The toll of needlessly dead Americans is going to rise, and rise, and rise…all while we spend what could pay for total universal coverage on the sands of Iraq and put in the pockets of the already rich. What will it take? What will finally get people to understand- “profit” and “health care” don’t mix? Ever?  Read more 

Seriously, I don’t get it. Fuck