Categorical Aperitif

Mytwords over at NPR Check notes that, I'll be damned (but you knew that), this week NPR also noticed the passing of Utah Phillips. I'm pleasantly surprised—something I haven't felt re. NPR in a long time. I'm also pleasantly surprised to be pointed to "The Talking NPR Blues," a song that I know my friend jules can identify with (though she's probably already heard it):

They don't give a damn what we want and need
They've all caved in to corporate greed
And sold us out to the ruling class
Well the whole damn bunch can kiss my… …Dot Com!

This is a family show folks
The FCC says watch your language
English
What's yours?

I got tired of being treated like a veg
So I called up the station and canceled my pledge
In a mighty act of liberation
Sent the money off to my community station

// posted by nash @ 7:38 PM 1 comments

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// posted by nash @ 7:27 PM 0 comments

I think I'm finally ready to forgive Comedy Central for canceling Mystery Science Theater 3000 back in the day.

// posted by nash @ 7:21 PM 0 comments

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

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// posted by nash @ 10:11 PM 3 comments

I don't have many commenters on this blog—or readers, for that matter—but damn, the ones I do have are sharp SOBs. My friend jules almost made me shoot liquid out of my nose when I read this thought on the McClellan story mentioned in my ABC rant earlier today:

I'm rather enjoying this; it's like pausing the videotape at the moment the king is discovered to be nekkid.

Speaking of commenters, I meant to thank Christopher Cerf for dropping by a few weeks ago. It's not enough that he's half of the entire Institute of Expertology, oh no. He also wrote songs for Sesame Street, co-created Between the Lions, and helped found National Lampoon. I thought I remembered Bill Moyers mentioning Between the Lions, but—wow. And I see that he's worked with Ray Bradbury. Years ago, when I saw him at a book signing and got his autograph on an ancient paperback copy of The Martian Chronicles, Ray Bradbury blessed me. Six degrees. Anyway, the expertologists have a ripping new piece up at TomDispatch. Go see.

// posted by nash @ 9:42 PM 3 comments

Well, the Trekkers will get this one, anyway.

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// posted by nash @ 9:23 AM 0 comments

I made the mistake of watching ABC World News with Charles Gibson again last night. I was curious to see that they had a segment with Martha Raddatz reporting on former White House press secretary Scott McClellan's "scathing" new book What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception. Having seen the Politico story on the book, I was also curious to see whether ABC would mention this aspect of McClellan's charges:

He says the White House press corps was too easy on the administration during the run-up to the war.

Mr. McClellan does not exempt himself from failings — “I fell far short of living up to the kind of public servant I wanted to be” — and calls the news media “complicit enablers” in the White House’s “carefully orchestrated campaign to shape and manipulate sources of public approval” in the march to the Iraq war in 2002 and 2003.

Like the Howler has shown time and again, there's nothing the corporate media covers like their own tracks.

// posted by nash @ 8:25 AM 2 comments

Got caught up in something and couldn't post yesterday, sorry.

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// posted by nash @ 7:36 AM 0 comments

The late great Bill Hicks had a bit wherein he imagined a self-hating Jay Leno, disgusted at interviewing celebrity dimwits and at having chosen to shill for Doritos even while making millions as Johnny Carson's successor, sticking a gun into his mouth and blowing his brains out live on television. I know that's not funny when you see it described, but it is in Hicks's telling, trust me (listen here, definitely NSFW). Anyway, I often think of this bit when I read Media Matters posts about Morning Joe on MSNBC. I don't have cable, and I wouldn't watch Morning Joe if I did; however, Media Matters usually mentions the show several times a week, and from many of these posts, I get the impression that Mika Brzezinski may be similarly contemplating the consequences of her choice to leave more serious reporting at CBS in favor of playing second fiddle to bullying blowhard Joe Scarborough and having to sit, smile, and feign enthusiasm while people like Tucker Carlson say things like this:

