“Overloading” the system.
Sometimes, you know, you can have a thought, or find a thought, and then have another thought, or find another thought — and suddenly it’s just like connecting to wires and lighting the lightbulb.
Of course there are all kinds of stale right-wing talking points flying around about health care reform, along the lines of “pulling the plug on grandma.” But the other day I was reading an intelligent far-right blog (they do exist, they just take some looking to find), and I saw a really good point about providing health care to the uninsured. If we add 50 or 60 million people to the cohort of regular consumers of health care in this country, we are going to need a whole lot of primary care doctors, trauma specialists, pediatricians, and nurses. Such people are the product of copious education and experience; they don’t grow on trees, and you can’t produce them in a hurry. This was the objection set forth in the particular far-right blog.
Ah, but wait. When you have a commodity that you need quickly, and producing it domestically would take too long, what do you do? You import it. If health care reform were to bring about a severe abrupt shortage of medical professionals in this country, that shortage would be filled primarily — if history has been any guide — by Asian and Latino immigrants, obviously highly skilled ones.
Now, of course an immigrant of any sort is a nightmare to the Republican Party. So is the average educated person. So a medically qualified immigrant, disproportionately likely to be a rock-solid Democrat, is exactly what the Republicans wish wouldn’t happen.
If a Republican happens to be yammering at you about the difficulties of health care for the uninsured, just remember: it’s not a new clients they don’t want. It’s the new providers.
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Don’t blow off the right.
Okay. I almost never link directly to ultraright stuff — in fact I wonder if I ever have — because why give them the audience? (It’s my obligation, after all, to deprive them of my millions of hits a day. 
) But this is simply too concise, dense, and polished to ignore, and you need to see it to understand what we’re up against… to understand how concise, polished, and dedicated we need to be in turn, and soon.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jeYscnFpEyA
As I’ve said before, I’m not scared of a third party; depriving the Republicans of their own rightmost 10 to 20 million votes is the best thing that could happen. I’m not especially scared of red states seceding; if Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana decide to break off and reestablish an agricultural economy, I’m sure they’ll do just fine, since look at how well they’re doing now. But I am scared of civil war. And if that video doesn’t sound to you like a call to insurrection, I respectfully submit that you’re not listening.
America today is a 21st-century social democracy. There are people in this country — no small number at that — who want to forcibly reimpose an 18th-century individualist republic. And if they attain any position from which to try, life will not be pleasant, to say the least.
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wtf, Joe Jackson was right
You may recall that about three weeks ago, I wrote:
I’m probably through with Bay Area News Group’s letters columns… What I mind…is that, seemingly, in order to get one letter published I need to write and send five or six.
Well, no sooner was I on the brink of quitting than — isn’t this always the way? — the situation turned around. I wrote a letter blasting a global warming denier for making unsupported assertions; it got published, and a week later I was counterattacked by an even bigger fool, which I found delightful. Editorial rules say you can’t rebut a rebuttal, which forestalls the kind of letter-volley that goes on for months in high-end UK papers — but hey, I don’t mind if somebody smacks me just so long as they mention my name. I was a PR account executive for seven years, I know how this game works.
So, I am now officially enlisting as the classic graying and grumpy geezer who incessantly writes to the local paper. This may or may not be pathetic, but I enjoy it, and I figure that I better take my enjoyment while there are still newspapers.
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Random political stuff.
I do hang around the right-wing blogs a fair amount — not so much the total tinfoil-hat ones, although those are fun, but the ones that halfway try to make their kind of sense — the ones that preach originalism, exceptionalism, and theocracy, stridently call for the failure of Obama’s programs and primly claim to delete demands for his assassination… you know, the Sean Inanity crowd.
Now, you remember I went to shrink school. And in shrink school, one thing they teach you is that if somebody is loudly objecting to something that you’re allegedly doing, the best possibility is that that’s exactly what they’re doing themselves — only they don’t want you to know it.
One claim incessantly made on the right-wing net is that “the Democrats are dumbing down the political discourse.” This is commonly followed by a lot of snarling about education for African-Americans, undocumented Latinos, African Muslim immigrants, and similar ESL types who are supposedly dumb enough to swallow the Democratic message. Okay, hold it.
