Exit: "Last Man Standing"

Digby's appreciation links to this last interview.

"It's 1962; Lenny Bruce and tall guy with posh accent get into a cab, toting a bag of drugs... ." It's an interesting story. Like the other stories, interesting not just for daring or outrageousness, but in hinting at real substance to the man.

The long ago Dick Cavett Show episode I saw must have been this one: from 1972, with Peter O'Toole the sole guest. As I remember it, the actor emerged from the curtains to lurch around and do some jokey mugging. That changed as Cavett said, "I notice you have 'Areopagitca' written on your hand." A reminder to himself, said O'Toole, to raise the subject of censorship. Which he then did, seriously and passionately (if also tipsily).

That show came to mind a few years ago, when I spotted this memoir.

O'Toole tells of his 1930s childhood in northern England, where he grew up in a working poor neighborhood of Leeds. With great zest for it all, young Peter observes the world of his bookie father (and Damon Runyonesque associates), while he and his sister absorb his mother's love of reciting poetry.

As O'Toole opens the book, he's about five years old when he "meets" someone who, if not local, will be more that a secondary character during the years he grows up. Immersed in the pleasure of being taken to the movies by his father, Peter wonders—

...Will Donald Duck be on today? Or a king or a cricketer, or a boxing match or The Three Stooges, or a hurricane or a Zulu? Who's this? A uniformed fat man with a big chin, all wobble and posture and rant. The audience is booing him. It's Mussolini, and he's being booed; cheerfully and vulgarly and ripely booed; but booed in the way you'd boo the Demon King in a pantomime. Comical villainy to be encouraged with a raspberry jeer.

Shortly after, in that cinema, Hitler and I met for the first time. It is impossible to tell you what I felt because, other than being temporarily unhappy, I cannot remember what I felt. When that profoundly strange, mincing little dude from Linz came all unexpectedly onto my screen, not his hideous mouth nor his noise nor his moustache nor his forelock, swastika, salute, eyes or frenzy disturbed my mind; it was the look on his face. He was booed, too. The audience boos, though, were of another colour; a grimmer lowing, an ugly note not for pantomime villains capering about banana skins...

A motif throughout is that of Hitler and top Nazi figures as childhood familiars. While the adult O'Toole's serious study of their history and psychology is much in evidence, the writer often approaches the subject with slangy nicknaming—Hitler as "Alf"; Goering as "Fat Hermann." Unlikely as this may sound, I found O'Toole's writing strong enough that he pulls off this cutting of the bizarre figures to size, while writing an excellent outline of Hitler's rise and fall.

RIP to the last of British "Cinema's Biggest Hellraisers," and an impressively multi-talented one.

Hands-On

Puff piece this may have been, but the subject was one of great interest—

For 160 years, the pianos made by Steinway & Sons have been considered the finest in the world. So when hedge fund billionaire John Paulson recently bought the company, it struck fear in the hearts of musicians: Would the famously handcrafted pianos be changed, for the sake of efficiency? Paulson, who owns several Steinways himself, says nothing will change.

[music]*

Great pianists need great pianos. Vladimir Horowitz, the famous Russian pianist, used to travel with his own personal Steinway when he concertized around the world...

*Seque here was a Horowitz clip: the opening notes of Mozart's C major Sonata (K330). It's music that always takes me back to the first time I heard it: played by the fine pianist who taught my keyboard literature course in college.

Classes were memorable, both musically and in Dr. T's use of sometimes corny jokes as teaching aids. The jokes worked: quite a few years later, I remember them well, as I do the musical points they illustrated.

Memorable, too, was the class trip organized by Dr. T.: a charter bus ride through several states to Astoria, Queens, and a tour of Steinway factory.

Here's a transcript of the NPR piece, describing the many hand crafting processes in use, and quoting veterans of 30, 40, 50 years at the factory. Some workers' families were employed there for generations before them; other workers just happened to grow up in the neighborhood and get interested in the place. Despite use of newer technologies, much of the hand crafting (and the generally good job security) is a throwback to old modes of work. The factory's atmosphere was a focus of the documentary filmed a few years ago, and it's something I remember from touring the place (even if that was... ummm... about 40 years ago).

We visited rooms where small groups worked on different stages of piano making, and they were enthusiastic about showing us what they were doing. People really seemed to enjoy their work and appreciate meeting a class of interested music students. A woman cutting leather (for key action dampening) offered us scraps to take home. We were puzzled, so she tried again—"Do you do crafts?"—until she had a taker. In other areas, other workers looked around their discarded materials for some possible souvenir to share.

In the room where a tester played a finished instrument, he ended the piece, spun his stool around to face us, then said, "Ya like Goishwin?!" Not waiting for a reply, he spun back to the keyboard. We listened to some spirited playing, from someone who was likely a former kid from the neighborhood.

The tour ended at an instrument showroom, where the guide invited our professor to play. He chose the first movement of the Mozart K330, one of the loveliest pieces we had studied. We all were fans of Dr T's playing and approach to teaching music history; our group's applause at the end was very heartfelt.

I'm no musician, but I've never forgotten the keyboard course, the class members, or Dr. T. And I haven't forgotten the high school music ed experiences that later led me to look for more.

The key was my year of singing in the H.S. choir. It was very much a group of average kids who listened to pop music most of the time. But we were the raw material for an ambitious plan of our director's: that we would learn the choral parts of the Bach "Magnificat" and perform them with professional soloists.

At that age (16 or so) I liked some classical music, but thought of Baroque as a repetitious, tinny harpsichord sound. Learning and rehearsing Bach's choral writing opened a new world, though. It was a revelation, just encountering the beauty of individual parts as we learned them. But when the vocal sections later combined to rehearse an entire chorus, the results were new and awe-inspiring.

All these decades later, I remember an afternoon after rehearsal. As the group walked through an empty hallway outside the gym, someone began singing his choral part; soon, everyone else joined in with their respective parts. The acoustics were pretty damn good, and I'll never forget that moment and the rush of feelings it inspired: awe at the music's beauty, as well as the powerful physical sensation of sound reverberating through my body; thrill at the possibilities that seemed ahead of us all; the sheer joy of spontaneously creating this together—and of doing something so out of the ordinary as impromptu mass singing in a school corridor.

It's a scene that always comes to mind in recent years, as arts education has been the first thing cut.

But, my school experience was in another century...

This is the 21st, after all, and art is meant for the elite. If the public deserves a look or a listen, surely a benevolent hedge fund manager will be willing to endow it. Maybe he even won't fire (for now) the craftspeople who contribute to his hobby.

"... a great man because he wasn't a Great Man..."

Charles Pierce, on Nelson Mandela—

He reminded us of that which we need to be reminded, over and over again, about our own best selves. He reminded us because he was the last one of them, the last in the line that began with George Washington, the last one to witness what Lincoln called for 150 years ago. He was there for a new birth of freedom.

Esquire had good pieces by other writers;Evan Fleischer—

There is no such thing as too much media saturation when it comes to Nelson Mandela's life and Nelson Mandela's memory, because there was once a time when his image didn’t exist, was illegal. As the moments pass after his death, we see a raised fist — Mandela's fist — finding the screen and breaking through.

Chris Jones, on South Africa: "Nelson Mandela's Dream Will Prevail."

Stephen Marche: Mandela as "saint," at least in terms of having won by showing the power of compassion. [On a related note, Bag News: "Reading the Tribute Photos: Mandela's Masterful Body Language"].

And this, by the Esquire editors.

This is important, that "Mandela was a great man because he wasn't a Great Man; his politics were aimed at the ability of the people to realize themselves."

On the Majority Report, Sam Seder and Cliff Schecter brought up how predictably the media avoided noting Mandela's greater agenda: of economic justice and peace. And they discussed how the right is perpetually on the wrong side of history—until it's forced to re-write the past, to claim a Dr. King or a Mandela. With Mandela, as with King, anyone standing for radical change has been branded a communist by the right—until decades later, when a whitewash is in order.

The idea that the anti-apartheid divestiture and boycott movement were first marginalized by "the technocratic center" was discussed (which led into the usual depressing but apt analysis of the Obama agenda).

At 1:20 in the audio, talk returned to the right's claiming Mandela's legacy while "tripping over themselves with mendacity or stupidity, or both." It seems Santorum compared Obamacare to apartheid on O'Reilly's show—"O'Reilly bringing the mendacity, and Santorum bringing the stupidity." Sam wanted to know "When's Rick Santorum gonna go into prison for 27 years to fight this?"

