should have sent a poet

There are no words. No words at all.



This is just outstanding stuff, and there's so much to parse here -- although we know that within the week, Gingrich will give us more -- but a couple things stick out. I'm just not sure what is most striking about two minutes in the abyss.

• Maybe it's the fact that his hair doesn't move, 
• Or that he smiles -- grimaces, really -- at completely inappropriate moments, 
• Or that a 1.4 percent decrease in unemployment -- a statistical margin of error -- is supposed to be significant when he wants it to be, 
• Or that he can claim ownership of economic bona fides while Speaker of the House, and then turn around an claim that "No One Man" can turn everything around, 
• Or that a serial adulterer asserted the need for honest, straightforward talk, 
• Or that there were some nasty veiled threats towards the enemies of whatever he's actually proposing. 

But actually it's none of those things. Nope, not a one. The most striking thing about that video? Definitely the fact that he just uttered a two-minute-long paragraph that consisted of a single sentence. Fantastic.

[Newt.org <-- This is a real thing now.]

Where is Equity?

As Keith Olbermann notes on FOK News Channel, when AFTRA -- "not the most belligerent nor plugged in of outfits" -- is stirred up, you know you've gone too far.

Welp, I've found someone yet milder, Mr. O.

In the Wisconsin conflagration, we have heard from every corner of the union movement in terms of news releases and messages to membership. I haven't heard much from my union, Actors' Equity, but I was able to dredge this up from their website, in the form of an open letter/monologue/diary entry from President Nick Wyman:

I can understand why Governor Walker and thousands of employers around the country would like to get rid of unions. They usually make employees more costly by negotiating salaries and benefits employees wouldn't be able to achieve on their own. They mandate work rules that not infrequently add to the costs of doing business. They limit flexibility by insisting on a say in or approval of changes in working conditions. We unions can be a pain in the butt.

Forgive me, however, if I shed no more than crocodile tears for the poor, put-upon employer. Unions exist to redress what is historically and consistently an imbalance of power between those who hire and those who do the work. We have moved beyond the most egregious abuses of the late 1800's - dehumanizing sweatshops with their if-you-don't-come-in-Sunday,-don't-come-in-Monday attitude - but the constant pressure to improve the bottom line leads to coal mining companies ignoring safety protocols and school districts putting sixty students in a class. The cards are still stacked in favor of management, and that disparity will only get worse as a result of the "Citizens United" ruling giving corporations the ability to give unlimited funds to candidates. Unions are the best and nearly the only

zzzzzzzzzzzz...hmm? Wuzzat?

Are you kidding me? We have the occupation by citizens of a public space for weeks on end, half a state legislature flees across state lines, phone stings where elected officials admit to totalitarian shenanigans, physical altercations between protesters and right-wing media, and the best my union president can do is come kind of mealy-mouthed history essay.

I have more vociferous debates WITH fellow union members ABOUT Equity. A clear existential crisis has galvanized the entire labor movement, and my union parks this shit on their homepage -- without even a red TAKE ACTION label, because, hey who cares about Wisconsin?

Disgraceful.

the reason why we shouldn't circle the racial wagons...

...is because if I felt some misplaced tribal loyalty to another person simply because they looked like me, I couldn't call Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas a democracy-undermining self-interested loathsome little toad. But since I'm free of such fetters, I can.

read it twice

This paragraph tells us more about how our political system does or does not work more any any random act of violence:

By managing her image almost exclusively through Twitter, Facebook, a reality television show and appearances on Fox News, Ms. Palin has managed to become both ubiquitous and insulated, and to emerge as one of the most formidable Republicans considering a presidential run next year.

[NYTimes]

really, guys ... they're fascists. you can't see it?

For those who suspected that our collective ridicule of Governor Palin and Sideshow Glenn was us whistling past the graveyard, those gut instincts are proving correct. Clearly, if he's a clown, Beck is a Stephen King-type clown.

His attacks on George Soros have revealed something darker in Beck's paranoiac psyche. Clearly Soros, guilty of the twin sins of being richer than beck and disagreeing with Beck, is part of a larger conspiracy:

Throughout three programs this week, Mr. Beck has portrayed Mr. Soros, a billionaire investor and philanthropist, as a “puppet master” who is “notorious for collapsing economies and regimes all around the world” and whose “next target” is the United States. Citing Mr. Soros’s statements about the decline of the dollar, Mr. Beck said, “Not only does he want to bring America to her knees, financially, he wants to reap obscene profits off us as well.”

Abraham H. Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, took issue with Mr. Beck’s depiction of Mr. Soros as a “Jewish boy helping sending the Jews to the death camps,” calling it “offensive” and “horrific.”

