Tweet du Jour

It's called "capitalism".

Happy Labor Day.

With thanks to commenter Reality.Bites at Joe.My.God.

Today in Disgusting People

So there's this person who goes from state to state helping Republican governors slash their budgets:

A few days after a powerful earthquake hit the state last November, Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy (R) issued an order increasing the power of the state’s budget office, led at the time by a woman who had lived in Alaska a mere two weeks.

In her newly empowered role, Donna Arduin — an infamous budget-slashing expert — and Dunleavy went on cut to hundreds of millions from the state budget. They aim to trim even more in her second year in the remote state.

It’s hardly Arduin’s first rodeo. The budget consultant has served in several Republican-led governor’s offices, slashing state expenses while cutting or resisting efforts to increase tax revenue.

She's hardly worried about the effect on the people who actually live there:

The University of Alaska’s Board of Regents, at a meeting in which they declared financial exigency last week, sounded less enthusiastic. The institution has been “crippled,” its president said, by the governor cutting roughly 40% of the school’s state funding — over $130 million. Thousands of students across the state found their state-funded scholarships suddenly defunded with the school year looming. “We will not have a university after February if we don’t make a move,” one regent noted.

Another Alaskan who had scheduled a dentures appointment four weeks after having his teeth extracted was left with gums flapping in the wind, after the governor eliminated Medicaid dental coverage for adults. That saved the state $27 million.

And she's crippled social services in other states:

In the process of cutting $8.1 billion over five years in Florida, the Los Angeles Times later reported, “Florida eliminated money for eyeglasses, hearing aids and dentures for poor seniors and forced 55,000 low-income children onto health insurance waiting lists.”

At a time when there is broad support for universal health coverage, assholes like Arduin are cutting funding. Her rationale?

“I joined government to shrink it,” she said.

Spoken like a true libertarian, which is possibly the most morally bankrupt philosophy that I've ever run across.

Of course, she doesn't have to bear the consequences.

Via Bark Bark Woof Woof.

Commercial du Jour

Maybe of the year. I don't watch regular TV, so I seldom have any take on ads unless they start generating news on their own. This one is:

In the context of the accusations of harassment and sexual abuse over the past few years, I guess better late than never. I will point out, though, that it took a national movement to penetrate the boardroom, which, in the case of abuse of women I find instructive: corporations have been very quick to respond to the gay community. Maybe this is why we can't have a woman president.*

The incels and right-wing nutjobs at YouTube are losing it over this one. I wonder why.

Via Joe.My.God.

* Stray thought: So many other countries have had female heads of state or heads of government -- the UK, Germany, Iceland, India, Sri Lanka, Israel, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Liberia, just off the top of my head (and I'm sure I'm missing some) -- and yet America elected a black man as president and still hasn't elected a woman. We haven't even elected a ticket that included a woman as VP. That says something.

Oops!

That's not what they were supposed to say:

"Fox & Friends” on Monday had a panel of independent voters to discuss the caravan of Central American immigrants heading through Mexico toward the United States — but it backfired hilariously after the guests expressed empathy for migrants.

Even though the show had spent the entire morning running scare-mongering segments about the caravan, the independent voters on the show said they were nonetheless supportive of helping the migrants.

“There’s a humanitarian crisis taking place in Central America,” said one independent voter interviewed by Fox News’ Steve Doocy. “And yet, this issue gets turned into a complete political football. There’s very little about what’s actually happening.”

A second guest quickly piped up to agree, while subtly knocking Fox for its efforts to frighten viewers about the migrants.

“Treating this as an ‘invasion’ is a bad idea and it’s going to end horribly,” he said. “People have to realize, yeah, these are human beings coming here, and there needs to be a real solution offered in dealing with it.”

American are better than what Trump wants us to believe. It occurs to me that the erosion of our standing in the world is not simply that our president is a joke. It wasn't based on money or military power (for those nations not led by people like Trump), but much more on our willingness to help. We took the lead in the fight against AIDS in Africa and Asia, we've always been there with relief for natural disasters, both at home and abroad, and -- well, remember the Peace Corps?

