How quickly they change

Maureen Dowd and Frank Rich in their Sunday New York Times columns give two excellent examples of how smug dismissal of Sarah Palin can quickly turn into admiration. The Beltway Village during 2008 and mostly up until now was more concerned with Tina Fey's imitation of Palin than with what Palin and her supporters were about. Especially as that might be indicated by Palin's own neo-Confederate and theocratic ties.

Maureen Dowd is in her more liberal mode lately. Which is kind of hard to distinguish between her Bush-friendly mode. But her latest, Visceral Has Its Value New York Times 11/21/09, shows how the Village script of Palin as a ridiculous dummy can easily morph into appreciating her as the voice of Real Americans. And the Villagers all fancy themselves as in tune with Real Americans. You know, the ones for whom the federal budget deficit is the biggest problem the country has. (Yes, Village thinking is often quite bizarre and contradictory measured against normal standards of reality. But since they think the deficit is critical, they assume as always that the Little People think the same.)


MoDo, who likes to remind us that Obama is a girl (not a compliment in MoDo's gender obsessions), now admires Palin for "her visceral power," the inner energy she radiates (MoDo used a quotation to say that - I guess it sounded too New Agey to put in her own voice), her dynamism, her close contact with the grass roots, her exuberance, and "the good looks, the tabloid-perfect family, the Alaska quirkiness, the kids with the weird names." With a mixture of admiration and snotty condescension - who says in print that other people children have "weird names"? - MoDo manages to both pump up Palin's image and give cred to her the-elites-look-down-on-us-Real-Amurcans" schtick. Palin's neo-Confederate ties? Her theocratic, superstitious, extremist brand of Pentecostal Christianity? I suppose MoDo would find that sooo booo-oooring to write about. So instead she insults Palin's children's names.

Did I mention that MoDo is one of the star opinion "journalists" in what is still considered the leading "quality" paper in the United States?

She actually spends most of the column trashing Obama in various ways. Then at the end she kinda-sorta defends him. But does it in such a pitiful way all that she just reinforces the Republican and Broderian criticism of Obama being supposedly "indecisive".

Frank Rich, who often writes some atrocious stuff, too, and has been recently taking the Republicans' bait to ridicule the Party base and their heroes, in The Pit Bull in the China Shop 11/21/09 actually manages to criticize other Villagers for delivering their authoritative opinions on Palin's book without actually having read it! Criticizing fellow Villagers is so rare that he at least deserves one hand clapping for that. (I would just note, without detracting from his unconventional stance, that one can certainly form a reasonable opinion about well-reported portions of a book without having read it cover to cover.)

Rich claims to have actually read her book. And coming from a guy who just a few columns ago was chortling over how the Tea Partiers (aka, Palin fans) were leading the Republican Party to a new 1964 landslide defeat, statements like this are another wonderful illustration how sanctimonious Village ridicule can quickly become star-struck admiration: "Palin is far and away the most important brand in American politics after Barack Obama, and attention must be paid. Those who wishfully think her 15 minutes are up are deluding themselves."

Rich goes on to focus on what are the important issues - in the eyes of our Village Pod Pundits. Palin's show-business acquaintances. Levi Johnston.

Neo-Confederate ties? Theocratic Christianism? Rich doesn't get into those, either. The Village script still calls for leaving those out. Even though they are highly relevant to understanding her politics and what the Republican Party has become. And it's understandable. Facing up to what today's Republican Party is would make the practice of High Broderism, with his idolatry of bipartisanship (on the part of Democrats) nearly impossible to practice. Later on, he cities some polls showing that Palin is a Republican favorite in the polls for the 2012 Presidential nomination just behind Mike Huckabee, he doesn't cite any polling data to support his assertion that Palin "the most important brand in American politics after Barack Obama." If the polls he's using show Huckabee leading Palin among Republicans, wouldn't that make the Huck a more important brand at the moment?

Rich devotes a paragraph to pointless ridicule of a pious letter Palin wrote for her baby Trig that is reproduced in the book. He is ruffled that she worded the letter as a letter from God. Pop psychology, yes. Actual analysis of her theocratic religious ties? Not so much. The only exception is a really vague and speculative reference to Palin's "'rapture' theology" - to which Palin may or may not subscribe from anything we see in Rich's column.

Rich's utter helplessness is trying to actually analyze her appeal is illustrated by the following comment, which is correct: "The more she is attacked for not being in possession of pointy-headed erudition, the more powerful she becomes as an avatar of the anti-elite cause." But without understanding that in the context of the dominant Christian Right culture in the Republican Party, it tells us nothing. Except that Frank Rich is disturbed at the dumb masses he takes the Real Americans to be.

With all that fluff in his column, I do give Rich credit for at least mentioning the anti-gay position of the far-rightist Lynn Vincent who Palin chose for her ghost-writer.

And to top it all off, Rich manages to sing the praises of that greatest of all Mavericks, St. John McCain. Yes, that would be the St. McCain who made Sarah Palin a national figure by choosing her as his Vice Presidential nominee in 2008. Our pundits' love for the mavericky Maverick McCain is even greater than their love for Monica Lewinsky.

Maybe I'm getting a bit too deep into the weeds on this, too deep at least for my own comfort. But this David Sirota column that provides a refreshing trashing of Dean Broder and our Pod Pundits generally over the Afghanistan War, Intelligentsia against intelligence Salon, even he manages to embrace the notion that Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck are somehow harmless entertainment on the fringes of the Republican Party:

The trend is deeply disturbing. It's one thing for talk-show-host wannabe Sarah Palin or carnival-barking provocateur Glenn Beck to glamorize willful ignorance -- that's been the narcissistic act of celebrity court jesters since the dawn of history. But it's an entirely different thing when hostility to intelligence and to the basic process of thinking itself emanates from the very professional thinkers who lead the nation's intelligentsia. [my emphasis]

Our pundits, even supposedly solidly liberal ones like Frank Rich and David Sirota, are just having a hard time facing up to what the Republican Party has become.

