It appears that in spite of fears of the contrary by many on the progressive blogosphere, the FCC is moving under the chairmanship of Julius Genachowski to strengthen and guarantee equality of access on the Internet with the support of the Democratic majority on the commission.

The battle over the net neutrality concept was formally joined Monday by FCC chairman Julius Genachowski, who threw his support behind the free flow of Internet traffic without interference from carriers and ISPs. He was immediately supported by commissioners Michael J. Copps and Mignon Clyburn, both Democrats like Genachowski. With those commissioners forming a 3 to 2 majority over the FCC's Republican commissioners, the eventual approval of the free flow of Web content without blocking, slowing or extra charges seems assured.

My apology for boneheaded statements over the jump...

Read more »

Liberal disgust for our party has become quite a no-brainer.  Under its oversized umbrella, the Donkey's wide straddle from the people's republic of Vermont to Landrieu's McCain-voting constituency is becoming an increasingly uglier balancing act to contemplate from down below amid the grassroots.  The pretzel-like contortions in which our Republicratic party must engage to hold its lukewarm coalition together in order to push any sort of policy must surely be a source of amusement to the defeated, yet ever more cohesive, wingnuts.  Meanwhile, disgusted liberals justifiably seek to bolt but are reminded by sanctimoniously odious centrists like myself of the self-defeating evil-breeding consequences of Naderism which only hands power over to the lunatic fringe.  The extremists are still powerful because even as the GOP loses moderates and influence, their party becomes more radicalized while the Democratic party grows into decreasingly effective, tepid majorities.

Meanwhile, the extreme right continues to engage in the hijacking of our institutions by controlling the base of the Republican party and thus controlling important strategic positions such as our schoolboards and by engaging in propaganda aimed at the wobbly center to which the Democrats are hostage.  It is clear that we are hijacked by them, and they operate unfettered by us.  So here is my proposal to the sizeable disgusted liberal faction of the Democratic party.  If you have already vowed to stay home rather than again support the Dems, forget the Greens and the Socialist third parties.  Instead, do something which would shift the nation's center.  Water down the Republican party.  Register as Republicans.  Vote in numbers in Republican primaries.  Let the Fundies know exactly who's coming for dinner.  Dilute the bejeezus out of the Religious Right's disproportionate influence on the GOP platform.  Shift the Republican party to the left.  Reclaim the party from Nixon, Reagan and Palin in order to return it to Lincoln, and thus allow the entire national political center to shift.

In my view this would be a win-win strategy for Liberals who already feel that the Democratic party is a total waste of time.  Political results will not be immediate, but the de-radicalization of the GOP would definitely change the political landscape significantly more than any third party ever will in the absence of a parliamentary system.  In addition, there are short term satisfactions to be enjoyed as the liberals register and potentially outnumber the radicals in many constituencies.  I am referring to the look on the the gun nut's face when the dirty effing hippies show up to vote in their primaries and caucuses, challenging the hate platforms, and ousting the flat earth school boards.  If enough lefties show up, the rightwing extremists will be the ones pouting and leaving to form third parties just in order not to coalesce with supporters of marriage equality, choice, and single payer healthcare.  Now that is change in which any Liberal can believe.

Shocking as it may seem, it takes very little to push young, liberal, humanistic, educated American college students toward behavior approaching that which was photographed in Abu Graib.  Such malleability of the average person has been demonstrated by numerous studies in the behavioral sciences since the Nuremberg trials.  Two towering studies in particular, Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Study and the Milgram Experiment at Yale reveal that the capacity for cruelty borne out of obedience are more universal than merely within the context of the Holocaust, that it could and does happen at any place and any time given the right setting, and that it is not at all unique to Nazi Germany.  Indeed, although most references to Nuremberg are to the legal precedent that its ruling establishes, that of totally dismissing obedience as an absolution for atrocities, perhaps the most shocking discovery gleaned by the court is that perfectly normal and otherwise moral people would do monstruous things to others if ordered to do so by figures of authority.

