Another Must-Read: But Who Gets To Be King?

Tom Sullivan, at Hullabaloo, with a summation of the urge toward -- not totalitarianism, exactly: he's casting it in terms of aristocracy:

There has always been a muted desire among some of our neighbors, as there was during the American Revolution, for rule by hereditary royalty and landed gentry. Holding onto our republic against that impulse has always been problematic, as Benjamin Franklin hinted it would be. A yearning for a return to the old ways never seems far from the surface. It has seemed a little bit closer lately.

I've written repeatedly of my theory that members of the fringe right, alt-right or whatever are simply acting out a traditional murder ballad with their country. Facing demographic and economic changes that threaten to upend the traditional political and cultural dominance of white Christians in America, extremists among them are pursuing the slow murder of their lover because if they can't have her, nobody can. Donald Trump is their hands around her throat. Those hands (insert your own joke here) got tighter last week at the G20 meeting.

But that frame applies more to the middle and working classes. For moneyed interests, what's happening could be the denouement of a decades-old effort to roll back the New Deal and Civil Rights era projects that strengthened and broadened the middle class, flattened American society, and brought the country closer to (although still far from) the ideal of a society in which all its citizens are not just created equal, but treated that way. For the Caledon Hockleys who see themselves as society's better or at least more productive half — 53 percent is surely not exclusive enough — that was never their ideal.

No matter what form it takes -- oligarchy, dictatorship, de facto monarchy -- this is the end goal of the ruling elite.

Again, a pretty thorough piece, and pretty sobering.

Freedom of the Press

To self-censor?

From Tom Levenson at Balloon Juice:

If there was a golden age for American media, it was long ago and it was short.

Over at The Atlantic, Torie Rose DeGhett has an excellent, utterly unsurprising article about a photograph taken in the last hours in the first Gulf War.

The work of the the then 28 year old photographer Kenneth Jarecke, the image captures a fact of war hopelessly obscured by the shots that angered Jarecke enough to postpone a planned hiatus from combat photography. “’It was one picture after another of a sunset with camels and a tank.” — or, once combat actually began, gaudy displays of gee whiz toys, the disembodied beauty of missile exhausts, or bloodless shots of tires and twisted metal. War as video game, or a spectacle for the folks back home.

The bulk of Levenson's post is an embroidery on DeGhett's article (at the link, where you can also find the photo, which is under copyright and so does not appear here) detailing the history of this photograph and the fact that no major "news" outlet would touch it.

DeGhett goes farther, though:

Let me say up front that I don’t like the press,” one Air Force officer declared, starting a January 1991 press briefing on a blunt note. The military’s bitterness toward the media was in no small part a legacy of the Vietnam coverage decades before. By the time the Gulf War started, the Pentagon had developed access policies that drew on press restrictions used in the U.S. wars in Grenada and Panama in the 1980s. Under this so-called “pool” system, the military grouped print, TV, and radio reporters together with cameramen and photojournalists and sent these small teams on orchestrated press junkets, supervised by Public Affairs Officers (PAOs) who kept a close watch on their charges.

The "free press" has learned its lesson. Granted, it's impossible to present all the news that's happening every day. Editorial choices have to be made, priorities implemented, but if you view more than one news source, you know some stories are being buried. Levenson, though, points out something from DeGhett's article we all need to keep in mind:

The key here, as DeGhett writes, is that there was no military pressure not to publish Jarecke’s photograph. The war was over by the time his film got back to the facility in Saudi Arabia where the press pools operated. The decision to withhold the shot from the American public was made by the American press, by editors at the major magazines, at The New York Times, at the wire service. The chokehold on information at the top of the mainstream media was tight enough back then that most newspaper editors, DeGhett reports, never saw the image, never got to make their choice to publish or hide.

You can guess the excuses. “Think of the children!” For the more sophisticated, a jaded response:

Aidan Sullivan, the pictures editor for the British Sunday Times, told the British Journal of Photography on March 14 that he had opted instead for a wide shot of the carnage: a desert highway littered with rubble. He challenged the Observer: “We would have thought our readers could work out that a lot of people had died in those vehicles. Do you have to show it to them?”