And, as it turns out, most Americans still believe in that. Which makes me wonder all the more how we put a bunch of sociopaths like Trump and the Republicans in charge.

Taking the Knee: Beto O'Rourke Gets It Right

O'Rourke is running for Ted Cruz' senate seat from Texas, and he's got Cruz worried. Episodes like this are one reason why:

And in case you were wondering, yes, I support the football players and anyone else who protests the rampant murder of blacks by police. Don't forget it was Trump who shifted it to disrespect for the flag and the military -- another lie from the primary source of fake news.

Oh, the Humanity!

Trump's pettiness is infecting the entire government: compare and contrast:

A billionaire business shark and a “worldwide” pop star have donated the use of their own planes, but the Trump administration is making U.S. citizens pay “full fare” to be evacuated from hurricane-ravaged Puerto Rico.

What’s worse, the U.S. government, in accordance with a long-standing but discretionary policy, will hold the evacuees’ passports as collateral until it gets its money.

Well, that should help the deficit.

I'm happy to note that Chicago has also stepped up:

Thank you @United for answering the call to provide relief to Puerto Rico. Find ways to donate & volunteer to help: https://t.co/wCICeloX3P pic.twitter.com/KiSNNuyXdu

— Mayor Rahm Emanuel (@ChicagosMayor) September 26, 2017

But I guess it's a matter of priorities:

Since Sept. 20, when Hurricane Maria made landfall on the U.S. territory, through Wednesday afternoon, President Trump has sent a total of 96 tweets, including retweets and de-tweets. Those mentioning Puerto Rico totaled seven. . . .

In contrast, there have been 26 tweets related to the NFL players kneeling during the national anthem (including those related to disinviting Steph Curry for a visit to the White House) since Saturday morning[.]

Trump is just sickening.

Today's Must-Read: The Right's Moral Vacuum

Tom Sullivan has a good piece at Hullabaloo on the Republican's complete lack of moral foundation:

After decades of accusations from conservatives that the American left advances reprehensible moral relativism, this week we saw that the real sin was having morals of any kind. What the Trump family modeled for the world this week is what it looks like to have none. Watergate veteran John Dean warned during the Bush II administration of the rise of "Conservatives Without Conscience." The Trumps consider that lack a plus.

"What stood out most in the interview was the moral emptiness of the president’s son," Slate's William Saletan wrote after Donald Trump Jr. appeared with Sean Hannity to explain away his meeting last June with a Russian emissary offering dirt on Hillary Clinton. What looks to be a willingness to conspire with a hostile foreign power to undermine an American election, Trump Jr. dismissed as no big deal. “That’s what we do in business. If there’s information out there, you want it." He might have done things differently, but he'd done nothing wrong.

It's not just the Trumps, although more and more I think that they're an accurate reflection of their class -- the movers and shakers, the "job creators," the plutocrats who trade in congressmen and senators -- it's the right as a whole: they've demonstrated time and time again that they have no idea of what morality is about. (This is only one example.)

Sullivan digs deeper, noting this by WaPo columnist Jennifer Rubin:

We have always had in our political culture narcissists, ideologues and flimflammers, but it took the 21st-century GOP to put one in the White House. It took elected leaders such as House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) and the Republican National Committee (not to mention its donors and activists) to wave off Trump’s racists attacks on a federal judge, blatant lies about everything from 9/11 to his own involvement in birtherism, replete evidence of disloyalty to America (i.e. Trump’s “Russia first” policies), misogyny, Islamophobia, ongoing potential violations of the Constitution’s emoluments clause (along with a mass of conflicts of interests), firing of an FBI director, and now, evidence that the campaign was willing to enlist a foreign power to defeat Clinton in the presidential election.

