I started this morning deep in dream-shadow.  I woke up trying to detangle the last shreds of REM-sleep from reality.  In the dream I was describing my family to someone.  I had gotten to my uncle, and described him as having four sons.  I named his second oldest grandchild as his oldest, and put her age as significantly lower than it is, and woke up with a strong sense of wrongness.

My first thought was “That’s not right!  George doesn’t have four sons, he has two!”

In reality, George has three.

Dreams do that to me sometimes.

Trying to regain my online presence (obviously I’ve fallen off the net somewhat).  I’m going to make more of an effort to at least occasionally read LJ, and am considering starting a Facebook account, because I’ve been getting lots of invites recently from people I haven’t seen in ages.  I’m weeks behind in e-mail.  If you REALLY need to get hold of me, phone.   If you really need to get hold of me and don’t have my number, either of the other authors on this blog can ‘ping’ me for you.

Will try to do better at being in touch.

I’ve made some various comments elsewhere about the arrest of Dr. Gates, a Harvard professor and nationally-recognized expert in race relations in the U.S.  Everybody has their own opinions on this matter, a lot of it depending on who you believe.  (Fox Noise, as an example, has made their bias pretty clear – as per fucking usual.)

Most are saying that both parties overreacted, which seems safe enough to say.  The thing that I’m not hearing from anyone is that of course, parties to such emotionally loaded situations do overreact – they’re just human beings, after all, and they have human feelings.  It’s natural for a police officer investigating a possible burglary to be on edge; it’s natural for a homeowner to feel anger and fear when challenged as a suspect in his own home.  And because these situations do happen, and because it’s not reasonable to expect people in those situations to deal with it as if they were emotionless aliens from the planet Vulcan, we have rules and laws to govern such interactions.

Let’s assume for the moment that the officer was correct when he said that Dr. Gates was unreasonable, unwilling to listen, and creating a disturbance of some variety when he mouthed off.  On that basis, the officer charged Dr. Gates with disorderly conduct; that is the law that was applied in this case.

A quick perusal of the definition of disorderly conduct shows that the law is pretty much a catch-all, designed to allow a police officer to put an end to a disturbance of the peace by making an arrest.  It’s ill-defined, but considered a part of the police officer’s arsenal of options that’s beyond reproach; it’s practically never challenged on a per se basis.  It is, however, limited in all cases, and one of the more common limits is that practically every single written application of the law contains the phrases “in public” or “upon the property of another”.  In other words, it can’t be used on you in your own home (unless you are creating enough of a disturbance that it’s affecting the public, which has never been alleged in this case, to my knowledge).

Now let’s keep something in mind.  Dr. Gates had already produced identification proving that this was his house.  At that point, there’s no burglary.  (Officer Crowley, I believe his name is, at one point in an interview claimed that he had no reason to believe that others may not have been in the house at the time committing a burglary, but somehow he forgot about “the burglars” after arresting Dr. Gates, so it’s not likely this was a serious concern on his part.)  The officer has no reason to stay.  And yet, something happened in between the time that the identity was established and the arrest was made that, in the opinion of Officer Crowley, caused a law to be broken – a law that was pretty much written not to be applied in that situation.

For some reason, that question has not been put to the officer, nor has his description of events covered it.  It wasn’t assault, because Dr. Gates wasn’t charged with that.  The officer hasn’t said he felt threatened.  Dr. Gates recounted specific things that he said, including asking for the officer’s name and badge number, and asking if he was being interrogated because he was a “black man in America”.  No one has disputed either of these things, and a quick perusal of the books doesn’t reveal those specific statements as crimes.  The main problem seems to be that Dr. Gates was yelling at Officer Crowley – and Officer Crowley just didn’t like it very much.  The arrest was made on that basis.

Was it because Dr. Gates is a “black man in America”, and Officer Crowley is white?  Did that have something to do with it?  It’s not at all clear.  It can’t be proven or disproven at this point.

There are a few personal observations which I can bring into it, however.

I’ve heard at least two people claim that Dr. Gates was in the wrong.  One of them, a white man, began by describing the black Harvard professor as “uppity”.  People like that should be called on their bullshit before any serious debate is attempted.  A second, a black man, explained it away simply as this: if you yell at a cop, he’s going to arrest you – period.  That’s a valid point.  Unfortunately, the point may be that we are already living in a police state – a state where disagreement with a police officer, regardless of any other details involved, may be punished as a crime.

