The Week In Republican Wingnuttery

Will this be the week that political scientists look back on in particular when they study the Great Republican Implosion of 2010?

The GOP has parlayed its humiliating 2008 loss of the White House and Congress into not an effort to broaden its base to include more than aging Caucasian males who put their teeth in a bedside water glass before turning in, but instead has tacked relentlessly to the ideologically "pure" right. Still, the last few days have been a doozy:

* In Florida, party purists all but completed the job of throwing Governor Charlie Crist under the bus, pretty much guaranteeing that the moderate Republican will run as an independent and as such will stand an excellent chance of beating the knuckle dragging Marco Rubio and Kendrick Meek, the eponymously uninspiring Democratic challenger.

* In Arizona, the Republican governor is poised to sign a harsh anti-immigration law passed by the Republican-controlled legislature that gives the term "police state" new meaning. Oh, and Barack Obama will have to prove that he is an American citizen before his name can be placed on the state's 2012 presidential ballot.

* In Nevada, right-wing Republican Susan Lowden, who is challenging Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, became the subject of untold chicken jokes after she declared that patients should be able to barter doctors' services. One wag calculated that the U.S. would be 443 billion chickens short if they replaced cash, credit cards and insurance for doctors' office visits.

* Presidential wannabe Newt Gingrich, who passes for the party's intellectual heavyweight these days, predicted that the Tea Party will become "the militant wing" of the GOP. Where's the Newtster been? It already is.

* Wingnut den mother Sarah Palin further burnished her credentials by ridiculing Obama for having no experience in negotiating a nuclear weapons reduction treaty with Russia when it turns out that the prez met or spoke with his Russian counterpart sixteen times to personally negotiate details of the pact.

* Jim DeMint, the South Carolina senator and arguably the nuttiest of the Capitol Hill wingnuts, became the latest Republican extremist to contemplate a presidential run.

* Party Chairman Michael Steele, reeling from yet another scandal involving the misuse of donor contributions, opined in a rare moment of candor that Republicans haven't given blacks any reason for vote for them. For the last 40 years.

* Finally, it was revealed that some 20 Fox News "personalities" have endorsed, raised money, or campaigned for Republican candidates or causes, or against Democratic candidates or causes, in more than 300 instances and in at least 49 states.

I can't wait to see what happens next. Can you?

Cartoon du Jour

Tom Toles/Universal Press Syndicate

Beautiful Photograph du Jour

LAKE NATRON
(Tanzania -- 2000)
By Stuart Franklin/Magnum Photos

The Inevitability Of Financial Reform

Unless your business model depends on bilking people, there is little to fear from these new rules.

-- BARACK OBAMA

Inevitable? I can't believe that I wrote that headline, but President Obama appears to be on the brink of pulling off the most comprehensive reform of the financial industry since the Great Depression and may do so with substantial Republican support.

What makes this all the more stunning is that this industry is so vast, accounting for nearly half of all corporate profits, and so influential, wielding enormous influence on both sides of the aisle, and so adamantly opposed to reform that only a few weeks ago the legislation appeared likely to founder or result in toothless new regulations that the industry would motor around en route to more trickery, deceit and obscene profits.

But a funny thing happened on the way to foundering and failure:

* Americans, sick and tired of the financial industry's assault on Main Street, overwhelmingly support reform and are repulsed by Republican arguments that the White House is trying to make Wall Street look bad.

* Obama, with the wind at his back following the passage of health-care reform and a slew of lesser initiatives, is willing to go for broke.

* The news media, accustomed to swallowing Republican talking points hook, line and sinker, uncharacteristically has begun holding them accountable.

* And Republicans who threatened to filibuster while lying through their teeth about reform would do, realize that they are hanging themselves out to dry in the run-up to mid-term elections.

The transformation of Mitch McConnell is especially stunning.

The minority leader, fresh off of a closed-door meeting with derivatives traders and other industry bigs, had claimed that reform would be a socialist takeover and not protection against predatory and abusive banking practices, but seems to have toned down his rhetoric after the Lexington (Ky.) Herald-Leader, his home-state paper, chastised him for "unabashedly courting Wall Street bankers for political money."

