Categorical Aperitif

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My friend jules has been introducing Maxxine to Walt Whitman.

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I may be offline tomorrow, so here's tomorrow's Daily Random Flickr Blogging—today.

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I meant to mention a while back that PBS's NOW is running an occasional caption contest. The captioning fodder is cartoons, and I'm sure they'd prefer captions with a pretense of chin-scratching profundity, but what the hell.

Nice political party ya got here. Shame if something was to happen to it.

(It seems that a who's-who of major donors—who, collectively, have given ten times as much money to Hillary Clinton's campaign as they have to Barack Obama's—have written to Nancy Pelosi urging that she stop suggesting to superdelegates that they ought to support the candidate who is ahead in the popular delegate vote come the convention this summer.

For now, Obama is ahead of Clinton in pledged delegates, 1413 to 1242, according to CNN's count, and the Clinton supporters who wrote to Pelosi this week want her to amend her advice to the nearly 800 superdelegates. "You suggested superdelegates have an obligation to support the candidate that leads in the pledged delegate count as of June 3, whether that lead be by 500 delegates or two," the letter stated. "This is an untenable position that runs counter to the party's intent in establishing super-delegates in 1984."

Yes, mustn't have too much democracy in the Democratic Party. Tsk tsk tsk.)

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See/hear/read Greg Mitchell on today's Democracy Now!, talking about his new book, So Wrong for So Long: How the Press, the Pundits—and the President—Failed on Iraq. A taste:

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about the “Iraq Follies,” and you’ve summarized this in a recent piece you did, the eighteen things we’ve already forgotten about the media’s flawed coverage of Iraq.

GREG MITCHELL: Right. Well, it’s really going back to the run-up and past the run-up, all the various commentators, like Chris Matthews or Bill O’Reilly or David Brooks and Tom Friedman—people like to poke fun at Tom Friedman for the so-called “Friedman Unit,” where he continually every six months would say, “Let’s give the war another six months,” and that went on for four years. But that was actually—

AMY GOODMAN: Thomas Friedman of the New York Times

GREG MITCHELL: Yeah, Thomas Friedman, yeah. But that was actually sort of a majority position. If you go back—I had to write at Editor & Publisher—and it’s all collected in the book—about every three months, I would write a column saying, “When is the first major newspaper going to come out for a—to reverse course and to begin a pullout?” And every three months, I would write this, and it never happened and never happened, until last year. So the Thomas Friedman situation really was the mainstream view.

Except that, as I pointed out three Friedmans ago, Thomas Friedman didn't invent the Friedman Unit; his equally misguided Times colleague David Brooks did. FAIR traces Friedman's first invocation of the magic six-month interval back to November 30, 2003, but his colleague Brooks said this three weeks earlier, on November 4, 2003:

Somehow, over the next six months, until the Iraqis are capable of their own defense, the Bush administration is going to have to remind us again and again that Iraq is the Battle of Midway in the war on terror, the crucial turning point where either we will crush the terrorists' spirit or they will crush ours.

I know, I know: that Midway analogy is so glaringly stupid that it distracts the attention from that "over the next six months," so casually tossed in at the beginning. Still, there it sits. David Brooks invented the Friedman Unit. I've suggested renaming it the Brooks Standard Unit or BSU, but I must admit, that doesn't have the euphonious zing of "the Friedman" or "the FU." Anyway.

Amy's conversation with Greg Mitchell is worth a read/view/listen if you'd like a quick refresher course in the many media disgraces that helped to bring us to where we are today. Surely somebody out there needs to induce vomiting?

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I'm a little baffled by the reaction to the recent Barbara Ehrenreich piece on Hillary Clinton's "Family" connection from some normally judicious voices, particularly The Daily Howler and uggabugga. Channelling Kevin Drum, both accuse Ehrenreich of "character assassination"; uggabugga says she has "crafted a pure propaganda piece," and the Howler goes as far as to compare her to—it pains me to type this—Maureen Dowd ("a screaming nut-case"). Perhaps both of them missed Drum's addendum:

UPDATE: I just talked to Jeff Sharlet, author of the forthcoming book, The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power. Although he says that Hillary Clinton's connection with the Fellowship (aka the "Family") is fairly shallow, he also thinks it's quite wrong to characterize it as merely "a collection of Bible study groups." Hillary's association with the Fellowship is no scandal, he says, but it is fair to question her about whether she accepts Doug Coe's particular brand of elite-centered, post-millennial theology. More here.