Why yes, Mr. Sullivan, you do.

Emphasis added.

There are days I just want to give up. Read both articles.

And On a Lighter Note

This post from Betty Cracker at Balloon Juice. I can't excerpt it -- click through.

Brothers in Arms

There are dots to connect here. First, this post from Gaius Publius at AmericaBlog, on the rich and the way they see the world, based on this piece by Chris Hedges. Hedges writes:

“The rich are different from us,” F. Scott Fitzgerald is said to have remarked to Ernest Hemingway, to which Hemingway allegedly replied, “Yes, they have more money.”

The exchange, although it never actually took place, sums up a wisdom Fitzgerald had that eluded Hemingway. The rich are different. The cocoon of wealth and privilege permits the rich to turn those around them into compliant workers, hangers-on, servants, flatterers and sycophants. Wealth breeds, as Fitzgerald illustrated in “The Great Gatsby” and his short story “The Rich Boy,” a class of people for whom human beings are disposable commodities. Colleagues, associates, employees, kitchen staff, servants, gardeners, tutors, personal trainers, even friends and family, bend to the whims of the wealthy or disappear. Once oligarchs achieve unchecked economic and political power, as they have in the United States, the citizens too become disposable.

See also this piece by digby.

My own experience is somewhat different, but not very. At one point I worked at an art museum as the executive secretary to the director, which meant working closely with the board. I raised eyebrows and caused comment all over the institution early on in my tenure because I dared to argue with the president of the board, who in retrospect, fits fairly neatly within the paradigm described by Hedges -- and this was one of Chicago's "lakefront liberals." For most of my tenure there, however, I worked with his successor, a woman of great charm and intelligence to took me into the fold, so to speak -- she learned to value my judgment and intelligence (and my political acumen), and when I followed her to another job, I had great input into policy and had the day-do-day operations left entirely in my hands. But there was always an underlying attitude that came out when she started talking about people's social standing -- including mine: I just wasn't in her class.

It didn't help matters that I simply refused to recognize the "superiority" of the people I was dealing with. It wasn't rebellion -- it just never occurred to me that they were superior, except that they had more money. They didn't share that opinion.

Now, some connecting, with this piece by Rob Tisinai at Box Turtle Bulletin.

Thomas Peters, NOM’s communications director, shows us the limits of empathy.

Peters suffered a diving accident that left him with a fractured fifth vertebrae, a severe spinal cord injury, and doubtful prospects for recovery. Fortunately, it seems, he’s doing better than most with this kind of injury, though he still may never walk and has limited use of his upper body. Recently, on NOM’s website, he posted “Reflections on my Time Away.”

. . .

The accident has taught me more about the incredible gift of marriage. My father, during his speech at my wedding reception, said the sacrament of marriage gives us the grace to do the impossible. I have met people during these months who think it is incredible, even impossible, that my wife and I survived a trauma like this having been married only three months. I tell them it helps to marry the right woman and get married the right way, the way the Church taught the two of us what marriage is and why it should be honored. People have told us that they are inspired and receive hope from the witness of our marriage – it inspires us too, I respond! We feel it is possible to face anything, even a future of me paralyzed, so long as we cling to each other, to God, and to our marriage vows.

I think the connection is somewhere in the comment I left at Tisinai's post, to the effect that ideology trumps humanity: Peters is not capable of independent thought and has to rely on what the Church has told him to think, especially, in this case, about marriage and gay people. (In my comment I noted that, in my opinion, it's a morally and intellectually stunted outlook.)

It comes down to the Other -- for the rich, everyone else is the Other, to be kept in their place; for Peters and his cohorts, those who don't follow their ideology, and especially LGBTs, are the Other, to be fought at every turn -- and to be kept in their place, preferably out of sight and, consequently, out of mind.

