Who Needs History
AUSTIN – Republicans on the State Board of Education soundly rejected a Democratic-backed proposal Thursday that would have required Texas students to be taught the reasons behind the prohibition of a state religion in the Bill of Rights.
See the whole sad tale here.
Reconciling Reconciliation
Bill Frist, a former Senate majority leader, called reconciliation an “arcane” procedure that Congress has “never used … to adopt major, substantive policy change.” Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee asserted that this parliamentary tactic was unprecedented for a bill like health reform. Senator John McCain of Arizona said that the use of reconciliation would have “cataclysmic effects.”
So, would reconciliation represent an anomalous and dangerous power grab? The accompanying chart, which lists 15 major reconciliation bills passed by Congress since the process was first used in 1980, provides evidence for assessing that charge.
Reconciliation was intended to be a narrow procedure to bring revenues and spending into conformity with the levels set in the annual budget resolution. But it quickly became much more. The 22 reconciliation bills so far passed by Congress (three of which were vetoed by President Bill Clinton) have included all manner of budgetary and policy measures: deficit reductions and increases; social policy bills like welfare reform; major changes in Medicare and Medicaid; large tax cuts; and small adjustments in existing law.
(via)
Thrashing around somewhere in a swamp of its own legislation
Mark Thomas takes on the Digital Economy Bill.
via @glinner
the first legal male prostitute
I think for a male, if you want to be successful in this type of venture, you’re not a prostitute. You’re a surrogate lover. You encompass everything that’s required of you—not only emotionally, physically—but psychologically. Because women are wired differently. They’re much more sensitive creatures. You actually have to enjoy what you do. You can’t necessarily say, “Oh, it’s just a job.” You actually have to say it’s a passion. I think it’s the same situation as with anything that happens when you break apart a social institution. There has to be some kind of change in terminology to describe persons like myself. And it’s more of a civil rights thing now. Basically this is the first time in the economy of the United States that a male has actually stood up and said, “I want to do this for a living.” And be protected under law to do it. It’s just the same as when Rosa Parks decided to sit at the front instead of the back. She was proclaiming her rights as a disadvantaged, African-American older woman. And I’m doing the same. I’m actually standing up now, and hopefully I can be supported by the male community and be understood as a person. This actually isn’t about selling my body. This is about changing social norms.
Congratulations.
(via marginal revolution)
Good Thing it Wasn’t Bobby Goldsboro
A man has been ticketed for rocking out to John Denver.
Freddy’s is fighting and they’re doing it on Fox News, baby
A couple of friends of mine were on Fox News yesterday morning, to talk about their fight to save Freddy’s, a hugely loved local bar in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn – as well as many homes and businesses - from being snatched in a landmark eminent domain ruling.
Basically, the New York supreme court has decided that billionaire developer Bruce Ratner can seize property in the 22 acres of the “Atlantic Yards” footprint in order to build an arena and some tower housing that is deeply unwanted by the people of the neighbourhood. It is now enshrined in law that it is fair game for the state to seize property from small businesses, homeowners and renters, if the billionaire or corporation who wants to seize their properties can pay higher real estate taxes to the state. This is an outrageous abuse of the idea of eminent domain which was originally designed to be used ‘for the public good’.
The community has fought against this for 6 years now, and the last appeal against this use of eminent domain was decided last month in favour of the billionaire. Two days before Christmas, Forest City Ratner initiated proceedings to seize the homes and businesses in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn.
The message is: if you are a homeowner in the United States of America, anyone who wants to seize your property is now enabled by law to do that, so long as he is richer than you. That is now enshrined in law, in a decision handed down by the highest court of the land.
Freddy’s is more than a bar. It’s a community, a true neighbourhood sanctuary, and a fantastic music venue. It is expected that the site that Freddy’s sits on will fit a few SUVs in the parking lot that is planned for it. Handcuffs have been installed in the bar, and there are more than enough people willing to chain themselves to the bar and go to jail to defy the bailiffs if and when they arrive at Freddy’s door.
The fifth amendment to the United States Bill of Rights
prohibits the federal government from depriving any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.
Well, they got their due process of law, but it is bad bad law indeed. More legal challenges are on the way.
UPDATE: I have now amended this post to reflect the fact that this decision was originally handed down by the United States supreme court, which means that it can happen legally anywhere in the US. It has been challenged in the state of New York in this case, but the ruling apparently (and I am not a lawyer or an American citizen) stands countrywide.
UPDATE again: George Will wrote this op-ed column in the Washington Post about the ruling and “the twisted meaning of ‘blight’”. Read it.
