Flying off the handle

You obviously know about John Tyner, the guy who became an instant folk hero by refusing to submit to the increasingly-customary crap people go through at airports.

He refused to go through the full-body strip scanner, then refused the groin grope. Okay, he was told, you won't submit, you can't fly. So I won't fly, he says, gets a refund on his ticket, and goes to leave the airport, escorted by TSA staff. Then he is told, oh, no, you can't leave the security area without submitting to the grope. Once we pick you for enhanced interro- er, search, you can't just leave. If you do, he was told, you'll be subject to a fine of $10,000.

The TSA confirmed that, actually calling a press conference to announce it had opened an investigation targeting Tyner - and to note that actual penalty could be $11,000.

Apparently realizing that it is not conducive to institutional power to be the target of bad headlines and public mockery - including calls to investigate the agency and for people to refuse the scanners the day before Thanksgiving (one of the busiest travel days of the year) - T&A chief John Pistole told the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee that "I don't anticipate anything" coming down on Tyner, while continuing to insist that the whole security jazz is absolutely necessary and THE TERRORISTS! THE TERRORISTS!

Which is pretty much how things stand right now. But as is often the case, there's something about this, some side to it, that I think hasn't received enough attention: the fine. Yes, he's apparently not going to be charged, which is good. But that still leaves the fact that he could have been and other people still can be in the future.

Get this now: The only argument offered in this whole airport security theater, the only basis for demanding people surrender their privacy and their Constitutional right against unreasonable search, is that flying is some sort of "privilege" and so you "willingly" agree to be scanned, digitally-stripped, and felt up in order to fly and if you don't agree, well, just don't fly. In fact,

[w]hen he tried to assert his rights, Tyner was told by a TSA supervisor on tape, “By buying your ticket you gave up a lot of rights.”

Janet Napolitano, Führer of the Ministry for the Defense of the Fatherland, said the same thing, blandly declaring that "if people want to travel by some other means," well, they can go right ahead and do that.

That is, take it or leave it. And we do mean take it: Tyner's experience was far from the worst. For example,

[r]adio host Owen JJ Stone ... claims that as he was passing through airport security this past weekend clad in sweatpants, he was informed by a TSA agent that the rules had changed for those wearing “baggy clothing.”

Stone further maintains that the agent told him “I have to go in your waistband, I have to put my hand down your pants.”

The same article described the case of Thomas Mollman, 54, of Missouri City, Texas, who said at Fort Lauderdale Airport he was felt up

between the underwear, right on the skin, all the way around the back, all the way around my front, 360 degrees, touched inappropriately.

Meanwhile, a woman from Amarillo is suing the government, claiming that during a grope

the agent pulled the plaintiff’s blouse completely down, exposing plaintiffs’ breasts to everyone in the area,

in the words of the suit. It also alleges that security staff laughed and made jokes about the incident "for an extended period of time," with one male T&A employee telling her he'd missed it so "he would just have to watch the video."

Such experiences can be summed up in Napolitano's touching plea to air passengers in a USA Today op-ed:

We ask for cooperation, patience and a commitment to vigilance in the face of a determined enemy.

That is, we expect passive submission and obedience and BE VERY AFRAID!

But hey, tell you want, grant that. Grant all of that just for the sake of argument. Grant for the moment that flying is a "privilege" and we "give up a lot of rights" for that "privilege." Tyner was not going to fly. Tyner had agreed that as a result of his grousing about the grope he would not be getting on that plane. He had accepted the rules and was heading to leave the airport.

And that's when officials threatened to prosecute him! They insisted that once he was in the security area, he couldn't leave without their permission. This even though the entire argument of the "security" system, the entire rationalization for all the scans, scopes, and gropes, no longer existed: He was not going to fly.

It was a true Morton's fork: His choice was either to submit - which he didn't want - or refuse, leave, and get fined $11,000 - which he also didn't want - or, apparently, to just stay in the security area until he starved (or became "more cooperative," in the creepy parlance of the security state).

But more to the point here, what possible rationale could there be for prosecuting him for leaving? Having been told, having the whole basis for the entire process being, agree or "travel by some other means," when he chose the latter he was told pretty much in so many words that he couldn't make that choice, that doing so is illegal. Why? For what? What is the crime here?

The excuse - I can't being myself to call it a reason - for this inanity is that the T&A doesn't want THE TERRORISTS to go into the security area, "gather intelligence" - that is, look around - and then leave.

Time for the next italicized question: Just how stupid does T&A think these people are? Just how lamebrained do they think anyone planning a terrorist strike is? You want to "gather intelligence?" Fine. You get a ticket, you go into the security area with the rest of the passengers, you scope the place out, you go through the screening, and you get on the goddam plane!

Oh, no no no, T&A assures us. That's not what would happen. Oh no, a terrorist wouldn't try to be inconspicuous, wouldn't try to fade into the crowd. Oh no, a terrorist would refuse the screening, turn around, and leave - thus drawing to themselves the attention of every f'ing security guard in the whole damn place. And will the prospect of that undesired attention deter them? No way - but the idea of a freaking fine will stop them in their tracks.

Head. Desk.

We are headed in a dangerous direction. Someone noted that when things have happened on planes, it has been the passengers who acted and prevented a worse outcome - and expressed a concern that the sort of people who would act in those sorts of situations are the same sorts who are increasingly choosing to "travel by some other means" and what that might mean in a future incident. However real that worry, it is clear that a docile, compliant public shuffling through airports in their stocking feet and standing passively with their hands raised while a stranger grabs their genitals is not one conducive to a free society.

So have we established a police state? No, of course not. But have we established the conditions for one, conditions where citizens are expected to passively cooperate with ever-more intrusive, ever-more psychologically dominant official demands such that simply to engage in what is for many an everyday experience -flying - becomes an act of submission to arbitrary authority? Yes. Without question.

At some point we have to as a people say "Back off - you've gone too far." I say we have reached, indeed we have passed, that point.

Footnote: There is some pushback. The very fact that Pistole had to answer Senate questions about Tyner and the screening process was one, temporary though it may have been. Besides the petition at Firedoglake to investigate the TSA and the call to boycott the scanners on November 24, linked above, there is the push by the US Airline Pilots Association for its members to refuse to cooperate with the scanners and call in sick if they find the grope too distressing. Meanwhile, two commercial pilots - one man and one woman - have filed suit, claiming the procedures are unconstitutional.

Privacy being an area where the left and right overlap, a number of right-wing sources have also condemned the intrusiveness of the screenings. This is from the National Post, a right-wing Canadian daily (links as per the original):

Apparently Ralph Nader, an accomplished crusader if ever there was one (for safety, ironically), thinks the naked-picture policy can be beaten. A bipartisan group of New Jersey politicians is pressing the TSA to end the use of the porno-scanners. Congressman Ron Paul has introduced to the House this week The American Traveler Dignity Act.

Jeffrey Goldberg and even World Nut Daily have joined in.

The T&A remains defiant - but Tyner's case could prove to be the one, the always-unpredictable one, that touches a nerve in just the right way at just the right time to make an actual difference. We can certainly hope so.

#IAmSpartacus

If I was on Twitter, I might have heard about this sooner. But I'm not, so I just came across it now.

Last January 6, a young man named Paul Chambers was irritated when Robin Hood airport outside Doncaster, England, was closed by a winter storm. He had plans to fly out of that airport to see a woman he had gotten to know online. Frustrated at the potential cancellation of his plans, he tweeted this to his followers:

Crap! Robin Hood airport is closed. You’ve got a week and a bit to get your shit together, otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high!

The message was discovered five days later by an airport duty manager who was browsing the Web.

The manager forwarded the offending tweet on to his station manager, and - even though the threat was deemed "non-credible" - it was passed on to police.

On January 13, Chambers was arrested. Even though police determined that the comment was a joke "for only his close friends to see" according to his police case file, he was charged with "sending a menacing electronic communication" - that is, of making a threat. In May, he was convicted. This, again, despite the undisputed facts that it was deemed a "joke" and "non-credible" as a "threat" and the supposed "threat" was never sent to the supposed target, which would not have even known about it but for pure chance.

This past Thursday, his appeal was rejected. Not only rejected, his punishment was increased: He'd originally been fined a total of £1000; on Thursday the appeals judge added an additional £2600 for "prosecution costs."