Discussing Sen. Hillary Clinton's decision to remain in the presidential race, MSNBC senior campaign correspondent Tucker Carlson, during the May 27 edition of MSNBC's Morning Joe, said of Clinton, "Look, she's a trapped animal, there's absolutely no question about it. As I've thought to myself many times, if you've ever tried to get your cat in a box, you know what Hillary Clinton is doing right now." Carlson then imitated a screeching cat, and added, "with all four paws out, all the hair standing up? Look, she is in feral mode." After co-host Mika Brzezinski said, "I don't know what to say," and guest co-host Mike Barnicle said, "Tucker Carlson, ladies and gentlemen," Carlson asserted, "And I say that as a compliment, I admire her tenacity. I do." Brzezinski then said, "I'd just like to point out, I have scars from trying to do that to one of the cats that I own," to which Carlson replied, "OK, then you know how [Sen. Barack] Obama feels." Later in the segment, Brzezinski referred to Clinton as "the cat in a box, as Tucker so aptly put it."

Later on Morning Joe, Carlson also compared Clinton to "the drunk party guest who won't go home, the cab's idling out front, and she's opening a new bottle of wine." He added: "And the hosts of the party, the press and the Democratic establishment, want her to go home, and she won't." At the conclusion of that segment, Carlson's last on that day's program, Brzezinski asked Carlson to "do the cat in the box thing just one more time before you go. Who's the cat in the box?" Carlson complied, again imitating a screeching cat.

// posted by nash @ 7:27 AM 0 comments

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// posted by nash @ 10:38 PM 1 comments

Absolutely no disrespect intended to a true and kind individual, but I could almost thank Utah Phillips for dying when he did, 'cause man, I really needed to hear his wonderful interview with Amy Goodman today. Highly, highly, highly recommended. It is indeed helpful to be reminded of the Wobblies and the Espionage Act and the Palmer Raids and the patient work of activists who built the more humane society I was lucky enough to be born into (but which I fear I will not die in) and that freedom means the freedom to say "no," even to Johnny Cash, and that it's possible to take "kill your television" literally:

AMY GOODMAN: Utah, you’re known for telling stories, very—well, really opposite from the mass media world today, where a sound bite is something like eight or nine seconds.

UTAH PHILLIPS: Mm-hmm.

AMY GOODMAN: What do you think that has done to the way people learn and understand?

UTAH PHILLIPS: I think that television has had a serious—we’re thinking differently. I’ll watch television once a year just to get kind of an idea of what is happening to people’s minds, or maybe I want to go see the World Series. The frequency of images is so fast that I can’t track it. If I don’t—I don’t have TV, and I don’t like them, so I can’t understand how people can watch them. The frequency of the images is just too fast. I can’t take it all in. Yeah, it is—you’re absolutely right that we’re thinking differently. Television alters consciousness. If it didn’t, they wouldn’t use it. It’s intended to alter consciousness.

Me, the last TV set I had, I shot. I don’t know what commercial importunement drove me off of the pier, but I hauled it into the backyard. It was up in Spokane, Washington, and I got a—had an old Stevens shotgun. I tied a scarf around it for a blindfold and scotch-taped a cigarette to the front and lit it and let it burn an appropriate amount of time, and then I blew a hole through it with the shotgun. It was out there in the lilac hedge, which grew through it eventually. It was kind of pretty after a while. But I have not—you know, I haven’t owned one of those foolish things since.

[...]

I don’t feel pessimistic... There’s simply too many good people right here in this room, too many good people on the street, close to the street, doing too many good things for me to afford the luxury of being pessimistic. I’m going to—I’ll tell people that tonight, damn it. I’m glad it came up. If I look at the world from the top down, from FOX, God help me, or CNN or—there ought to be a CNN Anon to ween people from that idiocy. If I look at it from the top down, I get seriously depressed. The world’s going to hell in a wheelbarrow. But if I walk out the door, turn all that off, and go with the people, whatever town I’m in, who are doing the real work down at the street level, like I said, there’s too many good people doing too many good things for me to let myself be pessimistic about that. I’m hopeful, can’t live without hope. Can you?

