Monday Jumpstart: Deerhunter

Revival by Deerhunter

Tragic and Inevitable

Map from Sarah Palin's PAC with cross-hairs over the districts of  Rep. Giffords and other Democrats who voted for health care reform

I mean, people don't -- they really need to realize that the rhetoric and firing people up and, you know, even things, for example, we're on Sarah Palin's targeted list. But the thing is that the way that she has it depicted has the crosshairs of a gunsight over our district. When people do that, they've gotta realize there's consequences to that action.--  Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, 3/2010

It is too early to tell what motivated the shooting of Rep. Giffords and 18 others, but the increasingly inflammatory rhetoric and violent imagery from the right was bound to land somewhere.  Republicans have demonized the President and others who oppose their political and social world view, and have called, perhaps metaphorically, for their demise in offensively graphic terms.  Tragically and predictably, not everyone understands it as metaphor.

Getting the most attention, and rightly so, is Sarah Palin's map and her call to "Commonsense Conservatives & lovers of America:  Don't retreat, Instead -- RELOAD!"  But, as Ezra Klein points out, there are countless examples from Republican politicians threatening violent reprisals, including:  Sharron Angle, warning that "if Congress keeps it up, people may find themselves resorting to Second Amendment remedies;"  Rep. Michele Bachmann saying she wanted Minnesotans "armed and dangerous" in opposition to cap-and-trade; and Jesse Kelly, who ran against Giffords in 2010, holding a gun-themed fundraiser. The pitch read: "Help remove Gabrielle Giffords from office, shoot a fully automatic M-16 with Jesse Kelly."  Republican leaders did absolutely nothing to rein in the lunatics within their ranks, who undoubtedly served the Party well in energizing their base in the last election.

One hopes the mainstream media will call out the Republicans for their singularly reprehensible conduct rather than simplistically resort to their default position, blaming both parties for their uncivil behavior and ferreting out some obscure and isolated example of some left winger's hysterical rant to counterbalance the incessantly overheated rhetoric of the right.  One also hopes that Republicans will do some soul searching, take moral responsibility for yesterday's tragedy, and finally tone down all the crazy talk. Without the first, it is unlikely that the Republicans will be shamed to do the second, and sadly, neither seems likely.

[Related posts:  Restoring Whose Sanity?; Restoring Whose Sanity? Redux]

Great Jazz Albums (IMO) #15

Miles Davis, Relaxin' With The Miles Davis Quintet (1956).  I thought it was time for a Miles Davis album.  There is obviously a lot to choose from, but my absolute favorite recordings are those from his first quintet, which consisted of the young John Coltrane on sax, the wonderful Red Garland on piano (more on Red in a later post), Paul Chambers on bass, and Philly Joe Jones on drums.  As the story goes, to satisfy his contract with Prestige before jumping to Columbia, the quintet got together in the studio for two sessions in 1956 and quickly recorded 26 tracks, all first takes.  This yielded three great records:  Relaxin', Steamin' and Cookin'.  I agree with one critic who states "each of these is considered not only to be among the pinnacle of Davis' work, but of the entire bop subgenre as well."  It is hard to pick one, but I'm going with Relaxin', because of the song selection, particularly the opening number "If I Were A Bell."  As the above-quoted critic said, Relaxin' "offers something for every degree of jazz enthusiast."  [Related posts:  Really Great Jazz Albums,  #1, #2, #3, #4, #5, #6, #7, #8, #9, #10, #11, #12, #13, #14] 

Weekend Must Read: The Toppling

Peter Maass has a devastating piece in the New Yorker, The Toppling, on the media's complicity in spreading the myth that the 2003 toppling of Saddam Hussein's statute in Baghdad's Firdos Square was a spontaneous celebration of the Iraqi people rather than an event staged by U.S. military.  As Maass explains:  "The media have been criticized for accepting the Bush Administration’s claims, in the run-up to the invasion, that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. The W.M.D. myth, and the media’s embrace of it, encouraged public support for war. The media also failed at Firdos Square, but in this case it was the media, rather than the government, that created the victory myth."

“Primed for triumph,” members of the mainstream press “were ready to latch onto a symbol of what they believed would be a joyous finale to the war.”  Maass describes this as “an unfortunate fusion: a preconception of what would happen, of what victory would look like, connected at Firdos Square with an aesthetically perfect representation of that preconception.”

