Can I Get A Mittless? Episode II: The Charity of the Sith

Told by a woman at a rally in South Carolina that she was struggling to make ends meet, Mitt Romney reached into his pocket, found $50 or so and gave it to her.

http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2012/01/14/romney-gives-cash-to-struggling-supporter-at-rally/?hpt=hp_t2

Those who have money and don't have empathy will applaud this as evidence of Romney's generous soul and impulses. The 99% of the rest of us will recognise the gesture as that of a lord and master demanding unwonted admiration from a serf. A newsclip of this one should be made into a continuous loop and played by the Democrats, in exactly the way Dukakis in a tank was transformed into a national joke.

And not just an astounding act in and of itself, but an utterly incompetent political act on the most pragmatic, amoral level. This is on the same level as citing 'Battlefield: Earth' as a favorite novel, which Romney also did. In both cases, he should have known better. But, then, the lord and master doesn't have to know better, really...

Remember: Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.

When he died, he was working for striking unionized municipal trash haulers, looking for economic justice, and against the war in Vietnam, looking for international justice. He had a dream. A larger dream than he's oft credited with, one encompassing all of us, a world full of us. The content of his character. worth remembering, that.

The Theocratic Nuclear Menace

An interlocutor asked me how I could possibly not be concerned about Iran's potential emergence as a nuclear power.

I am, of course, worried. It does worry me. Imagine: a state controlled by ultra-orthodox believers, feeling itself entitled by word of God to their nationhood, defiant of world opinion,showing itself capable of ruthless violence using weapons of major war in crowded cities and destroying infrastructure without a second thought, armed with nuclear weapons. Merciful heavens...

Poetry Corner: Two Tramps in Mud Time

Out of the mud two strangers came
And caught me splitting wood in the yard,
And one of them put me off my aim
By hailing cheerily "Hit them hard!"
I knew pretty well why he had dropped behind
And let the other go on a way.
I knew pretty well what he had in mind:
He wanted to take my job for pay.

Good blocks of oak it was I split,
As large around as the chopping block;
And every piece I squarely hit
Fell splinterless as a cloven rock.
The blows that a life of self-control
Spares to strike for the common good,
That day, giving a loose my soul,
I spent on the unimportant wood.

The sun was warm but the wind was chill.
You know how it is with an April day
When the sun is out and the wind is still,
You're one month on in the middle of May.
But if you so much as dare to speak,
A cloud comes over the sunlit arch,
A wind comes off a frozen peak,
And you're two months back in the middle of March.

A bluebird comes tenderly up to alight
And turns to the wind to unruffle a plume,
His song so pitched as not to excite
A single flower as yet to bloom.
It is snowing a flake; and he half knew
Winter was only playing possum.
Except in color he isn't blue,
But he wouldn't advise a thing to blossom.

The water for which we may have to look
In summertime with a witching wand,
In every wheelrut's now a brook,
In every print of a hoof a pond.
Be glad of water, but don't forget
The lurking frost in the earth beneath
That will steal forth after the sun is set
And show on the water its crystal teeth.

The time when most I loved my task
The two must make me love it more
By coming with what they came to ask.
You'd think I never had felt before
The weight of an ax-head poised aloft,
The grip of earth on outspread feet,
The life of muscles rocking soft
And smooth and moist in vernal heat.

Out of the wood two hulking tramps
(From sleeping God knows where last night,
But not long since in the lumber camps).
They thought all chopping was theirs of right.
Men of the woods and lumberjacks,
The judged me by their appropriate tool.
Except as a fellow handled an ax
They had no way of knowing a fool.

Nothing on either side was said.
They knew they had but to stay their stay
And all their logic would fill my head:
As that I had no right to play
With what was another man's work for gain.
My right might be love but theirs was need.
And where the two exist in twain
Theirs was the better right--agreed.

But yield who will to their separation,
My object in living is to unite
My avocation and my vocation
As my two eyes make one in sight.
Only where love and need are one,
And the work is play for mortal stakes,
Is the deed ever really done
For Heaven and the future's sakes.