// posted by nash @ 10:36 PM 0 comments

Next, mosey over to see what the group is up to this week.

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// posted by nash @ 10:27 AM 1 comments

Atrios pointed me to this. I made the mistake of looking at the comments. Oy. The general sentiment that the New York Times is some sort of liberal mouthpiece for the Democratic Party is bad enough—are these people ignorant of the Times' relentless coverage of the Whitewater "scandal"? of what the Times did to Al Gore in 2000? of Judith Miller? of the Times' rush to embrace the abortive coup against (democratically elected) Hugo Chavez in 2002? of the Times' reliably neoliberal positions on trade and corporate power? of the presence of William Kristol, David Brooks, and Thomas "Suck On This" Friedman in the Times' editorial pages? of the Times' silence (shared with the rest of the corporate media) on the Winter Soldier II hearings? etc. etc. etc.—but read down a ways and it's kind of like that scene in Jaws where Roy Scheider and Richard Dreyfuss cut open the belly of the shark on the pier and all kinds of sickening, half-digested crap comes pouring out: there are references to "jackass liberal demonRATS," for example, and a war opponent is referred to as a "pink pussy"—oops, sorry, forgot the capitalization, that's "Pink pussy"—and anyone who contests the claim that the NYT is a "leftist" paper is dismissed as a "snooty, skinny, post-modern, self-important, supercilious, Jon Stewart-wannabe ignoramus" (skinny? post-modern?), and, God help me, there are non-ironic references to "ChiComs" and to making the liberals sorry by having all the clever, productive people (such as the ones who spend hours typing semiliterate comments at mediabistro.com, presumably) "stop the engine of the world" by doing "an 'Atlas Shrugged'," which in less ranting hands might be a great name for a dance, now that I think about it.

Gah. Interestingly, though, even as they rave at the various liberal/Democratic/media/pacifist/socialist/communist/America-hating straw men that march perpetually through their minds, even the wingnuttiest of wingnuts in those comments seem desperate to distance themselves from George W. Bush. I guess I should take that as a small sign of hope.

// posted by nash @ 9:18 AM 0 comments

This is for yesterday. When I first saw this photo, I really did think for a moment that it was a still from one of Godfrey Reggio's Qatsi films.

// posted by nash @ 9:06 AM 0 comments

I'm sorry, but I was in a foul mood yesterday and just did not feel up to posting. Had I done so, I probably would have just pointed to "Getting Through the Bad Times" by Sam Smith.

We live in a nation hated abroad and frightened at home. A place in which we can reasonably refer to the American Republic in the past tense. A country that has moved into a post-constitutional era, no longer a nation of laws but an adhocracy run by law breakers, law evaders and law ignorers. A nation governed by a culture of impunity, a term from Latin America where they know it well—a culture in which corruption is no longer a form of deviance but the norm. We all live in a Mafia neighborhood now.

[...]

By 1961, with Kennedy contemplating involvement in Vietnam, General de Gaulle strongly urged him not to get involved in that "rotten country." Said de Gaulle, "I predict to you, that you will, step by step, be sucked into a bottomless military and political quagmire." The French had lost 55,000 troops there, almost as many as the Americans would.

DeGaulle understood the difference between the illusion and reality of empire. Many years ago some people built castles and walled cities and moats to keep the bad guys out. It worked for a while, but sooner or later spies and assassins figured out how to get across the moats and opponents learned how to climb the walls and send balls of fire into protected compounds. The Florentines even catapulted dead donkeys and feces over the town wall during their siege of Siena.

The people who built castles and walled cities and moats are all dead now and their efforts at security seem puny and ultimately futile as we visit their unintended monuments to the vanity of human presumption.

Yet like the castle-dwellers behind the moat, we are now spending huge sums to put ourselves inside a prison of our own making. It is unlikely to provide either security for our bodies or solace for our souls, for we are simply attacking ourselves before others get the chance.

