Audiobooks

Now finishing up working a redacting job. When a journalist receives a document that has words, phrases and sometimes whole paragraphs blacked out, that's called a redacted document. So I black out the information on documents that could allow people to take money from our customers. Decent job, but it allows all sorts of time for the mind to wander, so I purchased, took out and downloaded a whole set of audiobooks. I find that the type of attention that redacting requires and that the type of attention listening to an audiobook requires are two completely different types of attention, so I'm easily able to do both at once. Reading any sort of narrative and watching a TV show that has any sort of plot, on the other hand, requires the same type of attention, so I can't do both at the same time. While at work in the Navy, some of my shipmates wanted to watch a football or soccer game while I worked. I had zero problems with that as sports matches don't have narratives in the same way that a Personnel documents do.

The first audiobook I picked up from the library after “Cleopatra” was “Attack Poodles” by James Wolcott. Written in an attempt to influence the 2004 election, it's a good run-down of right-wing pundits. The saddest one is Dennis Miller, who switched from left-winger to right-winger. As Wolcott points out early on in the book, switching sides is a no-no. It's much better for a pundit to pick a side and stick with it through thick and thin.

Just as early movies tried really hard to always find a way to get a chase scene in, superhero comics have to get a fight scene in, soap operas have to get dramatic confrontations in, etc., detective stories want to tell us about the social and physical context in which the detective operates. Accordingly, my major window into how the Navajos live today (Hopis show up in these books from time to time and white people are generally represented by the FBI) is through the Tony Hillerman books. They focus on two characters, Navajo Police Sgt. Jim Chee and retired NP Lt. Joe Leaphorn. The audiobook I listened to was “The Wailing Wind.” The books have a relaxed pace and emphasize the wide open country out there on the Great Plains of New Mexico.

Another series I've enjoyed for a long times has been the Jeeves books (The author P.G. Wodehouse put out about a hundred of these). The one I listened to was “Stiff Upper Lip.” A foppish, excitable and not-terribly-bright young aristocrat named Bertie Wooster has adventures with his pal Gussie Fink-Nottle and the wise and sensible butler Jeeves bails them out all the time. The audiobook clearly designs itself on the PBS Masterpiece Theater “Jeeves and Wooster” series, which is set in the 1920s and Jeeves has a very particular way of pronouncing some phrases.

And yes, neither series has much to do with sex. None of the heroes in these two series has a whole lot to do with women.

Went to Librivox, a service that offers voice recordings of works in the public domain. Listened to “The Japanese Fairy Book” compiled by Yei Theodora Ozaki in 1908. Two interesting contrasts between mythology then and now. The first is that legends and tall tales today are told in specific formats. Movies are generally about 90 minutes long, comic books are generally around 20 pages an issue (though a single story can stretch over multiple issues), novels are 200-300 pages long (again, novels can come in a series), etc. Stories back in the day didn't have to be a certain length. Today, we have the movies “Tangled” and “Jack the Giant Slayer,” both of which take the old tales of Rapunzel and Jack and the Beanstalk respectively and bulk them out by adding lots of elements that were not present in the originals. 

In one of the Japanese fairy tales, a man, his wife and their daughter are living happily. The wife passes away. The man remarries. The stepmother makes the daughter's life miserable and then tattles on her. The daughter pours out her heart to her father. The stepmother overhears and apologizes. And they all lived happily ever after. The story is bulked out so that it takes 15-20 minutes to read, but that's essentially the plot. A lot of the stories are similarly cut-and-dried, but fortunately, there are many more complex stories in the collection. Also, some of the stories resemble Rudyard Kipling's “Just So Stories,” where tales are used to explain how certain animals took on the features that they did and how other natural phenomenon got to be the way they are. Did you know that jellyfish used to have hard shells and legs? Neither did I, until I listened to the Japanese tale of how a jellyfish got outsmarted by a monkey and so was punished by having all of his bones and shell removed. 

The modern comic book story of Sif, the Norse goddess of beauty and frequent companion to and lover of the god of thunder Thor, is killed and the ravens explain how “There were the White Mountains fashioned from her bones and there the night sky from her hair and her blood ran down and filled the mighty seas.” The wolf who is with the ravens growls irritatedly and insists “That is not how the story goes.” 

The ravens agree and get back to how the story was supposed to go, but that is very typical of the romantic, elevated sort of language that mythology uses. 

@Marvel Comics 2013 Journey into Mystery 648

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Another difference is that the superhero world is highly integrated. Everybody knows everybody else. In this sequence, Sif talks with Spider-Man. 

@Marvel Comics 2013 Journey into Mystery 649

 

Their dialogue here makes it clear that the two are not close friends, but they recognized each other immediately when they met and they know full well what their connections are and that they're on the same side. A number of characters clearly spend a lot of off-page time with each other, but these two are just acquaintances. To have an integrated universe like this, the comics need to keep their characters reasonably consistent from writer to writer and from artist to artist. That takes coordination, which clearly the mythology of yesteryear didn't need, though there are a few Japanese stories where characters appear in more than one story.

“The Princess & the Goblin” is an 1872 story. In progress. Will update when I've finished with it.

Update: Eh, it was okay. The female lead character was, I guess, about nine to ten years old. She was just getting to the age where, as a royal child, she realizes that she outranks the maid and can give orders instead of just receiving them. The male protagonist is, I'd say from 14 to 15. Some physical capability, quickness and initiative. The parents are universally wise, sensible and beloved. Have to say, I do kind of like the epilogue, where the villains are scattered and many that remain integrate themselves into the community. Makes for a nice, positive, forward-looking ending.

Ten years ago. The Iraq War in retrospect.

From WHYY Public Media.

One of Philadelphia's Gold Star Mothers, Celeste Zappala, was interviewed by WHYY on Tuesday, the 19^th of March and the tenth anniversary of the start of the Iraq War. Zappala lost her son Sherwood Baker in 2004. He was the first National Guard member to lose his life in Iraq. During the Vietnam War, the National Guard was so safe a place to be that the future president George W. Bush signed up for a six-year tour (Notthat he even served the full six years), but in Iraq, the National Guard was a vital supplement to the regular armed forces. Presidential candidate Senator John Kerry (D-MA) charged in 2004 that by keeping National Guard troops in their billets longer than they had planned and by using them as regular forces, the Bush Administration didn't have to impose a draft or to increase the size of the regular armed forces, and thus that using the National Guard in that way amounted to a “back-door draft.” Recruitment for the military to keep enough troops fighting in Iraq was a problem. In 2007, the Army had to spend $1 billion in bonuses to recruit and retain the soldiers it had. The economic collapse at the end of 2007 made it a good deal easier to do keep the military fully staffed.

Why did the Bush Administration depend so heavily on the National Guard during the occupation of Iraq?

Much of the planning for the occupation of Iraq was improvised, last-minute and inadequate. The Bush Administration didn't appear to think that many forces or much money would be needed after Baghdad had fallen. The problem then was very ably sketched out by Colonel Harry G. Summers, who built upon the theories of Carl von Clausewitz concerning war and national determination. Colonel Summers' book was entitled “On Strategy: The Vietnam War in context” and it was written in response to the failure of the US to win over the Vietnamese people to the cause of America. The military in both Iraq and Vietnam did everything that was asked of it and it carried out its assigned task with enthusiasm and professionalism. In neither case can America assign any significant blame to the military for the inability of the US to win hearts and minds in the occupied country. The Iraqi insurgents certainly deserve a great deal of credit for making an American victory after the fall of Baghdad impossible. Had all gone according to the plans made by the Bush Administration and had Iraqis quietly accepted the American occupation, there would have been no need for Bush and his people to whip up American enthusiasm and support for the war.

