worthlesscitizen's Blog

Reproductive health clinics have been the victims of violent crime and terrorism for years, folks, years.

2009-06-01T20:45:25Z

There are right-wingers out there right now, arguing that Scott Roeder's murder of Dr. George Tiller is an isolated event, the likes of which hasn't happened in memorable history. This is similar to an argument that emerged in the wake of the DHS memo on right-wing extremism: that the Oklahoma City bombing was years ago, and that the memo is therefore a lot of carrying on over nothing.

Sorry, but I'm calling BS. Don't take my word for it; read the statistics yourself.

]]> Over at the National Abortion Federation website, the good folks there have put together summaries and tables of data on reproductive health clinic violence.

Granted, anti-choice extremists haven't actually murdered any health care workers for about 11 years.

The violence hasn't stopped, though. In 2009 alone (through April), the NAF reports 11 cases of vandalism, 40 cases of trespassing, four incidents of assault and battery, six death threats, and six burglaries. Although there haven't been any cases of arson since 2007, there were cases every year between 1994 and 2005, usually at least two annually. In 2006, someone was even kidnapped.

So don't let anyone tell you that violence toward "abortion doctors" is some relic of the Clinton-era conservative holy war.

It never stopped.

I liked The Goode Family, darn it.

2009-05-29T16:47:35Z

So who saw The Goode Family on Wednesday night?

I was excited about this show as soon as I heard about it earlier this month, being a big fan of King of the Hill. King of the Hill pokes fun at a suburban Texan middle-class family (as a representative of the unsophisticated Christian conservative mainstream), but, with roughly equal time, it treats the Hills as protagonists in the midst of countless American cultural extremes. While the show mocks Hank's narrow cultural comfort zone (e.g. he's constantly freaked out by anything his son Bobby does that seems effeminate or homosexual), it skewers pretty much everyone and everything else in American culture, too (from carbon offsets to church-sponsored "Hell Houses" and right-wing bunker builders. The show makes the Hills fallible--very fallible--but ultimately gets around to showing us that everyone else is, too, and in a way, that makes it easier for us to all get along.

Enter The Goode Family, which sends up a family of environmentalist, vegan, non-flag-pin-wearing, hybrid-driving, bumper-sticker-toting, African-child-adopting, er, liberals. The wife, Helen Goode, wears a meat-is-murder T-shirt and tries way too hard to discuss sex with her daughter. Gerald Goode, her husband, a pencil-necked community college administrator, appears to be the reincarnation of the hippie high-school teacher from Beavis and Butt-Head.

What's funny about the show isn't so much that the people are extremely environment-conscious (much like King of the Hill doesn't merely laugh at the Hills). The humor is driven by the difficulty of living with a liberal's conscience. The daughter wants to go to an "abstinence dance" as a way to avoid the pressures of adolescent sexuality, and Gerald and Helen are divided on whether to support her. (The ensuing dance scene, by the way, is a hilarious sendup of contemporary Christian megachurch "hipness.") And Helen's preening liberal friends constantly outdo her in green living and motherhood.

As much as I loved the idea of the The Goode Family--and still do, actually--it wasn't terribly funny, and I have the feeling that much of this has to do with the fact that only one episode has aired. Once the characters develop and the writers begin to flesh out more of the basic idea of the show, it'll probably start to take off.

That said, I liked Nowhere Man on UPN back in the nineties, and that sure didn't keep it on TV.

So my point is this: I like Mike Judge's shows, loved his cultural critique in King of the Hill, and expect to love it in upcoming episodes of The Goode Family, too. What about you all? Is it too close to home?

Moral certainty and violent political extremism

2009-05-25T14:22:05Z

If you haven't heard of Brandon Darby, the activist-turned-FBI-informant whose undercover participation in the 2008 RNC "Welcoming Committee" activities ultimately sent two fellow activists, David McKay and Bradley Crowder, to jail, be sure to check out the most recent episode of the public radio show This American Life (#381, "Turncoat").

