I don't know who this pain in the ass is, but I love him.

"Checkpoint USA" is a fellow who, to use his own words, "dedicated to exposing the police state - one checkpoint at a time".

This video is especially delicious:
Driver: Am I being detained?
USBP Officer: No.
Driver: Then I'm free to go?
USBP Officer: No.
[Note: Summary and fair paraphrase.]

In the end, they didn't arrest him and let him go. I must confess that this surprised me. The American police agencies have gotten so used to ignoring their Constitution (and having that validated by judges like Alito, Roberts, Scalia and Thomas) that the simple fact that a person who hadn't done anything wrong and who insisted on his Constitutional rights was not arrested actually surprised the hell out of me. I have gotten so used to bogus charges like "obstructing police", "resisting arrest" and the like being laid in the USA when somebody doesn't roll over like a puppy for authority that I'm amazed when what should happen does happen.

How to identify a troll ... Yet another update.

Here ya go!

Some thoughts on debating courtesy

I just finished watching this Anderson Cooper 360 Proposition 8 "debate" between Dan Savage -- the sex columnist, writer and educator -- and Tony Perkins, writer and president of the Mormon "Family Research Council". (Bias: I'm pro gay-marriage, and a huge Dan Savage fan. I also profoundly dislike gleaming, smarmy apologists for authoritarian religions.)

That said, the exchange was depressing if you like the clash of ideas.

First, they constantly try and talk over each other and the moderator does nothing about it; Anderson Cooper's role can be kindly described as "completely supine". I've never really seen Cooper's show before (I try to avoid the next-to-useless US mainstream media) and I was very unimpressed. He's very pretty. And that seems to be it.

Second, I profoundly disliked Mr. Perkins' constantly complaining about being talked over when he was doing the same thing. (Frankly, I think that it's a bit of a microcosm of how the Religious Right operates in the US: it defines freedom and courtesy and the right to be heard as if they are things that only they are entitled to, but that's for another day.)

Third, I disliked Mr. Perkin's complaining about interruptions in specific light of one of his debating tactics: to keep talking and talking and not letting Mr. Savage get a word in edgeways. He just keeps rolling along, making point after point, never pausing, never stopping and then gets all self-righteous about interruptions when somebody tries to get a word in edgeways. It's the moderator's job to stop that sort of thing. (Still, points to Savage for noting that this fellow seemed to think that being interrupted was a far greater wrong being done than he and his type stripping fellow citizens of their rights.)

Fourth (and a sub-set of the third) is the insertion of deliberate of sequential falsehoods. If somebody is allowed to just roll along like Perkins does then one permits that person to erect a wall of their positions with the falsehoods inserted as supporting bricks in the wall of their assertions. Again, it is a journalist's job to be well-versed enough to know what's true and what's a fib, and that journalist-moderator's job to call people on it. Against such an opponent Savage had to repeatedly leap in and counter a falsehood resulting in even more crosstalk and protests about interruption.

Fifth, I notice that one of the most interesting thing about the Mormon Church's participation did not come up: taxes. The average Mormon's fiscal and personal participation in support of Prop 8 was mandated by their Church. It wasn't optional. Tens of millions of dollars and tens of thousands of foot soldiers for the lobbying and GOTV and related efforts were made obligations of the Mormon faith by the Church's hierarchy. Why isn't their tax-exempt status at issue? Savage had the principle grasped, at least, and called it at the beginning when he noted that American churches as a general rule want to have it both ways: they want to participate in the public arena but still retain a kind of benefit of clergy. Here there and everywhere they want tax-exempt status for not participating in the political process.... while still participating in the political process.

Sixth, I find it more than a little revolting that a church that started out as a persecuted minority turns so eagerly to persecuting other minorities. Then again, the Mormons have never been a tolerant bunch; they only admitted that blacks were as important as whites in 1978.

In the end, if I walked away from it disgusted it was for two reasons. There will always be Tony Perkinses out there, smoothly and sanctimoniously presenting lies about why their views must use law as a club to beat others of whom they disapprove. And I was stupid enough to watch something on American mainstream news. I totally deserved to walk away feeling ill.

Self-Quoting is still a sin.

And I'm not only going to hell, I will have to polish the desks when I get there.

"Most of the Dems current caucus are very much Subs in the B&D game of politics."

No, I don't exaggerate. The Dems are debating whether or not to keep Joe Lieberman in its caucus (!) and whether or not to let him retain his HSC Chairmanship (!!!!!!!!!!!). My god, if these people ran the FBI or CIA they'd be debating about letting Hanssen and Ames keep their security clearance.

Self-quoting is a Sin

I'm going to hell.