As it was, the left wing was proven correct by the failure to find any WMDs and was thus completely uninterested in supporting the war and the right wing was perfectly happy to keep their activities in support of the war very sharply limited. The right-wing columnist Jonah Goldberg was asked why he didn't join up and go to Iraq in uniform (Goldberg was at the very upper age limit for joining the military). He later apologized for this response, but it's worthwhile to remember what he said:

As for why my sorry a** isn't in the kill zone, lots of people think this is a searingly pertinent question. No answer I could give -- I'm 35 years old, my family couldn't afford the lost income, I have a baby daughter, my a** is, er, sorry, are a few -- ever seem to suffice.

The point here is that Goldberg's attitude was quite typical for right-wingers. People who supported the war didn't feel the need to actually go over to Iraq and spend years in a foreign land actually getting themselves involved in learning a foreign language and dealing with a very different culture. Patriotism only demanded so much.

According to Summers, yes, any military or any country's political leadership can carry out short, brief military actions without getting broad-based buy-in from the country's civilian population, but any war that costs significant time and resources must get the civilian population emotionally involved. People must be absolutely convinced that the war is of immense significance and that it's worth great sacrifice to win it. Bush failed to get civilians from the right wing to go to Iraq as civilian reconstruction personnel, which explains why $8 billion of the money allocated to Iraqi reconstruction was lost. Without on-the-ground personnel overseeing projects and with Americans attempting to supervise projects from desks inside the “Green Zone” in Baghdad or from the US, it wasn't at all surprising that the US reconstruction effort was a complete flop.

Getting Americans motivated

The first step to getting Americans enthusiastically involved in the conquest/occupation of Iraq wassupervised by Madeleine Albright in February 1998. Albright brought several fellow war hawks to a town meeting in Ohio. It was a PR disaster as citizens vigorously questioned why Iraq was considered to be a threat and why that threat had to be neutralized via a war. Albright and her people were unable to answer these objections and the Clinton Administration didn't make any further attempts to whip up the public to supporting a war against Saddam Hussein and his country.

It's generally accepted among many former skeptics that no, President George W. Bush and VP Dick Cheney didn't arrange for 9-11 to happen, but the belief was based on solid facts. Bush and Cheney both had oil industry roots, there was good reason to believe that the US oil industry would profit enormously via an American occupation of Iraq and 9-11 occurred just a few years after Albright's failed attempt to get American citizen buy-in for a war against Iraq. Al Jazeera points out that safeguarding civilians was certainly not on the agenda of the invading Americans:

The Iraq invasion cannot be reasonably described as a case of "humanitarian intervention" for three reasons. The means used in the war - a "shock and awe" bombing campaign, including the use of cluster munitions in populated areas - were clearly not designed with the objective of safeguarding Iraqi civilians. Secondly, there was no evidence of the triggering mechanism for a humanitarian intervention, such as mass slaughter or crimes that shock humanity. Saddam had a terrible track record but, during the run-up to war, no such crimes were ongoing or imminent. Third, humanitarian motives were clearly not dominant, as the war would probably not have occurred in the absence of the issues of WMD and/or the al-Qaeda connection. During his February 2003 presentation to the UN, even Colin Powell's slides related to Saddam's human rights violations were labelled, "Iraq: Failing to Disarm". 

Even if regular people didn't buy that Iraq had something to do with 9-11, the Washington DC press corps certainly did. What we do know for certain is that Bush & Cheney manipulated the information suppled by America's intelligence agencies to make it appear that Hussein had something to do with 9-11. 

The deleted paragraphs in the summary called "Key Judgements" read:

"Baghdad for now appears to be drawing a line short of conducting terrorist attacks with conventional or CBW against the United States, fearing that exposure of Iraqi involvement would provide Washington a stronger cause for making war.

Iraq probably would attempt clandestine attacks against the US Homeland if Baghdad feared an attack that threatened the survival of the regime were imminent or unavoidable, or possibly for revenge."

Many on the right wing have made their defense of the Bush Administration center around the allegation that Democratic Senators had access to the same intel that Bush had and that they reached the same conclusion. No, Democrats had access to the intel that Bush edited to make it look as though Iraq was a threat.

The consequences?  

As documented below, by the most scientifically respected measures available, Iraq lost 1.4 million lives as a result of OIL [Operation Iraqi Liberation], saw 4.2 million additional people injured, and 4.5 million people become refugees. The 1.4 million dead was 5% of the population. That compares to 2.5% lost in the U.S. Civil War, or 3 to 4% in Japan in World War II, 1% in France and Italy in

World War II, less than 1% in the U.K. and 0.3% in the United States in World War II. The 1.4 million dead is higher as an absolute number as well as a percentage of population than these other horrific losses.

The US absolutely must prevent anything like the Iraq War from ever occurring again. How are we doing on that? Unfortunately, not very well. The US leadership appears to greatly overestimate the effectiveness of sanctions, underestimates the usefulness of diplomacy and has far too much faith in our intelligence agencies. Also, people in Washington DC, both government officials and the press corps, appear to be talking about the deficit in much the same manner that they discussed Iraq in late 2002-early 2003. The good news is that US troops are very highly unlikely to go back into Iraq, no matter how badly the situation there deteriorates. The US couldn't do much there the first time and it seems our leadership knows that it couldn't do much on a return engagement. Could the US invade Iran? Certainly, elements want very badly to do so, but I think the public would be very highly likely to resist.

The 1934 movie "Cleopatra"

Listened to an audiobook on Cleopatra and re-watched Claudette Colbert in the 1934 Cecil B. DeMille “Cleopatra” movie. Most of the historical inaccuracies in it can be chalked up to dramatic license. Cleopatra ruled for 18 dramatic and event-filled years and the movie is only 100 minutes long, so there's a lot of compression involved. The only really startling, anachronistic, “Whuuh?” moment came for me when Colbert tries to convince Julius Caesar that Egypt was the stepping stone to India.

For Cleopatra to get to Rome, the audiobook tells us, her sea convoy traveled up the coasts of Israel, Turkey, Greece and Italy, stopping every night so the crew could sleep in buildings or tents on shore. It took a couple of weeks to make the journey of perhaps 500 miles. Now, getting from Egypt to India is well over 2000 miles. As the Suez Canal wasn't built until 1869, that added over 100 miles of land that ships had to be carried over. The point the book makes is that Egypt was a prize all on its own and Cleopatra was a royal personage well worth knowing as she was a highly attractive person (everybody who comes into contact with her strives to give her the benefit of the doubt and to make excuses for her and to stay with her as long as possible) who had a great deal in common with both of the Romans that she took up with.

The book doubts that Cleopatra had herself bitten by a snake, but agrees that she was researching various poisons to see how quickly and painlessly they worked. The only point where the book and the movie disagree is that the book concluded that she felt the end was near and she didn't want to be paraded around Rome as a captive. The movie concludes that she had agreed to dispose of Mark Antony with one of the poisons she had been researching. The book shows us that Cleopatra was a real sexual outlaw who did quite a bit of sleeping around, but whose goal was always a stronger and better Egypt. There's only one scene in the movie where she clearly has sex, but I guess that in 1934, that was enough to classify her as pretty wanton.

I was interested to see the parallels between this story and the story presented in “The Other BoleynGirl” with Natalie Portman and Scarlett Johanssen. In both stories, families try to make alliances through sex, through males being attracted to females. In both cases it works okay, for short periods anyway, but long-term alliances are best made for pragmatic reasons that don't need to be supplemented by sexual attractions.

Cleopatra played an important role in a tumultuous time and impressed pretty much all of the people she came into contact with. My regret concerning the movie is that she's presented as very passive and not nearly as assertive and nowhere near the goddess that she actually presented herself as in real life.

Jack the Giant Slayer

Quite good! Stirring stuff and, giving it some thought later, don't there were any glaring anachronisms, none that really stuck out for me anyway (That is, items and attitudes that could not have existed at the time the movie takes place). Naturally, the princess is a bit more rebellious than one would expect and Jack (The Giant Slayer) is treated quite well by his social betters, but all in all, it seems pretty true to the period.