Out of its collective sense of victimhood came the GOP’s disdain for not just intellectuals but also intellectualism, science, Economics 101, history and constitutional fidelity. If the Trump children became slaves to money and to their father’s unbridled ego, then the GOP became slaves to its own demons and false narratives. A party that has to deny climate change and insist illegal immigrants are creating a crime wave — because that is what “conservatives” must believe, since liberals do not — is a party that will deny Trump’s complicity in gross misconduct. It’s a party as unfit to govern as Trump is unfit to occupy the White House. It’s not by accident that Trump chose to inhabit the party that has defined itself in opposition to reality and to any “external moral truth or ethical code.”

I'd take Rubin's final comment one step further: the Republican party and its adherents are completely lacking in any moral truth or ethical code whatsoever.

Read it and weep.

Racism Is Alive and Well

In Mississippi, of course:

Mississippi student Jasmine Shepard (Photo: Facebook)

Jasmine Shepard was the top of her class and had the highest GPA, but her Mississippi high school forced her to “share” the title with students whose GPAs were lower. The school has never done something like this before, but they’ve also never had a black valedictorian before. She and her family think it’s because of her race.

“Prior to 2016, all of Cleveland High School’s valedictorians were white,” a lawsuit against the school says, according to The Washington Post. “As a result of the school official’s unprecedented action of making an African-American student share the valedictorian award with a white student, the defendants discriminated against [plaintiff].”

It seems the school district had to be dragged kicking and screaming into post-Civil War America:

In 2016, a federal judge ruled that the district failed to desegregate schools despite the 50-year-old Brown v. Topeka Board of Education decision ordering them to.

“The delay in desegregation has deprived generations of students of the constitutionally-guaranteed right of an integrated education,” U.S. District Court Judge Debra M. Brown wrote last year. “Although no court order can right these wrongs, it is the duty of the district to ensure that not one more student suffers under this burden.”
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The school tried to fight the order but ultimately gave up.

Aside from the arrogance (and probable mendacity), this is just so damned petty.

But then, we're talking about small, petty people.

Sadly, this kind of crap is not limited to the Deep South.

Today's Must-Read: The Perennial Target (Update)

Trump wants to do away with Social Security. He's not coming right out and saying it, but he's setting it up, if his "tax reform" proposals, sketchy as they are, are any indication. Michael Hiltzik lays it out:

President Trump’s tax reform agenda is in trouble. That’s not news, but one proposal that his team has floated as a way, ostensibly, to cut taxes on the middle class is. According to the Associated Press, they’re toying with the idea of eliminating the payroll tax, which funds Social Security and part of Medicare, or cutting it drastically.

This is an absolutely terrible idea, partially because it smells like a back-door way of cutting Social Security benefits. It needs to be nipped in the bud.

“This proposal is a Trojan horse,” the veteran Social Security advocate Nancy J. Altman told me. “It appears to be a gift in the form of middle-class tax relief, but would, if enacted, lead to the destruction of working Americans' fundamental economic security.”

To understand why, one needs to examine the history and mechanics of Social Security, something the Trump team hasn’t tried or doesn’t care to do. But we can.

And he does. Read the whole thing. Via Karoli Kuns at Crooks and Liars, who is worth a read as well.

Update: Digby has more on this.

What We're Losing

Via C&L, President Obama's speech to the troops at MacDill Air Force Base -- his "final words" as Commander-in-Chief. Here's the meat:

So let my final words to you, as your Commander-in-Chief, be a reminder of what it is that you are fighting for, what it is that we are fighting for. The United States of America is not a country that imposes religious tests as a price for freedom. We’re a country that was founded so that people could practice their faiths as they choose. The United States of America is not a place where some citizens have to withstand greater scrutiny, or carry a special I.D. Card, or prove that they are not an enemy from within. We are a country that has bled and struggled and sacrificed against that kind of discrimination and arbitrary rule, here in our own country and around the world.

We’re a nation that believes freedom can never be taken for granted, and that each of us has a responsibility to sustain it. The universal right to speak your mind and to protest against authority. To live in a society that’s open and free. That can criticize our president without retribution. A country where you’re judged by the content of your character, rather than what you look like, or how you worship, or what your last name is, or where your family came from. That’s what separates us from tyrants and terrorists.

