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Some Jokes Aren't Funny

By Chris Hall
October 18, 2007
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From yesterday’s press conference at the White House, one of those things that should only be true in satire:

Reporter: Mr. President, following up on Vladimir Putin for amoment, he said recently that next year, when he has to step downaccording to the constitution, as the president, he may become primeminister; in effect keeping power and dashing any hopes for a genuinedemocratic transition there …

Bush: I’ve been planning that myself.

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Filed Under: Politics Tagged With: constitution, Fascism, George W. Bush, Politics

Paul Krugman Has a Blog

By Chris Hall
September 19, 2007
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For the last seven years, Paul Krugman has been the only voice in the New York Times to be a consistent and articulate voice for reason.  His critics are fond of calling him “shrill,” but he’s anything but — one of the things that I admire him for is his ability to remain calm and sensible and still confront outrages against common sense and democracy without compromise.  Now, in the same week that the Times has finally axed their accursed “Times Select” pay wall, they’ve given Krugman a blog where he can expand on the ideas in his columns and interact with his readers.  Put it on your feed. Now.

“I was born in 1953. Like the rest of my generation, I took the America I grew up in for granted – in fact, like many in my generation I railed against the very real injustices of our society, marched against the bombing of Cambodia, went door to door for liberal candidates. It’s only in retrospect that the political and economic environment of my youth stands revealed as a paradise lost, an exceptional episode in our nation’s history.”That’s the opening paragraph of my new book, The Conscience of a Liberal. It’s a book about what has happened to the America I grew up in and why, a story that I argue revolves around the politics and economics of inequality.

I’ve given this New York Times blog the same name, because the politics and economics of inequality will, I expect, be central to many of the blog posts – although I also expect to be posting on a lot of other issues, from health care to high-speed Internet access, from productivity to poll analysis. Many of the posts will be supplements to my regular columns; I’ll be using this space to present the kind of information I can’t provide on the printed page – especially charts and tables, which are crucial to the way I think about most of the issues I write about.

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Filed Under: Blogging, Politics Tagged With: New-York-Times, Paul-Krugman, Politics

Ship of Fools

By Chris Hall
July 1, 2007
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It’s worth giving your public email and a fake zip code to get past the registration barrier at The New Republic to read Johnann Hari’s account of being afloat with a bunch of conservatives afloat on a luxury cruise sponsored by National Review. It’s a great peek at the skull beneath the skin of modern conservatism. It confirms my feeling that the deaths of 3,000 Americans on September 11, 2001, was the best thing that could have happened to conservatives. Time and social change has long since made it unacceptable for them to whip up fear of the niggers and kikes (except eupehmistically, using the fantasias of welfare queens and the Liberal Media), and even faggot-bashing is beginning to lose its charm in certain circles. To the rescue comes the image of swarthy hordes from the East, ready to overwhelm the more civilized folks:

Some people go on singles’ cruises, some on ballroom-dancing cruises. This is the Muslims Are Coming cruise. Everyone thinks it. Everyone knows it. And the man most responsible for this insight is sitting only a few tables down: Mark Steyn. He is wearing sunglasses on top of his head and a bright shirt. Steyn’s thesis in his new book, America Alone, is simple: The “European races”–i.e., white people–“are too self-absorbed to breed,” but the Muslims are multiplying quickly. The inevitable result will be “large-scale evacuation operations circa 2015” as Europe is ceded to Al Qaeda and “Greater France remorselessly evolve[s] into Greater Bosnia.” He offers a light smearing of dubious demographic figures–he needs to turn 20 million European Muslims into more than 150 million in nine years, which is a lot of humping–to “prove” his case.

But facts, figures, and doubt are not on the itinerary of this cruise. With one or two exceptions, the passengers discuss “the Muslims” as a homogenous, sharia-seeking block–already with near-total control of Europe. Over the week, I am asked nine times–I counted–when I am fleeing Europe’s encroaching Muslim population for the safety of the United States.

The authoritarianism of the Right has become more and more naked in the last few years, and increasingly, I don’t know whether to see it as farce or tragedy. The ruling of the Supreme Court in favor of school segregation was a real blow to me, and I’m still reeling from it. Not that other rulings lately haven’t been just as bad, but there’s something about this latest one that is particularly heartbreaking. For over fifty years, Brown vs. Board of Education has been important not only because of the actual, direct changes that it made to people’s lives, but as a symbol that our system worked; that even when there were massive, long-standing injustices that contradicted our essential beliefs of justice and democracy, we had tools and the will to address those injustices, without having to set up guillotines and gallows in the streets. But in handing down its judgment, the Supreme Court not only wiped that judgment away as a symbol (or at least leaves it toothless), but cruelly, cynically, claimed that it was doing so in the name of furthering MLK’s Dream®. National Review itself tries to spin the new decision by praising Brown: “…the decision resembles Brown in a crucial respect: Starting now in Louisville and Seattle, students won’t be blocked from certain schools simply because they lack the proper melanin content.”