Obama spent the first year of his administration trying to repair the damage wrought over the last eight years. Appointing Wall Street insiders to run the economy was not among his swiftest moves. Nor does the financial reform bill go far enough. But at least he now has the opportunity to begin fixing things that were broken long before Bush and Cheney drove the national car into a ditch.

TOONS (Top to bottom): Tom Toles, Bruce Beattie,
Chris Britt, Gary Varvel and Lisa Benson

The Havasupai Finally Get Their Due

MORE HERE.
Photograph by Jim Wilson/The New York Times

Pull The Plug On The Thug

The NFL didn't go far enough. And Nike ought to be ashamed.

Beautiful Photograph du Jour

IVIED TREE
(Wakehurst Place)
By Beth Dow

When The Court, Not The Law, Is An Ass

The 8-1 Supreme Court ruling striking down a federal law that made it a crime to create or sell dogfight videos and other animal cruelty depictions such as "crush" videos provoked a number of reactions in me that did not dissipate after a night's sleep. Those reactions can be grouped under the headings of disgust and confusion.

Disgust because dog fighting is so utterly barbaric, but then ours is a society in which a majority of people approve of Bush era unpleasantries like waterboarding. Confusion because dog fighting is illegal in all 50 states but videotaping such crimes is an expression of speech that should be protected, or so says the high court.

In writing for the majority in U.S. v. Stevens, Chief Justice Roberts sewed further confusion in declaring that a 1999 law banning dog fighting videos had created "a criminal prohibition of alarming breadth" and that the government's aggressive defense of the law was "startling and dangerous." Justice Alito was the lone dissenter, correctly noting that dog fighting crimes are committed "for the sole purpose of creating the videos."

Where my disgust and confusion merge is over the court's 1982 precedent putting child pornography outside the First Amendment, joining libel and incitement to riot, because depictions of such filth were necessarily linked to the actual abuse of children.

Does this mean that children are accorded a protection that dogs are not?

The majority in Stevens sidesteps that question by stating that the law cannot be enforced because of its "overbreadth," a contention that the holdout Alito parries effectively in writing that it is obvious that Congress never intended legal activities involving animals like hunting to be banned.

His commonsensical solution was to amend the law by including hunting in an exceptions clause that would allow the law to pass constitutional muster by the majority's standard.

"If the law supposes that," Charles Dickens' Mr. Bumble famously remarked in Oliver Twist, "the law is an ass -- an idiot." But in this instance it is a court hung up on hypotheticals and not the impact of its actions that is an ass.

As Alito noted, the 1999 law destroyed the crush video industry only to have that depraved form of entertainment revive after a federal appeals court struck it down en route to the Supreme Court, which has now validated that shortsighted decision.

Cartoon du Jour

Ted Rall/Universal Press Syndicate

Justice Stevens' Retirement, Judicial Activism & A Liberal Call To Arms

There are a couple, three reasons why unlike many left-of-center bloggers I don't call out conservatives every time they do a hypocritical turn. For one thing, I'd have little time to write about anything else. For another, it gets repetitious, not to say boring. For yet another, liberals are often just as guilty.

But in the case of judicial activism, I will make an exception. This because the conservative (which is to say Republican) chorus line has reliably tried to tar Sonia Sotomayor and virtually every other non-conservative judicial nominee whose names have been sent up to Capitol Hill by Barack Obama and Bill Clinton before him with that brush.

Hypocrisy comes in many flavors and sizes, but this is a whopper of heart-stopping magnitude when you consider that the current Supreme Court, which includes conservative icons Alito, Scalia, Roberts and the beyond crazy Thomas, has been breathtakingly activist.

How else to explain their rulings giving corporations the same free-speech rights as individuals. Asserting that affirmative action is unconstitutional but not regulating firearms is. That age discrimination is a fig newton of the victims' imaginations. Or that the manufacturers of deadly pharmaceuticals and medical devices can't be sued by the kin of the victims if the Food and Drug Administration approved their use.

