I have become a ditto head

Rep. Barney Frank (D-Massachusetts) recently wrote in The Nation:

"I would be very happy if there was some way to make it a misdemeanor for people to talk about reducing the budget deficit without including a recommendation that we substantially cut military spending.... Current plans call for us not only to spend hundreds of billions more in Iraq but to continue to spend even more over the next few years producing new weapons that might have been useful against the Soviet Union. Many of these weapons are technological marvels, but they have a central flaw: no conceivable enemy.... In some cases we are developing weapons - in part because of nothing more than momentum - that lack not only a current military need but even a plausible use in any foreseeable future.... If, beginning one year from now, we were to cut military spending by 25 percent from its projected levels, we would still be immeasurably stronger than any combination of nations with whom we might be engaged."

Ditto, ditto, ditto.

Chippers Beware!!

GA of VA passes partial smoking ban. A lot less effective than it might have been but considering the where and when of this particular chunk of legislation, pretty impressive. Still, I really love the last line of this AP story...so true.

"I think it will be signed quite promptly, in the quickest-drying ink I can find," said Kaine, the Democratic National Committee chairman, who privately negotiated the bill with Republican House Speaker William J. Howell. Republicans had tried to dilute it but were unsuccessful.

The measure passed the House and Senate without debate in a state where tobacco is so revered that frescoes of the golden leaf are painted on the ceilings of the Capitol rotunda. The crop was a mainstay of the earliest Virginia settlements, dating to Jamestown in 1607. A few miles south of the Capitol, Philip Morris churns out Marlboros and Virginia Slims at the world's largest cigarette factory.

A coalition of restaurant and tobacco industry lobbyists argued the bill went too far and would hurt business.

"Every restaurant in Virginia already had the right to ban smoking on their own, and many of them did," said Phillip Morris spokesman Bill Phelps.

The bill also got a lukewarm reception from anti-smoking groups who felt it didn't go far enough.

Hilton Oliver, executive director of the Virginia Group to Alleviate Smoking in Public, or Virginia GASP, called it "a pretty good bill under the circumstances."

"It's not as good a bill as it could have been, but in this state with this legislature, nothing ever is," Oliver said.

Chuck's stupid question and what it reveals

Mostly, during the Presidential election, I found Chuck Todd's insight to be spot on. He was never clearly partisan but he seemed to have a pretty good handle on where the country was headed politically and was not given to using the elaborate double think of the DC punditry to explain away differences that mattered.

But I have to admit his recent question after the House definitively passed the stimulus package without a single Republican vote was rather breathing taking.

Chuck Todd asked White House press secretary Robert Gibbs if Obama would veto the bill because it wasn't 'bipartisan'.

Let's unpack some assumptions that come ribbon wrapped in that query:

1)Bipartisanship means you must have Republican support. But does it? Or should it? Nearly one third of this bill was a gift to Republican dissent. Offering tax cuts, a large portion of which were pushed through by the Obama Whitehouse at the request of the Republicans. But because the stimulus bill actually contained government spending that will help to bolster the economy the Republicans refused to vote for it: en masse.

They weren't opposed because it might help the country or hurt they country--they were opposed on purely ideological grounds--and beyond that, more likely, purely political grounds.

Moreover, it was their ideology--no good can come from Government, starve the beast Grover Norquist infantilism -- that actually led the way to the current depression. But because Republicans are acting like purely political hacks, or more generously, refuse to take off their ideological blinders and vote for aid to a country and a people that desperately need it, the bill is no longer considered 'bipartisan' and therefore, according to Todd, Obama might be moved to veto it?

2) Bipartisanship is a goal in and of itself and not a means toward an end --like the economic health of our country. But really, bipartisanship that destroys the country economically in its quest for cheerful 'getting along' is useless. Republicans suffer under the myth that Government must be starved, because, they don't think government can ever solve any problems. And yet, in the last 8 years, under Republican leadership, there has been pratically no government oversight of hundreds of financial transactions, and trillions--literarily trillions -- of dollars of value has been lost or stolen. Our infrastructure is on a disastrous footing, our health services are daily causing economic diasters for inviduals who can't pay the exorbitant costs---costs easily paid for under systems that have the sense to allow government to control the legder sheets of the health industry.