Producer Michael Brooks contributed his impression of new conservative icon Nelson Mandela speaking out: against that assault on the conscience of humanity, "an inconvenient website." Which turned into an impassioned speech about comrades "Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich, and the other heroes of the struggle against the slightly expanded Medicaid"; which turned into conservative talk radio host Mandela hawking gold...

The jokes were not inappropriate, considering the eulogies that remembered Mandela as having had an "impish" sense of humor. Humor would seem necessary to accomplishing what he did: in struggling against the right enemies and being able, as Cliff said, "to come out of the most brutal prison yet swallow the urge for revenge."

Also funny, but it gets just the right tone: Nelson Mandela Becomes First Politician To Be Missed.

More Touching Tales Of The Season

Pre-Thanksgiving, Walmart encourages employees to donate food to "associates in need."

Post Thanksgiving: arrests of strikiing Walmart workers.

Hurrah for good news: "Calm Black Friday: Only 1 Death, 15 Injuries..." Attributed to Big Shopping Day.

Steve M. analyzed publicity around a firearms ad rejected for Super Bowl broadcast—

... in this man's world, there's country (represented by the flag and the military) and there's family, but there's nothing in between. There's no community. His posture is that he's a soft-focus loving dad, but he's also a lone wolf. It's him against the world.

The point of Bowling Alone is that America has become a nation of atomized residents who no longer join bowling leagues and other voluntary associations. I think there's some truth to that -- but this ad reminds me how much right-wing propaganda cultivates that sense of atomization, by portraying American society as debased and not worth participating in.

This guy comes home and regards the society beyond his property line as full of hostile figures who either want to hurt him precious family or deny him the means to defend his loved ones. This strikes me as a specifically right-wing worldview -- I can't think of an analogue for this on the left. If that's how you see society, no wonder you're bowling -- and gunning -- alone.

Well, are they really alone? Like the relatives around the holiday table who, by temperament or by the volume of the propaganda, are lost to wingnuttery, they'll always have their Rush, their Fox Friends, and the gun lobby voices in their heads.

And right on cue: elderly Alzheimer's victim killed by fearful and stupid gun owner.

All In The Family

Janeane Garafolo, on the Majority Report holiday special: how to talk to your right-wing relatives seated around the Thanksgiving table.

Yes, it's the start of that special time of year: when the public is encouraged to be charitable to the less fortunate, while wingnuts counter with the War on Losers Who Deserve Their Misfortune.

As income inequality is so obvious as to have become a bit more spoken of publicly, the right's pundits rush to expand categories of which groups can be blamed for not having chosen the right parents. Even if they too might be among the losers, there's never a danger of cognitive dissonance among the Fox viewership. As Roy Edroso put it—

If most of you who are punished by inequality are blameless, comfort yourselves that your suffering also touches the nation's whores, junkies, and MFAs!

Among the comments:

philadelphialawyer
[in] my own experiences at holiday family gatherings....Republican/conservaguy/"libertarian" makes a political statement of dubious merit. Liberal smiles and lets it go. Repub guy makes another, and another and another such statement, until, finally, liberal person calls him out on it. Then, like Sonny in the Godfather scene with his brother in law Carlo, Repub guy says we don't talk about politics over Thanksgiving dinner. Or someone else says that.

trex
Yeah, apparently "don't talk about politics" means don't argue about politics, and it is always OK to get in the first shot. Especially if it is a conservative one. Everyone, I guess, is just assumed to agree with conservative talking points, so presenting them is, somehow, not "political." But refuting them is.

[in a later comment]trex
... It's all "So I was just minding my own business commenting on how the Kenyan Pretender in the White House is a secret Marxist with ties to the Muslim Brotherhood and all of a sudden a liberal attacked me for no reason and almost spoiled everyone's dinner."

This season I give extra thanks, for keta's comment: an account of "Uncle Dick Cheney" at the family's holiday table.

Well-Laid Plans

Adele Stands outlines the method to the madness: "Anatomy of the War on Women: How the Koch Brothers Are Funding the Anti-Choice Agenda."

Of the multi-state assault on reproductive rights this year—

To the untrained eye, it seemed that a sudden wildfire of anti-choice bills had engulfed the legislative agenda, but in truth the assault had been years, even decades, in the making. It wasn't until three years ago, however, that conditions became so hospitable for the arsonists who trained their flame-throwers on these fundamental freedoms.

In 2010, three key events created the incendiary political landscape that fueled this summer’s inferno: the Supreme Court's decision to strike down campaign finance restrictions in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, elections at the state and federal levels that rode the winds of backlash against the 2008 election of Barack Obama, and the subsequent census-year victories of right-wing Republicans whose gains in state legislatures and governors' mansions gave them control of the process for drawing legislative and congressional districts.

Stans lists anti-reproductive rights "social welfare" groups, funded from 2009 to 2011 by the "now apparently defunct" Center to Protect Patient Rights (CPPR): a Koch-backed "pass-through group... used by big, unnamed vendors to pass money to other organizations, apparently as a means of further obscuring the original source of the funding."

Multiple uses of "apparently" aside: just why would the Kochs care about pursuing the "social issues" war? They presumably don't, but there's the old MO—

"If you want to promote a pro-corporate agenda, you're only going to get so far," Sue Sturgis, the Durham, North Carolina-based editorial director of the progressive website Facing South, told RH Reality Check. “But when you start weaving in these social issues like abortion and other reproductive rights issues, then you're gonna appeal to a broader range of people, and a very motivated voting bloc. They will turn out. So it serves your larger cause."

And, of course—

It follows that attacks on reproductive rights came on the heels of the assault against labor unions, public-sector workers, and poor people that began, most famously, in Wisconsin, as soon as the Republican right racked up impressive state-level wins in 2010, or that renewed attacks on voting rights ensued at the same time.

While in other places—

... in the State of Ohio, we can re-elect [U.S.] Sen. Sherrod Brown (D), we can re-elect the president of the United States, but we have a different result on the state level," [said state senator] Nina Turner... "It's absolutely the result of gerrymandering."

In North Carolina, Sue Sturgis sees redistricting as a factor exacerbating the polarization of her state, where abortion was among a host of contentious issues, including voting rights, that fueled the historic weekly Moral Monday protests.

At the level of the courts, this attack on women's health options has reached the Roberts court, where it's sure to break new ground in corporate personhood.

Tbogg quotes this MSNBC coverage of the case—

"... corporations could be allowed to opt out not only of health coverage for religiously contested services – including vaccinations or blood transfusions – but labor regulations. Some organizations have already been testing this: Duquesne University has claimed that its Catholic affiliation means it cannot allow graduate students to unionize."

TBogg concludes—

Needless to say, a determination that corporations can be religious in nature (I was going to write "... have a soul", but I couldn't stop simultaneously laughing and weeping) means that somewhere down the line those same corporations will feel free to claim that they shouldn't be taxed at all because they are a religious organization and, OHMYGAWD, everyone at the American Enterprise Institute just now got an enormous 4-hour boner at the idea of that and now we're going to need those slut pills more than ever.

Bah, Humbug

Deal with Iran: historic diplomatic breakthrough?

Nah, just a plot to distract from the horror of Obamacare.

More here.

Or seen from another angle, Roy Edroso says

...about two events last week -- the filibuster vote and the Iran deal -- that seem to have thrown the brethren for a loop. They'd gotten used to just piling abuse on Obamacare, and I think they genuinely believed they'd never have to work hard for a dollar again. No wonder they're pissed!

Inventing Camelot

I caught a bit of anniversary coverage; as expected, in the breathless style of, "He was so glamorous! Then: he was shot! Do you remember where you where?!"

Also very predictable: conservative punditry, per Digby—

It was such fun yesterday watching all the right wingers try to appropriate John F. Kennedy as the one true conservative just as they do whenever we honor Martin Luther King. It's actually a good strategy to take credit for the things your popular enemies do that are in line with your agenda, so I don't blame them. Democrats should do more of it themselves. (Reagan the peacenik! Newt Gingrich the environmentalist! George W. Bush the ... patron of the arts?)

