Willard Mitt Romney was a bishop, a lay pastor in his church, something he brings up to discuss abortion on the campaign trail. For being a Mormon missionary, he received a deferment from military service during the Vietnam War.
"Close them. Turn 'em off. Even some you like," he said. "You might say, 'I like the National Endowment for the Arts.' I do," Romney said. "I like PBS. We subsidize PBS. Look, I'm going to stop that. I'm going to say that PBS is going to have to have advertisement."
"We're not going to kill Big Bird," Romney said. "But Big Bird is going to have advertisements. Alright?"
Alright? Because we all agree that educating children always goes so much better with advertisements? Not alright, Willard.
Mitt's too old to have watched Sesame Street as a kid. In fact, electing him would turn back the leadership of our country a generation, to the Clinton/Bush generation. So maybe he just doesn't get it because, like so much else, he's above it by age and wealth.
Sometimes I wonder if Mitt is not just embarked upon the greatest single performance art piece of our times. If he can flip-flop so easily, if he is indeed the hollow man everyone believes he is, if he's say or do anything to get elected and we're not getting real principles, and if enough people understand that but vote for him anyway hoping the massive tea-pandering is with a wink, then he's doing a better act than Stephen Colbert or Sasha Baron Cohen.
If not, then he's just kind of douchy.
If you want to see his whole pander, here you go:
And watching this clip, as always with Willard, I find it difficult to believe American will vote to see this man representing America on TV for the next four years.
Fascinating chain of events starting on Friday when a police officer blanketed a row of sitting protesters on the University of California Davis campus with military-grade pepper spray. This video has now been viewed over a million times -- the spraying is near the start:
It's not quite Kent State -- no students were shot to death -- but appalling in its own right. These were peaceful protesters, not throwing rocks or threatening anybody, and the now famous Officer John Pike chose to douse them like roaches. No doubt the students who endured this silently are heroes to their classmates now.
Even move compelling is this video from later the next night, when the Chancellor who is responsible for putting the police on this, Linda Katehi, does what is essentially a perp walk past silent students. She had been in the administrative building for a meeting, this after various faculty called for her resignation, and evidently claimed the students outside were preventing her from leaving. In response, the organizers promised her safe passage and, as you can see in this video, called upon the protesting students for peace:
The walk of shame. Katehi has put out a statement today that's rather different from the day before, acknowledging what she's learned of the atrocious police action and promising some sort of change.
I wonder if she'll be able to keep her job, but it will only be by showing total growth and bending to the will of the people. If so, I believe she may become a model for others.
If not, she stands condemned with the 1% and their enablers.
The protests convulsed half a dozen countries across the Middle East on Wednesday, with tens of thousands of people turning out in Bahrain to challenge the monarchy, a sixth day of running street battles in Yemen, continued strikes over long-suppressed grievances in Egypt and a demonstrator’s funeral in Iran turning into a brief tug of war between the government and its opponents.
Even in heavily policed Libya, pockets of dissent emerged in the main square of Benghazi, with people calling for an end to the 41-year rule of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi. Iraq, accustomed to sectarian conflict, got a dose of something new: a fiery protest in the eastern city of Kut over unemployment, sporadic electricity and government corruption. And the protesters in Bahrain were confronted Thursday morning by riot police officers who rushed into the main square in Manama firing tear gas and concussion grenades.
Behind closed doors, Scott Walker, the Republican who has been governor for about six weeks, calmly described his intent to forge ahead with the plans that had set off the uprising: He wants to require public workers to pay more for their health insurance and pensions, effectively cutting the take-home pay of many by around 7 percent.
He also wants to weaken most public-sector unions by sharply curtailing their collective bargaining rights, limiting talks to the subject of basic wages.
...
Here, in a state with a long history of powerful unions, Mr. Walker’s plan was upending life in the capital city.
Madison schools were closed on Wednesday after many employees called in sick to help lobby. Thousands of teachers, state workers and students filled a square around the Capitol, chanting “kill the bill” and waving signs (some likening Mr. Walker to a dictator and demanding his recall).
And a hearing on the issue that had started at 10 a.m. Tuesday ran through the night and into Wednesday afternoon, as protesters with sleeping bags camped out near the Capitol’s rotunda and bleary-eyed lawmakers gulped coffee from paper cups.
