Kick-ass

What I learned from RedIvy today: you don't mess with Frances Martel.

And if the angle from which this particular reader criticizes homosexuality [link for context] is religious... I have to question what kind of God this wrathful evangelical deity really is, and why He is so desperate to smite everyone. Does He have nothing better to do, like create beauty in nature or answer the prayers of the faithful? My Christian God (and His Son), the one I talk to and worship every day, who in name and denomination is the same as yours, is kind, loving, forgiving, and understanding. He interprets sin and deprivation as an exclusive choice of the sinner, and not something thrust upon him from above (or below). Gays and lesbians can engage in sinful debauchery in the same way that straight individuals can, and aren’t considered sinners by default more than any of us are. I do not pretend to read the mind of the Lord, but if I am to believe that whole New Testament thing as the true way to lead one’s life(which I do), I cannot believe that God creates some people more sinful than others, or that there are sins that He is not willing to forgive.

...It is highly irritating to me that any mention of [Rachel] Maddow in the media has to come hand-in-hand with her sexuality, as if it were relevant to her occupation. Read any piece about her success and you’ll see what I mean. Those that abuse the stereotype will claim that she is “asking for it” with her short hair and, uh, eloquence, and all those “masculine” features like “snark” and “education”. Never mind that she rarely engages in discussion of gay and lesbian issues on MSNBC- she’ll talk about them when they’re relevant (she does have an extensive history in gay rights advocacy), but the scope of her political lens is much broader. She was “asking for it,” just for leaving the kitchen and not bowing down to the Valley Girl-esque image of the socially traditional newsgirl. Taking issue with her political beliefs (I myself disagree with her on almost every single point) is completely fair and, I believe, warranted. She’s practically wrong about everything, and it’s her choice to be so. Taking issue with her sexuality- which is neither here nor there in the political world- is disrespectful and uncalled for.

It’s almost as if the more envious elements of the media want to chalk up her success to her sexuality and not her talent, as if she is a product of this new socialist “Affirmative Action” thing and not a respectable pundit. And envy is always a thing to be mocked, traditional or otherwise.

FRANCES MAD. FRANCES SMASH.

...As much as I despise libertarianism -- and boy, do I ever -- I have to admit that the Internet, and the Republican Party, would be better if they had more people like Frances Martel in them. At least, they'd be more entertaining.

Sunday Screening

Everybody, this is Corb Lund. Corb, this is everybody. Now that we're all acquainted, let's hear some music.

CORB LUND is Canadian -- I know, me writing about Canadian music, you're shocked -- from Alberta, to be specific, and he plays country music (variously, along "the Corb Lund Band" or, lately, the wonderfully named "Hurtin' Albertans"). But it's not really country like most people understand it. Yes, there's yodeling in this song (which is part of a long tradition, actually, going back to Jimmie Rodgers who is arguably the founder of country music); but more than that, Corb Lund's music is just weird. Dense, inscrutable, sometimes deliberately stupid and sometimes deadly serious; you won't hear much else like it. Here's another example:

Now, I'm no fan of that video -- can't quite tell if it's a deliberate throwback to grunge, or just cheap and ADD-addled, but either way I'll pass -- but the song is just great. (That line: "This is grape juice and cheap vodka, man! This isn't even wine!" kills me every time. Not to mention it's an excuse to bring up the recent ridiculousness involving PZ Myers and a Communion wafer, which you should look at if you need more proof that this country's religious right is completely unhinged). You can hear the obvious Dylan influence in this one, but it's got that rootsy twist to it that adds a new dimension. Here's another, much more serious (and political) song -- follow the lyrics now:

Corb Lund's music, like a lot of Canadian rock, is an acquired taste. (I'm thinking here specifically of the Tragically Hip, whose songs are so dense both lyrically and musically that it often takes dozens of listenings before you can unravel them -- and that's not counting the YEARS of radio acclimation you need before you can get past Gord Downie's weird-ass voice.) But once you acquire it, man, do you ever acquire it; I've been spending a lot of time lately trying to tease out "Expectation and the Blues," under the logic that any country song which rhymes "over-intellectualize" with "self-actualize" must be worth understanding. (Here's a little low-quality snippet, if you're hardy enough to try it for yourself).

And it's not like he doesn't have a sense of humor. Here's "The Truck Got Stuck," one of Corb's most irresistibly dumb and catchy songs -- I warn you now, this is a talking blues about trucks getting stuck in mud, and if you hear it you WILL have it playing in your head for days. Listen:

(Agriculture Canada is our equivalent of the USDA, incidentally. Many Canadian federal agencies are just the name of what they do with the word "Canada" tacked on -- "Health Canada", ""Environment Canada", "Sport Canada", "Western Economic Diversification Canada", etc. You get used to it.)

