Uncharitable

The Komen Foundation is backing down from their stance on Planned Parenthood for one reason and one reason only - it's costing them money. They will try to figure out some way to reimpose the ban, probably by lumping PP with a group of other donation recipients and declaring that this type (what ever the criteria) will no longer get donations. Or they might declare that they will only donate to accredited research institutions.

Rotten to the Core

Dear Apple defenders,

I don't give a damn about Apple as a corporation. I am only interested in Apple as a cultural phenomenon. However, if you wish to encounter real criticism of Apple's corporate practices, not some fluff by the NYT, please read William Black's two analysis pieces about Apple as a criminal fraud operation:

• Anti-employee Control Fraud - In this article, Black discusses the nature of this kind of white-collar crime, how it functions, why it drives ethical corporations out of business, and how international supply chains encourage this behavior.
• The New York Times’ Ode to Foxconn and Anti-Employee Control Fraud - In the second article, Black goes through the New York Time's article and it's failure to really interrogate the discrepancies in the accounts given by and about Foxconn. 

Reality Check on Grocery Costs

In early January I put up a post Grocery Costs at Casa Anglachel, talking about my shopping habits and spending in 2011. A few days ago, an article was posted in the local paper, the Union-Tribune, about restaurant menu prices going up. The article included a table on wholesale food cost increases, courtesy of the Bureau of Labor.

Rotten Apples

There is nothing so annoying as an Apple fanboi/grrl. Especially when they are probably just some shill hired by Apple to search The Interwebz and post pro-Apple comments to blogs that have said something less than complimentary about their gizmos.

What Riverdaughter Says

The left blogosphere might want to think about that for awhile. If it thinks that nothing it does makes a difference to the powers that be, maybe it should try dissenting and allow the pain of independence work its magic. DON’T say you’re going to vote for the bastards even if they treat you like shit. And then mean it. They’re counting on you to go along with the crowd in order to alleviate that pain and fear. Peer pressure only works if you let it. And those of us who have resisted from the beginning can’t reason with you to make you see our point of view. Resisting peer pressure is something you need to come to grips with on an emotional level your own. It *is* painful but worth it when your thoughts are your own. It’s sometimes physically disorienting and nauseating, I won’t lie to you. People aren’t going to like you. They’re going to call you stupid or mentally ill. They’ll say they were wrong about you and you’re not as sexy and smart as they thought you were. They’ll tell you that you will bring Armageddon down on everyone’s head if you let the Republicans win. They know how the brain game works because they’ve read the studies and it’s always worked this way. If you give in to them, they win and they can do whatever they like because they know you will go along in order to feel good about yourself.

They need you more than you need them.  They still need the momentum of the crowd, the frenzy of the mob, the mounting pressure as the election gets nearer.  They need your vote.  If you refuse it, you monkeywrench their entire peer pressure apparatus and then they have to start paying attention to you and addressing your demands.  They’d rather not have to do that.  They have other people to win over.  It’s easier for them to know that they have checked you off their list so they can move on to tougher nuts.  Don’t make it easy for them.

Sunday: Ok, I think we’re on to something here

Amen.

Anglachel

Occupation

oc·cu·pa·tion

[ok-yuh-pey-shuhn] noun

1. a person's usual or principal work or business, especially as a means of earning a living; vocation: Her occupation was dentistry.
2. any activity in which a person is engaged.
3. possession, settlement, or use of land or property.
4. the act of occupying.
5. the state of being occupied. 

Cannon Fodder

Just before I mixed up the barley and favas for dinner this morning, I read this article in the LA Times.  It struck me as yet another misguided volley in the food morality wars.

Food Experiment

Something I've been doing over the last few months is keeping a database of food purchases. I'm doing this for a few reasons.

Slowly Returning

Life slowly returns to normal.

I've been watching a lot of stuff from Netflix - on demand and DVDs - as I've been wading through my  emotional detritus these last two months. I cam across a very interesting British detective series I recommend to anyone. It's called Life on Mars and has two very short (by US standards) seasons of eight episodes each. The basic premise is a contemporary police detective, Sam Tyler, is involved in a car accident. He wakes up in 1973, still a police detective in the same city. Much psychopathy ensues. The first season deals with a specific problem from Sam's past (which is the series' present) while the second season tries to provide a satisfactory explanation of what the hell is happening. It is a brilliant bit of story telling.

