Masters of their domain

This illustrates the decline of our so-called civlization (h/t commenter Waingro) better than any other short passage I have ever read (though the whole piece rambles a bit):

Then suddenly it was over, and The Atlantic’s own godfather, David G. Bradley, was marching toward David Weigel, a young and prolific journalist specializing in Republican politics who had recently made a name for himself getting fired and rehired by the same media company within several weeks. For Bradley, this shift in nameplates apparently constituted a Chalabi-caliber show of resilience:

“DAVID! So good to see you!”

“Hello, David.”

“David, you really came back swinging, didn’t you? You were out for all of, what, a week? But now you’re back!”

“Well, I mean, it was actually a few weeks, and it really screwed up my health insurance . . .”

“David, I just want you to know I’ve been scheming ways to deploy you here for quite some time now! Now, of course I realize you may be enjoying your present . . . deployment!”

“Well I mean, heh, I did just start . . .”

“But David, let me tell you this. David, I know you think your mastery is politics. But I think . . . I think your mastery . . . ”

Dramatic pause.

“. . . may be . . . mastery.”

“Oh uh, thanks . . .”

“Do you know what I mean, David?” Bradley finished, gliding out the door. “It’s the same thing with David Brooks. He thought his mastery was politics, but his mastery was actually, whatever he put his mind to. Think about it, David!”

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Levon Helm RIP

The only American member of “The Band”, dead at 71.

I’m still looking for a drunkard’s dream if I ever did see one.

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Just feel free to say whatever. It’s not like it’s important.

Meet Jim Webb:

Senator Webb’s roots lie in Southwest Virginia, a region that covers nearly a quarter of the Commonwealth, ranging from as far north as Highland County and as far west as Lee County. Originally settled by the Scots-Irish people, who populated the hills and valleys of the Appalachian Mountain Range, Southwest Virginia became an initial stopping point as these new Americans pushed west to settle throughout the South and Mid-West. A fiercely independent people, the Scots-Irish embraced democratic values and recoiled from elitism and the aristocracy that was so prevalent around eastern cities at the time. They also were deeply patriotic and willingly served in all of our nation’s wars. They held values that still today characterize the region: patriotism, an abiding faith, a sense of service, and a determination to work hard.

That’s part of his personal narrative. Here’s his political narrative, in his own words:

The overwhelming majority—95%—migrated to the Appalachians in a series of frontier communities that stretched from Pennsylvania to northern Alabama and Georgia.

Why are the 30 million Scots-Irish, who may well be America’s strongest cultural force, so invisible to America’s intellectual elites?

The Democrats lost their affinity with the Scots-Irish during the Civil Rights era, when—because it was the dominant culture in the South—its “redneck” idiosyncrasies provided an easy target during their shift toward minorities as the foundation of their national electoral strategy.

The decline in public education and the outsourcing of jobs has hit this culture hard. Diversity programs designed to assist minorities have had an unequal impact on white ethnic groups and particularly this one, whose roots are in a poverty-stricken South. Their sons and daughters serve in large numbers in a war whose validity is increasingly coming into question. In fact, the greatest realignment in modern politics would take place rather quickly if the right national leader found a way to bring the Scots-Irish and African Americans to the same table, and so to redefine a formula that has consciously set them apart for the past two centuries.

Here he is again:

“I’ll be real frank here,” Webb said at a breakfast organized by Bloomberg News. “I think that the manner in which the health-care reform issue was put in front of the Congress, the way that the issue was dealt with by the White House, cost Obama a lot of credibility as a leader.”

Okay, whatever. But what about health care? (pdf)

This is a partial breakdown of the uninsured in Virginia:

The nonelderly uninsured are from diverse racial/ethnic backgrounds: about half are white, non‐Hispanic (47.3 percent); 24.3 percent are black, non‐Hispanic; 19.7 percent are Hispanic; 6.5 percent are Asian/Pacific Islander; and 2.0 percent are of other or multiple racial/ethnic backgrounds

These are the Appalachian counties in Virginia:

Virginia: Alleghany, Bath, Bland, Botetourt, Buchanan, Carroll, Craig, Dickenson, Floyd, Giles, Grayson, Henry, Highland, Lee, Montgomery, Patrick, Pulaski, Rockbridge, Russell, Scott, Smyth, Tazewell, Washington, Wise, and Wythe

And this is the Uninsured Rate Among Nonelderly (0-64) in Virginia by Area. Scroll down to the last slide and look at the map.

Every Appalachian county in Virginia has an uninsured rate higher than the state average, sometimes dramatically higher. In the wealthier parts of Virginia, about 9% of people are uninsured. In many parts of Jim Webb’s beloved Appalachia, it’s 17, 18, 19, 20%.

I’m going to kick Jim Webb’s question right back at him:

Why are the 30 million Scots-Irish, who may well be America’s strongest cultural force, so invisible to America’s intellectual elites?

Why indeed, Jim? What about health care? Remember that?