This is why . . . drum roll, please . . . the fight to secure the nomination of the successor to Justice Stevens should be a liberal call to arms.

Cartoon by Pat Oliphant/Universal Press Syndicate

Dorothy I. Height (1912-2010)

MORE HERE.

Beautiful Photograph du Jour

CELLS
By Jean-Pierre Attal
Hat tip to Andrew Sullivan at The Daily Dish

Cartoon du Jour

Tony Auth/The Philadelphia Inquirer

Of Popes, Pedophiles, Poobahs & Pols: Why Epistemic Closure Is Soooo Hot

MR. CLOSURE HARD AT WORK

If you follow the ebb and flow of current events, you can't turn around these days without bumping into a dude by the name of Epistemic Closure.

Philosophers like to make Mr. Closure seem as complicated as Mr. Theory of Relativity, but he's a rather simple man, albeit one with a fatal flaw: While most people think they can increase their knowledge by accepting things that are logically implied to be true by the things they already know, Mr. Closure keeps falling through the same set of trap doors because the things he assumes to be true may not be and often aren't, while he is no longer able to accept any but a tiny fraction of the information available to him.

This brings us to two particularly pungent examples of epistemic closure in action: The conservative wing of the Republican Party (which is to say pretty much the entire kit and kaboodle) and the Roman Catholic Church (which is to say the Vatican hierarchy).

A pretty dissimilar bunch on their face, but they have this in common: They are determined to discredit internal and external dissidents because those dissidents are especially dangerous to their systems of epistemic closure, and survival is contingent on being out of touch with reality.

In the case of Republicans, this is a death wish known as political purity. If you don't completely buy into our Neanderthal views, then you are not welcome in our cave.

Jonathan Chait of The New Republic puts it this way:

"This epistemic closure can be a source of solidarity and energy, but it also renders the conservative media ecosystem fragile. Think of the complete panic China's rulers feel about any breaks in their Internet firewall: The more successfully external sources of information have been excluded to date, the more unpredictable the effects of a breach become. Internal criticism is then especially problematic, because it threatens the hermetic seal. It's not just that any particular criticism might have to be taken seriously coming from a fellow conservative. Rather, it's that anything that breaks down the tacit equivalence between "critic of conservatives" and "wicked liberal smear artist" undermines the effectiveness of the entire information filter. If disagreement is not in itself evidence of malign intent or moral degeneracy, people start feeling an obligation to engage it sincerely -- maybe even when it comes from the New York Times. And there is nothing more potentially fatal to the momentum of an insurgency fueled by anger than a conversation."

In the case of those Catholics, this is a rolling catastrophe known as the pedophile priest scandal. If you don't support the church in its time of crisis or deign to criticize it from outside, then you are an unworthy.

Peggy Noonan tackles this one in a Wall Street Journal column:

"Eight years ago . . . I wrote in these pages of the American church scandal, calling it calamitous, a threat to the standing and reputation of the entire church. . . . In the piece I criticized Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, then archbishop of Washington, who had suggested to the Washington Post that the scandal was media-driven, that journalists are having 'a heyday.'

"The piece didn't go over well in the American church, or the Vatican. One interesting response came from Cardinal Law [of Boston], whom I ran into a year later in Rome. 'We don't need friends of the church turning on the church at such a difficult time,' he said. 'We need loyalty when the church is going through a tough time.'

"I'd suggested in the piece that the rarefied lives cardinals led had contributed to an inability to understand the struggles of others and the pain of those abused, and soon Cardinal Law and I were talking about his mansion outside Boston. He asked me how it would look if he'd refused to live there. I told him it would look good, but more to the point, the church was going to lose the cardinal's mansion to trial lawyers, and it should sell it first and put the money in schools."

One consequence of the Republicans' obeisance to epistemic closure is that their party continues to shrink both in core supporters and geographically. And soon enough the Boston cardinal's mansion was indeed gone, sold off to pay victims of priestly abuse. Law's successor lives in a modest apartment.

Cartoon du Jour

Nick Anderson/Houston Chronicle

College Football Bans The Wedge . . .