Doesn't this all sound familiar? Deriding a sub-section of society as being the puppet master financiers constituting a fifth column that wants to destroy the country from within. Really? Not setting off alarm bells at all?

[NYT; image via Osborne Ink]

Everything they tell you is a lie

A rocket was launched in Southern California. The video is here. Clearly that happened. The Pentagon is mum -- bizarrely so:

[John] Pike[, director of the U.S.-based security analyst group globalsecurity.org] said he didn't understand why the military had not recognized the contrail of an aircraft. "The Air Force must ... understand how contrails are formed," he said. "Why they can't get some major out to belabor the obvious, I don't know."

I'll tell you why: because they know exactly what it is, and they're not telling.

When I was a kid, two Air Force bombers flew in concentric circles at a low altitude over Brooklyn over and over again. People on the street stopped and stared. Having read my fair share of crazy-but-plausible military coup porn, I thought I knew what was going on. But now that alien infiltration of our planet has been proven, I'm not so sure.

(Seriously, y'all, the Pentagon knows something.)

what you do with bullies

Last month, Michael Ian Black logged his exchange with what we're (I guess) now calling Tea-Party fellow-travelers:

Last night, as I was talking about how much I love the president (because I do), somebody yelled out “Heil Hitler.”

Heil Hitler?

My immediate reaction was to crumple to the floor, which I did. I don’t know why, except that it seemed to me in that moment that the show had now gone south very quickly, and if bottles were going to be thrown, I didn’t want to get hit.

But then I stood up and asked the person (shrouded in darkness, as people who scream “Heil Hitler” often are) why he yelled that, thinking maybe he thought it was funny in some obtuse way, like maybe he though shouting that would be interpreted as clever satire. Or maybe he was being ironic. Grasping, I know, but I honestly had no idea why somebody would yell that outside of a Klan rally.

But I am still being polite.

The guy in the dark says, “Because when you say you like Obama, that’s the same thing to me as saying ‘Heil Hitler.’”

The audience, predictably, starts booing. I ask them to please calm down, that I will handle this in a mature way. While I am saying this to the audience, I am thinking, How do I possibly handle this in a mature way.

So the audience settles down, and I turn to the gentleman and say, “Sir, I say with this all due respect - you are a fucking moron.”

And then I kind of lost my shit.

How, precisely, MIB lost his shit is worth reading through, but he ends his post with an apology to the anonymous heckler for losing his shit, with qualifications:

There was no reason to meet your idiocy with my own, even though you are a fucking moron.

That, in turn, brings to mind Shoutey McGlasserson's cogent rebuttal to opponents of the Islamic Community Center in Lower Manhattan. (Yeah, we're not calling it the G****d Z**o M****e, because it's not. Here are other things it's not: a dirigible tethering station; a BP oil derrick; an ice skating rink.)

The take-away here, aside from the helpful neighborhood context, is that "this is America, dammit" and banning houses of worship isn't really how we roll.

Which brings us to today's news that the Justice Department has taken "America's Toughest Sheriff" Joe Arpaio to court for his enthusiastic enforcement of the Nuremberg Laws not cooperating with an investigation into his enthusiastic enforcement of Nuremberg-like Laws. What sayeth thou, Grey Lady?

Obama administration officials called the suit the first time in 30 years that the federal government had to sue to compel a law enforcement agency to cooperate with an investigation concerning Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

“The actions of the sheriff’s office are unprecedented,” Thomas E. Perez, assistant attorney general for the department’s civil rights division, said in a statement. “It is unfortunate that the department was forced to resort to litigation to gain access to public documents and facilities.”

At a news conference on Thursday, Sheriff Arpaio said he was surprised by the lawsuit since he thought his lawyers and those of the government had been close to an agreement. “I’m not going to be intimidated by the federal government going to court against us,” he said.

[...]

The Justice Department issued 51 requests for documents, most of which Sheriff Arpaio’s department ignored, as well as asking for tours of department facilities and interviews with commanders, staff members and inmates.

Sheriff Arpaio, who has denied that he engages in racial profiling, has remained defiant of the government’s investigation. His lawyers have repeatedly refused to provide the documents sought by the Justice Department or provide unfettered access to its facilities.

“It is ironic that the very sheriff who regularly demands that others turn over their papers has refused to turn over his papers,” said Ali Noorani, executive director of the National Immigration Forum, which has been critical of Sheriff Arpaio.

(Snip snap.)

The bigger point is, just like Olbermann says above, when people are being idiots, it's your stand up and call them out on it. And hopefully not just in comedy clubs.

if you like this, you'll love those

For the past few months, a friend and I have played a game called add to the list of ways we're living in a more fascistic country this week. It's been a depressing past couple rounds this summer.