I’m currently in the throes of trying to prove that the level of education of the average Democrat is higher than the level of education of the average Republican. That takes some doing, although I already know that someone with a master’s or a doctorate is much more likely to be a Democrat than a Republican, but it certainly does seem to be true that Obama’s message — in its granularity and its specificity — is intended for educated people and a lot of Republicans just tune it right out.
It’s also true that Republican haters are easy to spot in places like CNN, because they often can’t spell or particularly make sense. This morning on CNN Political Ticker, somebody was going off on Specter voting for Sotomayor, and started their post with “Firstly the appointment of this racially predudistic feminist…”
Well, hell, if you saw that and were next in the stack, could you resist? I posted back “What does ‘predudistic’ mean? I can’t find it in my dictionary.”
Again and again the Republicans take the stance of rampant anti-intellectualism. It’s like Sarah Palin saying “Anybody who ever took Econ 101 already knows…” Yeah, Sarah, anybody who took Econ 101 and stopped there. Whereas if you were, say, a cabinet-level Federal officer, or a tenured economics professor, or a Nobel Prize winner in economics, you might just “know” something else “already.” But the brownshirt Republicans know that heads of the intellectuals are the first ones they want to bash.
No, dumbing down suits the Republicans just fine. The only hope they have of bolstering their dwindling constituency is to recruit people who are too uneducated to pose countercases, raise counterexamples, or even ask pointed questions. Find enough of those people who are, as Frank Rich said in the New York Times a couple of weeks ago, “aflame with grievance,”and… hey, you might have a Republican Party again. Just not a very smart one. When somebody talks to you about “the dumbing down of the electorate,” just remember who ultimately benefits.
……………………….
Speaking of right-wing blogs, I found a scary one yesterday: somebody saying that Hillary Clinton actually favors the abject failure of Obama’s policies, so that she can make a plausible run against him for the Democratic nomination in 2012. Right off the top, I can think of four reasons the Republicans would love that:
1. Her economic policies are Republican anyway.
2. She’s mad enough at Obama after the 2008 nomination — and for being politically neutralized as Secretary of State — that she’d be willing to pin blame on him for whatever had gone wrong by 2011. (Or so goes the right-wing gossip.)
3. If she were elected president in 2012, she’d walk into the job not just a lame duck, but a dead duck, on health care.
4. If she got the Democratic nomination, she’d be the Republicans’ perfect excuse to nominate Palin, say “May the best woman win,” sit back and watch and reach for the popcorn. How many people hate Clinton enough that they’d vote for Palin instead, we can’t be sure, but I’m not liking the idea.
…………………..
And one more thing — remember Steel Parasol? There was a good, if brief, letter in my home-town paper this morning that can be summarized as “I can understand your writer liking GM cars, but personally I’d rather have my Toyota built in Kentucky than a Cadillac built in Mexico.” It underscores the point that the right-wingers who lament the US economy are talking about an economy that no longer exists — not in the context they insist on dredging up.
…………………..
I’m off for the weekend to be an über-Democrat. See you soon!
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Suddenly it’s 2011, part deux.
I seem to be the last person alive to know this, but Sarah Palin just quit, handed over to her LG, and announced she wasn’t running for re-election. Clear message to the RNC: You nominated me for VP last time, you bastards, and this time it better be President, or else.
Or else what, Sarah? Or else the Republican Party isn’t crazy enough to nominate you and watch you get fifteen million votes? Real American Party, here we come.
xfingers.
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Steel Parasol ETA.
Well, they didn’t publish my letter about Japanese collectible cars, and that’s typical. What graveled me was that they published the GM suckup’s letter again, so two weeks in a row. I expanded my response a little bit, tightened it up, and resubmitted it. We’ll see.
In the new version I referenced the Honda S2000, a car I’ve always loved and which ended production last month. But what I didn’t know (thank you, Wikipedia, again,) was that beginning in 2007, there was a tweaked version called the S2000 CR. It was available only in white and with a red leather interior, and the production ceiling was “less than” 2,000 units. Golly, you think some of those are in museums already?