I have been in situations where police willfully disregarded laws to get people off the street – namely, anti-war marches.  The strategy is known: corral known figures in the movement early on, before the march starts; charge them with anything that’s remotely close.  If you can’t stretch the law that far, use moles and provocateurs.  When they insist on showing up to march anyway, arrest everyone in a radius for “disturbing the peace” or “resisting arrest” or “disorderly”.  The charges won’t stick, but they aren’t meant to – they’re just meant to detain you and keep you from doing what you came for.  The City Council will call the Police Chief to the floor in about three weeks and tell him how naughty he is for doing that, and he goes back to his office, and he does it again the next time.  It’s a known and accepted practice in practically every city police department around the globe.

If I had to hazard a guess, I’d say that’s what happened here: Officer Crowley just reached into the books, plunked his finger down, and figured Dr. Gates was guilty of that just to get him to shut up.  That’s illegal, by the way, just as much as it is when they do it to peaceful protesters…but of course, if your basis for what’s illegal is defined as “disagreeing with me”, then there’s little you don’t feel empowered to do.

Dr. Gates does have one other point: in the past, and to this day in some areas, tactics such as these were employed disproportionately against blacks, particularly black men, to reinforce their “place” in white-led society.  It was, and is, profiling.  Yes, I’m aware that everyone profiles, and I’m aware that much of modern law enforcement relies on it.  There is a right way to do it and a wrong way.  The way it has been done against black men in the past is the wrong way, and if it was done here, that is also wrong.

I will say I used to have a great deal of respect for the police, and still do – for certain examples of the breed.  For the most part, I don’t usually trust them; I don’t think they necessarily have the interests of all the public in mind as an organization.  As a member of the public, I’ve seen too many examples to the contrary, up to and including those who are simply criminals with badges so they can’t be (easily) arrested.

I’m aware they have a difficult job and are underpaid – frankly, I think one way to change things would be to increase the pay of police officers across the board.  Make the job attract the best and brightest, who’ll have a better idea how to handle the public.  (I’ve seen first-hand examples of those who’ve joined that are far below this standard; many failed in other jobs before joining.)

Whatever the deal, we need to be clear that the standard being applied in this case – directly, by the officer and by other officers around the country – cannot stand.  Law officers must carry out the law – not a code of vendetta underscored by a thin blue line.

and I was able to find the bookmark I knew I put somewhere…

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/??

- deadbytes

Wrote this a week or two ago, but never finished it.  May as well post what I have while it’s relevant and finish it later…or perhaps even provoke some commenters into doing it for me.

…nah, that’ll never happen.

Was reading yesterday in Rolling Stone about the state of the Republican Party post-2008.  It’s a lovely bit of schadenfreude, but I was tinged with a bit of sadness and frustration about the whole thing – and not because a bunch of guys who I think should dry up and blow away politically elicit any sympathy from me.

Briefly, in case you’ve been hiding under a rock, the GOP is in a grand clash right now between the ideologically pure segment (Cheney, Limbaugh, Sanford, Gingrich, Grover Norquist, et al.) and the old-time politicos (Lindsey Graham, Charlie Crist, Colin Powell, et al.) over the future direction of the party.  The moderates, for what appear to be mostly practical reasons, want to back off on some of the more strident bits of ideology and try to appeal to the former “Reagan Democrats” (who may or may not be a fictional construct; more on that a different time).  The purists want to keep dragging the party to the right, as they’ve done with the entire country since Reagan, and, earlier, Goldwater.

The sad part about this is that never has there been a better, more apt, more shining example of a need for electoral reform than this intra-party ideological struggle, and yet no one is looking at – sorry, but I have to use it – the elephant in the room.  In any sane democratic system, this battle wouldn’t be fought out in the wonkish margins of the Times’ editorial pages (be it the NY or DC) – the two sides would simply break off, post different candidates, and decide at the ballot box.  But because of the two-party system, that obvious solution can’t be done.

The U.S. electoral system is an artificial, undemocratic construct designed to concentrate power away from the people.  The mechanism isn’t any sinister conspiracy; it’s pure and simple mathematics.  When you go with single-seat, winner-take-all races, the math works against you having any more than two choices at a time.  So all the important, devil-in-the-details decisions are made away from the public eye, inside the parties or inside associated think tanks, and the people get to choose between the two most bland, TV-friendly figureheads who champion them.  The important minority voices within each are shouted down and weeded out before you get to choose; any competing alliances they could form with each other are scuttled before they can cause any meaningful change.