Robert Frost

Personal Responsibility

Righties have been talking a lot about personal responsibility. May have the temerity to offer three possible responses to any given problem this fraught, fallen world poses to hapless Homo (sic) sapiens living here:

1. Ain't it awful? The sweep of history is fixed; the problems too great; the forces too powerful; the doom inevitable. Pass the lemon meringue pie and the Chardonnay...

2. Ain't they awful? The spongers, parasites, criminals, out to steal our money, corrupt our daughters and sell the country to heathens. Back in a while, dear; I'm off to Home Depot to buy some more hollow-point 'Maim-N-Kill' ammunition and a few more alligators for the moat...

3. What can I do to help?

Seems to me that only one of these involves an adult notion of responsibility. Which reinforces my notion that a person calling for another person to exert more personal responsibility is putting the cart before the horse, confusing motes with beams in evaluating intraocular foreign bodies, and, in general, being a poopyhead...

The Voters Speak

A smattering of caucus attendees in Iowa, a state with a population 2/5 that of New York City, has given Romney, Santorum and Paul legitimacy in the media horse race. Today, New Hampshire, a state with a population 1/6 that of New York City's, speaks. Both states, also, are distinctly people-of-color-challenged.

Romney was attacked as saying he 'likes to fire people', referring to his experience as a M&A vulture at Bain Capital. This was a distortion. He said it in terms of demanding that he have the right to choose or dismiss a 'health care provider', a right which the Obama health insurance reform bill supposedly threatens. That, of course, is utter falsehood. He should have been called on that.

Yo, Mitt? Wombat here...

Wombat's Laws: Science Marches On

Several years ago, I advanced the Wombat Law of Homophobia: the louder and uglier the speech, the more likely closeted. Recent experimental results from the Large Bullshit Collider (LBC) suggest a wider perspective is necessary. In the spirit of scientific inquiry, I submit the Wombat General Theory of Bloviation: the louder, more certain, more dogmatic and more intolerant the bloviation, the more likely hypocrisy or denial/projection are at work. The key experimental observation made my my colleagues at the LBC imply that hypocrisy and denial may, in fact, be two manifestations of the same fundamental particles, dubbed 'coprotrons'...

Can I Get A Mittless?

Today's the first installment of a planned series on the subject of Mitt Romney, who has the courage of the convictions he holds today. He demonstrated in favor of the military draft during the war in Vietnam. Himself, he earned a religious deferment by doing Mormon missionary work in....

Wait for it...

Paris, France.

Yes. A millionaire's son, spreading the word in the City of Light. Every Vietnam veteran is doubtless grateful that he/she wasn't subject to the horrors...

C'mon, Baby; Let's Do The Twist

There's a fascinating article about injuries arising out of yoga practice, even careful yoga practice, in the Times today. I grew up in the fifties and sixties, when yoga was oft thought of as an alternative to western sports and exercises, integrating mind and body, resulting in spiritual as well as physical growth. The obvious contrast is with something like relentless strength training, the close to 100% injury rate in American football, with its paramilitary gestalt. Turns out you can get a stroke, or a bad spine problem, or other things, if you do yoga. Not always, obviously, but there it is.

The article closes with the words of one of the most prominent American yoga practitioners and teachers:

...‘Asana is not a panacea or a cure-all. In fact, if you do it with ego or obsession, you’ll end up causing problems.’ A lot of people don’t like to hear that.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/08/magazine/how-yoga-can-wreck-your-body.html?src=me&ref=general

That there ego/obsession business, seems to me, could be a problem inside or outside yoga, with any exercise, or, for that matter, just about anything Homo (sic) sapiens does: the idea is to confront ego, transcend it, master the obsessiveness arising out of it, to better appreciate the rest of the universe, those other carbon-based life forms, and your place in and amongst them. You do that, through basket-weaving, solving differential equations, walking in the woods, loving a good woman, anything, you're part of the solution instead of part of the problem.