Maass quotes various TV anchors who uncritically gushed at the images, and states that “a visual echo chamber developed:  rather than encouraging reporters to find the news, editors urged them to report what was on TV.”  Maass then documents how destructive this was, citing a study by George Washington University, which concluded that the coverage had “profound implications for both international policy and the domestic political landscape in America.” As Maass summed up the study’s findings: “ the saturation coverage of Firdos Square fuelled the perception that the war had been won, and diverted attention from Iraq at precisely the moment that more attention was needed, not less.”

The GWU study and other analyses of this iconic moment suggest, according to Maass, that “the bullishness of the post-Firdos era stemmed, at least in part, from the myth created at the square."

Without the erroneous finality of the statue falling, this argument goes, the notion of ‘Mission Accomplished’ would have been more difficult to assert; the Bush Administration would have had a harder time dismissing an insurgency that, for a fatal interlude, it all but ignored. Conventional wisdom blames the failure in Iraq on the Coalition Provisional Authority, which has been heavily criticized for its inept management of the occupation. But if the C.P.A. inherited a war rather than a victory, the story of what went wrong after Firdos needs to be revised.

Read the whole article.  It is well worth it.

R.I.P. Bill Alverson

Roman Colosseum lit to protest an execution

On January 6, 2011, Oklahoma executed Bill Don Alverson for his role in the killing of convenience store worker Richard Yost in 1995.  This is the first execution of 2011.

Just Kidding

That didn't take long.  The Republicans "Pledge to America," their highly publicized road map for the country's future, promised to "roll back government spending" by $100 billion a year, beginning this year.  As the New York Times reports, GOP leaders have repeatedly invoked this $100 billion number.  Now, on their first day in power, House Republicans have backed off their pledge, claiming that $100 billion was "hypothetical."

While it is fun to gloat about the alacrity with which Republicans are reneging on their promises to cut spending, it is more important to not let them narrow the debate on deficits to how much spending to cut.  The Republicans should not be permitted to get away with evincing concern about the deficit after insisting on maintaining the Bush tax cuts that will add $140 billion to it.  It should also be pointed out that their push for repeal of health care reform, according to a new CBO analysis, would increase the deficit by $230 billion over ten years.  Democrats need to explain that stimulus spending may have a short term impact on the deficit but is needed to spur the economy, and they must make the case that there are ways to reduce the deficit other than gutting social programs.  (See Growth is Good.)

[Related posts:  Growth is Good; Let 'Em Eat Catfood, Must Read: Krugman]

If It's Friday It Must Be . . . Yo La Tengo . . . (Black Flowers)

Black Flowers by Yo La Tengo (North Carolina 1/08)

[Related Posts: The Story of Yo La Tengo; If It's Friday It Must Be . . . Yo La Tengo -- Mr. Tough, The Summer, I Feel Like Going Home, Today Is The Day, Sugarcube, Tom Courtenay, Here to Fall, Autumn Sweater, Femme Fatale, Our Way to Fall; With a Girl Like You]

Back to the Dark Ages

Justice Scalia caused a bit of a ruckus with his assertion that the Constitution does not protect women from discrimination.  This is not a new position for the Supreme Court Justice.  Back in 1996, he was the sole dissenter from a ruling which ended the 157-year-old all-male tradition at Virginia Military Institute.  Scalia's disturbing view is still (for now) a minority position on the Court and certainly far outside the legal mainstream.  (His statements were handily rebutted by  Marcia Greenberger of the National Women's Law Center and Yale law professor Jack Balkin.)  However, Scalia is hardly an outlier among Republicans when it comes to disparaging women's rights.

New Speaker of the House, John Boehner, is a committed right-to-lifer, who as Mother Jones reports in The GOP's New Abortion Agenda, "has repeatedly emphasized his continued commitment to anti-abortion legislation."  Then there is Pennsylvania Congressman Joe Pitts, the new chairman of the Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Health, who the New York Times referred to as a "leading Congressional opponent of abortion rights."  The selection of Pitts, according to the Times, "presages a major shift on abortion and family planning."