Avedon Carol is a much better thinker than I am, and so expresses with an elegant beauty exactly what scares me so much about the people who have been running our country for the last twenty years, and even better — why American Democracy is a beautiful thing well worth preserving:

When our Constitution was signed, two things made it stand out and brought praise and admiration from all over the world. One was the idea of rule of law from which no one was exempt, in a country without any kind of a king. The other – the thing that made us genuinely, literally unique, was that we had written the secular nature of our government into law, maintaining that there was no religious test for public office, no state religion, a wall of separation between church and state.

The conservative movement’s goal has always been to overturn both of those fundamental principles, and they are doing it. They must be stopped.

The twin philosophies driving the Republican Party — theocracy and governance by the free market — are fundamentally anti-democratic, more well-suited to a feudal society than to a democracy. Although it’s become de rigeur to shut down any implication that many pundits and politicians have intentions that are clearly authoritarian by tossing back Godwin’s Law, it’s time to say it: George W. Bush and his friends are fascists. There shouldn’t even be an argument about this, especially after the latest revelations of Cheney’s total disregard for the system of checks and balances. When John fucking Dean, a veteran of the Watergate scandal, starts touring the country criticizing an administration for being too out-of-control with executive power, we should clearly respond with something better than “how interesting.”

The Republicans on the cruise certainly seem less disingenuous about their contempt for democracy, even while trying to convince themselves that Iraq has been a “triumph” that “couldn’t have gone better,” (the wisdom of Norman Podhoretz at work):

Tonight, there is explicit praise for a fascist dictator before the entrée has arrived. I drop the news that there are moves in Germany to have Rumsfeld extradited to face war crimes charges. A red-faced man who looks like an egg with a moustache glued on grumbles, “If the Germans think they can take responsibility for the world, I don’t care about German courts. Bomb them.” I begin to cite the Pinochet precedent, and [Kate] O’Beirne snaps, “Treating Don Rumsfeld like Pinochet is disgusting.” Egg Man pounds his fist on the table: “Treating Pinochet like that is disgusting. Pinochet is a hero. He saved Chile.” “Exactly,” adds O’Beirne’s husband. “And he privatized Social Security.”

And while they reminisce about fascist dictators of the past, Dinesh D’souza, a waste of a good oxygen-to-carbon-dioxide recycling system if there ever was one, helps push the new version of the Dolchstosslegende with the help of Robert Bork, no doubt figuring that if it worked so well in Weimar, why not now?

There is something strange about this discussion, and it takes me a few moments to realize exactly what it is. All the tropes conservatives usually deny in public–that Iraq is another Vietnam, that Bush is fighting a class war on behalf of the rich–are embraced on this shining ship in the middle of the ocean. Yes, they concede, we are fighting another Vietnam; and this time we won’t let the weak-kneed liberals lose it. “It’s customary to say we lost the Vietnam war, but who’s ‘we’?” Dinesh D’Souza asks angrily. “The left won by demanding America’s humiliation.” On this ship, there are no Viet Cong, no three million dead. There is only liberal treachery. Yes, D’Souza says, in a swift shift to domestic politics, “of course” Republican politics is “about class. Republicans are the party of winners, Democrats are the party of losers.”

The panel nods, but it doesn’t want to stray from Iraq. Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan’s one-time nominee to the Supreme Court, mumbles from beneath low-hanging jowls: “The coverage of this war is unbelievable. Even Fox News is unbelievable. You’d think we’re the only ones dying. Enemy casualties aren’t covered. We’re doing an excellent job killing them.”

It’ll be the Jews’ fault in the end. Just keep reading the script.

I have kind of a personal connection to National Review. In the mid-eighties, I spent two summers in Ohio, working for my grandfather, an immigrant from East Europe who owned his own electrical contracting firm. Ronald Reagan was as beloved to him as he was as loathed by me, and he not only subscribed to National Review for years, but swore by it as a font of wisdom. He often passed articles to me much like a missionary distributes tracts to a heathen, hoping that one of them would open my eyes to the Way. At one point, after I was in college, he even bought me a subscription for my birthday. And yes, I did read it, in fact.

National Review always seemed like a strange choice for my grandfather. Yes, he was definitely right-wing, and yes, it was people like him who made the Reagan Revolution possible. But National Review has always a very patrician tone. It is to the Right what The Nation is to the Left; not only in terms of prominence, but also in its bias favoring East Coast intellectuals who went to the right schools — in short, the very people my grandfather disdained most. It’s not a magazine of the heartland, nor is it one of the working class. One thing that I always disliked about it was the air of condescension that its articles were steeped in. Even in its better days, it was the magazine for people who had been born on third base and remained convinced that they had hit a triple.

