Herbert von Karajan Gives Us A Great Break From The Great Grate Of Donald

 

 
Donald makes America grate again; here's a brief respite.

GOP National Convention Starts Today, Monday...

... but a quick flip of the remote will transport me to Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood.

♪ Would you be my neighbor? ♪ And honestly: which of these two would you welcome in your neighborhood?

Each of them lives in his own land of make-believe; the difference is that Daniel Tiger admits it upfront.

Finally I Get It - Why Bernie Must Stay In The Race Until The Convention

It took The Young Turks to explain it to me... well, them and the short Bernie clip they play in this segment. Bernie cannot drop out now and accomplish his most significant goal, specifically, shifting the Democratic Party... the party platform and Clinton's expressed positions... leftward far enough to make a difference.



Bernie is not stupid, far from it. And I understand he would make a great president... if there were a way for him to get from here to there. But there's not. Any honest American (and that certainly includes Bernie) knows that the president who takes office in January will be the candidate of one of the two major political parties, Democratic or Republican, not anyone else. Bernie will not be one of those candidates... but even so he has a real opportunity from his current position to influence the behavior of one of those parties, by staying in the race all the way to the Democratic convention. If he withdraws earlier, he loses that power. If he announces a third-party presidential run, he becomes Ralph Nader writ large, almost certainly assuring a President Trump (about whom, not so incidentally, I agree with Bernie: America would collapse in chaos within a year if Trump became president).

So Bernie, smart guy that he is, does the one thing open to him that accomplishes the most significant of his goals. In support of his run... even if its success in the usual sense is certainly unrealizable... I continue to endorse him, on this site and in personal conversations, until he and his surrogates have accomplished what they can at the convention. At that point, if I'm still alive, you can anticipate a "Clinton for President" banner in the left column of this blog. Politics makes strange bedfellows, a fact that in this case I willingly accept.

NYT Editorial On How GOPers Are Behaving

The short version on GOP behavior as a whole: deplorable. The NYT says it better than I ever could:

...

Forget an up-or-down vote [on Obama's nomination to replace the late Antonin Scalia] on the Senate floor. Top Republicans are pledging not to hold hearings or even to meet with a nominee.

In a statement dripping with sarcasm, Mr. McConnell said that Mr. Obama “has every right to nominate someone,” and “even if doing so will inevitably plunge our nation into another bitter and avoidable struggle, that is his right. Even if he never expects that nominee to actually be confirmed but rather to wield as an electoral cudgel, that is his right.”

Senator John Cornyn of Texas, the majority whip, said, “We believe the American people need to decide who is going to make this appointment rather than a lame-duck president.”

These statements are so twisted that it’s hard to know where to begin. Let’s take them one by one.

...

And so they do take them and wield them like sharp swords.

This is not my father's Republican Party... yes, Dad was a Democrat, but he could occasionally be persuaded to vote 'R'; he was very proud of the whole system and explained to me why it had so many virtues.

McConnell & Co. were not virtuous when they decided to defy the Constitution by refusing even to consider "advise and consent" on Obama's proposed Supreme Court nominee. If one of us went to one of our bosses and said what today's GOPers in Congress are saying to the President and the American people, s/he would be met with Donald Trump's signature line, "You're fired!"

And the small bit I saw of last night's "debate" ... we don't have cable, but we were having dinner in a restaurant that plays Conservative News Network (CNN) continuously... was a schanda für die goyim... and the GOPers themselves seem unaware of that shame. The Democratic Party ("Democrat Party" if you're the author of Marco Rubio's campaign commercials) sometimes does things that make me squirm in embarrassment, but the Rethuglicans often do things that make me want to toss eggs at them.

Shame! Shame! Shame!

‘Freedom Of The Press Is Guaranteed Only ...’Sampling The Networks' Hillary Committee Aftermath

Liebling was right, and his famous quotation is never more apt than when applied to politics on broadcast TV...

[flip broadcast TV — ON]

Charlie Rose, who is I assume a Republican (at least he married in succession two wealthy women), hosted... two Republicans and John Grisham, probably not a Republican (he is on the board of The Innocence Project, and GOPers seldom think anyone is innocent). Three-to-one R-to-D on the set. They weren't shy about it, either. 

[flip]

A local knockoff of The View; five people on set. I don't know the ratio, but one unabashedly partisan Republican woman dominated the conversation monologue.

[flip]

A major broadcast network's morning national news. A "political analyst" spins the Hillary testimony. In this case, "political analyst" meant "paid Republican hack."

[flip]

Another major broadcast network's morning national news. Carly Fiorina, not pitted against any Democrat, ranting derogatory crap about Hillary, with no one on set to defend Mrs. Clinton. You can just imagine... it was as if Fiorina had been given a free ad spot.