This is not the way to peace and safety. Peace is a state without violence, interrogations, and moats. Peace is a state of reciprocity, of trust, of empirically based confidence that no one is about to do you in. It exists not because of intrinsic goodness or rampant naiveté but because of a common, implicit understanding that that it works better for everyone.

This state is often hard to come by, but it is still cheaper, less deadly, and ultimately far more effective than the alternative we have chosen.

// posted by nash @ 8:49 AM 0 comments

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// posted by nash @ 4:25 PM 0 comments

Sorry, I was busy offline and missed my DRFBing yesterday—first one since Jan. 1, I think. I apologize for the darkness of this one, but I've had fascism on the mind lately; I just read Sinclair Lewis's It Can't Happen Here, for example, and recently saw Watch on the Rhine (highly recommended). And, of course, lurking in the background is the Blackwater Logo Contest.

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// posted by nash @ 8:04 AM 0 comments

Rory O'Connor ("with Aaron Cutler") has some thoughts on Michael Savage, formerly Michael Weiner, aka Savage Weiner. This is my favorite passage:

The shift in Savage’s attitudes toward homosexuality may be the most revealing of his complex persona. When he was younger, his father mocked Savage’s sexuality. “Michael would have on tight black jeans and a boat-necked sweater, and his dad would say, ‘I don’t like the way you’re dressed. You look like a fag,’” childhood friend Alan Zaitz has said. In his first and only novel, Vital Signs, the protagonist (a fortyish Jew named Samuel Trueblood who shares many of Savage’s biographical details) says, “I choose to override my desires for men when they swell in me, waiting out the passions like a storm, below decks.” There are Savage’s years with [Beat icons Allen] Ginsberg and [Lawrence] Ferlinghetti, including a note to Ginsberg that read, “Watched a tourist from New Zealand taking pictures of Fijian people in the marketplace [and] thought of inserting my camera’s lens in your A-hole to photograph the walls of your rectum.” These days, his attitude is outright hostility, with, for instance, his continual assertion of a “homosexual mafia” trying to control the state of world affairs. Savage has also said that gay parenting is “child abuse” and that the sight of a gay couple “makes me want to puke.”

In an interview with the right-wing Web site NewsMax.com, Savage said, “I guess people love my show because of my hard edge combined with humor and education. Those who listen to me say they hear a bit of Plato, Henry Miller, Jack Kerouac, Moses, Jesus, and Frankenstein.”

// posted by nash @ 5:13 PM 0 comments

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// posted by nash @ 2:45 PM 0 comments

I forget exactly how this excellent critical essay by Steven Pinker came to my notice—I haven't paid much attention to The New Republic for years—but it really is worth a complete reading. Pinker takes a good hard look at the reactionary-right leanings of the President's Council on Bioethics and its attempts to hide illiberal prejudices and personal pet peeves (see the ice cream example) behind the magic catch-all concept of "dignity," and, with admirable clarity and brevity, Pinker argues that dignity may best be seen as a concomitant of more important ethical values: autonomy and respect for persons. Count me very much in with Pinker here:

A free society disempowers the state from enforcing a conception of dignity on its citizens. Democratic governments allow satirists to poke fun at their leaders, institutions, and social mores. And they abjure any mandate to define "some vision of 'the good life'" or the "dignity of using [freedom] well" (two quotes from the Council's volume). The price of freedom is tolerating behavior by others that may be undignified by our own lights. I would be happy if Britney Spears and "American Idol" would go away, but I put up with them in return for not having to worry about being arrested by the ice-cream police. This trade-off is very much in America's DNA and is one of its great contributions to civilization: my country 'tis of thee, sweet land of liberty.

// posted by nash @ 2:09 PM 0 comments

The good people at FAIR point us to this Newsday piece noting that Sean Hannity just bought a mansion on Long Island for $8.5 million.

Let's all remember that the next time he starts blathering about "elitists."