Unfortunately, the conservative economic mavens have Kennedy wrong. I have no way of knowing what he would do in today's circumstances and neither do they. But we have a pretty good idea of how he thought about economics in his day, and contrary to Grover Norquist's fevered tweet dream, it wasn't a celebration of laissez faire capitalism. Last night Stephanie Kelton posted this fascinating excerpt from his speech on that subject at Yale in 1962, that's well worth reading, if only to remind yourself that there is nothing new under the sun.

And fifty years ago this, if also nothing new under the sun, became the model for our media myth-makers: Jacqueline Kennedy's invention of the "Camelot" legend. Theodore White permitted her to re-write his post-assassination article for Life; in Rick Perlstein's account

... History should celebrate the Kennedy years as a time of hope and magic, [Mrs. Kennedy] ... insisted. White sat mesmerized for more than two hours, listening to the rambling and disjointed monologue.... She sneered at the 'bitter old men' who wrote history." ..."Finally, she came to the thought that had become her obsession, a thought embodied in the lyrics of the the Broadway musical—Camelot. Over and over again, she and the president had listened to the words sing out of their ten-year-old Victrola…"

What came next is pretty damned astonishing, a nadir in the history of court journalism, something that better belongs in the annals of the Kremlin. White retreated around midnight to draft his article in the maid's room, "mindful that Life was holding its presses at a cost of $30,000 an hour. When he finished, Mrs. Kennedy took a pencil to White's work, crossing out some of his words and adding her own in the margins. She hovered near the kitchen telephone—adamant that her Camelot portrayal remain the dominant theme—as he dictated the revised version to his editors." The article came out. Arthur Schlesinger, baffled, said, "Jack Kennedy never spoke of Camelot." One Kennedy hand said, "If Jack Kennedy heard this stuff about Camelot, he would have vomited."

Certainly, as Perlstein says, "The whole thing is a great object lesson in the horrors of access journalism—and access history." It's also been the model for the last fifty years. As Perlstein goes on to suggest the connections—

... here's a new Big Idea: journalist sycophants like White helped give us Watergate.

Consider: White felt so guilty at having slighted Nixon in Making of the President 1960 that he turned Making of the President 1968 into a virtual love letter to him, and sent him the book with a fulsome apology. Making of the President 1972 sucked up to Nixon even worse. But then, oops—I discovered this in research for the book I'm finishing now—White had to postpone publication so he could tack on a chapter about a little thing called Watergate, whose seriousness caught him completely by surprise.

Indeed, it was largely the clubbiness of the Washington village press corps that let Nixon get away with Watergate and still win his landslide in 1972. (Read Tim Crouse's Boys on the Bus for the full story.) Call it Camelot's revenge: the class of court scribes who made it their profession to uphold a make-believe version of America free of conflict and ruled by noble men helped Nixon get away with it for so long—because, after all, America was ruled by noble men.

Well-Publicized Anniversary

The 50th anniversary suggests much history of interest—at least to the usual types who bother paying attention to history.

Early this month, Charles Pierce noted efforts in Dallas to create a November 22 tourist event that would kind of ignore a little thing that happened fifty years ago.

But as Pierce says, "50 years ago 'civic leaders with deep ties to the city' of Dallas were a major part of the problem with the atmosphere when Kennedy came to town."

Earlier this week Sam Seder did a very interesting Majority Report interview with Bobby Kennedy, Jr., on "JFK's Vision of Peace." RFK Jr. shared some fascinating details about how JFK, surrounded by war hungry right-wing military brass, undertook secret diplomacy with Kruschev, who responded to the chance of finding a way out of the box his own hawks were creating. RFK Jr. also says that after the trip to Dallas, JFK had planned to announce withdrawal from Vietnam. Then LBJ was in the position of insisting he would not be known as the president who "lost Vietnam."

Text of the speech Kennedy was to have given in Dallas.

Some observations from Digby—

It occurred to me this week that very few people who are younger than I am can remember the Kennedy assassination --- which means that this commemoration is a lot like the memories of Roosevelt's death were to me when I was a little kid. Ancient history.

I was in the second grade in Wichita Kansas where my father was working for a defense contractor maintaining the nuclear missile silos. My teacher came into the room sobbing and told us all that we were going home, that the president had been killed. All the adults I saw for the next couple of weeks seemed to be shell-shocked, even my parents, who were big Kennedy haters.

...I don't think you can fully understand my generation without realizing that this was probably the most important national event of our young lives. The president was assassinated. To people my age that was not an abstract concern. It was something that happened. And it was only a few years later that it was further seared into our consciousness with the killings of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy and the attempt on George Wallace. You have to understand that to kids who grew up in that time, this was normal.

People think the hippies were just a bunch of kids doing drugs (and they were) but there was a real message behind their "peace and love" campaign that sprang from this violence. And the young revolutionaries that everyone now sees as some left wing version of the Michigan Militia weren't responding to something like the horrifying prospect of health insurance for everyone. They were (at least in part) responding to the fact that our leaders were being killed. There was a sense of urgency. Something's happening here ...

I've been watching all these remembrances over the past couple of weeks realizing that it's the last time anyone will really care much about this. It will soon pass completely into the history books and that will be that. ...

Digby includes images of the "Wanted For Treason" handbill, and the full-page "American Fact-Finding Committee" ad that ran in the Dallas Morning News on November 22, 1963.

Pierce again, on the Warren Commission as

... a natural outgrowth of a mentality that had infected the government from the moment that the government decided that it would build, in secret, a weapon that would not only win World War II, but also have the potential to end civilization if it -- or the men who allegedly were in control of it -- ever ran amok.

A secrecy that could only become

... an irresistible impulse to treat the American people... like fragile children who must be protected at all costs from what their government found necessary to do on their behalf.
From this has come a hundred commissions and boards and gatherings of the shamans of the security state -- the slow bureaucratic response to the Watergate crimes, the Tower Commission on Iran-Contra, even the Simpson-Bowles budget commission -- all of which sprang from the notion that the nation's elite should conduct the nation's business in as quiet a manner as possible, so as not to disturb the horses or wake the children. The Warren Commission was the first of these, and it did its job very well....

There's that, and the fact that the types behind the 1963 "liberal treason" accusations were regarded then as beyond polite notice. Over the last fifty years, the money has not only bought its own media empire, it has also bought unlimited access to, and unquestioned respect from, Establishment media.

IOKIYAR

Charles Pierce—

Okay, poor bastard congresscritter gets busted for cocaine and becomes yet another casualty of our silly "war" on drugs. The traditional abject grovelling ensues.

"I'm profoundly sorry to let down my family, particularly my wife and son, and the people of Southwest Florida," Radel said. "I struggle with the disease of alcoholism, and this led to an extremely irresponsible choice. "... This unfortunate event does have a positive side. It offers me an opportunity to seek treatment and counseling. I know I have a problem and will do whatever is necessary to overcome it, hopefully setting an example for others struggling with this disease."

... Okay, so far, go with god, congressman. Best of luck in your struggle. Except, yeah, you know what's coming, right?

Well, Rep. Radel was one of many House Republicans who voted for a bill that would allow states to require all recipients of welfare to be drug tested prior to receiving benefits.

On second thought, to hell with it.

A white guy? Question answers itself.

Tea Party guy? Check.

Commenter Casey Laughman adds—

No, see, it's totally different because the people who should be drug tested are only those whose income is funded by taxpayers. Wait. What?

A Page From Ye Olde Playbooke

Contemptible, but in no way new: the meme that ACA rollout problems are "Obama's Katrina."

Its shtick that in fact has been used throughout this presidency, as Steve M.'s "Canonical List of Obama's Katrinas" shows. Steve does a backward rundown of the punditry: from the ACA trope of today's NYT, to all previous "Katrinas" (from 5/17/13 back to 6/30/08)—

Check the date on that last one. I love it -- Obama is such a terrible president that he had his first Katrina even before he officially became his party's nominee.

Commenter Knight of Nothing added, "Good lord, I had blocked-out how absurdly high that number was. Apparently for some, in fact Katrina was Obama's first of twenty-four Katrinas."

In response to today's NYT piece Driftglass re-posted this 2005 piece. Written post-Katrina—the real one, that killed and displaced thousands of people—and meant now as a reminder to right-wing operatives and media stenographers alike

... of exactly what a bloody, murderous slog of pure hubris and anguish the Bush Regime really was.