But the meanness and petty cruelty of modern conservatives wasn’t present when my grandfather was passing those articles to me, and in Hari’s article, they even seem embarrassed of founder William F. Buckley, as if he’s a senile old uncle who’s turned into a bleeding-heart liberal. Beneath the patrician smugness, Buckley always had not only a working intellect, but a basic decency, both of which are liabilities nowadays. In the old days, when he hosted Firing Line, he had guests from across the political spectrum, including radical lefties like Noam Chomsky. And he didn’t bully them or turn off their microphone in a fit of pique. Nowadays, that alone makes him look like a radical.

More commentary on this article by Digby and James Wolcott. Props again to Avedon Carol for the original link.

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Filed Under: Politics Tagged With: Avedon-Carol, Johnann-Hari, New-Republic, Politics

Domestic Partner Activists Needed

By Chris Hall
December 12, 2006
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Elizabeth Wood is looking for people who can help her out with information about getting legal recognition for domestic partnerships. Dr. Wood is a professor in Nassau County, NY, which doesn’t offer legal recognition to domestic partners, and she and her partner desperately need help getting it, whether through contract negotiation with the university, or through getting the county to change its tune.

I need, badly, to hear from people who have been actively involved in successful organizing campaigns at local or county or public employer levels to win recognition of domestic partnerships. In New York this would mean people who helped win this recognition in Suffolk County, Westchester County, Rockland County, New York City, Albany, and Rochester. Outside of New York it means a lot more places.

If you are such a person � and of all you readers out there, there must be one who is � please get in touch with me at sexinthepublicsquare (at) yahoo (dot) com or by leaving your comments here. If you are not such a person, but you know someone who is, please pass along my request.

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Filed Under: Politics Tagged With: activism, domestic-partners, Elizabeth-Wood, Politics

You Can't Fool All the People All the Time….

By Chris Hall
November 11, 2006
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A little footnote to my previous rant about the government’s expansion of abstinence-only education: although the people making the policies may be idiots and prudes (not necessarily in that order), the American people are not. According to a study recently done by the University of Pennsylvania, 80.4 percent of American adults prefer a balanced “abstinence-plus” approach to sex education. Also, according to the study:

  • 91.6 percent of liberals, 86.4 percent of moderates, and 70 percent of conservatives support comprehensive (abstinence-plus) programs, while 19 percent of conservatives, 5.3 percent of moderates, and 3.7 percent of liberals oppose such programs.
  • 47 percent of conservatives support abstinence-only programs, while 67 percent of liberals, 50.4 percent of moderates, and 39.9 percent of conservatives oppose this approach to sex education.
  • 37.5 percent of conservatives, 13.4 percent of moderates, and 9.1 percent of liberals oppose condom instruction, while 51.2 percent of conservatives support it.
  • Among all respondents, 57 percent disagree that condom instruction encourages teens to have sex.
  • Of the respondents who never attend religious services: 87.4 percent support comprehensive sex education and 57.9 percent oppose abstinence-only programs.
  • Among those who attend religious services more than once a week: 60.3 percent support abstinence-only programs; 60.3 percent support abstinence-plus programs; 52.6 percent oppose and 37.9 percent support condom instruction; 31.3 percent oppose abstinence-only instruction.

In short, Americans aren’t as easily fooled as the puritan bureaucrats would want us to be. I’m cautiously optimistic about the election results, but hopefully, between statistics like these and the backlash against the Republicans, the government will have to stop pretending that sex is something that you can just sweep under the rug.

More good news: congratulations to the people of Spokane, Washington, who ousted Brad Benson, the Republican State Senator who claimed earlier this year that Planned Parenthood deliberately distributes condoms with an 80% failure rate because “they have an interest in the follow-up product.“

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Filed Under: Politics, Sex and Gender Tagged With: abstinence, Politics, Religious Right, Sex, sexual-education

The Elections in a Nutshell

By Chris Hall
November 9, 2006
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From Bitch | Lab:

Overheard: “I’m so excited to put in office a bunch of people who will sell out labor instead of spend all day dreaming up new ways to cut our throats!”

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Filed Under: Politics Tagged With: Democrats, election, Politics

Fear and Loathing and Fucking

By Chris Hall
November 9, 2006
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No matter how cynical I get, no matter how many nauseating things that I see perpetrated in the name of morality and decency, it seems that there’s always some fucktard out there whose mission in life is to show me that there’s always just a little farther they can take things.