// posted by nash @ 7:30 PM 0 comments

I'm in for the group fun this week.

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// posted by nash @ 9:14 AM 1 comments

Don't let the nerdy glasses and the bow tie fool you:

More than four weeks after ABC News commentator George Will, in criticizing Sen. Barack Obama, falsely asserted on the network's This Week that Social Security taxes are levied based on household income, ABC has yet to issue a correction on the Sunday morning show, even though Will has appeared on three broadcasts since making the false statement.

// posted by nash @ 9:10 AM 0 comments

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// posted by nash @ 9:17 PM 0 comments

So: We're going to supply enriched uranium to help along the nuclear program of Saudia Arabia, the country whence came over two thirds of the 9/11 hijackers as well as plenty of financial support for other Islamic terrorists, while at the same time periodically threatening to bomb Iran because its nuclear program might possibly someday maybe produce material that could be used to make a bomb.

And we're supposed to believe that this administration is serious about national security why, again?

// posted by nash @ 9:03 PM 0 comments

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// posted by nash @ 1:17 PM 3 comments

It's a TomDispatch brought to life!

Howard Zinn, voiced by Viggo Mortensen. Rather nice little piece of animation.

// posted by nash @ 1:06 PM 0 comments

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// posted by nash @ 8:24 AM 1 comments

Another lengthy excerpt from Matt Taibbi's The Great Derangement hilariously imagines the planning for 9/11—well, for the 9/11 Truther version of it, anyway. And you are there.

// posted by nash @ 8:19 AM 0 comments

For a lengthy but worthwhile read, check out Chalmers Johnson's review of a new book by distinguished political philosopher/scholar Sheldon Wolin. The essentials:

Wolin writes, "Our thesis is this: it is possible for a form of totalitarianism, different from the classical one, to evolve from a putatively 'strong democracy' instead of a 'failed' one." His understanding of democracy is classical but also populist, anti-elitist and only slightly represented in the Constitution of the United States. "Democracy," he writes, "is about the conditions that make it possible for ordinary people to better their lives by becoming political beings and by making power responsive to their hopes and needs." It depends on the existence of a demos -- "a politically engaged and empowered citizenry, one that voted, deliberated, and occupied all branches of public office." Wolin argues that to the extent the United States on occasion came close to genuine democracy, it was because its citizens struggled against and momentarily defeated the elitism that was written into the Constitution.

"No working man or ordinary farmer or shopkeeper," Wolin points out, "helped to write the Constitution." He argues, "The American political system was not born a democracy, but born with a bias against democracy. It was constructed by those who were either skeptical about democracy or hostile to it. Democratic advance proved to be slow, uphill, forever incomplete. The republic existed for three-quarters of a century before formal slavery was ended; another hundred years before black Americans were assured of their voting rights. Only in the twentieth century were women guaranteed the vote and trade unions the right to bargain collectively. In none of these instances has victory been complete: women still lack full equality, racism persists, and the destruction of the remnants of trade unions remains a goal of corporate strategies. Far from being innate, democracy in America has gone against the grain, against the very forms by which the political and economic power of the country has been and continues to be ordered." Wolin can easily control his enthusiasm for James Madison, the primary author of the Constitution, and he sees the New Deal as perhaps the only period of American history in which rule by a true demos prevailed.

To reduce a complex argument to its bare bones, since the Depression, the twin forces of managed democracy and Superpower have opened the way for something new under the sun: "inverted totalitarianism," a form every bit as totalistic as the classical version but one based on internalized co-optation, the appearance of freedom, political disengagement rather than mass mobilization, and relying more on "private media" than on public agencies to disseminate propaganda that reinforces the official version of events. It is inverted because it does not require the use of coercion, police power and a messianic ideology as in the Nazi, Fascist and Stalinist versions (although note that the United States has the highest percentage of its citizens in prison -- 751 per 100,000 people -- of any nation on Earth). According to Wolin, inverted totalitarianism has "emerged imperceptibly, unpremeditatedly, and in seeming unbroken continuity with the nation's political traditions."