The danger such a decision presents to freedom of speech online needs or at least should need no explanation, not when you can be arrested, convicted, and punished for what everyone involved agrees was a joke.

Well, okay, no, not everyone: The appeals judge - who "icily lectured the courtroom about the impropriety of sending Twitter updates during the case," claimed that "any ordinary person would have been menaced by the tweet." Well, if that's true then "any ordinary person" is a goddam flaming idiot. I mean, come on: threatening to blow up an airport if it is not open? Saying in essence that "I want that airport open and if it's not open in a week I'll keep it closed?" That's like making a "threat" along the lines of "You'd better feed me, or else I'll go on a diet" or "If you don't stop laughing, I'm going to tickle you." Who in their right mind could take that seriously as a threat? In point of fact, no one and yes I am fully aware of what I am suggesting about the appeals judge.

Chambers has suffered more than a fine as a result of this:

He was fired from his job as an administrative and financial supervisor at a car-parts company. He moved to Northern Ireland ... and was fired from a subsequent job after his employers discovered his criminal record. He is now unemployed.

So he is out of a job as well as some £3600 (about $5800) for failing to have sufficiently absorbed the "watch what you say lest you irritate some official or another" mantra, the "don't make waves or even ripples" meme. Star Simpson could tell him something about that.

On the upside, almost immediately upon the loss of the appeal thousands of tweets started appearing under the tag #IAmSpartacus either re-tweeting Chambers' original post or making their own comic "threats" against a variety of targets. AP said it counted 5000 in just two hours.

As I noted at the top, I'm not on Twitter, so I can't participate directly in the campaign of solidarity, but I'll say here that unless within a week and a bit Robin Hood airport adopts a policy of free beer and pretzels, I'll send a team of overweight middle-aged guys to do the full monty on the main concourse after which they will pee on the benches.

A spokeswoman for South Yorkshire Police, which originally arrested Chambers, scoffed and said "no" when asked if police planned on arresting any of Chambers' online fans.

But she refused to answer when asked why the thousands of jokey threats to blow Robin Hood Airport "sky high" would be treated any differently than Chambers' original tweet, which resulted in his arrest.

Of course she couldn't answer because there is no coherent response available. Right now, count on officialdom to hunker down and try to wait it out. Because even if the furor disappears, this case as a precedent, as a source of support for future, harsher limitations, will not. It will still be there, waiting to be whipped out.

Police and prosecutors "seem to have completely ignored the notion of context, which is a very dangerous thing," said Padraig Reidy of the London-based Index on Censorship. "If he genuinely intended to blow up the airport, he wouldn't have tweeted it. It's obviously a joke."

Reidy also said that

"The verdict demonstrates that the UK's legal system has little respect for free expression, and has no understanding of how people communicate in the 21st Century."

I suspect it's more likely true that they do understand - and the prospect of being unable to control such technology-driven intellectual anarchy, the prospect of not being able to confine communication within "acceptable limits," with appropriate "respect for authority," scares the living hell out of them. And that's why cases like this happen: to remind people who's boss.

As a footnote, after the hearing, British actor Stephen Fry renewed his promise to pay Chambers' fine. Good on him.

And another thing

Hello to Unknown News readers (and thanks as always to H&HH for the link) and to Jon Swift Memorial Roundup 2010 readers. Maybe you'd like to check out some of my other posts.

Updated The Christian Science Monitor's coverage of the draft proposal from the co-chairs of the Cat Food Commission starts this way:

The Democrat and Republican who cochair President Obama's debt commission haven't offered a magic fix for federal deficits, but they've tried to make one point loud and clear: Answers to America's fiscal challenges will involve "shared sacrifice."

"Shared sacrifice." Oh, my. What a high-sounding phrase. What a wonderful, "we're all in this together" sound bite. Group hug, gang, and a round of Kumbaya!

What a pile of unmitigated crap.

There are a hell of a lot of people in this country who over the past couple of decades have done their share of sacrificing, their share and more. They have seen their wages stagnate, their real household incomes fall, their household economies maintained only by working more hours.

We - millions of us - have lost our jobs, some of us so long ago that unemployment benefits are a memory. We have lost our health coverage and with it our access to health care. Growing numbers of us have lost our homes as foreclosures rise and rise again, foreclosures often driven by outright fraud by the banking industry. More and more of us have sunk into poverty and seen our children go hungry. We have seen our futures darken, our hopes that our children will be better off than us shrivel, and discovered too often that the light at the end of the tunnel is just a neon arrow pointing down another tunnel.

And now we are being told that we "all" have to "sacrifice." We "all" must "share the burden." We "all" have to "share the pain." And we are being told this by the very people who have gained, who have gotten richer, fatter, more comfortable, more secure, even as we, like Alice, have been doing all the running we can do, to keep in the same place. They are the ones who now dare to tell us that we "all" have to do our part so their stock portfolios won't be damaged in some future financial crunch.

So tell us, Erskine Bowles, tell us, Alan Simpson, tell us any of you sitting in your clean, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices, with your white collars and cut fingernails,* tell us what you are going to sacrifice. Tell us what part of the pain you are going to bear. Not vague generalities about groups and classes with charts and graphs and bullet points, but you, yourself. How great will be your "sacrifice?" How great will be your burden, your pain?

Because I say to you that if we "all" must sacrifice, if we "all" must bear our burden, I say to you that the amount of sacrifice in the decades to come should be directly proportional to the amount of gain in the decades just past. That those who have gained the most should give up the most. And that those among us who have already sacrificed, already lost, have already borne their share and more, should not be expected to sacrifice, should not be expected to be the widow giving her two mites to the treasury until after - after, I say - you prove that you will do more than the rich who cast in only what they thought they could just as well do without.**

You want to talk about "sacrifice?" Fine. Show us your cards. Put up or fucking shut up.

Updated with the link to the Taibbi piece and thanks go to, again, Blckdgrd for the tip.

*Look up quotes from C. S. Lewis's The Screwtape Letters. No link because in any I found, the relevant quote was buried in a long list of others and so the link was pretty useless. You're on your own.
**Mark 12:41-44

Friskies for all!

Well, not for the rich, of course, but yeah, for most of us. And it's not even Fancy Feast or something, fer cryin' out loud, but plain old dry.

I don't feel compelled to say much about the Cat Food Commission because so many others - including even some Democrats - are already saying it. But I do want to make a few disjointed observations on different aspects of the newly-released co-chairs' draft proposals on the theme that they repeatedly and I suspect unintentionally revealed themselves and their true aims.

For example, the Wall Street Journal quotes Erskine Bowles, the ostensible Democrat co-chairing the ostensibly bipartisan commission, as saying

I told people in the White House I had spent more time listening to people in the opposition party than they had done as a whole group.

Translation: The problem is that President I-Did-It-Your-Way has not compromised enough, has not adopted enough GOPper ideas.

Bowles [also] said the best hope for improving the political environment for [the co-chairs'] ambitious, painful budget plan is to convince people that doing nothing about the federal government's deficit and debt isn't an option

and talked about a "crisis" in five years. In other words, the best hope is to terrify us into submission. Which, I admit, is very probably true.

Meanwhile, Paul Krugman notes that among the co-chairs' "Guiding Principles and Values" is "Cap revenue at or below 21% of G.D.P."

The Christian Science Monitor says that 21% of GDP is "higher than its historical average, but a level that requires sharp spending discipline given the boomer retirement wave." Put another way, it's impossible without draconian benefit cuts, as the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities explains. That's particularly true considering that during the Reagan years, federal spending was at 22% of GDP.

But the real point comes via Krugman:

This is a guiding principle? And why is a commission charged with finding every possible route to a balanced budget setting an upper (but not lower) limit on revenue?

Why, indeed.

On Social Security, the co-chairs proposed what everyone expected: raise the retirement age and cut benefits. That was no surprise, what with co-chair Alan Simpleton having described us as being like "a milk cow with 300 million tits."

But what has this got to do with the deficit? The only rational answer is nothing at all: Social Security is financed by a separate tax, it does not draw on general revenues, it has a truly huge surplus (created consciously and specifically to prepare the system for the baby boomer retirement bulge) - in fact, by investing that surplus in T-bonds, it has actually helped finance the deficit, rather than add to it.