Tags: frank rich, maureen dowd, sarah palin

Vietnam and Afghanistan

Reasoning by historical analogy is dangerous. But the American approach to counterinsurgency wars didn't spring full-grown from the brow of David Petraeus. It is heavily conditioned, if not completely dominated, by the experience of the Vietnam War.

I've seen a couple of good analyses lately of the Vietnam War that provide useful critical perspective on Obama's current decision on how much to escalate the Afghanistan War. One is Bill Moyers Journal of 11/20/09, this past Friday, which looks at Lyndon Johnson's decision-making process from November 1963 when he assumed the Presidency to the decision to Americanize the war in 1965 by committing to a direct US ground combat role. Some of the background assumptions and habits of the military establishment from those pre-Internet days sound awfully familiar today.

The other is The Fifty-Year War by Jonathan Schell The Nation 11/11/09 (11/30/09 edition). Schell looks at the decision-making on the Vietnam War against the background of the Cold War that after the fall of the Soviet Union morphed into the Long War. He calls special attention to the effect of McCarthyism and the Republican hysteria after 1949 over "who lost China", the "lost" referring to the victory of the Chinese Communists in 1949 in mainland China.


He writes:

In short, in strictly political terms, the Vietnam dilemma has been handed down to Obama virtually intact. Now as then, the issue politically is whether the United States is able to fail in a war without coming unhinged. Does the American body politic have a reverse gear? Does it know how to cut losses? Is it capable of learning from experience? Or must it plunge unchecked over every cliff it approaches? And at the heart of these questions is another: must liberals and moderates always bow down before the crazy right when it comes to war and peace? Must presidents behave like Johnson, of whom his attorney general, Nicholas Katzenbach, later said, "It would not have made any difference what anybody advised him--he would have done what he did [in Vietnam].... It was fear of the right wing." What is the source of this raw power, this right-wing veto over presidents, Congresses and public opinion? The person who can answer these questions will have discovered one of the keys to a half-century of American history--and the forces that, even now, bear down on Obama as he considers what to do in Afghanistan. [my emphasis]

And because of that "right-wing veto", it appears that actually withdrawing from Afghanistan isn't even an option the White House is seriously considering.

William Polk in Let America be America, and Depart Afghanistan Informed Comment 11/22/09 writes about a different and more recent historical experience of counterinsurgency that is also worth considering around the American role in Afghanistan now. He's talking in particular about the historical role of village, tribal and national assemblies called jirga, or loya jirga at the national level:

The Russians were, obviously, opposed to the very concept of the loya jirga and managed to by-pass or suppress it. They did so, however, at great cost because without such a legitimating authority, they could not find an Afghan counterpart with which to negotiate an end to their occupation. The puppet government they set up lacked the imprimatur of the loya jirga and was not regarded by the people as legitimate. So the Russians left with their tail between their legs.

As the current Russian ambassador and long-time KBG expert on Afghan affairs, Zamir N. Kabulov, has commented, there is no mistake the Russians made that has not been copied by the Americans. He was right about the way we approached the jirga. In 2002, nearly 2/3rds of the delegates to a loya jirga signed a petition to make the exiled king, Zahir Shah, president of an interim government to give time for the Afghanis to work out their future. An interim government might have avoided the worst of the problems we have faced in the last seven years. But we had already decided that Hamid Kara was “our man in Kabul” and did not want the Afghanis [sic] to interfere with our choice. So, as Thomas Johnson and Chris Mason reported, “massive US interference behind the scenes in the form of bribes, secret deals, and arm twisting got the US-backed candidate for the job, Hamid Kara [Karzai], installed instead. [They] then rode shotgun over a constitutional process that eliminated the monarchy entirely. This was the Afghan equivalent to the 1964 Diem Coup in Vietnam; afterward, there was no possibility of creating a stable secular government.” While an Afghan king could have conferred legitimacy on an elected leader in Afghanistan; without one, as they put it, “an elected president is a on a one-legged stool.” Then, as Selig Harrison wrote in the New York Times, our proconsul, Zalmay Khalilzad, “had a bitter 40-minute showdown with the king, who then withdrew his candidacy.” [my emphasis]

Tags: afghanistan war, vietnam war

Who you callin' a socialist?

Claude Henri de Rouvroy Graf von Saint-Simon (1760-1825)

I must admit, even having as low a general opinion of the Republican Party as I do, that even I'm surprised at the popularity among the Republicans on the Know-Nothing usage that has become as common as dirt in which socialist, liberal, communist, fascist, and Nazi are used as interchangeable concept. Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh to it, members of Congress do it, "movement conservatives" with intellectual pretensions do it, and rank-and-file Republicans do it. I really wonder what they mean, what image in their minds those interchangeable words call up, other than something like "bad". And I know for the Christian Right they all mean something like "atheist", too.

But how crack-brained is that? Jon Stewart did a brilliant skit that was less a satire than just an imitation of Glenn Beck in which he said that Beck had had apendicitis. And he explained the significance of that: "Youre appendix is connected to your large intestine which is connected to your small intestine which is something that Karl Marx had." That kind of arbitrary association is what passes for thinking among many Republicans today.

How can someone even have a simple-minded understanding of the most basic events of the 20th century without having an elementary notion of the differences between those concepts? It would be pointless for anyone with that concept to try to understand the political process by which Adolf Hitler came to power, for instance, to take one of the more consequential events of the last century. Because, trust me: none of it will make jack for sense to you. Even though the Beckians love to compare Obama to Hitler.


Without knowing some basic facts about the split between the Social Democrats and Communists around the German Revolution of 1918-19, without knowing something about why the Nazis were fighting the Social Democrats and the Communists in street battles as well as in elections during the 1920s up until 1933, without understanding something about how the Nazis fit into the German rightwing and how their position meshed with the position of wealthy and powerful Germans opposed to the democracy of the Weimar Republic: forget it. Just memorize the fact that Hitler came to power in 1933 and don't give yourself a headache even trying to understand any of it.

What's even worse for our xenophobic Republicans, they would also have to understand the difference between what "liberal" means in most of the world and what it has meant in the US since 1920 or so. It was around that time that pro-labor activists who had called themselves progressive appropriated the word liberal to differentiate themselves from the dying Progressive movement as well as from, yes, communists and socialists.