Between hearing this and watching Band of Brothers on TV the other night (namely the scene where the Easy Company learns the hard way about Nazi concentration camps, namely by encountering one), my mind can't stop swimming around in that place where one's anger at the brokenness of our world leads to decisive action, sometimes violent. Sometimes truth seems as plain as day. I remember wondering if my anger at the Bush administration's abuse of power would ultimately ever lead to my joining a liberal militia of some kind--if the strength of my convictions would ever outweigh my existing commitments and belief in the political system.

I'll post on this more in the future, but I can't help but wonder if I'm the only one whose mind has piddled around in that topic.

Single-payer slipaway: Is there anything left to do?

2009-05-19T16:41:42Z

Over the past week or so, I've been reading a lot about Obama's backing away from a single-payer plan, about Mad Baucus's antics, etc. And feeling seriously let down.

Then, yesterday morning, Diane Rehm finally got around to bringing single-player into her ongoing health care conversation. Here's one sad snippet:

Rehm: So, Susan Dentzer, why is it that the president is saying that if he were starting from scratch he would move toward a single-payer system, but now the president and his allies are saying all options are on the table except for a single-payer plan?

Dentzer: Two primary reasons, I think, Diane. One is, of course, ideological. When Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina, former senator, was campaigning for president, he was saying he would go around the country and mention single-payer, and the response he'd get would be that half the audience would say, "Terrific, let's get it tomorrow," and the rest of the audience would say, "I don't want the same people who rescued people after Hurricane Katrina--i.e. the government--providing my health insurance." [They went to a break at this point.]

Depressing. Just depressing. That's #7, by the way--for those of you keeping tabs--from Tom Tomorrow's "Standard Conservative Responses to Health Care Reform.

David Sirota, I understand, has been making some noise in the streets about all this lately, most recently in his paper column, and I guess that helps.

But the sense I get is that we're pretty much out of luck and that it's all out of our hands now.

Anyone want to beckon me down from the ledge on this one?

DeMint's health care talking points: health care a private matter; too expensive; rationed care; long lines; too much gov't control

2009-05-14T23:10:22Z

There's a lot of rally and rhetoric in DeMint's Freedom Alert [shudder] today, but it also contains everything that a conscientious right-wing know-it-all needs to badger his coworkers tomorrow on Casual Friday. DeMint's actually better at this than a lot of his colleagues. He frames the situation like this:

Last month, Senator Ted Kennedy offered a glimpse of what they have in mind when called for the creation an optional, "public health insurance plan, where coverage is provided in the public interest." That may sound nice, but in one sentence, it describes everything that is wrong with a government take-over of American health care. Health care, by definition, can't be provided in the public interest because no doctor has ever seen "the public." Doctors see patients: one at a time, providing personal care in the patient's interest only.

After trailing off about "public" and "personal" (and frankly sounding a little buzzed), DeMint goes into how much the program will cost--something sure to resonate with a broad range of conservatives, crazy and sane alike:

They talk a lot more about costs than they do about care. Only . . . the government is the reason that costs are spiraling out of control now. Government now covers 100 million Americans, and costs are exploding. Under the proposed takeover, 130 million more will be added to government health programs.

Finally he gets to what may become the right wing's slogan during the health care debate in the coming months: rationing care.

How can they expect to get costs under control by doubling the government's role in health care? The answer is by rationing care. If government wants to cover 230 million Americans and bring down costs, the only way it can possibly do it is denying care to people whose health care is deemed - you guessed it - not in the public interest.

Now that that's taken care of, DeMint goes through a couple of totally unsurprising points. First, long lines:

Under similar schemes in Canada and Great Britain, people wait weeks to see their doctors, months to see specialists, and years to get routine procedures and treatments. High-tech tests and breakthrough medicines are off-limits because the government decides - in the public interest - that they are too expensive. When the late actress Natasha Richardson suffered her skiing accident in Canada this spring, the hospital didn't have an MRI machine. The doctors never knew her injuries were life-threatening... until it was too late. That's how a government take-over of your health care will try to get costs under control: cheap, outdated treatments, long waiting lists, and low-tech hospitals. It won't take long before families realize the true costs of such a plan aren't counted in dollars and sense.