You know, Jim’s “tribe” may not vote for Obama, but they will damn sure benefit from Obama’s health care law. If you’re in the “interest group” that ranges from below poverty level to 400% of poverty level you will benefit from this law.

I don’t have any particular problem with Webb having a personal or political narrative that is grounded in some romantic idea of a tribe, it’s not my thing, but it’s obviously important to him. However. It looks to me like +/- 20% of the people in his tribal region are probably going without basic health care, because they can’t pay for it.

They can’t pay for it, and I feel as if none of us can afford this anymore. We can’t afford romantic narratives that have nothing to do with reality. We can’t afford Justice Scalia musing idly about broccoli to a rapt, adoring, and ass-kissing audience or Barney Frank reflecting aloud on how poor people are political poison or Jim Webb denouncing Obama because Jim Webb was hoping for Andrew Jackson and Americans elected Barack Obama instead. Webb believes, in his heart, that Obama could have gotten Republicans to make a deal on health care? Really? Is he living in a novel?

The point of the health care law was to expand access to health care to those who aren’t getting any. The people who might benefit from that have been completely lost in all this ego-driven, self-aggrandizing bullshit.

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ALEC wounded, lashing out

The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is a catch-all conservative policy outfit that right-wing activist Paul Weyrich founded in the ‘70s and which specializes in quietly transforming clients’ feverish wish lists into legislation that pet Republican state legislatures pass more or less verbatim. Notable hobby horses include vote suppression by way of voter ID laws, reduced early voting, etc., NRA wet kisses like the infamous ‘stand your ground’ law, lax environmental protection, restricting women’s reproductive options, plus the usual focus on changing tax policy and government programs to transfer power to the wealthy and wealth to the powerful. Needless to say its leadership leans Republican in the same way that a klan meeting leans white.

The trick with this game is that even captive legislatures have a vestigial trace of self-respect, so you should at least pretend that a law printed on Natural Gas Alliance stationery was thought up by the local lege to address some theoretical local concern. Ears perked up when some of ALEC’s dimmer pets submitted laws without bothering to change any language from model bills posted on its website. Then a racist dude made national headlines for murdering a black kid in a way that no sane person could defend, and he looked likely to get away with it thanks to one of ALEC’s special gun laws. Would you want to be an official corporate sponsor of George Zimmerman? Surprisingly at least ten sponsors so far have said no.

ALEC’s first response looked promising: they reorganized their guns, gays and ‘ginas division, and they swore to get out of social issues and focus from here out on nothing but transferring wealth to the wealthy. Don’t get me wrong. I would love to hear that one star in the vast constellation of rightwing social policy outfits might have blinked out. Still, does that sound stupid or belligerent enough for today’s conservative movement?

Duh. Of course not. Go to C&L for the whole sordid tale, but to summarize ALEC has asked the children of a lesser Breitbart to coordinate an online rightwing ragegasm against the, um, shadowy liberal conspiracy to discredit their good name.

ALEC is looking specifically at Democratic strategist Karen Finney (who appears daily on MSNBC as a contributer), journalist Lisa Graves and organizer Van Jones. They are advising these wingnut bloggers to go after them in the comments of articles, on social media and throughout the blogosphere.

Now there’s behavior that I expect from folks who still mark William Buckley threatening, unconvincingly, to punch Gore Vidal in the nose as a high point in history. Never retreat. Never surrender. Countertop inspection team go!

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Watch out, the world’s behind you

Wired for white, male, Republican control:

A new study by the liberal watchdog group — which looked at ABC’s This Week, NBC’s Meet the Press, CBS’s Face the Nation and Fox News Sunday from August 2011 to February 2012 — claims that the Sunday morning shows have become “extraordinarily friendly terrain for the right.” Seventy percent of one-on-one interviews on the shows featured Republicans, according to the study. That’s 166 Republican guests to 70 Democrats. For the roundtable discussions, Republicans and/or conservatives made 282 appearances to 164 by Democrats and progressives.

[.....]

Partisanship aside, women made up just 29 percent of the shows’ roundtable guests. Eighty-five percent of the guests were white, 11 percent were African American and 3 percent were Latino.

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Open Thread

Been a while since we had one. Here is a video of Max doing the ‘dobie walk’ with his friend Bea. Somewhere in their genetic heritage dobermans picked up the idea that they can will themselves invisible if they just move slow enough. Max has a yellow lab friend who can drag on this staring match for the better part of ten minutes.

Chat about whatever.

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Forcing Them To Keep Their Word

Via the Benenator 2000 over at the Maddow Blog, I see that Obama is tired of dealing with deceitful Republicans:

Acting White House Budget Director Jeff Zients wrote to the heads of the House and Senate Appropriations Committees on Wednesday to lay down the threat.

“Until the House of Representatives indicates that it will abide by last summer’s agreement, the President will not be able to sign any appropriations bills,” the letter states.