The co-chairs know this. Writing at Crooks and Liars, blogger karoli notes that the very draft report itself lists as a goal for Social Security to "Reform Social Security for its own sake, not for deficit reduction." So why is the whole section even in the draft? Because the commission provided an excuse, an opportunity, to attack Social Security. No other reason.

On taxes, I hardly find it necessary to comment; it's just the same old same old, proposing to reduce or eliminate tax breaks that matter to the middle class. The revealing part is that they propose to use most of what is gained thereby not to reduce the deficit but to finance a cut in tax rates for the rich and the corporations. That, we can assume, is part of their "Guiding Principle" of "Make America the best place to start and run a business and create jobs." Not the best place to live and work, mind you, the best place for business.

Finally, there is health care, a matter more central than considered in most commentary because, as Krugman says,

the main driver of those pretty charts [showing deficits falling and debt levels stabilizing] is the assumption that the rate of growth in health-care costs will slow dramatically. And how is this to be achieved? By “establishing a process to regularly evaluate cost growth” and taking “additional steps as needed.” What does that mean? I have no idea.

Actually, we do have some idea.

The section of the draft on health care (pages 31-36) is painful to read. The very first cost-saving proposal is to just cut payments to doctors and other providers. The second is to adopt "comprehensive tort reform," the politically expedient way to say "make it harder for patients to sue when they get fucked over by incompetent care or corporate malfeasance." Oh, and the third, I love the third:

Expand cost-sharing in Medicare to promote informed consumer health choices and spending.

"Cost-sharing." "Informed choices." Isn't that just precious. I had something to say about this line of bullshit almost a year ago:

Do you get it? Do you see? The problem, according to [these people], is you. You "overuse" health care. You are insufficiently "cost-conscious." It's all your fault. You don't comparison shop for a cardiologist. You don't independently investigate and evaluate treatment options for your cancer or your diabetes or your hypertension and generate a cost-benefit analysis. You don't personally compare the clinical trials for Avapro and Diovan. And the way to (I love this phrase) "bend the cost curve" is to reduce your coverage and make you spend more out of pocket for what remains through higher deductibles and co-pays - so you'll use less health care, thus keeping the cost down. In other words, the way to make health care more affordable is to make it less affordable.

As for the "additional steps as needed," the draft makes a few suggestions of possibilities, the first among which is to raise premiums. The bigger point, the more revealing point, however, is that the co-chairs want to keep the growth in the cost of health care to no more than GDP+1%, that is, health care costs cannot be allowed to rise any faster than a rate one percentage point above the growth in GDP and whatever cuts have to be made to achieve that, no matter how widespread, damaging, deep, or cruel, well, that's just what ya gotta do 'cause a balanced budget is obviously far more important than public health. Besides, it'll "promote informed consumer health choices" so it's all good.

Last licks go to Paul Krugman:

It seemed obvious, as soon as the commission’s membership was announced, that “bipartisanship” would mean what it so often does in Washington: a compromise between the center-right and the hard-right.

And in the end we get a hard right, right to the center of our future.

Footnote: For what it's worth, Dan Froomkin has an overview of "Ten Flash Points" in the draft proposal. And credit where it's due times two, Froomkin is where I came across the bit about Medicare "cost-sharing" before I searched it out in the draft and I heard about the Froomkin piece via Blckdgrd, who manages to find more online stuff than I ever will.

This should have gone up yesterday #2

This was originally posted on November 11, 2009. It is the second of the posts I've decided to put up every year. As in the previous post, this introductory paragraph and the Footnote, if any, may change year to year. The rest of the post is as per the original. Here it is:

This wasn't about Veterans Day originally, it was about Memorial Day, but I think it fits here equally well.

In May 2002, someone on a mailing list I was on posted a message asking people to take a moment of silence on Memorial Day, saying "Let us ensure that those who have made the ultimate sacrifice for our freedom are not forgotten."

In response, I wrote:

And in that silent moment remember, too, the many nonviolent warriors who struggled, searched, sacrificed, for justice and freedom, who remain without songs or memorials to celebrate their lives or their passing, but who at some moment stood weaponless against the machinery of oppression and showed in their simple “No more” a force that can move history.

It is indicative of how we as a culture regard things that on the whole, we celebrate our soldiers while they are alive and our nonviolent warriors only when they are safely dead. Then again, I'm not so sure we're so different from others in that way.

This should have gone up yesterday #1

This is something I posted two years ago on Veterans' Day. I've decided that I'm going to post this and the post that follows every Veterans' Day. There may be slight edits in the intro and the Footnote if there is one, but the main body, the original post from June 2008, is unchanged.

November 11 has become so well-known as Veterans' Day that not many people remember that it was originally called Armistice Day. It was intended to commemorate those who died in World War I by an observation of the end of the war, which ended, at least on the Western front, on "the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month." But after World War II, the US changed its day to Veterans' Day and over time it's become not a commemoration of those who have died in war but a celebration of anyone who's ever been in the military. It has slid from a commemoration of the dead and of peace to a promotion of militarism, to the "nobility of sacrifice" of "true" - and apparently the only true, as they are given due unavailable to the rest of us - "patriots."

So for my own observation of Veterans' Day, I'm going to re-post something I first posted in June 2008. Here it is:

I've tried various ways to start this, wanting to make sure that I say what I mean and only what I mean. But I've come to realize that there is no way that will not be misunderstood, either accidentally or deliberately, by some. So I gave up trying to do anything other than say it outright.

I am deeply disturbed by the increasing tendency among "progressives" to adulate all things military, and particularly disturbed by the practice of referring to soldiers routinely as "our heroes" or some similar formulation. Let me be clear here: Soldiers are not "heroes." A "hero" is by definition someone who is in some way extraordinary, remarkable, worthy of emulation. It is at best a risky business to define someone as "extraordinary" simply by virtue of wearing a uniform and in fact it is potentially dangerous as it makes it too easy to slip into the militaristic attitude that what soldiers do goes beyond "necessary evil" or just necessary, beyond even honorable, to admirable, to something to celebrate, an attitude that makes it all to easy to promote additional enlistments, additional weapons, and even additional wars.

The root of this, I'm convinced, is that after years of the constant drumbeat from the right that those on the left are "soft" on "national security," that we aren't "tough enough," not ready enough to "do what's necessary" to "protect our way of life," we increasingly have decided to, if you will, fight on those terms; that is, we have absorbed the idea that we have to prove ourselves on "security" issues by proving that we're "tough."

Our means of doing this, a means that first appeared during the Gulf War, was to declare loudly that "We support the troops!" That was our way into the national security debate, a way to (supposedly) oppose the war while, we declared, supporting the men and women sent to fight it. We would prove that we were as committed to the military and national security as the right, just, well, in a sorta different way.

One less important but still revealing example came on Monday during Jon Stewart's interview with Senator Jim Webb. Most of that interview was a discussion about Webb's bill to expand veteran educational benefits, under which, in return for three years in the military, soldiers would receive four years' tuition at their best state college plus the cost of books, plus a monthly stipend. At one point, when Webb said that the least we can do for our soldiers is give them the chance for "a first-class future," the audience burst into loud applause.

And I thought then, as I have before when this bill was being discussed, would there be any chance, any chance at all, of that same sort of reaction if the same proposal was made on behalf of any other group? What if someone proposed paying for four years of college for, say, firefighters? Or cops? How about volunteers in VISTA (now AmeriCorps VISTA)? Or the Peace Corps? The latter two provide some educational benefits for those who put in their time, but nothing vaguely approaching four fully-paid years of college.

What about publicly-funded continuing education for doctors and nurses? Such continuing education is not only a good idea for health care professionals, it's often a requirement for maintaining their licenses to practice. And certainly having doctors and nurses who are up to date on the best knowledge and practice is beneficial to the public. So why not have public financing of that continuing education?

When it comes down to it, why not have public education, tuition-free, taxpayer-supported public education, right up through four years of college for anyone who can show themselves capable of meeting the educational standards for a college degree? Can you seriously imagine a studio audience bursting into spontaneous, enthusiastic applause for someone seriously proposing such an idea?

Why only soldiers? What does it say about us that the idea of paying soldiers' way through college gets ovations while the idea of anyone else getting the same benefit gets at best quizzical stares if not overt sneering rejections? It says that we regard the work of soldiering as inherently more important, inherently more deserving of praise and reward, than the work of others - and the lives of soldiers as inherently more valuable than the lives of the rest of us. That is the attitude we are buying into.