Anyway; if you want to hear more Corb Lund, his albums are in all the usual places. I recommend eMusic, which sells real DRM-free MP3s at sensible prices ($10 for 30), and has a catalog of everything you need (they just don't carry the major labels, which is fine, because all that mainstream shit is on the filesharing networks anyway). Meanwhile, enjoy the rest of your weekends; this is an open thread.

Deregulation solves everything. Deregulation is magic. Deregulation is your father

Nathan Newman's little article about the failure of deregulation and the current financial crisis made me have an equally little thought -- remember after one of the more recent Wall Street shocks, I think it was the Bear Stearns collapse, when McCain went on TV and gave a big speech where he said the answer to our problems was more transparency and a simpler tax code?

My thought: Boy, that was stupid.

McCain opposes gay adoption

Sickening.

Q: President Bush believes that gay couples should not be permitted to adopt children. Do you agree with that?

Mr. McCain: I think that we’ve proven that both parents are important in the success of a family so, no I don’t believe in gay adoption.

Q: Even if the alternative is the kid staying in an orphanage, or not having parents.

Mr. McCain: I encourage adoption and I encourage the opportunities for people to adopt children I encourage the process being less complicated so they can adopt as quickly as possible. And Cindy and I are proud of being adoptive parents.

Q: But your concern would be that the couple should a traditional couple [sic]

Mr. McCain: Yes.

So-called "social issues" aren't normally my purview, but this pisses me off. There are innumerable children out there who desperately need a stable home, and innumerable gay couples out there who could provide them one with love and care. And -- surprise -- there are no psychological issues associated with growing up in a gay household, none. No reasonable person in the 21st century should hold this position; the fact that McCain and other conservative politicians can say this stuff publicly without immediate rebuke and ostracism is a sign that our national discourse is still, in fundamental ways, retarded.

I hate Mondays. Somebody get me a drink.

(Both links via the Washington Independent.)

UPDATE (Thursday): "Actually Senator McCain only kind of opposes gay adoption, and also he doesn't, and it's a state issue anyway, and PLEASE GO AWAY SCARY GAY PEOPLE."

What Not To Do On CNN

This clip has been making the rounds today, in which Gov. Mark Sanford (R-SC) does a total faceplant trying to articulate any contrast between McCain and Bush on the economy. This is one of the worst appearances by a high-profile surrogate you'll ever see, and it highlights the severe message difficulty McCain's campaign is having on the economy. Look:

Brutal.

(Also, as Taegan Goddard notes -- we can probably strike Mark Sanford off McCain's VP list.)

Sunday Screening

OH MY GOD. Seems The Americanization of Emily, one of my favorite relatively-unknown classics, is available in full on YouTube (and in handy playlist form, at that). It's been up for over a month, which is a good sign that the YouTube Copyright Gestapo isn't on the hunt for it in particular, but these things often vanish suddenly so get it while you can. To whet your appetite, here is an appropriately bizarre and incoherent trailer:

Don't let the black & white fool you, this was 1964; the young James Garner plays opposite the younger Julie Andrews in a biting satire of war and war-politics. Almost unknown and criminally underrated, this is everything Dr. Strangelove should have been: calm, intelligent, and devastating. (I hold Dr. Strangelove, like all of Kubrick, to be criminally OVERrated, but that's for another day.) It's not a great film, to be sure -- the directing is lackluster, and Julie Andrews is not exactly known for her dramatic range -- but the writing alone makes it more than worthwhile. Paddy Chayefsky, who you probably know as the guy who wrote Network in 1976 and then died, is the force at work here; Americanization of Emily is one of a series of movies he did as he transitioned out of 1950s TV and radio. (I'm not qualified to comment on the rest of Chayefsky's work -- the only one I've seen is the absurd Paint Your Wagon from 1969, with Lee Marvin and Clint Eastwood, singing. Let me tell you, the only worthwhile thing about seeing Paint Your Wagon is that you can subsequently say you sat through it -- a not insubstantial accomplishment, actually. ...I'm digressing.)

I imagine that some of you shiftless, MTV-addled teenagers will lack the patience to watch this whole movie (and you productive, career-building Harvard types certainly won't have the time); if so, I demand you at least watch this one scene. Here, James Garner devastates Julie Andrews' war-widow mother at a garden tea party, delivers a subversive speech about the virtues of cowardice, and in his grinning, clean-cut, all-American way, starts the 1960s. Skip to 3:27 and watch through into the next clip.