Which brings up Ayn Rand, or would, if there weren't only so much fun you can have in one day...

Again, The Lesser of Two Evils

Someone on Facebook who thinks that my willingness to vote for Obama over any conceivable Republican, despite my disagreements with him, makes me a stupid fucking un-American idiot, and has decided I'm no longer worthy of either friendship or conversation. I'll have to read an extra chapter of DeToqueville tonight to get to sleep. It's going to be an ugly year, and uglier than even it has to be.

It must, I repeat, must be possible to work with those with whom one disagrees. It must also be possible to do so while being clear and true to one's own beliefs. These need not be in conflict, and, in fact, should not. It's possible to be clear that one is compromising, doing some of the work that needs doing, while militating for doing more of it. The alternative is irrelevance or totalitarianism. Neither are acceptable. History is unkind to the notion that withholding a vote for the lesser evil does anything other than empowering the greater evil.

All those who are sure that Humphrey wouldn't have been an improvement over Nixon, nor Carter over Reagan, nor Gore over GW Bush should really, really rethink their inclination to withhold their vote from Obama. Please...

A Nuanced Assessment of Gingrich's Views on Separation of Powers

That Newt Gingrich is at all taken seriously as a human being, much less an intellectual, by anybody, is appalling. The runaway winner of last week's 'You can't make this shit up' award was a column which tried to salvage Gingrich's years in disgrace by comparing them to Churchill's in the political wilderness, suggesting that pre-1938 Churchill had a low reputation indeed, despised and rejected, that he blossomed into a titan only thereafter, and that Gingrich at his nadir, or at present, could be seen similarly. Only the most recent, of course, of Republicans' ever more ridiculous and incredible attempts to make chicken salad out of chicken shit. I feel like shaking them, saying, for the love of anything you care about, listen to yourselves...

With respect to his respect for separation of powers and checks and balances and the rule of law, Montesquieu, Madison, Jefferson, like that, well, it's been a staple of Republican rhetoric for some time that the Supreme Court engages in unwonted judicial activism, results-oriented jurisprudence, rejection of stare decisis, and resort to ideology over sober legal reasoning. For a while now, I've been agreeing with that position. If you haven't read Justice Stevens' magisterial dissent in the Citizens United case, it's well worth a look: you need dental records and DNA to identify what's left of the majority's opinion, and for legal writing is unusually clear and direct

http://yubanet.com/usa/Justice-Stevens-Dissenting-Opinion-in-Citizens-United-v-Federal-Election-Commission.php#.Tu-JfFZki7s

Which makes the timing of his pronouncement on the subject odd, don't it? So, there are a few reasons why he might have made it:
1. The primary-election base has been drinking this as mother's milk for a long time, and he's positioning himself as the non-Romney. He doesn't need fact of logic to do that; he's laying down a social marker rather than actually contributing to the debate. His rather comical signature on the life-purity pledge is exactly similar.
2. He's anticipating the reelection of Obama and a couple of more appointments, and making rhetoric delegitimizing and rejecting the authority of an 'Obama Court' before the fact, with prescience which he hopes will earn him credibility as a thinker and fighter. After all, it's what the right has been doing with respect to the Obama presidency. And, as with the presidency, this isn't 'mere' disagreement, even violent disagreement, while accepting that they hold the offices to which they were duly elected and/or appointed. This is a rejection of their right to hold office, of any authority they exert consequent to that office. Not, one would think, the sort of thing an intelligent, well educated PhD historian would be glib about.
3. He really is that fucking stupid, vain, hypocritical, demagogic, and evil; a low-born whoreson canker'd nematode, a poopyhead of the first water; a fucknozzle and a shitwhistle; a man whose ethics and intelligence, were they elastic, wouldn't suffice to make suspenders for a cockroach, and whose sociopathic, narcissistic egotism is as inconspicuous and easily glossed over as a tarantula walking on a piece of angel food cake. Not that he arouses strong feelings in me.