But if it was only things like veterans' benefits, it might not seem particularly important. I say that despite the fact that the amount of money involved in such benefits is not trivial and Webb's argument that his bill just provides the equivalent of educational benefits given to veterans of World War II is quite misleading: For one thing, many of those soldiers had been drafted "for the duration," so it wasn't automatically a matter of three years and out. For another, the avowed purpose of those World War II benefits was to make up for what those soldiers had lost in regard to their civilian careers as compared to those who had not been in the military. That is, they were to insure that soldiers did not wind up being penalized for having been soldiers. They were not intended to give soldiers a leg up over others (or "a first class future") and they most definitely were not presented as being a reward for military service. But that's what they have become over the years and that's how Webb's bill treats them.

I also want to make abundantly clear in case it's not or is willfully ignored that the benefits being questioned here do not include such as medical care, rehabilitation, and counseling for vets wounded either physically or psychologically. But, yes, veterans benefits are too generous to the extent that they become a reward for being in the military. So I am against Webb's bill and I don't give a damn whether it will affect retention rates or not. I am opposed to it so long as soldiers get singled out for an opportunity for higher education that is becoming increasingly financially impossible for many people.

Even so, again, if that's all there was to it, it might not seem like a great big huge deal. But that's not all there is to it, not when we are trying to lay claim to national security chops by out troop-supporting the right, insisting that we're the ones who really support the troops, we're the ones who really support their brave courageous efforts and we prove it by undaunted adulation, blandly treating, with no hint of hesitation, the phrase "have a lot of courage" and the word "soldier" as synonymous.

So we were the ones who loudly decried the lack of body armor and the lack of reinforced plating on military vehicles, accusing the right of "not supporting the troops" as much as we do because of that failure. But as Mark Twain pointed out in "The War Prayer,"

[i]f you would beseech a blessing upon yourself, beware! lest without intent you invoke a curse upon a neighbor at the same time. If you pray for the blessing of rain upon your crop which needs it, by that act you are possibly praying for a curse upon some neighbor's crop which may not need rain and can be injured by it.

In war, in combat, as long as the soldiers are there, there is an unavoidable trade-off: The more you wish for them to remain safe, the more you are wishing for them to kill others. That is what safety in combat means. The more you wish for them to return safely, the more you are wishing for Iraqis not to. The more you wish life for them, the more you are wishing death for others. The more you wish that American mothers, fathers, wives, husbands, sisters, brothers, daughters, sons, don't suffer the loss of a family member, the more you are wishing that Iraqi mothers, fathers, wives, husbands, sisters, brothers, daughters, sons, do.

So when we express "support for the troops" by demanding we "give them the equipment to do the job" and "then come home safely" rather than simply and solely saying "get them the hell out," we are offering a tacit - and sometimes not so tacit - endorsement of the killing. For the sake of the blessing of safety and life for our soldiers, we are calling down the curse of risk and death on Iraqis. When we declare support in terms of equipment rather than withdrawal, that is what we are endorsing. In war, there is no other way.

Undoubtedly, there are those who are prepared to declare American lives are worth more than Iraqi lives. I am not among them.

The emotional embrace of "our heroes" as some sort of disembodied ideal has policy implications beyond the immediate ones. Within that embrace, and the effects can already be seen in various interviews and commentaries, it becomes easy to absorb, absorb so deeply that one is unaware of it, the idea that a veteran's take on the Iraq war - and by extension, all things military - is inherently more valuable than that of others not by virtue of knowledge or logic or informed comment but simply by virtue of being a veteran. We regarded it (correctly) as a scandal when media outlets used retired generals who were actually Pentagon-trained PR flacks as "experts" on military and foreign policy questions in the runup to the Iraq War - but an overlooked point is that the reason retired generals were so prominent in that number was that their status as military people gave them added credibility in the eyes of many viewers and listeners. In our pursuit of "support the troops," we have fallen prey to that same attitude, one that regards the statements of Iraq War veterans as more valuable, more telling, than those of non-veterans. It even has become fairly common to hear dismissive references to those who "never saw combat." At first, that was a legitimate argument, directed as it was against chickenhawks, those rightwingers who were eager for fights, ready for wars, provided they did not have to take part in them. But increasingly it has been used as an all-purpose putdown, even against those on the left who have criticized soldiers - as, I imagine, it would be directed against me (a non-veteran and a Vietnam-era draft resister) were my voice loud enough to attract the attention.

But the real danger is that as the attitude persists, it distorts our way of thinking, drops a magnet on our moral compass. In a bizarre mirror image of the fanatical right, we refuse to blame soldiers who commit atrocities, or, more exactly, we refuse to acknowledge them. We refuse to blame those who shoot civilians even when the attacks are clearly acts of vengeance; we downplay the war crimes and the routine cruelties; we make excuses for those who shoot the wounded or torture prisoners; even when official Pentagon reports casually mention how a US soldier summarily executed a wounded fighter and shot another wounded, unresisting fighter twice in the back, we pay little notice - and if we do, it's usually to brush off complaints with that all-purpose "you've never been in combat" defense. "These things happen in war," we say.

Yes, they do. And "our heroes" are doing them. Which is, even as the deniers seem incapable of recognizing it, the point. Just as the right tries to blame the individuals and exonerate the hierarchy, we want to blame the hierarchy and exonerate the individuals, to remove all their responsibility for their own actions. That is an idea we were supposed to have rejected nearly 60 years ago; apparently, we haven't.

Soldiers are not heroes. They can be heroes, they can act heroically, they can do heroic things - but the act of putting on a uniform and agreeing to put your conscience in a lockbox for the next so many years does not make your life more important than others, it does not make your opinions and insights more worthy of respect than others, it does not exempt you from moral judgment. It does not make you a hero.

And we should not fall prey to hero-worship.

Next up

I have only two real thoughts about the immediate case of Keith Olbermann. One is that the rapidity with which MSNBC President Phil Griffin responded (hear about it in the evening, announce the punishment the next morning or maybe it was afternoon if so BFD) and the severity of the punishment (immediate, indefinite suspension without pay) suggests to me that Olbermann's breaking of the rules was not the reason, it was the excuse. Griffin just wanted to slam down his fist and make clear that "I am the boss!" and this gave him the opening to do it. That is, it had a great deal more to do with office politics and battling egos than with the donations themselves.

The other thought is that the speed with which Olbermann was returned to the air says to me that Griffin was unprepared for the intensity of the response and rather quickly realized he had blundered into a PR mess.

That said, what I actually wanted to comment on is the issue this raised of journalists (or commentators or whatever) making political donations and the rules imposed on them by their employers. Y'see, aside from technical arguments over NBC News rules applying to MSNBC or whether or not KO knew about the rule that he had to get clearance since (according to him) it wasn't mentioned in his contract, or any of the rest, there is something about this that bothers me:

The rule in question says that those to who it applies "should" (which is apparently taken to mean "must") get permission from higher-ups before they may make contributions to political candidates or causes. The thing is, what if those higher-ups say no? Saying you have to ask permission means, by definition, that permission could be denied. It is one thing to argue that people in the news business should not make political donations - and while I disagree for reasons that will be made clear as we go along, it is an arguable position. It is quite another to say that your boss can tell you that you cannot do so - or, to put it a different way, can decide to who and to what causes you can and can't contribute. That idea - which clearly allows for a corporation to, for example, allow all contributions to those on a list it makes up of reactionary pro-corporate candidates while disallowing contributions to anyone else - is disturbing to say the least.

Something to keep in mind is that the whole notion of journalists staying away from politics was based on the self-created image of the "impartial" reporter, the "unbiased" journalist. That is, because you as a reporter are supposed to be completely impartial, you were to stay away from anything that would indicate a preference for a certain point of view. (That same idea is largely responsible for the inane practice of false balance - you know, like how an article about some racist white nut shooting up a black neighborhood has to then say "there have been examples of similar black-on-white violence; here's a case from four years ago where some black guy said 'fuck off, whitey' to some guy he didn't know.")

The problem with that notion, of course, is that viewers and readers have long come to accept the reality that people in the news industry are people before they are newspeople and that they do have biases and preferences and those can leak into (or, if you prefer, be inserted into) their reporting. It is simply a part of being human. So the studied "I have no preferences, no political convictions one way or the other" pose just doesn't impress anyone any more and so serves no purpose.

