— Aaron Sorkin, screenwriter for the latest Steve Jobs biopic in response to Apple CEO Tim Cook’s claim that he is being “opportunistic”.
Burn cream to aisle 5.
Category: Good Writing
Editorial of the Day
Brevity is the soul of wit
Michigan State Representative Cindy Gamrat, a Teabagger from the banks of the Kalamazoo river, was expelled from the state house because she and fellow rep (and fellow Teabagger) Todd Courser (who resigned) used state funds to cover up their adulterous affair.
A special election was called to replace her, and Gamrat is running for reelection.
The Grand Rapids Press and Kalamazoo Gazette editorial on this development is remarkably concise: (click for a larger image)
No.
It’s as if Ernest Hemingway wrote this editorial.
H/t Jim Romenesko
This is a Truly Epic Rant
In fact, this rant about US missteps on Syria is good enough that I forgive the blogger’s use of the Comic Sans font:
I have decided to voice my opinions on what the situations are in re the MENA area both abroad and in the US concerning Syria and Turkey. More tomorrow on Iraq. These are simply my opinions, feel free to disregard them and come up with your own:
– Petraeus wants John Allen’s wretched job? Give it him. As I understand what happened, Allen found it to be impossible to argue successfully with the WH’s collection of “those whose brains were destroyed in the process of obtaining a Ph.D in poly sci ” led by the country’s community organizer in chief. Let us see if Petraeus will do better. IMO Petraeus is a phony of the sort that David Hackworth used to describe as a “perfumed prince,” in my words, a Byzantine courtier type whose fame was generated in a largely self orchestrated media campaign. Let us see if this “Great Captain” can unravel this skein of wormlike threads that he helped create. Perhaps Broadway Joe Scarborough will turn and burn with him?
………
It goes on from there, and it is truly a thing of beauty.
I also think that it is an accurate assessment, and it shows why the President of the United States cannot blithely accept the counsel of Council of Foreign Relations types, who subscribe to the “Green Lantern Theory of Geopolitics,” which states that so long as the US maintains it will, it can accomplish whatever it wants.
It didn’t work in the Bush administration, and it won’t work now.
Headline of the Day
From the New York Times, we see the obituary for Hall of Frame catcher, Yogi Berra:
Yogi Berra Dies at 90; Yankee Star Built His Fame 90% on Skill, and Half on Wit
Berra was a standout as a catcher, as well as achieving success as a manager, but much of his fame came from his penchant for mangling the English language, with such memorable quotes as, “Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too crowded,” and, “It’s déjà vu all over again!”
The headline is a fitting homage to Lawrence Peter “Yogi” Berra.
Headline of the Day
Liberals Push to Correct Inequality — Just Not If It Involves Opening Up Our Neighborhood Schools.
It’s a pity that the article that goes along with it, which I am not linking to, is a piece of crap generated by Campbell Brown’s corporate whoring AstroTurf “educational” organization, where the entire thing is a screed about how liberals really should support education by and for Wall Street Charter Schools, because it means that a few brown faces in those schools.
It’s an intellectually bankrupt piece, and willfully obtuse, as Matt Bruening (the link above) so ably notes:
You see, we know very well how to integrate schools along class and racial lines. It’s called busing and we used to do it. Yet, isn’t it weird that Williams never writes about busing? Isn’t it weird that you hardly hear a peep out of that entire gang about busing? Why don’t they advocate for explicit integration through busing instead of these charter schools which may or may not even have a desegregating effect (and even where it does, not nearly to the same degree as busing would). Isn’t it awfully convenient that these folks say they definitely care about school integration and inequality but refuse to advocate for the most effective solution for it?
When pressed on this, one of the responses you will hear is that they don’t see practically (speaking in political terms) how we can get busing. But why would people oppose busing, one has to wonder. Is it because they don’t want to send their kids to school with poors and blacks? But wait, isn’t that the same reason they don’t like charters? Isn’t the opposition the same to both things? Why advocate one thing that runs up against a brick wall due to racism and dislike of the poor but not another thing that runs up against the same brick wall?
There are two basic answers here.
The first is that the charters don’t promise integration (and in many cases brag about how segregated they are, e.g. KIPP gleaming about how uniformly poor and black their schools are). So the reformers sidestep the hurdle of the racist affluent white liberal by basically giving in entirely to their desire for segregation, which charters don’t threaten that much if at all.