Wouldn't rule any of these out. And they're hardly mutually exclusive...

Tanned, Rested and Ready

I've been away for awhile, and apologise for that, but the wealth of material out there requires that i do something other than whine about it all by myself. So, I'll give my readers, all seven of them, the unparalleled opportunity of listening to me whine, and whine back should they be so inclined. The post below on Tom Friedman is new. I'll add more when, as I read the papers, the mood strikes me. That'll be often, i'm afraid...

Dear Mr. Friedman: Suck On This

In response to Tom Friedman's column today:

Dear Mr. Friedman:

No, sir, you did not support the Iraq war because we might transform, or collaborate in transforming, Iraq into a democracy. You said, in your column right here, that after 9/11 we needed to do something to show the Arab world and Al-Qaeda that we were still capable of strong military response, and that Iraq was as good a place as any. It came down to, in one of your columns, nothing more nor less than 'because we could', and, as 'winning progressive' points out above, in one of your TV interviews, a schoolyard bully's 'Suck on this!' You do not get off as easily as you would like.

Your 'And, of course, Iraqis paid dearly as well' is appallingly glib. Hundreds of thousands dead, millions of refugees, destroyed infrastructure, looted antiquities, the movement into the power vacuum of people with no interest whatever in democracy. You don't mention Abu Ghraib, white phosphorus bombs, or the $9 billion in cash that vanished. The improbable empowerment of the Iranian theocrats in a country with which they fought a savage, pointless war.

And you didn't mention in your column the name of a single dissenter, offering that opinion before the war. There were a few. Some inspect nuclear weapons sites for a living. Some write in the very newspaper for which you write. One, even, serves to this day as president of the United States.

Not well played, Mr. Friedman. Not well played at all. It won't wash.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/21/opinion/friedman-the-end-for-now.html?_r=1

Mogadishu is Off the Grid

Libertarians fantasize that they don't need anybody, and that every social interaction other than on their terms is not merely unnecessary but equivalent to slavery. Were their fantasies actualized, they'd quickly find that common action is necessary against common problems, and that restraint of private actors' power is fully as necessary as restriction on public actors' power.

That has, of course, happened before...

Utilitarian Cannibals: You Are What You Eat

Watching Michael Sandel's lectures on justice at Harvard, where he discussed utilitarianism via a case in which a group of shipwrecked survivors, adrift in a lifeboat, sacrificed the life of the weakest amongst them, sustaining themselves on his flesh, were rescued and then tried for murder. Had the following points to add to his limited half-hour discussion:

1. The decision not to act is itself an action. No getting around the responsibility to make choices. None.
2. One can rescue Bentham by suggesting that an 'enlightened' view of utility involves dire consequences to the happiness of a nation, and its citizens as individuals, not just now, in this specific case, but going forward indefinitely in time, applied to all cases, of the notion that murder can be acceptable in some circumstances, to the extent that one of the most fundamental laws of that nation is violated. Bentham himself might have voted for conviction out of a utilitarian argument. (He was at pains to define pleasure more broadly than one usually does.) One can, therefore, reject murder consequentially as well as categorically. The two might well not be entirely mutually exclusive.
3. The question then begged is how to evaluate the justice of a law itself: whether Victor Hugo's Inspector Javert, from 'Les Miserables', seeing the necessity of law as a constraint on individual conduct, is justified in hounding Jean Valjean over a stolen loaf of bread, whether Supreme Court decisions such as Dred Scott v Sanford and Miranda v Arizona carry equal requirements that they be followed, whether a citizen of Nazi Germany should follow laws passed by a government clearly supported by a majority of its citizens.
4. Using these arguments, one can reduce the case, as is often done in law school, to a question of the moral basis of the law itself, and the duty of a citizen to conduct him/herself within it. An obvious contrast to Hugo here is Robert Bolt's Sir Thomas More, from 'A Man For All Seasons', who sees law as a bulwark against the Devil, acting through a fallen humanity. Such an argument transcends the actors' duty in the cannibalism case to embrace the duties of all citizens, which obviously introduces political philosophy alongside of, and complementary to, moral philosophy.