We are a nation that stands for the rule of law, and strengthened the laws of war. When the Nazis were defeated, we put them on trial. Some couldn’t understand that. It had never happened before. But as one of the American lawyers who was at Nuremberg said, “I was trying to prove that the rule of law should govern human behavior,” and by doing so, we broadened the scope and reach of justice around the world. Held ourselves out as a beacon and an example for others.

We are a nation that won world wars without grabbing the resources of those we defeated. We helped them rebuild. We didn’t hold on to territory, other than the cemeteries where we buried our dead. Our greatest generation fought and bled and died to build an international order of laws and institutions that could preserve the peace, and extend prosperity and promote cooperation among nations. And for all of its imperfections, we depend on that international order to protect our own freedom.

In other words, we are a nation that, at our best, has been defined by hope and not fear. A country that went through the crucible of a civil war to offer a new birth of freedom, that stormed the beaches of Normandy, climbed the hills of Iwo Jima, that saw normal people mobilize to extend the freedom of civil rights. That’s what makes us who we are. It makes us stronger than any act of terror.

Remember that history. Remember what that flag stands for. For we depend on you. The heirs to that legacy. Our men and women in uniform, and the citizens who support you, to carry forward what is best in us, that commitment to a common creed, the confidence that right makes might, not the other way around.

I didn't agree with him sometimes on specifics, and I felt he was too willing to negotiate with Republicans, who don't have the word "compromise" in their vocabulary. But he's a class act. Pity all we have to follow that with is a fraud.

Well, That Didn't Take Long

They've come out from under their rocks. Let's see -- why don't we start with the League of the South, which is directed toward the secession of the southern states to form an all-white nation:

Once the globalist-progressive coalition of Jews, minorities, and anti-white whites stops reeling in confusion from the results of yesterday’s election, we can expect them to start striking back with trickery and violence. Thus, we as Southern nationalists face both danger and opportunity.

“Now, more than ever, we need tight organization and numbers to help drive a stake through Dracula’s heart and keep him from rising once again to menace our people and civilization. No mercy should be shown to the enemies of our God, our Folk, and our civilization. None would be afforded us.

A little over the top, but that's sort of par for the course for these nutjobs.

The Klan, of course, is jumping at the opportunity (via Joe.My.God.):

One Birmingham neighborhood received an unsettling wake-up the morning after Election Day when they discovered Ku Klux Klan recruiting fliers littering their neighborhood. . . .

The front cover reads, “Get off the fence, whitey, and join the only group that has ever stood for the white man."

David Duke, needless to say, is ecstatic:

 

David Duke ‏@DrDavidDuke

 

This is one of the most exciting nights of my life -> make no mistake about it, our people have played a HUGE role in electing Trump! #MAGA

 

 

• Retweets 3,889
• Likes 2,052
• 

11:14 PM - 8 Nov 2016

And of course, grabbing some of the credit.

And those are just the high-profile assholes. Check this out.

I have to confess to being somewhat insulated from this sort of thing: you may have read mention of my neighborhood, which is so diverse that I can't even identify all the elements. Not all of Chicago is like that. There was an offshoot of the American Nazi Party headquartered in Marquette Park, on the southwest side, for a number of years; I don't know if they're still there. I hope not. And then there was the woman at a bus stop who was convinced that the CTA was cutting back service because Obama was giving everyone cars -- a step up from cell phones. (I figured it was just because so many more people are riding bikes, especially in the summer. It's called "supply and demand.")

It's not only the racists who are going to get more active.

Arsonists destroyed two gay Pride flags in Rochester, New York, on Tuesday and Wednesday, and one of the victims believes the incidents are linked to the presidential election.

screen-shot-2016-11-10-at-11-47-19-amGreg Ventura (right), who discovered the Pride flag outside his home burned on Tuesday night, told WXXI that he believes it was a “targeted hate crime.”

“There were heated temperaments due to the election happening so I did make the tie later on that possibly the election was the reason,” Ventura said. “I thought I lived in a very accepting area of Rochester and I just couldn’t believe that this happened in the downtown region.