As I was getting some coffee for the movie (the local theaters carried coffee for a bit, so they've told me I can carry a cup of coffee in), the salesperson at the convenience store commented on movies plundering material from the past. Yeah, Jack is an adaptation of the old Jack and the Beanstalk tale, but yes, plundering the past for story material is hardly new.

The Golem was a 1921 movie that was based on old Jewish legends. When I saw it, it immediately brought to mind The Hulk from Marvel Comics. Thor, of course also from Marvel Comics, derives directly from Norse legends. The DC Comics series Fables (Started up in 2003), very directly and explicitly takes characters and situations from past stories and adventures and the TV series Once Upon A Time appears to have derived directly from Fables.

So the only question for me is, does the latest appropriation of the past do a good job of re-telling the old story? I think Jack does indeed do the job quite well.

So long, PhillyIMC!

PhillyIMC is now no more. For a long period, members of the group that maintained the site and contributed stories had been going off to do other things and moving on in their lives one by one. The real problem was that the Philadelphia Independent Media Center never came up with a way to recruit new members, so when people left, there was just one less member to do the work of maintaining the site.

So it's largely been just me maintaining the site for the last several years. I was finally told by my employment company that they'd lined me up for a job, but that the job would not involve being at a computer all day. I feared that this meant that the spammers (People who post unwanted, commercial articles and comments) would eventually figure out that the site was unguarded for a certain number of hours each day and every day when I came back to it, that the site would be overrun with still more spam.

I wrote a note to the fellow who had previously agreed to upgrade our open source content management system from Drupal 5 to Drupal 7 and asked him to shut the site down. He did so and there's now nothing in its place.

I'm very happy that I worked on it. Got to know a number of good people and had some good times.

Wouldn't say “Great” Minds Think Alike, but certainly “Some” Minds Think Alike

Two right-wingers have come to the same conclusion at the same time. Ted Nugent, the aging one-hit wonder of the late 1970s and really, really enthusiastic gun advocate, tells us about black people voting for the Democratic Party:

The truth is that the Democratic Party has been the engineer of the destruction of black Americans, and everyone knows it except the very people who need to know it the most - black Americans. The turbo-destruction will continue for black Americans until they realize that dirty Democrat politicians are their true enemy, not their salvation. Fortunately, some are beginning to embrace this self-evident truth.

And, at the same time, Herman Cain, the marvelously entertaining gaffe-machine of the 2012 Republican primary, says about Americans in general that President Obama is continuing his campaign even though the election is over and he's been reelected and Cain and Bill O'Reilly agree that Obama has not been able to solve all of America's problems (Gee, an obstructionist House majority and a constantly-filibustering Senate minority wouldn't have anything to do with that, would they?), but the real problem is that (selected excerpts) “51% of the voters were...misled enough to vote for him.” O'Reilly: “How dumb are they?” Cain: “We have a severe ignorance problem.” So yeah, I guess we liberals are just too stupid to know what's good for us.

Funny how, when the “smart people” were in charge, we ended up getting into a completely unnecessary war and the Great Recession. Hmm, strange how that works out!

Review of "Hubris"

Showed on 9:00pm on Monday 18 February. Rachel Maddow previewed it a few days beforehand. Real Clear Politics presents all of the ten-minute segments of it. I agree with David Swanson, the show has some flaws, but I'm very happy that it was shown. As I've related to many people, I had read appeals before President George W. Bush's UN speech (Made just after the first anniversary of 9-11) to give Bush a chance to make his case for war against Iraq and to not dismiss his case out of hand, so I got the NY Times the day after and read his case from beginning to end. I immediately concluded that Bush was lying and that he had already made up his mind to go to war. I made it to what I believe was the first demonstration opposing the Iraq War.

At the demonstration, it was clear that everyone had reached the same conclusion that I had, that there was no point in even trying to persuade Bush to not go to war. Our protest was instead aimed squarely at the general public. One item that Hubris mentioned, that I remember well, was that President Bill Clinton had, in 1998, decided to bomb Iraq to make a point and to force compliance with American edicts. Not wanting American weapons inspectors to get hurt, he ordered the inspectors to be withdrawn. The annoyance and aggravation came on the American side when the Iraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein, had refused to let the inspectors back into Iraq after the bombing.

In August of 2002, Bush declared that Hussein had kicked out the inspectors. I knew immediately that this wasn't true as I had been following the story in 1998, but also because back then, Clinton was undergoing all sorts of trouble from Republicans with the Monica Lewinsky scandal and for Hussein to have treated Americans with such contempt would have driven Clinton to declare war right off the bat. Sure enough, Fair.org published a piece in October showing the media headlines in 1998 and how the same publications discussed the same event in 2002 with very different headlines. So yes, when Bush made his speech at the UN to gin up enthusiasm for a war with Iraq, the press treatment of Bush's inspectors claim really sealed the deal to convince me that the traditional media was hopelessly in Bush's pocket.

Maddow does a good job in allowing the Colin Powell spokesperson Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson and Douglas Feith to get plenty of screen time to make their cases, but the Powell case is fatally undermined by the demonstration earlier in the show that all of Powell's major points were debunked many months before he made his speech at the UN. He made his speech shortly before the February 15th march. It was the largest protest in history and was especially important as it was scattered all over the world. I didn't watch Powell's speech myself, but asked my brother-in-law about it later. He said "Yeah, it was convincing to people who didn't know anything about the issue beforehand. As someone who was pretty informed on the issue, it wasn't convincing to me at all."

It was clear to me, though I admit things may look different from inside the Washington DC bubble than it does to ordinary citizens out in the country, that Bush's evidence for the need to go to war with Iraq was all quite vague and very heavily dependent on taking the word of government officials for it all. We common citizens were asked to simply trust that what those government officials were saying was true. Valerie Plame Wilson was shown in Hubris, speaking about how she and another CIA person were reacting to Colin Powell's "revelations" that had been obtained from the highly unreliable "Curveball." A scene in Fair Game, a movie based in part on Wilson's book "Fair Game: My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House," made it clear that there were quite a few people in the CIA who felt that Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney were very eager to go to war and quite willing to say whatever it took to convince Americans to support that effort.

Update: Colonel Wilkerson takes exception to David Swanson's accusation of knowingly lying. Swanson explains his conclusion and adds that the honorable thing for Wilkerson to have done was to have resigned rather than to participate in a lie. 

Les Misérables

I think this movie was done as well as it could have been, but it hasn't aged well at all. I can see Javert (Played by Russell Crowe) chasing Jean Valjean (Played by Hugh Jackman) all over, hither and yon if Javert was really bored and his case file was really thin and he just had nothing better to do or if Valjean's crime was so monstrous that Valjean was a real danger to public safety, but Valjean's crime was so petty to begin with (It was revealed very, very late in the film) that when I finally learned what it was, I was like “Wha-a-ah?!?! THAT's what this whole, long chase has been all about?”

The siege in the later part would have made more sense if I understood what the rebels were planning to do to improve things in the event that they were successful, but that detail got lost in the the hazy, romantic, rebelliousness and bravery, etc. I guess they would have started something “New” and “Bold” and “Different,” yada, yada, yada.

Now, Madame Thénardier was another Helena Bonham Carter villain and she's gotten quite good at doing those roles. She played a very good villain in both Sweeney Todd and Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. She's very good at being believably human, but also at arousing the desire to boo and hiss and throw things at the screen. Anne Hathaway did a good job as Fantine. She was very pretty with long hair and good clothes. After her hair had been shorn off and she had been degraded, abused, defiled and was dressed in rags, yeah, she looked pretty darned haggard and worn out.

