True Dat

(note to wingers on both sides: expressing the opinion that Obama is not in fact moderate-lefty in the current US political spectrum, but is instead whatever thing you hate the most, is an IQ test in itself. Try not to fail it)

-John Scalzi

And, bonus quote:

But Obama’s real problem is not Obama or his own policies; Obama’s real problem is that in Congress, his allies are incompetent cowards and his adversaries are smug dicks.

Why Everyone in the Circular Firing Squad Should Turn Around

There was a lot of delusion among progressives who convinced themselves, in the face of clear evidence to the contrary, that Obama was a strong champion of their values. He wasn’t and isn’t.
That doesn’t mean that there’s no difference between the parties, that everything would have been the same if McCain had won. But progressives are in the process of losing a big chance to change the narrative, and that’s largely because they have a leader who never had any inclination to do so.
-Paul Krugman

For what it's worth, I never thought Barack Obama was anything more than a center of the road politician. I appreciated that he at least told the lies I wanted to hear during the campaign, and it was nice to hear lip service being paid to my beliefs and agenda. But I never expected him to be anything other than what he is, which is a politician. Perhaps smarter and certainly more eloquent than the average politician, but a politician nonetheless.

But whatever he is, it remains the case that a good portion of the electorate that voted for him, his 'base' if you will, was the Progressive Left, many of whom did a little projecting, unfortunately, and came to believe, in the face of plenty of evidence to the contrary, that he shared their values and their policy agenda. And to some extent he might have. Probably not as much as they (or I) might wish, but at very least he recognized many of the obvious problems that thirty years of being a 'center-right nation' have caused, and at least paid lip service to solving them.

Now, after months of bickering and mishandling, one of those solutions, Health Care Reform, which is something that's needed doing for several decades if not a centrury now, is on the brink of getting the foundation laid or failing for another generation. And while it's important in and of itself, it's also important in that it provides a rallying point for Progressives to organize around.

You can bitch and blog all you want, and God knows I do plenty of both myself, but at the end of the day, you gotta get in there and do your duty as a citizen. You gotta write the letters and make the calls and put the pressure on your elected representatives, because if you don't, they'll just listen to and aim to please the people that do, starting with the people that pay for their campaigns. Votes are great, and we all know that nobody gets elected without them, but money comes in a close second, and it certainly concentrates influence more than votes do.

Progressives may not have the leverage we think we deserve, and perhaps we never will, but we have more now than we've had in decades, and it's more important than ever that we use it. For most of the last decade, we could howl and scream all we wanted, but the people in power (i.e. Republicans) weren't going to listen because it wasn't our votes that elected them.

But that's all changed now. Obama and the 111th Congress need us in order to stay in power, which means that, if we act in sufficient numbers and with a modicum of discipline, we can influence the direction of policy more than we could in the recent past. If we can actually get some legislation enacted, like Health Care Reform (imperfect though it is), then it will make life better for people, which will go a long way to convincing them that our ideas are better than the ideas of the people on the other side of the aisle. We're already halfway there, because the folks on the right had the whole damned government for six or eight years and everybody saw how well that went.

But now we own it, at least in the eyes of the public. So that means we have to make it work.

Eyes on the prize, people. It's a long, hard slog, and it'll be filled with disappointment, but if we aren't willing to get in there and make it happen, nobody else is going to.

In Defense of the Democratic Party

There is no realistic scenario in which the electorate is impressed by policymakers who spend a year doing the hard work of tackling a seemingly-impossible challenge, pass the landmark legislation, and then somehow manage to come up short anyway.

-Steve Benen

Look, I hate the Democrats as much as anybody. They're feckless, and gutless, and they lack the courage of their convictions. They're in bed with many if not all of the same kleptocrats as the Republicans. But they do at least try to govern effectively when they're in power, and they do try to identify and solve the many looming crises that hang over our world and our nation like the proverbial Sword of Damocles. Yes, they must often compromise the best solutions to those problems, because the people with whom they negotiate have pretty much abandoned the notion that government is for anything other than handing out fat defense and energy contracts to their friends and the people and corporations who subsidize their campaign efforts. And they're a little too like Jesus, turning cheek after cheek until they're red and raw both top and bottom.