First, the Supreme Court handed down the Dred Scott of civil liberties decisions in Berghuis v. Thompkins, as it dictated that the right to remain silent does not affirm a citizen's right to, you know, actually remain silent.

Then the New York Times profiled the NYPD's occupation (there's really no other word for it) of Brownsville, Brooklyn:

When night falls, police officers blanket some eight odd blocks of Brownsville, Brooklyn. Squad cars with flashing lights cruise along the main avenues: Livonia to Powell to Sutter to Rockaway. And again.

On the inner streets, dozens of officers, many fresh out of the police academy, walk in pairs or linger on corners. Others, deeper within the urban grid, navigate a maze of public housing complexes, patrolling the stairwells and hallways.

This small army of officers, night after night, spends much of its energy pursuing the controversial Police Department tactic known as “Stop, Question, Frisk,” and it does so at a rate unmatched anywhere else in the city.

The officers stop people they think might be carrying guns; they stop and question people who merely enter the public housing project buildings without a key; they ask for identification from, and run warrant checks on, young people halted for riding bicycles on the sidewalk.

One night, 20 officers surrounded a man outside the Brownsville Houses after he would not let an officer smell the contents of his orange juice container.

The whole thing is worth a read (a) to prove that long-form journalism isn't dead [yet] in a daily newspaper, and (b) because those who clamor loudest for law 'n' order should have their noses rubbed in the consequences of their call for a police state.

The article has proven useful; even though the Times is consistently the last to the party, its voice is still the most influential. On Friday New York Governor David Paterson signed into law a bill prohibiting the NYPD from retaining personal information regarding a stop and frisk in their official database where the individual was released without being arrested.

This is the kind of stuff commonly done by other policing authorities, most notably in the UK -- where the DNA information of innocent people is kept on file by the authorities without any cause whatsoever. But they don't have a written constitution. We do.

Not that it really helps to have it written down. Because Stop and Frisk here in NYC has a direct thread tying us to the new face of American fascism (aka the Arizona Legislature). Take a look at this piece of the new law (actually, you should read the whole thing: it's not that long):

B. IT IS UNLAWFUL FOR A PERSON TO ENTER A MOTOR VEHICLE THAT IS STOPPED ON A STREET, ROADWAY OR HIGHWAY IN ORDER TO BE HIRED BY AN OCCUPANT OF THE MOTOR VEHICLE AND TO BE TRANSPORTED TO WORK AT A DIFFERENT LOCATION IF THE MOTOR VEHICLE BLOCKS OR IMPEDES THE NORMAL MOVEMENT OF TRAFFIC.

So it's not only illegal to block traffic, and to hire illegal aliens -- it's illegal to block traffic for the express purpose of hiring illegal aliens. On top of reading like the irate rant of someone irrationally eager to get their Starbucks latte at the Phoenix Home Depot Strip Mall and Savings Emporium, it's a jackbooted thug's wet dream. How much probable cause does one traffic cop need? There's never enough if you're Arizona Governor Jan Brewer, or Police Commissioner Ray Kelley. (Kelley wants to be New York City's next Mayor. Want to see if someone will make us actually miss Rudy's restraint?)

But we don't have to slap the fascist tag on unwilling public figures. Real, actual fascists love Arizona!

Minutemen groups, a surge in Border Patrol agents and a tough new immigration law are not enough for a reputed neo-Nazi who is now leading a militia in the Arizona desert.

Jason Ready is taking matters into his own hands, declaring war on what he calls “narco-terrorists” and keeping an eye out for illegal immigrants. So far, he said, his patrols have found only a few border crossers, who were given water and handed over to the Border Patrol.

Normally, I would feel sympathy for any municipality that became a magnet for neo-Nazis. But Arizona? You guys put out the welcome mat. Enjoy.

if there was any doubt, by the way...

More than a month, old, but still: this should begin to seal the argument that privatization and constitutionality are diametrically opposed:

Private security guards from Blackwater Worldwide participated in some of the C.I.A.’s most sensitive activities — clandestine raids with agency officers against people suspected of being insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan and the transporting of detainees, according to former company employees and intelligence officials.

The raids against suspects occurred on an almost nightly basis during the height of the Iraqi insurgency from 2004 to 2006, with Blackwater personnel playing central roles in what company insiders called “snatch and grab” operations, the former employees and current and former intelligence officers said.

You can't outsource government responsibilities and also believe in the rule of law -- you have to choose one or the other. (Thank goodness the still-open Guantanamo Detention Facility is run by the Army!)