Thank you Eli at FDL for renewing our acquaintance with this wonderful Python clip. The timing was perfect for my semi-depressed frame of mind. (Time to lay off the news for a while I think.) I may just have to find a torrent for a whole Monty Python movie. I had completely forgotten how much fun it is, and it's gotta be cheaper than Prozac.
But the real fun is in the post that goes with it, in which Eli lays bare the manner in which the Blue-Dog Dems are beating a very brave retreat on the “public option” aspect of healthcare reform. Please read and enjoy The Courage of the Conservadems at Firedog Lake. And may the gods and godesses of delight and absurdity continue to entertain Eli for eternity.
More Random Thoughts (cont.)
Public campaign financing, anyone?
I’ve been reading a lot of posts and hearing and seeing a lot of discussions in the media recently along these lines: The 2008 elections were an overwhelming repudiation of the Republican party and the principles for which it stands. Americans stood up last November and literally shouted “No more!” to Republicanism, wars of choice, and corporate control of the government. So, if the good guys won so big (and they did!), why aren’t any of the big changes happening? Why are Obama and Congress tippy-toeing around on things like universal health care and saving people’s homes and nationalizing and breaking up the banks as if the other guys still had the power and we can only accomplish that which has bipartisan support?
I think the answer is pretty obvious: The “other guys” do still have all the power and bipartisanship has nothing to do with it. Whether the officeholders call themselves Republicans or Democrats, with a few wonderful exceptions, the corporate interests still own our government. And they’ll continue to own it until Americans demand that our political campaigns by financed by public money, and only by public money.
An overwhelming percentage of Americans (I’ve seen polls ranging from 56% all the way up to a whopping 87%) want the country to change to a European-style, single-payer public health system. But does single-payer have a chance in hell of even being seriously considered? Not on your life! Nor is it likely to be, as long as the health profiteers put billions and billions of dollars annually into the reelection coffers of our nation’s congresscritters. Ditto the banks. Ditto Wall Street (whatever that means).
As long as it costs more than the GNP of a mid-sized country to be elected to public office, and as long as corporate interests are permitted to give game-changing sums to political candidates, we’re never going to have a government that’s interested in the needs of the working people they’re supposed to be looking out for.
With the Sotomayor Supreme Court nomination, we’ve been seeing Obama on teevee a lot talking about how important it was in the selection process to pick a candidate from the most highly qualified whose decisions reflected a philosophy of standing up for the little guy against the forces of the big and powerful. I guess that’s only for judges, eh?
Before the election, I responded to several polls about what should be the highest priority for the new administration with “None of the above: Restore the constitutional balance of powers and roll back the whole unconstitutional ‘unitary presidency’ idea.” After seeing what’s rolled out in the four months since Obama took office, I have a new answer for those pollsters: Stop the corporate stranglehold on the American government. Support public campaign financing now!
Credo, please leave me alone!
Seems like a day doesn’t go by when I don’t receive something from the Working Assets cell phone subsidiary, Credo. They want me to switch my mobile service from AT&T to their politically correct correct Credo brand. Today’s message came via snail mail in an appeal that compared Credo to AT&T and Verizon. Did you know that AT&T and Verizon both support war, laugh about global warming, favor criminalizing abortion, oppose campaign finance reform, and are opposed to free speech? Not a word about call or network quality.
There are three reasons why Credo isn’t for me:
- There are only two carriers whose very best phones receive a marginally acceptable signal in all the rooms of my ancient brick apartment, and Credo (Sprint) ain’t one of them.
- I spend 4 to 6 months of most years either at home in Spain or traveling elsewhere in Europe or Asia. If I want to own one telephone with all my contacts and data and bookmarks and calendar and personal junk in it, it needs to operate on a GSM network, since they don’t (for the most part) use the U.S. CDMA standard that Sprint—Credo’s actual network provider—uses. I’m stuck with AT&T or T-Mobile.
- The whole credo thing is about 90% hype.
Credo Mobile is not a telephone company. It’s a mobile phone service reseller for Sprint, a company that’s no more ‘progressive’ than AT&T or Verizon (or any of the others). If Credo had added a ‘Sprint’ column to the comparison chart they sent me today, it would have been just as dirty as the others.