The Milgram Experiment was, literally and figuratively speaking, shocking.  Under the guise of a memory and learning experiment, subjects who were paid to participate, under the direction of an authoritative lab-coated actor, were persuaded to administer what they were told were incrementing electric shocks to a stooge based on the correctness or incorrectness of the stooge's answers to questions.  Subjects heard progressively distressed pre-recorded screams and complaints from the unseen stooge, which even after awhile included protests over his heart condition, all these triggered in accordance with the voltage level the subject believed then to be administering.  With the prodding of the lab-coated administrator, sixty percent of participants, although hesitantly and occasionally frantically, reached the 450 volt level, long after the stooge screams had troublingly gone silent.  This experiment was repeated around the world under different settings with insignificant differences in its results, and it clearly showed how easily randomly selected people could be convinced by a figure perceived to be authoritative to inflict cruelty and possibly even kill or seriously hurt a stranger.

Zimbardo's experiment recreated a mock prison populated with students who for a couple of weeks were to be paid to play the roles of prisoners and guards.  These were healthy, psychologically evaluated Stanford students during the early seventies who embraced much of the hippie culture of their era.  The results were so unexpected that the experiment was terminated on its sixth day.  Participants assimilated the roles they played to an extent that transformed the site into a veritable prison with its entailing harsh authoritarian environment.

Read more »

Credit: Reputation for solvency and integrity entitling a person to be trusted in buying or borrowing: You should have no trouble getting the loan if your credit is good

We digested the American pie over three decades ago, and we now owe even the Indonesian soles of our shoes to foreigners.  Our trade deficit based service economy has for the past three decades been one of increasingly borrowing from abroad to purchase from abroad, and Americans have survived by suckling from the global financial teat, and the world was all dandy with this because of our unique credit.  The fact is that credit has been for a long time the US's one true asset, and with a global financial crisis and our nation collapsing into a depression, the consensus is that investment is our least painful way ahead, but in order to invest we must more than ever resort to our credit.

However, in many circles there are cries that we should stiff the sovereign bondholders who invested in major private bond markets in institutions such as Citi.  Puzzlingly it should be Treasury that steps in to effectuate the stiffing, the very same Treasury which must maintain credit to finance our recovery.  After stiffing these creditors, we then simply expect them to return business as usual and buy our Treasury Bonds so we can finance our much coveted healthcare reform and other liberal dreams.

Sovereign funds from abroad are already growing impatient, and although they too are inextricably intertwined with us in our financial bacchanal, they do not necessarily have to continue in this path.  We are in a position to call China's bluff, since everyone knows that the value of the US bonds they hold will only diminish as they let go of them.  However, to what extent must any longterm lenders continue to give us fresh credit for our dream supertrains and investments in new energy if we make the decision to stiff them through the private institutional bondmarket, all in the name of politics and pitchforkers threatening with imported pitchforks purchased at Walmart.  Of course, many will disingenuously attempt to blurr the difference between stiffed Citi bonds and Treasury bonds, but from the eyes of a world of sovereign lenders, the difference will at best be fuzzy, but their lost wealth will be as real as their diminished capacity to lend to us and also as real as our evaporated credit.

How ironic it is that the cry for Treasury to step in and stiff international bondholders at Citi and other institutions is advanced by precisely those who most wish that Treasury issue debt to finance their dream healthcare reform.  There is a typically American hubris-filled notion that we can stiff our foreign creditors on one end and expect them to continue offering us trillions on the other, via Treasury bonds, to finance our safety net and our pet projects.   I, for one, know that my credit is based on my payment history to all of my debtors, and the world will judge the US likewise.

Perhaps some of us need to pause and reconsider, put down our Chinese manufactured pitchforks, and place practicality before moral indignation, and most of all admit to ourselves that we all partook in the loot.

What else should I be?
All apologies.
What else could I say?
Everyone is gay

 

Kurt Cobain

 

Rarely does anyone emphasize their non-membership within an ethnic minority when defending said group's civil rights, yet it seems a few appear to feel the need to remove any doubts about their one hundred percent sterling heterosexuality before advocating for the rights of gays.  Many are so eager to point out bigotry that led to the passing of Proposition 8, and yet they betray a necessity to assert their unequivocal straightness while doing so, lest the audience may inconveniently misconstrue, or perhaps to emphasize the extent to which their advocacy is untainted by personal stakes in the discussion of the rights of what we view as a straight majority and a gay minority.