I wish they'd fight harder. I wish they'd get more accomplished.

I wish they'd at least realize that the other side isn't interested in finding common ground or even common sense solutions to the serious problems we as a nation, a people, hell, even a species, face.

But there really aren't any other options. No other game in town, except for the Republicans, and they've already amply demonstrated that they think campaigning is more important than governing, and when they do manage to get ahold of some power we end up with an endless series of debacles like the George W. Bush presidency.

For those, like me, who would pursue a largely Progressive agenda, who would like to see real problems addressed and life made better for everyone, both at home and abroad, there really isn't another credible vehicle for making the change I desire, the change I believe, in my inmost heart, is needful if we all are to survive for much longer. It may break my heart, and does on a regular basis, but the Democratic party, with its big, dysfunctional tent and its penchant for the circular firing squad, is pretty much it if what I want is Progressive legislation.

And that is what I want.

Thoughts on Caprica

I loved about half the run of Battlestar Galactica. I was totally addicted to it for the first season, when emergency after emergency came up and it seemed as if at any moment it might be curtains for humanity. Then they lost me, when it started to be more of a soap opera than a far-flung sci-fi adventure series. Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of character development and the human drama associated with big events like the near extinction of humanity and the headlong flight into the unknown reaches of space with the agents of said near extinction in hot pursuit. But the series was more interesting when it was about the hard choices and the sacrifices demanded. Once things got to be about how everybody felt about each other I became less interested, and once they started playing political campaign I found it difficult to suspend my disbelief. When they found a planet and then the Cylons came and conquered them it got a little more interesting, but by the time the revolution was over and they started looking for Earth again I just stopped caring, and watching.

So it was with mixed feelings that I approached the prequel series, Caprica, which takes place fifty-odd years before the Second Cylon invasion. For what it's worth, I paid no attention to any of the hype or the previews. Knew nothing about the plotlines or anything besides what the Directv description on my DVR had to say about it. Not a perfect beginner's mind, but close enough.

There will be spoilers in what's to follow. Caveat lector and such.

Too Funny

The Known Universe

This is pretty freakin' cool, a journey, to scale, from the surface of the Earth to the farthest reaches of space that we've seen and mapped and back again. Music's a little cheesy, but what do you expect?

The Massachusetts Special Election

Well, it appears that Milquetoast Martha, who apparently went on vacation to the Caribbean during a six-week special election campaign, has conceded the race for Ted Kennedy's Senate seat. The polls closed about an hour and a half ago, with all indications that what happened was, in fact, going to happen, and now it has.

It's hard to understate just what a stupendously poor campaign Coakley ran, what with the aforementioned poorly-scheduled vacation, along with her apparently referring to Kurt Schilling as a Yankees fan as well as just generally not getting out there and shaking hands and kissing babies. And it can't be denied that the trends in the national scene didn't do her any favors. People are, rightfully, unhappy about the direction the country is headed in, and I think anti-incumbent sentiment worked against the Democrats, even though Coakley was not, in fact, an incumbent. After all, when you're not happy, you want to throw the bums out, whoever the bums happen to be, and the Democrats (not that they act like it) are at least theoretically in charge, and are thus the bums to be throwing.

But Kennedy's seat should have been a shoo-in, and it's a testament to how far out of control the National Dialogue has gotten that the Democrats could lose it, and in doing so, probably lose Health Care Reform, which was his signature issue.

I don't know what the solution is, how we're going to get Health Care Reform now. All we needed was to get the basic bill on the books, and fix it later.

Well, maybe now there might be some momentum for discontinuing the filibuster. Luckily the Republicans mapped out the way to make it happen a few years ago. Wonder if the Democrats will have the stones to go there?

Yeah, I'm not holding my breath, either.