It is certainly well past time to remind them that regardless of how many layers of whitewash they slather onto the Bush Administration to create a blank scrim against which they can project their paranoid fantasies and panic-peddling fairy tales about the Failed Obama Administration being as bad or, perhaps even Worse Than Booosh!...

...a few of us will never go along to get along and will never, ever agree to forget what life was really like under the ongoing, train-wreck of failure, ruin, hopelessness, corruption, treason, round-the-clock Liberal-bashing and utter, prostrate media-complicity that was the Bush Administration...

No Low Too Low

Two videos here.

1. Fox host Stuart Varney smirks at the retraction of Australia's [newly wingnut] government of a previous pledge of climate change aid to developing nations. Video of Typhoon Haiyan devastation in Phillippines rolls in background.

2. A plea through tears, by Naderev "Yeb" Sano, a Phillippines' representative to U.N. climate summit. Who is on a hunger strike for "concrete pledges" to the Green Climate Fund; knowing the death toll, that the fate of relatives is unknown, and that his own brother has survived but is is trapped without food.

Shauna Theel notes—

The U.N. fund is intended to address a critical moral hazard of climate change: those who have contributed the least to climate change will suffer the most. The Philippines, for instance, is the third most vulnerable country in the world to climate change -- "particularly exposed" to "cyclones, flooding and sea level rise" -- yet it has much fewer carbon emissions than either Australia or the U.S. ...

The climate fund would help the Philippines lessen its vulnerability to the changes that are already locked in -- changes that are projected to include stronger tropical cyclones such as Haiyan -- by implementing measures such as smart construction and a more effective government response that could lessen the deadly impact of future storms. (Varney selectively quoted The New York Times saying "it is difficult to link any single weather event to climate change" to claim that the recent typhoon is not at all connected to climate change. However, he left out the second half of the sentence: the editorial board continued, "there is little doubt that rising sea levels caused by global warming will worsen the dangers.")

Varney is not alone in his callous response to calls for such aid. Many prominent conservative media outlets, including the Wall Street Journal's editorial board, scoffed at the climate fund when it was first proposed, saying developing nations simply wanted to "cash in" on "climate gold."

Half-bitten

Because until now, insurance companies never baited and switched, or canceled policies...

But absurd sound-bites count. The corollary being that a Dem won't get away with a clumsy one; it matters not one whit that no actual human being ever before would have imagined "liking" their insurance.

As Roy Edroso put it—

...about the latest Obamacare outrage -- that some people had their old policies cancelled, an event that could not have been foreseen unless you had been paying attention to the news when the ACA was passed three and a half years ago or at any time since. I'm thinking they have these things on a rotation schedule -- next week, I'm told, Routine 12 will be that your new Obamacare plan will have fewer providers than the one you have now. The week after that, it'll be that the laminate will wear off your plan ID card more easily than your old one. Eventually, it'll be "Benghazi" and "skree."

Specialty of the House

So special, indeed, when it's on the menu cooked up by this particular House.

Here's Tbogg, quoting Rep. Renee Elmers on the meme of the moment: Obamacare makes men pay for maternity benefits "they" don't "need," because "they can't give birth!"

And in another venue—

There's a reason why the Republicans blocked the president's attempts to fill vacancies on the federal Court of Appeals for the DC circuit. They have made it a decades-long project to salt the federal courts with people like Janice Rogers Brown, and they are disinclined to allow anything as trivial as two presidential elections to stand in the way.

Referring to the healthcare reform law as "the behemoth known as the Affordable Care Act," the court said the case was not about the law's "constitutional authority." "Instead, we must determine whether the contraceptive mandate imposed by the Act trammels the right of free exercise -- a right that lies at the core of our constitutional liberties -- as protected by the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. We conclude it does." The appeals court, widely regarded as the second-most powerful U.S. court after the Supreme Court, found the mandate was burdensome to business owners even if it does not require them to pay for contraception directly. "The burden on religious exercise does not occur at the point of contraceptive purchase," wrote Judge Janice Rogers Brown, an appointee of former President George W. Bush. "It occurs when a company's owners fill the basket of goods and services that constitute a healthcare plan."

(Judge Brown is one of the lasting gifts to the Republic of former president C-Plus Augustus, and her record is a chewy blob of wingnut goodness. Nakedly ideological and utterly heedless of precedents that she doesn't like, Brown believes the New Deal to have been "a socialist revolution," and has called the federal government a "leviathan" -- which, like "behemoth," which she used in her opinion today, is a term for a biblical monster....

When conservative politicians tell you that the DC circuit has enough judges to do the work in front of it, this is what they mean. This ruling is preposterous on its face -- Companies do not have a right to freedom of religion. People do. -- and intemperate in its language. ... This has been a long march for these people, and they believe that only their victories are permanent ones. ...

Before the end of the day, a TSA agent was killed at LAX, where Charles Pierce happened to be in transit—

Well, that was certainly a strange way to end the week. We would be remiss, however, if we didn't point out how well the local police handled the mass exodus of tourists wandering down Century Boulevard on foot. It looked like the last scene in Fiddler On The Roof, except with rollerboards and cellphones. We also would be remiss if we didn't point out that the TSA agents who were the targets of this latest impromptu exercise of Second Amendment rights probably were working without pay a couple of weeks ago because Tailgunner Ted Cruz is the single biggest jackass to hit American politics since the voters of Long Island sent John LeBoutillier into early retirement. This was (again) a day to celebrate the singular courage of public employees....

Later: the shooter was found to be carrying "anti-government material."

About which, more may become known, eventually. Or maybe not, assuming it's the usual right-winger: a loner, influenced by no one, and so, a non-story.

Balancing Act

And a giant sigh of relief from Big Media: the longer the shutdown and threat to the economy, the more criticism of the GOP it might have been forced to air.

With predictable lack of proportion, the national health care exchange's website problems were deemed an instant Huge Scandal. Relieved and grateful, the media put their all into covering Republican tears—shed over the public's difficulty in accessing a service the blubberers had done everything possible to deprive them of.

After all, no big website launch ever had problems until now. And never mind that 36 states were allowed to refuse participation, forcing their residents to swamp the national site. And a contractor built the site, because we can't have government performing its own functions, when "business does better."

In other stories, a former Speaker of the House dies; cue fatuous hand-wringing over The Good Old Days of Bipartisan Cooperation.

Pierce weighs in, and commenter John Rogers adds—

I knew people in the Speaker's office at that time and [Chris] Matthews was basically a gopher, regardless of what he's telling people now.

Oh, and remember Ronnie's 3x5 cards? Most of the Tip and Ronnie meetings consisted of Tip listening patiently (if exasperatedly) to Ronnie reading off his cards. The cards were necessary because Ronnie's Alzheimer's (and aberrational behavior) were already showing themselves during the FIRST campaign. Efforts of the NY Times reporter I got this from to report on it were repeatedly spiked.

Followed by Susie Madrak—

How can you not love TipnRonnie, the moral midgets who passed the legislation that, for the first time, taxed unemployment benefits -- to pay for a tax cut for the rich? Good times.

Fair and balanced as we are, there is—what else?—a mere slap on the wrist for one Master of the Universe ("And this is just one bank")—

...Jamie Dimon will never suffer any consequences for this spectacular fail, his calls will always be returned, he will always have a roof over his head, unlike the thousands or millions of people his bank stole life savings from.

As San Francisco area BART workers went on strike— largely over work rules affecting both worker and passenger safety—reaction by local Masters of The Universe said oh so much about their sense of entitlement.

But when it comes to MOUs and "creative disruption," those guys are nothings—not when Big Time is back, and on a book tour.

Philip Toledano

Here CNN touts Cheney's interview with Sanjay Gupta. With extra added sympathy for Bush (He's had heart surgery, too...)

Lest Mr. and Mrs. America be outraged, CNN was careful to note about Cheney and his hack-free device—

SPOILER ALERT: Fans of the Showtime series "Homeland" might find it a familiar scenario. The vice president in that series died after terrorists hacked his heart pacemaker and instructed it to emit a lethal jolt of electricity.

"The Losers Take Victory Lap"

For a while there, it was all placed in the hands of Ted Yoho.

But in the end, the likelihood of blowing up the world economy was a no-go for the Owners. Even if this particular episode of hostage-taking ended with the "losers" taking their victory lap, as Steve M. wrote.

And if all tantrums fail, they'll always have impeachment.