There's an element of pathology in both, and I suspect it's the same, or a very similar, pathology: lack of ability to connect with others, lack of empathy, and consequently, a lack of social consciousness. In some cases, I hesitate to go so far as to call it sociopathy, but it's at least the seeds of it: it's an outlook that is totally self-referential and self-absorbed. (By way of illustration, I'm reminded of the story about one of NOM's interns who went to a rally of some sort or other and was "saddened" by the preponderance of marriage equality demonstrators and the relative paucity of the "pro-marriage" contingent. Her reaction was that allowing same-sex marriage "diminished" her relationship with God, and "demeaned" her own -- future, and therefore hypothetical -- marriage vows. So it was all about her, and not about the people -- not really people, mind you, but abstractions -- whose rights, and whose essential humanity, she was working to deny.)

And also common to both the anti-marriage activists, as exemplified by Peters, and the rich is the element of control: they must be the ones controlling others.

The sobering part is that the rich are succeeding. The NOMbots, happily, not so much.

Food for Thought

While we're all appalled and/or disgusted by the revelations of NSA hijinks (is there anyone they haven't spied on?), I had a sobering thought -- this is just the top end of a trend that's been happening for a long time, and it's all of a piece: the increasingly interlocked nature of the Internet, with what seems to be a natural phenomenon: a few corporations starting to gobble up everything else so that you have one account for everything -- "for your convenience." (Google keeps trying to sign me into everything with my Google account, which I don't use -- I just created it because of a server glitch causing a site I needed to get into to reject my regular account.)

At any rate, let's start with something a little closer to home for most of us. (At least it used to be, but more on that in a minute.) Notice how militarized our police departments are getting? SWAT teams, assault rifles, body armor, the whole works. Here's the Tampa police department, from their official website:

The 12-ton Armored Personnel Carrier (APC) can drive through five feet of water and withstand winds up to 130 mph helping police operate under the most severe conditions. The carrier, nicknamed "high-top shoe" for its tall silhouette look, can be used for search and rescue during a natural disaster or a terrorist attack. The APC is bullet resistant, can hold 13 passengers and it is virtually unstoppable. On pavement, it can reach speeds of 60 mph. This one of a kind APC was purchased from the military and it was paid for with a Federal security grant.

It's worth going to the site just to see the pictures. Is this Tampa, or Baghdad?

The bottom line is that we're putting huge amounts of lethal force in the hands of people who overreact (remember Chicago, 1968? Imagine that with today's armaments), who make mistakes (and that story is by no means the worst in that vein), who stage full-scale raids on flimsy pretexts (and that story is not the only one about the authorities finding "probable cause" after the fact), and whose judgment is open to question (remember the pepper-spray incident at UC Davis? And to underscore my point, the campus police lieutenant who "pulled the trigger" as it were has filed for worker's comp.).

Which brings us to the surveillance state. The police are armed and ready, now they just need a target. Any target will do, and that's where NSA and its subsidiaries come in. The trend toward constant surveillance started a long time ago -- maybe with police radar to catch speeders. Then we went to cameras in high-crime areas. (They don't actually prevent any crime, as it turns out.) But now, with the advent of the Great War on Terror, there are not only a larger pool of suspects, but a ready-made excuse for watching them. This is choice:

The New York Police Department has secretly labeled entire mosques as terrorism organizations, a designation that allows police to use informants to record sermons and spy on imams, often without specific evidence of criminal wrongdoing.

Designating an entire mosque as a terrorism enterprise means that anyone who attends prayer services there is a potential subject of an investigation and fair game for surveillance.

Since the 9/11 attacks, the NYPD has opened at least a dozen “terrorism enterprise investigations” into mosques, according to interviews and confidential police documents. The TEI, as it is known, is a police tool intended to help investigate terrorist cells and the like.

Many TEIs stretch for years, allowing surveillance to continue even though the NYPD has never criminally charged a mosque or Islamic organization with operating as a terrorism enterprise.