In short, although I didn’t think that I could be shocked anymore, I am once again appalled at the fear and hatred of sexuality that those in charge of our country harbor in their hearts. Hatred of the naughty bits has been an aggressive part of the Republican party’s agenda at least since Reagan’s malign neglect of the AIDS crisis, allowing thousands to die because they were a bunch of sinful faggots and junkies while simultaneously casting abortion as a luxury item for murderous sluts who would rather kill a baby than lose their girlish figures. [Read more…]

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Filed Under: Politics, Religious Right, Sex and Gender Tagged With: abstinence, Politics, public-health, Religious Right, Sex, sexual-education

Mark Foley: Predator or Sleaze?

By Chris Hall
October 16, 2006
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Probably the greatest irony of the Mark Foley affair is one that gets little attention: if Foley had just had the nerve to act on his urges and cornhole markfoleya few of those pretty young pages in the Congressional cloakroom, he’d be free and clear — legally anyway. (The Repubs would still eat him alive for daring to be a public homo, but that’s a whole other can of worms.)  In the District of Columbia, the age of consent is 16; but Foley is getting nailed under the Adam Walsh Chid Protection Act, which he himself toiled to make into Federal Law and which makes it illegal to solicit sex from a minor (under 18) via the Internet.  In other words, in D.C. you can fuck the pages — just don’t have Internet sex with them.

There’s plenty of room for schadenfreude here, and I for one plan to take mine in extra-large helpings.  The Republicans and conservative Democrats have made themselves both rich and powerful by plundering the American public’s fear of sex, and many people who just wanted to be left alone have paid the price.

But we’re facing a severe crisis in the fate of our Republic now, and I’m appalled that of all the things that have happened in the last six years, this is the thing that seems to stick.  People are finally paying attention to the moral rot inside the Republican party, and why?

[Read more…]

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Filed Under: Politics, Sex and Gender Tagged With: Elizabeth-Wood, Mark-Foley, Politics, scandal, Sex

Republicans and the New Newspeak

By Chris Hall
August 7, 2006
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Untitled document

Gore Vidal will be a great loss when he finally dies.  He's one of the old-style intellectuals; arrogant as hell maybe, but also insightful and brimming with a moral sense that seems almost quaint nowadays. I would cheerfully rip Dick Cheney's pacemaker right out of his chest if it meant that Vidal got to stay around for just one more day.  Actually, it would take significantly less than that to get me to tear Cheney's pacemaker out (like perhaps, a free month of Netflix), but rhetorically, it illustrates my point. James Wolcott, the Interweb's inside man on the intelligensia, got an advance copy of Vidal's latest memoir, and provides the following excerpt, which neatly summarizes not only the success of the Republicans at gaining Orwellian control over the language of modern politics, but why simple decency can be made to seem like such an 

A current pejorative adjective is narcissistic. Generally, a narcissist is anyone better looking than you are, but lately the adjective is often applied to those 'liberals' who prefer to improve the lives of others rather than exploit them. Apparently, a concern for others is self-love at its least attractive, while greed is now a sign of the highest altruism. But then to reverse, periodically, the meanings of words is a very small price to pay for our vast freedom not only to conform but to consume.

And of course, there is the other side of the coin, the perverse dismissal of every good intention as "politically correct," which not only manages to portray humane gestures and ideas as authoritarian demands while also making every possible form of thuggishness and bigotry seem not only acceptable, but noble.  The Republicans have truly mastered the language of slavemasters.

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Filed Under: Politics, Quotables Tagged With: Gore-Vidal, James-Wolcott, Politics, propaganda

Thank God SOMEBODY Said It

By Chris Hall
August 5, 2006
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Two things have bugged me about the LGBT movements in this country for the last ten years or so.

Well, actually, lots of things have bugged me about LGBT politics, but that’s because I’m a skeptical, misanthropic bastard.  But for the moment, let’s pare it down to two, just so I don’t have to keep typing until my fingers bleed.  The first is the insistence on a biological origin of homosexuality.  As a matter of scientific inquiry, it’s always interesting to play the “nature or nurture?” game. But as a point of political ideology, it’s a dead end.  It smacks of cowardice; if it’s biological, being queer isn’t a choice, and therefore it isn’t your “fault.” In essence, pushing the “gay gene” idea amounts to institutionalized whining: “We can’t help being homos; it’s in our genes.” But more importantly, it surrenders to the ‘phobes the idea that it matters.  In a country that promises the freedom that America does, it shouldn’t matter one bit whether gayness is locked in by a molecular switch flipped by your mom listening to Color Me Barbara eight million times while she was knocked up, or if it’s something you decide as casually as the choice between Chinese food and steak; who you fuck should be as sacred as what god you worship, and by hammering on homosexuality as biological destiny, the national LGBT groups have completely abandoned that principle.

[Read more…]

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Filed Under: Queer Politics Tagged With: gay-marriage, lgbt, Politics, queer

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