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Friday night Music-Woody Guthrie

Friday, March 21, 2008

I’ve made it a rule to avoid this type of video, in which there’s actually no video, but most rules are made to be broken. It being Good Friday, this song seemed to be appropriate.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDS00Pnhkqk[/youtube]

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It’s time for her to go

Friday, March 21, 2008

Josh Marshall links to this article at the Politico that argues that the press has been complicit in pushing a narrative that Hillary Clinton still has a chances to win the nomination. In this morning’s Times, even that narrative appears to be crumbling. Bill Richardson’s endorsement is likely the first in a cascade of endorsements from super delegates, who recognize the need for this battle to be over, to allow Obama to pivot and face McCain.

Wouldn’t it be nice to see Hillary put her country (and, incidentally her party) first and leave with her head high? We have an uncommitted superdelegate here in the Second, our own Joe Courtney. Maybe it’s time for Joe to get on board the Obama train, no matter which of the two he would actually prefer. We need to circle the wagons around our eventual candidate. That candidate, it now seems clear, will be Barack Obama. So long as Hillary is out there it will be more difficult for Obama to deal with the Swift boating he is currently enduring.

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Today’s Comic

Friday, March 21, 2008

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Happy Good Friday

Friday, March 21, 2008

Today we observe Good Friday, on which the believable events of the Easter myth took place. It takes no stretch of the imagination to believe that a person with a revolutionary message like Jesus’ would be executed. As for the rest, well return from the dead is a bit hard to swallow, Richard Nixon’s political comeback notwithstanding.

I spent a large part of last evening searching youtube for a good outtake from the film version of Jesus Christ Superstar. In my humble opinion Webber and Rice did a good job of exploring some of the issues raised by this fable, particularly the fate of poor Judas. It is the case, after all, that we can only assign real blame to him if he was not, as the story implies, a cosmic pawn in Jesus’ game. I had never seen the film version before. It turns out the whole thing is available on youtube, chopped into pieces, song by song. Unfortunately it is terribly dated. Jesus and his pals are portrayed as a bunch of roving hippies; and what’s with all the males, including the high priests, wearing clothes that bare their chests? (Except Jesus of course). So the film’s a no-go. Before I leave that subject, why is it the case that in every film about Jesus he’s portrayed as a sort of weakling blond guy, who appears more acted upon than actor? The guy was a Middle Eastern Jew and was a carpenter for at least 10 years. That was before the days of power tools folks. He should be portrayed as muscle bound, dark skinned, and dark haired and, god or man, someone with a little charisma and intestinal fortitude. I mean, the man drew large crowds and, if the story is to be believed, withstood torture and a grisly execution. Even the CIA couldn’t have broken him.

So, since Jesus let me down again, at least his filmed versions, I am falling back on an old stand-by, the very best movie ever made about crucifixion, The Life of Brian, in which we learn a few lessons about life:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1loyjm4SOa0[/youtube]

Now that’s true theology.

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The news, 21st Century style

Thursday, March 20, 2008

This morning’s Day (I couldn’t find the article on-line), on page A-3 (not the Entertainment section), contains a short AP article reporting the latest developments in American Idol. The doings on the TV show are reported as straight news. We are informed that a contestant that one of the judge’s didn’t like has been voted off the show. What’s next? Perhaps we’ll be getting page three accounts of the latest developments in popular soap operas.

This is not quite the same as reporting fantasy as reality, but it comes awfully close. Is this a reflection of the way people think, or is the media creating a mode of thinking that blurs the line between fact and fiction. Perhaps the tendencies reinforce one another. We live in strange times indeed.

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Vidal gets in the last word

Thursday, March 20, 2008

Old enmities die hard. Gore Vidal takes a swipe at Newsweek for sullying his reputation in the course of burnishing that of the loathsome William F. Buckley. It’s worth reading, if just for the prose stylings, though it appears to suffer from a lack of editing. I’m old enough to dimly remember the debate to which Vidal refers, in which Vidal defended the rights of the demonstrators in Chicago 1968, and Buckley stood up for the police state. Vidal is right that Buckley consistently got a free pass from the “liberal” media, which chose to ignore his Neanderthal views and some quite despicable actions because he kissed their asses and used big words, which in the view of many made him a bona fide intellectual. All that aside, there seems to have been a falling off since then, judging by the type of idiots who pass for commentators these days. Buckley does appear to be an intellectual giant compared to pygmies like Sean Hannity, and when was the last time someone as decidedly left wing as Gore Vidal was allowed on national television.