Protesters shared stories of their families’ deep history in unions, people struggling to pay their mortgages, workers considering moving away, switching careers, retiring.
Kim Hoffman, a middle school music teacher, said she and her husband, also a teacher, would lose $1,200 a month under the plan — too deep a cut to manage.
“I love teaching, but I’d have to start looking for another job, period,” she said.
While union leaders here set up makeshift offices in the Capitol, distributing fliers and planning vigils and “teach-outs,” national officials from more than a dozen unions pledged millions of dollars, as well as phone banks and volunteers, to block such efforts in Wisconsin and elsewhere.
We'll see how the new crop of GOP leaders at the state level fare with their plans, who amongst them and their legislators blink...and at the ballot box in 2012, when there will be a Dem at the top of the ticket who gets a higher percentage of party voters showing up than without him in 2010.
Consider: in 1928 the richest 1 percent of Americans received 23.9 percent of the nation's total income. After that, the share going to the richest 1 percent steadily declined. New Deal reforms, followed by World War II, the GI Bill and the Great Society expanded the circle of prosperity. By the late 1970s the top 1 percent raked in only 8 to 9 percent of America's total annual income. But after that, inequality began to widen again, and income reconcentrated at the top. By 2007 the richest 1 percent were back to where they were in 1928—with 23.5 percent of the total.
Each of America's two biggest economic crashes occurred in the year immediately following these twin peaks—in 1929 and 2008. This is no mere coincidence. When most of the gains from economic growth go to a small sliver of Americans at the top, the rest don't have enough purchasing power to buy what the economy is capable of producing. America's median wage, adjusted for inflation, has barely budged for decades. Between 2000 and 2007 it actually dropped. Under these circumstances the only way the middle class can boost its purchasing power is to borrow, as it did with gusto. As housing prices rose, Americans turned their homes into ATMs. But such borrowing has its limits. When the debt bubble finally burst, vast numbers of people couldn't pay their bills, and banks couldn't collect.
So who's on the side of the middle class? Not Sen. Mike Pence (R-IN):
"Republicans, me included, have supported numerous extensions of unemployment benefits and we're anxious to do so again," the Indiana Republican told interviewer Chris Wallace on "Fox News Sunday." "The deficit this year is a trillion dollars for the second year in a row ... The American people have had it with runaway federal spending, deficits and debt, and they want to see men and women in Washington, D.C. make the hard choices."
After all, Pence is making his Party's hard choices like this:
"The reality is that as you study -- when President Kennedy cut marginal tax rates, when Ronald Reagan cut marginal tax rates, when President Bush imposed those tax cuts, they actually generated economic growth, they expand the economy, they expand tax revenue," Pence said. "The point is we've got to get this economy moving again and we can't go back to the tax-and-spend policies of the Democrats or the tax-cut-and-spend policies of the prior administration."
Study? As in studying the catastrophic failure of Bush's tax cuts on the rich?
Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) explained on Wallace's show last week that "you do need to offset the cost of increased spending, and that's what Republicans object to. But you should never have to offset cost of a deliberate decision to reduce tax rates on Americans."
On the issue of unemployment benefits, of course we Republicans in the Senate under the leadership of Mitch McConnell and Jon Kyl who’s doing a fantastic job, we want to extend unemployment benefits, but we want them paid for, because there are so many things that the Democrats lard onto it, whether it be for hiring new teachers or other programs, so they keep adding onto it to force us to vote yes.
Those darn teachers! That's pork to McCain, money better spent elsewhere:
I would tell the corporations which are very important, like Intel and Raytheon and others in our state, we’ll cut the corporate tax rates so that you won’t have to send jobs overseas. We’ll continue… I’ll continue to support the military and our bases and the men and women who are there and the thousands of employees, including our people over in Mesa that make the Apache helicopter and down at Raytheon that make these wonderful missiles and Intel that’s doing such a great job in employing so many people that I’ve supported for so many years.
No wonder McCain wants open-ended military commitments across the board. Otherwise, too much of that military funding would go not for "wonderful missiles" (oxymoron?) but for keeping schools like those here in SoCal from slashing teachers and loading up classrooms.
I guess you need that military money to keep those corporate leaders' kids in private school.