The series of lectures is well worth the time, and is online:
http://www.justiceharvard.org/

Nursing Homes: They Don't Have To Take You In

The Times this morning reviews that talk about cutting Medicaid will affect more people than those parasitic poor brown folk: many nursing home patients depend on it:

The House plan would turn Medicaid, which provides health coverage for the poor through a combination of federal and state money, into a block grant program for states. The federal government would give lump sums to states, which in turn would be given more flexibility and independence over use of the money, though the plan does not spell out what the federal requirements would be.

Beginning in 2013, these grants would increase annually at the rate of inflation, with adjustments for population growth, a rate far below that of inflation for health care costs. As a result, states, which have said that they cannot afford to keep up with the program’s costs, are likely to scale back coverage. Such a reduction, critics fear, could have a disproportionate effect on Medicaid spending for nursing home care for the elderly or disabled...

According to the Congressional Budget Office, in the 2010 fiscal year, 77 percent of people enrolled in Medicaid were children and families, while 23 percent were elderly or disabled. But 64 percent of Medicaid spending was for older Americans and people with disabilities, while 36 percent went to children and families.

According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, which analyzes health care issues, 7 of 10 nursing home residents are on Medicaid, in large part because even middle-class patients often run through their savings while in a nursing home and turn to the entitlement program.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/11/health/policy/11medicaid.html?hpw

This is a huge deal. Typically, a middle class aged person goes into a nursing home, where the meter runs quite quickly. They start on Medicare, and, after they spend down their assets and become poor, they go on Medicaid, which lets them stay in the nursing home, and lets the nursing home stay in business. You cut medicaid, not so much. You turn Medicaid into block grants to states hurting for money, and likely to use it elsewhere, worse yet.

Which means that a lot of old folk would be out of nursing homes. Their kids' houses, bank accounts and lives are poorly, if at all, equipped for it. Visiting nurse agencies, home physical therapy, home visits by doctors? You may say I'm a dreamer...

Currently the aging parent's finances are independent (mostly) of the adult child's. That'll change very, very quickly if the Medicaid cuts go through, unless they're content to leave Granny out on the street. What will also change very, very quickly is the sort of financial guarantees from patients and their families that nursing homes will demand before admitting a new resident.

These people vote. They won't like this at all.

Yogi In Middle School

My daughter, describing a classmate in eighth grade:

'She's one of the popular girls; that's why nobody likes her'

Choose Wisely

I've been arguing against capital punishment for half a century, with little to show for it. I'll leave it at this: if one has a choice, one should not kill. I don't see it as a leap of logic at all to differentiate ourselves from murderers, and societies condoning murder, by making a choice not to kill when we can make that choice. Nor do I see it as a leap of logic, or flawed logic, to differentiate a society casually and brutally employing show trials, if even those, and executions, from one under the rule of law, restraining a state's power, requiring documentation of a crime and exacting punishment from those found guilty. Quite the contrary: I find the logic inescapable. That Al Qaeda and Bin Laden pose current threats that a defeated Germany did not only adds to my argument: recourse to the rule of law is a mark of courage rather than weakness, of confidence in one's values, and would resound throughout the world as an alternative to non-state actors', or state-sponsored, terror, brutality and murder. I believe such a course to be profoundly in America's national interests, even narrowly construed. Again, half a century's experience with the topic allows the safe prediction that many will disagree. But there it is.

We had a choice at Nuremburg, and tried the Nazis, affording them defense counsel. Israel had a choice with Eichmann, tried him, affording him defense counsel, and executed him. We might, or might not, have had a choice with Bin Laden. His capture was necessary, and if there was no other way to capture him than dead, it was worth doing. If we had a choice, which I don't know and have a hard time opining half a world and a week and a half away, we should have captured him and put him on trial for his crimes. And it is always, always unseemly to celebrate death, even if necessary. I predict disagreement on this point, over a gap that will not be closed by further argument.