Judgment

I'm in absolute, complete, unequivocal agreement with Riverdaughter in her post "failure to discriminate", especially this:

I’ve never seen so much denial in my life. The right was happy as all get out to stomp all over us before this shooting. If it really had nothing to do with it, and I’m not saying it did, why not just admit that it was fun while it lasted? Sarah and Glenn aren’t apologizing. Take credit for the poison. You deserve it!

But if you’re tired of it, like I am, turn off the TV and the radio. Step away from the fight. If you are an FDR type Democrat in Exile like me, this doesn’t have anything to do with you anyway. It’s just two anachronistic, legacy parties going at each other. It has very little to do with how people are living today. It won’t get more people employed, fix our crumbling infrastructure, punish the bankers or end a war. It is a major distraction.

Enough.

It's called judgment. It exists in its exercise. It is what my class has consistently, persistently failed to do since it decided the last Democratic president was too white, too hick, too Southern, and too transactional for them to deign to support. It's what my political opponents, the Movement Conservatives, refuse to do in their single minded pursuit of power, demonizing anyone who fails to fall in behind their hateful, anti-democratic message.

I've been avoiding the news for the most part this last week because of the opportunistic appropriation of the shooting by the usual political suspects. It's why I've avoided most American political news for the last two years. I think I stopped paying attention to most of the Media Kabuki when the loudest voices of Left and Right decided that whatever was wrong with the country, no matter the specific wrong being mentioned, it was the fault of "liberals". Those damn extremists. Those damn partisans. Those damn centrists. Those damn moderates. Those damn transactional, practical folks who give a little here and take a little there, aren't much in the mood for conspiracies, don't agree with any exterminationist sentiments (left or right), don't like culture wars standing in for political contest, and are getting really, really tired of single-issue, faux-victim politics.

Anglachel

Hillary is Not Going to Save Us

I've had private conversations on this point before on whether Hillary would run again for President. I have always said she would not. After the disastrous midterm elections, people who had dismissed her in 2008 began asking if she would, perhaps finally understanding the penalties of having been so wrong before. Today, myiq2xu has a post on The Confluence citing two news articles where HRC says pretty firmly that she's done with public service after the Secretary of State gig. Nope, Hillary is not going to save us, even if we ask nicely.

Season's Greetings

Krugman smacks the Obama apologists:

After the Democratic “shellacking” in the midterm elections, everyone wondered how President Obama would respond. Would he show what he was made of? Would he stand firm for the values he believes in, even in the face of political adversity?

On Monday, we got the answer: he announced a pay freeze for federal workers. This was an announcement that had it all. It was transparently cynical; it was trivial in scale, but misguided in direction; and by making the announcement, Mr. Obama effectively conceded the policy argument to the very people who are seeking — successfully, it seems — to destroy him.

So I guess we are, in fact, seeing what Mr. Obama is made of. 

Yup, this is what you voted for, Whole Foods Nation. This is the person you were warned about. You voted for a Reagan-adulating, Democrat-hating cipher who has taken the total mess bequeathed to the nation by Bush/Cheney and has made it worse. He is not even pretending to try to defend any interests, not even his own.

Instead, he apparently intended the pay freeze announcement as a peace gesture to Republicans the day before a bipartisan summit. At that meeting, Mr. Obama, who has faced two years of complete scorched-earth opposition, declared that he had failed to reach out sufficiently to his implacable enemies. He did not, as far as anyone knows, wear a sign on his back saying “Kick me,” although he might as well have. 

Obama is not a Reaganite, no matter how much he enjoys fellating the corpse of the Gipper. If he really were a Reaganite, he'd know how to preserve and expand power.

I've written before that Obama lacks any sense of or taste for politics, and think I have his political philosophy identified, namely a very patrician Hoover-ish progressivism, but something Krugman wrote today made me have a very bad thought:

One would have expected a candidate who rode the enthusiasm of activists to an upset victory in the Democratic primary to realize that this enthusiasm was an important asset. Instead, however, Mr. Obama almost seems as if he’s trying, systematically, to disappoint his once-fervent supporters, to convince the people who put him where he is that they made an embarrassing mistake.

I read this a little differently. What it looks like to me is Obama methodically reversing the desires of the people who voted for him, inverting every virtue and intention they projected on to him. If someone was trying to deconstruct the Democratic Party from the inside - betray its hopes, derail its changes, destroy its legacy - you couldn't ask for a better example.

Almost like an act of revenge.

I said in Primary Objective that Obama was not mortally unpopular with the base, but I'm having to rethink that claim much more quickly than I imagined given the way he has increased his pissing on the Democrats since the mid-term losses. If he has no loyalty to any part of the party and is eager to walk around with a big "Kick me" sign taped front and back, then it makes no sense for the party to follow him off the cliff. Krugman closes by saying, "It would be much easier, of course, for Democrats to draw a line if Mr. Obama would do his part. But all indications are that the party will have to look elsewhere for the leadership it needs."