As far as what "liberal" means in the rest of the world, I strongly advise that you not go look at the Web site of the Liberal International (LI), the Federation of European and other parties in the world that self-identify as liberal. If you go there and start reading, your head may explode. Or not, because it has nothing to do with whatever it may be that the Beckians and Limbaugh dittoheads, i.e., most Republicans, mean when they use the term "liberal". The affiliate of the LI in Germany is the Free Democratic Party (FDP). They are part of the current "center-right" coalition in Germany. The "center" part of that name refers to the conservative party, Angela Merkel's Christian Democratic Union (CDU); the FDP is the "right" portion. The FDP is anti-union. The CDU has a union "wing".

If you should stumble across their Liberal Thinkers section. You will find people listed there like Friedrich von Hayek, a hero of American economic "libertarians", i.e., advocates of de-regulated Killer Capitalism. And also (gulp!) Ayn Rand. Yes, the John Galt and Fountainhead Ayn Rand, guru of Alan Greenspan. And Thomas Sowell of the Hoover Institute.

Carl Grünberg (1861–1940)

Anyway, I thought this post would be a good place to mention the real historical origin of the word socialism, based on a couple of articles from what is known as the Grünberg Archiv, after its editor Carl Grünberg (1861–1940). The publication was actually called Archiv für die Geschichte des Sozialismus und der Arbeiterbewegung (Archive for the History of Socialism and the Workers Movement). Grünberg later became director of the Institut für Sozialforschung, better known as the Frankfurt School. These two articles from the Archiv deal with the origins of the words "socialism" and "socialist": Carl Grünberg, Der Ursprung der Worte „Sozialismus“ und „Sozialist“ 2/1912 and Ernst Czóbel, Zur Verbreitung der Worte „Sozialismus“ und „Sozialist“ in Deutschland and in Ungarn 3/1913.

The earliest usage of the words Grünberg found was from an Italian cleric in 1803, where it was used to refer broadly to the opposite of individualistic philosophies, which Grünberg describes as "a thoroughly different" meaning that the one it was to later acquire. He finds a French usage from 1831 of "socialisme" where it referred to ... the Catholic Church! In the sense of the Universal Church: Catholic theology emphasized the importance of community in contrast to the more individual-oriented Protestant theology.

The first use of "socialist" he identifies is in 1827 from the English Co-operative Magazine and Monthly Herald, a paper of Robert Owens' reform movement to describe the Owenites. This is essentially the first usage he finds of the word in the sense it came to be generally used in the 19th century. Although he notes the word didn't catch on for a while in England.

In 1831, he finds "socialisme" used in a French paper, Le Globe, where it is used to describe the Saint-Simonist reform doctrine in contrast to individualism. This is a very similar usage to that of the English Owenite paper in 1927.

So, in other words, the term socialist came into usage as a reference to the reformist doctrines that later came to be known as utopian socialist, particularly those associated with Robert Owen (1771-1858), Charles Fourier (1772-1837) and Claude Henri Graf von Saint-Simon (1760-1825).

Grünberg and Czóbel find the first usages of the adjective form "sozialist" in German in 1840, though it's not clear which among them was the earliest, Fr. J. Buss in a speech of July 1840 or August Ludwig Churoa, writing under the pen name of Rochau, in the book Kritische Darstellung der Sozialtheorie Fouriers. Grünberg finds the first use of the noun form in German in an 1842 book by Lorenz von Stein (1815-1890), Sozialismus und Kommunismus des heutigen Frankreichs. Czóbel finds the earliest incidence of the word in Hungary in 1842.

In short, the use of "socialist" and "socialism" in the sense to which the world became accustomed in the 19th century began around 1830 and by the 1840s was beginning to come into general usage to describe utopian reform schemes like those of Owen, Fourier and Saint-Simon.

Tags: socialism, radical right, republican party

Glenn Beck Has a Dream

So it's a crappy video -- mostly with the view of the back of someone's head, but Glenn Beck talks about "The Plan," his 100 year crusade to take back the country from...well, whoever.  This is all about Beck's new book, which seems to be just a continuation of all his other books.  On his website, he's asking everyone "to join me at the feet of Abraham Lincoln on the National Mall for the unveiling of The Plan and the birthday of a new national movement to restore our great country." The date of the big meetup is August 28, 2010, the anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech.

Another Hurdle Crossed

On Saturday night, health care reform cleared a major preliminary hurdle as the Senate voted 60-39 to end a Republican filibuster and begin debate on the bill.  Two Democratic holdouts, Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas and Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, were finally convinced to join the party.  Debate is expected to begin after the Thanksgiving recess on November 30 and to continue for many, many weeks.

"My vote should in no way be construed by the supporters of this current framework as an indication of how I might vote on the final bill," said Landrieu, adding that she also will seek more generous tax credits for small-business health care.

Republicans are portraying the bill as the end of the Republic.  In an email newsletter from Johnny Isakson, one of my two senators, the Georgia Republican promised to vote against moving forward on the bill..

"because, among other things, it will raise taxes, cut Medicare services to seniors and force billions of dollars in massive unfunded mandates on states.

The unintended consequences of this legislation are disastrous to small businesses, and will drive people to a public option where there is no option at all. This is not a public option; this is a public ultimatum.

Saudia Arabia, Yemen and Shi'a-Sunni tensions

The Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram Weekly Online reports in Sectarian rifts appear by Omayma Abdel-Latif (11/19-25/09 edition) that Saudi Arabia's military campaign against Shi'a rebels in Yemen is really ticking off Iran and Saudi Shiites, the latter composing 1/3 or so of the Saudi population. It also says Al Qa'ida implicitly supported the Saudi attacks by issuing a statement condemning the Shi'a Al-Houthi group the Saudis are targeting.

Gee, hyper-Sunni cult Al Qa'ida hates Iranian-backed Shi'a group? Who could have guessed? (Yes, that's meant to be sarcastic.)