Courthouse Envy
Letter from my late Uncle Ray (grand-uncle, if absolute accuracy is required) to the editor of the McKenzie Banner. As background, Huntingdon (pop. 4125) is the county seat of Carroll County, TN, and McKenzie (pop. 5357) is its neighbor ten miles to the north. The two towns harbor a fierce football rivalry, with the blue and gold Huntingdon Mustangs typically prevailing over the red and gray McKenzie Rebels. The letter is dated February 17, 2004.
Dear Reader,
I could not help but think of you tonight as my blood boiled to a blue and gold phrensy as I read the McKenzie Banner. As of this moment, the latest edition is not online but for your future reference: www.mckenziebanner.com will reach the article in question dated Feb. 18th and bearing the headline of McKenzie Library Supporters …
Lest you thought it was a forgotten issue, one of their leading citizens,in a rare unguarded moment of revelation, let the old bloody burr of their discontent show itself to the public. Until you can reach it online, I will provide the quote in an article generally bemoaning the “inadequate funding” of the library in McKenzie in juxtapositon to the Carroll County Library which to their eternal discontent is situated in the county seat.
“We furnish as many people (as the county library does). I don’t care about having the courthouse over here[McKenzie] but we ought to have our share of the tax money back for our town. And we do not want to be a branch of their library,” added Mrs. Sybil King.
This is rich stuff. I will eschew the temptation to postulate what would happen if every crossroads in Carroll County opened a library and demanded their fair share of tax money. Is there not a sense of alienation in her terminology of “their library”, the Carroll County Library? Perhaps a sense of privilege, elitism? You be the judge of that. That is not what caught my attention.
Yes, its all about the courthouse. They cannot get over it. Its as if all their inadequacies would be redeemed if only their square housed the county seat of government. It is constantly on their minds. Even if suppressed temporarily it is always there subliminally. If not, why else would it be blurted out in a Freudian fit of frustration? It is all about the age old dysfunction, courthouse envy. A curse that they have suffered from since Nathan Nesbitt staggered into what would become Huntingdon from his confines at latter day Maytown and sawed out the door of county government. McKenzie’s envy surpasses any of the ancient disputes over Holy Jerusalem.
It saddens me. Their isolation, their deep seated feelings of inferiority, their lust for domination and their undying hatred for the paradigm to their south. No doubt all of these feelings were exacerbated by the seeming success of their revived football program until it too was exposed as a fraud by the state champions. Salt in the wounds.
Where will it all end? If you have a modem, you probably have an opinion.
Over and out,
Ray
The letter was not published.
an actual Chamber spokesman showed up and yelled: “This is fraudulent!”
This makes me really happy.
“The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is a parody of itself in running circles around its own position on climate,” said Sievers. “So Yes Men took the opportunity to parody them.”
pregnant-belly art
Seriously, I didn’t know which to pick.
“Painting the belly to look like a ball works really well,” says Greenawalt.
“faster than we thought”
“In about 10 years, the Arctic ice will be considered as open sea.”
We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture.
Sending this message was important to us.
(via @johndiesattheen)
Historical Memory
This observation made by Charles Taylor in a recent interview, to my mind, speaks to the heart of thinking itself:
Bloor: In you work you’ve often been trying to correct a kind of failure of self-understanding of our culture. For example, you called Sources of The Self ‘an essay in retrieval’. In some sense we’re missing what it is to have arrived at this point in our history, so your work is an attempt to explain Western culture in the early 21st century to itself.
Taylor: I think that’s right. I try to do that by delving back into history. If you’ve lived through a transformation you understand something of how you got to where you now are. But further generations may lose sight of history, and they take the mental landscape they’re in as being totally natural. They therefore miss something about the nature of that landscape, about the nature of their reference points of identity. They take them not as adopted possible reference points, but as the obvious ones you can’t avoid. So they’re living their identity, but in a way which hides very important dimensions and features of it. So it is a matter of retrieval – retrieving the trajectory that brought you to where you are. I think that should be a very important part of philosophical work.
I have always suspected that if the United States had a better historical memory, then a great deal of public policy and its attending discussion–and this is a bipartisan truth–would be less asinine. (via Redeeming My Time)
Something unusual is happening in Kansas
I think the Guardian’s best work is done when they find people at the heart of raging issues, and let them tell their own stories. This article is about a highly unusual doctor in Kansas who has set up a clinic for people who are uninsured, people who can’t afford any healthcare. Dr. Sharon Lee treats them, free of charge. Dr. Lee’s clinic exists on the basis of donations and the fact that all staff – remarkably, including Dr. Lee herself – are paid a flat rate of $12 per hour. Just let that fact sink in for a while.