The genius of our inverted totalitarian system "lies in wielding total power without appearing to, without establishing concentration camps, or enforcing ideological uniformity, or forcibly suppressing dissident elements so long as they remain ineffectual. A demotion in the status and stature of the 'sovereign people' to patient subjects is symptomatic of systemic change, from democracy as a method of 'popularizing' power to democracy as a brand name for a product marketable at home and marketable abroad. The new system, inverted totalitarianism, is one that professes the opposite of what, in fact, it is. The United States has become the showcase of how democracy can be managed without appearing to be suppressed."

Many analysts, myself included, would conclude that Wolin has made a close to airtight case that the American republic's days are numbered, but Wolin himself does not agree. Toward the end of his study he produces a wish list of things that should be done to ward off the disaster of inverted totalitarianism: "rolling back the empire, rolling back the practices of managed democracy; returning to the idea and practices of international cooperation rather than the dogmas of globalization and preemptive strikes; restoring and strengthening environmental protections; reinvigorating populist politics; undoing the damage to our system of individual rights; restoring the institutions of an independent judiciary, separation of powers, and checks and balances; reinstating the integrity of the independent regulatory agencies and of scientific advisory processes; reviving representative systems responsive to popular needs for health care, education, guaranteed pensions, and an honorable minimum wage; restoring governmental regulatory authority over the economy; and rolling back the distortions of a tax code that toadies to the wealthy and corporate power."

// posted by nash @ 7:41 AM 0 comments

Don't miss this marvelous collection of Straight Talk™ from Robert Greenwald and company:

// posted by nash @ 7:36 AM 0 comments

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// posted by nash @ 2:52 PM 0 comments

What, now you're "far left" if you have any concerns about the civil liberties implications of wiretapping, agents provocateurs, email surveillance, and so on? Jeez. Somebody give Matt Lauer another million dollars so he can buy a clue.

I almost wish one of Lauer's guests would proposethis thesis, just to see what would happen to Lauer's head:

Given the current centrality of petroleum to our economy and way of life, in the interests of national security and national stability, we should not institute an excess profits tax; rather, we should immediately nationalize the oil companies.

// posted by nash @ 2:26 PM 0 comments

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// posted by nash @ 10:14 PM 0 comments

Think Progress noted yesterday that the Project for the New American Century, that lusty bunch of imperialists who did so much to neocon America into the Iraq debacle, has apparently vanished from the world wide web. Sure enough, as of, oh, two seconds ago, you still get a "This Account Has Been Suspended" notice when you visit their website. Slink away, boys. Slink away.

// posted by nash @ 10:08 PM 0 comments

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// posted by nash @ 5:04 PM 0 comments

First: There's a new Get Your War On up.

Second:

On Thursday night, the US Senate initiated the process of overturning an FCC ruling made in December to allow for greater media consolidation.

The joint resolution (S.J Res. 28) passed by an overwhelming margin in a voice vote on the Senate floor.

The resolution, originally sponsored by Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-North Dakota), was cosponsored by Sens. Hillary Clinton (D-New York), Barack Obama (D-Illinois), Olympia Snowe (R-Maine), and a long list of others.

"Today, the Senate stood up to Washington special interests by voting to reverse the FCC's disappointing media consolidation rules that I have fought against," said presidential candidate Barack Obama. "It is essential that the FCC promotes the public interest and diversity in ownership."

[...]

The FCC's decisions in December, and its policies since early in the Bush administration, have drawn a flood of criticism from individuals angered by what they see as an irresponsible and partisan stance of broad deregulation.

Chairman Kevin Martin has been accused of divisive leadership, lacking in accountability and transparency.

Martin has become the subject of a Congressional investigation headed by Congressmen John Dingell (D-Michigan) and Bart Stupak (D-Michigan).

Staff members of the FCC voiced their discontent with Martin's tenure in a memo to Dingell and Stupak. "The bottom line is that the FCC process appears broken and most of the blame appears to rest with Chairman Martin," the memo said.