Parsing the questions - Politifact and Jeep

The Weekly Standard is outraged, outraged, I tell you!, the Poltifact apparently stretched the truth when it said that Mitt Romney lied during the closing days of the 2012 campaign. They give us a general description, based on Politifact's statements, of what Romney allegedly said:

"It was a lie told in the critical state of Ohio in the final days of a close campaign -- that Jeep was moving its U.S. production to China."

Now, to me, the word "moving" is extremely critical. That doesn't just suggest that Jeep was planning on opening up factories in China, it suggests that Jeep is letting Americans go and re-locating American jobs there. Here's Romney's statement as quoted by The Plum Line:

“I saw a story today that one of the great manufacturers in this state, Jeep — now owned by the Italians — is thinking of moving all production to China,” Romney said at a rally in Defiance, Ohio, home to a General Motors powertrain plant. “I will fight for every good job in America. I’m going to fight to make sure trade is fair, and if it’s fair America will win.”

Sounds to me as though that's exactly what Romney is saying. The Weekly Standard goes on to show that Jeep is indeed opening up factories in China to serve the Chinese market and flourishes this fact as though it proves their point that Politifact is being dishonest. But the WS quotes a Jeep executive who says:

"Let’s set the record straight: Jeep has no intention of shifting production of its Jeep models out of North America to China," Ranieri wrote..."

Again, the question for me is not whether Jeep was opening up a factory in China, it was, but whether it was doing so at the expense of American jobs. Could Americans have been producing Jeeps in the US and then shipped those cars to China? As WS says:

To recap, Jeep Patriots—oh irony, you capricious sprite!—that were heretofore exclusively produced in America and sold overseas are now going to be made and sold overseas. [emphases in original]

Probably, but let's keep in mind that Japan makes Japanese cars in the US for the US market, so it would be hypocritical for Americans to complain of Jeep producing cars in China for the Chinese market. From a Forbes piece that makes it sound as though the US is fast becoming the Mexico to Japan's US (A country that is assembling products for the wealthier market), Forbes states that:

The Japanese carmaker [Honda] has invested more than $2.2 billion in its North American operations over the past two years, enabling it to increase production capacity in North America from the current 1.63 million to 1.92 million units per year in 2014.

Now, what precisely did Politifact condemn Romney for?

PolitiFact has selected Romney's claim that Barack Obama "sold Chrysler to Italians who are going to build Jeeps in China" at the cost of American jobs as the 2012 Lie of the Year.

WS correctly points out that, yes indeed, Jeep is indeed producing Jeep models in China for the Chinese market, just as Japan is producing Japanese cars in America for the American market. So yes, Politifact goofed up and accused Romney of the wrong thing. Why did Romney's statement draw so much fire at the time? My own "ruling" is that Romney suggested that Americans would lose their jobs and that those jobs would be moved overseas. So yes, Romney's statement that "Jeep — now owned by the Italians — is thinking of moving all production to China,” [emphasis added] is very clearly false and Romney very clearly had good reason to know that it was false and that his statement richly deserved condemnation.

So, when it comes to fact-checking, an endeavor that's worthy and something all reporters should do, Politifact demonstrates that it's far from an exact science or...well, that they're really not very good at doing it. I feel that Romney was rightly condemned for making an inflammatory statement that he knew full well was false, or at the very least highly misleading, but that Politifact deserves condemnation for making a statement that they, in turn, also had reason to know was false. Yes, Jeep was indeed planning to set up factories in China and yes, they condemn Romney for saying just that, but Romney deserves condemnation for suggesting that Jeep would do so at the expense of American jobs.

Update: These two posts were on PhillyIMC.org:

Notice how Romney said that

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Mon, 01/21/2013 - 7:07pm 

 

Notice how Romney said that Jeep was "thinking of moving" Jeep manufacturing to China. The fact is they were and the story in Reuters proves it. Romney said nothing about moving manufacturing to China "at the expense of American jobs." You and Politifact tried to put words into Romney's mouth that he did not say and you are getting smacked for it. This is probably the most clear example of left-wing "journalists" using the Logical Fallacy of the Straw Man in their analysis. Had Romney said the words that you and politifact tried to insert into his mouth, he might be culpable of lying but he did not. He might not have stated other pieces of the story but there is a big difference between withholding information and lying.

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Are you saying that The Plum Line quotes him inaccurately?

Submitted by Rich Gardner on Mon, 01/21/2013 - 8:49pm 

 

Romney's words, as quoted:

“I saw a story today that one of the great manufacturers in this state, Jeep — now owned by the Italians — is thinking of moving all production to China,” Romney said at a rally in Defiance, Ohio, home to a General Motors powertrain plant. “I will fight for every good job in America. I’m going to fight to make sure trade is fair, and if it’s fair America will win.”

If you can show me that Romney didn't actually say these words, and he's quoted very specifically as saying "Jeep...is thinking of moving all production to China," [emphasis added] then please feel free to supply me with the correct quote (With source, please) where Romney doesn't lie. My reading of that quote is that Jeep was planning to move production to China. That means to fire American auto workers and to replace what they were producing with a factory in China.

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Anonymous never responded.

Today, I saw a piece on Daily Kos on the issue and it says that a fellow asked on behalf of Romney for the Washington Post factchecker to please reconsider the "Four Pinnochios" (The worst ruling possible) that he awarded for Romney's lie. The WaPo fatchecker responds:

With all due respect to Stevens, the claim that Romney turned out to be right is simply not accurate. [...]
We reaffirm our earlier ruling of Four Pinocchios.

Bold, fresh ideas from Republicans

Columnist, former speechwriter for the elder George Bush and frequent talk-show guest Peggy Noonan urges conservatives "Now's the time to put a dagger 'tween their teeth, wave a sword, grab a rope and swing aboard the enemy's galleon. Take the president's issues, steal them--they never belonged to him, they're yours!" ... "Really, it's pirate time." Essentially, Noonan urges right-wingers to take a page from the Democratic playbook and to stand for the little guys, the working and middle classes, against the rich.

How's that working out for Republicans? Well, let's see, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal's bold, fresh, new idea is to eliminate state income taxes and to boost the sales tax instead. What would that do?

According to ITEP, while Louisiana millionaires would receive a tax cut of around a quarter of a million dollars, “[the] poorest 20 percent of taxpayers, those with an average income of $12,000, would see an average tax increase of $395, or 3.4 percent of their income, if no low income tax relief mechanism is offered.” (And if a low income tax relief mechanism is offered, it will have to be paid for, almost definitely on the backs of the middle 20 percent, with average incomes around $43,000.)

And Jim DeMint, the former Senator and new head of the Heritage Foundation insists that welfare reform is an amazing success. What does that success actually look like?

In the state of Georgia, where 300,000 families survive below the poverty line, 4,000 people are on welfare. The goal is zero people on welfare. Not “zero poor people,” but zero recipients of government benefits.

So, er, not very well if you're a person who's down on their luck and in need of assistance. Great, if you're a wealthy person who doesn't like paying taxes.

How about bold, fresh, new ideas on climate change?

The Washington-commissioned analysis makes clear that America is already feeling the impact of global warming; infrastructure, water supplies, crops and coastal geographies are being noticeably affected, it says, while heatwaves, downpours, floods and droughts are all both more common and more extreme.

...

But although President Obama has brought in a smattering of regulations on greenhouse gases, and his energy strategy ultimately aims to wean the US off foreign oil, explicit references to climate change are still few and far between in Washington, and...

Okay, so that's a very serious issue and Democrats aren't making a very big stink about it. So what are Republicans doing on that?

...most Republicans refuse to acknowledge any link between human activity and a changing climate.

Hmm, so much for that hope. But hey! Republican Senators can perform their "advise and consent" role that the Constitution gives them.
In Meet The Press, Bob Schieffer asks Senator John McCain (R-AZ):

SCHIEFFER: What about John Brennan, the nominee for the CIA? Your friend Lindsey Graham says he should not be confirmed until we know more about the attack in Libya. Are you going to...