Digby has a very good, must-read post on the effect of all this on us, the targets. Her summation:

The surveillance society naturally results in less creativity, less innovation, less dissent, less freedom. I know it sounds ridiculously hyperbolic, but this strikes me as a potentially huge social change that nobody's talking about. What kind of a world will it be when people no longer have an inner self, at least an inner self that has any possibility of expression without being revealed to everyone else. What happens when you lose control over your identity, your history, your ability to reinvent yourself and take second chances?

My reaction: Connect the dots: wages sinking, the 1%'s war on the middle class, constant surveillance, get out of jail free passes for the banks* and "energy" companies (not to mention their very sophisticated use of propaganda). Less dissent, less freedom? That's what they want.

* A footnote: ran across this post this morning. From Henry Paulson, Jr., Secretary of the Treasury during the financial collapse in 2008:

“There was such a total lack of awareness from the firms that paid big bonuses during this extraordinary time.”

That is what Henry M. Paulson Jr., former Treasury secretary, said last week. We were discussing the 2008 financial crisis in light of the approaching five-year anniversary of those white-knuckled days, when Lehman Brothers collapsed and the government stepped in to bail out the American International Group and then the banking system….

"Lack of awareness?": Pot, meet kettle. Read on:

He said the hardest part of the bailouts for him was in the disconnect between the bailouts’ ugly image with the public and his faith that the bailouts would help keep the economy from collapsing.

“I understood that people were angry,” Mr. Paulson said. “They wanted to hear that those that made the mistakes were going to be held responsible. Then on the other side was stability. It’s hard to punish and save the banks at the same time.” He paused for a moment. “I was much more concerned with stability.”

I don't understand how that became an either/or proposition. It seems to me that reining in the bonuses and obscene compensation packages for those who caused the crisis might have contributed to public confidence. Maybe the DoJ going after them would have helped as well. But then, I'm not a economics guru, like Hank Paulson -- who, arguably, is one of the people who created the mess.

Draw your own conclusions.

Photo du Jour

Via Balloon Juice

Well, That Didn't Take Long (Update)

This is what hit me first this morning:

President Barack Obama's offer to slow the growth of Social Security benefits would force fellow Democrats in Congress to abandon promises to shield the massive retirement and disability program from cuts as part of negotiations to avoid the year-end fiscal cliff.

Both Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., pledged not to touch Social Security as part of deficit reduction talks. Now that Obama and House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, have agreed to a new measure of inflation that would reduce annual cost-of-living adjustments, or COLAs, for Social Security and other government programs, Democrats are reluctant to call it a deal-breaker.

Umm -- I seem to remember a candidate up for re-election who insisted that Social Security was off the table in deficit reduction talks. And he's been insisting that Social Security has nothing to do with the deficit, which anyone who's been paying attention knows. Via e-mail from DailyKos:

This proposed benefit cut goes against previous statements from the White House which indicated that Social Security cuts would not be part of negotiations because Social Security is not the cause of or solution to our budget woes. On November 26, 2012, White House spokesperson Jay Carney stated, “Social Security is not currently a driver of the deficit. That's an economic fact.”

Gaius Publius has a couple of cogent posts on this at AmericaBlog. First, the cave, quoting WaPo:

President Barack Obama has agreed to curtail future cost-of-living increases for recipients of Social Security and softened his demand for higher taxes at upper income levels as part of accelerating talks with House Speaker John Boehner to avoid a “fiscal cliff,” people familiar with the talks said Monday.

Read GP's post -- he's got good detail on what's under attack (it's not just Social Security) and how bad it will be.

And here's his post on the "chained CPI" proposal. A good analysis from Salon:

The CPI, or cost of living index, is used to make sure benefits keep pace with inflation, but there are lots of different ways to calculate it. The current measure, called the CPI-W, is generally accepted to overestimate inflation, but the liberals say the proposed alternative, the chained CPI, is too stingy. The chained CPI assumes seniors will adjust their buying habits in response to price shifts (e.g., if the price of oranges goes up, they’ll buy more apples), so they should be able to afford to take a haircut on benefit checks. But liberals say that seniors often barely make ends meet with current benefit levels, so cutting them more would be devastating.