Now, Hil asked reasonably how the original writer — and lifelong GM buyer — could be expected to know something about a Japanese car that I was surprised to find out myself. But that’s exactly my point. If you’re granted the increasingly scarce privilege of publishing an opinion in a newspaper, don’t just spew without sources, and DON’T WRITE ABOUT WHAT YOU DON’T KNOW. If you sit there and blow smoke, you’re wasting time, ink, and paper as all three become steadily more valuable.
Having said that, I admit that I’m probably through with Bay Area News Group’s letters columns. A political editor of the West County Times told me that, no matter how often you write, you won’t be published more often than once a month, and that’s fair. The stricture is occasionally violated, see above, but so what.
What I mind a lot more is that, seemingly, in order to get one letter published I need to write and send five or six. I write, I find sources or check sources, I edit before I submit, and on average one letter probably takes me an hour. Sorry, but I can’t spend five or six hours on publishing a letter in the Times or the Journal once a month. I’d rather blog, choose my own subject and length, guarantee that I appear, and — best of all — be able to re-edit if I decide that something’s clunky.
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Senator Franken.
Well, stuff about the Minnesota Senate race is becoming clear. I mean, Norm Coleman fought for eight months, until the whole thing became a statewide and then national and international joke, Michael Steele and the RNC totally had his back, and the Republicans ended up spending almost $1 million. Now that Franken is a done deal, the cryptofascist bloggers have already begun their drumfire that electing a former standup comedian as a Senator is as much of a joke as the rest of this administration. Okay, what’s going on here? I thought Republicans were all about the will of the people. And even Tim Pawlenty, who’s a rock-ribbed conservative, agreed with that and signed the election certificate.
Okay, CNN this morning says that Franken:
- Supports an “Apollo project” for clean energy.
- Supports “comprehensive immigration reform” including a path to citizenship for undocumented workers, tamper-proof ID cards, an end to ICE raids, and — get this — working with Mexico to improve their domestic economic conditions! Of course, improving Mexico’s economic conditions will take bites out of profits for American companies operating in Mexico…
- Got installed on the Judiciary Committee in time to support the Sotomayor nomination, which he thoroughly does.
One of my favorite right-wing blogs opined that Franken being seated was “actually a loss for the Left.” Talk about, as Rabbit used to say, pretzel logic. Al Franken is going to be a damn good Democratic Senator and a real pain in the rump for the Republicans, which they knew from day one.
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I’m back from one of my huge tangents. Hee, hee.
Astoundingly enough, my little town still has a weekly newspaper. (For how much longer is anybody’s guess.) As with most local papers, the letters column is thick with wingnuts heavily invested in cryptofascist nostalgia. Well, last Friday someone waxed rhapsodic about how the old GM cars were so great, and so many people are still devoted to them, and if we’d all just been sensible and kept buying GM cars, we wouldn’t be in all this trouble. And in the course of the letter she asked “What Japanese cars are collectibles?”, clearly intending to be rhetorical and dismissive.
There are so many problems with this approach. To start with, the “GM cars” that this writer is eulogizing are like the 1958 Buick LeSabre that Hil and I once owned, about which the only great things were that the car cost us $25 and gas was 39 cents a gallon. Secondly, what the letter writer is implicitly advocating is protectionism, which in “the good old days” was so heavily practiced by European countries which people of her stripe now — of course — tend to hate. Yes, heaven forbid we should be like Europe, but that’s a rant for another time. Thirdly and primarily, she’s, like…
deranged, off the wall, and, whaat?! Because if you want to talk collectible cars any later than, say, the middle sixties, Japanese iron (or aluminum, magnesium, or carbon fiber) is right up there with the choicest American cars from the same period. But unlike the GM ranter, I wanted some firepower before I wrote my retort — irritating habit of mine — so I looked up a few things in Wikipedia. Oh, the stuff I found out. To reiterate: “What Japanese cars are collectibles?” The envelope, please.
In the late 1960s there was a two-seat sports coupe called a Toyota 2000GT. It was about the first Japanese car that made people’s jaws drop. Toyota, working in collaboration with Yamaha, only ever built 377 of them. Of those, two were converted into slightly phony convertibles for the James Bond film You Only Live Twice, both of those got messed up, and one of the coupes was rebuilt into a replica Bond car for a museum. So, 300-something coupes and one convertible. Collectible? Let’s just say a really clean coupe can go for $200,000.