MCCAIN: I think Lindsey's right that we need to know. It has been months now and we still haven't gotten basic information. Like, what was the -- how were the talking points that were given Ambassador Rice to tell the American people? And on this program, why weren't there DoD assets for seven hours capable of -- I mean, there are so many questions that have not been answered, and Lindsey is right.

Erm, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and former Senator Joe Lieberman (I-CT) both refuse to be tagged as critics of the Obama Administration's response to the deaths of a US Ambassador and several other people in Benghazi, Libya last year. The project of making the Benghazi deaths into a scandal took a severe hit when McCain skipped a briefing on the Benghazi situation in order to complain that he lacked information on...the Benghazi situation. McCain is beating a horse that's not only dead, it's long since decayed.

McCain also claimed earlier in the conversation that:

By the way, on this process [of appointing presidential cabinet picks], usually with the previous presidents, both Republican and Democrat, when they're considering nominations, they call in the other side and say -- you know, the key members on the other party and say, hey, I'm thinking about nominating Mr. X, what do you think about it? There has been none of that with this administration.

Really? Sorry, but I certainly don't recall that ever happening under George W. Bush. Bush just made his decisions and put them out. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but McCain appears to be insisting that President Obama observe a higher degree of cooperation than Bush ever demonstrated.

Django Unchained

Think I've caught every Quentin Tarantino film since Pulp Fiction. Django is a worthy addition to the line-up. It doesn't disappoint. Tarantino and the many stars that appear here are all given the chance to really sink their teeth into roles that allow them to break out of their usual noble, selfless heroic parts and to play really awful, terrible, e-e-e-villll villains who all thoroughly deserve the horrible ends they come to. Not that it's all a kill-fest. There were a couple of minor, side characters I was sad to see get blown away.
Amanda Marcotte comments accurately I believe, that Django should not be viewed as history. What interested me about the film was the deep complicity that some characters who, in real life, had to have felt about the various events and happenings of being a slave. The film really drives home the point that lots and lots of people involved with slavery had to have felt morally complicit and unclean from their actions/lack of actions.
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$%#@^!!! The IMDB review of the film spells our heroines name as "Broomhilda." No, the character from the Ring of the Nibelung is spelled Brunnhilde and the opera was around at that time for people to get the name from. She's NOT named after the chubby green witch of the much later comic strip!!!!

A few Barbara Stanwyck films

Taped and just finished watching Sorry, Wrong Number,  The Mad Miss Manton and  Breakfast for Two. And I learned by watching the TCM commentary that  Double Indemnity and  Stella Dallas are big, acclaimed films of hers, neither of which I've seen. Sorry is an interesting film as the main characters are not at all sympathetic until the very end, when it's too late. Mad is interesting as Stanwyck's character heads up a sort of women's posse that runs around solving crimes. In that and Breakfast, an attempt at a madcap romantic comedy of the type that Katherine Hepburn did in Bringing Up Baby, I'm sorry to say that Stanwyck is completely unconvincing as a woman in love. The men in these films say that they love her, but their statements fall completely flat. Maybe that has something to do with the rumors that Stanwyck was a lesbian. As she had an affair with Robert Wagner that no one was aware of at the time (They broke it off because of the age difference), perhaps she was bisexual. In any event, there's a great deal to admire about her as an actor. And nah, I checked to see if anyone has ever collected her movies together into one set and no one has. The next TCM classic actor film-fest is for Loretta Young. Not sure if I've ever seen her in anything.

Lincoln

Finally saw the movie "Lincoln" after having written about a piece that was about the movie. Although I show in my piece that the article is wildly inaccurate in some respects, now that I've seen the film, I would characterize the article as not so much inaccurate as it is over-determined through the author's own perspective. There's a scene near the end of the film where the long-time Radical Republican abolitionist Thaddeus Stevens (Played by Tommy Lee Jones) borrows the official copy of the just-passed 13th Amendment (It had been passed by the Senate, was passed by the House in the movie and was then ratified by the states) and then

...brings it home, where he is greeted by his Black housekeeper Lydia Smith, played by S. Epatha Merkerson. He presents it to her with the words “a gift for you,” whereupon the satisfied servant crawls into bed with the White man, for a night of emancipation fornication, one assumes.

I'm not familiar with the actual facts of the Stevens-Smith relationship, but my interpretation of that scene in the movie was that Stevens and Smith were in a long-term, comfortable, romantic relationship and Stevens felt, accurately, that Smith would appreciate seeing the real, genuine words of what represented freedom for her people. Yes, emancipation resulted in a very real improvement for black people for a number of years, then white America kicked back, ending Reconstruction, and what followed that was nearly a century of conditions that powerfully resembled slavery. Greatly improved conditions followed that were brought about by the Civil Rights Movement and by white people who wanted to see America fulfil its promise as a land that treated all people with dignity and respect.

I don't see the movie as glossing over Lincoln so much as it introduces a game-playing Lincoln who made necessary compromises when ha had to and who juggled many balls at once, trying not to let any of them drop. There were points where both Lincoln and Stevens said things they obviously didn't believe to be true (Though Lincoln used a semantic dodge to prevent his statement from being an outright lie), but both of them agreed that freedom for the black people was a good thing, even if their methods of achieving that freedom had to be a bit indirect and had to involve covert appeals.

Are the black people seen as one-dimensionally grateful to the white politicians here? They certainly play a secondary role here. They certainly are not the primary characters around whom the plots of the film revolve. So, up to a point, yes, blacks are seen in the light of being the grateful recipients of what Northern whites do for them, but I reject the idea that blacks played no role in their own liberation. I think that the entrance of blacks into the House gallery before the critical vote probably strengthened the resolve of the Congresspeople who decided to go against their peers and most likely, against a lot of their constituents back home by voting for the 13th Amendment. So I see FinalCall's interpretation as an overly simplified one. Could blacks have simply freed themselves by their own efforts? The South had taken many measures and a great deal of thought and time and effort over the preceding centuries to prevent rebellion by their slaves. No, I think the blacks of that era simply didn't have any choice. If they wanted freedom from chattel slavery, they had to work with Northern whites, which they did, to the ultimate benefit of both groups.

Arrow

Saw a bit of the last episode and just saw a full episode tonight. According to IMDB, these were the only two appearances, so far, of Helena Bertinelli (Played by Jessica De Gouw). Her role is a pretty obvious one for a "billionaire playboy." What does a man with everything else want? Well, back in the old days, as Jane Austen had one of her characters say in Pride & Prejudice, “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” Now, these are not the old days (Pride & Prejudice was published in 1813) and Oliver Queen (Played by Stephen Amell) gets Bertinelli into the sack right away, but for Bertinelli to give Queen a sense of purpose, to give his life meaning, a mission to focus on, is a favor he greatly appreciates. He tries to turn her away from simply killing her hated target, to taking apart the guy's fortune without killing him or anyone else.
Now the character that Arrow is clearly based on is the comic book character Green Arrow and sure enough, there's a Dinah Lance (Played by Katie Cassidy), who's his girlfriend in the comic and who's apparently on the outs with him at the moment. Looks like Bertinelli is going to be Arrow's main opponent here. Should be fun!