As tough as it was to forgo making the subject of this post the sucker-born-every-minute revelation that the Teabaggers of 2009 spent most of their political donations supporting -- what else but -- the very astroturfing, Dick Armey-led GOP organization that created them (and it appears to be a legal racket!), and as much as I wanted to tout, to my doubting friends on the left, that President Obama is moving to curb the very federal secrets policy that the secrecy-fetishizing Cheney (Bush) Administration overly strengthened, there's one story that just rises...or, shall I say, floats above the rest.
Not much of a success when first released, this movie has grown in stature over the years, mainly due to how it increases in funniness over repeated viewings. (And as we know, most comedies do the reverse, disposable.) As a little background on the cult, from Wikipedia:
Steve Palopoli wrote about the film's emerging cult status in July 2002.[57] He first realized that the film had a cult following when he attended a midnight screening in 2000 at the New Beverly Cinema in L.A. Palopoli and witnessed people quoting dialogue from the film to each other.[58] Soon after the article appeared, the programmer for local midnight film series in Santa Cruz decided to screen The Big Lebowski and on the first weekend they had to turn away several hundred people. The theater held the film over for six weeks which had never happened before.[59]
An annual festival, the Lebowski Fest, began in Louisville, Kentucky, United States in 2002 with 150 fans showing up, and has since expanded to several other cities.[60] The Festival's main event each year is a night of unlimited bowling with various contests including costume, trivia, hardest- and farthest-traveled contests. Held over a weekend, events typically include a pre-fest party with bands the night before the bowling event as well as a day-long outdoor party with bands, vendor booths and games. Various celebrities from the film have even attended some of the events, including Jeff Bridges who attended the Los Angeles event.[60] The British equivalent, inspired by Lebowski Fest, is known as The Dude Abides and is held in London.[61]
Dudeism, an online religion devoted largely to spreading the philosophy and lifestyle of the movie's main character was founded in 2005. Also known as The Church of the Latter-Day Dude, the organization has ordained over 50,000[62] "Dudeist Priests" all over the world via its website.
Info on the creation of this fine new scholarly tome:
Most of the essays in “The Year’s Work in Lebowski Studies” began as papers presented at the 2006 Lebowski Fest in Louisville. Working at an unhurried, Dude-like crawl, it took the editors three years to wrap these papers up and usher them into print.
“When we first put out a call for papers, we received about 200 proposals,” said Mr. Comentale, an associate professor of English at Indiana University, Bloomington, whose previous books include “Modernism, Cultural Production and the British Avant-Garde” and “T. E. Hulme and the Question of Modernism.”
The essays sound pretty great, both fun and illuminating, and the influence of Jeff Bridges' "Dude" are growing with the college students of today:
In another of this book’s essays, “Professor Dude: An Inquiry Into the Appeal of His Dudeness for Contemporary College Students,” a bearded, longhaired and rather Dude-like associate professor of English at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Va., named Richard Gaughran asks this question about his students: “What is it that they see in the Dude that they find so desirable?”
One of Mr. Gaughran’s students came up with this summary, and it’s somehow appropriate for an end-of-the-year reckoning: “He doesn’t stand for what everybody thinks he should stand for, but he has his values. He just does it. He lives in a very disjointed society, but he’s gonna take things as they come, he’s gonna care about his friends, he’s gonna go to somebody’s recital, and that’s it. That’s how you respond.”
I've always said that the strongest thing in the world is a philosophy, and in the post-Sam Spade/Philip Marlowe world, that pretty much means a code. It's not about governments or ideologies, it's how you see the big picture and apply it to the small. Maybe that's best represented by an academic collection. Or maybe by a 2010 wall calendar.
In any case, when they hand Jeff Bridges the statuette for Best Actor at this next Oscars ceremony, it may say it's for Crazy Heart but we'll know the truth. Sure, there's a lifetime achievement aspect. And sure, it looks like a potentially career-best performance for this new movie, but in our heart-of-hearts, for all of us rooting everso hard for him out here in Lebowskiland, it'll be The Dude that we'll be cheering for.
For as well all know, when all is said and done, the Dude abides.
As The Stranger says, it's good knowin' he's out there.
The class will be taught by sociology professor William J. Wilson, one of the best-known African American history professors in the country, who has made no secret of the fact that he is a huge fan of the show.