I'll leave you with that to ponder, and for heaven's sake, watch the entire movie. Meanwhile, enjoy the rest of your weekend; this is an open thread.

And baby makes five

I recall writing a blogpost five weeks ago called Next Stop: Bank Failures. Well, I'm not one to toot my own horn, but... Toot! Toot!

The federal government took control of Pasadena-based IndyMac Bank on Friday in what regulators called the second-largest bank failure in U.S. history.

Citing a massive run on deposits, regulators shut its main branch three hours early, leaving customers stunned and upset. One woman leaned on the locked doors, pleading with an employee inside: "Please, please, I want to take out a portion." All she could do was read a two-page notice taped to the door.

IndyMac -- whose slogan, wonderfully, was "You Can Count On Us" -- is the fifth U.S. bank this year to bite the dust. Something tells me it's not going to be the last.

(Note: FDIC insures every account up to $100,000, so most non-business and non-rich IndyMac account holders have nothing to worry about save some logistical hassles. Over that number, it's an open question. The government will sell off IndyMac's assets for whatever they can get, and go from there...)

Focusing the debate

Boy is this new DNC web ad a good one:

Though I've always believed that the way to win this election is primarily through pocketbook issues, it's also important that we tie Iraq -- which, as we saw in 2006, is a proven vote-mover -- to the debate. This spot reinforces the already-developing perception, on both foreign policy and economic issues (please DO go read those links, btw), that McCain actually has no idea what he's doing and is just making stuff up as he goes along. Which is a GREAT frame for us, both because it makes the McCain=Bush argument that much easier, and because it works against the "experience... trustworthy... integrity" argument that the GOP will undoubtedly make. More like this, please.

UPDATE (Saturday, 11 AM): As if on cue.

More about Ivy admissions and privilege

As a corollary to last week's post about the social roots of Ivy League elitism, here's an interesting article from the New York Post about how some ultra-privileged Manhattan parents are upset that their kids aren't getting into Harvard, Yale and Princeton as much these days. This is the heartwarming part:

it seems private schools are feeling the heat more than their public counterparts. “The Ivies are reaching out for a diverse economic background—even home-schooled students are becoming more of a thing,” says one guidance counselor at a private school in Manhattan. “They are interested in first-generation college kids, and few privates have that. The Ivies are still good to legacies [children of alumni] if their alums have been good to them. But it’s getting harder for private school students because it’s getting fairer for the rest of the world.”

“Our low-income initiative has repositioned us,” agrees Marlyn McGrath, Harvard’s director of undergraduate admissions. Harvard, Princeton, Yale and other top-tier schools have replaced loans with grants in financial aid packages, which has encouraged students who wouldn’t have been able to afford the schools in the past to apply. “A lot of people are starting to think about Harvard when otherwise their state university might have been on the top of their list.”

One local example of this brave new world is public school student Lukasz Zbylut, who just graduated from Brooklyn’s New Utrecht High School. After rejecting offers from 18 top colleges, including Yale, Princeton, Stanford and Dartmouth, he plans to attend Harvard University come fall. Lukasz’s parents are Polish immigrants, and his father works in construction in Brooklyn to support his wife and three children.

Now, one working-class student from Brooklyn does not a fair admissions policy make -- especially when we're still accepting (per this article) six from the Trinity School and eight from Horace Mann, which have graduating classes of 107 and 173 respectively, and which both cost around $30,000/yr. (Here's something that will blow your mind -- at Horace Mann, which costs $29,000/yr, only 18% of students get financial aid. Everyone else, one assumes, pays it out of pocket. My God.) The economic elite is still way, WAY overrepresented at places like Harvard.

But, even if it's not a substantial change, it's at least satisfying to read that people who spend $46,000 on admissions counseling -- I'm not making that up, it's in the article -- aren't automatically guaranteed a seat at the nation's best universities. (Don't expect me to have any sympathy for these people, either. They get into Johns Hopkins and they're disappointed? Fuck them.) Education is supposed to be the great equalizer in America, and any increase in meritocracy at these places is a good thing.

Deep thought

If this were a just world, every self-righteous libertarian who started talking about how they're "tired of the traditional left-right divide" would be immediately punched in the face.* That goes for Al Giordano too.

*Preferably by a union worker.

Sunday Screening

As a lover of classic pop culture, I watch a lot of videos that are corny. A lot that are cheesy. A lot that are campy. But less often do I find something, from what was at one time the centerpoint of the American mainstream, that is completely bugshit insane. Look:

That's Jan & Dean, performing their 1960 single "White Tennis Sneakers" on what I am assuming is American Bandstand. You can tell just by looking at them that there was something seriously wrong with these boys.