The Al-Houthis "are Zaidis, a branch of Shiism closest to Sunni doctrine". Like the other Shi'a, the Zaidis (also Zaidiya, Zaydīyah, Zaidīs, Zaydis) recognize the primacy of the fourth caliph ‛Alī ibn abī Tālib to follow the Prophet Muhammad as the leader of the Muslim community. But unlike most Shi'a, the Zaidis do not regard the first three caliphs, Abū Bakr, ‛Umar and ‛Uthmān, as usurpers.


The name of the sect comes from Zayd ibn ʿAlī (d. 740), the grandson of Shi'a martyr Ḥusayn ibn ʿAlī (626-680), the son of the fourth caliph. The Zaidis are commonly known as the Fiver Shi'a because they recognize Zayd as the fifth Imam, which other Shi'a do not. Their interpretations of Islāmic law have often been close to those of Sunni jurists.

Oxford Islamic Studies Online gives this discription of Zaidi distinctiveness:

Although they have their own school of law based on the legal interpretations of Zayd and his successors, the Yemeni Zaydīs are otherwise the closest of all Shīʿī factions to the Sunnīs (and most particularly to the Ḥanafī school of Sunnī jurisprudence); this has often been interpreted by Western scholars to mean that they are “moderate” or practical. The Zaydīs differ from other Shīʿī denominations in that they accept the legitimacy of the caliphates of Abū Bakr, ʿUmar, and, at least partially, ʿUthmān. Moreover, in contrast to certain other Shīʿī groups, the Zaydīs do not view the imam as infallible, nor as a quasi-divine, inspired, or supernaturally endowed person representing God on earth, and, again unlike other factions, they do not require that he be divinely designated in any way. In Zaydī belief, the qualifications for the imamate include: descent from ʿAlī and Fāṭimah (though they do not require that it pass from father to son), absence of physical imperfections, and personal piety. The imam must be able to take up the sword, either offensively or in defense, which rules out infants as well as “hidden imams” of the type acknowledged by the Ismāʿīlīyah and the Twelvers. [my emphasis]

That latter point indicates that they also lack the messianic/apocalyptic element that characterizes Twelver Shiism. The Zaidis generally reject mystical approaches to the faith.

The article quotes the head of the Lebanese Hizbullah party on the sectarian implications:

Hizbullah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah called for rapprochement between Iran and Saudi Arabia. Nasrallah said there is a tendency today to put a gloss of sectarianism on every conflict in the region, and that this was meant to break up Muslim nations into small entities. This, he said serves Israel.

"Every conflict in our region is being interpreted only from the perspective of the Sunni-Shia divide," he said in his latest speeches commemorating the Day of the Martyr. "It is being said that Turkey, the Sunni state, is engaging in the Middle East to take the role of Iran, the Shia state." Nasrallah called on Iran to make a rapprochement towards Saudi Arabia and vice versa. "There should be an initiative from any Arab or Muslim nation to bring those two big and important nations together to dialogue in order to put out the sectarian fire."

The fighting has spilled over into Saudi Arabia, as reported in Saudi villages evacuated due to violence in Yemen, UNICEF says Today's Zaman (Turkey) 11/14/09.

Tags: iran,
islam, saudi arabia

The audacity of timidity

Paul Krugman assesses the consequences of having done too little in the spring to combat the economic crisis in The Big Squander New York Times 11/19/09:

Earlier this week, the inspector general for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, a k a, the bank bailout fund, released his report on the 2008 rescue of the American International Group, the insurer. The gist of the report is that government officials made no serious attempt to extract concessions from bankers, even though these bankers received huge benefits from the rescue. And more than money was lost. By making what was in effect a multibillion-dollar gift to Wall Street, policy makers undermined their own credibility — and put the broader economy at risk.

For the A.I.G. rescue was part of a pattern: Throughout the financial crisis key officials — most notably Timothy Geithner, who was president of the New York Fed in 2008 and is now Treasury secretary — have shied away from doing anything that might rattle Wall Street. And the bitter paradox is that this play-it-safe approach has ended up undermining prospects for economic recovery. For the job of fixing the broken economy is far from done — yet finishing the job has become nearly impossible now that the public has lost faith in the government’s efforts, viewing them as little more than handouts to the people who got us into this mess. [my emphasis]

It's part of the Republicans' Predator State approach to government, in this case with the pattern on handling Wall Street bailouts continuing into the Obama administration: the bankrupt financial institutions get bailed out and their executives get paid billions in bonuses after bankrupting or near-bankrupting their companies, while most people see unemployment and mortgage payments both rising. And the Republicans have honed their methods over the decades for blaming the results on the Democratic Party and "gubment" in general. Unless the Obama administration starts trying to please those facing unemployment and reduced salaries instead of Wall Strett bankers and billionaires who want to abolish Social Security using the federal deficit as an excuse, the Republicans could be successful with those methods in 2010 and 2012. And the fact that Frank Rich thinks that Sarah Palin is an exotic extremist (which she is!) won't make any difference, except to encourage the Democrats in their foolish complacency.

Meanwhile, David "Bobo" Brooks, neocon warmonger and reliable belweather of "respectable" Republican opinion, thinks the Obama administration has done just fine on the economic bailout. Bobo is impressed with Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner's moderation: "prudence was the key to his effectiveness. In interviews and testimony, Geithner uses the word 'balance' a lot." This is the greatest compliment that the devotees of High Broderism can bestoy on a political figure, especially a Democrat. This gives Bobo hope for the future. Because the Obama administration confronts more economic problems. And which is foremost in Bobo's mind? Yes, it's a rhetorical question: "First, the need to reduce the deficits ..."

Tags: obama administration, us economy

Jerry Brown 1.0

"First, think clearly; then ask a lot of questions." - CA Gov. Jerry Brown, 1975

This seems like a good time to make use of one of the better brief descriptions I've seen of Jerry Brown's first Governorship of 1975-83. It comes from Neal Peirce and Jerry Hagstrom, The Book of America: Inside 50 States Today (1983). Jerry's second term ended in early 1983, so they were reviewing his whole governorship. He had run for the US Senate in 1982 on an assertively liberal program against Pete Wilson, who would later go on to brand the California Republican Party as the anti-Latino Party.