Frankly, I find these people incomprehensible. Yeah, the pundits are probably right on one score: they're losing control of their lives and they think voting for a sociopathic loser like Donald Trump is going to fix it -- this from a man who proposed moving factories and offices from state to state to keep jobs in America while also depressing wages. The fix is not going to involve an all-white America, but it's going to get really ugly for a while.

I'd like to say they deserve it, and they do -- but the rest of us don't.

Shell Shocked

In the immortal words of Quicksilver, from the last Avengers movie, "I didn't see that coming."

Chicago dyke left a comment at Joe.My.God. that touches on what happened, I think:

people just have to face it: she ran a campaign that appealed to the brain, he ran a campaign that appealed to emotion. 9 times out 10 the latter will beat the former, in politics.

She's right: Clinton ran a campaign heavy on substance, designed to appeal to the educated, thoughtful voter. The proportion of those in the electorate has been shrinking over the past number of years -- how else to explain George W. Bush? Twice?

There's also the Republican hate Clinton machine, which has been on overdrive since long before this election season. And it hasn't been the usual suspects -- Fox "News," Rush Limbaugh, and their ilk. The FBI managed to weigh in, at the time calculated to do the most damage, and our "news" organizations did their part, in spades.

So, what's next? Trump was very conciliatory in his victory speech, issuing what some are terming a "call for unity":

I pledge to every citizen of our land that I will be president for all Americans and this is so important to me. For those who have chosen not to support me in the past – of which there are a few people – I am reaching out to you for your guidance and your help so that we can work together and unify our great country.

It may come as no surprise that I don't place a great deal of confidence in that. Think about it: this is a man who listens to no one reaching out for guidance? This is a man whose entire campaign was devoted to dividing us calling for unity? Color me unpersuaded.

I may start weighing options, once this has really sunk in. Canada's too close. South Africa's a possibility, or New Zealand. Australia looks to be almost as dysfunctional as we are, at least with the Liberals in power. Argentina, I'd have to learn Spanish.

And those romantic little islands in the Pacific are not likely to last as long as I do, particularly if The Hairpiece does as little about climate change as I expect.

I'm really sort of sorry I don't drink.

Starring John Kasich as Chris Christie

So guess who wants to gut Social Security this week. Gov. John Kasich, whose campaign for the GOP presidential nomination seems to have -- well, I can't say it's stall, because it never got going to begin with.

At any rate, his target is now Social Security and Medicare, which is so-o-o 2012.

First off, if you don't know what your benefit is going to be, it's your fault: Social Security sends you a freakin' letter telling you what your benefit is going to be. Sorry, Governor, but it's not part of some nefarious plot to keep people in the dark.

“I’d rather have people be in a position where they’re aggravated with me so I can accomplish something, than have them love me and accomplish nothing,” Kasich told the audience during an event in Concord, New Hampshire. “I’m not there to run a popularity contest.”

The former governor of Ohio preceded the remarks by asking the crowd how many of them knew how much their initial Social Security payments would be. Two people raised their hands to indicate that they did know.

“What if I told you that your initial benefit was gonna be somewhat lower in order to save the program?” he asked. “Would that drive you crazy?”

When one audience member responded that it would “upset” them, Kasich told them, “Well, you’d get over it, and you’re going to have to get over it.”

That's Kasich being real butch, just like the bully from New Jersey.

(Ed. note: As far as I know, Kasich is the current governor of Ohio. My sympathies.)

Kasich later made a similar statement about Medicare, saying that any voter wanting him to “ignore the fact that it’s going broke” would not like him.

In a brief interview later, he accused Democrats in turn of allowing Social Security to “get to a point where it could go bankrupt.”

“We’re getting close to Halloween, and they just want to scare people,” Kasich added.

We've been through this, but apparently Kasich missed class that day: Neither program is anywhere near bankrupt, and is not going to be. For Social Security, the fix is simple: lift the cap on the payroll tax. Medicare is more complicated, but it's in good shape for the next fifteen years: spending has not increased as much as expected, and may follow that trend as more and more people are insured under the ACA. There's plenty of time to do any fixes that are necessary -- of course, that assumes that someone actually wants to fix it, rather than handing it over to Wall Street and the insurance industry.