Posted Without Comment

"No, I'm not a pessimist. At some point the world shits on everybody. Pretending it ain't shit makes you an idiot, not an optimist."
-Justin's Dad

Posted Without Comment

You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.
-Leon Trotsky

Dear Progressive Community

I understand that you're disappointed in how things are turning out here in the Obama era. It was easy to believe, during the campaign, and in those heady days after the election, that the tide had turned, and that America had consciously chosen to move to the left. Or at least farther to the left than it has.

For what it's worth, it probably did. Not all of it, but enough to win the election.

But governing? Well, that's a whole other business. A messy, ugly, dirty business, compromised by its very nature. It doesn't help that the other team thinks it's more important for liberals and progressives to lose than it is for America to win, and will do and say anything to make the job of governance harder. Hell, one of their founding principles is that government is bad and shouldn't work. That's why things were so awful when they were in charge.

And now that they're not, it's even easier for them to be the great big jerks that they are and suffer little in the way of consequences for it. Thanks to Senate tradition (and a stupid one at that), 41 Senators, representing just 10% of the population, can stop any and all legislation in its tracks. It ain't fair, and it ain't right, and I don't really understand why it's allowed to function the way it is, but it's how things are. Yes, the Democrats have a supermajority, but only because people like Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson caucus with them. And since the Republicans basically filibuster everything that comes to the floor (and while it's in committee, too, for that matter), and because they move and vote in lock-step, having purged themselves of all moderates except the two estimable ladies from Maine, that means that only things that are acceptable to people like Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson get passed. Sucks, but there it is. Are there things that can be done about it? Sure. If nothing else, I'd like to see Harry Reid make Republicans actually filibuster. Make them stand there reading the phone book until they collapse in exhaustion. But there are good reasons not to (for instance, no other business can get done, which is less than wholly responsible).

The Democratic party is hardly perfect. It lacks discipline and cogency. Many of its members are just as venal and in the pockets of industry and the kleptocrat class as the other side. It's one of the reasons I'm only a democrat for about an hour every four years (since Presidential candidates are picked by caucus in Washington state). The problem is that it's a coalition, and an often uneasy one. Not everybody agrees on every- or even anything. Many are Blue Dogs, and represent districts and states that lean conservative. Expecting that these people are going to govern from the hard left is just crazy. It'd be one thing if we had 60 Russ Feingolds in the Senate, or even just 60 Chuck Schumers. But we don't, and deals have to be made. Which means that Progressives aren't going to get what they want all or even much of the time.

None of which excuses the collective fucking hissy fit I'm seeing all over the net and hearing from people I know.

You know what? I'm disappointed, too. In Barack Obama, and the Democratic party. I want a single payer health care system. I want the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to end. I want the financial markets regulated and the environment saved. I want nuclear proliferation to stop, and for everybody in the whole goddamned world to have enough food to eat, a decent education, and a safe and comfortable place to sleep at night. Even Africans and Muslims. Hell, especially Africans and Muslims. I want terrorists to be read their Miranda rights and given a fair trial in open court. I want government surveillance of phone calls, emails, text messages, and internet surfing to stop. Shall I go on? I think I've made my point.

I was heartened by Obama's election. I really was. Not because I think or thought that he was particularly liberal or progressive, but because he was more liberal and more progressive than anybody who's made a credible run for President since I can remember. I had no illusions that suddenly, just because we elected a black man to the Presidency, who spoke well and articulated the hopes and dreams of the best of America, that all of a sudden the entirety of the Progressive agenda would be enacted or that everything was going to magically change for the better. But given the choice between Obama and McCain, there was no choice. And things have gotten better.

But they need to keep getting better. And this whole fuck-it-all, they're-all-the-same-so-I'm-just-gonna-take-my-bat-and-ball-and-go-home attitude that I see everywhere is just fucking horseshit. Do you believe in a Progressive agenda? Do you want to make the world a better place? Then get out there and fight for it. Do something. Raise money. Call your congressional representatives. Write letters. Blog. Fight and win the war of ideas.

This is about more than you, or how you feel. Politics is not therapy. There are serious problems in this world and this country that need solving, and if you're not in the game then nobody cares what you think or how you feel.