If consumers ever looked beyond the shiny surface of crap like this, they’d realize that the more important message here is that the profits in the telecommunications industry are so obscenely huge that a reseller like Credo Mobile—a company that doesn’t own one stick of real telecommunications equipment—can afford to buy somebody else’s product and turn around and not only sell it to me at a competitive price, but also give me a $450 phone for $60, and give me $200 to buy out my AT&T contract and make generous contributions to good causes (they’re Planned Parenthood’s largest corporate contributor), and spam me by email and snail mail several times a week, and earn a decent return for their investors.
I grew up in Springfield, IL, one of the few municipalities left in the country that still has municipally owned and operated public utilities. Springfield’s progressive Republican fathers, led by the amazing V.Y. Dallman, saw the wisdom of municipally-owned public utilities and oversaw the creation of City Water Light and Power Company, and still in 2009, Springfield has OK water and electricity (about all anybody can claim these days), and the lowest electric rates in the country. It’s one of the few places where it’s actually less expensive to heat your home with electricity than with natural gas.
A mobile phone provider that did that for its users would have my business in a second. Until you do that, Credo, please lose my addresses.
And finally
One last thought on congregational animal names: I was tickled to learn that the correct name for a congregation of bears is a sloth—further evidence that I am, indeed, a member in good standing of the bear family.
More Random Thoughts (incomplete)
Naming the beast
I’d been trying to come up with a clever name for collectively referring to the Bush insiders (Bushco) without hitting on anything that stood out, when it occurred to me that there are some really wonderful names in the world of wildlife for groups of the the same kind of animal (‘herd’, ‘flock’, etc.). Wouldn’t it be cool if there were a delightfully ironic or comical name for a group of some disgusting and/or deceitful/mean/nasty wild critter, like a “slither” of shitsnakes or something? (noi to my herptophile friends)
Looking for a place to start, I turned to one of my favorite wildlife sources of info-for-idiots, the US Geological Survey web site, where I learned that in educated-speak the generic word for groups of the same animal is ‘congregation.’ So let’s see if we can’t come up with a good animal avatar for the congregation of Bush insiders whose shenanigans brought our country to a point where the jury is still out on whether it will survive in recognizable form.
Right away, I discovered that if I’m going for a name that includes the whole gaggle, the project is harder than I thought it was gonna be. I started by excluding all the names that were too generic: most people are turned off by snakes, but there’s no punch in the name “nest” by itself. The “Bush nest”? Meh.
I love the idea of an obstinacy (of buffalo), but the animal has zero ick factor. On the other hand, I kind of like the (biblical) ass for political metaphor, but the Bush Pace just doesn’t do anything. A cowardice of curs is good, but nowhere near destructive enough. I like the idea of a bloat of something, but the animal it names is the noble hippopotamus, capable of violence when provoked but otherwise pretty mellow fellows.
But I think if I had to pick the official Grumblebear nickname for the Bush insiders right this very minute, I’d go to the creepy place and start referring to them as the Bush Intrusion.
“Intrusion” just kind of sums up the whole Bush nightmare, and in the animal world when you’re talking about an intrusion of something, you’re referring to an intrusion of cockroaches.
I don’t know. What are your thoughts? Rather than insulting our friends in the animal world, maybe we should be throwing around candidates for an original name for a congregation of Bushies. An ignorance of Bushies? A failure of Bushies? An arrogance . . ? Wait, I’ve got it! A frathouse of Bushies. I think one of the rules for naming congregations is to try to stick to one-word names, but it’s damned difficult to come up with one word that even begins to express the soulless, venal, depraved, corrupt malignancy of George W. Bush’s presidential team.
Cast your vote or offer your own suggestions in comments.
The Ugly Truth
Sometimes my brain does some really weird stuff—especially right now while I’m coming off my antidepressant—but tonight it threw me a strange curve ball:
I serve on the steering committee of the local ACLU chapter, and it’s ‘that time of year’ at the ACLU when our representative to the state board has the unenviable job of hitting up the local major donors for some extra bucks. It’s a job I’ve done quite a few times over the years, and for me, it’s the only really unpleasant part of representing the chapter to ‘Chicago.’