// posted by nash @ 2:46 PM 0 comments

I've been missing the group fun, including the record turnout a while back. Partial amends are below.

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// posted by nash @ 11:32 AM 1 comments

Unfortunately, you can't see Mika Brzezinski's face at the right moment in the attached video, but I'd swear that when, upon being informed that MSNBC was about to spend valuable time talking to Tonya Harding "about her place in history and now her infamy within American politics" (apropos of Hillary Clinton supposely contemplating "the Tonya Harding option" in response to Barack Obama), Brzezinski says, "I can't believe that. It's great," you can hear a small part of her die. It's kind of a very, very subtle rip/groan/thud. Listen carefully.

// posted by nash @ 8:00 AM 0 comments

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// posted by nash @ 8:46 PM 0 comments

So Chris Matthews thinks that billiards is an elitist sport now—apparently, because Barack Obama was photographed shooting pool. Or something. Not polo, mind you, or croquet, or even lacrosse—billiards.

Something tells me that if Obama were photographed at a cockfight, the next day Chris Matthews would be telling Howard Fineman about how fighting roosters are really big in the The Hamptons, dontcha know.

// posted by nash @ 8:31 PM 0 comments

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// posted by nash @ 4:38 PM 0 comments

Bad fires down here since Sunday: fires to the south, fires to the north. The south fires have been particularly scary and destructive; at one point yesterday, a wall of flame marched suddenly toward a school, which had to be evacuated on the run:

Authorities believe that all the fires were deliberately set. Ironically, I have yet to hear anyone use the word terrorism; all the speculation seems to be about pissed-off loners horny for fire, "copycat arsonists," and whatnot. I'm not saying it was terrorists, lord knows—I'm just a little surprised that we could be two days into a multiple-fire arson spree and not be having authority figures muttering darkly about "homeland security" implications. Perhaps my country is saner than I thought.

At any rate, send out your best wishes for the folks who've been injured, lost homes, etc. And your best hopes that police catch whoever did this.

// posted by nash @ 4:05 PM 2 comments

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// posted by nash @ 7:33 PM 1 comments

This is one of the funniest film reviews I've read in a while. I've seen some commercials for the Wachowski Brothers' Speed Racer, and I must say that it looks like the sort of thing that would send me fleeing from the theater to seek refuge someplace calmer and quieter, like an Indian casino.

// posted by nash @ 7:24 PM 0 comments

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// posted by nash @ 2:01 PM 0 comments

On the Wright controversy, on yesterday's Democracy Now!:

I know that—look, Jeremiah Wright was in this church for thirty-six years. I had never met him. I belong to the United Church of Christ denomination, but I had never heard of Jeremiah Wright. He was a local pastor. That was his calling. That was his commitment. That was his passion. If Obama had not been in his congregation, we’d never have heard of Jeremiah Wright.

But over the—someone figured out, at Christian Century magazine, figured out that over thirty-six years on the 11:00 Sunday morning services, he had preached 207,711 minutes. And the sound bites that were being looped throughout the mainstream media and the rightwing media were sixteen to twenty seconds. How would you like for your long career in journalism as a broadcaster to be summed up at the end in sixteen to twenty seconds? I understand that anger, that frustration, that he—that was driving him to finally want to speak.

// posted by nash @ 1:47 PM 0 comments

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// posted by nash @ 3:18 PM 1 comments

I'm busy as heck, but I finally had a chance to listen to Kevin Phillips on yesterday's Democracy Now! Now I know what chum feels like.

AMY GOODMAN: What do you think is one of the most serious signs of this overall global crisis of American capitalism?

KEVIN PHILLIPS: Well, not to single out just one, I have an approach I use to say that normally when a country is—United States is—heading into a recession, there are one or two, sometimes three, factors that you worry about. But at this point in time, the American economy, you can think of it as being kind of in a shark tank, and there are like six or seven sharks, and you don’t usually see anything like that number.