Take Martha Coakley. I don't particularly support her. She's a milquetoast candidate who's run a terrible campaign. She might even lose. To a Republican. In Massachusetts. But you know what? I gave her money today. You know why? Because if her opponent wins, he'll support a filibuster when the reconciled Health Care Reform bill comes to the Senate floor, and there won't be the votes to override the filibuster, and Health Care Reform will die. And while it's not the bill that I want, what it represents is the recognition, on a federal level, that every American is entitled to adequate health care. That's fucking huge. That's something that will never be taken away. Social Security, when first legislated, left all kinds of people out. It didn't even include cost of living adjustments. But over the years, bit by bit, it was expanded, and fixed, and got better, and now noone even thinks about trying to roll it back. And everybody in America has some income they can count on when they get too old to work. And that's a good thing.

And it'll be the same for Health Care Reform. That's why Republicans and the Insurance industry have fought so hard against it. It's a game-changer, another nail in the coffin of conservatism's stupid notion that the rich should be left alone to fuck everybody else over as roughly and raggedly as they want.

You can be as disgusted as you want about the lesser of two evils. I'm right there with you. But throwing up your hands and not participating means that the greater evil wins. And when the greater evil wins, then shit gets worse. Period. Ten years ago everybody on the left was talking about how Al Gore was no better than George W. Bush. And enough of them voted for Ralph Nader, even knowing how close it was going to be, that Al Gore lost and George W. Bush won. You wanna tell me that things would be the same if Al Gore had been President for the Oughts? That we'd roll back environmental protections and fall for al Qaeda's trap? That he'd've given away the budget surplus in a tax cut for the wealthiest one percent of the country and put us in hock to the Chinese to go fight two wars halfway around the world? Cuz if you do believe those things, you are fucking delusional. And while Al Gore would probably have disappointed me, too, the fucking horrorshow that was the Bush Presidency could've been avoided if only the hard left had thought more about the collective good than about their own fucking feelings.

There's a lot that's wrong with this country. Always has been. Probably always will be. But if you want things to get better, you have to keep choosing the lesser of two evils, until you shift things over enough that you can choose the greater of two goods. But until then, you have to keep the pressure on. You have to stay engaged. You have to keep fighting.

It may feel good to throw up your hands and walk away. But it doesn't fix anything. It doesn't make anything better. And it sure as hell isn't going to make the world a better place.

Posted Without Comment

Of course they're sinking. It was just a matter of time before more of that reflection of the people's uncomfortableness that they feel towards this administration is manifesting in these poll numbers. There is an obvious disconnect between President Obama and the White House, what they are doing to our economy and what they are doing in terms of not allowing Americans to feel as safe as we had felt and people finally saying, "You know, this is not the representative form of government that we thought that we had voted in." After a year of time, people are saying, "No, we want the White House, we want President Obama to hear from us. We want these common sense solutions with health care, with jobs, with the economy, with the war on terror to be implemented so we can get back on the right track."
-Sarah Palin

Posted Without Comment

"I'd rather overreact than underreact." This appears to be the consensus view in Washington, but it is quite wrong. The purpose of terrorism is to provoke an overreaction. Its real aim is not to kill the hundreds of people directly targeted but to sow fear in the rest of the population. Terrorism is an unusual military tactic in that it depends on the response of the onlookers. If we are not terrorized, then the attack didn't work. Alas, this one worked very well.
-Fareed Zakaria

(hat tip to Bob Cesca)

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Here's a Thought

So, one thing everybody's always on about when it comes to Muslim terrorism and terrorists is just how many of the guys that get radicalized are educated, middle-class people. The consensus seems to be, basically, wtf?

I think the underlying assumption is that educated folks should be harder to radicalize because they aren't dirt-poor and, as such, have so much more to lose. I mean, here are guys whose families have enough money to send them overseas to Europe or the United States to study useful professions (engineers seem to be especially well-represented among radicalized Muslims), who get to spend time in the West, in our generally freer, more tolerant atmosphere, while they're being educated, and who come out the other end with valuable job skills. All of which would seem to gravitate away from radicalization (after all, radicals are typically drawn from the ranks of those with little or nothing to lose).