Holy shit! Did I write that? Where’d that come from? Do I really think that?
To which the answers are – indeed, yes, I’ll explain, and sadly, yes.
For me and many like me in the civil liberties community, the single most important issue in the 2008 presidential election wasn’t the war or the economy or immunity for telecommunications companies that assisted the government in illegal spying on innocent American citizens or even the torture memos. For us, aside from wresting control of the country from the hands of an apparently completely insane Republican Party, the 2008 election was about restoring the United States Constitution and the rule of law.
Since taking office, Obama’s record has been mixed. But Bush left one hell of a mess, and Obama is a constitutional scholar fer krissake, and surely when the dust settles, he’ll get this stuff sorted out. Or at least, that was my illusion until Thursday’s speech on Gitmo in which he introduced the concept of “Prolonged Detention.” I think Rachael Maddow said it best:
The only difference between Obama and Bush is that this level of rape of logic and of the United States Constitution is not something an inarticulate, bumbling fratboy with ADHD could pull off without the absurdity being so obvious that even Aunt Martha’s cat Puddin was scratching its head there at the end. A constitutional law professor, on the other hand . . . .
More on this soon (or not)
Odds & Ends
100 Years of The Progressive
I'm just back from a wonderful weekend in Madison, WI, celebrating 100 years of The Progressive magazine. It was everything I expected and more. How's this for a lineup? Howard Zinn, Russ Feingold, Dennis Kucinich, Amy Goodman, Delores Huerta, Naomi Klein, Jim Hightower, Tammy Baldwin, Keith Ellison, Katha Pollitt, John Nichols, Bob McChesney, Will Durst, and Robert Redford. And the whole thing was held together by the unassuming miracle worker Matt Rothschild, Progressive editor. Extended thoughts (and pics) on the conference later this week. For now, I'll just say that it was a great weekend with wonderful people, and I came away from it with my spiritual tanks refilled to the brim and my physical energy supply running on empty—just the way they should be after a good weekend house party.
Stuff I learned on the trip (unrelated to the conference content)
Then there were the roads. Somebody please tell Pat Quinn that when Illinois gets that extra highway money from the stimulus, he needs to make sure not one penny gets diverted to anything but repairing our interstate highways! There are holes in I-39 between Bloomington and Rockford you could lose a Mini Cooper in, and there are no signs, no orange cones, no warnings—just gigantic holes in the pavement, and you're on your own, thank you very much.
My Prius is not my Saab. And that’s a subject for another diary or two (one on stupid things about the Prius, and one on the auto industry).
There are crazy people and assholes on the left as well as the right. The right has no monopoly on this one. The most obnoxious were the single-issue folks who used public discussion time to push their agenda, regardless of the topic. But for me the most annoying were the self-absorbed (and they're at every conference) who spent the entire presentation time formulating their clever little statement, totally missing that the speaker(s) had just spent 20 minutes either supporting the point in great detail or blowing it out of the water.
There is sadness in seeing movement heroes from one's own salad days suffering the physical deterioration of age. Howard Zinn, 24 years my senior, will be 87 on his next birthday, and it shows. But, oh, the mind! If I were 1/10 as sharp at 63 as Zinn at 87, I'd still be grateful for the intelligence boost.
Replacing David Souter
They say that Team Obama has been thinking about a replacement for Souter since even before the primaries. Obama, himself, has been quoted as saying that Souter is an example of the kind of Justice he would like to appoint. Me? Not so much. Souter certainly has been better than we expected when he was appointed, but he's sure not my idea of the kind of forward-thinking progressive that I'd be looking for to help restore what Rehnquist and Roberts and the Scalia-Thomas ideology have done to the SCOTUS. I'm prepared to be disappointed by the appointment. But I'm also aware of the long history of ideological surprises that have followed Supreme Court appointments. What progressive Senator gleefully would have voted to approve nominee Earl Warren in 1963? We'll see.
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