Toward the end of his screed Vidal makes an observation about the state of our media which I must pass on, since it is in accord with my own thinking, and therefore must be right:

The unique mess that our republic is in can be, in part, attributed to a corrupt press whose roots are in mendacious news (sic) magazines like Time and Newsweek, aided by tabloids that manufacture fictional stories about actual people. This mingling of opinion and fiction has undone a media never devoted to truth. Hence, the ease with which the Republican smear-machine goes into action when they realize that yet again the party’s permanent unpopularity with the American people will cause them defeat unless they smear individually those who question the junk that the media has put into so many heads. Anyone who says “We gotta fight ’em over there or we’re gonna have to fight ’em over here.” This absurdity has been pronounced by every Republican seeking high office. The habit of lying is now a national style that started with “news” magazines that was further developed by pathological liars that proved to be “good” Entertainment on TV. But a diet of poison that has done none of us any good.

Unfortunately, this paragraph is one that suffered from bad editing or bad transcription, but the basic message gets through.

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Thirty and counting

Wednesday, March 19, 2008

Today my wife and I celebrated our thirtieth anniversary. I’m none the worse for wear. At least I don’t feel the worse for wear. That’s not really so surprising since I’ve spent those years married to her. What’s amazing is that she’s also held up remarkably well, despite spending thirty years married to me.

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Hillary and Obama on mercenaries

Wednesday, March 19, 2008

Hillary Clinton recently announced that, if elected, she would “ask the Joint Chiefs for their help in reducing reliance on armed private military contractors with the goal of ultimately implementing a ban on such contractors,”. When this first came across my RSS reader I thought it was great and intended to give Hillary credit for getting out front on the issue. Unfortunately, and as usual with Hillary, there’s more to the story.

Although she’s attacked Obama for not taking a similar position, in fact Obama introduced anti-mercenary legislation before the incident in Fallujah. Obama’s legislation would have subjected the mercenaries to U.S. criminal law, which sounds good at first blush, but may in fact provide helpful PR cover for the companies supplying the mercenaries without really curbing any abuses:

In February 2007, Obama introduced contractor reform and oversight legislation that has become the Democrats’ major plan in the Congress. Obama’s bill seeks to make all contractors subject to prosecution in US civilian courts for crimes committed on a foreign battlefield. The bill is not without its problems. In theory, FBI investigators would deploy to the crime scene, gather evidence and interview witnesses, leading to indictments and prosecutions.

Apart from the fact that it would be impossible to effectively police such an enormous deployment of private contractors (at present basically equal to the number of active duty US troops in Iraq), the legislation would give the private military industry a tremendous PR victory. The companies could finally claim that a legally accountable structure governed their operations, yet they would be well aware that such legislation would be nearly impossible to enforce. Perhaps that is why the industry has passionately backed this approach.

The problem, according to Jeffrey Scahill of the Nation, from whose article these facts are gleaned, is that both Hillary and Obama must rely on mercenaries to protect the thousands of people they both intend to leave in Iraq, should they ever really substantially withdraw troops. So both of them will be forced to leave a huge contingent of largely uncontrolled armed thugs in the country. That ought to win a lot of hearts and minds.

Neither Obama or Clinton are willing to consider the obvious solution of a truly complete withdrawal from Iraq. They are both willing to allow George Bush to bequeath a permanent Middle East headache to them and to this country. They either truly believe we should try to maintain our imperial sway, or are afraid to risk the wrath of the neo-cons, who got us into this mess in the first place. I’m not sure which of those is worse.

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Another round lost to the crazies

Tuesday, March 18, 2008

Across the left side of the blogosphere, tempers are running high. Supporters of each candidate are damning the other, and threatening to withhold their votes should the other side prevail. In the heat of the moment we forget that the difference between them is slight, and that a McCain victory may seal the fate of this country for generations.