But here's the kicker. These guys, many of them young, return home with their degrees to countries that just don't have any jobs for them. So here they are, young and ready to work, with an education they can't use because their economies are lacking in opportunity, and they get frustrated.

What's worse, and this is, I think, the crux of the matter, is that because they can't find work, they can't get married, since they can't support themselves, much less a family. Which means they can't have sex. And that's a problem.

As we all know, or should by now, Islam has some very strict rules about gender relations. I'm not going to go into a deconstruction of sharia law here, or even express my own feelings about that. I'm not a Muslim, and I do my best to respect the faiths of others, even when I do not share that faith, or necessarily understand it. But the fact remains that in conservative Islamic situations there is very little chance that a young man with no job is going to be able to woo a wife, which is pretty much the only acceptable path to the bedroom for him.

Sure, Muslims aren't the only religious conservatives that have a problem with premarital relations. I was once told by a Christian friend of mine, a woman, that she couldn't stand hanging out with the men in her church anymore because "all they want to do is get married, so they can have sex."

It was funny at the time, but it got me to thinking.

However you feel about it, whatever your Book says, the fact remains that the prime directive of being alive is to reproduce. Human beings are no exception. We're wired, especially when we're young, to desire sex, preferably right now. That our societies have evolved rules that countermand that primordial drive may or may not be a tremendous mistake, but the fact remains that there exists a powerful tension between what our bodies tell us and what our societies tell us we should and shouldn't do.

So here are these guys. They're raised in a strict Muslim culture that says the only way they're ever going to get some is by getting married. They've spent time in the West, where the rules are quite a bit more relaxed (after all, the most conservative parts of the US also have the highest rates of unplanned pregnancies and sexually-transmitted infections, so we can safely say that there is sex being had, whatever the prevailing moral attitude toward it might be), where they might or might not have gotten a taste of that sweet, sweet fruit that is a woman's love. But whether or not they were successful at the dating game, the women are much freer and more open, and sexuality is much more prevalent, which when you're young and horny can be quite maddening.

They then return to a land where a woman may not so much as step outside her home without a male relation to escort her. And because the economy is poor, thanks either to a kleptocracy or foreign intervention, or both, they can't find work, even with their advanced degrees. So they're not only frustrated by having all this training and education and it not doing them a damn bit of good, but they know that until they get that job and get that money that they're never going to get some love, which'll drive any man crazy.

No wonder they're so often willing to sacrifice themselves to kill Westerners. When you've got no healthy outlet for the perfectly natural desire to get your rocks off and you can't see a way forward to ever getting to, you become imbalanced and angry. Easy to radicalize. I'm sure it doesn't help that the Islamic heaven seems to involve a large supply of willing virgins, but even if it didn't there would still be this pool of young men who feel they have a reasonable expectation of finding work, getting married, and having, if not a good life, then at least sex, and who are frustrated beyond all reason when they discover that even though they have jumped through all the appropriate hoops that they still don't get to get some.

Hell, it's a wonder there aren't more of them.

Also, Too

"Fine, let’s take a vote. Who wants fish for dinner?...Yeah, democracy ain’t so fun when it fucks you, huh?”
-Justin's Dad

More Health Care Bill Explanation! This time from Paul Krugman!

Take it away, Dr. Krugman.

Start with the proposition that we don’t want our fellow citizens denied coverage because of preexisting conditions — which is a very popular position, so much so that even conservatives generally share it, or at least pretend to.

So why not just impose community rating — no discrimination based on medical history?

Well, the answer, backed up by lots of real-world experience, is that this leads to an adverse-selection death spiral: healthy people choose to go uninsured until they get sick, leading to a poor risk pool, leading to high premiums, leading even more healthy people dropping out.

So you have to back community rating up with an individual mandate: people must be required to purchase insurance even if they don’t currently think they need it.

But what if they can’t afford insurance? Well, you have to have subsidies that cover part of premiums for lower-income Americans.