Democratic Rep. Keith Ellison, the chairman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, noted that 102 House Democrats have already said that Social Security changes should be kept off the table in these negotiations. “Everyone has a grandparent, a friend or a neighbor who relies on the Social Security benefits they earned to pay for medical care, food and housing. A move towards chained CPI would be a long-term benefit cut for every single person who receives a Social Security check,” he said in a statement.

The chained CPI would cut about $6,000 worth of benefits in the first 15 years of retirement for the average 65-year-old, and $16,000 over 25 years.

For those who like pictures:

Here's another showing just how much the chained CPI would lower benefits compared to the current index:

Both images from StrengthenSocialSecurity.org.

I'm starting to wonder if maybe I should have voted for the robot instead of the snake. The result would have been the same, but at least we would have known what we were getting.

You know the drill -- call or write your reps and make a lot of noise. Maybe you should even write the president, just so he knows we're not as stupid as he thinks we are.

Update: Here's Matt Yglesias on the Chained CPI.

If This Doesn't Freak You Out

you're beyond hope. A major article in Wired about the surveillance state.

Under construction by contractors with top-secret clearances, the blandly named Utah Data Center is being built for the National Security Agency. A project of immense secrecy, it is the final piece in a complex puzzle assembled over the past decade. Its purpose: to intercept, decipher, analyze, and store vast swaths of the world’s communications as they zap down from satellites and zip through the underground and undersea cables of international, foreign, and domestic networks. The heavily fortified $2 billion center should be up and running in September 2013. Flowing through its servers and routers and stored in near-bottomless databases will be all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails—parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital “pocket litter.” It is, in some measure, the realization of the “total information awareness” program created during the first term of the Bush administration—an effort that was killed by Congress in 2003 after it caused an outcry over its potential for invading Americans’ privacy.

Judicial review? We don't need no judicial review. Or anything else in the way of oversight, for that matter. I love how Congress killed the project, and the administration -- now two administrations -- went ahead and did it anyway.

Talk to me again about Obama and civil liberties. But be sure there are no drones in the neighborhood before you open your mouth.

In Related Newsn (Update, Update II)

Is anyone really surprised at this?

President Obama came into office pledging his dedication to the rule of law and to reversing the Bush-era policies. He has fallen far short.

Mr. Obama refused to entertain any investigation of the abuses of power under his predecessor, and he has been far too willing to adopt Mr. Bush’s extravagant claims of national secrets to prevent any courthouse accountability for those abuses. This week, he is poised to sign into law terrible new measures that will make indefinite detention and military trials a permanent part of American law.

The measures, contained in the annual military budget bill, will strip the F.B.I., federal prosecutors and federal courts of all or most of their power to arrest and prosecute terrorists and hand it off to the military, which has made clear that it doesn’t want the job. The legislation could also give future presidents the authority to throw American citizens into prison for life without charges or a trial.

Welcome to post-Constitution America.

Update:

From Andrew Rosenthal, some comments on the president's about face on signing the bill. This is priceless:

The White House statement says that if the process of putting the law into force “will negatively impact our counter-terrorism professionals and undercut our commitment to the rule of law, we expect that the authors of these provisions will work quickly and tirelessly to correct these problems.”

Yeah, right, just like they worked tirelessly to draft the original bill. This is Obama bailing on taking any responsibility for signing a bill he's decided to sign.

Update II:

Just to demonstrate how schizophrenic this administration is, get this, from an NYT article on Sheriff Joe Arpaio:

“The absence of clear policies and procedures to ensure effective and constitutional policing,” the report said, “along with the deviations from widely accepted policing and correctional practices, and the failure to implement meaningful oversight and accountability structures, have contributed to a chronic culture of disregard for basic legal and constitutional obligations.”

Umm -- Pot, meet Kettle.

Taxes as Punishment

Or, Spoiled Brat Libertarianism takes another hit.