Every single area that the Republican ideology has touched and affected (one could say 'infected') has brought disaster. Who wants to be bipartisan with some of the demonstrably worst ideas of the 20th century?

It would be great if Republicans could forgo their political instincts and forget their jihad on Government long enough to vote for the single largest middle class tax cut in US History, or to help restore unemployment insurance to millions of unemployed Americans. But if they decide that maintaining doctrinal purity is more important than the men and women in their own districts--men and women who are having to make the hard choices now about how they are going to live without jobs and sometimes without houses--than one can only express surprise and sadness.

To think that anyone would expect the President to reject a bill because a set of ideologically and politically opposed idiots have not bothered to learn either economics nor simple lessons from their last two electoral losses has obviously breathed too long the toxic air of DC punditry.

I'm sad to see Chuck go the way of so many others, but it's well to remember that the District is built on a swamp, and those who make a swamp their home necessarily become innured to the more fetid odors of daily decay; brain-wise and otherwise.

Virginia GOP Chairman's Blog Outreach: Massive Fail

From By Eric Kleefeld - February 11, 2009, 6:04PM

The Republican Party's embrace of technology, which many inside and outside the party see as essential to a political recovery, so far is working out like...well, it's not working out at all.

Yesterday the Virginia GOP came very close to taking control of the state Senate, nearly luring a Democratic Senator to switch parties and put them at a 20-20 tie, which would have been broken by the Republican Lt. Governor. Then Jeff Frederick, a state legislator and the party chairman, ruined it all by Twittering this:

Big news coming out of Senate: Apparently one dem is either switching or leaving the dem caucus. Negotiations for power sharing underway.
The Dems then read the message, quickly mobilized to talk the renegade out of it, and stopped the GOP coup before it could happen.

We usually don't cover state-level politics, but this is just too much. Really, Mr. Frederick, you don't live-blog about ongoing secret negotiations!

(Via the Not Larry Sabato blog)

As I've noted before the perfect definition of Republicanism is loosely borrowed from a John Kenneth Galbraith quote regarding the Hapsburgs -- cruelty tempered by incompetence.

Love live teh stupid!

For the next time...

...you need to discuss that $500,000 CEO cap with a wall street titan who feels abused...

...you need to defend the Employee Fair Choice Act

...someone announces the fruits of 'raw' Capitalism as practiced in this country

...you have a wealthy relative over who decries the 'socialism' of the Democrats.

Begin with two words: Fuck you. Then show them this

Compared to the pay rate of an average CEO, the average full-time worker would have to work in the upwards of 385 years to make what a CEO receives in one year. During the 1980s the pay gap between CEO and ordinary factory workers grew from 42 times to
almost 85 times (Byrne 1991).

In 2004 CEOs in the United States made over 475 times as much as the average worker.

Country Ratio of CEO pay to
average worker pay

Japan 11:1
Germany 12:1
France 15:1
Italy 20:1
Canada 20:1
South Africa 21:1
Britian 22:1
Hong Kong 41:1
Mexico 47:1
Venezula 50:1
US 475:1

Europe has far better equity than we have and they are already
taking it to the streets.

Are we such docile chumps that we will watch the Oligarchs (excuse me, 'Masters of the Universe'),the Evangelical brain dead (excuse me, Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, Ted Haggard, Rick Warren and their gay baiting, war mongering, piously inane hypocritical followers) and the Republican fuckwits whose last course in economics was in the sandbox of Milton Friedman where they learned that screaming it's mine, it's mine is all that matters and taxes per Lilly Helman were for the little people (that's us). .... destroy this country without a peep?

Stay tuned.

For the geezers

John Updike, RIP

If you hit google news right now (01/27/2009, approx. 7:45 EST), you would see the"Death of John Updike" ensconced between a headline heralding "Obama Visits Capitol to Press Republicans on Stimulus Plan" and another far more crude declaring "Man Kills His Wife and 5 Children".

Updike would find his obit caught thus between the proverbial rock of a politics he never really liked or understood (he was much more conservative than liberal) and the hard place of the brute philistine of human nature (he was a soft spoken gentleman of letters who was both hospitable as well as charming) par for the course.

He had a knack for being caught between those extremes.