Finally, DeMint warns us not to empower the government with health care:

Instead of the government-controlled "public option," we should move toward a "personal option," where we help individuals and families buy and own their own health insurance plan that no government can ever take-over or take away. [...] Any law that empowers government to provide health care in the public interest implicitly empowers government to deny it for the same reason.

My question to you all: is there any easy retort to any of this? Are there actually any good points buried in there? Thoughts?

The right's answer to "Obama Youth": train children in antiterrorism and border control!

2009-05-14T13:20:00Z

"Won't somebody please think of the children!?"

The Helen Lovejoys on the right have been working for a long time to dredge up the worst instincts from the bottoms of Americans' souls when it comes to the Obama administration. For example, an expansion of Americorps, which Obama advocated during his campaign,has drawn flies in "real America" for kinda-sorta seeming like a scary paramilitary movement on the rise.

Granted, the loony left plays these scaremongering games, too--remember Naomi Wolf's coup talk during the month or so before the election? Yikes!

But this time, elected officials like Michelle Bachmann--a member of the House of Representatives--has gone around making public accusations that her colleagues are engaged in un-American activities and want to send young Americans to re-education camps.

Bachmann is not Michael Savage. Not your crazy uncle. She is an elected official.

Those of you who aren't familiar with the Godwinian lawbreaking that's transpired with the Obama-as-Sinister-Pied-Piper idea should see for yourself what the words "Obama," "Hitler," and "Youth" bring you in a Google search.

But to most of you, this is all old news. And to some of you--particularly those most critical of Obama--you must be quite tired of hearing about the lunatic fringe all the time, particularly when it is all too easy for Obama supporters to make a tidy dichotomy between virtuously faithful support [read: uncritical following or "Kool-Aid chugging"] and the "bad guys." Let no one make this mistake! Obama's BMs stink just like yours, and he's done plenty wrong so far as President. That's one thing we should be able to agree with the right-wing crazies on: Obama is not a Morgan Freeman character. There, I said it.

Some folks on the right, however, react a little differently to this, according to a article in this morning's NY Times. While we fax our representatives, the right has decided to answer the alleged Obama Youth with its own juvenile Heimwehr.

Some choice snippets:

"This is about being a true-blooded American guy and girl," said A. J. Lowenthal, a sheriff's deputy here in Imperial County, whose life clock, he says, is set around the Explorers events he helps run.

[...]

Cathy Noriego, also 16, said she was attracted by the guns. The group uses compressed-air guns -- known as airsoft guns, which fire tiny plastic pellets -- in the training exercises, and sometimes they shoot real guns on a closed range. "I like shooting them," Cathy said. "I like the sound they make. It gets me excited."

[...]

In a competition in Arizona that he did not oversee, Deputy Lowenthal said, one role-player wore traditional Arab dress. "If we're looking at 9/11 and what a Middle Eastern terrorist would be like," he said, "then maybe your role-player would look like that. I don't know, would you call that politically incorrect?"

News from Bachmann

2009-05-12T14:39:33Z

I put myself on Michelle Bachmann's e-mail list, mainly because her rhetoric seems to approach the most reprehensible that today's elected officials can get away with. It's useful, I think, to keep an eye on how that rhetoric develops. Some highlights:

The House just voted to "fund ACORN," after Barney Frank succeeded with his "ACORN amendment." Bachmann, of course, was a major opponent. She ends her bit on ACORN with a gloomy eye to America's dark future: "If Congress can't draw the line with funding for organizations investigated for criminal activities in more than a dozen states, where will it draw the line?"
Bachmann warns of a coming "debate over socialized medicine." She's worried that "this will mean rationed care, especially for the most vulnerable; reduced consumer choices; and an inefficient and ineffective delivery of the very best medical care in the world." More than this, though, she expresses concern that national healthcare--I'm sorry, "socialized medicine"--will go the way of Medicare. By which she means this:

Take Medicare as an example. When it was created in 1965, it was said to be a backstop. Benefits were limited and retirees actually paid a significant portion of the costs. That year, Medicare was estimated to cost $3.1 billion by 1970. But it actually came in at $6.8 billion. Today, it costs $455 billion and the costs continue to rise substantially.