There are two basic solutions to this: change the math, or exploit it.  Everyone else did the former; we did the latter.  Most of the Congressional races now, for example, aren’t “races” in any sense; they’re more like the patsy, for-show elections that take place in authoritarian countries.  A Democrat, for example, will win in my district in 2010.  It’s been gerrymandered to take place.  Any Republicans in my district will never, ever have any representation in the House.  The system is broken enough that essentially special gerrymandering had to be introduced so that you could have any – any! – blacks or Latinos elected, much less any in proportion to their actual size in the population.

In the Presidental ballot, it’s even worse, thanks to the Electoral College.  If you are a Democrat in Texas – and there are literally millions of them – it is likely that you will never in your lifetime cast a vote that matters for a President.  Same thing if you are a Republican living in Massachusetts.

The thing is, changing the math is easy.  Proportional representation is intuitive to anyone: 30% of the people should get you 30% of the representatives.  If the legislature is split such that no one has an absolute majority – which makes sense, given that you’re trying to represent 300 million people! – then you can make the deals necessary to govern right there in the legislature itself, where it’s supposed to happen in a democracy.  Gingrich might only get 25% of the people for his freaky little glee club, but that’s better than the 0% he’s going to get when his ideas get shelved by the moderates of the GOP (assuming that’s the way it actually goes).

There are many, many problems when we speak about race, gender, religion, and minority/majority in this country, and they can be committed on both sides of the equation.

At this point, I should stop and allow that sentence to percolate.  It is, I fear, more profound than it should be.  To say that people are fallible no matter who they are should not be a statement of any insight whatsoever…and yet, there are some who refuse to acknowledge it because of who they are, or the characteristics they exhibit, or the group to which they belong.

Too often, the dialogue needed in order to address and eliminate bigotry and the various -isms that spring from it becomes a monologue – or worse, a sermon.  A one-way street between those who are the sole repositories of wisdom, and those who are unenlightened, whose opinions and stories and lives are of no consequence to those who hold the truth-with-a-capital-T.  Privilege, or the lack thereof, does not and should not have any bearing on knowledge and wisdom and its exercise in solving problems.  One can listen and acknowledge and gain wisdom from any vantage point; one’s group should not be the defining factor.  All men are not rapists.  All whites are not elitists.  All blacks are not militant.  And so on.

To those earnestly seeking an end to the inequalities of society, this shouldn’t be any kind of impediment.  Arguing from a position of strength – basing opinions on facts, allowing evidence to adjust one’s views, working together towards solutions rather than engaging in ad hominem – does not require making yourself and your kind infallible while the “others” are irredeemable.  There can be multiple solutions to a problem, all borne of sincere efforts to understand and fix things.  Apologies and courtesies can be strong.

I’m going to ask that we all please think carefully in these situations – not because I am so very profound, but because we really need to solve some things in this country once and for all…and we can’t do it without clear thought.

Granted the Orioles are not yet a “good” team, but there is some hope on the horizon, in the form of some refreshing young talent.  There is also the shining example of exactly how bad it can really get, and it is very conveniently located just down the road from us in a town which has always been smug about its supposed superiority to Baltimore.  It is therapy and schadenfreude all in one package, and its name is the Washington Nationals.

Exactly how bad it really is in the city where I now work, as opposed to my “home” city of Baltimore, was brought home in no uncertain terms today.  The Examiner, a franchised daily, flogged the Nationals on the very front page of its local edition today in a full page ad.  Ryan Zimmerman, the Nats’ talented (and quite lonely in that respect) 3rd baseman, was in the ad.  The other two figures shown, and I am absolutely not kidding when I say this, were the Nats’ eagle-headed costumed mascot, and…the guy who cruises around in a Segway between innings, firing t-shirts into the crowd with a compressed air cannon.

That was it.  Literally.  Those were the selling points for professional baseball in the nation’s capital.  Oh, and the mascot was in the middle, and was portrayed the largest of the three – the obvious main draw.  I hope I didn’t drool from my mouth gaping like that when I saw it and realized they were trying to sell tickets for the team.

Whew.  Thank God I’m a country boy, indeed.

O’s pitcher Koji Uehara was forced to leave the game yesterday after three innings due to dehydration.  Okay, it was pretty hot in D.C. yesterday, where the Orioles were playing, and we did win the game and all…but could we please teach the O’s coaching staff how to say, “Hey, have a cup of water,” in Japanese?

Onto other matters: I was listening to a discussion on Nominally Public Radio about the hullaballoo over President Obama’s address at Notre Dame.  The usual balance stunt was in effect: a member of the faculty for the neutral stance (he was obviously in favor of Obama’s speech, but was very carefully asked neutral-seeming questions in an effort to bleach out his viewpoint), a Catholic activist for the antis, and – all together now! – E.J. Dionne for the liberals.  (As an aside, can we just buy that man a sign that says “LIBERAL ELITE” and have him wear it on every single channel?  Good thing that the MSM is so independent and all.)