The second is that practicality is defined here in terms of what you might call the Left Wing of the Fundable. You can get money to push for charter schools and privatization and breaking teacher/public unions (all things the education reformers push, including right now Students First pushing a SCOTUS case that aims to eliminate all public sector union security, not just for teachers). You can get a fellowship at a think tank to push for those types of things. They are thus practical in the sense that there are enough rich people and institutions with somewhat mixed interests that are willing to pony up the money necessary to push them through our hilariously undemocratic political system and to fund a healthy number of advocate jobs. The same money doesn’t exist for busing advocacy.
So who then is really the intrepid supporter for integration in all of this, I am left to ask. Is the education reformer who dare not say a peep about busing because it’s outside of the Left Wing of the Fundable and too radically integrationist the real no-nonsense advocate willing to say what needs to be said? I don’t think so.
The title has some real truth to it: Far too many liberals call for problems to be fixed, and then recoil in horror when they discover that this involves the smallest sacrifice on their part (i.e. busing and cross district money transfers), but the rest of the article, which is so ably Fisked by Mr. Bruening, is bovine scatology.
That Sheriff and DA Who Blamed Black Lives Matter for the Shooting of a Deputy? Turns out That They Were Lying through Their Asses Off
Will Bunch adds his own perspective on this based on his own experience jumping to conclusions, though I think that he is being to kind.
Bunch jumped to conclusions, but these guys clearly seized an opportunity to push a political agenda:
One of the easiest things in this world is to leap to a conclusion — especially when there’s some circumstantial evidence that fits what you’re looking for. It’s also a very bad thing to do. I know because I’ve done it myself — and I regret it to this day. Six years ago, a part-time census worker in rural Appalachia was found strung from a tree with the word “Fed” scrawled on his body. Although I was careful to note that the case was still under investigation, I wrote about the man’s death in the context of right-wing anti-government chatter during the first year of the Obama administration. I was writing a book about the Tea Party at the time and had just gotten back from a gun rally in Kentucky (true story). Anyway, it turned out the man had staged his suicide so his beneficiary could collect the insurance. I’d made a mistake…and also learned a lesson.
You’d think if anyone would know better than a lowly journalist/blogger not to leap to conclusions — especially on little or no evidence — it would be high-ranking law enforcement officials in a major American city.
………
Those are the facts of a sad and infuriating story. But top officials in Harris County — including the sheriff and the district attorney — went well beyond the facts of the case. Deputy Goforth had barely been transported to the morgue when these law-enforcement officials held a nationally televised news conference to blame the murder on the #BlackLivesMatter movement that’s been confronting America’s uniquely high rate of police-involving killings. They did so even as they also acknowledged they had absolutely no information — none, nada — about what the killer’s actual motive was
………
If Anderson or Hickman had uttered such baseless accusations in court, their words would have been tossed out by the judge and perhaps the basis for misconduct charges. Instead, the invented allegation was barely questioned by a feckless mainstream news media, then amplified by the right-wing echo chamber of faux news and political opportunists who seized on a chance to squelch a growing movement for social justice by linking it to a high-profile murder. It’s fair to note that officials in Harris County were emotional about the murder of a colleague — but where was the professionalism to know not to toss a match onto a political bonfire, with such rank speculation?
This behavior is contemptible, but it is also not unexpected, though it was egregious enough that the Houston Chronicle, a paper that could never be mistaken for the liberal media, also excoriated this behavior, particularly on the part of the Sheriff (paid subscription required, but you can also find it in the Google cache) noting that, “Linking a non-violent group with a cold-blooded murder, without proof, isn’t leadership.”
In the meantime, Fox News is gleefully using this as an excuse to use euphemisms for n****r, which I’m sure amuses their audience no end.
What Ta-Nehisi Coates Said
He notes that there is no Ferguson effect, and that this is a matter of fact, not of opinion:
The Times has a story today on the rise in homicide in some American cities. It’s an important story—one which is hurt by the utterly baseless suggestion that those who protested against Ferguson may well have blood on their hands:
The New York Times quoted two academics, one of whom suggested that police are too concerned to act with impunity, and the other who notes that the rise in murder rates in the St. Louis area predated the shooting of Michael Brown.
For police to be in fear of prosecutions of their misconduct* to be driving an increase in crime, it would have to occur after the trigger.
