Archive for August, 2009
27
Aug
09
links for 2009-08-27
24
Aug
09
Bill Cassidy is not a bright man
(cross-posted from the League of Ordinary Gentlemen)
Democrats are choosing to “go it alone” without the country if they opt to pass healthcare reform on a party-lines basis, one Republican congressman accused Thursday.
“If they go it alone without the Republicans, it also sounds like they want to go it alone without the American people,” Rep. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) told a conservative news radio program in an interview.
Rep. Cassidy may not have noticed this, but Barack Obama was elected president, which means – as far as modern presidents are concerned – that he was elected with either a majority or a plurality of the popular vote. In last year’s case, Barack Obama beat his Republican opponent with a solid 52.9 percent of the vote. What’s more, if Rep. Cassidy were to look at the results of last year’s congressional elections, he would notice that Democrats represent an even more solid 53.04 percent of the population. Far from going “alone,” Democrats are accurately representing the stated preferences of a majority of the population, many of whom voted for Democrats so that there would be health care reform.
On a related note, I would pay a lot of money to see a media outlet call bullshit on claims like the one above. I’ve read a ton of process stories this summer, and few – if any – have taken the time to remind readers that Republicans are both A) a distinct minority and B) deeply unpopular with the majority of voters. Even after eight years of miserable failure, they are consistently treated as if their ideas (or lack thereof) matter. With that kind of media attention, it’s no surprise that they are using the opportunity to saturate the dialogue with misinformation and dishonest nonsense.
12
Aug
09
links for 2009-08-12
(cross-posted from the League of Ordinary Gentlemen)
Marc Ambinder is right to say that vacuous, unintelligible outrage is kind of a bad strategy as far as trying to stop a popular president’s health care reform package is concerned. Unfortunately, he can’t seem to make that point without relying on the usual “split-the-difference”/”pox on both houses” calculation:
As usual, in a pattern that the left patented during the Bush administration, the organized right lost control of its message. Lawmakers, Republicans and Democrats, were being asked to respond to non-sequiturs (would you support a health care reform plan that grows the deficit? Health care grows the deficit right now, so it’s a nonsense question, one that is easy for politicians to answer); ; they found their meetings full of engorged spleens. Unrestrained, these town hall meetings are going to turn off the type of voters Republicans most need to pressure Blue Dog Democrats — independents who don’t have red genes or blue genes. Both Fox and MSNBC televised Sen. Arlen Specter’s raucous town hall meeting live. It was full of confrontation and protest. There were boos when Specter reaffirmed his president’s Americanness.
Okay, let’s be clear. For all of the liberal/leftist protests and demonstrations during the Bush Administration, I don’t recall anything approaching the rancor (or receiving the attention) of the current round of right-wing town hall demonstrations. In the past, Ambinder (and if I recall correctly, a commenter here) has compared these town hall demonstrations to liberal demonstrations against President Bush’s attempted Social Security reform. As Josh Marshall pointed out, Ambinder was missing some pretty critical distinctions:
I watched those events unfold pretty closely. And what the Dems did in 2005 consisted almost entirely of protest outside town halls and anti-privatization activists trying to get into the meetings to ask questions to pin members of Congress down on their position. What made it so uncomfortable for Republican and some Democratic members of Congress is that they got questions they didn’t want to answer.
Did some meetings get heated? Sure. But these weren’t organized attempts to shut down the meetings themselves.
I know this is difficult to admit for some folks, but these concerted attempts to shut down dialogue aren’t a normal part of the political process. They are corrosive to the very idea of public discussion, and I would prefer it if our Beltway overlords didn’t simply dismiss them with a wave of the hand and a “business as usual.”