I'd divide newspeople into two sorts here, slightly different ones from the ones that have been bandied about: straight journalists and opinion journalists.

"Straight journalists" are the reporters, the anchors, the correspondents. They are not completely impartial or unbiased; again, they are people, so they can't be. What they can do and should do and are ethically charged to do is to strive to be impartial, strive to be as impartial as they can in their reporting. (Note well I say impartial, not "balanced." Not only does being impartial not prevent you from saying one side in a dispute is right and one side is wrong, it can require you to.)

"Opinion journalists" would be best understood by considering syndicated newspaper columnists. They are expected to have opinions, in fact the whole purpose of the column is to express their opinions and their interpretations. What they are called on to be is not impartial, but fair. That is, they should base their observations and interpretations on fact, not on wild hypothesizing or idle speculation (although even the latter can be fair provided it is labeled as such). Print columnists are expected, that is, to fact-check their assertions. That idea of having and expressing opinions, openly acknowledging preferences, but still being constrained by and committed to fact, defines what I'm calling "opinion journalism."

By that definition, I'd call the evening line-up of MSNBC "opinion journalists." That does not mean they are right, it does not mean they interpret matters correctly, it does not mean they do not overlook or even ignore relevant facts. It does not mean they can't be infuriatingly stubborn about seeing events through a "what's good for the Democrats" filter. It does not mean that they are not (because by all appearances they are) consciously concerned about being seen as "too far" left. It does mean that unlike the Hannitys, the Becks, the O'Reillys, the Stossels, and the rest, they don't actively distort or misinterpret data and they don't simply make shit up.

So of those groups, who is it that must be isolated from political involvement in order to protect their supposed neutrality which in one case isn't believed and in the other is not even claimed? What artificial notion of "neutrality" is there to protect?

Here's another thing: How high up the ladder does this go? No one is suggesting that the parent corporations can't make donations on the grounds that would "compromise the impartiality" of their news divisions. And what of corporate executives as individuals? Why is a ban on political donations okay for the employees but not for the bosses, if such a question does not answer itself?

Debating the issue on Countdown the day Olbermann returned, media critic Howie Kurtz insisted, rather bizarrely I think, that journalists of any stripe should not contribute to campaigns because, for example, as a viewer watching Keith Olbermann interview Rep. Raul Grijalva he shouldn't have to be wonder "Did KO give money to him?" I say bizarre because besides all the ways there are to disguise contributions if you really want it to be a secret (do it through friends, family members, organizations, and so on, as well as new ways opened by Citizens United) - which means Kurtz could be wondering the same thing anyway - it omits the other half of the question: "Did the corporation which owns this media outlet give money to them?"

Not an issue, according to Kurtz: Asked by Olbermann how high up such a ban should reach, Kurtz actually said it would be okay above a vaguely-defined level above which executives "are not meddling with newsroom decisions."

Seriously? I mean, seriously? There is a level above which what goes on the news is of no concern to those occupying those high positions? You mean Phil Donahue was not fired by MSNBC because of a corporate decision that his anti-war views were not good for the corporate image? You mean those memos from a senior vice-president of Fox News telling on-air staff how to slant the day's stories didn't exist? You meant that infamous memo from CNN Chair Walter Isaacson saying it "seems perverse to focus too much on the casualties or hardship in Afghanistan" was never sent? Seriously?

Now, do the very top executives at major media corporations spend their time micromanaging day-to-day operations of their newsrooms? Of course not. The lofty people in those lofty positions have far loftier things to think lofty thoughts about loftily. But do they "meddle with newsroom decisions?" Will they "meddle with newsroom decisions" if they think corporate interests are at stake? Damn straight they will. Proposing to exempt them from the same "no, never, ever contribute" standard you would apply to lower-level staff is not to protect the sanctity or independence or the whatever it is you think you are protecting of the media, it is simply to embrace the worldview - the frame, if you will - of the powerful in which the rules for others do not apply to them.

Which leaves one last thing: Kurtz also argued that journalists must not become "partisans" and that making a contribution is being partisan. Where does it stop? he wondered. If you can contribute, can you consult for a campaign? Can you raise money for it? Can you write speeches on the side?

In addition to thinking that it's much easier to draw a line between being a supporter of a campaign (that is, a contributor, something any citizen can do) and a participant in a campaign (a consultant-fundraiser-speechwriter-whatever, something only a handful can do) than Kurtz would allow, this is a classic slippery-slope argument and I generally refuse to address them.

However, in this case the slope does not only slant one way. What of the reverse direction? If you can't contribute to a political campaign because that is "partisan," what can you do? Can you sign a petition for ballot access or to get a certain public question up for a vote? Can you talk to a neighbor about who you like in an election or how you feel about a public question? Yes, that may be only one person or a few people, but it still makes the information public and therefore able to spread. In fact, can you even vote? Sure, it's supposed to be secret, but if Howie Kurtz says he shouldn't have to wonder if a host gave money to an interviewee, why should he have to wonder if that host voted for that person (or who they voted for at all)?

The ultimate point for me is that I would rather an outlet admit to its biases or at the very least to refrain from pretending they don't exist. I said in another discussion that many different news sources, even conservative ones, can be valuable if you apply the right filters - that is, if you know their biases and how to read past them. Having a journalist make a political contribution does not damage their ability (or obligation) to strive to be impartial and it does not damage their ability (or obligation) to be fair. What it does do is create another filter.

And even if I didn't feel that way, the idea of your boss being able to decide when and to who you can contribute still makes me incredibly uncomfortable.

Sorry

Some things, it turns out, take longer than others.

We're back from the trip but something that developed in the course of it has kept me away from the keyboard. But here I am again, like the proverbial bad penny.

Anyway, so how'd "the most important election EVAH since the last one until the next one" work out for you?

Oh, and did you hear about Keith Olbermann? Like, wow, dude!

So, having mentioned them, I suppose I'm obligated to offer a paragraph or two on each. Election here, KO later.

Yes, this was called - more than once - "the most important election of your lifetime." However, the same was said about every goddam presidential election since at least 1980 and a good number of off-year ones, too. In other words, it's just more election year crap. I just can't get behind the notion that this is either the beginning of ultimate evil or the end of all things good and true. Yes, it will make our work a little harder, but our work - as opposed to the efforts of those who thought and think that the answer is ever to "elect more and better Democrats" - was always hard. And get some perspective: We have been here and worse before, up to and including the murder of dissenters to the cheering of crowds. Even with John Boner (that's not a typo) as Speaker of the House, I really really doubt we're going to see a lot of book burning. (Well, not a whole lot more, anyway.)

On the other hand, one thing the election did prove to all who have eyes to see and ears to hear - in other words, not Democrats - is that chasing the GOPpers to the right is a terrible electoral strategy: Yes, some notable liberals (defined as people actually worthy of the term) lost, particularly Russ Feingold and Alan Grayson (the latter of who we should have been surprised was elected in the first place). But so did Blue Dogs: Half of the Blue Dog caucus in the House lost their seats. So did so-called "New Democrats." Their caucus in the new Congress will be a third less as a result of the election. On the other hand, if I have the numbers correct and I believe I do, of the 78 members of the House Progressive Caucus, 75 retained their seats, a retention rate of 96%.

Such comparisons are always somewhat misleading, since outcomes depend on the local electorate. The House, remember, is not one big election but 435 smaller elections. But the figures do point up the bogus nature of the claim that victory is simply and always a matter of becoming just a little more of a rightist. They also means that potentially - and I emphasize the word potentially - the Dims could be more liberal in opposition than they were in the majority, since the Progressive Caucus now makes up a larger portion of the whole.

I say "potentially" because there are two big objections to that prospect. One is that it depends on the Dimcrats ability to, in what I think were Michael Moore's words, get a soul and grow a spine, either of which would be a dramatic change from recent behavior.

The second, bigger, objection is that it assumes the Ds as a party want to be more liberal, that their reluctance to stake out and clearly argue for positions to the left of Blanche Lincoln and Ben Nelson is neither a reflection of actual conviction nor an act of financial (as opposed to political) cowardice, a fear of straying too far from the desires of their corporate paymasters, by which I mean their source of campaign financing.