As they explain, Jerry was a leader in creating a post-Sixties version of progressive politics and programs. And, amazing as it seems now that California has turned into a model of dysfunctional state government, he was able to achieve some important innovations in environmental protection, supporting the farm workers' right to organize and bringing much greater diversity into state government. How some Democratic progressives today can look back at this record and see something other than a liberal Democrat, I'm not really sure:

Like his father, Jerry Brown was elected as a Democrat, but there the similarities stopped. The young bachelor Brown (he was born in 1938) refused to move into the huge governor's mansion Reagan had built, rode in a Plymouth instead of a chauffeured limousine, and occasionally retreated to a Zen Buddhist monastery to meditate (he had studied in a Jesuit seminary before entering Yale Law School). But despite this seemingly ascetic lifestyle, he also broke with politicians' conventional discretion to travel to Africa with his companion, rock singer Linda Ronstadt. Intellectually, Brown symbolized his generation's dissatisfaction with big institutions and megasolutions. He set up the nation's first Office of Appropriate Technology to explore and test such concepts as environmental and climatically designed buildings, including wind power and solar heating, bioconversion (using waste to produce energy) and home organic farming to increase people's self-sufficiency. He launched California onto an energy conservation path unequalled by any other state, consistently opposed nuclear power, maintained the nation's toughest air and water pollution standards and laws against toxic wastes, and created the Agricultural Labor Relations Board, which leaned to the left in its regulation of farm-labor relations. He made precedent-shattering appointments of women, blacks, Hispanics, and Asians, who received 50 percent of his 6,000-plus executive appointments and 40 percent of those he made to the courts. [my emphasis]

On Tuesday of this week, Attorney General Brown moved to take toys that could poison children out of stores as the holiday buying season descends upon us, as Mark Glover reports in Stores must remove lead-laced toys, says Attorney General Brown Sacramento Bee 11/19/09. He was aggressively pro-consumer as Governor, as well, as Peirce and Hagstrom describe:

The "old boy networks" of white males were closed out. Hundreds of laypersons were placed on California's 41 consumer boards, breaking the monopoly control of groups—from doctors to engineers—who've often used the state's regulatory boards for their professions' interests rather than the public interest. Brown ended up with five women in his ten-member cabinet — not to mention his highly controversial appointment of a liberal female lawyer, Rose Elizabeth Bird, as California's chief justice. In the last weeks of Brown's governorship, we asked him the rationale of his appointments approach. His reply: "to make government a mirror image of what society is" in a state with millions of working women and fast-rising numbers of minorities and the foreign born. His appointees' skills, Brown admitted, often weren't the highest. But the alternative was to leave a "dying" white male coalition in power. "I came down on the side of opening a window to the future." [my emphasis]

Rose Bird, California's first female chief justice, became a special target of Republicans because she led the State Supreme Court to hold that the death penalty violated the California state constitution and ended it. A ballot initiative later restored it, a measure that Jerry opposed despite its high popularity. Rose Bird later wound up being rejected for re-election to the Court in 1986. The Republicans led a high-visibility campaign against her, focusing on their objections to her decisions and her death penalty ruling, in particular. This San Francisco Examiner obituary for her gives more background: Ex-Chief Justice Rose Bird dies by Larry Hatfield 12/05/1999. The following year, conservatives whined mightily that the Democratic Senate rejected President Ronald Reagan's nomination of rightwing ideologue Robert Bork to the Supreme Court. After the right's aggressive pursuit of Rose Bird, I didn't feel the least sorry for them. Actually, the Republicans are still whining about Bork's rejection.

Rose Bird, California's first female chief justice, appointed by Jerry Brown

Ah, the memories: in those days, the Democratic Party was actually able to reject a poor Republican nominee to the Supreme Court. Hard to imagine, I know, but it actually happened! And even more amazing, six Republican Senators voted against St. Reagan's nominee! We've gone through the looking glass since then.

Jerry also made other reforms, including an effort to control rising medical costs:

Brown authored a state urban policy to revitalize inner cities and discourage wasteful sprawl — a first in any Sunbelt state. He inaugurated an energy and resources fund, financed from tidelands oil revenues, to foster California fisheries, reforestation, soil conservation, wetlands, and coastal protection. He cajoled government pension funds to invest mote (up to $900 million a year) in California housing and economic enterprises, rather than distant investments irrelevant to the state's economic future. Enamored of high technology, which he believed must be a linchpin of both California and national economic growth strategies, he created an industrial innovation commission (including many successful high-tech entrepreneurs), which recommended "a new governing coalition between business, labor, academia and government" to foster growth industries and dominate international markets in such cutting-edge areas as semiconductors, computers, telecommunications, robotics, and biotechnology. Brown argued that radically improved scientific education in schools and colleges, combined with ambitious workers retraining, was imperative for state and national economic survival. He gave energy and direction to a highly innovative California Conservation Corps for young people. Belatedly, he tried to tame soaring health costs through a "czar" to prenegotiate economical doctor and hospital rates, on a competitive basis, for patients of the state-subsidized "MediCal" system. [my emphasis]

Tags: jerry brown

Fort Hood and Complacency

We all remember how a former President failed to respond to the threat of terrorism until after 9/11. Although George Tenet's hair was famous for being on fire the summer of 2001, he failed to gain the attention of either Bush or Condi. There was a complacent attitude then that could not be shaken, even by intelligence briefings warning that bin Laden planned to strike us here, at home.

In some ways, the story of Major Hasan is a very similar example of complacency and inaction -- there were many warning signs of the man's instability, and he himself warned that Muslim soldiers might react violently to the internal conflicts improsed on them by America's wars in Muslim countries. Nobody took any of it seriously.

It is curious, in an America that often demonizes Islam as a religion of hate and violence, that we have been so persistently complacent about the problems that gave rise to Major Hasan's actions. Putting aside the obvious and appropriate questions about his mental health, Hasan's case should raise questions in our minds about the impact of the "long war" on American Muslims.

In our habitual complacency, we assume the mythic benefits of our great melting pot and liberal traditions of tolerance and freedom will ensure that American Muslims could never feel as conflicted about their loyalties as was clearly the case in Hasan's tragic and criminal act.