 

However, such a demographic breakdown seems at odds with the Kinsey scale.

 

 

 

 

Read more »

Read more »

Look at the numbers from the latest CNN poll.  Only thirty-six percent of women view Sara Palin favorably, and we know who those thirty-six percent are.  Simply put, outside the wingnutosphere, Sara Palin is the biggest flop conceivable as garnerer of female support for the ticket.  At thrity-six percent, she fails to impress even quite a few Republican women.  Simply put, women do not like Sara Palin.

The trophy running mate <a href="http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/talk/2008/08/the-trophy-running-mate-1.php">(tm)</a> is having pretty much the same effect on the electorate that a trophy wife typically has in your average ex-urban cul-de-sac.  Palin is generating bulging enthusiasm among certain males, who, after oogling the unqualified Alaskan VP nominee on CNN as she shoots her gun with her tight sweater on, run to their keyboards and blog what their scrotums have told them, that Palin will be a major game changer.  Suddenly, they have ceded to the power of imagery over policy and have fixated on the notion that Mrs Palin offers the McCain presidential ticket its much needed bounce.

Little did these prognosticators in their second pubescence realize that most hard-working women who struggle in a man's world, the ones who admired Hillary for her erudition and tenaciousness, were not going to transfer their support to an unprepared Linda Carter look-alike, just because CNN is touting with her marksmanship.  The truth is that Palin offends women.  She insults them.  She reminds the normal struggling woman of the less qualified for whom they get passed-over for jobs on a day-to-day basis just because men prefer their ilk smiling at the reception desk, waiting at the restaurant table, beaming at meetings, or standing next to them in a presidential ticket so they can catch a peek.  Women read her body language and understand it without succumbing to it.  Women listen to her tall-tales about her last pregnancy and are calling out the bullshit.  Most of all, they are telling themselves, this is no Hillary Clinton.

Although not much prone to welling up easily, I have wondered what on Earth it was about this Democratic convention that has had me repeatedly reaching for the Kleenex box.  I had not even watched that much of it, yet even during the brief segments I witnessed, I caught glimpses of tears betraying deep emotions surfacing up to the tearducts of delegates, prominent politicians, and other participants of this event.  There also seemed to be a sense of disbelief, a pinch me because I must be dreaming this is really happening attitude, throughout the Pepsi Center. 

Obviously, the sense of reconciliation after a bitterly divisive primary is one important reason for this phenomenon.  The cameras have not spared us from any of Michelle Obama's unguarded facial expressions, and the drama for the rest of the world as she and all of us witnessed the Clintons coming through for the party and channeling their political genius with no holds barred must have opened up a stream of emotions.  Art does make me tear up, whether it is a Beethoven symphony or the Clintons at their best, and I can now only feel love toward them in spite of the rancor of the past few months.

Likewise, the sight of the globally spanning Obama family leaves few of us untouched as the multiple generations of Asian, African and Euro-American faces take the spotlight, making everyone realize that this family's presence in the White House will be an unprecedented symbol of unity of people from so many backgrounds.  Thus, as Maya Soetoro-Ng gave her brief and touching speech, a young Asian woman in the crowd was caught by the camera shedding a tear, and we all, in our heart of hearts, can understand the joy behind it.

Fortunately, I missed the Ted Kennedy appearance.  It would have been too much.  I however, like most, could not and did not miss Obama's acceptance speech.  It was an evening during which the camera caught face after face filled with emotion and shedding tears of joy with a frequency that I never before in my life have witnessed.

Perhaps others here at this forum could add to these impressions for they certainly are beyond the capacity of a single person to explain.