As my colleague Brentin Mock points out, to observe that homicides began increasing in St. Louis before the protests is not to make a subjective interpretation, but to offer a knowable and verifiable fact. If the “Ferguson Effect” is real, how can it be that it started before the Ferguson protests?
Neglecting this question is neither dispassionate nor high-minded. It is the sort of insidious “false equivalence” that so rightly irks my colleague James Fallows. “False equivalence” runs contrary to the mission to journalism—it obscures where journalists are charged with clarifying. A reasonable person could read the Times’ story and conclude that there is as much proof for the idea that protests against police brutality caused crime to rise, as there is against it. That is the path away from journalism and toward noncommittal stenography: Some people think climate change is real, some do not. Some people believe in UFOs, others doubt their existence. Some think brain cancer can be cured with roots and berries, but others say proof has yet to emerge.
I’m sick of this, “Opinions on the shape of the world differ” crap.
*Or maybe it isn’t fear. Maybe it’s a bunch of cops throwing a tantrum. Certainly, it appears that some of their behavior, particularly with regard to the NYPD and Mayor De Blasio to be the acts of a petulant child.
John Carpenter – Frozen: Deleted Blood Test Scene (Gory) – Stellar Parthenon
If you have not seen John Carpenter’s magnificent movie, The Thing, you will just find this strange.
If you have, you will find this positively brilliant. (Not safe for work)
H/t DC at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.
Tweet of the Day
Hey, GMC: change the name of the Denali to the McKinley and watch a lot of right-wing idiots decide to buy one.
— Steve M. (@nomoremister) August 31, 2015
A Very Thought Provoking Essay………
Over at the Archdruid’s crib, there is a must read post on the requirements for overturning an existing order. You want to read the whole thing, but here is a sample:
The first and most essential step in the transformation of any society is the delegitimization of the existing order. That doesn’t involve violence, and in fact violence at this first stage of the process is catastrophically counterproductive—a lesson, by the way, that the US military has never been able to learn, which is why its attempts to delegitimize its enemies (usually phrased in such language as “winning minds and hearts”) have always been so embarrassingly inept and ineffective. The struggle to delegitimize the existing order has to be fought on cultural, intellectual, and ideological battlefields, not physical ones, and its targets are not people or institutions but the aura of legitimacy and inevitability that surrounds any established political and economic order.
He also quotes what may be Isaac Asimov’s most enduring bit of prose, “Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.”
It is an very interesting essay why’s and wherefores of violence and non-violence for any revolutionary movement.
F%$# Me! I Agree with Bill Kristol!
Though for completely different reasons.
You see, while lamenting the weakness of the Republican field, something that I laud, Bill Kristol made a suggestion for a Presidential candidate:
But all this is a sideshow. I present to you now the most correct thing that Bill Kristol will ever write:
And there are distinguished conservative leaders from outside politics; Justice Samuel Alito…
Let me be clear: I cannot possibly endorse this more strongly. Alito should run. He should be the nominee. The discussion should be over. And needless to say the ticket should be balanced with the nation’s most prominent African-American conservative. ALITO/THOMAS ’16! Make it happen.
I’d love to see Alito run for President.
Anything to get those antediluvian ratf$#@s off the f%$#ing court.
Best Letter to the Editor Ever!
For those of you who don’t see the image, it is a Washington Post reader noting that the only place where Donald Trump hasn’t appeared in the paper is the weather page.
H/t Jim Romenesko.
America’s Finest News Source
Over at The Onion, they quote the Amazon CEO’s response to the New York Times story revealing the internet marketplace’s toxic workplace, “Jeff Bezos Assures Amazon Employees That HR Working 100 Hours A Week To Address Their Complaints.”
Brilliant!
An Interesting Point About Donald Trump………
Ian Welsh notes that “The Donald” has many policies that place him at the left of the Republican field:
Let’s state the obvious about Trump.
No, not that he’s a joke, or a sign of fascism, or any of that.
Rather that a lot of what he says makes sense. His policies aren’t as crazy as people make out, and people who support him aren’t as stupid as the media pretends.
- He doesn’t want to cut Social Security. Jeb Bush does. Obama has talked this up.
- He wants full universal healthcare. Yeah, he badmouths Obamacare, but he’s badmouthing it from a position of, “Give them the real thing.”