"I do not hesitate to say that it has done more to enhance our understanding of the challenges of urban life and the problems of urban inequality, more than any other media event or scholarly publication," Wilson told the audience before poking fun at himself, "including studies by social scientitsts."
Nothin' new, though, per Associate Professor Jason Mittell at Middlebury College:
Mittell treats The Wireas he should, in the same league as the novels of Dostoevsky or drama of Shakespeare, at five episodes a week. And there's word of a similar course at Dartmouth.
Yep, best show cop show ever.
And arguably the finest fictional television series yet produced.
The newest school in California's public university system is UC Merced, with less students that some high schools (somewhere in the vicinity of 2000) and set in the agricultural heartland of our state, which gets a lot less press and attention than the glittering cities of the coast. The students of Merced are culturally diverse and, we now, know, innovative and determined, as they launched their wildly successful "Dear Michelle" campaign to get our nation's new First Lady to deliver her first commencement address to their school.
The students sent 900 valentines to Michelle on Valentine's Day, and she responded by sending this nascent school and small farming town into the stratosphere on Saturday with her landmark address:
"Why did I chose the University of California Merced to deliver my first commencement speech as first lady? Well, let me tell you something, the answer is simple. You inspired me. You touched me," Obama said, referring to the unusual campaign of valentines, letters and videos the students produced in inviting her to speak. "There are few things that are more rewarding than to watch young people recognize they have the power to make their dreams come true. And you did just that."
The school is now on the map, no longer a footnote to the UC system, sure to attract more terrific students. These 350 members of the inaugural class received a message of service from Ms. Obama:
"As the students who helped build this school, I ask you, make your legacy a lasting one," Mrs. Obama told the graduates as an enthusiastic crowd of students, family members, dignitaries, university personnel, community members and other well-wishers looked on.
"Dream big, think broadly about your life and please make giving back to your community a part of that vision," she said. "Take the same hope and optimism, the hard work and tenacity that brought you to this point, and carry that with you for the rest of your life in whatever you choose to do."
In keeping with the best of last year's Obama Presidential campaign, it's a story to bring a tear to the eye, and remind us that we're living in a very special age, one that I can only pray lasts a full eight years.
Spent the day at the MI6 Conference in San Francisco, where the first big speaker of the morning was Nicholas Negroponte, who was amazing as he described his One Laptop per Child worldwide program, phenomenal, inspiring stuff.
He described how they have all these $35,000 grants that you can fund, or your group or your company, and these young Americans go into the most remote reaches of the world with solar and handcrank-powered indestructible little PCs. It's the brightest thing in the house in places where there's no electricity. The kids are learning directly, teaching their parents to read on it. They're creating their own PC hospitals where they service the machines themselves, thanks to the very inexpensive, modular design.
Negroponte wanted it to be like opening the hood of an old VW, where you could see what was wrong even if you didn't know engines. There's a display part that he said display makers never like to make removable, since it's the part that usually breaks but only costs fifty cents to make. The display makers prefer for you to buy a whole new screen. Negroponte got the design he wanted.
Each of the PCs has these "ears" that fold up, stubby colorful antenna on either side, so the software creates local wireless web networks instantly. So in these villages, if just one kid on the network has an Internet connection, every kid is on the Internet.
It's the vision of peace, that we find our tribal, pre-national connections to each other, only this is so much more sophisticated, unprecedented in human history. The biggest webs of social connectivity in human history.
O.k., maybe it isn't yet time to stop McNaming John. Kind of like McDonalds. Does that make Sarah Palin the Hamburgler?
While the 4+/- margin of error may make this CBS/NY Times poll more like Obama 49% and McCain 41%, but the fact that the morning of the final Presidential debate has the candidates at 53%-39% must be troubling for the McCain camp. It's a threshold you don't want to cross, even in an outlier. It's something you don't want bolstered with most post-debate polls. Crossing below the 40% mark, that's Bush Country.
While the 100% negative as spend this past week polls as one reason for the drop in McCain support, clearly the biggest political mistake of this political cycle was his selection of running mate. Sarah Palin has single-handedly flipped Florida for Obama. She scares old people, especially elderly Jews.