. . . and it's about fricking time considering the disproportionate number of concussions and other injuries that this kickoff formation causes. One observer says that "Banning the wedge is like removing an appendix, excising the oldest remnant of truly old-school, pre-forward pass football from the modern game."

More here.

Historic Photograph du Jour

DREAMLAND TOWER
(Coney Island, New York -- 1905)
By Samuel H. Gottscho

Science Sunday: The Obesity Debate

The rule is, jam tomorrow and jam yesterday -- but never jam today.

-- THE WHITE QUEEN

If dealing with childhood obesity were simply a matter of diet and will power, there probably would not be an epidemic of grossly overweight Americans who cost us billions of dollars a year because of heart disease, diabetes and the other maladies that their conditions spawn.

It is not that simple, of course, and the societal, psychological and medical issues that swirl around really overweight people have made the debate kicked off by a plan spearheaded by Michelle Obama to tackle childhood obesity unusually rancorous although no one -- not even the most extreme denialists -- consider obese children to be a good thing.

The rancor is, in large part, because the PC Police are upset that fat kids will feel bad about their body image, hence screed like this from a blogger who barred me from her comments section because I argued that growing healthier kids was a trifle more important than coddling them.

This is the backdrop to the debate:

Some 16 percent of children (over 9 million) 6-19 years old are overweight or obese -- a number that has tripled since 1980, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In addition, another 15 percent are considered at risk of becoming overweight, while overweight adolescents have a 70 percent chance of becoming overweight or obese adults. This increases to 80 percent if one or more parent is overweight or obese.

Although there are some genetic and hormonal causes of childhood obesity, most excess weight is caused by kids eating too much and exercising too little. This sort of comes naturally in that children, unlike adults, need extra nutrients and calories to fuel their growth and development. So if they consume the calories needed for daily activities, growth and metabolism, they add pounds in proportion to their growth. But children who eat more calories than needed gain weight beyond what's required to support their growing bodies.

While diet is the major cause of obesity, there are a variety of risk factors that in combination pretty much guarantee that a child will become obese. These include inactivity, emotional problems, family problems, socioeconomic issues, and yes, genetics.

* * * * *

As Ezra Klein notes, obesity is much more structural than it is personal. In other words, it is predictable in that it disproportionally afflicts poor communities with lousy food and transportation options, as well as public-safety issues.

But Marc Ambinder, who underwent bariatric surgery in an effort to conquer his weight problem, paints the problem with a bigger brush: "This jumble of circumstances and effects is what Thomas Frieden means when he says that just being an American can naturally lead you to be obese: Obesity is an almost inevitable consequence of living with our cultural norms, our history of agricultural production and subsidies, our long-standing socioeconomic inequalities, and the impact of technology on our behavior and bodies. Against this formidable dynamic, America has erected two lines of defense: Name-calling and hectoring about diet and exercise."

I myself don't see much chance of the White House's anti-childhood obesity initiative succeeding in any substantive way.

There are too many poor people, too many people telling people it's okay to be obese, too little will power, too many cheap junk foods, too few role models, and too much unscrupulous advertising involving miracle diets.

Another Perfectly Awful Week For Obama

I have to ask once again: Can things get any worse for the Kenyan socialist prezdent with the funny name and dubious birth certificate?

First he signs into law the biggest fix to the social safety net in 45 years. Then the scoundrels who have been ripping off the student loan system for years are banished from the temple, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu is told where he can stick his settlements, a strategic arms reduction treaty with Russia is finalized, the obdurate GOP is given the middle finger as long overdue recess appointments are made, stocks and growth indicators continue to rise, President Karzai is given an earful and American troops a well-deserved pat on the back in a brief visit to Afghanistan.

Then the dude has the temerity to announce that his administration is going to treat walking and biking as equally important transportation options as driving in a car, that gays and lesbians will be able to visit loved ones in hospitals and exert power of attorney, and Goldman Sachs and the top guns at Blackwater will be made accountable for its criminality. Oh, and he chaired an international summit on securing nuclear material that might be converted to use as weapons.