At the same time, we regularly engage in a public dialogue about Islam that is ignorant, hostile and ultimately alienating to anyone in this country belonging to that faith. "Muslim = Terrorist" is the equation that underlies much of our pop culture -- from right-wing thriller novels to video games to Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity.

We hold quite contradictory views: on the one hand, that Islam justifies and motivates and approves the murderous acts of terrorists; and also that American Muslims, who are well aware of the first view, are nonetheless successfully assimilated, loyal, and extremely unlikely to ever engage in violence against their neighbors. Holding both thoughts at once, we are overwhelmed, and do nothing.

Steven Simon and Jonathan Stevenson have written a thoughtful piece in Foreign Policy that calls for an end to our complacency and mindless passivity. Maybe Fort Hood will cause some of us to refelct on how hard it might be to be a Muslim in America, and to take action to improve the situation, and to react to the risks it presents.

Probably, and most unfortunately, not. Some lessons of 9/11 have yet to be learned.

Jerry Brown, presumed Democratic nominee for CA Governor in 2010

In addition to focusing more on comprehensive immigration reform, I also want to start paying closer attention to Jerry Brown's (officially undeclared) 2010 gubernatorial race. With his main presumed Democratic opponent for the Party nomination, Gavin Stevens Newsom, out of the running, Brown is the presumptive nominee.

I certainly haven't been making a secret of my general admiration for Jerry Brown, though I also generally think it's at least as important to be critical-minded about politicians you support as those you don't. And, yes, the rumors are true. I was once caught hanging out at his old commune in Oakland with Jerry, homeschoolers and Berkeley nudists. I can't deny it.

From following his career and from the limited in-person contact I've had with him, I would say that he's basically a pro-labor, pro-immigrant Democrat. He spent four years in a Jesuit seminary as a novitiate (studying for the priesthood), and the Jesuit approach to Catholic Christianity is a major influence in his thinking. I've sometimes said that one way to understand Jerry's sometimes challenging approaches is that he's a Jesuit who went into politics. That influence shows up in his work with Mother Teresa in India and in his friendship and intellectual engagement with the late Austrian Christian theologian-philosopher Ivan Illich (1926-2002). (Illich is commonly described as an anarchist but that's a very inadequate description.)


Jerry has also seriously studied Zen Buddhism, which emphasizes concepts such as living in the moment and playing the role appropriate to your life and your situation in the moment. He's also very ecologically minded, and his aggressive approach to environmental protection is the most important of his legacies from his first stint as California Governor in 1975-83. Along with more traditional influences like being part of a major political dynasty and his training in law, all this gives him a complex set of lenses through which to view politics. The results are sometimes surprising and even contradictory, though rarely if ever incoherent.

Jerry is currently viewed with suspicion by many Democratic activists who perceive him as insufficiently liberal, or not liberal at all. I can't say this is entirely surprising to me, but I also can't say I really understand why that is. Digby, one of my favorite bloggers, just posted a spirited defense of Jerry against some airhead Beltway Village idiocy (Moonbeams and Starshine Hullabaloo 11/18/09). But she also writes, "There are plenty of criticisms to be made about Brown, who in many respects is no longer even close to being a liberal."

That perception does puzzle me. I would say that Jerry in general is much more of a solid liberal/progressive than Barack Obama. As Attorney General, he's been aggressive in pursuing corporate misdeeds, companies who scammed consumers and investment frauds, a solid pro-consumer record. Brown has been articulating as much of a full-throated criticism of the arrogant financial elite as any Democrat I can think of. Just this week, he announced a $1.4 billion settlement against Wells Fargo: Wells Fargo to Pay $1.4 Billion in Auction-Rate Securities Settlement by Cheryl Miller The Recorder 11/19/09. Aren't these kinds of aggressive, pro-consumer actions what liberal Democratic activists would want a Democratic Attorney General to pursue?

Part of the concern may be more factional, i.e., Gavin Stevens until recently was expected to be Jerry's opponent in the 2010 Democratic primary. Gavin won the admiration of liberal activists by his aggressive stand on same-sex marriage. He also had made an effort to cultivate the netroots in a way that Brown seems not to have done. Gavin was a featured speaker at the 2008 Netroots Nation convention in Austin, for example.

But Jerry has a decent record on same-sex marriage, as well. As Attorney General, he took the very unusual step of opposing the state law against same-sex marriage established by Proposition 8 (aka, Proposition Hate). He was unsuccessful in his challenge to the law. But in making the case, he even relied on an unconventional Constitutional theory arguing that same-sex marriage should be considered a right guaranteed by the US Constitution that no state had the right to deny. That's a more pro-same-sex marriage position than any President Obama has taken.

This article gives a good overview of Jerry's current political situation: Why It’s Nuts for Dems to Want a Primary Fight Calbuzz 11/09/09.

I had a dialogue with David Dayen in the comments to his Roundup post of 10/30/09 FDL News Desk post, over Jerry's progressive politics or lack thereof. The folks at the Calitics blog, which included David until a couple of months ago, have been very skeptical of Jerry's candidacy for Governor.

Steven Harmon of the Contra Costa Times gives his take on why Liberals worry about Brown's move to 'center' 11/18/2009. This report by Martin Wisckol of the Orange County Register provides some items for concern, Jerry Brown shows O.C. his moderate, populist side 10/30/09. The article also uses the term "moderate populist", which I'm not sure I've ever seen before. It's a reflection of how near-meaningless the word "populist" has become in the American usage. (In Europe, it is used to mean rightwing demagogue, which is also a corruption of its meaning for the original Populist Party in the US.)

Reading the Brown Transcripts by Joe Mathews of the New America Foundation Fox & Hounds 11/11/09 provides a more nuanced view of Jerry than the Contra Costa Times and Orange County Register pieces might suggest. Matthews is also the author of the recent American Prospect's skeptical cover story on Jerry, See Jerry Run. Again. 09/24/09. That one is not a very good analysis of Jerry's career. Matthews almost seems to think that he was responsible for the property-tax-cutting initiate Proposition 13, writing, "As it happens, the only thing worse than Prop. 13 itself was its implementation." He doesn't even mention that Brown had earlier proposed a much more sensible property tax reform that the legislature foolishly rejected. Or that he very actively supported a competing and also sensible tax reform intiative in 1978 that unfortunately was defeating by Prop 13.