Ding Dong, The Witch is Us

How to have dealt with Bin Laden? The question, once asked, reflects far less Bin Laden's status as a moral agent than ours. It is, after all, our actions which we choose in an elective context, and, therefore, must take personal responsibility for.

The notion of war crimes recalls to me the entirely despicable Curtis LeMay's observation that a victorious Japan would have tried him for war crimes. Meanwhile, Robert Jackson remains amongst the most revered of American jurists, and his concurrence in Youngstown, oft cited as one of the finest ever advanced in the Supreme Court, is a fascinating book end to his Nuremburg role.

I remain of the opinion that Nuremburg was necessary, that the Nazi crimes were to some extent sui generis and required unambiguous documentation for the historical record. The comparison with the Soviet treatment of Stalin, or the current Chinese treatment of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, and with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission as apartheid ended, is, to my mind, only to the benefit of Nuremburg.

More so, I deeply believe terrorist acts to be unworthy (if that's the right word) of being defined as acts of war rather than crimes. And crimes are to be defined, their commission demonstrated, their perpetrators identified beyond a reasonable doubt and required to pay a price. War is far, far less defined than criminal justice, and invariably involves behavior on both sides which, outside the context of a war, would itself be criminal. A break from the formulation of 'war on terror', without in the least relaxing vigilance with a view towards prevention and punishment of the guilty, would, to my mind, be amongst the most helpful changes in our policy even with respect to our national interests narrowly and amorally construed, much less a renunciation of the perception that fighting terrorism requires terror. To that extent, an imperfect Nuremburg trial, or, with respect to a single actor, a far more appropriate exercise, mirroring the Eichmann trial, seems to me in order.

Bin Laden required capture. I am ambivalent about the violation of Pakistani sovereignty but reluctantly concede that it was necessary and, perhaps, in view of Pakistan's obvious complicity, even desirable. I would have had no problem with Bin Laden's death during his capture were there no other alternative. That isn't clear to me yet. I have great difficulty with exultant celebration, of the sort that one sign in my town rather revealingly summed up as 'Ding dong, Osama's dead.' Munchkins, indeed.

Those Dastardly Teachers and Their Thuggish Unions

Our local paper last week, appalled, exposed our town's teachers' union as guilty of (prepare yourself to be shocked) the excesses of spending money on a couple of newspaper ads and extending a speaking invitation to Ralph Nader. I wrote this letter in response to their story, which they printed unaltered:

Dear Editor:



It is indeed outrageous that the teachers' union, as one party to a contentious negotiation, seeks to put its views before the public via a couple of half-page newspaper ads and a speaking invitation to Ralph Nader. This sort of thuggish political intimidation shouldn't be tolerated. Only Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, most of the Republican Party, and other lonely patriots such as the Waltons of Wal-Mart and the Koch brothers (six of the world's top 30 richest billionaires on Forbes' list), balance unions' relentless zeal and enormous financial resources in pushing their members' agenda.

I'm grateful that politicians are demanding that unions and their members be denied fundamental rights to contract negotiation and collective bargaining. If prior contracts overly favor one of the two sides, the obvious remedy isn't more competence and courage from the other side, but a denial of long-established rights to the previously successful side. Anybody appalled by excessive government power would agree.

What shocking excess will the union resort to next? Merciful heavens. I'm sure that, as always, the vast majority of our town's voters and taxpayers will attend Town Meeting to make their voices heard.

(Full disclosure: my daughter, now majoring in linguistic anthropology, had many excellent teachers in )xxxx( High School, including )yyyyy(, who, in response to planned decreases in staffing, benefits and funding, and increased class sizes, had the nerve to suggest that he and his colleagues were being asked to do more for less. Another brazen attempt to suppress debate by stating facts. Disgraceful.)