A critical review of “Lincoln, lies and Black folk”

First off, let me state my view on how the races/ethnicities relate to each other. Initially, all of the ethnic groups saw each other the way that the US Navy and the Marines do today, the “squids” are lazy and disorganized, the “jarheads” are not so bright, but when we're down to brass tacks, when our backs are to the wall, we're all Americans, we get our instructions from the same Commander-in-Chief and both branches serve the same country. We'll never occupy a world where there's no friction or conflict between the ethnicities, but in the Western world, in the early 1500s, that relatively comfortable situation changed with the introduction of Western technology. It went to the heads of Western white people, who began to think of themselves as Übermensch. Around 1950, the Nazis had taken the theory of the racial supermen to its logical and horrifying conclusion and the colonies that Europe acquired demanded to be free of direct Western control. Westerners began to lose the conviction that they were humanity's supermen. So, when a white person becomes a non-racist, he's not so much moving forwards to enlightenment as he is simply returning to ancient norms, which is why children are not naturally racist. Their racism has to be taught.

Lincoln was very much a man of his time and still retained a feeling that white people were essentially superior to black people. Fortunately, he also felt that Africans had suffered enormously under the boots of white Americans and that the imposition of that suffering was fundamentally immoral. Eventually, he felt near his final days that the political spectrum of his day, with white supremacists feeling that the slave system was just fine and needed no alterations, the centrist middle-of-the-roaders who felt that slave-owners should exercise responsibility and self-control (The idea of commercial regulations was still a few decades in the future) to the wild extremist abolitionists who were radical lefties.

As Lincoln's thought on the subject progressed, he found himself more and more in agreement with what the TV commenter Bill O'Reilly would call “the far left” on the subject.

As to the piece “Lincoln, lies and Black folk” (I have not, as of this writing, watched the Steven Spielberg film, Lincoln) was the Civil War fought for the benefit of the Africans who had been dragged against their will to America? Before and early in the war, Lincoln made his feelings on that subject quite clear, he wanted to preserve the Union whether the Africans were freed or not. Was the fate of the Africans then irrelevant? No, their plight touched sympathetic chords within white people in the North and as the Civil War progressed, rescuing the blacks from their fate was seen as a fine and noble cause and it inspired many Northerners to great efforts.

From Reply to “The Bonnie Blue Flag”

We deem our cause most holy,
We know we're in the right,
And twenty million freemen
Stand ready for the fight.
Our pride is fair Columbia,
No stain her beauty mars,
On her we'll raise the brave old flag
That bears the stripes and stars.

Preserving the Union was a fairly abstract goal, white people supported it, but rescuing the Africans in America from their fate as it was outlined in “Uncle Tom's Cabin” was an inspiring goal that was worth a lot of bloodshed.

What was the essential cause of the Civil War? Lincoln wisely stated:

A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure, permanently, half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved — I do not expect the house to fall — but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other.

Not sure how completely Lincoln understood the issue here (though he states the problem quite well), but America had two economies, the North was a rising industrial, capitalist power, the South was a Medieval-style, feudalistic source of raw materials. What was the essential difference between the two regions? Slavery. Without chattel slavery (Very different and far crueler than slavery in Biblical times and in South America at the same time), a feudalistic system where very few people owned lots and lots of land was simply impossible to sustain. The only way to sustain a Medieval-type system was to have people in bondage, chained to the land. So yes, without slavery, the South would have been economically indistinguishable from the North. To strike at slavery was to strike at the essentially feudal system of the South.

Did white Americans fight for “free black people”? Ultimately, yes. In order to break the feudal system of the South, the slaves had to be freed. Was that the deliberate, conscious intent of white people in the North? I suspect the Radical Republicans understood the connection at the time, but I doubt many other people truly understood that.

What was the effect of the Emancipation Proclamation? Wikipedia says that 50,000 slaves were freed immediately by the Proclamation as that was the number of black people living within the Federally-occupied areas of the states that were in rebellion when the Proclamation was issued. In the following paragraph about the Hampton Roads Peace Conference, that number had increased to 200,000 as the Conference occurred much later in the war.

This discussion led into the overarching issue of emancipation and the status of blacks in the South. Lincoln, in response to an inquiry by Stephens, indicated that opinions in Washington differed as to the "operation" of the Emancipation Proclamation, particularly after hostilities had ceased and it could no longer be considered a war measure. Some people, he said, believed that it was not operative at all; others, that it applied only to federal-occupied areas; and still others, that it applied to all of the Southern states listed in the proclamation. Seward pointed out that about two hundred thousand slaves had already been freed under the authority of the proclamation, an estimate with which Lincoln agreed. The issue of the Emancipation Proclamation's legality, Lincoln told the Confederate commissioners, would be decided by the courts after the war. Meanwhile, he reminded them, he would not retract or modify any of the proclamation.

Also,

Though "the abandonment of armed resistance to the national authority [was] the only indispensable condition to ending the war," the president made it clear that he would not "retract or modify the emancipation proclamation, nor ... return to slavery any person who is free by the terms of that proclamation, or by any of the Acts of Congress." (emphases added)

Yes, Lincoln put the preservation of the Union first in his short list of demands, but very clearly, black emancipation was a close and very important second.

“Lincoln, lies and Black folk” goes on to claim:

In 1861, when General John C. Fremont freed all slaves in the state of Missouri, Lincoln fired him. When General David Hunter freed the slaves in three states, Lincoln cancelled and reversed the order.

Yes, clearly these early attempts at emancipation were premature and occurred before Lincoln decided that freeing the slaves was a necessary precondition for ending the war. Lincoln needed the loyalty of the border states and he felt that taking away slaves before slave-holders were ready to give them up would damage the war effort, so he rhetorically concentrated on “Preserving the Union” as his announced motivation for pursuing the war. Was this the act “of a Saviour or of a Salvation Army”? Obviously not, but it was clearly the act of a politicians trying to balance competing demands, to pursue a war of liberation while asserting that liberation was not his goal at all,

Was Lincoln a “hero for the Black man”? Certainly in the long run, for African-Americans to make the progress that they have, ending slavery was a first, necessary step. I certainly don't consider their experience under American law to be much better than slavery from the end of Reconstruction until the successes of the Civil Rights Movement under Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

No, I'm not convinced that Lincoln deserves to be stripped of the honor in which many Americans hold him. We need to look at him with open eyes, of course, and not with blind hero-worship.

James Bond – Skyfall

Quite good. I rarely make the really popular movies in the early evening and, no surprise, I had to park 200-300 yards away from the theater. Got into the theater well before the official starting time, getting a reasonably decent seat (Theater was already just about full when I arrived), and naturally, had to sit through lots and LOTS of previews. But by the time I made it back to the car after the movie, most of my fellow moviegoers had already cleared the parking lot.

Bond tries to sneak off and start a non-spy life of his own, but we know of course, that the call of duty will drag him back. Interestingly, an American would have been breaking rules right and left, but Bond remains respectful and dutiful to the end. Gotta agree with the reviews, this is definitely one of the best Bond episodes ever.

Project ORCA - major fizzle

First off, yes, the Mitt Romney campaign Digital Director Zac Moffatt is correct:

"For whatever reasons, the conservative bloggers have latched onto Orca as the reason it all fell apart," Moffatt added. Those bloggers have suggested that developers with Democratic sympathies somehow acted as a fifth column within the Romney camp.
----
Moffatt said that this kind of thinking puts too much faith in a single piece of software. "Anyone who knows campaigns knows this was all baked in before that day—there was no magic, Orca wasn't a silver bullet,"...

And when we look at the margin of victory that Obama enjoyed, we see that the race wasn't anywhere near close enough for the complete and utter clusterfuck that was the Project Orca to have had any serious effect on the race.

That being said, Project Orca would, in a rational universe where people cared deeply about objective facts, do such enormous damage to Mitt Romney's reputation as a skilled and savvy and smart and organized businessman that no one would miss the would-be Romney presidency for the effect that he would have had on the nation's economy.