It must be good to be an ex-POW.  Indeed, all because John McCain was a POW,

he cannot tell a lie,

it is proof enough that he did not cheat at that Evangelical forum,

General Wesley Clark cannot reasonably question his qualifications to be CIC,

it's ok if he has an affair,

he was able to become, that's right, a celebrity-hero and a Senator,

he gets to run a dishonorable campaign,

he got to marry the ultimate golddigger's dream wife,

he is entitled to have her buy him four (or is it seven or ten) homes,

he gets to call her anything in public, even a trollop or a ...

he gets her to buy him $520 shoes while he calls others elitists,

he knows how to win wars,

he gets special media treatment,

and he even gets to admit he did not love America until he became, you guessed it, a POW.

So indeed it is good to be a John McCain, although he will never play that POW card.

"I kind of reacted the way I did because I have a reluctance to talk about my experiences," he said, noting that he has huge admiration for the "heroes" who served with him in the POW camp and said the experience taught him to love the U.S. because he missed it so much.

"I am always reluctant to talk about these things," McCain said.

 

White, Brown, and Black in South Side Chicago

Race relations is a subject that will never go away, that can hardly ever be avoided, and which can so strongly mark on an individual level, yet it is also one I seldom address.  With Chicago's South Side now thrust to the center of our nation's discourse on race, so much has been broadcast and written about this place, of which until this election season I had known almost nothing.  There are three narratives that stick to my mind: two by fellow TPMers and the third an eye-opening description of black experience in this rough city excepted from Rick Perlstein's Nixonland.  Each narrative is a disturbing read yet each creates an important context for the others.

The first is an excerpt from TPM reader Chauncey Baker's touching essay about his family in Chicago.  I hope he does forgive me for using his candid narrative here, but I was so struck by it, I find it cathartic to contextualize it here.  Among other things, Chauncey tells us:

Because they were one of the few white people in the neighborhood, they were terorized by a few thugs in the community that decided any white person was open to attack.

My grandmother bore the brunt of the attacks.  It started with her not being able to carry her groceries home because someone would knock them out of her hand.  It escalated with her being spit on.  It ended with her being beaten.

Who is to blame?  Who knows.  My grandmother was the perfect stereotypical German woman: Big boned and didn't take shit from nobody.  Who knows what she might have said to provoke the attacks.  But I can say this, anything she might have said was done out of fear and a complete misunderstanding of America at the time.  She thought that America was the land of opportunity. I guess she learned the hard way.

More recently, TPM reader Hard Truths shares her traumatic upbringing as an adopted brown Hispanic child growing up in two black families in Chicago.

Then and now, people stop me in grocery stores, gas stations and on the street to ask, "Are you mixed?" and "What are you mixed with?" as if having golden-colored skin grants all the world the right to inquire about my full familial history anytime or anyplace.

When I was twelve, I asked my second-adoptive mother to explain what it meant for me to be three different races. Since I had been raised in mostly black neighborhoods and educated in a strict ethnic culture, with little to no white or Hispanic interactions other than school, I simply wanted to get to know and love my own, multi-racial self.

She said, "You have to pick one or the other. Because you cannot be both." In a single sentence, my own mother had not only over-looked my Latino heritage altogether, as if it didn't even exist, she had commanded me to choose between being black or white, because society (which included my own parents) would not 'allow' me to be both. She might as well have said, "Which perfectly good arm do you want to cut off and throw away?"

For the the black experience segment, I quote from Rick Perlstein's Nixonland via Brad DeLong:

You could draw a map of the boundary within which the city's seven hundred thousand Negroes were allowed to live by marking an X wherever a white mob attacked a Negro. Move beyond it, and a family had to face down a mob of one thousand, five thousand, or even (in the Englewood riot of 1949, when the presence of blacks at a union meeting sparked a rumor the house was to be "sold to niggers") ten thousand bloody-minded whites. In the late 1940s, when the postwar housing shortage was at its peak, you could find ten black families living in a basement, sharing a single stove but not a single flush toilet, in "apartments" subdivided by cardboard. One racial bombing or arson happened every three weeks.... It neighborhoods where they were allowed to "buy" houses, they couldn't actually buy them at all: banks would not write them mortgages, so unscrupulous businessmen sold them contracts that gave them no equity or title to the property, from whcih they could be evicted the first time they were late with a payment.