"Thanks for all the salmonella," says Tbogg to GOP, as he drops short-form snark in favor of a longer review—

Now that we can say finally goodbye to the Republican True Colors Fail-athon or, as it is known around the Ted Cruz household: Pledge Week, let's us take a gander at all the damage, Tom and Daisy-like, the GOP left in their wake...

Tbogg outlines the damage to science, including flu monitoring (CDC) and medical research (NIH), and to the economy (an estimated $24 billion taken out, in those weeks). He also goes over the names and situations of some real people hurt, like the cancer patient shut out of a last-hope clinical trial treatment.

Very soon, it will soon be as if the last three weeks never happened: the Austerity industry hasn't missed a beat, and the media is full of "Centrism" touting (just for one example: here).

Yes, let's pretend this is for real, after decades of the how far rightward the "center" has been pushed. And with an indefinite government shutdown of much anything that benefits the public via "sequestration,"even as the next shutdown cycle (or other budget tantrum) will soon be here.

Digby says of the Republicans' purge of "moderates"—

The good news is that the Democratic Party, which held on to its inappropriate reactionaries for far longer than the GOP held its liberals, will finally have a chance to at least fight to a draw on the major issues that separate the two parties. The bad news is that there is plenty of terrain for big bipartisan consensus around taking good care of the two parties' most precious assets: their billionaire benefactors. I'm afraid that's the only thing the "vital center" of our two parties agree on. And they are very much in agreement.

Meanwhile, On Earth...

As usual, nothing to see: as when record flooding in Colorado makes a great human interest story, but only some concerned locals and environmentalists seem to have noticed the concentration of oil and gas drilling in the affected area—or how many wells and contaminant holding tanks were damaged.

It took at least another week before there was a little more national coverage, other than human interest.

In other parts: nothing to see here.


Or here, even as this approaches.

Ticking Coup-Coup Clock

Oops: salmonella outbreak. The need to track its origins across state lines is a sudden reminder of why the CDC and FDA exist.

There are public servants who continue to work without pay.

This essential service certainly was kept open.

Much as the Heritage Foundation turned against its own plan after Obama adopted it, the right's project to shut down the government began when Obama was re-elected. Not only were some of the predictable players at work, the effort was coordinated by the undead Ed Meese.

Ho-hum: the Koch Bros. should soon be free to cut out the money-laundering middlemen, and just buy themselves elections outright.

Digby and Sam Seder, on the Republicans winning their war against the rest of us. The GOPs line about "job creators" is certainly true for one group: right-wing propagandist jobs are being created by grotesquely rich funders. Sam noted that Republicans used to be people who don't want to pay taxes; now, there is a such a huge industry making money by pushing fear narratives, and the payoffs are too great for this to stop.

As Digby added, "it's working for them": Dems accepted the sequester budget, and have already capitulated over the new continuing resolution—even as the GOP keeps pushing the goalposts. The latter has had "an unprecedented win: from control of one house of congress ... [they] now have debt ceiling as a tool to get their way." Here, Sam brought up his worry that Obama will agree to a process change to prevent the ceiling from being used this way again. It's a bargain that would be made at the cost of "reforming entitlements," something that's been Obama's goal, and would be his Establishment-endorsed "legacy winner."

Meanwhile, I have to assume there is unfurloughed federal protection for the honoree of this event.

As Pierce says, "Talk about the waste of someone else's heart." As commenters add—

Rich Jenkins
His continuing ability to walk and talk is a testament to technology and an example of its shortcomings.

Amy Danto Hundert
... It's too bad donors don't get a veto.

This (from Philip Toledano) always bears repeating:

Like Cheney and Meese: far from dead is establishment fawning over Paul Ryan. Steve M dissects the NYT's front page treatment—

We're supposed to ignore the fact that the Republicans are still shutting down the government. We're supposed to ignore the fact that they're still talking about a very brief respite from debt blackmail. A manly man, both tough and gentle, has taken the lead, and we're all supposed to swoon.

The mainstream press always does this -- always tells us that the GOP that just drove the car off the cliff two minutes ago isn't the real GOP. When the party's problem was seen as racism, Marco Rubio was declared to be the real GOP. When the problem is seen as "Washington," Chris Christie is said to be the real GOP. For now, it's Ryan. And if the current talks break down and Ryan gets some of the blame, it'll be someone else. The Republican Party is never at fault, because the Republican Party is endlessly malleable, in the mainstream press's view.

Or, as TBogg puts it, "Paul Ryan has an unused agenda he thinks you might want to reconsider"—

You may remember all of this from before when Ryan called it the Path To Prosperity or possibly you played the EA Sports videogame version: Galtscape – Ayn Rand's Survival Of The Fattest. You may also remember that America rejected Ryan's innumerate plan and the Rafalca it danced in on. But now times have changed with a faction of Ryan's own House having shifted into Bachmann-Gohmert Overdrive and are threatening to burn the whole country down in order to save it at the behest of the Tea Partiers who figure they have enough bullets, bibles, and cans of Vienna sausages to ride out the Fiscal End Times when either Jesus or Sarah Palin returns. So Paul Ryan felt the need to step into the breach and use his "moderate" K St cred to go "Whoa, whoa, whoa there folks. Sure we want to destroy the safety net, deny people medical care, allow children to go hungry in the streets, and turn our country into a crumbling riot-torn post-apocalytic hellscape that will make Somalia look like the Hamptons, but let's not take down the T-bill market in our haste. I mean, c'mon."

Because moderation to the Paul Ryans of the world means methodically burning down one house at a time. And definitely not the nicer ones...

This fantasy is laughable, but the misplaced rage isn't.

Once, working class guys might have been expected to identify with a fat guy whose life looked a lot like theirs...

Then they were offered a fat radio blowhard, who became obscenely rich by inciting their hatreds.

Too bad these guys need ridiculous fantasies of triumphing over an imaginary Evil Guvmint.

Instead of being with Ralph Kramden's pal Norton, who just kept things "rolling along."

A "Coup" By Any Other Name...

TBogg returns to the Internets; just in time for the spectacle.

Yes, the start date of the Heritage Foundation's insurance industry payoff, the House shuts down all possible parts of governance, aside from itself.

As expected, members distinguish themselves—

Rep. Renee Ellmers (R-NC) told a local television station that she would not be deferring her pay during the government shutdown, as some other members have done.

"I need my paycheck. That's the bottom line," Ellmers told WTVD in Raleigh, N.C. "I understand that there may be some other members who are deferring their paychecks, and I think that's admirable. I'm not in that position."

According to Ellmers's official website, she was a registered nurse for 21 years before being elected to Congress. Her husband Brent, the website says, is a general surgeon.

On the October 4 Majority Report, Sam Seder and Cliff Schecter got pretty much everything in.

That there are 800,000 furloughed workers losing (at the very minimum) one week of pay; another 1.2 million are working without pay.

That children are deprived of Head start and mothers left without food for babies, thanks to Congresspeople who claim to be "pro-life."

That there will be losses to scientific research, since experiments can't be stopped and re-started on whims.

The damage relates to what Sam presented as the problem of investment. If people don't see an immediate, direct benefit to themselves—and have been told to hate public expenditures—then science, like the general public good, is easily undermined.

It's not as if we have a responsible media to explain why investment matters. Since Reagan, and, as Cliff put it, "the death of news as a public service," the public is led on about "public spending = welfare queens get something I don't."

Of the Republicans' tantrum—shutting down the government over not having been able to overturn "Obamacare," and now "needing something" for their trouble—Sam suggested there might be some offering to ease their hurt feelings; perhaps, "ritual bloodletting of poor people on the floor of Congress."

A long, but interesting post by aimai: The Punishers Want To Run The Country or We Are All Tipped Waitstaff Now, with Republicans as "the dissatisfied and angry diners at the table of life."

Since the Supreme Court's States Rights cleverness with the ACA, it's not hard for the NYT to find people treated this way. Real people, with names and stories, who are clearly being harmed. suffering; so oddly unlike those anonymous welfare queens of legend.

As Sam Seder says, "welfare reform" has been the Establishment's great legacy enhancer, as bestowed on Bill Clinton. In the form of cuts to "entitlements," Obama has begged the GOP to simply consent to its own prior agenda.

Charles Pierce just re-ran an old story, written in response to that earlier round of "welfare reform": the story of a very real family, and the gravely disabled child who died when support for his medical care needed "reform."

