Ben just voted with the Republicans to filibuster financial reform.
Month: April 2010
A Brief Commercial Announcement
I get paid for the ads on the basic of page views, so the more often you check back (or refresh the page), the more money I’ll make. Since readership is down, I’d appreciate the extra visits.
Thanks!
The Oil Slick
Call It Democracy
Bruce Cockburn with his song about the International Monetary Fund:
Padded with power here they come
International loan sharks backed by the guns
Of market hungry military profiteers
Whose word is a swamp and whose brow is smeared
With the blood of the poor
Who rob life of its quality
Who render rage a necessity
By turning countries into labour camps
Modern slavers in drag as champions of freedom
Continue reading “Call It Democracy”
Super Devils
I went to see Super Devils, Brendan Calling’s rockabilly band, at Murph’s Tavern in Fishtown this weekend. What a gas!
Elections Have Consequences
I read this somewhere this morning, and I thought, “While I could never endorse that view, it’s the logical progression of their thinking.”
It’s a good point: The people of Mississippi put Haley Barbour in the governor’s mansion, and Haley doesn’t believe the federal government should help poor people. He also says the state should take care of their own problems.
So maybe Mississippi should pay for their own tornado cleanup.
Comeback of the Year
This weekend I was with my quilter friends of twenty years. We come in various shapes and sizes and selected religious backgrounds. For some reason the discussion of abortion and federal dollars came up with all of the hushed voices and somber mightier than thou that goes along with such conversations.
I chimed in, ‘Stop right there with your comments. For over eight years this country has used my tax dollars to wage a war that has killed innocent children, women and men and has killed and maimed hundreds of thousands of American soldiers in the process. All of this blood that was shed rests squarely on my shoulders and no one gives a damn about that. Don’t use tax dollars and abortion in the same sentence again!”
The conversation stopped and they looked at me with big eyes and by golly that was the end of it. For a minute there I thought that they could feel my pain. Being the resident peace-niq is exhausting sometimes but I do believe that they got the message. Never give up, folks.
Journalism
Whenever I meet young people who are determined to become journalists, I try to talk them out of it. And if I can’t, I tell them to go work on little papers, where real journalism is still possible.
Looks like I was right. (The comments contain probably the best comments validation I’ve ever seen.)
Brrr
Cold and rainy here this morning. It’s a bit disorienting, considering we had temperatures in the high 80s only a few weeks ago.
It’s gotten to the point where you can only put your winter clothes away for about six weeks.
Washington
I don’t remember who told me to read it, but Meg Greenfield’s “Washington” is the best book about the Village I’ve ever read. (I highly recommend you get a copy.)
Greenfield, a Pulitzer prize winner and the Washington Post editorial page editor, wrote the book as she was dying from cancer; she kept it a secret from all but one of her friends. It was published posthumously in 1999.
And I can see why she waited. She’s a sharply perceptive woman who sees people clearly, facades and all. Not only was she their colleague, she was their friend. The book is filled with the kind of thing you’d like to tell a really good friend about themselves — if only they had the nerve to ask for your advice.
If you’ve ever wondered why journalists don’t ask politicians about obvious contradictions, or why so many whiz kids fizzle out once they’re in political office, you’ll appreciate her take.
She writes that high school is the only correct social analogy for Washington (we already knew that) but makes the incisive point that the District is filled with people who were very successful children. She breaks them down into types: The Good Child, The Head Kid, The Prodigy, and the Protege:
They will have developed instead the mediating-between-generations way of doing business, protecting the boss and appeasing contemporaries by telling them how much can be extracted by the boss. With that prop gone, newly elevated figures are expected to act boldly, to direct, to deliver, to have the brass to themselves utter the decisive words “yes” or “no” — not to negotiate, Moses-like, with God for limited concessions.
[…] Years of exercising derivative power in a defensive, backstairs, non-accountable way have also unfitted the poor protege/prodigy for the elementary requirements of his new role — the direct statement, the assertion of will or position, and above all, the concomitant acceptance of the murderous criticism that being in charge inevitably generates.
[…] … The Washington child-politician, fully in charge and fully accountable at last, is utterly unaccustomed to being called anything other except an outstanding young person of exceptional promise — no matter what his age.
She also foresaw how the internet and the political imagemakers were going to distort the political discussion.
Yes, she was a creature of her time. But for the political junkie who ask not what, but also why, this book explains a lot.