Yes, he had to implement it as Governor. And he did a good job of minimizing the damage. In fact, it was Prop 13 that created the situation that we still have today, in which the state government is forced to run chronically on the verge of bankruptcy. That's the conservative and Republican vision of government. And that's not the view of government that Jerry Brown represents. He does take government efficiency seriously, as distinct from Republicans for whom "eliminating waste, fraud and inefficiency" is nothing but a magical incantation. As Jerry once famously said before Prop 13, "I'm not conservative, I'm just cheap."

Jerry recently fired his spokesperson, who was revealed to have secretly taped interviews reporters had with Jerry. Secret taping of that kind is illegal in California. But it has produced this compilation of documents, most of which are transcripts from those interviews. This report describes them: Secrets of Secret Jerry Brown Tapes Revealed Calbuzz 11/10/09. Here is the 93-page PDF of the document itself, which give the reader an unusual chance to look at how Jerry processes information in that context. On page 5 of the PDF, he puts environmental concerns front and center when AP reporter Beth Fouhy asks him why he wants to run for Governor again:

That's the question. That is the question. I would say in response, that the state has lurched from crisis to crisis. The creativity that I saw in state government 25 years ago is not there and I do believe that I have the experience and the ability to attract very skilled and creative people that could make a major contribution both in education and renewable energy, prison reform and in dealing with the water crisis. These key challenges that the state has been facing since the time that I was governor are still continuing. For example, they haven't built a water project since my father was governor. [Pat Brown was Governor from 1959-1967.] The only one that's ever been proposed was blocked in a referendum. The high speed rail authority? I signed it 1982. The bonds were just passed in the last election and they're talking another 10 years. There are a lot of things I did as governor. For example, California introduced to [sic] the state energy commission which I started. It didn't have one employee when I was governor and we built it up to the major state energy authority of the country. California became the world leader in wind and other renewable energy sources. By the way, California now uses less electricity per person than the other states. We haven't even grown. Not only because of the renewable energy but the efficiency, the building codes, the appliances. I'm continuing that as attorney general[.] I'm pushing each of the local governments, of which they're hundreds, to adopt land use plans to reduce vehicles miles traveled and require energy efficient building materials. [my emphasis]

Tags: jerry brown

Around the bend on Palin

Maureen Dowd provides an example of why Sarah Palin is not only a star within the Republican Party. She also has the potential for a wider appeal.

MoDo's Palin piece is Rogue American Woman New York Times 11/17/09. There are two basic problems with MoDo's article. It treats Palin as a pop-culture celebrity, not as a politician with a potentially huge effect on public policy.

And in treating Palin's ghost-written memoir as something to be ridiculed, MoDo neglects to mention that the ghost-writer, Lynn Vincent, is a white supremacist - at a minimum she co-authored a book with one (Robert Stacy McCain) - a fact which might have alerted her readers to the genuinely ugly side of Palin's appeal. Vincent also ghost-wrote the memoir of Lt. Gen. William G. "Jerry" Boykin, the theocrat who assured his Christian Right finds that he knew his God was bigger than the Muslims' God. She's also known for her hostility to gays and argues that Franklin Roosevelt during the Second World War (and by extension the US) was "a hapless puppet" of Joe Stalin. (Palin - or one of her speechwriters - has also shown questionable judgment in choosing a source for a cutesy quote.)


MoDo actually spends more of her column looking for cutesy commonalities with Palin. Her column comes off like a Republican parody of a sneering poo-bah of the Liberal Press Conspiracy. MoDo apparently intended the following to be obvious mockery of Palin/Vincent:

Here is what the former Alaska governor censoriously writes about “shenanigans” in two capital cities: “Politically, Juneau always had a reputation for being a lot like Animal House: drinking and bowling, drunken brawls, countless affairs, and garden variety lunchtime trysts. It’s been known at times to be like a frat house filled with freshmen away from their parents for the very first time. At other times, the capital city’s underside was even darker: clandestine political liaisons and secret meetings, unethical deeds and downright illegal acts.”

She concludes: “In short, it was a lot like Washington, D.C.”

Sure, it's a stereotypical rube's description of the sinful Big City. But that's the Republicans' general posture, not just Palin's: they aren't the servants of greedy CEOs, they're the champions of the regular folks against the swells and scary minorities in the big cities and dirty ghettoes.

Is Washington "like a frat house filled with freshmen away from their parents for the very first time"? I don't have that particular impression myself. But that is the kind of impression I get of MoDo and her fellow celebrity pundits when I watch them on the Sunday morining talk shows, or on the 24/7 cable channels. MoDo has so little self-reflection on own conduct and her pundit cohort's that she seems unaware of how credible a description that might seem to a lot of people. And because of that, she provides a half-plausible illustration of Palin's far-right posturing against the dreaded Liberal Elite.

Here's more information on Lynn Vincent you won't get from MoDo's column:

Palin co-author Lynn Vincent's inflammatory record Media Matters 11/13/09

Charles Johnson (a recovering Islamophobe), Sarah Palin's Book Ghostwritten by Associate of White Supremacist [Robert Stacy] McCain Little Green Footballs 09/29/09

John Cook, Sarah Palin's Ghostwriter Pals Around With Racists and Wackos Gawker 09/30/09

David Weigel, Robert Stacy McCain Responds to Gawker, Defends Palin Collaborator Lynn Vincent Washington Independent 9/30/09

Tags: maureen dowd, radical right,sarah palin

Tea party is over

I know that's kind of a groaner of a headline. What it means is that the hoopla from the Radical Right/Republicans over health care reform is likely to seem like a lower-case tea parties compared to the s**tstorm they are likely to kick up over immigration reform.

Pro-immigrant activists from Reform Immigration for America are sponsoring house parties for comprehensive immigration reform.

The xenophobic Tea Partiers are also gearing up for an anti-immigrant hate campaign, as Dave Neiwert reports in Teabaggers punk'd by anti-racists who get them to cheer rant against European-American immigrants Crooks and Liars 11/16/09.