[flip — OFF]

There's not even an attempt to be subtle about it. Many Republicans hate Hillary so much that I am worried that if they can't stop her by legitimate means, one or more of them may assault her. But whatever they want to say is OK with me, as long as there is someone on set to present an opposing viewpoint. Somehow, there seldom if ever is such a person.

Regular readers know I am a strong supporter of Bernie Sanders, and I wish to goodness it was his year, but as much as I personally enjoy supporting a genuine progressive, I think Bernie is the proverbial snowball in Hell in the race for President. It ain't gonna happen.

When Bernie departs the race, I will revert to type: I am a strategic voter, and as distasteful as I find big-money politics, I plan to vote for Hillary... no matter what stupid (and utterly false) scandals the Rethugs toss at her. Hey, she's gotta be better than The Donald (admittedly not a very high standard).

As to who will win, I have no idea. With the broadcast networks wholly owned by right-wing nut-jobs (even PBS news shows are dominated by executive directors who lean right), the public never has a fair chance to see any other views. (A colleague of mine with whom I carpooled many years ago, a well-educated wing-nut but nonetheless a wing-nut, used to rant about the "liberal media." I can only wish...)

From Buckley v. Valeo (1976) forward, the "spending-is-speech" crowd, themselves mostly wealthy Republicans, have effectively owned US politics. If we want our democracy back, I don't know how in Hell we're going to get it. It's sad, when you think about it. <sigh />

Moyers And Winship: ‘Turn Left On Main Street’

Leave it to the estimable Bill Moyers and his senior writer Michael Winship to come down hard on people like Rep. John K. Delaney, who in his WaPo op‑ed lambastes all members of the Democratic Party who are politically to the left of John Boehner. Thank you, Messrs. Moyers and Winship; my patience with purportedly Democratic members of Congress who insist on pretending the Democratic Party is, was and ever shall be hardcore conservative just because self-proclaimed "New Democrats," "Blue Democrats," etc. have made inroads into the process of turning the DP into a Second Republican Party. Who the fv<k needs that?

Endorsing Bernie: Four Posts, A Video And A Short Rant

I am endorsing Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-VT) (no, that's not a mistake; from what I've read, he's running as a 'D') for President, for as long as he's in the race. Yes, I'll switch my vote to Hillary when Sanders inevitably loses at the primary level. Why am I doing this? That's easy to demonstrate.

First, the video:



... then some articles:

• DSWright at FDL: Team Clinton Worried Sanders Will Make Hillary ‘Look Like A Corporatist’
• John Nichols at The Nation: Bernie Sanders to Billionaires: ‘You Can’t Have It All!’
• tvdude at Kos: Bernie Sanders blows Wolf Blitzer's mind with a simple idea (guess it doesn't take much)
• John Nichols at The Nation: ‘Don’t Underestimate Me’: Bernie Sanders Knows a Thing or Two About Winning

Look. This could easily be my last presidential election. When it comes to voting, I've been a dedicated Democrat all my life. What did I get for my troubles? A rightward-running party (or at least its leadership), almost as corporatist as the GOP, wholly devoted to the surveillance state, supporting secret "free trade" agreements guaranteed to damage the average working American, running presidential candidates more conservative than Dwight Eisenhower, absorbing immense "campaign contributions" (virtual bribes) from corporations, again just like the GOP. As restaurant customers sometimes say, who ordered that? Not I, and not any other rank-and-file Democrat I know!

If I am to continue as a Democrat, there are going to have to be some changes to the disappointing entity the Democratic Party has morphed into in the past few decades. If that means I have to retract my commitment to strategic voting and actually vote my conscience in this potentially last show, well, damn the whole Obama‑Rahm‑a, that's what I'll do.

And there's no one actually running in the Democratic presidential field more credible, more consistent with my own political conscience, than Bernie Sanders. So at least for the primary, I'm voting for Bernie, and I urge you to do the same. If we end up with the semi-corporatist anyway, well, at least we will have done what we could toward the creation of (to paraphrase the late great Paul Wellstone) a democratic wing of the Democratic Party.

Bernie 2016... join me!

Just How Bad A Presidential Candidate Is Jeb Bush?

Ask Joseph Wilson. And then stand back; it's a long list and a blistering one...

Wilson

Bush
(leans right)

(BTW, I believe TPM's headline got the answers mixed up, but I'm not sure.)

Mom! Look! I'm Cleaning My Plate!

Here are some significant items from the past few days (if this thunderstorm doesn't take my system down)...