At about the same time, there was a cute tiny roadster called a Honda S800. Powered by a bored-out Honda 750 motorcycle engine, had chain drive, looked like an Austin-Healey Sprite that shrank. You go online today poking for a Honda S800, and you find… an original magazine ad, or dealer brochure, or gearshift knob, for 20 bucks. Or a wrecker, parts car, for maybe $2,000. But if you look for a complete, pristine, original S800, you’ll have a terrible time finding one. If you know how car collecting works, you know what’s happening; nobody has their cars on the market for cash, because they’re waiting for auctions and a chance to get much better prices.
I could go on, but let’s just say this: any time you see a Japanese car and it’s older than 1971, OR its designation includes the letters “R,” “RR,” “RS,” “R-plus-a-number” like Nissan Skyline R32, or “GT-R” or a few others, you’re looking at an ichiban collectible car. My letter-writing neighbor is — in the old phrase — not only wrong, but totally wrong. And having thought about this a lot — you can tell, right? — I am prepared to sum up with three points:
- Japanese auto manufacturers have big, well-funded competition and concept departments. They like to build world-beating road racers, like the Mitsubishi Evolution Lancer; world-beating rally cars, like the hot variants of the Nissan Silvia; and sexy show cars, which is what the Toyota 2000GT started out as. They do this a lot. This is why you can buy a Honda Civic with almost 300 horsepower, although maybe not in the United States.
- Japanese auto manufacturers, like Detroit in the 60s and 70s but mostly not since, are willing to build very short runs of cars for sale. Toyota 2000 GT, as mentioned, 377. Most years of Acura Integra R, 500. When you start talking about cars never sold outside of Japan — like a Nissan Nismo 270R, which was a super-hot Silvia — the quantity can be as few as 50, and in only one year. Collectible? We’re on the same playground as a good Ferrari or even a Bugatti.
- Finally, Japanese collectors, of pretty much anything, and the prices they will pay for rarities, especially Japanese rarities. If you’ve ever collected stamps or coins, you probably know what I’m talking about.
It would be a better service to the public if people did their homework before they wrote to the papers… but when they don’t, I really have fun.
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Suddenly it’s 2011.
Okay, guys. I’m more worried than I was.
For the last few months, for a little while every morning, I’ve been reading right-wing blogs, from the relatively reasonable to the ones peppered with words like “socialist,” “communist,” “New World Order,” “Bilderberg Group…” and constantly invoking the tenth amendment to the Constitution. Naturally I’ve been reading about the tea parties and the blizzard of tractionless pro se petitions to SCOTUS. But yesterday I read something that affected me in a way nothing else had yet:
http://tinyurl.com/mnvlb6
All right, I get it. This has gone beyond the conspiracy theorists and the shills for the Republican wealthy. There is a substantial current of disaffection in this country that will power a grassroots movement far to the right of the Republicans, as disgusted with the Republicans as they are with the Democrats. They want to replace this government, and there’s another word for that, but I’m not using it yet and most of them aren’t either. How many of them are there? After a year of looking, I’m pretty sure more than a million. I certainly hope not ten million, but the truth is probably somewhere in between.
In 2008, somewhat under 70 million people voted for Barack Obama; just under 60 million voted for John McCain. A strong, nonaligned right-wing bloc of five to ten million voters could really screw things up, in some fairly unpredictable ways. I’ve had a grin on my face for a while as I thought of the Republicans shooting themselves in the foot by allowing their party to split in half — along the secular/theocratic boundary, if nothing else. But this is not that. This is a growing call for “no moderation,” which decodes to “no coalition-building with mainstream Republicans,” and it threatens the serious disruption of national electoral politics as we’ve known it.
This bloc, currently, is flexing its muscles beyond the blogs, low-power radio and the Drudge Report, exerting a creeping influence on the Wall Street Journal, and shifting Fox News steadily to the right. It has its own political celebrities — Sarah Palin, Mike Huckabee, Newt Gingrich, Mark Sanford, Rick Perry — and those are just the loud ones. There are other names invoked primarily by the ultra-right community, like DeMint, Coburn, Cantor, Inhofe, Kyl, Enzi, Vitter, and Cornyn. There’s plenty of political firepower to the right of the RNC already in office. I’m talking about the people who hold meetings with Rush Limbaugh, who want Michael Steele gone, whose agitation may prevent Sotomayor from being confirmed. To those you can add right-wing former electeds like Cheney, who’s obviously finally dragged Bush into this too, in defiance of the informal prohibition of criticism of the incumbent presidents by former presidents.