The Mother Jones article details the Republican Party's top goals:  "enshrine tough restrictions on abortion funding into federal law and defund Planned Parenthood."  It also notes that there are still anti-abortion Democrats willing to go along.  The question, as always, is whether the rest of the Democrats in Congress and the President are willing to stand up and fight for women's reproductive health care.

Mid-Week Palate Cleanser: Cake

Frank Sinatra by Cake

Hall of Fame on Steroids

The Baseball Hall of Fame is about to announce this year’s inductees.  To be inducted, a player must have been retired for five years and receive 75% of the votes among the members of the Baseball Writer’s Association, who can vote for up to ten candidates. In recent years, as players of the so-called Steroid Era become eligible, the persistent question is whether those suspected of juicing should be allowed in.  I believe the answer is "yes."

It is unquestionable that steroids were used by a large group of players --  hitters and pitchers -- from about 1995 until 2005, when the baseball establishment, under pressure, finally began to crack down on the use of performance enhancing drugs.  During this time, when offensive numbers (and players’ heads) were suspiciously inflated, the fans cheered and the owners gleefully looked the other way.  For better or worse, steroids were part of the game and unless we are going to disqualify everyone who played during these years, we simply have to accept it.  (Not to mention that players in every era used whatever substances they thought could help them perform better -- amphetamines were in common use at least as early as the 1960s, and even Babe Ruth reportedly injected himself with an extract from sheep testicles).  Moreover, with the exception of the few players who have either admitted steroid use or whose tests have been made public, we have no way of knowing with any hope of accuracy the extent of who juiced and who didn’t.

In my opinion, the best and most dominant players of any era should be enshrined in the Hall of Fame, and confirmed or suspected steroid use should not be a barrier to entry.  That being said, some of the gaudier offensive statistics need to be considered in the context of the times.  Hitting 500 career home runs and amassing 3000 hits was a far more impressive feat in the 1950s-1970s than it was in 1990s and early 2000s.  So, for example, I don’t think Rafael Palmiero should be in the Hall of Fame; not because he was a steroid user (or flagrantly lied to Congress about it) but because despite what are traditionally Hall of Fame numbers (over 500 homers and 3000 hits), he was not one of the dominant players of his generation.

If I had a vote, I would vote for the following players to be inducted:  Roberto Alomar, Barry Larkin, Alan Trammel, Tim Raines, Jack Morris, Bert Blyleven, Lee Smith, Dave Parker and Mark McGwire.  [Read more after the break]

Fair and Unbalanced Radio

For your listening pleasure, here is the first Fair and Unbalanced Playlist, comprising the first ten songs I have featured on the blog:

1. Lazy Eye by Silversun Pickups
2. Don't Haunt This Place by Rural Alberta Advantage
3. Tighten Up by The Black Keys
4. The Crash Years by The New Pornographers
5. Don't You Evah by Spoon
6. Boy by Ra Ra Riot
7. One Red Thread by Blind Pilot
8. Sunrise by Yeasayer
9. Floating Vibes by Surfer Blood
10 The Walls Are Coming Down by Fanfarlo

Playing Chicken With Madmen

The total amount of debt the federal government can incur is set by statute and only Congress can raise it.  This so-called "debt ceiling" is expected to be reached this spring and Republicans are threatening to vote against raising it despite the general consensus that this would have disastrous consequences for the U.S. economy and global markets.

The fact that this has become a 'serious' topic of discussion is remarkable. Even George Will thinks the Republican threat to oppose increasing the debt ceiling is nuts, calling it suicidal.  Well, the Republicans are either crazy or they have merely become adept at using a version of Nixon's Madman theory to get the Democrats to believe they will do anything -- even blow up the economy -- to get what they want.  Several Republicans have gone on record in opposition to raising the ceiling.  Sen. Lindsay Graham said that  failing to raise the debt ceiling “would be very bad for the position of the United States in the world at large,” but he still "wouldn’t vote to raise it “until a plan is in place" for the nation's long-term debt, particularly restructuring Social Security and cutting discretionary spending.

So, here we are again, with Republicans threatening to hold the government hostage until their demands are met.  At least this time the White House has begun to fight back, employing Austan Goolsbee, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, who hit the airwaves on Sunday to warn against "playing chicken" with raising the country's debt ceiling, saying it would cause "a worse financial economic crisis than anything we saw in 2008."  Goolsbee declared that “the debt ceiling is not something to toy with.”  He said that “[i]f we get to the point where you’ve damaged the full faith and credit of the United States, that would be the first default in history caused purely by insanity.”  This is a good start, but the Obama Administration will ultimately need to show that it can win this game of chicken -- that it has core principles and is just as determined to fight for them as the madmen are for theirs.