Featured in the article is the story of a porsche-driving gynaecologist who lost his practise when he developed symptoms of Huntingdon’s disease – it took a while for him to even get diagnosed – that made it impossible for him to work, and with it went his health insurance, and with the cost of his medication, very quickly went the snazzy house, the cars, and the rest of it. He now lives in a small flat in the suburbs and regularly has to choose between food and medication. The fickleness of American life never ceases to amaze me.
And while you’re at it, check out this five minute audio sample from Dr. Lee’s clinic. What a fucking hero.
Four things that should happen, but won’t.
Andy Kessler reimagines our national communications policy:
• End phone exclusivity. Any device should work on any network. Data flows freely.
• Transition away from “owning” airwaves. As we’ve seen with license-free bandwidth via Wi-Fi networking, we can share the airwaves without interfering with each other. Let new carriers emerge based on quality of service rather than spectrum owned. Cellphone coverage from huge cell towers will naturally migrate seamlessly into offices and even homes via Wi-Fi networking. No more dropped calls in the bathroom.
• End municipal exclusivity deals for cable companies. TV channels are like voice pipes, part of an era that is about to pass. A little competition for cable will help the transition to paying for shows instead of overpaying for little-watched networks. Competition brings de facto network neutrality and open access (if you don’t like one service blocking apps, use another), thus one less set of artificial rules to be gamed.
• Encourage faster and faster data connections to our homes and phones. It should more than double every two years. To homes, five megabits today should be 10 megabits in 2011, 25 megabits in 2013 and 100 megabits in 2017. These data-connection speeds are technically doable today, with obsolete voice and video policy holding it back.
the crazy tree blooms in every moment of liberal ascendancy
It was interesting to hear a BBC reporter on the radio trying to make sense of it all.
With a little historical perspective.
In the early 1950s, Republicans referred to the presidencies of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman as “20 years of treason” and accused the men who led the fight against fascism of deliberately surrendering the free world to communism. Mainline Protestants published a new translation of the Bible in the 1950s that properly rendered the Greek as connoting a more ambiguous theological status for the Virgin Mary; right-wingers attributed that to, yes, the hand of Soviet agents. And Vice President Richard Nixon claimed that the new Republicans arriving in the White House “found in the files a blueprint for socializing America.”
Better yet.
When Adlai Stevenson spoke at a 1963 United Nations Day observance in Dallas, the Indignation forces thronged the hall, sweating and furious, shrieking down the speaker for the television cameras. Then, when Stevenson was walked to his limousine, a grimacing and wild-eyed lady thwacked him with a picket sign. Stevenson was baffled. “What’s the matter, madam?” he asked. “What can I do for you?” The woman responded with self-righteous fury: “Well, if you don’t know I can’t help you.”
At least we’re not Socialists
Deron: write about it.
I am being asked for 32k from the first surgeon who operated on my hand after the table saw accident. (Amy and I drove to the nearest emergency room and were presented with a surgeon not in my network.) My relationship with him is complicated by the fact that he ignored my pain for two days and used external sutures on my ringer finger (internally) that are still there. I was also told repeatedly by my insurance company that this would be taken care of, that he was paid what he was contractually obligated to receive, and that he had no business presenting me with a bill. Until they stopped saying that. Additionally, I was caused to believe that the amount he was charging was ridiculously overpriced, and incommensurate with the procedures he performed. Mix all that up. Add a pinch of uncertainty — coupled with rage — and that begins to approximate it.
There is more, of course. But that is all I can currently stomach.
Ireland’s new blasphemy law makes me want to sodomise Jesus.
Ireland got a new blasphemy law today. Before our new blasphemy bill was signed into law, I hadn’t ever actually even for a moment considered sodomising Jesus. So who knows, perhaps the Russians were right. A little oppression makes people think creatively. Great ideas may come out of this. Or we might all just lie awake in our beds at night, contemplating sodomising Jesus.
Ireland is in a tricky position: our constitution enshrines respect for religion, and so we have to either respect this idea, or update it by damning it all to Jesussodomy hell via a referendum (expensive things). The current government has decided that now that our economy is dribbling away down the toilet of jesuspoo, this – THIS – is the time for us to copperfasten the concept of blasphemy into law. Our Taoiseach says that we just can’t afford to change the constitution in this economic climate. Indeed. But we’re having a referendum to vote FOR THE SECOND TIME on the Lisbon Treaty in October, after having embarrassingly voted ‘no’ the last time. Of course, as Padraig Reidy points out,
Wouldn’t it have been sensible to hold both the Lisbon referendum and a referendum on the abolition of the concept of blasphemy from the constitution on the same day, cutting down on costs? Wouldn’t it, minister?