As the right-wing blogger Ace of Spades points out, Romney and the Republican Party had 37,000+ ("Ace" initially estimated only 30,000+) volunteer poll-watchers and get-out-the-vote people:

In a final training call on November 3, field volunteers were told to expect "packets" shortly containing the information they needed to use Orca. Those packets, which showed up in some volunteers' e-mail inboxes as late as November 5, turned out to be PDF files—huge PDF files which contained instructions on how to use the app and voter rolls for the voting precincts each volunteer would be working. After discovering the PDFs in his e-mail inbox at 10:00 PM on Election Eve, Ekdahl said that "I sat down and cursed, as I would have to print 60+ pages of instructions and voter rolls on my home printer. They expected 75 to 80-year old veteran volunteers to print out 60+ pages on their home computers? The night before election day?"

Now, this sounds great IF your objective is to save money. Outsourcing production of the voter rolls to individual employees sounds like a great idea IF people are all supplied with corporate-style laser printers that spit out a half-dozen to a dozen pages a minute and to people who have the time and the expertise to absorb a few pages of written technical instructions. Obviously, campaign volunteers are not employees and they don't necessarily have the equipment or training to do these things. The Ars Technica piece concludes that the Romney team essentially did a "beta test" (Sort of a technological "full dress rehearsal," with customers actually getting their hands on the product and testing it in real time with the tools they'd normally use) on November 6th. Problem: November 6th was the drop-dead, must-work-perfectly day when all the bugs had to be ironed out and and all the errors fixed and for all of the system's users to be completely up-to-date with and comfortable with the system. Yes, the Romney team would have had to sacrifice secrecy and shock effect, but they would have had a fully working and functional product and not a complete fizzle of a product launch. Yes, yes, Zac Moffat points out that they did a few things right. I'll give 'em a C- on the whole thing.

What's perhaps the clearest sign of just plain, flat-out incompetence, bordering on malfeasance, is that Comcast, the website provider, was not informed that the project was expecting really massive traffic on November 6th. Senator Joe Lieberman (I-CT) ran into a very similar problem during his 2006 primary campaign against challenger Ned Lamont. His website crashed because it wasn't prepared to be as busy as it was during the last days of the campaign, when the site was flooded with people wanting to cast an informed vote but who hadn't taken the time to do any research beforehand. Romney's contractor or Romney's own people should have known from Lieberman's experience that website providers need to be notified that you have a political site and that you're expecting a really big surge in traffic on election day. There's no guarantee that the website provider would have provided any resources with which to assist the electioneering team, but at least Comcast would not have been under the impression that Romney's site was suffering a denial-of-service attack. They might have even been prepared to assist with computer resources, extra lines of communication or more servers.

So yes, Project Orca was very much of a test of Romney's abilities/capabilities as an executive and yes, he failed that test miserably. The nation lost nothing when it didn't vote him into office.

Update:
Ars Technica decided to follow up their look at the failed Mitt Romney product by looking at the successful Barack Obama product. The Obama 2008 campaign software, nicknamed Houdini, was okay. Not great, just okay. It more or less did the job and contributed some to the campaign, but Obama's people understood they'd really have to scale it up for 2012. Some interesting quotes: "Rather than focusing on creating something significantly new, Reed said, the team focused on taking what they already knew worked and fitting the pieces together." and "Dashboard didn't replace real-world field offices; rather, it was designed to overcome the problems posed by the absence of a common tool set in the 2008 election, making it easier for volunteers to be recruited and connected with people in their area." and "...the philosophy of applications like Dashboard and Call Tool was that 'you can't just make a difference through tech alone,' Ecker said. 'You can't just send e-mails and make robocalls and do stuff on Facebook—the real persuasion is going to happen when a real person is talking to a real person.'"

Desert Peach & sexy pictures

I did an extensive illustrated post on why posting pictures that demonstrate excessive sexiness are inappropriate for forums like Facebook. I've never agreed with the Anti-Porn Feminists that porno is always bad, but I do agree that it's inappropriate under some circumstances. I pay lots of attention to a particular character in order to show that no, just because one is creating in a popular fiction format, that doesn't mean that one can't create complex characters nor that one has to avoid sexual subjects. Enjoy!

Fellow lefties

There is a split in the Left right now, between those who feel that Republicans and Democrats are six-of-one and a half-dozen-of-the-other or Tweedle-dum and Tweedle-dee, i.e., there's no substantive difference between the two political parties and between those who feel that the differences between Republicans and Democrats are smaller than we'd like, but they're nevertheless real and substantive and worth getting to the voting booth for. I completely agree that Obama has played close 'n' cozy with the bankers and those who contributed to the housing bubble and that he hasn't pushed for more Keynesian stimulus hard enough and that launching drones is arguably worse than torturing suspects as drones create a lot of collateral damage that torture doesn't. A recent piece by PhillyIMC contributor Shamus Cooke and many pieces by our frequent contributor Stephen Lendman and of course, Cindy Sheehan made that case as well. A conversation between progressives on voting for Obama featured both sides arguing their respective cases.
I believe I've made the case here that yes, there is a very real and substantive difference between the parties and that it would be a terrible thing to see the Republican gain the office of the presidency, but no, this is not an issue of the Left versus the Establishment. This is an issue where, as a proud leftist in good standing, I simply don't want to be represented by those who don't see a distinction between the parties.I'm perfectly happy to be represented by other leftists under many other circumstances.
What I especially don't see is any sort of plan of action from the other lefties. As I pointed out here, we already have 90 million Americans skipping the vote, two-thirds of whom would be likely to pull the lever for the Democrats if they were to vote. What happens if a few million more people skip voting? Well, the result so far has been to keep right-wingers in office and that's been about the only result. Democrats should be up by 30 million votes, or around 15%, but instead they're running neck and neck with the Republicans. Politicians should be pandering to the political left and should be competing to see who can be more liberal, but instead, conservatives are on a more-or-less equal footing with progressives.
Yeah, I guess that makes me an incrementalist, a muddle-through, step-at-a-time kinda guy. I'll be happy to join The Revolution when it breaks out, but I think we're better off in the meantime doing what we can, when we can and not waiting for, or depending on, overnight change.

Electoral math and boycotting the vote

Adding up the male and female vote in 2008 gives us a total of 130 million votes. According to Harper's, there is a pool of 90 to 95 million voters who are staying out of the voting process and that about two-thirds of that number would vote for a Democratic candidate if they were compelled to cast a vote (The piece recommends extremely mild, slap-on-the-wrist penalties for not voting). The first piece adds that part of the reason Obama won in 2008 was that "Turnout among young black voters was 55%, eight percentage points higher than four years earlier," and that "turnout among blacks, Hispanics and Asians increased by four percentage points in 2008 from four years earlier."

So why do the Presidency, the House and the Senate all skew to the right wing politically more than demographics suggest they should be doing?  Why aren't they all pandering and competing more towards the left side of the political spectrum? Two reasons, the first is campaign finance. Campaigns need money to get out their message and to air advertisements and getting a big check from a wealthy person is a good deal easier than getting lots of small checks from a lot of voters. A quick Google search on "obama small donors" shows that Obama did better with small donors in February 2012, but that he now gets about the same percentage of big to small donors as his Republican rival does. The second reason is that many on the left/liberal/progressive side of the aisle are convinced that the system is corrupt.

What's the result of people boycotting the system? Commenters saying that "we live in a center-right country," even though polling on specific issues (budget/economy) shows that voters lean towards the left on most political issues. Counting up newspaper endorsements, Romney has more newspapers endorsing him than Obama does, but "Total circulation of the newspapers endorsing Obama: 12.8 million Total for Romney: 7.8 million." [emphasis in original] But the vote is far closer than it should be.

Essentially, boycotting the vote because it's corrupt is of great electoral benefit to the right wing and helps get right-wing politicians into office.