Tags: immigration reform, radical right

Amazing Grace: Generosity in Hard Times

We often seem to be a cranky lot, here at The Blue Voice, in our thinking and our posting. So, today I'd like to post something in a vein that is anything but cranky. This one is about the feelings of amazement and gratitude I experienced toward my fellow human beings last Saturday. It was the fall Postal Carriers' Food Drive here in Albuquerque, and maybe all over the country. You know, it's that day that you clean out your cupboards and pantry and put all the canned/packaged/dry foods that you know you'll never eat into a grocery bag and leave it out by the mailbox for your postal carrier to pick up. Or at least that's kind of how I've always looked at it. I look at it quite differently now, after the experience Gail and I had late Saturday afternoon. As we are donors to Roadrunner Foodbank, our local supplier of food to those in need, we receive their newsletter. The most recent letter had a request for volunteers to help out at all our postal stations unloading the trucks as carriers came in from their mornings and afternoons of loading them full of bags of food.

So, we volunteered. The substation to which we were assigned is out behind the airport, in an area we are completely unfamiliar with. But after Saturday, I feel like I know at least some of the people who live in that neighborhood. I must add the caveat that this is far from being a wealthy residential area, quite the opposite in fact. We suited up for the cold weather, climbed up on the loading dock, and started unloading bins containing the bags of food. Then we sorted them into three categories and tossed them into huge cardboard bins: cans, glass jars, and dry packages or boxes. There were some subsets, like bags of chips, and loaves of bread, that had their own boxes on the sides so they wouldn't get crushed by heavier boxes or bags of stuff.

The big surprise to us was both the quality and the quantity of food in those bags coming off the postal trucks. These people hadn't just cleaned out their cupboards and gotten rid of the old boring stuff that had been there for a year: they had gone to the regular chain groceries for sure, but they had also gone to CostCo and Whole Foods, Sunflower Market and Keller's, places where they purchased organic peanut butter and pasta sauce, cartons of vegetable juice, Amy's soups, giant bags of organic pastas. There were bags of organic lentils and other legumes, boxes or organic cereals hot and cold, baby food of all kinds.

In short, the world has changed a lot more than I had any idea. More places are carrying organic foods of all sorts, and more people are buying them when they shop. The truly astounding thing is that they are buying them, not just for themselves, but for unknown strangers who can't afford to feed their families organic pasta with organic tomato sauce or make their kids organic peanut butter and strawberry jam sandwiches. And that this is happening in a time of economic hardship unprecedented in most of our lifetimes. I've worried that my bags with cans of organic navy beans, pumpkin, lentil soup and so forth would be simply ignored or cast aside by putative recipients. How wrong I have been. We were so cheered up by the people we were working with, many of whom brought their young adolescent kids, people of all ethnicities and ages, and by the amount of food we all unpacked and sorted - I've looked at the entire city with new, and completely uncranky, eyes for the past week.(Crossposted from Quid Nunc, my personal blog.)

Going Rogue; Like the Yankees

Photo lifted from Onion Sports

I've been slow to catch on to the excitement about Sarah Palin's new book, "Going Rogue", in which the former governor and VP candidate tells her side of the story of her recent 15 minutes of fame. The book has been the butt of jokes -- David Letterman called it "the book to nowhere" -- but I think Palin may have hit a home run.

For the title of the book, Palin chose an expression used by John McCain's advisors to express their disapproval of her penchant for doing whatever the hell she wanted during the presidential campaign last year, turning their intended insults into a major money-maker.

I think it's a smart strategy. Apparently, my beloved New York Yankees have been very successful in taking a similar marketing strategy over the past 13 years...

War on Moral Clarity

Christopher Hitchens starts an essay at Slate as follows:

The admonition not to rush to judgment or jump to conclusions might sound fair and prudent enough, perhaps even statesmanlike when uttered by the president, as long it's borne in mind that such advice is itself a judgment that is more than halfway to a conclusion. What it plainly implies in the present case is that the actions of Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan should not be assumed in any meaningful way to be related to his Muslim faith.

Thus defined, the debate about whether Major Hasan is a terrorist in formal alliance with bin Laden (and merely one player on a vast team of Qaeda agents in America) is transformed into a debate about whether Hasan's actions are likely to be completely unrelated to the fact that he is a Muslim. I often agree with Hitchens, although I find his arrogant manner irksome, and what I generally find admirable in his writing is that his rhetoric is usually supported by clear thinking, though not always. This is one such exception.

Some people jumped to label Hasan a terrorist and with the use of that term they meant to suggest that he is in league with Al Qaeda. This is what most Americans mean when they speak the T-word. Indeed, many of these people pointed out that Hasan attended a Virginia mosque that some 9/11 hijackers also attended. Hawks in the "war on terror" need occasional terrorist acts, or at least thwarted plots, to support their proposed policies in defense, immigration, intelligence, domestic surveillance, and homeland security. Islamophobia serves their purposes; they do not hesitate to play that card beacause they know it gets our attention. Hasan couldn't just be a Muslim; he had to be part of the global jihad.

On the other side, some of us doubt the wisdom of policies created during the Bush years to deal with the terrorist threat, and generally resist the assumption that Islam is identical with that threat. We don't deny the connection between Islamic fundamentalism as a primary driver of terrorism -- or even that Hasan's religion influenced his actions, as Hitchens suggests we would -- we just aren't disposed to label, as terrorism, every murder of an American committed by a Muslim. And we aren't in a hurry to place such a powerful label on events we are still trying to understand.

Whether Hitchens deliberately framed the issue in such a dishonest fashion, or cannot see that he had, is an interesting question. It seems to me that he is suffering from what George W. Bush, our least clear-thinking ex-president, called "moral clarity" and which often appeared to the rest of us as muddled madness. Is it possible that even the smartest commentators on the events of the day are so overwhelmed by their biases and convictions that they are no longer capable of thinking critically?

If I've been mistaken about anything, it's often been something I'd previously been completely certain of. That was true of Bush and it is equally true of Hitchens. That comparison should make him uncomfortable...