- His idea of returning manufacturing to the US and doing bilateral trade deals is not insane, or crazy, except to neo-liberal apologists and people too stupid to realize they’ve imbibed the economic philosophy of neo-liberalism, whose results have been the stagnation and then absolute decline of ordinary American wages. This is how capitalism worked for about half of capitalism’s history. Disagree if you like, but it’s not crazy.
- His idea of simplifying the tax code enough so that ordinary people don’t need professionals to fill out their tax forms is a good one. Jimmy Carter, by the way, wanted to do the same thing.
I’m not a fan of Trump, there are plenty of reasons why he’s problematic, but he’s actually an economic populist on many issues. People shouldn’t overlook that this comes married to some nasty nativism, but I’m tired of people who are lumping all parts of the Trump campaign together.
It’s an interesting point, and it actually places Trump in what has been a common meme in American politics, the racist populists, also known as the “Dixicrat.”
There has been a long tradition of politics who promise benefits for their communities while promising to keep them from perceived outsiders. (No Irish need apply is an example)
So, Donald Trump reduces to Strom Thurmund with a flamboyant hair.
This is a Very Interesting Perspective on Black Lives Matter
Even more than the now moribund Occupy movement, Black Lives Matter appears to be a movement without goals.
There is nothing approaching a statement of goals, just a vague statement of principles, which are unattainable because they are little more than a word salad of good sounding words.
Over at Orchestrated Pulse, R.L. Stephens II says that this serves a purpose, and that many of the “leaders” of the nominally leaderless Black Lives Matter movement have personal career goals at the core of their actions:
The latest effort to storm Bernie Sanders’ appearances is only making the problem more obvious. The two women that interrupted Sanders last weekend seemingly did so unilaterally. You can’t build real mass political power that way, but building effective power is not their point. Make no mistake, this Bernie Sanders hoopla is ultimately about campaign jobs and foundation funding, not emancipation for the masses. These interruptions will create career opportunities for a few activists and political operatives—the Black leadership desired by [BLM activist] Tia [Oso] and others—but, as with Ferguson, the masses of Black people will be unaffected.
I have heard variants of this complaint for decades, that some elements of the Black political class are driven more by a desire for patronage positions than by a desire for substantive change.
Certainly, this would explain why BLM activists have not been as active, or as effective, at confronting Hillary Clinton.
If the name of the game is patronage, than it naturally makes sense to hitch your star to Hillary, who has been a creature of this sort of politics, for decades.
Read the rest.
H/t Naked Capitalism.
I Cannot Believe that I am Saying This………
But I was wrong when I suggested a few days back that the disruption of a Bernie Sanders speech by Black Lives Matter was likely an exercise in Nixonian rat-f%$#ing by the Clinton campaign.
It turns out now that the best evidence now is that at least one of the protesteris a bit of a nut, who was in the not too distant past a Teabagger supporter of Sarah Palin.
IMNSHO, you cannot manufacture this kind of lunacy, so I’m going with a small group of nuts:
An interesting development has occurred within the Black Lives Matter movement and it has caused many outside and from within the movement to question the wisdom in the most recent interruption of Bernie Sanders campaign. While no one can deny its effectiveness, especially considering Senator Sanders newest addition to his team is a Black Lives Matter activist, this interruption happened after Bernie had already begun shifting his campaign towards publicizing his stance on racial issues.
When individuals place themselves in the public eye they become scrutinized at every level. While looking into these activists for the Black Lives Matter movement, it became readily apparent that either they were not officially a part of the BLM movement, or they were not organized until just around the time of the incident.
………
Then more startling information came out concerning Marissa Johnson, the main agitator who berated Bernie for being a racist. According to her own Facebook profile she was a huge Tea Party supporter and had supported Sarah Palin in her 2008 Vice Presidential candidacy.
………
While none of that necessarily qualifies her as being a troll, or as some on the internet have accused an operative who is just trying to delegitimize the Sanders campaign. It is very possible that Johnson was a staunch Tea Party supporter in 2008 and has now changed her political persuasion to more closely mirror that of Bernie Sanders or Martin O’Malley. Eight years are a long time for an individual to reflect upon politics and their effects in the real world.