What exactly are the Howler and uggabugga so excited about? Do they think that the claims made about the Fellowship/Family, or about Clinton's connection to it, are false? If so, they don't say so—and the Howler even says, "We’ve been interested in Jeff Sharlet’s work ever since his 2003 Harper’s piece" and adds that "We look forward to reading his forthcoming book." Do they think that the claims are not relevant? If so, then they're ignoring the specific context mentioned by Ehrenreich right at the beginning of her piece: the recent (and ongoing) flap over Barack Obama's pastor.

Some on the right have been trying to whip up a frenzy over some of Reverend Wright's remarks; some on the left have countered by trying to call more attention to John McCain's connections to prominent Bible-thumping loonie John Hagee. Given the level of interest being shown to both of these men's more controversial religious connections, how exactly is it out of bounds to point out that Hillary Clinton has some of her own? Do the Howler and uggabugga think that the connections between Clinton and this little-known right-wing "Christian" group are so tenuous as to not bear mentioning? Perhaps—but surely voters can decide for themselves what to make of connections like these (emphases mine):

When Clinton first came to Washington in 1993, one of her first steps was to join a Bible study group. For the next eight years, she regularly met with a Christian "cell" whose members included Susan Baker, wife of Bush consigliere James Baker; Joanne Kemp, wife of conservative icon Jack Kemp; Eileen Bakke, wife of Dennis Bakke, a leader in the anti-union Christian management movement; and Grace Nelson, the wife of Senator Bill Nelson, a conservative Florida Democrat.

Clinton's prayer group was part of the Fellowship (or "the Family"), a network of sex-segregated cells of political, business, and military leaders dedicated to "spiritual war" on behalf of Christ, many of them recruited at the Fellowship's only public event, the annual National Prayer Breakfast. (Aside from the breakfast, the group has "made a fetish of being invisible," former Republican Senator William Armstrong has said.) The Fellowship believes that the elite win power by the will of God, who uses them for his purposes. Its mission is to help the powerful understand their role in God's plan.

[...] The Fellowship's ideas are essentially a blend of Calvinism and Norman Vincent Peale, the 1960s preacher of positive thinking. It's a cheery faith in the "elect" chosen by a single voter—God—and a devotion to Romans 13:1: "Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers....The powers that be are ordained of God." Or, as Coe has put it, "we work with power where we can, build new power where we can't."

When Time put together a list of the nation's 25 most powerful evangelicals in 2005, the heading for Coe's entry was "The Stealth Persuader." "You know what I think of when I think of Doug Coe?" the Reverend Schenck (a Coe admirer) asked us. "I think literally of the guy in the smoky back room that you can't even see his face. He sits in the corner, and you see the cigar, and you see the flame, and you hear his voice—but you never see his face. He's that shadowy figure."

Do most voters know that Hillary Clinton pals around with people like this? I doubt it. Hell, after what the Rethugs did to her in the 1990s, I'm sure that many people still think she's some sort of lesbian witch. Will any voters care that she pals around with people like this? Some certainly will. And frankly, I think they have good reason to. After all, a government full of people who talk like this—

Through all of her years in Washington, Clinton has been an active participant in conservative Bible study and prayer circles that are part of a secretive Capitol Hill group known as the Fellowship. Her collaborations with right-wingers such as Senator Sam Brownback (R-Kan.) and former Senator Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) grow in part from that connection. "A lot of evangelicals would see that as just cynical exploitation," says the Reverend Rob Schenck, a former leader of the militant anti-abortion group Operation Rescue who now ministers to decision makers in Washington. "I don't....there is a real good that is infected in people when they are around Jesus talk, and open Bibles, and prayer."

—has left behind it an ever-lengthening trail of corpses, a failing economy, and a thoroughly corrupted government. How exactly has Barbara Ehrenreich done us a national disservice by pointing out Hillary Clinton has longstanding and more-than-casual connections to people like these?

Though I must say that the Howler is right about the cheap "tormented search for identity, marked by ever-changing hairstyles and names" bit. I'll give him that one.

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Happy Birthday, Johann Sebastian Bach.

Glenn Gould playing harpsichord. I was just thinking that there's an alternate universe where he got the Lurch part on The Addams Family. And fit right in.