In short, you end up with the health care bill that’s about to get enacted. There’s hardly anything arbitrary about the structure: once the decision was made to rely on private insurers rather than a single-payer system — and look, single-payer wasn’t going to happen — it had to be more or less what we’re getting. It wasn’t about ideology, or greediness, it was about making the thing work.

What's the takeaway? Because we lack the political will for the better system (cuz, you know, socialism), what we got is about what we had to get.

Hopefully, what we're getting will be a step in the right direction. After all, the single most successful subsystem of American health care is Medicare, which has its faults but that everybody seems to agree works pretty good, which is a single payer system.

But thanks to politics, echo chambers, and the seeming disconnect between the stakes of the game and the game itself in some circles, we can't just move to the smarter, more efficient, more humane system right away.

Okay. Guess we'll just have to take a deep breath, steel ourselves for the long slog up the hill, keep up the pressure on our duly elected representatives, and keep winning the war of evidence and ideas.

I think these words of Churchill's, though used in a different context, might prove instructive:

The United States invariably does the right thing, after having exhausted every other alternative.

I have the best girlfriend ever, I'm pretty sure.

Last night a funny thing happened while I was at work. First of all, an old friend I used to work with came in, someone I hadn't seen in a long time. That was cool, and I was happy to see her, and also surprised that she'd brought me a bottle of wine for my birthday, which is on Sunday.

Then another friend showed up, and he had a bottle of wine, too. Then, while I was talking with them, another friend came, and she had a bottle of wine for me too.

"Did you read the cards?" the first friend asked. And then I noticed that each of the bottles, in addition to a colorful ribbon around the neck, had an identical little envelope on it. I started opening them, and each one had a little note in it, in Kendal's handwriting, telling me something about me she loved.

Then another friend walked by the outside of the bar, someone on my soccer team that I haven't seen in months (I tweaked my knee a bit before I had to go to Florida and haven't had a chance to play since, much to my dismay). I ran out to say hi, still not quite getting it, thinking how random it was that a friend who lives on the Eastside would walk by my bar in Fremont with her two kids on a Wednesday night. Until it was revealed that she too had a bottle of wine for me, and had made me a cd, too.

I went back inside and texted Kendal 'Did you do this?' She totally left me hanging.

By 6:30 more than a dozen of my friends had shown up, each bearing a bottle of wine with a note from Kendal on it. Many had added their own. By the end of the night I was up to around 29 or 30 bottles, maybe more, from people in all of my circles of friends, who'd all dropped by to wish me a surprise happy birthday. There were people from my soccer team, people I've worked with at a few different places, people I went to school with; the list goes on.

And Kendal did it all. Without my knowing. She tracked them all down, individually, and got a note to each of them for them to attach to their bottle. I'm amazed. Absolutely floored. Noone has ever done anything this awesome for me for my birthday before. Ever. I had one of the best nights I can remember, even having to work. All night people kept showing up. Some could only stay for a minute, some stayed an hour or more. Every one, and every moment, was almost unbearably precious to me, and will stay with me forever. I can't express how blessed I feel to have such people in my life.

Especially Kendal. The best girlfriend ever. Whatever I did to win or deserve her, I'm glad that I did it, and I hope I keep doing it.

Posted Without Comment

To live is to accept some modicum of risk. To live in an advaned, industrailized, technological, hegemonic, militaristic, imperial society in the twenty-first century is to accept with fair certainty that someone, somewhere, wants to blow you up, like, right now. This is, as they say, the cost of doing business, an inevitable outcome of the system in which we live, work, and pretend to thrive.
-IOZ

Hm

I just watched the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff say on the Daily Show that the military was 40% smaller than it was in the Vietnam era. But our military budget has increased every year that I can remember. What gives?

Posted Without Comment

For me the basic dynamic of the mortgage bubble is some Ivy League dickwad hawking a billion dollars of securitized subprime mortgages to a pension fund, and then Hobie-sailing off into the sunset with a bonus after they all blow up.
-Matt Taibbi