• Paul Krugman: A Victory Against The Shadows
  

  "GE Capital was a quintessential example of the rise of shadow banking. In most important respects it acted like a bank; it created systemic risks very much like a bank; but it was effectively unregulated," - PK

• Peterr at FDL: 150 Years After Appomattox, the GOP Revises Their Views
  

  "Consider, for example, the remarks of a rather well known Republican leader, speaking in 1865 on the eve of the surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox" - Peterr

• Katha Pollitt at The Nation: There Are No Abortion Cakes
  

  "If CEOs are worried that their LGBT employees won’t be treated as equals in Indiana, they should show as much concern for their pregnant and potentially pregnant employees." - KP

• Joan McCarter at Kos: Dick Cheney: Obama is the 'worst president we've ever had'
  

  [For Dick, an irony lesson... obviously unlearned - SB]

• NYT Editorial Board: A New Phase in Anti-Obama Attacks
  

  "It is a peculiar, but unmistakable, phenomenon: As Barack Obama’s presidency heads into its twilight, the rage of the Republican establishment toward him is growing louder, angrier and more destructive." - NYT [NFK - SB]

• Joan McCarter at Kos: Rand Paul: America's hungry seniors should turn to charity
  

  [And this man would be President? - SB]

• BlankBeat at Kos: You won't see Hillary Clinton in the same light ever again
  

  [As any reasonable hope of Elizabeth Warren as the 2016 Democratic presidential candidate fades, I find myself looking for legitimate justifications for voting for Hillary, which in fact I will do in preference to pitching my vote into a third-party sinkhole. This article expresses a decent and substantive reason for such a vote. - SB]

Global Climate Change: The Science CANNOT Be Treated As A Matter Of Religion... Or Politics

Tim McDonnell at Grist:

Scientists and science journalists like to say that one of the best ways to tell that climate change is real is to take a look at the changes we can already see: This year is on track to be the hottest ever recorded, and glaciers, corn, and even grizzly bears are responding to the warming. But all those shifts won’t be enough to convince most conservative climate skeptics, a new study in Nature Climate Change finds.

A growing body of recent research suggests a person’s political ideology, economic philosophy, and religious beliefs tend to overwhelm observed facts about global warming. The new study, which was released Monday, put that hypothesis to the test by analyzing Gallup polls taken just after the unusually warm winter of 2012. It found that both Democrats’ and Republicans’ perceptions of the warmer weather in their state tracked fairly well with actual satellite temperature data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. But “for people who said their local winter was warming, the observed temperature anomalies had no effect on the tendency to attribute that to global warming,” explains Aaron McCright, a sociologist at Michigan State University who authored the study.

In other words, the actual temperature had no bearing on whether people believed in climate change. Instead, McCright says, “one of the strongest predictors” is party affiliation: Republicans were far less likely to attribute the warming they felt to human-made climate change than were Democrats. Other variables — gender, age, and level of education — were far less reliable as predictors of a person’s global warming beliefs.

...

NASA Temp's Feb 2015
(hottest on record)

This result aligns with my personal observations: Republicans or conservatives with whom I am still on speaking terms (i.e., those who are not so irrational moment-to-moment as to preclude reasonable conversation) frequently take the attitude, "You believe one thing; I believe another. So it's a matter of faith, and in America, we have a constitutional requirement to treat all faiths equally under the law. So my belief is as good as your belief, and I don't have to change my life to conform to your belief."

There's literally no arguing with that. But it's wrong.

Florida Sea Level Rise

The problem is, the physical universe does not operate on that basis. Its actual physical behavior, on the grandest and the most microscopic scales, takes no account of what anyone "believes" in a religious sense of the term. The physics of the universe is not a matter of faith, nor an issue to be decided democratically. And that's what we're talking about here: conservatives treat global climate change as if it were a matter of religion.

It's going to be a long, hot century...

Why Is Papa Pizza A Republican?

Paul Krugman has an answer of sorts, and I suppose it's plausible, though the whole notion that pizza is partisan strikes me as... ahem... un-American. (Except pizza from Papa John's, of course... now that's partisan... RWNJ-partisan! [CORRECTION: Pizza Hut is even MORE Republican than Papa John's!])

Here's Krugman:

No, really. A recent Bloomberg report noted that major pizza companies have become intensely, aggressively partisan. Pizza Hut gives a remarkable 99 percent of its money to Republicans. Other industry players serve Democrats a somewhat larger slice of the pie (sorry, couldn’t help myself), but, over all, the politics of pizza these days resemble those of, say, coal or tobacco. ...

I'd be willing to bet that if you assessed the pizza Americans eat according to a single categorization, pizza shop or grocery store, you could still detect the partisan difference. Most of the pizza I eat is from the grocer. These days, who can afford to order a fancy pizza out? Republicans, that's who! (YMMV. Just an opinion.)

Mitch Admits It: GOPers Don't Have Votes To Repeal Obamacare, But Supremes Can ‘Take It Down’ For Them

Joan McCarter at Kos reports this admission by McConnell, unsurprising in substance but very surprising in the fact that he admits, unapologetically, that our Supreme Court now is a wholly partisan Republican body acting to the detriment of the American people. McConnell would be an asshole if he weren't already a turtle.