Meanwhile, the Tea Partiers, his most vocal opponents this side of Mitch McConnell, are further revealed to be overwhelmingly white, male and affluent. They want government off their backs but love their Social Security and Medicare. Can you say whiny and privileged?

The disappointments just keep coming for poor Obama, don't they?

Agence France Press photograph

Cartoon du Jour

Don Wright/Miami Herald

The Chutzpah Of Goldman Sachs

So the feds are suing Goldman Sachs for securities fraud, specifically for creating a financial instrument that enabled the giant bank and select clients to bet against the housing market, yielding huge profits all around when the housing bubble broke.

Goldman responded to the lawsuit by stating that the accusations are "completely unfounded in law and fact" The firm said it would "vigorously contest them and defend the firm and its reputation."

Itty Bitty Titty Watch

Kate Hudson goes from an A cup to a B. World doesn't end.

Daryl F. Gates (1926-2010)

MORE HERE.
Los Angeles Times photograph

Beautiful Photograph du Jour

BAMBOO GRAFFITI
By Mark Boyle

Stéphane Grappelli: An Appreciation

(ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN DECEMBER 2007)

There is no more emotionally evocative musical instrument for me than the violin and no more emotionally evocative violinist than Stéphane Grappelli.

The French jazz virtuoso is best known as co-founder of the Quintette du Hot Club de France, the first and most famous of the string jazz bands, with guitarist Django Reinhardt, but his most outstanding and rewarding work came later during a long career as a soloist.

The self-taught Grappelli had a distinctive style that mixed tender lyricism, seemingly effortless swinging and hard-edged riffing with extraordinary harmonics. I was fortunate to see him perform in 1976 when he was 68 years old but played like he was half that age. He performed until shortly before his death in December 1997 at the ripe old age of 89.

* * * * *

Playing jazz violin is especially challenging and bears only passing resemblance technically to folk and classical styles. The musician must adhere to the melody but also improvise solos while interacting with the rest of the band. Jazz violinists also need to play in the higher positions and imbue the music with a rich tone so that their sound doesn't get lost when they solo or get drowned out in ensemble play.

Grappelli did these things as well, and some would argue even better, than other jazz violin greats. These include Joe Ventui, Stuff Smith, Sven Asmussen (who also played jazz cello) and Eddie South, and later with Jean-Luc Ponty, whose great but hard to find Violin Summit collaboration with Grappelli in 1966 is a great crash course in jazz violin styles for the uninitiated.

After studying at the Paris Conservetoire in the mid-1920s Grappelli began busking in Paris restaurants and courtyards playing polkas and waltzes. He also played piano in a silent movie theater, later recalling:

"In the cinema, I had to play Mozart principally but was allowed some Gershwin in funny films. Then I discovered jazz and my vocation and kissed Amadeus goodbye."

Grappelli went on to play piano in a dance band, and it wasn't until he met Reinhardt that he became serious about playing jazz violin. Although the two could hardly have been less similar -- Grappelli was educated and urbane and Reinhardt a freewheeling gypsy -- the two had a powerful musical rapport which led to the formation of the Hot Club in 1933.

The quintet was an immediate success, but in 1939 violinist and guitarist were separated by World War II, which Grappelli spent in London and Reinhardt in Paris. They were reunited after the war, but Reinhardt had pretty much lost his edge and was to die in 1953. Grappelli's career went into eclipse until the 1970s when he was discovered by a new generation of jazz fans and embarked on a solo career.

Grappelli jammed with a Who's Who of great musicians and appeared on hundreds of recordings. Collaborators included jazz pianists Oscar Peterson and Claude Bolling, classical violinists L. Subramaniam and Yehudi Menuhin, vibraphonist Gary Burton, pop singer-songwriter Paul Simon and mandolin player David Grisman.

Grappelli once said of improvisation:

"It is a mystery. You can write a book about it, but by the end no one still knows what it is. When I improvise and I'm in good form, I'm like somebody half sleeping. I even forget that there are people in front of me. Great improvisers are like priests, they are thinking only of their God."

Cartoon du Jour

Pat Oliphant/Universal Press Syndicate