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While the media continues to leg-hump away over Barack Obama's insufficiently patriotic pastor, Barbara Ehrenreich reminds us that Hillary Clinton has some Christofascist skeletons in her own closet:

There's a reason Hillary Clinton has remained relatively silent during the flap over intemperate remarks by Barack Obama's former pastor, Jeremiah Wright. When it comes to unsavory religious affiliations, she's a lot more vulnerable than Obama.

You can find all about it in a widely under-read article in the September 2007 issue of Mother Jones, in which Kathryn Joyce and Jeff Sharlet reported that "through all of her years in Washington, Clinton has been an active participant in conservative Bible study and prayer circles that are part of a secretive Capitol Hill group known as "The "Fellowship," also known as The Family. But it won't be a secret much longer. Jeff Sharlet's shocking exposé The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power will be published in May.

I thought I'd heard about this creepy group before; sure enough, in my files I found a 2003 interview with Sharlet about The Family. It all sounds quite surreal—a cognitively dissonant mix of Christian piety ("Jesus is in charge"), elitism and fascism ("but bidnessmen and guys like us should run things"), topped off with real-world connections to actual gosh-darned skull-cracking, torture-committing, dissidents-out-of-airplanes-dropping authoritarian dictatorships:

GNN: So how scared are you of this group? Are they a force for fascism or some sort of cult-like group with big connections that comes and goes?

SHARLET: I think they are definitely a force for fascism. I think a lot of the way the world looks is a result of their work. They were instrumental in getting U.S. government support for General Suharto, for the generals' juntas in Brazil. Just take those two countries alone, they are two of the biggest countries on Earth. Those countries might have been progressive democracies a long time ago had it not been for U.S. support for those regimes ...

GNN: But don't you think the CIA and the U.S. government's own agenda had a lot to do with those decisions?

SHARLET: Yeah, but they made those connections.

GNN: What are the connections between the CIA and the Fellowship?

SHARLET: A lot of their key men in a country would be the intelligence officers in the American embassy. Throughout their correspondence, that's the kind of guy they would like to have involved. They always had a lot of Army intelligence guys involved, Pentagon guys.

Doug Coe in the early 70's was touring the frontlines in Vietnam with intelligence officers and South Vietnamese generals. That's the level of connections they are talking about, like the Salvadoran general Carlos Eugenios Vides Casanova [convicted by a Florida jury for the torture of thousands] and Honduran general Gustavo Alvarez Martinez [a minister also linked to the CIA and death squads]. They are the people who brought those people in. They said you need to meet this person. That's how it works.

Their diplomacy can affect some good things, like the truce in Rwanda. They had a lot of connections with the South African [apartheid] regime, where they were generally a moderate, even a progressive force. But it's kinda hard to name a nasty regime around the world that doesn't have really well-documented connections to them. Franco was a hold-out. So they started winning over a bunch of ministers in the Franco regime and then they went to Franco and said this is a good group, we can do business with them.

Yeah, you can see how Jesus would be totally sympatico with guys like Franco and Suharto. Right. It almost makes you pine for some honest fascists, doesn't it? Guys who don't don't feel the need to hide their paternalistic power-f*cking fantasies behind the conceit that it's all being done for God. But then I guess that if this deception fools enough people (possibly including The Family themselves) to be useful, and if power is what you really worship, then you might as well embrace the deception and drag the good name of Jesus into your sick little game. Once you're a power-f*cker, you might as well be a power-f*cker all the way.

At any rate, I eagerly await the mainstream media's leg-humping frenzy over Hillary's connections to this lovely little organization. Not.

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While browsing Today's Papers this morning I came across an interesting article about a wacky young Finnish computer-game designer, Petri Purho, who just won a fairly prestigious game developers' award for a game called Crayon Physics Deluxe (free simpler prototype version here). That one looks like fun, but what really caught my eye were a couple of his other simple-themed, made-in-less-than-a-week games:

But many of his experiments are wickedly funny and original. There are many games based on the exploits of Indiana Jones, but Purho's version is the only one that tells the story from the boulder's point of view, letting players control the rampaging sphere and smoosh wave after wave of attacking archeologists. Another game, Grammar Nazi, is a literate twist on shooters like Space Invaders. Players fire upward at swarms of enemies, but the ammo in Purho's version is the letters you type on the keyboard, and the longer the words you spell, the more damage they do. (Tapping out indie has some impact. Autodidact causes a massive explosion.) Purho made it in a single day.