Religion is a bit like The Jackal’s crutch in the famous thriller: it serves to hold some people up, to gain sympathy, and obtain entry into where they should not be permitted to go; having served that purpose it can now be used to hurt somebody.

How to identify a troll...


another update.

Alaska...

Do you think that the Russians would be foolish enough to take it back if the Americans asked very, very, very, very nicely?

Not-stradamus

I made some predictions. How'd I do?

1. The Democratic leadership would continue to foolishly tack to what it and the MSM erroneously called "the centre", i.e. it would continue to move to the right and be Republicans whilst claiming to be an alternative.

Congressional level: They did not continue their tack to the right. There was no repeat of 2002, 2004 and 2006 where they sought to be the GOP.
Presidential level: They selected a reasonably progressive Senator as the nominee and won with him, and did so without pandering Right.
Result: seeker was WRONG.

2. The Democratic leadership would continue to "alienat[e] liberals and progressives by abandoning their objectives and principles...".

WRONG. See #1.

3. The Democratic leadership would continue to "alienat[e] independents because of their inaction on the war and their constant, demonstrated weakness...".

WRONG. See #1.

4. "[R]ecord low turnouts" [amongst Democrats and independents] in the 2008 elections.

64% voter turnout, "the biggest voter turnout since women got the vote in 1920", according to the Wall Street Journal.
Result? Not only was I wrong but I was WRONG WRONG WRONG.

5. "[S]urprisingly large GOP votes" in the 2008 elections.

McCain pulled 62,040,610 votes [Wiki, as of today's date], a drop of 6,031,257 from Bush's 2004 total, and in a year of record voter turnout.
Result? WRONG.

6. "[R]ecord levels of vote fraud in bellweather areas". I should have clarified that I meant GOP voter fraud. I should also note that I should have said "swing states". In any event, a prediction for high levels of GOP vote fraud, by which I mean voter suppression and perhaps computer theft like Ohio in 1984.

Result? If it happened, (and it probably did... or maybe it didn't) then it was too little to swing the election to McCain. I would be worried that the Democrats, secure in their majorities and with a historic president, will not do their utmost to correct the multitude of systemic cheats built into the system for the GOP.
Prediction result: INCONCLUSIVE.

Wow. Five out of six wrong, and the sixth is too early to tell and we may never know.

In my defence, I made the prediction in September of 2007, based only on the performance of the Dems in that Congress. I still think that they were weak, Chamberlainish turds. But in making the prediction I grossly underestimated the transformative effect of Barack Obama.

What I will be interested to see (and sorry, no predictions, I've learned my lesson), is whether or not Dem congresscritters who wouldn't say boo to George Bush or fight back against their GOP counterparts will suddenly stand up, dust off their knees and install a spine when it comes to being obstinate to a Democratic President.

I will also be interested to see just who, both on the Hill and in the new Obama administration, had the stones to undo the massive, massive damage done to governmental institutions during the Bush years. The number of hack appointees to career-level positions has been astounding. It is darkly and unamusingly ironic that the Bushies, having ridden roughshod over the civil service rules and legislation (in hiring unqualified people for career slots and using blatant ideological tests to do so) will scream blue murder and wave the law and paint the Dems as the bad guys as they try to smoke the cockroaches out of the woodwork. (And the CMSM will suddenly discover the story, the story that it for the most part avoided as the damage was being done.)

Droll sarcasm at its accurate finest.

MSNBC’s staying with four hours of former GOP Representative Joe Scarborough, who sits with moderate conservative radio host Mike Barnicle and ultra-conservative Pat Buchanan talking the entire time about how the media is too much in Obama’s tank.

Jesse Taylor over at Pandagon, today.

Funny.


Courtesy of Ta-Nehisi Coates over at The Atlantic:

I don't use marijuana. But I do stand by this.

A comment that I made at theagitator.com:

The marijuana laws exist for a number of reasons. One of those reasons is to take something normal and useful and safe (the WD40 of the drug world) and make it illegal. Its very ubiquity and utility guarantees a demand for more and more enforcement, “necessitating” harsher laws, more police, more raids, etc. ; it also serves as a backup justification for any other mistakes they make. (A raid of the wrong house magically becomes a righteous raid because, almost inevitably, some cop is going to find a joint.)

Marijuana/cannibis isn’t illegal because we need protection from it. It’s illegal because many forces within the state need it to craft a growing, authoritarian, moralistic, anti-constitutional police state. If cannabis had never existed it would be something else.

Marijuana is not the End which necessitates the Means of an aggressive police state. It is the Means by which the End of the aggressive police state is created, justified and maintained.

She's got it.

Commenter "Thena, Sultana of Stale Raisin Bread" addresses the difference between poor, working class and middle class:

The difference (IMO) between working-class and middle-class is not just about income but about security.