GOP Threats Of Impeachment And Allegations Of The Criminalization Of Politics

Jon Perr at Kos gives us a thorough if rambling examination of two of Republicans' favorite whines in his article Criminalizing liberalism. (I'm still looking, mostly in vain, for the liberalism in today's Democratic Party.)

Rolling Stone Does Koch

Tim Dickinson of Rolling Stone gets "Inside the Koch Brothers' Toxic Empire."

(In)Famous Quotation

ELECTIONS HAVE CONSEQUENCES.*
—"President" George W. Bush

*Offer void where prohibited by Republicans. Some restrictions apply (race, ethnicity, wealth, etc.). Political party membership may disqualify some voters. All voters must be identified by local driver's license and DNA test performed in three labs with halls of sufficient width as specified by law. Voters regardless of age must have been qualified to vote according to laws in effect prior to August 18, 1920. Votes to be counted by machines manufactured by corporations with directors certified to be GOP activists. Have a nice day.

(If you wonder what inspired this "quotation," see the previous post.)

Governor Glasses Lands In Ebola Soup

Clark Kent 'Glasses' Perry to far right

Lucky Texas received the first diagnosed intercontinental case of ebola virus in the US (Liberia to Dallas). Governor Rick "Glasses" Perry promptly jumped on the case as an opportunity to display his Great Leader skills, issuing statements intended to calm the population.

Playing the typical Republican game that views every tragedy as an opportunity, Perry is betting that Texas has the skills and resources to handle the case without facing a serious outbreak of the disease that is by now rampant in part of western Africa.

Perry is probably right: ebola can be successfully combated, and Texas has medical resources comparable to those anywhere in the country and the public health expertise to mount a successful effort against an admittedly terrifying infectious agent which is nonetheless spread only by direct personal contact.

Will Weissert at TPM has an outline of the political dimensions of the "opportunity." If Perry is good at anything, he is good at political opportunism; whether it can take him to the White House is questionable, but it should be entertaining as we all remind ourselves, per Donald Trump, not to shake hands.

Watch Lists In Post-Constitutional AmericaHow Ray McGovern Ended Up On A ‘BOLO’ List, Though He Engaged In No Criminal Activity, And What It Took To Remove Him From The List

Peter van Buren at FDL has the story; here's an excerpt from the middle to familiarize you with the basic concepts and the specifics of McGovern's case, how he ended up on a BOLO (Be On the Look Out) list, and how he got himself removed from it:

...

Watch Lists in Post-Constitutional America

McGovern’s case has many touch points to the general state of affairs of post-9/11 government watchlists, such as No-Fly.

Ray McGovern
(NOTE: hair, beard vary
greatly across photos)

The first is that it is anonymous interests, within a vast array of government agencies, that put you on some list. You may not know what you did to be “nominated,” and you may not even know you are on a list until you are denied boarding or stopped and frisked at a public event. Placement on some watchlist is done without regard to– and often in overt conflict with– your Constitutional rights. Placement on a list rarely has anything to do with having committed any actual crime; it is based on the government’s supposition that you are a potential threat, that you may commit a crime despite there being no evidence that you are planning one.

Once you are on one watchlist, your name proliferates onto other lists. Getting access to the information you need to fight back is not easy, and typically requires legal help and a Freedom of Information Act struggle just to get the information you need to go forward. The government will fight your efforts, and require you to go through a lengthy and potentially expensive court battle.

We’ll address the irony that the government uses taxpaying citizens’ money to defend itself when it violates the Constitutional rights of taxpaying citizens another time.

...

The concept alone is enough to curl your hair: anonymous lists, compiled in secret, involving Americans who are not accused of any crime except that of offending someone in a powerful position, but subjected to surveillance as if they were the most heinous criminal... indeed, traitor.

How much worse can it get? How many of us are on such lists for what many of us consider ordinary political activity and/or speech? The short answer: we may never know.

‘Amanda’ Expresses My Sentiments Exactly

Enjoy this viral photo which I encountered thanks to Leslie Salzillo at Kos:

NY Times Corrects Article: Cheney Was Veep, Not Prez

NY Times:

Correction: September 9, 2014
An earlier version of a summary with this article misstated the former title of Dick Cheney. He was vice president, not president.

Coulda fooled me...

(H/T Ahiza Garcia at TPM.)

Krugman On Cantor: ‘Fall Of An Apparatchik’

Krugman's conclusion:

Whatever the reason, it turns out that being a movement conservative apparatchik is no longer a safe career choice. This is a very big deal. Conservatives, as I said, will always be with us. But the structure that shaped them into a cohesive movement is now starting to unravel, at a time when movement progressivism — which is much less cohesive and much less lucrative, but nonetheless now exists in a way it didn’t 15 years ago — is on the rise.

One can hope.