I think the primary season has opened a few months early.

Anglachel

And how

Courtesy of A Softer World.

Anglachel

Oh No - He's Your Son of a Bitch

Obama is not a Clinton Democrat. I'm a Clinton Democrat. I voted for Hillary. I picked the candidate who had the best mix of policies for the middle class and who had the best track record of delivering on legislative measures. I picked someone with a decades long record on human rights and promoting heath care reform. Me and the majority of registered Democrats threw our support to Hillary Clinton.

Obama did not come to power because of me. I did not give Obama my primary vote. I constantly pointed out his conservative tendencies in my blog. I did not give him any funds. I did not cast a vote for him in the general - I wrote in Hillary's name. I knew what he was and what he would do since November 2007. I did not fall for his bullshit.

YOU DID.

You, David Sirota. You Josh Marshall. You, Jane Hamsher. You, Arianna Huffington, and Markos, and Armando/BTD, and Big Media Matt, and Ezra Klein, and Kevin Drum, and Steve Benen, and Digby, and Jeralyn, and Chris Bowers, and all the rest of you self-proclaimed liberal/progressive/radical types who decided that you should be the arbiters of progressivism.You proclaimed "Out with Bubbas, up with Creatives" and swore your allegiance to Whole Foods Nation. Your idol was The Precious.

You shilled for someone whose political hero is Ronald Reagan. You gave him your votes, your money, your volunteer time, and your seal of approval. You devoted your time and energy to promoting him and brushing away the very valid questions about what he would actually do if he gained the office. You called those of us who dared to ask these questions bitter, low-information, racists, and said we were voting with our cunts. You said that we didn't support Obama because we supported McCain/Palin. You did everything in your power to bully, threaten, shame and intimidate us into going along with your delusional fantasy.

For crying out loud you fucking threw PAUL KRUGMAN under the bus when he didn't drink your poisoned kool-aid!

Obama is your creation, not mine.

He is your son of a bitch, through and through, and is made in your image. He is what he labeled himself - an Obamacan, neither Democrat nor Republican, dedicated to nothings save his own cult of personality. You chose him and made him the media darling you wanted to associate with. You did so knowing exactly what he was, and the single biggest reason you did this was to piss on Bill and Hillary Clinton. All you wanted him to do was beat "that bitch", and it never once occurred to you what your son of a bitch would do when he got into office. This is why I call him The Precious - a beautiful thing that destroys and corrupts everything and everyone it touches.

Don't you presume to call him a Clinton Democrat.

Anglachel

The Truth of the Bitter White Elite Class

In the 2008 primaries, I wrote an article The Myth of the Bitter White Working Class that, using the work of Paul Krugman and Larry Bartels, poked holes in the moronic claims by Stevensonian elites that the white working class in America, Bubbas and Bunkers, are collectively responsible for perpetuating Republican rule because they are such knuckle-dragging, low-life, racist, anti-intellectual rubes, clinging to guns and God, as Obama (in)famously put it. I pointed out, way back in April 2008, this was little more than projection:

The basic problem is that two similar reactions to frustration - anger and bitterness - are getting conflated and transposed in an attempt to explain away Obama's failure at the polls.  ... What we are seeing is the way in which Obamacan bitterness over not getting what they want (and a pony) results in them crudely projecting their biases and fears onto people who are simply voting their interests. Bitterness is a reaction to having been stymied or betrayed, and is not an automatic reaction to having to work hard. I suspect a lot of working class people, regardless of color or gender, look at the shit life throws them pretty much the way I do, which is to sigh, daydream a bit about winning the lottery, and then just getting on with the business of making do with what life has handed you. It's only if you feel entitled to something you haven't received or burdened by things you do not deserve that you become bitter. Anger can be empowering. I have never encountered bitterness that is not corrosive and destructive.

Of Hicks and Hacks

I was reminded by the Spousal Unit of a post by Brad DeLong a little over a year ago (Health Care Reform: Memories of 1994) that fits quite well with the themes I've been writing about. DeLong notes (my emphasis):

After President Clinton's 43 percent plurality victory in the presidential election of 1992, I worked as a spear carrier in the U.S. Treasury Department under Secretary Lloyd Bentsen. The plurality view in the Treasury Department throughout 1993 and up through the middle of 1994 regarding the health-care reform situation had six analytical pieces:

(1) There were not even 50 votes available in the U.S. Senate for any health-care reform bill sponsored by President Clinton. It did not matter what the bill included or how good the policy might be, because key Democratic senators placed a higher priority on teaching the hick from Arkansas that he was not their boss; they were determined to vote against it. Thus even though the Democrats had a majority in the Senate, they could not pass Clinton's bill—whatever it was—even if the Republicans did not filibuster it.