I'm not a big computer game player—aside from good old Windows Solitaire, I have an old poker CD-ROM and that's about it—but there's a certain subversive appeal in something like "A Tribute to the Rolling Boulder":

Instructions
You play as the infamous rolling boulder. Roll over the archeologists and protect the honor of the golden idols of fertility.

If your honor drops to zero (honor is indicated by the bar in the bottom of the screen) the game is over. The honor will decrease if there are archeologists touching the golden idols.

I'm thinking that Orson Welles's movies might be a good source of similarly decentered games. Perhaps one where you chase Harry Lime through the sewers of Vienna, or one where you play a fly that has to stay out of the way of Kane's room-trashing rampage? Hmm.

I'm in a foul mood today, what with the five-year anniversary and three days' worth of Winter Soldier testimony on Democracy Now! and all.

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I'd figured that the new Winter Soldier hearings wouldn't get much mainstream press attention, but I didn't think they'd be ignored this thoroughly:

Although Winter Soldier was held just outside the nation’s capital, it was almost entirely ignored by the American corporate media. A search on the Lexis database found that no major television network or cable news network even mentioned Winter Soldier over the weekend, neither did the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times or most other major newspapers in the country. The editors of the Washington Post chose to cover Winter Soldier but placed the article in the local section.

For curiosity's sake, twice over the last weekend I browsed the websites of the major TV "news" channels; all I found were links to the same lonely WaPo story, and those were only at CBS and MSNBC. I found nothing at ABC, CNN, or PBS's NewsHour. From the good NPR Check I find that All Things Considered had a story on Sunday, but listening to it, I find that it's all of three minutes long and well sanitized, with examples that seem carefully chosen not to offend: a soldier says that rules of engagement allowed firing on vehicles that strayed too close to convoys, and another says that a prisoner was denied food, water, and sleep for three days. Gosh. Meanwhile, over at Democracy Now! and other outlets, there's testimony about terrorizing families, indiscriminate shooting of civilians, indiscriminate firing of machine guns into buildings, etc. etc. etc. But I guess that basic honesty about such things would cut into tote bag sales.

Oh, that liberal media.

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You may have already seen "The Iraq Follies," Greg Mitchell's review of "eighteen things you've already forgotten about the media's flawed coverage of Iraq," but be sure to check it out if you haven't. The first item on his list remains one of my personal favorites:

The day before the invasion, Bill O'Reilly said, "If the Americans go in and overthrow Saddam Hussein and it's clean, he has nothing, I will apologize to the nation; I will not trust the Bush administration again, all right?"

The mystery isn't why you didn't follow through on that promise, Bill; the mystery is why anybody continues to watch a pompous lying jackass like you. But this is the one that Democrats had better not forget come this summer and fall:

On March 27, 2007, John McCain, referring to the supposed calm settling on Baghdad, said, "General Petraeus goes out there almost every day in an unarmed Humvee." This turned out to be pure bunk, but McCain quickly visited Iraq to try to prove his overall point. There, the Arizona senator went from the ridiculous to the maligned, touring a Baghdad market and claiming all was safe—while troops surrounded him and helicopters twirled overhead. Rep. Mike Pence (R-Ind.) likened the scene to "a normal outdoor market in Indiana in the summertime."

Either John McCain actually thinks that it's normal to take half a Marine battalion and air support along with you when you go shopping, or he's a dirty stinking liar who should have this shameful anecdote hung around his neck like a dead albatross. Straight talk!

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Hey, Generik is back in action, and he has up a truly magnificent rant by his brother. Speaking of "classic rock": I confess that I sometimes tune in to our local (as in broadcast from somewhere in Orlando but probably programmed somewhere in Hong Kong) "classic rock" station when I'm in my car. And only when I'm in my car. There is a certain "comfort food" element in hearing the exact same songs I was hearing 2-3 decades ago, I admit. Or do I mean "comfort station"? "Comfort women"? I'm not sure anymore. But y'know the weirdest thing? Pretty much every single time I'm in my car and tune in that station, they play a Boston song. Honestly, I don't remember hearing that much Boston back when this "rock" was "classic." At what point in the past twenty years did Boston get promoted to classic rock archetype? 'cause if I were Journey I would be, like, seriously pissed.