I figure it this way:

the genuinely poor are those who struggle to get by on a day to day, week to week basis. The keyword here is Survival.

the working class (where I see myself) are those who get by but can’t really get ahead - able to pay the rent but not save up enough for a down payment, perhaps, or employed but uninsured, for instance. The keyword here is Security.

Real middle-class status, to me, implies a certain basic level of security: you know you’ve got enough to take a hit and keep rolling in a “One down three engines good” sort of way. You own your home (or have a mortgage that you can easily keep up with); you have health insurance and savings and a 401K or a government pension and you can reasonably expect that things are going to be Okay - maybe not fabulous, maybe you won’t make that trip to DisneyVille this summer, but you’ll eat regularly and go straight to the ER when you injure yourself instead of waiting a few days to see if it gets better on its own. The keyword here is Stability.

(In this paradigm I’d use “Savings” as the keyword for the upper class - being those who have money left over to save or invest after their material needs and comforts are assured for the foreseeable future - and “Surfeit” as the keyword for the genuinely wealthy, the people who have more money than I can figure out what to do with. And I am capable of finding good homes for absurdly large dollar figures, I work in a state government accounting office. At the moment.)

By this measure I believe there are a whole lot of people in this country who are not middle class but call themselves by that name because they don’t want to admit the economy’s broken.

(In case you were wondering about the name: there was a period where most regular posters at Pandagon had a food-related nickname, or a foody variant on their normal nickname. Why, I cannot recall.)

Name the people in the picture



Foreground: Mr. Barack Obama, future candidate for US President; Mr. Stanley A. Dunham, Mr. Obama's maternal grandfather.

Background: Unidentified future McCain-Palin "Real America" supporter.

Ummmm... Yeaaaaahhhhhh.... Riiiiiiiiiight...

It has been interesting and instructive to watch representatives of the American Right and the GOP complain about how the "liberal media" (which is a unicorn fantasy in itself) favours Obama, they want him elected, and so forth.

Before I make my short point, just this first: no movement or party which has received the ass-kissing that it's candidate got in 2000 and 2004 and right up until Katrina can complain about the media. There's a joke about how the left and right both hate the media in America: the left hates it because it doesn't do its job, and the right hates it when it does. Bush and the GOP received ludicrously favourable coverage and they can't complain.

Let's use Vincent Bugliosi's simple test of reversal of situations. That famous American trial lawyer, in analyzing Bush v. Gore, asked the reader this: if the situation had been reversed, and Gore was seeking the relief that Bush was seeking, would those judges have decided the case exactly the same? The answer is an inarguable no. (Scalia, for example, decided in favour of Bush using the "equal protection" principle that he had mocked and derided in every single other case that he'd ever heard. For that matter, would the media have been silent if the USSC had decided in favour of Gore and we found out afterwards that no judge recused themselves even though one exclaimed in public that she was horrified that Bush might win, and two others had close relatives on the Gore team who would later receive senior governmental posts?)

That test in place, let's ask ourselves two simple questions:

1. If it turned out that Michelle Obama had become a drug addict, stole from her own charity, forged doctor's signatures and later crushed the whistleblower, and only evaded jail by her husband exerting his political influence, would Obama even be the nominee, let alone in the lead? Obviously not. Yet that's what happened with Cindy McCain.

2. If it turned out that Michelle Obama or Jill Biden had been members of an anti-American secessionist organization until very recently, and had, while their husbands were in office, actively inserted themselves into their spouse's jobs, including having space in their offices, would these Democratic figures get away with that? Obviously not. But nobody outside the lefty blogsphere mentions this about Todd Palin.

Liberal media my foot. The American right is whining so loud because they have to deal with a bit of their own medicine now. They've had it their own way so completely for so long they are getting ugly, like a spoiled child hearing the word "no" for the first time.

I hate to admit it, but he's right.

Jeffrey Simpson in the Globe and Mail:

Since 1993, the largest number of francophone Quebeckers apparently has wanted no part of federal parties, and therefore of the government or governance of Canada. Canada is no longer a country they wish to participate in governing, but one from which they wish to withdraw cash, like an automated teller machine.

They want to influence decisions in Ottawa without taking any responsibility for those decisions. They want neither to separate from Canada, nor to govern it. They want, through the Bloc Québécois, a variation of an old and enduring ambition: to be part of Canada, but only sort of, and on their terms, which means some sort of associate status, égal à égal, separate but not fully separate, sovereignty but with association, autonomous but still tied, somewhat in but somewhat out, or, in the metaphor of the brilliant Quebec journalist Jean Paré, parishioners in a church called Canada they seldom attend except for important occasions like Christmas, Easter and maybe marriages. They want to take but not to give. And they always prefer leaders, when given a choice, from Quebec.