And just to skim the list quickly, we have a financialized economy in which we don’t make much anymore, and finance is up to 20 to 21 percent of the US GDP, and manufacturing down to 12. Finance dominates the US economy.

The second problem is that we have massive debt, both public and private. It’s gone up about 700 percent since the early 1980s, staggering numbers where there—we basically have $50 trillion worth of credit market debt, which is tradable debt. And people just have no idea of this. It’s not government debts that’s the problem, it’s private sector debt, both financial and corporate and then in the consumer sector with credit cards and then mortgage debt. We just have this extraordinary level of it. 340 percent of the gross domestic product, that’s how big debt is. And the last time something was close to this—and it was less—was in the late 1920s and early 1930s. So it’s enormously a vulnerable, dangerous thing.

Third shark in the tank is the collapse of home prices. They continue to follow the scary trajectory that has people predicting that there’s going to be a 15 to 20 percent decline in home prices, which would be the sharpest since the Great Depression.

Then you can go to shark number four, that’s global commodity inflation. Oil and food, people are as worried now about the price of milk as they are about the price of a gallon of gasoline. That’s a global problem, but it makes a mockery of the administration’s pretense that there’s no inflation.

The fifth shark is, frankly, lousy economic statistics. I don’t think the average American should believe either the inflation numbers, the GDP numbers or the unemployment numbers. And there’s a lot of complexity and technical terminology involved here, but the long and the short is that over thirty to forty years, we’ve seen a kind of Pollyanna Creep, and administrations of both parties have done this. They want the figures to be friendlier, not to get them in trouble. And we’re at a point now where the figures lie enough that foreign investors are starting not to believe them and, I think, with considerable justice.

Now, the next shark in the tank is obviously the price of oil. And it’s not just global commodity inflation, it’s the problem that we see of oil production peaking in the world sometime in the next ten to twenty years. And the advance signs of this are scarcity in peaking in certain countries. And the prediction just came out of Goldman Sachs a couple of days ago that within a fairly short period of time, probably this year, you’re going to see $150 or $200 oil.

And that’s because, partly at least, of the scarcity, but the US dollar has been tied historically since the 1970s to oil, because of a deal worked out when OPEC wanted a price increase. Henry Kissinger and others were involved in getting OPEC to commit that they would sell and buy oil only in dollars and that they would invest their petrodollars in the US, in Treasury debt. So we have a currency that’s profited from the connection to oil, which sustained it in many ways. But now oil has boomeranged on the United States.

We have to spend $400 billion a year to import the oil we need. We don’t have the basis for controlling oil anymore, after the idiocy in Iraq, which was partly put in motion to solve the oil problem, and instead you’ve got oil prices going up 500 percent in five years. So the dollar is on the ropes, and that’s the other shark in the tank.

There has never been a period in anybody’s memory, except very old people who remember the late ’20s and ’30s, where you had so many things converging. And that’s what makes it frightening. And every time the administration says it looks like it’s under control or it’s half-over, you start to get evidence that, no, it’s not under control, and maybe it’s not even a third over.

// posted by nash @ 2:26 PM 2 comments

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// posted by nash @ 12:45 PM 2 comments

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// posted by nash @ 7:09 PM 0 comments

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// posted by nash @ 7:32 PM 0 comments

Nice segment last night on Bill Moyers Journal with Christopher Cerf and Victor Navasky, aka the Institute of Expertology. Is it satire, or is it sanity? Sixth months of one, a Friedman of another, I guess.

// posted by nash @ 7:27 PM 1 comments

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// posted by nash @ 5:01 PM 2 comments

Minneapolis hasn't seemed this interesting since Mystery Science Theater 3000 was emerging therefrom.

// posted by nash @ 4:59 PM 0 comments

It's being a rough week, but Happy May Day! anyway.

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// posted by nash @ 12:40 PM 0 comments

I remembered to join the group fun this week. Check 'em out.

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// posted by nash @ 12:28 PM 0 comments