Look no further than the Supreme Court, for which the bell may already have tolled. The Court is apparently poised to rule in favor of the NRA, and, for the first time, and in spite of the language and historical context, find that the Second Amendment guarantees an individual’s right to “bear arms”. Justice Kennedy, the swing vote, is sure “that the amendment’s framers wanted to assure the ability of ‘the remote settler to defend himself and his family against hostile Indian tribes and outlaws, wolves and bears and grizzlies and things like that,’ as he phrased his concern with self-defense at one point”. Nowadays this apparently translates into the capability to blow away dozens of your fellow citizens.

The court is unfazed by the fact that by ignoring the introductory clause in the Amendment, it will be needlessly arming criminals. The government, which took a surprisingly reasonable (for the Bushies) position, pointed out that if the militia clause merely means that the type of arms Americans are allowed to bear are those of the same class that the 18th century militia bore, then the Amendment would now protect the right to bear machine guns. Counsel for the plaintiffs was surprisingly moderate too. He allowed that maybe you could forbid someone from bringing a gun to school. How reasonable. But then again, it was just a maybe.

This is an important battle lost to the crazies. There is hope, assuming we can replace one of these Supreme Idiots before they are allowed to do further harm. The Bill or Rights was originally not applied to the states. That is, it was considered a limitation on the federal government only. That’s why, for instance, many states had established churches long after the Constitution was adopted. States were free, as well, to limit speech as they saw fit. When the 14th Amendment was adopted, it was understood that certain rights established by the Bill of Rights were incorporated into the Fourteenth Amendment and were thus binding on the states. E.g, no more established churches (I think they were all disestablished by that point, anyway) and no more suppression of speech. (That is now left exclusively to the feds, thank you very much). The protections in the Bill or Rights were not incorporated en masse, but on a case by case basis. The Second Amendment has never been incorporated into the 14th, and there are sound reasons to believe that it shouldn’t be, but of course those may cut no ice with the Roberts court.

This is a court that has steadily eroded those rights that we traditionally believe are at the true core of democracy. But they have no problem expanding a “right” that we can do without, and that no person with brains could imagine the founders intended that we have. I refuse to believe, for instance, that a man as fundamentally sane as James Madison would like the idea of giving individuals the absolute right to own and possess machine guns.

So if you are considering sitting this one out if your favorite moderate to centrist candidate doesn’t get the nomination, ask yourself this: How does the Republican establishment placate its nut job base? Take a look at the courts. They are half destroyed now. McCain will not hesitate to finish the job.

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Who would have thought it

Monday, March 17, 2008

From the LA Times:

Freelance financial watchdogs who examined the paperwork on sub-prime home loans being sold to Wall Street had an inside view of the boom in easy-money lending this decade. The reviewers say they raised plenty of red flags about flaws so serious that mortgages should have been rejected outright — such as borrowers’ incomes that seemed inflated or documents that looked fake — but the problems were glossed over, ignored or stricken from reports.

…

Executives at the two main firms that hired the freelancers — Shelton, Conn.-based Clayton Holdings Inc. and San Francisco-based Bohan Group — say the reviewers weren’t there to find every potential problem with a sub-prime loan. Rather, the executives say, the job was to perform specific tests to help buyers determine how much to pay for a pool of loans. In some cases, the investors wanted only minimal testing, said Frank P. Filipps, Clayton’s chairman and CEO.

As always its hard to tell where gross negligence ended and criminality began. I can personally testify that some of these lenders had a fairly lax attitude toward fraud. Years ago I represented several people who had purchased “flipped” houses. In one case my clients were on SSI because they were mentally retarded. The house they bought for over $70,000.00 in New London had sold to the flipper a year before for less than $10,000.00 and it was worth every penny of that. According to the loan application provided to the nationally known subprime lender my client was making $5,000.00 a month working at the seller’s used car dealership, an obvious fraud of which my client was unaware. The appraisal came in at, if I recall correctly, over $80,000.00, and never mentioned the $10,000.00 sale price. Everyone involved was crooked.

In my naivete I contacted the lender before I brought suit, because, at first blush, it was as much a victim as my clients. It held $75,000.00 in paper that was bound to default on a house worth $20,000.00 at the very most. I figured that we could join forces to go after the folks who had defrauded us both. Much to my surprise, they were surprisingly unruffled by the situation. Later I concluded that the guy I spoke to (the head of the local branch) was in on the scam, but now I’m not so sure. Maybe they just didn’t really care, since they didn’t expect to be holding the paper by the time the loans went South.

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