She goes on to quote the WSJ: "This one is about whether to turn 17% of the U.S. economy entirely and permanently into the arms of the government."
Number of instances in which "Democrat" is used as an adjective: 2

Ooh, can I be in a militia, too?

2009-04-16T15:37:14Z

Partially out of genuine fear (but mostly out of nostalgia for apocalyptic- and semi-apocalyptic action movies when the L'Homme Armé saves the day), I was googling around to figure out just what these militias are.

They look like fun!!! Especially for a man, like me. At least, MichiganMilitia.com makes it seem that way.

You can start your journey now, my Lord (not necessarily for free, though.

The Queen is waiting!

Just think: a heightenend sense of self-worth. Resolution of my suppressed homosexual impulses (teabagging just fueled my hunger). A feeling of duty. Belonging. And if I happen to join one with its own complex mythology, it'll just enrich the general militia culture. My wife calls it a sausage party, which is awesome--I eat a plate of brats at least one day a week. Where do I sign up?

Hey, whaddya mean, no liberals allowed?

Obama als Verwesungssymptom

2009-03-30T17:28:29Z

As a scholar of Austro-German music of the early-to-mid twentieth century, I'm accustomed to reading cowardly screeds against this or that modern thing being a Verwesungssymptom or symptom of decay, a rotten spot on the fruit of our great [enter your ethnic or national self-identity here] culture. (And, to my amusement, I always hear Mark Levin's tiny voice narrating it.) I guess it's sort of like being a proctologist--it's work, so it doesn't really shock you.

But this does.
]]>

This man [Obama] is the embodiment of everything that is wrong with United States. It is really not his fault. He is just another of the long line of misguided, foolish and naive peacenik pieces of shit that have come out of the hippie movement of the 1960s. [...] Never before have I been more convinced that American culture, the culture that allowed us to be the greatest nation in the history of the planet, has been destroyed. The average person in this country is not worth the air they breathe. These are the same people who fawn over American Idol, buy houses that they can't afford and would not know the Constitution if it [BLEEP] them in the [BLEEP]. There are people who voted for Obama who are not brain dead (not very many, but there are). The fact that they voted for Obama is testament to the decay of our society. American culture has descended into a celebrity worshipping, hyperactive, uninformed, placated and pathetic state. I simply do not believe that Americans understand what they just did, and the thing is, the vast majority don't give a shit.

This rhetoric has won before. We know where it leads. But what on earth could possibly be done about it? How can the so-inclined be prevented from sliding into this mentality?

Surely not all bigots are as easy to make fun of as this one. Which brings me to my other point: please check out the rest of the site. This guy Arthur is, um, interested in Vikings and, um, manliness. A lot. I thought the site was satirical at first. There's a sidebar with links to several unintentionally hilarious articles (the man party is my favorite).

A Face All Too Familiar

2009-03-21T16:08:30Z

I keep seeing this face on TPM, the NYT front page, and the muted TV in the library that is always set to CNN. The hair varies, the skin color, even the bone structure, but one thing is always the same: both lips are tucked behind the front teeth.

]]> Is this apology? Is this a last refuge of inner defiance? I want to say it's a nervous tic, but surely public figures learn quickly enough to do this in invisible ways, like mashing one's toes inside one's shoes, squeezing one's glutes, etc.

These faces should look pretty familiar, but the lips? What's with the lips?

(Apologies for the links: the website wasn't cooperating.)

Surely you've seen this face before. But what signals is it supposed to send? Does it call off the fight or provoke it? Does it make one look bolder or weaker? And why this face?

(Please ignore this if it seems trivial.)

Jim Cramer on Jon Stewart: Holy Cow!

2009-03-13T03:27:31Z

I signed on to comment on someone else's post, but no one has talked about this yet.