I let these texts speak for themselves and with each other, together with any of your impressions.

Since I have not as yet seen this mentioned elsewhere on TPMEC (ehem), here is a shoutout of some more encouraging news for John McCain (snark plag'ed from Atrios).  Indeed, Adam Nagourney would find it strange that the spread at this stage is a mere seven points in favor of Obama, but such is the state of the media we have, not at all the semi-competent one we beg for.

Anyways, returning to Gallup, we find the following gem:

The question, part of an Aug. 7-10 Gallup Poll, allowed respondents to name any candidate or political party, without prompting of specific names from Gallup interviewers. This is a different approach than Gallup takes in its Daily tracking polling and USA Today/Gallup polls, in which voters are asked whether they would vote for Barack Obama or John McCain for president if the election were held today.

With the unaided question used in the new poll, 83% of registered voters named either Obama (45%) or McCain (38%) as their preferred candidate. Obama's 7-point advantage over McCain on the open-ended ballot is similar to the 5-point lead he currently holds in Gallup's Daily tracking poll.

45 - 38!  Sigh!

Reader Taniel points to some very encouraging news.  A recent poll puts Barack Obama firmly ahead in Alaska.

In Alaska (polling history), a poll by the Hays Research group has Obama leading 45% to McCain’s 40%. The survey included Ralph Nader (who got 2%) but not Bob Barr, who is also on the Alaska ballot. The poll’s margin of error is rather high, however, at 4.9%.

Indeed, further polls will be needed in order to confirm the trend, but the fact that even one poll shows such a comfortable margin in hitherto solidly Republican Alaska means that the stealth strategies of the Obama campaign are beginning to yield results.

The news also put to rest the primary season meme which stated that only certain traditionally democratic states were significant and brings to an end the dismissing of a fifty-state strategy.

The news also suggests that the Obama campaign is repeating the successful primary season strategy of wooing votes in areas that campaigns traditionally neglect or take for granted while McCain, as did the Clinton campaign, invests exclusively in the typical battleground states, where he has shown some, though limited, progress.  The Clinton camp paid dearly for embracing such a limited strategy which left them no margin for upsets.  McCain seems headed along the same path.

Loathe as I am to stir up the mud here at our wonky, politically-obsessed and generally cordial Café, the post by Sidney Blumenthal discussing Galbraith's new book presents challenges to my concentration in view of the many unanswered questions about the author of said post, if this is indeed the very same Sidney Blumenthal.

As reported by Peter Dreier last May on the HuffPo, Blumenthal, the former critic and heroic exposer of the right wing smear machine against the Clintons, engaged in the propagation of defamatory rightwing talkingpoints meant to tarnish then Democratic presidential primary candidate Sen. Barack Obama.

Writes Dreier:

Almost every day over the past six months, I have been the recipient of an email that attacks Obama's character, political views, electability, and real or manufactured associations. The original source of many of these hit pieces are virulent and sometimes extreme right-wing websites, bloggers, and publications. But they aren't being emailed out from some fringe right-wing group that somehow managed to get my email address. Instead, it is Sidney Blumenthal who, on a regular basis, methodically dispatches these email mudballs to an influential list of opinion shapers -- including journalists, former Clinton administration officials, academics, policy entrepreneurs, and think tankers -- in what is an obvious attempt to create an echo chamber that reverberates among talk shows, columnists, and Democratic Party funders and activists. One of the recipients of the Blumenthal email blast, himself a Clinton supporter, forwards the material to me and perhaps to others.

These attacks sent out by Blumenthal, long known for his fierce and combative loyalty to the Clintons, draw on a wide variety of sources to spread his Obama-bashing. Some of the pieces are culled from the mainstream media and include some reasoned swipes at Obama's policy and political positions.

Many questions on this story remain unanswered, even by otherwise muck-exposing recipients of Blumenthal's emails.  If light is indeed the best disinfectant then it would certainly be cleansing for all of us and for future generations to know the details behind this upseting story.