Basically, the teahadist faction in the right wants to make more cuts to domestic spending beyond what was already agreed upon, while at the same time spending MORE on defense than was agreed upon:

But fast forward to this spring when, as we’ve noted in previous stories, House Republicans pledged to cut more out of discretionary spending programs in the next fiscal year than they agreed to last summer. Facing a rebellion from House conservatives, budget committee chairman Paul Ryan and party leaders cut deeper, setting a ceiling for discretionary spending that’s $19 billion below the cap in the debt limit deal, and cuts domestic spending even further to finance greater-than-agreed-to funding for the Defense Department.

For now, at least, the White House is holding strong.

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Total Systemic Failure

Brad Hicks reviews the UC Davis Pepper Spray Report (.pdf here) and discovered that as awful as we thought this event was, it turns out it was much, much worse:

But before it even came to that point, the student protesters had, with the help of Legal Services, gone over all the relevant state laws, city ordinances, campus ordinances, and campus regulations and concluded that no matter what the Chancellor thought, it was entirely legal for them to set up that camp. When the university’s legal department found out that Chancellor Katehi was going to order the camp removed, they thought they made it clear to her that the students were right.

I kept having to stop and slap my forehead over that one repeated phrase in the report: (this person or that) was under the impression she had made it clear that (some order was given), but nobody else present had that impression. Anybody who is “under the impression that they made it clear” that some order was given who who didn’t put it in writing and who hasn’t had that order paraphrased back to them? Should be slapped. Or at the very least demoted. Unless you actually said it, you didn’t “make it clear.”

It turns out that it is illegal for anybody to lodge on the campus without permission, but the relevant law only applies to people trying to make it their permanent dwelling. The law prohibits non-students from camping on campus for any reason, but neither student affairs nor the one cop sent to look could find any non-students who were there overnight. A campus regulation says that students can’t set up tents without permission, but that regulation is not enforceable by police, only by academic discipline. Campus legal “thought they made it clear” that the law was on the students’ side, but according to multiple witnesses, what they actually said was “it is unclear that you have legal authority to order the police to do this” and Chancellor Katehi heard that as “well, they didn’t say I don’t have that authority, only that it’s not clear.”

Chancellor Katehi, on her part, “thought she made it clear” that when police ordered the students to leave, they were (a) not to wear riot gear into the camp, (b) not to carry weapons of any kind into the camp, (c) were not to use force of any kind against the students, and (d) were not to make any arrests. But all that anybody else on that conference call heard her say out loud was “I don’t want another situation like they just had at Berkeley,” and Chief Spicuzza interpreted that as “no swinging of clubs.”

Chief Spicuzza “thought she made it clear” more than once that no riot gear was to be worn and no clubs or pepper sprayers were to be carried. What Lieutenant Pike said back to her, each time, was, “Well, I hear you say that you don’t want us to, but we’re going to.” And they did, including that now-infamous Mk-9 military-grade riot-control pepper sprayer that he used. Oh, funny thing about that particular model of pepper-sprayer? It’s illegal for California cops to possess or use. It turns out that the relevant law only permits the use of up to Mk-4 pepper sprayers. The consultants were unable to find out who authorized the purchase and carrying, but every cop they asked said, “So what? It’s just like the Mk-4 except that it has a higher capacity.” Uh, no. It’s also much, much higher pressure, and specifically designed not to be sprayed directly at any one person, only at crowds, and only from at least six feet away. The manufacturer says so. The person in charge of training California police in pepper spray says that as far as he knows, no California cop has ever received training, from his office or from the manufacturer, in how to safely use a Mk-9 sprayer, presumably because it’s illegal. But Officer Nameless, when he wrote the action plan for these arrests, included all pepper-spray equipment in the equipment list, both the paint-ball rifle pepper balls and the Mk-9 riot-control sprayers.

You really need to read the whole report and Brad’s summary. I can’t believe Katehi still has a job, and the Buffalo Beast was too kind to her.

(via that Facebook thing)

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Smoking Bans are Like The Holocaust

Here’s John Raese, who is running against Manchin:

He’s talking about the newly established smoking ban:

Smokers can no longer light up in bars, restaurants and workplaces in Monongalia County. The countywide smoking ban goes into effect today.

Hookah lounges and cigar bars that meet the county Board of Health’s definition are the only exemptions to the new law.

Monongalia County Health Department staff will start routine inspections next week, said Jon Welch, program manager for public health environmental services.

This small government conservative wants the feds or the state to override the decision of the local community.

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An Interesting Pulitzer

Eli Sanders at Seattle’s Stranger alt-weekly won a Pulitzer Prize for reporting on the aftermath of a brutal home invasion and attack. Sanders’ prize is the fifth awarded to an alt-weekly, and the first since 2007. I’m actually surprised that any alt-weeklies have ever won, not because of the quality of the journalism, but because the prize board is made up of incumbent media dinosaurs.

As far as I can tell, the only print media outlets that are doing well in the current “death of print” era are alt-weeklies. One reason is probably that they were already used to operating on a shoestring with a business model based on free distribution, and another is that they weren’t too proud to embrace digital early and sincerely. For example, the Stranger’s blog, Slog, is really good and has been for a long time.

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