(cross-posted from The League of Ordinary Gentlemen)
Via Jeremy’s twitter feed (whose blog Social Science Lite is a must-read) is this post over at Daily Mathematics by “Blackneck”, arguing for some sort of legalized prostitution. Which normally wouldn’t be worth commenting on, since these sorts of arguments are a dime a dozen. Obviously though, I’m commenting on Blackneck’s argument, which suggests that there’s something novel about it. And, as it so happens, there is:
Last week, this dude, George Sodini, went apeshit in a Pittsburgh LA Fitness health club and shot up the joint, killing 3 women before murking himself. News of his blog rantings about his problems and planned “shoot ‘em up” spread like crazy on the internets and old media systems. The running theory is that he’s a little crazy and was pissed at women for not giving him any ass. I’m thinking the problem was that he was just plain batshit, but let’s run with the no sex angle.
[...]
The reason this dude didn’t get any of that nook-nook is sort of a chicken and egg question: -Did dude not get any ass because he was crazy? I know women have a great sense of intuition and the fact that he had the propensity to go Columbine might have set off women’s senses not to fuck with him. That was probably was the case with that Virginia Tech kid too… And the Columbine kids. -Or was he crazy because he didn’t get any ass? A dry spell of a few months might make a nigga flip out. But nineteen years would probably send the Pope on some Helter Skelter type shit. It’s just not natural. I don’t need to search the internets to know that there are of plenty psychological studies that show that sex depravation will drive a person crazy. Just think: old people and a house full of cats… or homeless people who mumble to themselves. Dudes who can’t get any on their own power should have unfettered access the world’s oldest profession. For those who have a medical case of not non-pussy-getting, like Sodini, there should be a public option.
I understand the argument, but that doesn’t make it any less ridiculous. Blackneck is wrong. George Sodini didn’t kill those women (and injure many more) because he was sex deprived. There are many – many – men (and women for that matter) who either haven’t had sex, or haven’t had it in a long time. If sex deprivation were really that terrible, we would see many more killings of the kind witnessed last week. Let’s be clear. George Sodini killed those women because they were women. It’s abundantly clear, from his blog and from his journals, that Sodini harbored a deep-seated hatred towards women, and sex happened to be the lens through which he focused those hatreds. And judging from the intensity of Sodini’s hate, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to say that there is little that would have dimmed Sodini’s disdain and disgust for women.
All of the legalized prostitution in the world wouldn’t have stopped Sodini (and might have even intensified his hatred). To suggest otherwise – to suggest that maybe, perhaps, women do bear some of the blame for his actions – is more than a little offensive, and comes dangerously close to victim-blaming. Which isn’t terribly surprising, to be honest. We are fairly sensitive to instances of racism, kind of sensitive to classism, and absolutely tone-deaf when it comes to misogyny. Which, as Bob Herbert noted this past weekend in the New York Times, is kind of a problem when you consider that the United States is – as he puts it – “saturated with misogyny.” Blackneck’s post, well meaning as it is, is reflective of that tone deafness. If he (and I’m going to assume that Blackneck is a he) had a better grasp on the deep misogyny that permeates our society, then his solution to Sodini-types wouldn’t be to legalize prostitution in the hopes of staving off another massacre, it would be to preempt another massacre by directly addressing the rampant – and perfectly acceptable – disdain for women which permeates our mainstream discourse.
10
Aug
09
Trust and Good Faith
(cross-posted from the League of Ordinary Gentlemen)
It’s taken me awhile to get to this – mostly because I’ve been (unusually) busy with real life – but I wanted to offer a few thoughts on Mark’s post on Wyden-Bennett, and particularly his broader issue with liberals and Democrats assuming the worst of conservatives and Republicans. Here’s Mark in his own words, if you didn’t read the post:
I’m usually one of the more cynical people when it comes to politicians, but in this case the evidence that Republicans would turn against Wyden-Bennett if it came to a vote is pretty weak. It appears to me that liberals who assume that Republican support for Wyden-Bennett would disappear were it actually pushed are committing the cardinal sin of underestimating their opponents, attributing the worst possible motives to all of those opponents despite clear evidence to the contrary and without any supporting evidence.
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