Jon Stewart ripped Jim Cramer a new one on television tonight. Cramer was on the verge of tears. Wow. I loved it, but I cringed the entire time (I know, I shouldn't have). Stewart was not playing around, making nice or being cute this time. This is the Stewart that hooked me on the Daily Show back in the fall of 2001.

What do you all make of this?

Three newspapers kicked off Obama plane

2008-10-31T14:33:12Z

The AM dial in Dallas-Fort Worth is afire with news that three newspapers no longer get to fly on Obama's planes. (Don't ask me why I listen.) The papers?

The New York Post (makes sense)
The Washington Times (well, duh!)
The Dallas Morning News (Huh!?)

Although the DMN endorsed Obama during the primaries, on the 20th it endorsed McCain for the generals--this, our local bloviators believe, is the reason they're off the plane. Drudge passes on the rumor that they're making room for either (1) a documentary film crew or (2) people whom the right perceives as yes men, such as Maureen Dowd (I'm not making this up!). Also covering this story right now (you'll never guess who!) are Fox News and the Washington Times.

Just thought I'd pass this along before you hear the whines at the watercooler (especially fellow red-staters).

UPDATE. The Christian Science Monitor does some fishing.

Obama's propaganda and the boundaries of creepy

2008-10-30T13:09:19Z

Please hear me out. I like Obama. I read The Audacity of Hope and loved it. I voted for him. But I see a trend that makes me worry.

My wife and I watched the infomercial last night. We were both sort of bored, since we've been following things so closely and have heard much of it before. But for me, what stood out the most is that the Obama campaign keeps pressing on with this propagandistic marketing. I felt this way for a long time, even before I settled on him in March. That torturingly obvious sunrise logo, the "Vero possimus" gaffe, the suggestion that he is running in part as a metaphor--it made me uncomfortable, but I generally like Obama's politics, so I ignored the silly marketing.

And then the infomercial aired.

]]> Don't get me wrong. I think it's great for a candidate--although, perhaps more appropriately, for a president--to sit down and speak with American citizens. To chat, if you will. By a fire, even.

But does there need to be quasi-Aaron-Copland scoring as the scene shifts from field to factory? Does the camera need to roll slowly rightward, imbuing with barely perceivable magic a scene in which Obama delivers number-studded talking points? Does the business of our government need to become a History Channel presidential documentary with the gravitas of a Spielberg war epic?

I realize that not everyone sees it like this. I also recognize that Obama has, in some respects, fought an uphill battle against prejudices that prevent some voters from even considering him fully. And for years, now, running for president has involved the creation of a brand, of jingles and icons, and has employed marketing strategies, framing, propaganda, etc.

I just hope that Obama does far less of this after the election. It gives me the willies.

Being Republican after Nov. 4

2008-10-29T19:47:46Z

Okay, I get it. From now until Election Day, everyone on McCain's side is going to try to spook us with forboding images of Obama Nation, or as Pat Buchanan put it, "Obamaland." A land in which no one can have a gun. A land that will see the rise of the Culture of Death, part of which will involve fertile females who will repeatedly impregnate themselves, just for the pleasure of aborting fetus after innocent fetus. A land with a presidential cabinet of black preachers, basketball players and R&B singers. All our artists will embrace socialist realism and urine-wet Christs. Our national anthem will be ~~Lionel Ritchie's~~ Smokey Robinson's "Quiet Storm." We'll give all of our income to the government--every penny. When three Democrats gather, they will become a "troika." Republicans are going to try to scare Americans McCainward with this kind of crap up until November 4.

But what are they going to do after that?

Surely this undignified, ridiculous drivel can't sustain the right during their underdog-days to come. Can it?

Good political forums

2008-10-24T15:20:17Z

I know this site doesn't supply the best medium for queries like this, but then again, that's kinda the problem. I've tried googling "political discussion forum" and "liberal discussion forum," but the sites I find tend not to have a lot of deep discussion. I like TPM, but obviously blogs serve a different purpose than forum threads.

Can anyone help me?