A two-parter, by Thomas Levenson. Here's part 1.

Over at Balloon Juice, a number of posts culminating here, and a gazillion (technical term alert) comments, have fully roasted Andrew Sullivan (and James Joyner) for their whimpering over the hurt feelings of the deserving rich.

That last link from John Cole decisively rends from limb to limb the pathetic straw men trotted out by Sullivan and Joyner.  It is not the rich that require deference for their contribution to the nation’s well being; rather, it is the working stiff who has forked over what John accurately calls “a direct transfer payment to the most well off in the country.”

I have to confess, I simply don’t understand the possible chain of reasoning that would lead someone to write as Joyner does of taxes on the rich (and remember — we are talking about a very minor increase from historically low levels of taxation), that “to confiscate it from the successful without acknowledgment of the sacrifice… is to court resentment.”

I've been sniping at Sullivan about this for awhile, but Levenson's critique is both elegant and pithy.

Part 2 is even better:

But even more than the argument that some of the super rich in the financial sector basically ripped off the economy and the average American, the key point here is that our financial system, just as much as our technological economy, depends deeply on a strong governmental infrastructure. Bank insurance schemes, (FDIC etc.); loan facilities (the Fed); extensive research into every corner of the economy (half of the executive departments); market regulation (SEC, many others — known to be highly imperfect, but essential to the system nonetheless) and so on — modern capitalism requires an enormous infrastructure to create markets in which the participants can participate. I know that this is a little subtle — but the collapse of the banking system in Sept. 2008 and its rescue over the next weeks and months provide an at-the-extreme example of the central role government, supported by taxation, plays in the system through which one quarter of the 400 richest Americans gained their fortunes. And that role keeps on going even in more placid times.

Self made, perhaps, many of them, but only within a system made workable by, in essence, the willingness of 300 million Americans to pay their taxes and empower their government to guarantee the system.

And that's the whole point -- the Randians are full of it, simply because we don't live in a world in which a single "entrepreneur" can buck everyone and come out on top -- said hero depends on the work of too many other people, and as Levenson points out, the infrastructure (and tax breaks) provided by the government.

I don't know Joyner's writings at all, but I've never thought of Sullivan as a particularly deep thinker. In fact, I may even have called him "shallow." I probably have. He is. But now that he's been sounding off more regularly on how the super rich are victimized by the rest of us, I realize he's just not very smart.

And to be honest, those who have it all don't really come across as very sympathetic victims.

It's Not Race, It's Class

Something that I've pointed out a number of times. There are several stories that converge on this point this morning. I'm just going to lay out the dots, and you can connect them.

First, Nicole Bell's post on this speech by Sen. Bernie Sanders:



Oligarchy is really the only way to describe this. The Republican platform benefits such a small percentage of Americans. And that's the way they prefer it. Social programs are democratizing and give voice to the unwashed masses, which only get in the way of the elite. That's why there's been a systematic dismantling of social programs since Reagan.

Meanwhile, the Republicans keep just a high enough percentage of authoritarian-minded voting against their best interests by preying on their worst instincts--fear of the Other, where the other is alternatively people of color, women seeking reproductive rights, gays, undocumented workers, or any other variation on a theme. The oligarchy points to these fellow-victimized groups as the ones to blame for the poor condition of your life, rather than admit that it is their policies: free trade, union-busting, corporations off-shoring, and the dismantling of social safety nets that hurt you.

And they just flat out lie to you. Other countries manage to offer systems that enable there to be a thriving middle class, social programs like universal healthcare, paid college educations, public transit, child care, and job training. But you'll never hear the truth about how well these programs work, because that might clue in the masses at just how much is kept from us.

This segues quite neatly into this post at Mahablog:

I’d also say that while the issues of racial discrimination and entrenched poverty do overlap, a lot, they aren’t exactly the same. I agree also with John that the real issue is closer to what Shirley Sherrod was saying about class v. race.