Full Moon

According to the lunar cycle: just happened, on the 19th.

Judging from behavior: the full moon would seem to be permanent. And this was another routine week—of mass, and other, murders that were not caused by guns. This time around, it's people who hear voices in their heads, or play games with toddlers, that kill people.)

Days later: this.

In the narrative that's been settled, such things just happen: Act of God, Nothing To Be Done, and so on.

For some time, Digby has been doing "Dispatch From Taser Nation" posts. This week's incident: tasering of a deaf 12-year old.

And Pierce last week wrote of "the casual cruelties we no longer notice," from the 107-year old man killed by a SWAT team, to vulnerable elderly losing homes to shady tax lien operators.

No matter how many mass murders or other grotesque events there are, nothing slows the war against the poor.

There's this, from Clever Sister: Michigan lawmakers approve bills for drug testing the unemployed, and requiring community service for anyone receiving public assistance.

Sen. Vincent Gregory, D-Southfield, said it didn't make sense to make someone — such as a single mother, for example — have to pay child care costs because of state-required community service. He offered an amendment — which ultimately failed — that would require the Department of Human Services to pick up child care costs while parents performed community service.

CS adds, "Will kids die when left alone?"

With the right's success at state levels and in controlling the House, eagerness to hurt the poor is in newly high gear. It's an agenda being served by the "balanced" coverage of news like the House's vote to defund food stamps. Digby's rundown of the cruelty and lies, includes Dan Froomkin's noting—

Everyone is concerned when there are a lot of people getting food stamps, but the problem is that they are hungry, not that they are being fed.

The GOP argument boils down to a nonsensical: When people are hungrier, we should feed them less. It shouldn't be treated as if it makes sense. But it was.

As David Atkins goes over the stats—

SNAP provides families with an estimated 22 million children with resources to purchase a nutritionally adequate diet. This represents close to 1 in 3 children (29 percent) in the United States. Almost half of all SNAP recipients are children (47 percent), and an additional 26 percent are adults living with children. ... Forty percent of all SNAP recipients live in households with preschool-age children (ages 4 and below).

Over 70 percent of SNAP benefits go to households with children. In 2011, SNAP provided an estimated $51 billion in benefits to families with children, over half of which went to families with preschool-age children.

And so on. One can only agree with Atkins' conclusion, that—

This is not a rational disagreement about public policy. This is a gulf of basic decency, a demand by fearful people for the sacrifice of innocents to sate a perversely sadistic form of cosmic justice.

Interestingly, most people demanding the starvation of children so that billionaires can buy more yachts call themselves Christian. Perhaps they're reading a Biblical translation that calls for blood sacrifice of innocents so that the rich may enjoy more fruits of Mammon. I missed that part in my copy.

Wednesday morning, I caught this on NPR—

"We should reform the food stamp program so we can get the aid to those who need it most in their hour of need, without the kind of rampant waste and abuse that you see," said Rep. Tom Cotton, a Republican from Arkansas.

It's not clear that waste and abuse really is all that rampant, but when House Republicans talk about the problem, they are most likely thinking of Jason Greenslate.

Greenslate is an unemployed San Diego surfer dude seen in a using his Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP card, to buy sushi and lobster. The story from correspondent John Roberts was reportedly circulated to GOP lawmakers.

The report shows Greenslate heading to the automated checkout counter and paying with his food stamp card. "Two hundred dollars a month, and you just go like, boom," Greenslate says on camera. "Just like that, all paid for by our wonderful tax dollars."

In reality, the vast majority of SNAP recipients either work or are children, disabled or elderly. Greenslate is the exception, rather than the rule. He's been described as the new welfare queen — a caricature used to push welfare reform in the '80s and '90s.

Indeed, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor describes the new House food stamp bill as an extension of welfare reform.

What, instead of a Cadillac-driving welfare queen, the cheat is all of a sudden a white guy? Or is the missing racist bait trumped by California ?

It may just be another example of the laziness granted the propagandists. After all, their base needs no consistency of narrative; Balance will ensure the memes are broadcast to everyone else, and the GOP is once more given cover for its war against the poor.

With the typical SNAP recipient being a working single-mother—employed by Walmart or McDonald's, at pay making her eligible for food stamps—Jason Greenslate is very much an outlier. Yes, NPR noted that, while it dutifully disseminated the "welfare reform" meme. And the Greenslate audio is a more obvious attention-getter than a bunch of boringly real statistics.

The audio is from Fox. I had expected to learn next that Greenslate is on a think tank payroll, but under California rules, he has been an eligible recipient. Media Matters looked at how Fox set this up and inserted it other media before the House vote, and some very knowledgeable readers responded with perspective on who typically receives SNAP. A commenter also linked to the San Diego Union-Tribune's coverage of the local surfer dude story, including remarks by a Greenslate relative (who happens to have written this book).

But never mind the facts: the GOP's white surfer dude story is "out there." Which, in observance of "Cokie's Law," makes it worthy of heavy coverage.

Hunkered In A Bunker

From a few months back, but fitting for Labor Day: Sam Seder's interview with Rich Yeselson, about this article.

Yeselson highlights the historical memory being lost: of how strong organized labor once was—in numbers and in daring—and how hard labor's opponents needed to work to reverse things. The rise of labor came in the decade after the 1935 passage of the National Labor Relations Act, which itself was a response to increased worker militancy. By 1945

... union membership quadrupled from almost 3.6 million to more than 14.3 million workers. During this period, American labor dominated the daily life of much of the nation and drew the obsessive concern of politicians and the press. Even some Southern states had union membership percentages in the high teens—statewide numbers that would be among the highest in the nation today but were among the smallest then. In a six-month period in 1937 alone—the year of the great sit-down strike at General Motors (GM) in Flint, Michigan—the CIO signed up two million workers in a nation with a population of about 130 million.

Organized labor made a no-strike pledge during the war. As the fight ended, wartime production levels decreased, along with workers' hours. An anticipated end to wage and price controls prompted further worry about inflation. The whole situation made Americans, whether in unions or not, fearful of a return to the Depression's economic conditions.

The American labor movement responded to these uncertainties with the greatest strike wave in the history of the United States. It started almost immediately after the war and continued right through 1946. Clerical workers walked out at the citadel of capitalism, the New York Stock Exchange. About 68,000 textile workers struck in the East, while 35,000 oil-refinery workers struck across seven states. In the Northwest, 40,000 lumber workers struck. In the Midwest, it was 70,000 Teamsters. In Oakland, a strike that started at the loading docks of two downtown department stores spread quickly to include 100,000 workers who effectively halted the city’s commerce and services for two days—the most dramatic general strike of several during the period. 100,000 workers who effectively halted the city’s commerce and services for two days—the most dramatic general strike of several during the period.

At the end of 1945 and into the next year, was the UAW's 225,000 member strike against GM (which Walter Reuther "used as an effort to bring European style co-determination to American labor-management relations"); 350,000 mineworkers struck in spring 1946.

All in all, about 10 percent of the entire American workforce withheld their labor in 1946. There were about 5,000 separate work stoppages involving about 4.6 million workers. ... To imagine this kind of union militancy today is to imagine 14 million workers striking in a single year.

1946 also saw midterm elections: Republicans won, under the slogan "Had enough?" Big majorities in both houses opened the way for them to create new labor laws, with backing from corporations and smaller business, the Federal Reserve Board, and the publishers of most major newspapers. In Congress, Republicans also had perfect allies in Dixiecrats eager to rid the South of unions and to forestall all moves toward civil rights.

Thus the paradox that at the high-water mark of its power and size, the labor movement generated an even more powerful backlash from the nation's power elite, which was augmented by an obsessive determination from the white South to make its region as union-free as possible. Southern elites, led by their nearly unified bloc in both houses of Congress, feared an ongoing alliance between labor and the first signs of a sustained African-American civil-rights movement, fueled by the return from the war of African-American soldiers newly emboldened to seek justice. The CIO, observing the same phenomenon, hopefully launched "Operation Dixie" in 1946, a well-funded effort to organize throughout 12 Southern states. Southern elites ruthlessly race-baited, red-baited, and intimidated poor black and white workers. Operation Dixie failed dismally, only making the Southern bloc more determined to stop unions in the region. Ira Katznelson, the great historian and political scientist, has called this implacable opposition of the South to African-American rights and the labor movement "the Southern cage."