Mourning Constitutional

So, the House Republicans want to honor our founding document by reading it out loud on the floor of the Congress.  They may be surprised to learn that the Constitution does not say what they think it says.  As constitutional scholar Akhil Reed Amar explains, the Constitution charters a "very broad federal power" and is not a narrow states' rights document.  Firedoglake has a clever post on the various constitutional clauses the Republicans may want to gloss over, including that Congress has the power to collect taxes and provide for the general welfare; that the President has the power to make recess appointments; that treaties made under the authority of the U.S. shall be the supreme law of the land; that no religious test shall be required as a qualification to any office.  And then there is the entire bill of rights, which, among other things, bars Congress from making laws "respecting an establishment of religion," ensures that people should be secure from "unreasonable searches and seizures," and bars the infliction of "cruel and unusual punishment."

Contrary to holding the Constitution sacrosanct as they profess, the right tends to pick and choose the parts of the Constitution they like and those they would rather ignore.  In fact, these same conservatives are hoping to rewrite the Constitution they pretend to treasure so dearly, having proposed at least 42 amendments in the last Congress, including a proposal to abolish so-called birthright citizenship, by amending the Fourteenth Amendment which grants American citizenship to anyone born in the United States.  As the Washington Times reports, "other widely supported Republican amendments would prohibit government ownership of private companies, bar same-sex marriage, require a two-thirds vote in Congress to raise taxes, and prohibit desecration of the American flag."

Another constitutional amendment, introduced by Rep. Rob Bishop of Utah, would permit two-thirds of the states to nullify any federal law they collectively dislike.  Incoming House Majority Leader Eric Cantor supports this "Repeal Amendment," which he argues "would provide a check on the ever-expanding federal government, protect against Congressional overreach, and get the government working for the people again, not the other way around."

I happen to be reading Jeff Shesol's excellent book, Supreme Power, on FDR's battles with the Supreme Court over the New Deal.  Shesol writes about the American Liberty League, a group of extreme conservatives whose ostensible goal was to "defend and uphold the Constitution," but who really sought to undermine New Deal programs.  The League's cynical embrace of the Constitution and its fear mongering about a "socialist takeover" is strikingly similar to the Tea Party tactics of today.  The big difference, thus far, is that FDR and his allies fought back.

The right has always shown a genius for hijacking the symbols of this nation in order to put a populist spin on policies that are anything but populist -- policies that favor unregulated big business and big money and disfavor social programs and minority and immigrant rights.  Because their efforts seem so laughably hypocritical -- and the symbols they rely on deemed so sacred -- liberals have far too often failed to challenge their methods and end up ceding the terms of the debate.  Democrats in Congress must not allow this latest cheap political stunt to go unanswered.

Monday Jumpstart: The Shins

Kissing the Lipless by The Shins at the Enmore Theatre in Sydney, Australia, 8/07.

Great Jazz Albums (IMO) #14

Duke Ellington, And His Mother Called Him Bill (1967).  I never really got Duke Ellington and then, about 20 years ago, my friend Tim turned me on to this album and I instantly became an avid fan.  It is Duke's tribute to his long-time and highly influential collaborator Billy Strayhorn in the wake of Strayhorn's death.  All the songs on the album were written by Strayhorn, and use his arrangements.  The orchestra includes a stellar lineup of many of the extraordinary members of Duke's orchestra, including Clark Terry, Johnny Hodges, Paul Gonsalves, Harry Carney, Jimmy Hamilton and Sam Woodyard.  "This retrospective of Billy Strayhorn's compositions found the orchestra in inspired form with several touching moments."  It has been called  "a magnificent album . . . perfomed with great love and intensity by the mid-'60s band doing more than justice to the original performances and captured in glorious fidelity."  As one reviewer put it, "For a man who issued well over 300 albums, this set is among his most profoundly felt and very finest recorded moments."
[Related posts:  Really Great Jazz Albums,  #1, #2, #3, #4, #5, #6, #7, #8, #9, #10, #11, #12, #13]