The Halloween comment, I thought, was pretty funny: pot, kettle.

And a note: I'm of the camp that insists that for Social Security the cap should be raised and benefits increased: the "cost of living" increase doesn't come anywhere near the actual increase in cost of living. And this is coming from someone who lives a fairly Spartan life.

Health Care and the Social Contract

Jack Balkin has an excellent post at Balkinization about the deeper significance of the Supreme Court's decision in King v. Burwell:

But on a deeper level, King v. Burwell had constitutional overtones. The Affordable Care Act was no ordinary statute-- it was a framework statute like the Social Security Act, the Wagner Act, Medicare, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It significantly changed the terms of governance in the United States by reorganizing the health care industry and creating a new guarantee of (virtually universal) health insurance.

This gets into the kind of discussion that fascinates me because it reflects on my basic question: Why do we form societies?

My answer is, of course, "To take care of each other." The ACA, as an aspect of that "common good" criterion for a successful society, is, indeed, one of those foundational pieces of legislation -- as Balkin terms it, a "framework" statute -- that describe the particulars of how we are going to implement part of that taking care of each other.

Balkin's post is worth reading in its entirety. It delves into the history and sometimes gets a little technical, but it's fascinating. The key concept:

Framework statutes that are central to the American social contract-- like Social Security and Medicare, have a special status in the American system of government, and courts understand this implicitly. (That is what made the Court's decision in Shelby County v. Holder so important and so shocking-- it gutted a key part of framework statute from the Civil Rights Revolution--the Voting Rights Act).

In NFIB v. Sebelius, the Supreme Court decided that the creation of a new framework statute designed to guarantee universal health care was a legitimate innovation in American government.

I think these ideas have ramifications for other cases -- Obergefell v. Hodges being of major concern right now. If the Court rules, as most expect it to, in favor of marriage equality, it's going to have repercussions across the spectrum of civil rights, and I don't think it's going to matter how narrowly the opinion is written: once the Court has decided that, for purposes of the fundamental right of marriage, "queers are people, my friend," it's going to be very difficult to exclude us from the exercise of other rights. There's no law in these cases that could be considered a "framework" -- that's the Fourteenth Amendment. What's important here is the Court restating that, yes, the Fourteenth Amendment, when it says "all persons," means exactly that.

Today's Must Read

Very interesting post at Mahablog, focused ostensibly on race and identity, but touching as well -- well, actually, based on human beings as social animals and how that context shapes who we are and who we think we are.

We are not only physically dependent on each other but psychologically dependent as well. There is all kinds of data and real-world experience showing that actual isolation is devastating to a human. Prolonged isolation from other humans literally drives us mad. Indeed, our personalities — the traits we think make us uniquely “me” — are (to the psychologist and sociologists who study these things) entirely about how we relate to other humans. If there are no other humans to relate to, personalities cannot be expressed and arguably don’t even exist.

One of my favorite exercises — describe who you are as an individual without reference to a position within some kind of social or economic network. In other words, describe who you are as an individual without reference to family, nation, profession, interests (sports? stamp collecting? messing around on the Web?) or anything that doesn’t require other people. I say it can’t be done.

This ties in to my thinking on the social contract and the bases of morality, which I've explicated ad nauseam, but to summarize: the social contract is our morality, which in turn is all about how we relate to other people, which is something those who rail on about the evils of birth control and homosexuality and the like are never going to understand, since they think of morality as a set of rules derived from the tribal taboos of a group of ancient Middle Eastern nomads that can't be broken for fear of eternal damnation, to which I can only respond, Well, you get what you pay for.

And This Is a Surprise?

Gee -- the Republicans in the Senate are blocking a vote on a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United:

Senate Republicans on Thursday blocked a vote on a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United and other Supreme Court rulings dating back to 1976 that invalidated restrictions on money in politics.

The party line vote was 54 in favor, 42 against, falling short of the 60 votes needed to defeat a filibuster and proceed to a final vote.