They were pioneers of surf music, which is best remembered these days for producing the immortal Beach Boys, but which was also a fad in its own right in the early 1960s that produced unbelievable amounts of dreck. My analogy would be that the Beach Boys were to surf music what the Bee Gees were to disco: a group of musical geniuses whose brilliance was outpaced tenfold by meritless commercial imitators. And if the Beach Boys are the Bee Gees, then Jan & Dean have to be ABBA: talented but totally synthetic and really, really creepy. To illustrate, here is the ultimate text of the surf genre, Jan & Dean's decidedly pre-feminist 1963 hit "Surf City" -- which was co-written, by the way, by the Beach Boys' Brian Wilson:

This shit was everywhere. Here's a particularly unnerving little thing, a clip from a 1963 TV pilot called "Surf Scene" starring Jan & Dean themselves -- I'll let you decide for yourself why the networks never picked it up:

Surf music, always a strictly American phenomenon, passed when the Beatles came along and pop-rock as we know it today began. But Jan & Dean kept at it; Jan (his full name was Jan Berry) suffered debilitating injury, including brain damage, in a 1966 car accident, and briefly the name "Jan & Dean" was used for both an album entirely by Dean and, later, a truly freaky psychedelic album called "Carnival of Sound" recorded by the convalescent Jan, his girlfriend, Glen Campbell, Davy Jones of the Monkees, and Phil Spector's studio musicians, among others. It is a scattershot, nonsensical collection of songs and random noise; their label (Warner) never released it. (I had the luck to get it from BigO, a strange website run by Singaporean leftists who regularly upload rare lost albums and concert bootlegs, then take them down almost immediately. Want to hear John Cage in San Francisco, 1965? Get it while it's hot...)

Yet Jan & Dean pressed on. Here, as proof, see one of the most incredible things I ever found on YouTube: this is from a VHS tape called "Surfing Beach Party" that Jan & Dean made, apparently, in 1983. This thing will scramble all your chronological indicators. Look:

Are you trying to figure out why that clip feels so strange? I'll tell you -- and it's not just because the costume designers couldn't seem to figure out whether it was the 80s or the 50s (and the song is from the 60s!). It's because, even though "Surfing Beach Party" is a comparatively recent production, it's completely without irony. These boys are totally earnest! And that just doesn't happen in our understanding of pop music, post-1960s. It's not coincidental that I mentioned the Beatles above; they changed the paradigm for pop, which they performed with a knowing smirk instead of the traditional big ol' grin. Most latter-day performances of great classic pop understand this and temper themselves accordingly (not to mention, the songs are so great that they stand on their own) -- Jan & Dean, clinging as they are to a tiny shard of Kennedy-era flotsam, have no such luxury. If you're anything like me, that makes you uncomfortable.

I'll leave you to ponder that. Enjoy the rest of your weekend; this is an open thread.

Yet another reason to love Robert Byrd:

he is old enough that he can unreservedly lay the smackdown.

Sen. Jim Bunning (R-KY): "Regular order!"

Byrd: "Who said that?"

Bunning: "I did."

Byrd: "Who are you?"

Bunning: "I'm a senator."

Byrd: "You're a great baseball man."

Bunning: "I'm a senator; I have the same rights as you."

Byrd: "Yeah, man, you're a senator." [Ends by laughing hysterically at Bunning.]

Jim Bunning, BTW, is not only an actual baseball player but also also a crazy old man who has been ranked among the five worst senators, so Byrd (no stranger to "old" and "crazy" himself) is kind of justified here. But regardless, I get so much joy from imagining the withering tone in which Byrd would have said "Who are you?"

Missing the point

Ed Kilgore at Democratic Strategist, who has been refreshingly readable in recent years, is back in the old DLC mode today with a silly argument attacking criticism of Obama's perceived move to the center. Basically Kilgore's case comes down to "Obama's not moving to the center, but if he is it's just because he's awesome, SHUT UP ARIANNA HUFFINGTON," and it's not really worth our time. (Especially his dreamy-eyed contention that Obama is a "remarkable man" who can operate outside existing political paradigms, which is startlingly credulous for a man of Kilgore's intellect and experience.) But there's one bit I do want to take issue with, because it's important -- it has to do with concepts of "swing voters." Kilgore writes:

Second of all, as the TDS Roundtable on swing and base voters earlier this year illustrated, there's plenty of disagreement about the definition and nature of "swing voters." They don't necessarily all reside in the ideological "center" of the electorate on every issue, and moreover, "base" voters don't necessarily have inconsistent or antagonistic points of view from "swing voters." The two things that are pretty hard to deny are that (1) undecided "very likely" voters are indeed a disproportionately important electoral prize because winning each of them produces two net votes, and (2) most successful campaigns in a competitive environment manage to energize the partisan base while expanding it into the ranks of independents and even the other party's base. Huffington's horror at swing-voter pandering, and her manifest contempt for swing voters themselves, probably reflects the fashionable but very dubious Lackoffian belief that swing voters are cognitively confused, perhaps even stupid or amoral people who can only be appealed to by an even more strongly expressed partisan "frame."