Many words spring to mind: "provincial", "tribal", "selfish". They're harsh. They hurt. I wish it weren't this way. But it is. And Simpson goes ruthlessly on in his accuracy:

Conservatives and Liberals in Quebec now appear like parties from the "other," that is to say, the rest of Canada. This perception, in turn, allows the Bloc to portray Quebec's interests as unrepresented in those parties and therefore threatened by them.

It's the acts and lies Constitution debate from the 1980s all over again. Those purporting to represent Quebec storm out, and then convince their electorate that they were kicked out and unwelcome when in fact the wound was self-inflicted. It's where I think that Mulroney's legacy is most poisoned. During his near-decade as PM he and his nationaliste allies accepted, spread and reinforced the lies about Quebec's betrayal during the patriation efforts. There's nothing like an insulting and energizing lie when it comes to sticking to a soul.

What's fatiguing about this is that Quebec's political class often seems wedded to the philosophy of demand and the magic of extortionate pressure. Picture an entire political class being operated under the same principles as a 1970s British trade union. The idea of cooperation is baffling to them. Cooperation and compromise is met with a series of new demands:

Quebeckers have a Premier who, although a federalist of a certain variety, is always demanding, never happy and seeking by all avenues to expand Quebec's powers, prestige and transfers. They have a Prime Minister in Ottawa, of whatever political stripe, who pays enormous attention to the province, owing to its 75 seats and the always-possible threat of national dismemberment. And in the Bloc Québécois, they have their very own, homegrown opposition party, always demanding, never satisfied, and seeking, like the Premier, to expand Quebec's powers, prestige and transfers. ... In this culture, nothing is ever enough.

Simpson ends his article with a question to which I have no answer: What now?

My Hostage to Fortune.

About thirteen months ago I made a prediction over at Pandagon.

In discussing a possible move by the Democrats in the US Congress I said:

Yeah, like the current Dem leadership in Congress has the stones to do this. They are too busy denigrating their own base whilst trying to peel away votes from the 25% of Americans who would neverevereverevereverEVER! vote Democrat.

I’m going to make a prediction here. The Dem performance in 2008 will be far, far poorer than they anticipate. They are alienating liberals and progressives by abandoning their objectives and principles, and they are alienating independents because of their inaction on the war and their constant, demonstrated weakness. Today’s call for 2008: record low turnouts; surprisingly large GOP votes; record levels of vote fraud in bellweather areas.

You read it here first.

So, there's a number of predictions there:

1. The Democratic leadership would continue to foolishly tack to what it and the MSM erroneously called "the centre", i.e. it would continue to move to the right and be Republicans whilst claiming to be an alternative.

2. The Democratic leadership would continue to "alienat[e] liberals and progressives by abandoning their objectives and principles...".

3. The Democratic leadership would continue to "alienat[e] independents because of their inaction on the war and their constant, demonstrated weakness...".

4. "[R]ecord low turnouts" [amongst Democrats and independents] in the 2008 elections.

5. "[S]urprisingly large GOP votes" in the 2008 elections.

6. "[R]ecord levels of vote fraud in bellweather areas". I should have clarified that I meant GOP voter fraud. I should also note that I should have said "swing states". In any event, a prediction for high levels of GOP vote fraud, by which I mean voter suppression and perhaps computer theft like Ohio in 1984.

The American election is coming up. Let's see how I did.

Best quote on abuse of authority that you will hear for a while.

"When your only tool is a hammer, everyone looks like a nail."

Commenter "Cynical in CA" over at The Agitator.

Helpful Cultural Hint

“judicial activism” (modified noun)
Term used by American conservatives to decry any judicial decision with which they disagree.

Cultural interpretative note:
The visitor to the United States is cautioned that the phrase is not to be taken as an objective descriptor, but rather as a subjective pejorative. A judge declining to substitute his judgment for that of the legislature on a matter on which conservatives wish him to act is a “judicial activist”, even though he is exercising deference to the wishes of the elected legislature. Conversely, a judge who renders a decision of which conservatives approve is not a “judicial activist”, even if the decision in question goes directly contrary to the clear language of the statute and the expressed intent of the legislature.

The GOP

If you want to understand the modern Republican Party of the United States:

The GOP is capable of taking mom's apple pie, wrapping it in an American flag, and then swinging it to smash that into their neighbour's face. And while the neighbour is trying to stop the bleeding from their mouth, sputtering "why the hell did you do that???" the GOP turns to the other neighbours and screams "that man hates mom's apple pie and the American flag!!!!" It is capable of doing this while everybody's house is burning down and convincing everyone that the pie/flag issue is more important than the burning houses.

How to identify a troll...


an update.