I'm actually surprised that there were no Democrats joining the Republicans on this one, but they probably figured they were safe. Oh, and Ted "Obama Will Censor SNL" Cruz didn't bother to show up for the vote.

And the Through the Looking Glass Award goes to Mitch McConnell:

"I have to say it’s a little disconcerting to see the Democrat-led Senate focusing on things like reducing free speech protections for the American people," he said before the vote. "This is what they chose to make their top legislative priority this week. Taking an eraser to the First Amendment."

There you have it: in the Republican lexicon, corporations are "the American people." What does that make the rest of us?

Another "Grab Your Hanky" Post

Via AmericaBlog:

Rion Holcombe, age 20, has Down Syndrome. His dream is to be a college student.

A few days ago he got “the letter.”

His reaction:

Just remember, as you're reading about the assholes in Washington posturing and gesticulating (not to mention "world leaders" from around the globe) while selling us all to their major donors: Good things do happen.

It occurs to me that this is the sort of program that's just what the teabaggers and their corporatist handlers keep preaching about -- you know, self-reliance and all that -- but they've forgotten one very important element: no one does it by himself. That's why we have societies.

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.

SNAP

The Republicans in the House have voted to cut $40 billion from the SNAP program (food stamps) over the next ten years. This will result in almost four million people either being eliminated from the program completely or having their benefits cut. Here's Rep. Jackie Speirer's (CA-14) response:

And here's one of the Republican apologists for the cuts:

It's nice to watch the bastard squirm. And his numbers don't add up.

One of the Congressman who voted for the cuts is Phil Gingrey of Georgia:

A Tea Party Republican U.S. Congressman from the state of Georgia yesterday told his colleagues in a closed-door meeting just how frustrated he is with what he sees as his low-income. Rep. Phil Gingrey, attending a GOP strategy meeting on how to extend their all-out war on Obamacare, was reported to complain that Congressional aides can quit and become lobbyists “and make 500,000 a year. Meanwhile I’m stuck here making $172,000 a year.”

Congressman Gingrey, based on his own reporting, not only is a millionaire, but has assets that earn him over a million dollars annually. And The Raw Story notes that “USA Today reported that Gingrey’s net worth is estimated to be between $3 million and $7.6 million, while the median household income in Georgia is $49,736.”

My heart bleeds for him.

Here's the vote tally:

FINAL VOTE RESULTS FOR FOOD STAMPS PROGRAM: 217-210 by davidbadash

NSA Oversight -- Right (Update, Update II)

Digby has a good post on this this morning, that sort of sums up everything that's wrong with trusting the government to govern itself, at least as far as safeguarding Americans' privacy rights. To start off, Digby has this choice little bit from the Guardian:

The National Security Agency has a secret backdoor into its vast databases under a legal authority enabling it to search for US citizens' email and phone calls without a warrant, according to a top-secret document passed to the Guardian by Edward Snowden.

The previously undisclosed rule change allows NSA operatives to hunt for individual Americans' communications using their name or other identifying information. Senator Ron Wyden told the Guardian that the law provides the NSA with a loophole potentially allowing "warrantless searches for the phone calls or emails of law-abiding Americans".

The authority, approved in 2011, appears to contrast with repeated assurances from Barack Obama and senior intelligence officials to both Congress and the American public that the privacy of US citizens is protected from the NSA's dragnet surveillance programs.

I'm sure you've all heard this story, from the late days of the Bush administration:

Faulk says he and others in his section of the NSA facility at Fort Gordon routinely shared salacious or tantalizing phone calls that had been intercepted, alerting office mates to certain time codes of "cuts" that were available on each operator's computer.

"Hey, check this out," Faulk says he would be told, "there's good phone sex or there's some pillow talk, pull up this call, it's really funny, go check it out. It would be some colonel making pillow talk and we would say, 'Wow, this was crazy'," Faulk told ABC News.

Do you think anything has changed under Obama? Then:

In testimony before Congress, then-NSA director Gen. Michael Hayden, now director of the CIA, said private conversations of Americans are not intercepted.