Per Adam Nagourney, Obama eased voter doubt past the tipping point in the two debates. McCain isn't going to beat him by being nice or feisty or aggressive tonight. The die is cast. Even if he comes in jovial it'll read as erratic.
But we're also seeing the beginning of the organizational tsunami. Obama has an amazing early voting effort, which has him ahead in the pre-election day vote in New Mexico by 23 points and in Ohio by 18 points -- votes already cast.
My own experience: I volunteered for phone banking yesterday at the well-situated Democratic HQ here on Wilshire and 9th in Santa Monica. So well-organized, with some key people (mainly young women) making things work, while volunteers of all ages put in time.
The 13-year-old girl next to me got called a "dumbass" on one call, and I got one 80-year-old McCain supporter but he was respectful, and a few enthused Obama supporters. One guy told me he's voting for Obama because "McCain's too old and Palin's a dipshit!" Right on.
Mostly it was marking down "NH" for not home, but they have these call sheets with UPC's for each of the 18 targets on the list, along with age and registration. When you finish the sheets they go right to the data entry team. I used a landline, but there was one guy just trafficking cellphones (leave your driver's license) and swapping batteries. The core focus of these calls to Nevada is early voting, I'm assuming for the next few weeks. I'm guessing there's a horizon (maybe not this election) where a campaign wins before Election Day even begins. I'm betting the momentum of cast votes will almost always help whoever is ahead -- winners are magnetic, not so much perceived losers.
I got one mom on the phone who was happy to get the early voting info for her and her husband -- that's a phone number that reaches the Nevada campaign to tell you early voting places and even provides a ride(!) -- as well as absentee ballot info for her son in college back in Boston. The old (like, 78) woman next to me (and her 80+ year-old husband) was hilarious. She was a Hillary supporter who thought she'd vote Obama but not volunteer -- she and her husband both phonebanked for Kerry and were unhappy with the result -- until Sarah Palin came along! She started going to websites debunking the anti-Obama emails her friends were sending her and has grown to really like the guy.
At the other end of the age spectrum, the organizers told me that one of their very best callers is just 10-years-old.
There's a buzz going on coast-to-coast now, and Zack Exley lays it all out on HuffPo:
The "New Organizers" have succeeded in building what many netroots-oriented campaigners have been dreaming about for a decade. Other recent attempts have failed because they were either so "top-down" and/or poorly-managed that they choked volunteer leadership and enthusiasm; or because they were so dogmatically fixated on pure peer-to-peer or "bottom-up" organizing that they rejected basic management, accountability and planning. The architects and builders of the Obama field campaign, on the other hand, have undogmatically mixed timeless traditions and discipline of good organizing with new technologies of decentralization and self-organization.
Win or lose, "The New Organizers" have already transformed thousands of communities—and revolutionized the way organizing itself will be understood and practiced for at least the next generation...This article focuses on the field program's innovative "neighborhood team" structure and the philosophy of volunteer management underlying it that is best summarized by the field campaign's ubiquitous motto: "Respect. Empower. Include."
I expect the Obama 2008 Campaign, from the first strategic plan Barack presented to Michelle in order to get her approval to run two years ago through the groundbreaking GOTV effort on Election Day, will be taught not only in political science classes but also business schools for the next 25-50 years.
And I recommend participating -- less than three weeks left to volunteer to be a part of making history.
Previously I've written about how, after his Presidency is over, George W. Bush will become a shunned person, someone who people do not want to be seen with just as poets routinely reject First Lady Laura Bush's invitations to the White House since the Iraq War began. As more and more truth about this dark Administration comes out, the more contagion the participants will seem.
Yesterday I wrote about former Bush Chief of Staff Andrew Card getting booed at UMass where he was receiving an honorary degree. However, I didn't realize how little justice the print news reporting did to the situation.
You have to see this video to understand exactly how overwhelming this protest was. We're talking possibly more than 50% of the students wearing Ghostbuster-style anti-Card stickers, then the overwhelming two minute-long booing when his name is announced, accompanied by a massive number of yellow anti-Card signs being held up and, most damning of all, a huge anti-Card protest on the very stage where he is sitting.
I mean, protesters with the yellow cards on that stage behind him, and a long "CARD, NO HONOR, NO DEGREE" banner unfurled behind the dais speaker, right in front of the Bushman himself.