Either way, the odds on the Dums obtaining either soul or spine are low indeed, considering that already Barack "I did it your way" Obama has once again caved even before entering the arena, this time on tax cuts for the rich, and party so-called "centrists" are arguing the Dims must tack to the middle - the "middle" being defined as midway between the Dims and the GOPpers, which means that if you do "tack to the middle," that is, to the right, the "middle" will still be defined as midway between you and them, meaning you "must" go even further to the right to get to the "middle," and so on.

But none of that matters. It's all irrelevant because we know what the real problem is, the real reason the Dims got creamed. It's all the fault of the left, as self-described "socialist" Lawrence O'Donnell (He has got to be kidding!) insisted election evening. In fact, it's so much all the left's fault that according to O'Donnell, Blanche Lincoln lost because she was primaried by someone somewhat to her left, Bill Halter, which left her "wounded." This even though Lincoln was always behind eventual winner John Boozman in the polls even before the primary and Halter polled better against Boozman than Lincoln did. No matter. It was the left's fault.

Something for which I will credit O'Donnell is his declaration that he refuses to surrender the term "liberal." Good. Because I'm damn tired of hearing yet another wishy-washy "Love me, I'm a liberal" scared of their own shadow call themselves "progressives," thus sullying the time-honored and honorable appellation for those who are to the left of liberals, who do the spadework to clear the ground onto which liberals might later gingerly step. (I've long thought of myself as standing at about the point on the US political spectrum where "progressive" and "radical" meet; my moral and ethical convictions run to the radical but my stylistic approach tends to be somewhat more moderate.)

The point of that diversion is that when those of us who actually are progressives try to advance our policies and politics by arguing for or supporting (or, worst of all, being) third party candidates, we get denounced for it. As I wrote the day before the election,

[t]he root argument ... invariably, is that "independents are just spoilers who only hurt the candidate closer to them and so help the one further from them." Put another way, "they only damage their own cause." Put a third way, those who support such candidates are "pissing away their votes."

So what alternative is there? What are we encouraged to do? Why, work within the party! Run in primaries! That's the ticket!

Um, except now, according to O'Donnell (and not only him), even that is bad as it "wounds" the establishment candidate so when they lose - even if they were expected to all along - it's our fault and we again just "helped the worse candidate."

So now what's the alternative? How are actual progressives supposed to work within the electoral system? Let's see: We're not supposed to go third party. We're not supposed to primary incumbents. If it's an open seat, surely we have to present a "united front," not that of a "divided party," so challenging the establishment candidate in that case is out, too. And certainly we can't not vote! The very idea! So what can we do? What is it that we are instructed to do, expected to do, by the "realists," the "pragmatists," the ones who "understand these things?"

Simple: We are to sit quietly and vote obediently while regarding The Daily Show and Countdown as marking the outer limits of acceptable commentary.

In other words, we are to STFU.

Same as it ever was.

It is the opinion of the Court, Part Three

Things do not look so good for Arizona's bigoted "Your papers, please" law.

During an hourlong hearing [on Monday], the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals examined four provisions of the Arizona law that a federal judge in Phoenix blocked as unconstitutional. The three-judge appeals panel appeared largely inclined to agree with the lower court's July ruling, which said the law usurped the federal government's sole authority to regulate immigration.

There was some skepticism about blocking the state from from requiring police to investigate the immigration status of someone stopped on suspicion of a crime, largely because federal law permits police to inquire about a person's immigration status. Since this was taken from an article in the LA Times and not a law journal, I'm unclear on what if any difference there is between "investigating" a person's immigration status as opposed to "inquiring" about it or if there ultimately will be a meaningful difference between "allowing" an "inquiry" and "requiring" an "investigation."

The thing is, even if that provision of the law stands intact, it may not mean much. UC Hastings Law Professor David Levine said it "may end up being toothless" because the enforment of immigration law would still be up to the feds.

Meanwhile, other provisions of this hateful and hating law, including requiring all immigrants to have proof of legal residence with them at all times and barring illegal immigrants from accepting paid work, are likely headed for the dumpster.

Unsurprisingly, John Bouma, representing Arizona in the case, spun the usual horror stories about the border being "the finish line" for illegal immigrants, who are swarming over the border to commit horrendous crimes without ever being expelled. Happily, it seems the members of the panel were not overly impressed.

It is the opinion of the Court, Part Two

Surprisingly, not all the news coming out of the Supreme Court is bad. The justices have

left in place a lower court's decision requiring groups to register as political action committees even if they spend money in federal elections independent of the candidates or political parties.

It was the second time since the court's controversial 5 to 4 decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission that the justices have passed on a challenge that would again bring the issue of campaign finance to the court.

Earlier, it refused to hear a GOPper challenge to the so-called "soft money" restrictions on contributions to political parties contained in the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform bill, a challenge that had failed in lower courts. This time, it declined to consider a challenge from a cash-über-alles outfit called SpeechNow.org over an adverse decision of the DC Court of Appeals.

That court found the group could, in accordance with Citizens United, accept unlimited donations to fund its ad campaigns. However, the court also said that the group

must comply with the disclosure requirements that come with being registered as a PAC.

SecretCashNow.org didn't like that, of course, and so it appealed. And got nowhere, so it still has at least those restrictions on it.

Actually, in one sense it might have been better if the appeal had been accepted, because even in Citizens United, eight of the nine members of the Court supported the idea of disclosure requirements, so some sort requirements along those lines might have been set down rather than still being open to challenge in other districts. Still, I'll take what I can get, especially since

[m]ore than 50 similar groups [to FatCatsFunnelingBucksNow.org] are now operating as a result of decisions by the courts and the FEC, and outside organizations are spending an unprecedented amount of money in the midterm elections.

Footnote: If you want my view on what's wrong with Citizens United and why I'm not surprised by the burgeoning of money in politics, you might look back on my critique of Glenn Greenwald's defense of the decision.

It is the opinion of the Court, Part One

To what I expect was no one's surprise,

[a] federal appeals court will allow the military to continue enforcing the law restricting the service of openly gay men and women in the military while a lower court decision that struck the law down as unconstitutional is being appealed.

The three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals had earlier granted a temporary stay, which it has now broadened. One judge dissented, saying he would have preferred to bar the military from dismissing members of the military under DADT during the appeal. The majority, however, using the typical excuse of "deferring" to the judgment of Congress and the military, saw nothing wrong with continuing to wreck people's chosen career through a policy they themselves admitted, albeit indirectly, subsequently could be found unconstitutional.

In Monday’s decision, the judges said the government had “persuasively” argued that Judge Phillips’s injunction “does not permit sufficient time for such appropriate training to occur, especially for commanders and servicemen serving in active combat.”

I'm sorry, but what kind of crap is that? This entire issue has been kicking around for years: Remember that when DADT was instituted at the end of 1993, it was the compromise, the "middle ground" between the military's witch hunts for The Gays on the one hand and gays and lesbians being able to openly serve on the other. That was seventeen years ago, folks. This is not a new deal.

Now, we've got various suits on the matter, we've got a House of Representatives that voted to kill the policy last May, we've got a president who swears he intends - not wants, intends - to end it, and we've got a Pentagon supposedly studying how - not if, but how - to do that. But we're supposed to act like this is some big shock and oh my, we need time, please give us time to adjust because, like, we never saw this coming and stuff? Please. All this talk about "training" is just an excuse for foot-dragging.

Frankly, it should be easy to reform the policy: Instead of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," it's "Don't Ask, Don't Care." When a law is passed to newly allow or ban some practice, we don't get "training" in how to obey the law, we don't get an "adjustment period" to get used to the idea. (Delays in implementation are almost invariably due to allowing time to set up new administrative procedures, which simply does not apply here.)

When bigots were told by the Civil Rights Act that they could no longer discriminate against blacks in areas like public accommodations, the start of that law was not put off until we could provide them "appropriate training." They were just told, we are all told in the face of new laws, that as of such and such a day, this is the law. Period. There is no reason why members of the military should be babied in a way no one else is.

Everybody's doing it

It seems everyone is doing it. So, while waiting for election results which I won't check for another hour or so, I figured I'd take a moment to offer my opinion on the Stewart/Colbert rally over the weekend.

That opinion is that it could be as well-attended as it was precisely because it was completely non-threatening, completely harmless, a homily-ridden exercise in self-congratulation about a self-proclaimed "reasonableness," a notion based entirely on a wholly bogus claim of a moral equivalence between right and left of a sort that would equate al-Qaeda's attack on 9/11 with Jesus throwing the money-changers out of the temple on the grounds that both involved destruction of property.