One of the absolutely best paragraphs I have ever read, courtesy The Poor Man:

If you pull down a six- or seven-figure salary working in a cushy media job, and especially if you spend time in a makeup chair before putting on your gossipy news “show”, you forfeit the right to speak for the “working class”, or anybody who has a real job, ever again. If your made-up face on your catty chat show is beamed down to normal people from far-out satellites, you are basically a Mick Ronson riff away from being Ziggy Stardust, and should probably work on coming to grips with that, rather than imagining that you are somehow the authentic proletariat. You’re a freaky moonage rich person in spaced-out freaky daydreamland, man. Deal with it.

Word.

I'm having a crappy week, as witness my utter lack of inspiration today.

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Here's a quick one for this week's group fun.

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I can't wait to see how little attention this gets from the mainstream media:

Winter Soldier: Iraq and Afghanistan will feature testimony from U.S. veterans who served in those occupations, giving an accurate account of what is really happening day in and day out, on the ground.

The four-day event will bring together veterans from across the country to testify about their experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan—and present video and photographic evidence. In addition, there will be panels of scholars, veterans, journalists, and other specialists to give context to the testimony. These panels will cover everything from the history of the GI resistance movement to the fight for veterans' health benefits and support.

When: Thursday March 13 to Sunday March 16

Schedule and streaming information here. I was only a kid when the first Winter Soldier hearings took place; growing up as a good progressive optimist in the richest, most powerful democracy in the world, I never dreamed that another set would ever be necessary. Thanks to the Bush-Cheney administration, it almost feels like we have to recover an entire century's worth of moral progress.

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When you read student papers, you find (a) errors that confuse you, (b) errors that annoy you, and (c) errors that make you rock with laughter. Here's one of the latter that helped to make my day a bit more enjoyable:

When man landed on the moon everyone thought it was such an amazing historical event. They thought that it was such an immense accomplishment. Everyone watched the broadcast of it on their black and white television in their living room and tried to imagine what they were seeing. Watching it, you would have seen an image of Louis Armstrong bouncing up and down on the moon’s surface, planting that celebrated American flag.

And then you would have seen his thrilling rendition of "Basin Street Blues" in the vacuum of space. Man, did Satchmo have a set of lungs on him or what?

The Daily Show is usually good when it comes to satirizing the corporate "news" channels, but this—this is magnificent:

You laugh now, but that skull locomotive thing will show up on MSNBC one day, just you wait.

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Sometimes, when you're pressed for time, you just have to go with first thoughts, however inexplicable they might be. When I saw this picture, I swear, this is the first thought I had:

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Tsk tsk, I've been forgetting the weekly festivities again. But not this time.

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Don't miss Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes talking about their new book on the real cost of the Iraq war. Don't miss 'em on Democracy Now!, anyway, 'cause it's unlikely that Tim Russert, Chris Matthews, Chris Wallace, Tucker Carlson, etc. will be having them in for a chat anytime soon. And don't think about all the education, health care, infrastructure improvements, etc. that could've been bought with that money.

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I haven't done a threefer for a while. So here one is.

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And don't let the door hit you on the way out:

San Francisco - Another high-ranking George W. Bush administration official has resigned. The Department of Veterans Affairs Undersecretary for Benefits Daniel Cooper quit Thursday amid mounting criticism over a backlog of disability claims for injured veterans that runs six months long and an appearance he made in a fundraising video for an evangelical Christian organisation where he said Bible study was more important than doing his job.

Cooper has been under fire for using his office to proselytise for evangelical Christianity ever since he appeared in a 2004 fundraising video for Christian Embassy, which carries out missionary work among the Washington elite as part of the Campus Crusade for Christ.

In the video, Cooper says of his Bible study, "It's not really about carving out time, it really is a matter of saying what is important. And since that's more important than doing the job - the job's going to be there, whether I'm there or not."

Cooper's declaration inflamed veterans who saw the number of veterans waiting for the Veterans Administration (VA) to decide their disability claims balloon to 400,000 on his watch, with the average veteran waiting six months for a decision from the government.

"He was clearly a fundamentalist Christian first and essentially a government paid missionary for his particular world view of the gospel of Jesus Christ," said Mike Weinstein, who runs the Military Religious Freedom Foundation. "The fact that he's gone obviously is good."

Spokespersons for the Department of Veterans Affairs refused to grant an interview for this story.

I've heard of the "Protestant work ethic," but this is ridiculous.

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