Although it is quite disquieting when you dig deeper into the facts. The Facebook page and social media presence of Johnson’s faction BLM Seattle did not exist until the day of the rally. Two hours after the interruption her Facebook page had been live for less than 24 hours and had garnered less than 50 followers. Again, this may all relate back to poor planning and nothing nefarious, but it is certainly not indicative of someone attempting to achieve legitimacy within the political spectrum. Johnson is also a member of a group called Outside Agitators 206, a movement within the larger Black Lives Matter movement, based out of Seattle. Unfortunately, they don’t appear to hold the same goals as the larger movement and actually made a public statement declaring their intent was to “declare war on the Democratic Party“. ………
I would note that there has been no formal comment by BLM on this protest, and I would argue that there can’t be one, because, much like the Occupy movement, there is no head, there is no tail, and there is no way to determine if someone is official, a nut, or an agent provocateur.
On the other hand, I think that the preponderance of the evidence here is that this specific protest is the product of the bat-sh%$ insane wing of BLM, so I apologize to the Clinton campaign.
BTW, read what the Bear who Swims has said about Occupy and its ilk about the tendency of groups like Occupy, and BLM to function as “Useful Idiots”.
Here is a particularly good bit:
Say what you like about the reactionaries, they have spent the last 30 years do these things. They have
- Used mass media to explain their theories, and why they are better.
- Popularized goals and objects and made them part of the political discussion through poltical organizing and outreach.
- Created a cadre of individuals who are willing to take on public office at all levels of govenment to implement their policies.
- Created a core group of constituencies who are loyal to their cause — even against their own interested.
Let us put that another way, they have play practical electoral politics effectively. In the course of this they have created a separate reactionary nationalism, which while at odds with the views of many, has no counter balance.
Go read what the Bear, AKA my brother, AKA the hairiest Saroff, AKA Stephen wrote.
He has been involved in politics for a long time, and has little patience for folks who think that it is noble to rearrange deck chairs on a certain White Star Line ocean liner as an alternative to identifying and avoiding icebergs.
If I Did this, My Liver Would Jump Out of my Thorax and Beat Me to Death
Matt Taibbi has come up with what he calls, “The Official GOP Debate Drinking Game Rules.”
This is potentially a VERY hazardous activity.
Hundreds of people perish from alcohol poisoning every year in the United States.
Playing a drinking game based on the level of Republican stupidity in the debates is French kissing cobras, or trusting in the honesty of investment bankers.
I am not going to be watching the debate.
I’m sure that after 5 minutes of listening to them, I would feel compelled to start mainlining bat guano and licking toads by way of self medication.
Yes, Racism Is Rooted in Economic Inequality
This is the title of a a thought provoking article in Jacobin that needs to be read in its entirety.
A snippet to present their basic thesis:
Here’s my question to the angry commenters: if racial inequality isn’t merely a symptom of economic inequality, what is it a symptom of?
I already feel like I can hear the answer: it’s a symptom of hundreds of years of slavery, colonialism, Jim Crow, and urban apartheid.
Yes. But what were slavery, colonialism, Jim Crow, and urban apartheid if not extreme forms of economic inequality?
What was the point of England’s colonization of Ireland if not to impose a lucrative “economic inequality” on its victims? Was the urban apartheid of Haussmann’s Paris not the “symptom” of nineteenth-century economic inequality?
It provides a very good historical perspective (as one would expect with the author invoking Georges-Eugène Haussmann’s rebuilding of Paris under Napoleon III) on how bigotry is very much the product of exploitative economics.
It should be noted that Jacobin is an explicitly Socialist publication, and socialism has a long history of viewing pretty much everything in society through the prism of economics,* so this focus is unsurprising.
Still, it is a good read, and very thought provoking.
*In fact, I would argue that the lasting contribution of Marx to the study of society was his focus on the economic. Certainly, the degree to which all aspects of society, whether they be government, judicial, or social are viewed largely through the lens of economics has expanded enormously since Marx published Das Kapital almost 150 years ago.
Quote of the Day
As useless as a marzipan dildo.
—Atrios on the general uselessness of the timid wastes of DNA that are New Labour in Britain.
I am so glad I wasn’t drinking something when I read that.
That is f%$#ing genius.
Quote of the Day
If the U.S. Institute of Peace is just an Orwellian absurdity, then Hadley is an appropriate chairman. If it wants to demonstrate that it isn’t that, Hadley’s resignation or removal would be a step in the right direction,
—Kevin Connor, director of the Public Accountability Initiative, on the fact that frothing at the mouth war monger Stephen Hadley is heading the Institute of Peace.
Hadley is a former Bush National Security Adviser who has publicly called for massive military interventions in response to quite literally every foreign policy dispute that he has encountered.