Plebian Acts

The Incomparable One, Bob Somerby, seems to be channeling my writings about the cultural Stevensonians all this week. He talks about the cultural blindness in The Fruits of Our Blinkered Elites:

“That a New Elite has emerged over the past 30 years is not really controversial,” Charles Murray wrote in Sunday’s Washington Post. “That its members differ from former elites is not controversial.” Murray went on to explain what this means; according to Murray, this “New Elite” differs from earlier elites in that its members earn their status through high performance in universities and then in graduate schools.

After that, they inter-marry—and breed. The process starts again.

Of Reds, Racists and Rubes

One of the reasons I don't blog much anymore is that I said most of what I had to say between November of 2007 and the election the following November, when the general ideas I had about the state of the liberal mind in America came to life before my very eyes. Those 480 posts were me theorizing out loud. The over-arching theme was the fault line within the Democratic Party (which I had been haphazardly posting about since the previous electoral cycle in 2006, when the Lieberman debacle started to expose the fissure) that has only widened.

Accusations of racism, obsession with reducing political opponents to racists, and a reflexive lunge for racism as the true root of opposition to the Obama administration/ health care/organic produce/ insert issue of the week here looks and sounds like nothing so much as the Red-baiting tactics of McCarthy and Nixon back in the day. Just as that obsession (revived today under the "Socialist! epithet being attached to someone whose policies are well to the right of Tricky Dick's) had roots in both the pre-New Deal strength of labor and the danger of the "Commie" Russians and Chinese (usually confounded with the fascist Nazis), so, too, does the racism obsession have it's roots in slavery and segregation. As I discussed in The Whiteness of the Whale, reversal of the Democratic Party's traditional defense of racism became the defining characteristic of the party after Johnson signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act Act (about which LBJ said "I know the risks are great and we might lose the South, but those sorts of states may be lost anyway.").

As with the Right's use of anti-Communism, the Left's use of racism as a political trope to delegitimize opponents (to be distinguished from battling actual racism, which would entail relinquishing the historical privilege those liberal elites enjoy, just as actually abiding by true capitalist/free market ideology would wipe out the "socialism for the rich" advantages of the Right's elite) is sounding more like the crazy uncle than describing any reality I can observe.

Popular is as Popular Does

I laughed out loud at lunch today when I read this article in the LA Times, Clinton outshines Obama as campaign trail surrogate, poll finds:

According to a Gallup Poll released Tuesday, more voters of all political persuasions said they were more likely to back a candidate if Democrat Clinton campaigned for him or her, than if the campaigner were President Obama, who is fighting to keep Democrats in control of Congress.

The poll found that 53% of Democrats said Clinton’s personal endorsement would carry weight compared to 48% who said Obama’s would. On the negative side, 5% of Democrats said they would be less likely to vote for a candidate if Clinton campaigned, while 6% said they would be more hostile if it were Obama. The differences between those numbers translates into what the poll said was a net of 48 for Clinton and 42 for Obama.

Clinton and Obama fare less well with Republicans and independents but the former president, free of the burden of actually being in office and having to make tough decisions, again gets the edge. Neither Democrat carries much weight with either group, but Clinton is less hurtful by a ratio of about 2 to 1 among Republicans.

Among independents, 21% said they'd be more likely to vote for a candidate who was baked by Clinton compared to 12% who said the same about Obama.

Locovores

Not a full thought here, but a reflection on a deep problem with the locavore/localvore (I've seen it spelled both ways) "movement". The gist of their argument is that by eating "locally" (ostensibly food grown within a certain distance of their home and often including other conditions such as being organic, purchased "from the grower", and bought at a "farmers" market), you are using fewer resources, avoiding the horror of industrial farming, getting better quality/more nutritious foodstuffs and generally are are more virtuous person than your neighbor who buys vegetables from the big supermarket chain.

These claims have a ring of truth, especially the feelings of moral superiority. Intuitively, we think food grown nearby should have a smaller carbon footprint than food grown three states over or in another country. Isn't it better to have food that isn't grown with chemical pesticides? Aren't organic farming methods less destructive to farmland and riverine systems?