Mirror, Mirror

Just saw the Julia Roberts vehicle Mirror, Mirror on DVD. As with Snow White & The Hunstman, it's a re-telling of the tale of Snow White. Very interestingly, both Snows use swords. I guess if anyone knows of a young lady who wishes to be a princess, one might tell her that fencing is now part of their expected skill set. Of course, according to The Hunger Games, archery is a necessary skill as well.
The film gets a bit ideological as it examines how the evil queen rules the people of the kingdom. I explained to a buddy that the handsome prince (Armie Hammer) was bamboozled into allying with the queen and so he and Snow (Lilly Collins) had to face off against each other. Snow had perhaps a week of fencing practice whereas the prince had obviously been practicing all his life, so their fencing wasn't really much of a contest, but she distinguished herself through her resourcefulness and quick thinking.

Comment on double standards

I'm scribbling out my response to Krauthammer's column in the Inky today, but I was most amused by the question posed by the  commenter who calls himself "The Monk": 

Bush was lambasted when he announced "Mission Accomplished" yet the media has not criticized President Obama one bit for his constant crowing that "Osama is dead, and GM is alive". Why the double standard?

Erm, well, let's see, the "mission" was NOT accomplished, if it had been, then US troops would have left Iraq. They didn't. they remained. Sure, if one defines the "mission" as merely overthrowing Saddam Hussein, then yes, that was accomplished, but Bush clearly meant much more than that. He wanted a "radical reconstruction of [Iraqs] entire economy." He meant that he had accomplished the first steps in bringing prosperity and stability to Iraq, that he would replace tyranny with democracy, or at least that he would give Iraqis a government that they would be content with. He did none of that. Heck, he couldn't even restore electric power to Iraq and because he couldn't follow up his initial military success against a nation that had been weakened by years of sanctions, Bush lost whatever success American arms had given him by May 2003.

How does the killing of Osama bin Laden compare with this? There's no indication that Obama ever wanted anything more than the destruction of al Qaeda and that project is proceeding quite smoothly, thank you very much. According to ABC News:

ABDUL BARI ATWAN: It seems Osama bin Laden had a long-term strategy. He told me personally that he can't go and fight the Americans and their country. But if he manages to provoke them and bring them to the Middle East and to their Muslim worlds, where he can find them or fight them on his own turf, he will actually teach them a lesson. It seems the invasion of Iraq fulfilled Osama bin Laden's wish. That's why the Americans are losing in Iraq, financially and on a human basis, and even their allies, including Australia, are really losing patience, losing money, losing personnel, losing reputation in that part of the world.

By ending the Iraq War on a schedule (As opposed to waiting for conditions to be fulfilled), Obama has stopped the bleeding and has frustrated one of bin Laden's objectives. General Motors is indeed alive and doing well.

In order for there to be a "double standard," Bush and Obama had to have made similar statements with similar intentions. They obviously didn't as Bush made grand and glorious plans for a brand new Middle East and Obama just wants to destroy al Qaeda and get America's economy back up to speed. There's simply no indication that Obama is pushing for more. Sorry "Monk," but your question is a FAIL!

Republican campaign and billionaires versus education

Laura Ingraham feels that Mitt Romney will win by "reminding people that we have 11.7% unemployment, not 8%" (I more or less agree with her featured, headline view that for Romney to try for a "human moment" is a fool's errand as he's a dick and there's no point in his trying pretend otherwise). By the way, Media Matters disagrees with Ingraham's assertion, calling it baseless. The problem with telling voters that the economy is in bad shape is that we already know that. The real problem is what his plans are for doing something about it.

VP candidate Ryan's no help. He spent his Sunday talk show appearance saying he and Romney will fix the economy, but kept claiming that the subject was too complicated and wonkish to get into. Of course, he could book a smallish university auditorium, warn the audience in advance that his speech was going to be lengthy and complicated and have at it. Not all that many people would see the whole speech, but economists and analysts could review something really meaty and substantive.

I completely agree with Ryan's statement that:

We want to grow the pie. We want economic opportunity. We want people to be able to get a better job, have more income security and higher take-home pay. And you can do that through economic growth.

There's no question that this is definitely the way to do it, but then Ryan makes a bizarre statement:

Attend our town hall meetings. Look at how we're walking people through how we fix Medicare, how we fix Social Security, how we create jobs, how we reform the tax code, how we have an energy policy, an education policy, a trade policy. Mitt Romney has put out more specifics on how to revive this economy, on how to get people back to work than the incumbent president of the United States has.

This is not the slightest bit believable. If these details had ever been presented, why doesn't anybody have the transcripts for any of those town hall meetings? Obviously, there are many people who would be happy to present these details to a broader public, if only to show fellow citizens how stupid they are.

Update: From Ezra Klein's analysis:

That doesn’t mean Romney is doomed to lose this election. But he needs to do more than convince voters that the economy is bad at this very moment. He needs to convince them that the economy will be better if he’s elected president. And that means convincing them that he’s got a policy agenda capable of turning the economy around.

Which gets to Romney’s real challenge in the debates, which has also been his real difficulty throughout the campaign: He doesn’t have an appealing policy agenda capable of turning this thing around, and his party hasn’t given him the freedom to construct one.

On a completely difference note, I'm very pleased to report that the movie "Won't Back Down" is a complete and utter bomb. I saw the preview. Wasn't impressed. Maggie Gyllenhaal plays a very enthusiastic, vivacious single parent. Holly Hunter is credited, but I didn't see her anywhere in the preview. Main problem I had with the preview is that the movie appears to be very two-dimensional, setting up a very simple problem, followed by an equally simple solution.  I saw later that the movie is very anti-teachers' union and that it suggests privatizing schools. As I pointed out back in June, privatization is not driven by popular demand, it's driven by wealthy special interests and it's simply not the answer. Not surprisingly, the movie is

Funded by Republican billionaire (and owner of the Weekly Standard) Philip Anschutz, who also funded the anti-teachers union documentary Waiting for Superman, the movie is, happily, drawing terrible reviews, many of which comment directly on its political mission.

Unfortunately, I wrote to my Representative and both Senators about the apparently bipartisan desire to make deep cuts in the budget that will, naturally, have a deep and unnecessary, very painful impact on the public at large. They all appeared determined to make those cuts anyway. Paul Krugman calls attention to the planned cuts. Let's hope he has an impact.

Bill O'Reilly and the closed world of Fox News

Bill O'Reilly claimed, first in a conversation with Laura Ingraham and then in his own show, that the Internet was making people stupid and prone to fantasy explanations. That's presumably as opposed to reading the local newspaper, plus maybe an out-of-town one like the New York Times, or watching one to three of three TV channels, as was true back during the 1950s and 60s. Problem with that theory is, unlike Fox News, where Roger Ailes puts out talking points of the day in memos to all of the staff, most of what people find on the Internet tells a consistent story. Why is that? Well, because it's true. When you have multiple, independent sources all reporting more or less the same thing, it's highly likely to be the truth.
Vice Presidential candidate Paul Ryan obviously needs to spend less time in the Fox News hothouse and more time out on the Internet. Ryan appears to subscribe to the belief that there are such things under the Affordable Care Act as "death panels." Former Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin put out this idea, inspired by what appeared to be a sort of a cross between black & white horror films and dystopian novels like 1984 and Brave New World (She even makes a reference to "Orwellian" in her initial Facebook post on the claim), that a group of authoritarian figures would make arbitrary, soulless decisions that certain patients would either live or die. There was no mention in her post of the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB), that was an assertion made by a spokesperson after media figures and politicians started questioning her claim.
Wikipedia is frequently criticized as an unreliable source, but even Wikipedia reports flat out that the "death panels" claim was debunked. The claim was such a blatantly shameless lie that it won the award for "Lie of the Year" from Politifact.
Listening to the video of Ryan's description of "death panels," he appears to be suggesting that Medicare would do better by simply handing doctors everything they ask for in terms of payments, that the government should excercise no controls whatsoever and should not try and impose any sort of discipline when it comes to payments. And this is the fellow who advertises himself as a fiscal conservative?!?!?!