"It's not for the heck of it. We are narrowly focused and drilled on protecting the nation against al Qaeda and those organizations who are affiliated with it," Gen. Hayden testified.

He was asked by Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT), "Are you just doing this because you just want to pry into people's lives?"

"No, sir," General Hayden replied.

And now:

The day after the Guardian revealed details of the NSA's Prism program, President Obama said: "Now, with respect to the internet and emails, this doesn't apply to US citizens and it doesn't apply to people living in the United States."

Speaking at a House hearing on 18 June this year, deputy attorney general James Cole told legislators "[T]here's a great deal of minimization procedures that are involved here, particularly concerning any of the acquisition of information that deals or comes from US persons.

"As I said, only targeting people outside the United States who are not US persons. But if we do acquire any information that relates to a US person, under limited criteria only can we keep it."

Do you believe that?

Digby has what I think is the best summation:

There is every reason to be skeptical about the NSA's oversight of its own programs. After all, Edward Snowden was able to do a whole lot of things they claim nobody can do. Is it reasonable to think that there aren't other operatives digging in where they shouldn't be? Or certain people who think they have good patriotic reasons to do it and can't see why a stupid legal technicality should stand in the way? These are human beings not machines. They can talk themselves into anything.

My own prediction, based on my admittedly jaundiced view of the government and its respect for the Constitution, as filtered through "national security!!11!!!": This will change when major corporations find out how much of their "privileged" communication is sitting in a government data storage facility.

Update: Another post from Digby, with the president's response to the stories coming out about the abuse of the NSA surveillance apparatus.

He seemed to have been saying today that Snowden's revelations ruined his plan to have an orderly investigation of the NSA programs even though there is no evidence that he was doing any such thing. Certainly, there is no evidence that there was any "plan" to inform the American people since the senators who were running around with their hair on fire were lied to right to their face in open testimony by the intelligence community.

Somebody's in full damage control mode.

And another story on the President's news conference, from TPM, with a slightly different take:

President Barack Obama made it clear Friday he has no intention of stopping the daily collection of American phone records. And while he offered “appropriate reforms,” he blamed government leaks for creating distrust of his domestic spying program.

No, Mr. President, the distrust has been created because you and the national security apparatus have far overstepped the bounds of what's allowable and lied to us about it. That's what's created "distrust."

And this just points out how clueless Obama and everyone else in Washington is:

“Understandably, people would be concerned,” the president said. “I would be, too, if I weren’t inside the government.”

WTF?

Update II And from Glenn Greenwald, favorite bete noir of some elements in our polity. (Fine, he has an agenda. Good luck finding someone who doesn't. And I happen to agree with most of Greenwald's.)

A Texas-based encrypted email service recently revealed to be used by Edward Snowden - Lavabit - announced yesterday it was shutting itself down in order to avoid complying with what it perceives as unjust secret US court orders to provide government access to its users' content.

What's instructive is this:

What is particularly creepy about the Lavabit self-shutdown is that the company is gagged by law even from discussing the legal challenges it has mounted and the court proceeding it has engaged. In other words, the American owner of the company believes his Constitutional rights and those of his customers are being violated by the US Government, but he is not allowed to talk about it. Just as is true for people who receive National Security Letters under the Patriot Act, Lavabit has been told that they would face serious criminal sanctions if they publicly discuss what is being done to their company. Thus we get hostage-message-sounding missives like this:

I wish that I could legally share with you the events that led to my decision. I cannot. I feel you deserve to know what's going on - the first amendment is supposed to guarantee me the freedom to speak out in situations like this. Unfortunately, Congress has passed laws that say otherwise. As things currently stand, I cannot share my experiences over the last six weeks, even though I have twice made the appropriate requests."

Via Balloon Juice. John Cole has a slightly different take on my prediction about big business, above:

Money talks, which is why we had a big press conference today. You and I can’t afford a lobbyist, but you start screwing with the high tech industry’s bottom line, and you bet your ass some changes will be coming.

Talk among yourselves.