Anyway, the interesting part popped up when the conservative – a Catholic who’d written some books and been named to one of the Pope’s citizen boards or something – was delivering the predictable rebuttal.  The quote came out something like, “We’re sorry that Notre Dame chose to welcome someone with such a poor record on human rights.”  (Emphasis mine.)

Dionne of course missed it, but I immediately realized that the anti-abortionists now have yet another frame.  They’ve even borrowed a liberal one – rather broad-minded of them.  And if Dionne wasn’t sticking to the lib-elite script and being polite so he knew that he’d get invited back to NPR instead of, say, Jerry Springer, he’d be able to connect the dots to the nascent forms of the movement, and its unfortunate, underlying hypocrisy.

Now before we start, there are three things.  First, despite the fact that the Orioles won, I’m in a lousy mood, so this might be, um, a bit more direct, let’s say, than I might usually be.  Hey, I told you that if I didn’t get the coffee, things were gonna be ugly…

Second, frame-borrowing, even from the other side, isn’t a new or amazing practice; witness, for example, the liberals’ criticism of Dubya for his military record.  Someone who dodged military service would otherwise be a liberal hero, because, well, liberals don’t like marching off and killing people for proto-fascist reasons, but they were more than willing to point out that W was a bad guy for not doing exactly that during his service.  Of course, there’s one major difference here, and that is hypocrisy.  When you are waddling around on an aircraft carrier deck as the big, brave kicker of Muzz-lee-im terr’ist butts, the fact that you welched out on your country earlier and got away with it because you’re a privileged white preppie is just a bit…yeah.  When the conservatives change frames, more often than not, they’re marching right in the opposite direction, happily embracing the raging contradictions of their stated positions without a hint of irony, which I’ll get to in a second.  The actual positions – the ones below the stated ones – don’t really change, but they can’t really let them out to play too much in polite company.  (Okay, David Duke did, but he’s an exception.)  I mean, sure, everyone knows what they are - witness the crowds at a Sarah Palin rally – but the guys actually delivering the speeches can’t say them.  Darn those lib-uh-rulls.

Third and finally, I do feel I should back off on the Catholics concerning this particular issue.  While the foregoing applies to conservatives in general, the Catholic community really does seem to have a particular slant on the issue that absolves them.  They don’t mind going to the “other side” if the Pope announces that he’s against war, or against the death penalty.  Granted, they seem to have caved on this particular frame, but they haven’t quite landed themselves in the same category as the rest of the Neanderthals on this issue.

So, yeah, if you’re Catholic, this article applies…but not with as much snark.

Okay…with that as prologue, let’s examine the anti-abortion movement over time.

Fact is, at the start, there was no “pro-life” movement.  Those who were opposed to abortion were opposed to it on religious grounds, period, end-of-sentence.  Those who were married didn’t get abortions; ergo, abortions were out of wedlock, and therefore, it was a matter of sin.  Those who did such wicked things were expected (by those who didn’t do them, natch) to be burdened with the wages of their sin.  That was, for the most part, it.  The baby itself wasn’t even a consideration in this matter…it was about the mother, and more specifically, about the mother’s (and father’s, to a much lesser extent) moral fibre.  Not her life, or her well-being.  After all, she should have thought of that before she sinned against Jesus by sleeping with that man that wasn’t her husband.

Unfortunately, I do not have the sources to back me up on this, but it’s easily enough checked by examining the media of the time: the term “pro-life” didn’t particularly emerge until the 1970s.  It was adapted thanks to a need for a new frame, and a response of a very deliberate re-frame.  The Sixties saw the rise of cheap and available contraception and the Sexual Revolution.  Anti-abortionists responded by attacking The Pill – a perfectly acceptable and in-character response, given their actual beliefs, but not a very effective one, as it exposed them as a bunch of reactionary anti-sex fuddy-duddies who didn’t keep up with the changing times.  The few remaining leaders of the movement met in Washington – the state, not the city – and deliberately chose the term “pro-life” as theirs, refocusing away from their true beliefs to a secondary but much more politically palatable alternative, with the added bonus of demonizing their leftist opponents.  (Again, I don’t have the source where I heard this, but do trust me on this one.  I ain’t gettin’ paid for this…it’s opinion.)

It worked like a charm.  The GOP picked up a pro-life plank, Reagan got elected, and things went swimmingly except for that naughty Supreme Court.  But that was okay – legal justification based on the new frame was being marshalled.