Of course he doesn’t want to do that, because he doesn’t want any other debate happening at the time that the Lisbon brainwashing show goes on the road. If ever there was an opportunity for a protest vote to the blasphemy law, October is it. And you know, that’s how Ireland works. That would be a pity, because something as important as Lisbon really needs to be handled with integrity but what the hell, we voted on that one already.
Meanwhile, I am hoping this tweet becomes viral. Feel fwee to weetweet.
quote out of context
Right when I sat down and shook his hand he asked me if I’d helped any poor people that day, and I said, “Of course!” Then he took out his Purell, squirted it into his hands and told me that it was nothing personal, but “poor” seemed to be going around these days and he had a family to think about.
A Rat’s Nest of Hippies
Anonymous, courtesy of the Seattle Municipal Archives.
“glimpse into id of a small town”
glimpse into id of a small town, found when seeking newspaper coverage of that tractor business: http://tinyurl.com/nwt29b. Read&weep,BKLYN
—2 hours ago by @hyla_crucifer
Selections from “Readers’ Column week of June 14, 2009,” Owego Pennysaver, after the jump.
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Why we don’t have trains
Beginning in the 1920s, General Motors began investing in mass transit systems. According to historian Marty Jezer (and Congressional hearings held in 1974), between 1920 and 1955, General Motors bought up more than 100 electric mass transit systems in 45 cities, allowed them to deteriorate, and then replaced them with rubber-tired, diesel-powered buses. Buses are more expensive, less efficient, and much dirtier than electric/rail systems. (And of course automobiles are even less efficient than buses, by far.) In 1949, General Motors, Firestone Rubber, and Standard Oil of California were convicted by a federal jury of criminally conspiring to replace electric mass transit with GM-manufactured diesel buses; in a noteworthy illustration of justice for corporations, the court fined GM $5000 and forced H.C. Crossman, the GM executive responsible for carrying out GM’s policy, to pay $1.00.
—”Tire Dust,” Rachel #439 (Annapolis: Environmental Research Foundation), April 27, 1995
This is just the warmup. The article is actually about widespread allergies to rubber in the form of tire dust.
“work forms us, and deforms us”
When we praise people who do work that is straightforwardly useful, the praise often betrays an assumption that they had no other options. We idealize them as the salt of the earth and emphasize the sacrifice for others their work may entail. Such sacrifice does indeed occur — the hazards faced by a lineman restoring power during a storm come to mind. But what if such work answers as well to a basic human need of the one who does it? I take this to be the suggestion of Marge Piercy’s poem “To Be of Use,” which concludes with the lines “the pitcher longs for water to carry/and a person for work that is real.” Beneath our gratitude for the lineman may rest envy.
—Matthew B. Crawford, “The Case for Working With Your Hands,” New York Times, May 21, 2009
(via Dervala)
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summer in california
Some of the places I might not be able to go this summer:
Beginning July 1, the governor plans to cut core funding for 279 parks in half (by $70 million), and during the next fiscal year he intends to cut all funding. If the cuts are approved by the Legislature, more than 200 parks could be forced to close.
American Terrorism
Hilzoy’s post on the implications of Dr. Tiller’s assassination and what should be done in its aftermath sums up just about everything I think needs to be said.
Update: A little recent political context.
Remember how Republicans in Congress were all in a dither about the DHS report on right-wing extremist organizations as potential terrorist threats? The Tiller gunman was affiliated with at least two of those organizations. In addition to his connection with Operation Rescue, he was a tax protester, a “sovereign citizen,” and a member of the Freemen. Maybe someone should ask Rep. Peter King of New York (ranking Republican on the House Homeland Security Committee) and John Hinderaker of PowerLine whether they still consider the threat of right-wing terrorism to be mere Obama Administration fantasy. (That’s beside the fact that the report was ordered up during the Bush Administration.)
Update: More from Hilzoy.
I do not think that it would be OK for people who oppose the death penalty to kill the people who carry it out. I opposed the war in Iraq, but I did not conclude that it would be OK for me to kill soldiers who were shipping out, policy makers with blood on their hands, and so forth. In that case, many more innocent lives were at stake than could possibly have been at stake in Tiller’s.
young conservatives rap (n(i)s)*
Enjoy feeling uncomfortable?
“Three things taught me Conservative Love / Jesus, Ronald Reagan, plus Atlas Shrugged.”
*not (intentional) satire.