But whatever it is, it’s a real issue, and it is not at all helpful to react to discussion of the problems of white poverty with knee-jerk declarations that “This isn’t about white people; it’s about privileged white men.”

No, it’s about white poverty, and about the cultural marginalization of rural whites. I don’t think Webb addressed the topic as well as it needed to be addressed, but I know where he’s coming from, because it’s pretty close to where I came from.

I've had a taste of that myself, when I was growing up. I'm not sure, however, that the idea that "it's about privilege white men" is necessarily a knee-jerk reaction, nor that it's incorrect.

The connection, I think, is in the Andrew Breitbarts of the Republican party. Remember, the scandals that Breitbart has trumpeted have all involved, in the conventional wisdom, race. He's delilberately avoided the mention of the real issues, most tellingly brought home in the speech by Shirley Sherrod that he didn't want to report all of, when she mentioned her realization that it's not about black versus white, it's about the haves versus the have nots. It's about the deliberate employment of tactics designed to keep the electorate at each other's throats while the upper crust makes off with the loot.

Among the most vivid revelations of just how deeply ingrained this sense of privilege has become over the past couple of generations is the reaction of Wall Street to the financial crisis: it's simply that they don't understand why their failures should be penalized, because they don't see them as failures. They did what they were supposed to do: they made a lot of money for themselves, and don't understand why the people they screwed over don't see it that way. Things are supposed to run the way they want because they're rich, which by definition means they're better than the rest of us. And their minions, the politicians a pundits they've bought, will keep finding ways to be sure it stays that way.

Update: In that vein, this quote from Howie Kurtz says it all:

As for Boehner... don't take his heartless agenda-- limitless war, limitless tax breaks for the wealthy, no breaks for the middle class-- personally. His sister, Lynda Meineke, says Boehner has two brothers and two brothers-in-law back in Ohio who are out of work. He told reporters after he voted against unemployment insurance last week that three brothers had lost jobs during the recession and he wasn't sure which if any had found work. He did remember that one is named Bob Boehner though.

What Is It About Anti-Gay Bigots?

First the Catholic Church, now The Boy Scouts of America:

Where have we heard this before? An organization known for hierarchy, homophobia, and a self-presumption of moral and religious superiority is revealed to have a long history of protecting sexual predators and covering up their crimes.

Last month, the Boy Scouts of America were found liable in a case of sexual abuse that is being compared to the scandal that is rocking the Catholic Church.

The Scouts have files on child molesters in the organization going back to 1925. Thousands of files. And they did nothing about it.

Send A Coathanger

Credo has a new campaign to enlighten the twenty "pro-choice" Democrats who voted for the Stupak Amendment. It's called Send A Coathanger. I like that, but then, I'm an in-your-face kind of guy.

The message to those twenty is:

"We know what happens when women are denied access to reproductive health care including abortion. And we can't go back to an era of coat hangers and back alley abortions. Reconsider your vote on the Stupak Amendment. Tell House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid that the final health care bill that emerges from the conference committee can't turn the clock back on women's rights."

I think that message should be expanded. I think maybe Speaker Pelosi should be included, for allowing that amendment ever to reach the floor. And President Obama, that fierce advocate for something, I forget what just now, but I'm sure he is a fierce advocate, for refusing to use his muscle in any way, shape or form to move a progressive agenda -- the agenda he was elected on.

Here's the list:

Rep. Joe Baca (CA-41)
Planned Parenthood score: 100
Nat'l Right to Life score: 0

Rep. Zachary Space (OH-18)
Planned Parenthood score: 100
Nat'l Right to Life score: 0

Rep. Ciro Rodriguez (TX-23)
Planned Parenthood score: 100
Nat'l Right to Life score: 0

Rep. Christopher Carney (PA-10)
Planned Parenthood score: 100
Nat'l Right to Life score: 14

Rep. Victor Snyder (AR-2)
Planned Parenthood score: 83
Nat'l Right to Life score: 0

Rep. Silvestre Reyes (TX-16)
Planned Parenthood score: 83
Nat'l Right to Life score: 0