This is wrong on a very profound level, and it misunderstands both Lakoff and the entire political-strategy argument of the netroots (which Huffington is making a facile version of). If I can arrogantly presume to speak for Lakoffian progressives for a minute -- we don't think that swing voters are confused. We think they don't exist.

Longitudinal research has shown, consistently, that people who claim they are "independent" or "nonpartisan" or whatever overwhelmingly display identical voting patterns to partisan voters. They may not say they're affiliated, but they vote like they are. A few people are out there whose votes regularly switch from Democratic to Republican or vice versa depending on the election in front of them, but there are so few of them that they're politically and statistically insignificant; most are just partisans who won't admit it. What DOES actually define that self-identified nonpartisan group, meanwhile, is that they're predominantly lower-information voters who are much less engaged with the political process and turn out much less frequently. (Which makes sense: the more time you spend following politics, the more likely you are to take a side. It's not that they are "stupid and amoral," and frankly it's rather offensive that Kilgore put those words in Arianna Huffington's mouth. It's only that they're politically disengaged.)

Therefore, outcome-decisive changes over the course of an election, so often assumed by the best analysts to be the product of swing voters changing their minds, are more likely the product of these marginal voters deciding whether or not to vote. (Traditional polls, not being longitudinal, cannot measure this.) Hence a focus on turning out the "base"; there is nobody else to turn out! Of course that's a controversial thesis, and I imagine Kilgore and lots of other people disagree, but it sure makes more sense to me than the alternative (that elections are decided by a tiny cadre of cerebral David Brooksian independents who are somehow engaged in the political process yet fail to identify with a political group).

So even if we grant Kilgore the argument that Obama's not moving to the "center" per se in his pursuit of swing voters, it doesn't matter, because pursuing swing voters at ALL is a wild goose chase. The way to win those valuable marginal votes is to campaign confidently and persuasively, using -- here comes Lakoff -- a cognitive FRAME which can be easily adopted by voters who aren't particularly political in nature. Republicans have done very well since Reagan in establishing their frame (and winning over all kinds of marginal Democrats, both so-called independents and their "Reagan Democrat" cousins, in the process); Democrats are only starting to do so. (I'm beginning to think that Obama's "Change" thing is a good step in that direction, actually, which is for another post.)

From this perspective Obama's movements away from progressivism, then, actually do direct damage to both the Democratic voter coalition and to his own electoral prospects (which are closely tied), by cutting up the party's frame for no damn reason. Hence Arianna Huffington's outrage, and hence the netroots' frustration at those within the party who still (insanely) think nonpartisanship and "triangulation" is a route to victory. Kilgore's total failure to understand this, and to instead treat the argument like he's defending Obama from hordes of raging hippies, is a saddening reminder of how out-of-touch -- how ignorant -- DC-elite centrism is of the way politics works in real life. But what else is new?

Breaking: Congress Accomplished Something

Here's an interesting little article from the Washington Independent on how Jim Webb's GI Bill, without fanfare, came back from the political brink and will quietly become law -- despite the best efforts of the usually-decisive Blue Dog caucus. This is kind of heartening, both because the Blue Dogs suck, and because the new GI Bill is a great piece of legislation that will help innumerable military families and add a much-needed patch to our unraveling social safety net.

But it makes you think -- what else has this Congress, which in 2006 ostensibly was going right to work in rolling back conservative policies, actually accomplished? Other than that hike in the minimum wage, which came immediately after Pelosi and Reid took power, they've done nothing that I can think of. We all know that Blue Dogs, and their Republican pals, have been obstructing most major legislation (especially anything serious on Iraq), but surely after a year and a half there'd be some incremental progress we can point to, right? Is it hiding somewhere?

YES YES YES

Under the strong leadership of God's President we've been safe for 7 years. But if we abandon God now, we could be hit again. Yes, we can vote for George W. Bush in 2008...

The important thing to understand about so-called "term limits" is that they are man's law, not God's Law. The God who parted the Red Sea is surely not worried about so-called "term limits"... Presidential term limits are not in the Bible...

Millions of partriotic (sic) Americans need to know that we can write in George Bush for president in 2008. Never underestimate the power of a bumper sticker to get the word out.

I love this country.

(Via.)