 In terms of his place in literature, he crosses a curious divide between a now faded modern movement insistent on the primacy of language and the older schools of narrative realism from which he ultimately descends. Language wise, Updike could probably fashion a description of a man's hand, a woman's belly, a mountain range or the quiet stubbornness of a library on Saturday evening ten minutes before closing better than any writer on Earth. Seriously, he was a master of the gem like sentence, so masterfully cut it takes your breath away. His aphoristic descriptors nail with visual intensity. He's not especially witty--ultimately, I've come to decide he never thought that much of wit--he's painfully, subjectively visual, turning abstract concepts--like time, for example-- into visualizations.

Watch:

"He comes into Brewer from the south, seeing it in the smoky shadow before dawn as a gradual multiplication of houses among trees beside the road and then as treeless waste of industry, shoe factories and bottling plants and company parking lots and knitting mills converted to electronic parts and elephantine gas tanks lifting above trash filled swampland yet lower than the blue edge of the mountain from whose crest Brewer was a warm carpet woven around a single shade of brick. Above the mountain, stars fade."

--Rabbit Run, p. 41

You can do that with almost any Updike novel, plop down on a page and find some extravagant description that is conceptually accurate, visually demonstrated and somewhat melancholy and sonorous. Like William Styron, his contemporary, Updike loves the long description, lives to tell you what someone or something looks like, how they fit into a particular context, or better, even, what exactly that context is. He lives on every page of his novels, is there, his opinion, whether right or wrong, is always inexorably there--and this has probably won him as many literary enemies as any literary gift is apt to do.

And it is a gift, for surely the one thing we must say of praise about Updike is that he was an enormously gifted writer, with an enormous awareness of his place and his time.  His awareness, his insistent consciousness and instruction on such to the reader ends up being something of a hindrance, however. Certainly, not to speak ill of the dead (as Updike would necessarily admonish) but there is nearly a sophomoric awkwardness to the display of his gifts which might put off even his most admiring fans.

One of Updike's first published pieces, a short essay poking fun at the use of  quotation marks in Henry James's work comes to mind. I remember reading it years ago, after I'd already tackled a few of Updike's greatest hits, Centaur and his Rabbit trilogy. It was an attempt at humor at the expense of Henry James larded use of quotes for ironic purposes. Updike, of course, found the `quotes' nettlesome and took James to task for them in no uncertain terms. The result was somewhat effective, but not terribly funny, and left you feeling ultimately a bit sorry for Henry James.  

Much of Updike's fiction does this--creates characters that are visually accurate, perhaps even emotionally accurate, yet are surprisingly unconvincing. It's not that they aren't `liked', per se, it's that ultimately they are not believed. Maybe Updike himself understands this, naming his most realistic attempt 'Rabbit Angstrom'....Angstrom being the world's smallest unit of measurement (at least at the time Updike wrote the novel, I believe it's been since replaced with the nanometre--no little irony in that, either). It's as though the characters Updike invokes are so small and diminished in his eyes that his language completely overwhelms them. He needed a Quixote or Ignatius O'Reilly to fill out that fulsome tongue, but he only allowed himself the thin shades of characters in a gray state suffering an deep economic downturn and social upheaval. So, I think, Updike's overweening presence seems to mask his more realistic characters (Chiron, the mythical protagonist in the Centaur is an exquisite exception that seems to prove the rule), or create a penumbra of words that visually talks about them even as they indict and ultimately hide them.

The hard truth is, he had very few compelling characters that walked and talked and danced on his stage.

What he had ultimately was his voice. A multileveled, incredibly talented voice that  talked about these ideas he had for people in really extraordinary ways. He just never got around to the hard work of letting his people, his characters talk for themselves.

I can already hear his singular judgment from the piney woods of Pennsylvania. Not so direct, sir, I am, after all, dead. A bit of respect is in order.

Indeed. His criticism -and I single out  Hugging the Shore as one of his best volumes of criticism, will be reread by future generations. Some of his short stories, especially those illuminated in his Pigeon Feathers collection, and his wonderfully fanciful work, The Centuar will all be honored and remembered. As will John Updike.

A great writer died today. That he did not do all that he might--even after 50 books, should surprise no one--especially not for those of us engaged in these dark arts. As Samuel Beckett once said at the end of one of his works, "try again, fail better."

Let us grieve.