Rep. Jim Costa (CA-20)
Planned Parenthood score: 80
Nat'l Right to Life score: 0

Rep. Richard Neal (MA-2)
Planned Parenthood score: 77
Nat'l Right to Life score: 0

Rep. Bob Etheridge (NC-2)
Planned Parenthood score: 75
Nat'l Right to Life score: 0

Rep. Artur Davis (AL-7)
Planned Parenthood score: 71
Nat'l Right to Life score: 0

Rep. Michael Michaud (ME-2)
Planned Parenthood score: 71
Nat'l Right to Life score: 0

Rep. Jim Cooper (TN-5)
Planned Parenthood score: 71
Nat'l Right to Life score: 0

Rep. David Ross Obey (WI-7)
Planned Parenthood score: 69
Nat'l Right to Life score: 0

Rep. Dennis Cardoza (CA-18)
Planned Parenthood score: 67
Nat'l Right to Life score: 0

Rep. Albert Chandler (KY-6)
Planned Parenthood score: 67
Nat'l Right to Life score: 0

Rep. John Spratt (SC-5)
Planned Parenthood score: 67
Nat'l Right to Life score: 0

Rep. Baron Hill (IN-9)
Planned Parenthood score: 71
Nat'l Right to Life score: 14

Rep. Earl Pomeroy (ND-ALL)
Planned Parenthood score: 69
Nat'l Right to Life score: 16

Rep. Sanford Bishop (GA-2)
Planned Parenthood score: 69
Nat'l Right to Life score: 20

Rep. Jason Altmire (PA-4)
Planned Parenthood score: 67
Nat'l Right to Life score: 28

By the way, the Stupak Amendment brought Taylor Marsh on board the "Don't Ask, Don't Give" campaign. The list is growing.

The Kindle Fiasco

The irony here is the two books that were pulled. From NYT:

In George Orwell’s “1984,” government censors erase all traces of news articles embarrassing to Big Brother by sending them down an incineration chute called the “memory hole.”

On Friday, it was “1984” and another Orwell book, “Animal Farm,” that were dropped down the memory hole — by Amazon.com.

In a move that angered customers and generated waves of online pique, Amazon remotely deleted some digital editions of the books from the Kindle devices of readers who had bought them.

Now, this story has hit the blogosphere big-time, but it seems that Amazon had a legitimate reason for the recall:

An Amazon spokesman, Drew Herdener, said in an e-mail message that the books were added to the Kindle store by a company that did not have rights to them, using a self-service function. “When we were notified of this by the rights holder, we removed the illegal copies from our systems and from customers’ devices, and refunded customers,” he said.

First, I find it strange that anyone can add a book to the Kindle inventory without it being vetted by Amazon -- given the fluster over copyrights that we've been subjected to since the advent of file-sharing and the like, that would seem to be one of the first concerns for anyone developing such a system. So, dumb move number 1.

Second, to remove the books remotely and unilaterally, without notification, is just a little bit arrogant, done't we think? Apparently, that sentiment got back to Amazon:

Amazon effectively acknowledged that the deletions were a bad idea. “We are changing our systems so that in the future we will not remove books from customers’ devices in these circumstances,” Mr. Herdener said.

Dumb move number 2. Tell people what you're going to do and why you have to do it, FTLOP.

And it appears that Amazon has violated its own terms of service:

Amazon’s published terms of service agreement for the Kindle does not appear to give the company the right to delete purchases after they have been made. It says Amazon grants customers the right to keep a “permanent copy of the applicable digital content.”

Frankly, I never had any intention of buying a Kindle anyway. I spend enough time reading from a screen, and these old eyes get really tired. And I like books. I like the physical feel of a book in my hands, I like turning pages, I like the whole experience of reading a book. And I like the fact that once I buy it, it's mine. Forever. No matter what.

Does anyone really think I'm going to spend a few hundred dollars on a reading device that remains under their control? I don't think so.

Chalk one up for tradition.