So this is my call to arms. In 2010, we need to build and bolster a legislative structure for 2012. I’m sure Al Franken will get seated unless lightning strikes, but I wouldn’t mind two or three more Democratic senators on top of that 60. I’m hoping for a strong shift to the left in state legislatures. And in 2012 — listen up –
It will take as much money and is much work to re-elect Barack Obama as it did to elect him in 2008. We cannot slack, we cannot take anything for granted, we cannot say “I’m out of here because he bailed on too many promises,” and we have to start now. Because we have to return Obama to office with more electoral votes, and with a higher proportion of the popular vote, than he received last year — which won’t be easy. Only then will we be able to say to this ultra-right fraction,
“Go ahead and call yourselves ‘We the People’… but there aren’t nearly enough of you to make the difference you want.”
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I’ve been gone a long time, and I pwe mail to a tremendous number of people, and to some of you I’m sure I owe an apology as well. I can only explain by telling you that over the last several months I’ve been through two overlapping adventures — a big, long, incredible one, which was political, and a somewhat smaller but still fascinating one, which was medical. So here goes.
Hilary decided to run for controller — that is, chief financial officer, or financial field commander — of the California Democratic Party. This is something she began doing last summer, in early June, and at first she didn’t think it was going to be a very big deal — she talked about “passing out flyers at Costco.” But in fact it was a very big deal, because there was an incumbent in the position who had served for four years, was from LA, and was well enough known and had his partisans. In order to make the case that she should be party controller instead of him, Hilary had to go to Democratic Party central committee meetings all over California, although finally we couldn’t go to them all — of the 58 counties in California, I think we ended up personally visiting about 28. We drove about 10,000 miles purely in the service of this campaign. We drove all night twice — 404 miles from Santa Cruz to Riverside, and 463 miles from Oroville to Gardena. We flew twice, when driving simply wouldn’t fit the schedule. We printed many thousands of flyers, postcards, placards, and stickers; I think the budget for postage alone, never mind printing, was over $1,000. The whole campaign ended up involving Hillary, a magnificent campaign manager, five volunteer coordinators, about a hundred volunteers including phonebankers, two IT guys one of whom was me, and a graphic designer. There were countless episodes of real strenuous overwork, fantastic generosity, and plain dumb luck.
The 3,000 delegates voted at the state Democratic Party convention in Sacramento on April 25. Hil beat the incumbent by 54% to 46%, and is now the Controller of the California Democratic Party… although we’re still very much in process of figuring out what that means! What we ran has been called the best-conducted and most impressive intraparty campaign in California’s political history. All I know is, it sure was fun; and it meant we saw a lot of California that we otherwise might not have, in our lives.
Okay, that’s why I’ve been criminally busy for the last nine months. But last month there were some totally unanticipated changes. I had been having the kind of trouble with my eyes that comes with advancing age — floaters and that kind of thing — and I was on notice to come in to Kaiser of homology the minute I noticed any strange phenomena with my eyes. One afternoon in early April I was at Hil’s office installing a computer, I realized that my right eye very much wasn’t behaving properly, and I went to Oakland Kaiser and set off a total panic. A big hunk of my retina had detached, in a way that imperiled the vision of that eye permanently, and the following afternoon I was in Kaiser Santa Clara (the Bay Area’s on-call Kaiser ophthalmology since it was a weekend,) getting operated on. The operation was a success, but that kept me in bed for a week so I could hold my head still, and after that my vision was very much changed. I need totally different glasses, and until I get them, using a computer more than trivially is a real chore; atm I just about can’t see.
So that’s why I haven’t been doing things like answering mail, but I promise that as soon as I have my new glasses, I’ll set about getting back to people. In the meantime, I hope your spring is being wonderful, and I hope we’re all not too broke. I love you and have been thinking of you often.
blackkitty
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