Passage of Taft-Hartley would shift the balance in numerous ways. The overall insidious effect, Yeselson finds, was that

... Taft-Hartley bureaucratized labor unions. Unions required more and more lawyers—and more and more union stewards adept at labor law—to untangle the welter of laws, board decisions, judicial decisions, and contractual obligations that now ensnared the modern labor organization. This pervasive legalistic framework made the labor titans increasingly cautious, and it drained the energy and creativity out of the members and their rank-and-file leadership—the idea was to wait for the lawyers to tell them what would fly before the NLRB or the courts.... Taft-Hartley unmistakably signaled that anti-union political, economic, and cultural elites could contain both the leaders and their ranks. The bill shaved a risk-taking edge off labor that, perhaps, it didn’t realize it needed until subsequent moments of institutional crisis, like Ronald Reagan's firing of striking air-traffic controllers in 1981.

By the 1960s, says Yeselson, Taft-Hartley had been so effective that "even with its deep penetration in the workforce at the time, even at the apex of LBJ’s enormous Democratic congressional majority, labor could not repeal a comma of it."

"Fortress unionism" is Yeselson's concept of where private sector unions need to focus their energies now: defending regions and industries that remain unionized; strengthening locals and enhancing member education and activism; building coalitions with progressive groups; investing in "alt-labor organizations."

In the end, it's up to workers.

...union growth occurs when working-class activism overwhelms the quotidian strictures of civil society, forcing political and economic elites to accept unionization as the price of civil peace. During episodes of massive union growth, the workers don’t confine themselves to the careful strategies of union staff—they disregard them, and force the union to play catch up....

Yeselson notes the successful tactics Justice for Janitors used in a number of cities: going over the heads of cleaning subcontractors by targeting the real employers, commercial real estate owners.

There's another good Majority Report segment: Sarah Jaffe at the end of last year, as New York fast food workers held their first walkouts. It's a valuable history, with Jaffe suggesting the issues of low-wage adult workers are similar to those of earlier assembly line workers, prior to being organized and forcing those jobs to pay living, ultimately middle-class, wages. In this instance, housing activists saw so many of the working poor trying to subsist on depressed wages paid by local franchisees of powerful national companies.

Robert Kuttner has a good summary of these issues and possible strategies, in his rundown of recent actions around the country.

Kuttner's aticle is among Digby's list for reading, and taking encouragement.

All In A Day's Work

An incident not long before Labor Day, 2013. Elementary school bookkeeper uses kindness to prevent heavily armed intruder from shooting up the place; someone who in another media context could serve as one of those leeches who laze around as public employees.

Obama's Lincoln Memorial speech was in commemoration of a political event where organizers kept elected officials away from the platform. It was fine on history

...we would do well to recall that day itself also belonged to those ordinary people whose names never appeared in the history books, never got on TV. Many had gone to segregated schools and sat at segregated lunch counters. They lived in towns where they couldn't vote and cities where their votes didn't matter. They were couples in love who couldn't marry, soldiers who fought for freedom abroad that they found denied to them at home. They had seen loved ones beaten, and children fire-hosed, and they had every reason to lash out in anger, or resign themselves to a bitter fate.

He concluded with the usual dream world rhetoric: work hard and you'll succeed, as we are a country full of good people, like "that successful businessman who doesn't have to but pays his workers a fair wage and then offers a shot to a man, maybe an ex-con who is down on his luck..."

And this kind of thing is so routine now as to be considered a fine standard—

That tireless teacher who gets to class early and stays late and dips into her own pocket to buy supplies because she believes that every child is her charge -- she's marching.

Teachers "dipping" into the pocket—and fundraising, and corporate sponsorship— it's merely expected that education should be financed this way.

And after all, the message machine is happy enough with assuming a single mother needing to work three jobs is "uniquely American."

After noting the current president's fine rhetoric for a day, the pundits are no doubt relieved to get back to cheering on an attack against Syria, and a Grand Bargain with Obama's fine friends across the aisle.

Anniversary

Nobody Turn Me Around: A People's History of the 1963 March on Washington
Charles Euchner, 2011

Even if the march has been reduced to an "I have a dream" sound-bite, this was the original idea, fifty years ago:

Dr. King's charisma and moral authority—and the power of his speech that day—were crucial to the march, but he is not the center of this book. Euchner writes about the people and politics behind the march, and about the meaning of the event, as reflected by the stories of many who participated that hot summer day.

The idea originated with A. Philip Randolph. During a lifetime of organizing black workers, he first conceived of a mass march on Washington during the 1940s. Returning to the idea in 1963, Randolph was at first rejected by Roy Wilkins of the NAACP and Whitney Young of the Urban League.

Despite his ultimate identification with the march, Martin Luther King Jr. at first declined to participate. Busy with the Birmingham campaign—and unsure of the march's value—it would take much persuasion by some of his closest advisers for him to commit.

After key groups finally agreed to join forces, Bayard Rustin brilliantly outlined an organizational plan for the largest march to ever take place in D.C. It was a feat that would be pulled off in just two months of intense work. In this very quick read, Euchner covers much fascinating background detail of how the march was put together.

In a discussion here, the author says of the organizers and marchers he interviewed

... every time I talked with someone I was carried away emotionally like I'd never been before. I was so overwhelmed by the basic decency and courage of these wonderful people who did so much to end the formal regime of racism. It is really a priceless gift that they gave us. And they gave it to us in so many ways — some dramatic, some ordinary. Honestly, despite the problems we have in this country now, they pale next to what they would be if we lived under the legal system of apartheid that existed in the U.S. until the 1960s.

With ongoing violence all over the south in 1963, the bravery of young activists gave older workers the courage to risk employer reprisals by missing work to be in D.C. That was because Rustin had chosen a Wednesday for the march; in Euchner's words, "so preachers could bring their flocks without missing Sunday services."

The power of Dr. King's speech is undeniable, though Euchner quotes a King aide who was dismayed to hear King insert what seemed like an overused, corny "dream" metaphor. More importantly, what later came to be the media narrative—"the March on DC where MLK had a Dream"—leaves out the point of the march: to demand economic rights, simply as part of a broader concept of equal justice promised to all citizens, yet denied to so many.

There's interesting contemporary coverage in Life's cover story (with work of eleven photographers credited). Dr. King "made the day's strongest speech," read a photo caption, which goes on to highlight not the "dream," but the metaphor that "America has given the Negro people a bad check. It has come back marked 'insufficient funds'"

National archive footage gives a sense of crowd, along with bits of music and speeches.

The march was a triumph—and subsequent civil rights legislation shifted the movement, in Rustin's words, "from protest to politics." The "jobs" part of the formula would become more evident in King's later work. When that joined with his opposition to the Vietnam War, King had come around to Rustin's linking of social justice with economics and opposition to war.

"From protest to politics," fifty years later: not the prettiest picture on the jobs front, to be sure.

And the work to undo justice has achieved much, with the Supreme Court's green light for voter disenfranchisement in states, "stand your ground" laws in the same states, and all the other tactics financed by the right's deep pockets.

The Court's majority wreaked vengeance against the Voting Rights Act, on a pretense of "little evidence of continuing racial discrimination in the states that were required to get preclearance before changing their voting laws." It's the same line the right's paid pundits use: we have a black president; there's no racism—as they use that president's very existence to fuel more racism each day.

Sam Seder and Prof. Eddie Glaude had this discussion of the anniversary. Glaude notes the event has been made into a symbol of "the goodness of America; that we've come so far and we celebrate." Thus ignoring the march's origins: in the black labor movement and as an act of mass non-violent civil disobedience.

Seder points to more recent years, when "everything to do with economics has been swept under the rug." The problem is that this anniversary becomes one of "commemoration in service of a narrative," instead of attention to the real political work needed.

Glaude has much to say about Obama, and how the focus on him as an individual co-opts black progressive traditions and establishes a precedent for how future presidents will deal with race.

Certainly, the right's use of Obama as the example of "no racism to see here" follows years of effort to brand MLK as being on their side. As Charles Pierce puts it, "the great loophole" of Dr. King's speech is the only part conservatives choose to know: the "not judged by the color of their skin but the content of their character" line—

... it subsequently has been used as an opening through which all manner of historically backsliding mischief has come a'wandering in, from "reverse discrimination" to Allan Bakke, to what is going on today with the franchise in too many places, to the reaction to the killing of Trayvon Martin and the acquittal of George Zimmerman. Modern conservatives have used that line to conscript Dr. King into their ideology, now that he's dead and unable to speak for himself. ...
...