The quote that adorns the top of my blog is taken from Glenn Greenwald and says something totally alien to the mindset of the John Stewarts and Stephen Colberts of the world but remains true nonetheless: Passion and substance are not mutually exclusive. And frankly, despite their implicit claims to greater insight, it is those who think the proper answer to the bullies, bigots, and blowhards is to without exception rely on accommodation and polite conversation who do not understand the political and social world around them.

That does not mean, by the way, that I will stop watching either Stewart or Colbert (although in fact for various reasons I've been watching very little of them of late). They are funny and once in a while even informative. However, they are singularly lousy guides for political action and their rally proved it.

FYI

A bit of advance notice: I'll be away on a kinda-sorta business trip from tomorrow (Wednesday) morning until late Sunday night and I expect I won't have internet access in that time. So after tonight (and I may post more tonight) don't expect anything until very late Sunday or on Monday.

Everything you need to know, Headline Div.

Foreclosure activity up across most US metro areas
     - AP, October 27

Wall Street Pay to Hit Record High This Year
     - DailyFinance.com, October 12

Are you happy now?

Oh dear, another someone with another re-hash of the by-now routine "lefties are humorless sourpusses" meme. Writing at AOL, Paul Kix, a senior editor of Boston magazine, says that

[a] recent study says that Republicans are happier than Democrats and -- and! -- have more friends.

The study, published in the journal Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, is the work of Jacob Vigil, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of New Mexico. He gathered 701 undergrads at a university in Florida in the months before the 2008 election and had them fill out a survey. The survey touched on, among other things, the students' pasts, their political affiliations, the number of friends they have, and how much they trusted them and, by extension, the rest of society.

Vigil then had the participants look at photos of strangers' faces, whose expressions ranged from joy to sadness, fear to surprise, disgust to anger. Vigil asked the participants to interpret, among other things, how threatened they felt by the faces. He then took that data, and that which came from the completed surveys, and reached his conclusions about who's happy and why.

Now, far be it from me - and I mean this sincerely - to denigrate socio-psychological research. But while I have a real interest in psychology (I once considered pursuing a career as a clinical psychologist), my science background is more in the so-called "hard" sciences (physics, to be exact) and as a result I often find the results of such research to be frustratingly imprecise and the conclusions drawn to be based on unspoken (and often enough unexamined) presumptions.

It's worse in this case because the full text of the study is behind a pay firewall. So I'm not sure how much of the characterizations is Vigil's and how much is Kix's. Either way, something jumped out at me immediately: "how much they trusted [their friends] and, by extension, the rest of society." By extension? There is a straight-line relationship between how much you trust your friends and how much you trust society as a whole? Really? Based on what? That strikes me as a glaring, untested assumption before the data is even gathered.

What's more important to the issue here, however, is that based on the abstract of the study, Kix more than once either misstates or misunderstands the study in order to push his own preferences. For one thing, he says Vigil "reached his conclusions about who's happy and why." The study was not about "who's happy and why," it was about how people examined faces to look for cues indicating either competency, found to be favored by the right, and trustworthiness, favored by the left.

But getting to the "friends" part, something good the study did, something often ignored in such studies and assuredly and much to my irritation was ignored in the lede of Kix's article, was to consider what people mean by the term "friend."

Vigil found that Republicans have a looser definition of friendship, one that doesn't rely as much on the sort of intimacy that Democrats favor.

More specifically, rightists define "friends" as those who can help them socially or professionally while lefties define "friends" as people with who they have some degree of emotional intimacy and can trust. Somehow, to Kix this means that rightists are "happier" with their friends "because these friends can help them" while lefties are "miserly" and have fewer friends because they are "victims" who don't trust other people. Again, Kix has misrepresented the study: Besides the pejorative language, saying the study concluded that lefties are "are wary of trusting" people is simply false: It concluded, rather, that they value "trustworthiness" over "competency" in seeking new social connections.

But put bluntly, what all this really means is that rightists define "friend" as someone they can exploit for their own benefit while lefties define "friend" as someone they care about on a direct personal level. Besides finding one of those superior on a moral level - and yes, you know which one - I also have to note that it makes Kix's initial claim that rightists "have more friends" utterly meaningless, a classic apples and oranges, because rightists and lefties don't mean the same thing by the term "friend." In fact, according to the abstract, the study doesn't even say "friends," it says "social networks," which is not the same as "friends" unless you equate "friends" and "acquaintances." Kix's description of the study and its conclusions is simply inaccurate, even misleading. But it does fit the meme.

(Parenthetically, Kix wrote that "Republicans, the study says, feel more threatened by the people they don't know." How in Kix's mind it could be true both that lefties have fewer friends because they don't trust other people and rightists have more friends in spite of being more threatened by strangers still has me scratching my head. The only way out is to adopt the rightists definition of "friend." Which tells us more about the meme - and perhaps Kix, who has apparently embraced that definition - than it does about either lefties or rightists.)

The same issue of definitions arises in discussing "happiness." Usually, and in this particular case, it is just self-defined; surveys ask people some variation of "How happy are you?" No attempt at all is made to determine how the person defines the term or how understandings might vary. Admittedly, there is some reason for that: How do you put a value to an internal emotional state, how do you quantify such an inherently unquantifiable notion as how "happy" you are? If I say I'm "fairly happy," am I feeling the same degree of happiness as someone else who says the same? How would anyone know?

There is a notion - tenable, though hardly conclusively demonstrated in non-laboratory environments - that over a large enough group, those variations tend to even out and so for a general statement about a group as a whole, such surveys can be an accurate measure. Granting that at least for the moment, there is still the problem of interpretation, even of meaning. That is, what does it mean to say "conservatives are happier than liberals?" (Or the reverse, for that matter.) What defines "happiness?" We've already been told that right and left don't define "friend" they same way, why should we think they agree on "happy?"

Kix links to a post by Arthur Brooks of the American Enterprise Institute (red flags flying everywhere) which, if you follow it through the rest of Brooks' series, reveals that to the degree the data can be trusted there is something that makes for an intersection of "happiness" with political belief. That intersection, it develops, is not a matter or left or right, it's a matter of left and right - or, more specifically, hard left and hard right. According to the results that Brooks cites, those toward the "fringes" tend to be, or at least say they are, happier.

What unites those more-extreme beliefs in a way that differentiates them from their more centrist brethren? One clear way is what could easily be called "certainty." Those at the outer edges of the political spectrum tend to be clearer and firmer in their beliefs; they tend to have either worked through or successfully repressed questions and conflicts. And, apparently, having strong convictions contributes to self-described happiness.

(Which, considering the number of times I've been called "stubborn," "pig-headed," and "arrogant," should mean I should be ecstatic. But never mind.)

That connects to a broader context. Greater security in various ways, be those physical, emotional, or psychological, appears to be connected to self-described happiness. For example, wealthy people tend to rank themselves higher on a happiness scale than poor people do. Married people - or people in a committed relationship - tend to regard themselves as happier than single people do. And people who are more secure in, more convinced of the rightness of, their political convictions tend to express a greater degree of happiness than people who are less devoted to a particular set of principles.

But that raises the central question: Why do these and other studies say that "Republicans" (that is, rightists) are "happier" than "Democrats" (that is, lefties)? Yes, rightists tend overall to be wealthier than lefties, but even after controlling for that and other factors such as age, marital status, and even church attendance, a difference remains. So why? It can't be the fact of being a Republican: Unlike, say, getting wealthier or entering a committed relationship, the act of changing party registration is not itself going to make you happier. It's got to be something about what produces a Republican. What could that be?

I think I know and it draws on a couple of related points.

One is that Kix describes the results of Vigil's survey as showing that lefties "sympathize with people more" than rightist do, which is pretty much a psychological truism: Such sympathizing, such even more to the point identification, is a factor strongly connected with being on the political left. As Eugene V. Debs famously said when being sentenced to 10 years in prison for his opposition to World War I,

years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.

Lefties are more sensitive to, more emotionally aware of, the injustices in the world, more emotionally connected to the suffering of innocents, than are rightists - and that leads them to connect their own welfare, their own security, their own, yes, happiness, with the welfare and security of others. As I expressed that in a letter to a friend some time ago:

The fact is, it’s the right that says “I,” the left that says “we.” It’s the right that says “gimme,” the left that says “we’ll give.” It’s the right that says “compete,” the left that says “cooperate.”