If Larry Johnson were to return and begin posting at TPM, I would at least know whom I was reading and what to expect.  The mystery around Mr Blumenthal's activities, on the other hand, are a bit too distracting at this stage for me to seriously focus on the substance of his current contributions.

For the life of me, I do not understand how TPMEC has failed to post and comment on this ad.  To those who have not yet seen the Hands ad that will be playing during the summer games, do not miss it.

The "Hands" ad gracefully and beautifully artfully hits on many themes, values, and visions we, as a society, share, such as work and jobs, the environment, and technological progress to address some of our more pressing challenges.

Fortunately, the Obama campaign has not yielded to the hand-wringers in the Media and the blogs caught in 2004 Groundhog Day, and they have instead put out this Olympic ad which ignores all the armchair pundit advice to actually address and dignify the McCain tactics.

This ad, instead, hits positive, visionary and constructive notes and leaves little doubt that in this race, one candidate's message is optimistic, realistic and serious about much needed change while the other candidate, with his puzzlingly childish ads, deserves as much attention as Lyndon LaRouche does - that is, absolutely none.

What do you think?

In spite of the red traffic light holding back the six lanes of impatient SUV and delivery van traffic, the senior citizen's electric wheelchair passage over the crosswalk, from her conveniently located retirement apartment complex to the strip mall parking lot, is a trip she will never get used to in her feebler years.  Although she herself does own a luxurious suburban vehicle, the uncomfortable and over-exposing wheelchair cross is infinitely less complicated than maneuvering her own massive utility vehicle through the multiple turns, medians, and narrow parking spaces she would rather not negotiate at this stage in her life.  For decades, she had driven the equivalent of a few times around the planet's equator, whether it was chauffeuring her children, shopping, getting to work or to the drive-though window, or just to get about anywhere in her life.  The wheelchair is a mere culmination of a lifetime of little walking, of not knowing what it is to walk to a corner store, to a bakery, or to her workplace and of never having had to wait at a stop to catch a commuter bus or train, or to use her body members the way one does in a habitat built for humans rather than for automobiles.

Beyond the strip mall supermarket, she ventures nowhere else on her own.  Her neighbors are also of her age.  Unlike our ancestors, she is of the generation of the old who seldom encounter the young.  The modern American habitat lacks the park benches where the old enjoy the screams of playful children, the bus stops where they wait together with the school aged, the sidewalks where they encounter people who could help them cross the street, the neighborhood store with familiar faces, and a habitat which demanded more from her body and kept it from degenerating.  To get to church, instead of walking there as older people elsewhere on this planet do, our protagonist hires Esperanza to chauffeur her.  The larger world of huge arteries of vehicles on intimidating freeways horrify her, so she finds refuge in cable television.  Luckily, she is one of the lucky few who is visited by her son, his wife and the three grandchildren, and it is seventh heaven for her, but this is a blessing none of her neighbors enjoy.

Imprisoned in her lonely, isolated, suburban American dream, her atrophied body falls prey to premature degenerative disease and her life is a medical nightmare.  The boredom and the loneliness do not help.  The cable news, reality TV, celebrity gossip, and religious channels atrophy her intellect.  Strangely, she believes that her nightmare is the norm.  She has no idea that whether she lived in a large city or in a small village in many other nations of the world, she would not be a prisoner and victim of the automobile habitat.  Instead, her local farmers market teeming with produce and other goodies and crowded with other members of her community would only be just a few blocks of real-life sidewalk away.  She would not be isolated from children, who themselves are also imprisoned in a habitat created for driving adults in their prime.  When she was in her prime and took to the freeway on a regular basis, she failed to realize the entrapped situation in which her children lived while they depended on her to chauffeur her in a world built at the scale of the automobile.  Now, whether she realizes it or not, she is not free and has never known freedom.

The truth is that for humans, having the option to walk is a freedom.  Having the option not to own a car and all the burden that a car entails is freedom.  When in a bus, train or tram in city X in Europe, Asia or even Latin America, an elder lady sits next to a young mother holding her toddler in her arms, and they both exchange smiles and human warmth, that is quality of life, that is freedom, that is true mobility, for we actually get to meet.