...The greatest and most lasting use of the great loophole has been to fasten Dr. King in our history as a devout and relatively harmless national icon, and not the true revolutionary that he was.

If things are grim at the national level, Prof. Glaude sees hope for local coalition building around social justice issues affecting both the poor and middle class, as in North Carolina's Moral Mondays protests. He finds these actions recall the best of the black freedom struggle, in focusing on issues of justice for all. It's a focus that brings about, in James Baldwin's words, a "re-imagining of America."

Euchner ends his book with a passage from Robert Penn Warren's interview of Bayard Rustin. The enduring power and inspiration in the faces of people in D.C. that August day, and in the remembrances of Euchner's interviewees, lies in something Rustin speaks to here—

... I happen to believe... the Negro is, as it were, the chosen people, by which I do not mean that he is superior or that he is better or that he's any more noble. It means, I think, that he has now an identity which is part of the struggle in this country for the extension of democracy.

Taking His Internet And Going Home

Tbogg walks away from a venue where he's long provided perspective along with belly laughs. Before going, he left a pick of greatest hits.

He's been a master at saying what needs to be said, and with admirable wit and brevity. Though one of my favorite bits of Tbogg's writing was in a longer than usual piece last year, in which he cut the Republicans and their "job creators" spiel down to size.

When I was a kid, my dad and his brothers had a dry cleaning business and, back in those days, they actually used to deliver dry cleaning to their customers homes. ... My dad, being the youngest, used to make most of the deliveries ... and he used to tell us how, when he went to deliver dry cleaning to the swells up the hill in La Jolla, often people would leave a note on the door or the gate asking him to leave their clothes because they wouldn’t be home. In those days most people would pay upon delivery, so my dad would knock on the door or ring the house anyway in an attempt to get paid which, at the time, was probably a couple of bucks tops back in those golden days when dimes and nickels weren’t just useless pocket weight. After getting no answer, my dad would leave the clothes to avoid a call to the shop wondering why they hadn’t been delivered which could only mean yet another trip back up the hill. More than a few times, after getting back in the truck, he would look back at the house only to see the curtains move because the occupants were checking to see if he had gone and whether it was safe to come out and collect their belongings.

All of this, of course, to get out of paying a $1.50 for services rendered which, by the way, the customer would invariably dispute the next time they dropped their clothes off if they weren't outright trying get out of paying because of too much starch or maybe a missing button.

He used to tell us all about it over dinner.

But what my dad didn't tell us was that those rich people who lived in those nice houses were the real hard workers in the world (unlike himself and his brothers) and if we worked as hard as those wealthy folks we could be just like them and live in a nice house, and not a $35 a month apartment, and we could drive a big car that we actually owned and maybe even someday have a color TV. Because, even at a very young age and before we had the appropriate words to describe them, he didn’t need to tell us what we instinctively knew about these people and how they got where they were.

They were assholes.

The kind of assholes who would try to screw some guy out of a couple of bucks because he was just a common working man with a family and he didn't make his money the old fashioned way.

By inheriting it.

So Reince Preibus and Marco Rubio can take their remarkably similar Dreams My Father Sold Me stories and blow it out their asses. That starry-eyed pie in the sky bullshit doesn't sell any better now than it did back then. Save it for the rubes at the Americans For Prosperity and Freedomworks rallies.

Those dumbasses will believe anything for the price of a balloon...

"See you in the Norton Anthology," says Roy Edroso—

... Tbogg has for years been one of my favorite writers -- and I needn't qualify that with "in the blogosphere," which is like calling someone the smartest guy on a National Review cruise. That he is known as a "liberal blogger" is just an accident of history, I think -- he's really a satirist... who has hunted where, in our low mean time, the ducks pretty consistently wind up: Out on absurdly elevated media perches, defending the indefensible in loud, quacking voices, just begging for his buckshot.

Part of a satirist's racket is wisdom, and Tbogg has supplied enough of that ... but I've been most grateful for the laughs -- for the times when he has greeted the sententious argh-blargh of internet hierophants with appropriate seriousness, or got right to the nub on the works of Ayn Rand...

Perfect sentiments, as are those of commenters—

JennOfArk
Well, George Tierney Jr. of Greenville, SC, for one is not sorry to see TBogg go.

StringOnAStick
... I'll miss the blog, but my sadness is well tempered by support for his reasons for hanging it up. Life is indeed too short. I hope he isn't done with writing; he's too damned good and I would be immeasurably sad if I let myself think I'll never see another perfect Tboggism.

hellslittlestangel
Well, he says he'll be on Twitter. If that isn't giving up writing, I don't know what is.

From The Very Sad To The Pathetic

Two pieces of news to do with the state of journalism. The very sad one was first: Doug Case, AKA Doghouse Riley, gone quite suddenly, at just 59.

... I didn't know much more about him than he chose to reveal on his own blog. But I knew he could write -- something which was obvious to anyone who read his posts and comments -- and hey, a soupçon of literary mystique never hurt B. Traven. Perhaps the biggest mystery (or maybe, considering the state of the modern media, just the greatest injustice) is why people like David Brooks and Ross Douthat had sinecures at the New York Times, and Doghouse didn't.

A real writer, with much to say; so different from what Charles Pierce's remembrance calls "cowardly, masthead-climbing pissants."

Pierce particularly valued Case's blog for this—

Mr. Riley was the go-to source if you needed material to deflate the national pretensions of Indiana's value-sized governor, Mitch Daniels, who managed to fool national pundits, fools, and David Brooks, but I repeat myself twice. ...

Here's the official obituary, ironically from the Indianapolis Star, which the redoubtable Doghouse used to serve up en brochette a couple of times a week. But if you seek his monument, look to Purdue University, where Mitch Daniels, onetime presidential timber, is reduced to doing his best Mel Gabler imitation on the subject of Howard Zinn. Every day that this squirt isn't president is testimony to the warm heart and good works of J. B.S. (Doghouse) Riley, man of the blogs.

With the death of local news in most places, the loss of a voice like Case's makes that vacuum greater.

I mainly saw his work in comments, especially as one of the alicuati. mortimer's comment gets at what I missed.

I'm going to miss Doghouse for all the reasons given here and then some: the breadth of his knowledge about history, his lawyerly skill at building perfect arguments, and because, like our genial host, he could also be screamingly funny. Whether tossing off a perfect one-liner to caption a picture of Michael Douglas: "The good news is that we know ass-kissing doesn't cause cancer, else there'd be fewer Americans now than in the 15th century," or a tour de force of pure stand-up on the Bush Museum, his generous wit generated LOLs like it was a public service. Hell, the only way I could get through a David Brooks column was knowing that I might get to read Doghouse shredding it to pieces later -- there's no way I can do it solo now.

But for all that, and his blistering rants on Indiana politics, he came across to me as a guy with a big heart in the right place. I can't find it at the moment, but a few years back he wrote a post (or two) about a student in his wife's school who died for lack of a working heater (IIRC) that was righteous, angry, and terribly moving. Despite having never met Douglas Case or corresponded with him, I feel like I just lost someone who was great to know, which is a sad but marvelous thing on these Internets. I'm glad I got to "know" him.

About a week later, and the world of big money media was in a tizzy. When the WaPo's editorial page can't sink much farther, it's hard to care much about this.

On the other hand, Pierce had a very funny update next day. Among comments—

Pat Healy
I put a WaPo editorial page into a bird cage, and the bird complained that I'd made his cage dirtier.

Tom Klee adds this, from America's Finest News Source (once again channeling an alternate, just world)—

"Following yesterday's announcement that Amazon.com founder Jeffrey Bezos would be purchasing daily newspaper The Washington Post, sources confirmed today that Post associate editor and legendary investigative journalist Bob Woodward had already been repositioned at a new staff position in one of Amazon's main warehouses just outside of Seattle.

Amazon.com sources say that Woodward, who is reportedly now a junior warehouse associate at the web company's Bellevue-based warehouse, will be primarily responsible for stocking the factory shelves, tracking and packaging online orders, and several other daily tasks related to the location's inventory."