Lefties can't really be happy when those around them are not.

Another point is that has been shown often enough to be another psychological truism that the one psychological thread that unites people who call themselves “conservative,” reaching across lines of class, age, race, and gender, is fear of change. Conservatives want things to stay the way they are - or, more often, to be "the way they used to be" (even though they often weren't). You want an example? Just think of the TPers with their cries that they are going to "take the country back," a "back" that applies chronologically, and thus socially, as well as politically.

I’ve for a long time argued that the great emotional attraction of conservatism in all its forms is its certainty: You don’t have to decide if something is fair or unfair, right or wrong, good or bad. You just have to know what someone else told you. It’s already been decided. The doubt, the fear, the questions, the responsibility are all gone.

(An even longer time, now: I wrote that just under 17 years ago.)

That is, rightists as a group are more likely than lefties as a group to be convinced they have The Truth and such a state increases self-described "happiness." They know what's true, what's false, what's right, what's wrong, and they know because they were told what's true and false and right and wrong and they don't have to think about it, they just have to believe what they were told. It's an easy, a psychologically safe, way to live and to be, one that does not require you to think though matters and experience all the doubt and conflict involved in finding your own way to your own convictions.

So why are rightists supposedly "happier" than leftists? Two reasons: One, lefties think in broader terms. Like rightists, they want to be secure. Unlike rightists, it matters to them, affects their own sense of security and thus "happiness," if other people are also secure. It's "I" versus "we" and the burdens on "I" are much smaller.

And two, unlike rightists, lefties are not spared what I once called "the frightening prospect of having to re-think yourself, possibly from scratch." Lefties do not inhabit a world - a happy security blanket world - of predetermined answers drawn from handed-down, unexamined, principles. Even those on the "fringe," the ones usually most secure in their beliefs, have almost always gotten there by going through a period when all their beliefs, everything they'd held true before, seemed to be up for grabs. Rightists are "happier" than lefties as an overall group because as an overall group they are more secure in their beliefs because they've never bothered to subject them to any critical examination.

There's one other important thing here, one which goes back to the earlier question of if we should think lefties and rightists think about "happiness" the same way. It's quite possible they don't.

In a review of one of Arthur Brooks' books at Amazon.com, a man named Richard Bennett makes a very valuable point (I have corrected some typos and cleaned up the formatting some):

On page 4 Brooks distinguishes between three distinct forms of happiness. They can be summed up as "fleeting feelings of happiness", "happiness on balance" and "moral quality of life".

The first is similar to joy or euphoria, [the] second is like an emotional balance sheet we keep that allows us to tell honestly whether we are living, all things considered, a happy life. This is the level most often studied by social scientists and it is the level measured in the survey data used in this book.

The third form is of happiness measurement is eudaimonia, a "moral quality of life (that) has little to do with a sense of happiness - it is the well-lived life, in which a person realizes his or her true potential...Aristotle termed (it) eudaimonia...an activity of the soul expressing virtue."

Brooks is not interested in this form of happiness! But for liberals it is possibly the most important sense of what is meant by "happiness". What is the import of someones self reported state of happiness when no account is taken of of his aims?

"The well-lived life." A life with meaning, with importance, a life that matters to others - that is the sort of life that lefties crave, that is the sort of life that will make them happy. Is also a life not easy to achieve because even if others think we have lived such a life, we may well not think so, having desired even more from ourselves. It is also a life to which few rightists will aspire because it requires that identification with others for purposes beyond one's own self-advancement at which they fall short compared to lefties. Which means no, what constitutes "happiness" to lefties and rightists is not, in the final analysis, the same thing, because something of genuine importance to lefties is also something in which rightists have little interest.

So do rightists "have more friends" than lefties? Are they "happier" than lefties? Sure - so long as you define the terms in ways that will get you that answer. And that's how you advance the meme.

Footnote: Kix really just can't help himself, he has to keep pushing the meme. He quotes a study by the Pew Research Center as saying, in Kix's words,

regardless of who holds political power, people who have more money, and worship a god regularly, "tend to be happier."

However, the very link he cites says that "the factor that makes the most difference in predicting happiness is ... being in good health."

But that doesn't push the meme, does it?

In which I take a moment out to pat myself on the back...

...for my prognosticatory acumen.

Speaking of elections, running up to one populated by more than the usual number of freakoids, nutzos, and dingbats, I recall that the day after the 2008 election, even before the smiles had faded from the faces of the faithful, I said

the wackos and nutballs populating the right edge of our political discourse are not going to go away. I do not even expect a moderation in their rhetoric; in fact I expect it to escalate.

And yet now we're supposed to be even more convinced that our best hope, indeed our only hope, is to stick even more firmly with those who think that half-measures go too far and that making nice with the bullies and bozos will get them any further toward the quarter-measures they favor next year than it has to date.

We are so screwed.

Show who's placed to win

The LA Times had an article a couple of days ago on the potential for some "third-party candidacies" to "shake up" several races. It reminded me of the always-vociferous, sometimes-nasty exchanges I've had about the role of third parties and the reasons to support (or refuse to support) them. The root argument against them, invariably, is that "independents are just spoilers who only hurt the candidate closer to them and so help the one further from them." Put another way, "they only damage their own cause." Put a third way, those who support such candidates are "pissing away their votes."

As someone who regularly (but, I will note, not exclusively) votes for third parties and more than once has run for office on a third party ticket, I obviously disagree. A while back, after one nasty exchange, I set out my own ideas on the importance and value of third parties, available for those who are interested at these four links.

But leave that aside to get back to the LA Times article. One of the "third party candidacies" mentioned was that of Kendrick Meek, mired in third place in the Senate race in Florida. Another was Scott McAdams, who, despite some improvement in his poll numbers, is still considered a long shot at best to win the Alaska Senate race.

The thing is, as I'm sure you know, Meek and McAdams are the Democratic party nominees for those seats - while the leaders in those races are in each case a conservative GOPper (Charlie Christ and Lisa Murkowski, respectively) and a certifiable nutzoid (Marco Rubio and Joe Miller). In neither case is either leader desirable, but in both cases one is arguably worse, especially as measured by a yardstick of a size normally wielded in rejecting third-party candidates.

So here's the question: Have you heard anyone, anywhere, any time, has anyone among the blogging Obamabots and their fellow-travelers - people always ready to gasp in horror at the notion of someone voting for (or, worse yet, running as) a Green or a democratic socialist or some other version of lefty because "You're only helping the Republicans! Is that what you want?" - have any of them even once called for Meek or McAdams to drop out because they're just "spoilers" who are helping the "worse" candidate?

As the saying goes, "Some questions need only be asked." Of course no one is saying that. Of course no one expects them to drop out. Why? Because they're Democrats! Because being part of the in-group, being in the major parties, playing the game according to the rules set down by that in-group composed of the major parties, exempts you from the requirements and expectations placed on those who want to change the rules and generate that "wider range of choices" so many claim - apparently falsely - to want.

Just how much are we as a political culture locked into that game, just how mentally trapped are we by those rules? Here's an example: The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee has done an ad buy in Alaska. Not to attack Miller. To attack Murkowski and to do it in terms echoing the right-wing mantra:

It characterizes her[, the Wall Street Journal says,] as having “gone Washington” by voting for big budgets and a Wall Street bailout.

I say with a very great deal of confidence that if all else had been the same - including the poll numbers, political records, and political and social convictions of all three - except that Murkowski was the Democrat and McAdams was the write-in candidate, we would hear peals of outrage in significant portions of the "progressive" blogosphere at how he was "attacking the Democrat" and "only helping the Republican." Instead, it's crickets - which says a lot about how much that concern about "third party spoilers" is truly about "not helping the worse candidate win" and how much is about just telling the left to STFU.

So there I was...

...all ready to post some stuff, just finishing up the writing, when my wife starts complaining that she's been booted from AOL. Which prompts me to realize that my internet connection is down as well. So AOL is off the hook this time - particularly when we realize that our phone isn't working, either.

So there's been a bit of a delay. But here I am again, he said to a thunderous round of silence. A couple of the things I had are now too dated to post, but there are others coming right up after these important messages.