The problem then developed with the burgeoning neo-con war and the conservative “tough on crime” canard that for the most part, pro-lifers aren’t really, um, pro-life.  They’re pro some lives, sure; little babies are cute, after all, but if they grow up to become soldiers, and our country sends them off to die…well, that’s okay, then.  Or if they’re one of the countless number of brown people that happen to be living where we’re invading at the time – no problem with them dying.  Or if they do something really bad in our own country, and happen to be the wrong color, and the government decides they have to die – they’re all for it.  Heck, some of the pro-life conservatives didn’t even go as far as the babies thing: fetuses were okay, and needed protection from Uncle Sam…but once they were born?  Heck, that was your problem then.  Assistance?  In keeping your child alive?  What are you, some crummy welfare mother?

There were even some (Mike Huckabee comes to mind) who were suggesting that if people really were “pro-life”, they would start supporting some of these initiatives so that those who were born would really have lives once they were born.  This of course couldn’t stand – it wasn’t punishing the people who had babies enough (remember what the original cause was?), and when people in the conservative movement take off the armbands and start thinking about what they’re doing instead…then buddy, it’s time for another re-frame.

And what a frame they’ve now got.  Granted, things are coming apart on the GOP side pretty egregiously nowadays, but the thought of a micro-mind like James Inhofe or Mitch McConnell using “human rights” in a sentence would send me screaming for the exit of this funhouse.

As I noted, the Catholics are not comfortable members of the conservative “movement” anyway, and they do pay attention to human rights, so I’m not as boggled there.  But for the more numerous, Palinesque GOPers out there, you wonder what’s coming next.

I don’t go to bat for people too much, especially on the Intarwebs.  One could spend one’s entire life doing so, unfortunately, and there are things around the house that need doing, and the cats need to be fed, and such like that.  But every so often I pipe up on something which I feel needs a bit of attention, and so it is with the Internet Sacred Texts Archive.

I don’t know the fellow that does this at all, or what his particular reasons are for doing it beyond those stated on the site, but the Archive is exactly what it says on the tin: a voluminous collection of texts which are sacred to someone, somewhere on the globe.  Note that this isn’t confined to the usual Most Popular Religions, Inc., but there’s also plenty of weird cultic stuff, long discredited nonsense, and even stuff that the seculars and atheists dredge up just to get into the act.  (They get jealous.  It’s almost cute.)

The guy running the site sells copies of it on DVD-ROM, and you should buy one, because I can’t, because I’m broke.  Obviously he has been – all together now! – hit by the economic downturn, so he could use the cash money to keep things going.

Alright, okay.  I haven’t written here in eons.  Chalk it up to a perfect storm of soul-searching, personal drama, dwelling on some insignificant details like where the next meal’s coming from, and a well-deserved vacation from, to closely paraphrase Barbara Bush on post-Katrina New Orleans, “wasting my beautiful mind on something like” the news of the day.  I’m not going to spend a lot of time on the wherefores, because I have a different fish to fry right now.

I do not have extensive experience in politics.  Yes, I helped to lead a political party, but we weren’t exactly in the mainstream; there were many, many backrooms where true political power was exercised that I was not invited to, and I may not have accepted even if I was.  But I can safely say that I have more than the average joe, and from observation, I may have more than the dreadful excuses for punditry whose limp opinions dominate the interminable analysis that news is subjected to, thanks to the 24-hour news cycle.  (That’s a true misnomer, by the way: there simply aren’t 24 hours of news in a day, pretty much by definition, so much of what they say has no value.)  Even if one doesn’t buy that assumption, I would hope I’d be seen as possessing at least a different point of view, informed by different but no less valid information.

With that as prologue, I feel I can say two things are true about politics:

1. The vast majority – and I mean vast majority – of “conspiracy theories” are complete crap and unworthy of any further inquiry.  The whole field, which is fairly homogeneous, if you look at it, is riddled with more than its fair share of mentally ill people.

2. Anyone who believes that politics and current events occur exactly as depicted in the mainstream news sources is an idiot at best, and an ignorant tool of forces beyond their limited conception – or perhaps an informed agent of those forces – at worst.

This twin observation, which the more self-satisfied readers might characterize as internally contradictory, comes as a result of looking up some stuff from a cute outfit called Steamshovel Press, operated by Kenn Thomas.  Steamshovel Press is a magazine which has unfortunately, like so much else of late, fallen on financial difficulties and may be switching to electronic form only.  Its topic is conspiracies of all types, and reflects Mr. Thomas’s omnivorous tastes within the subject.  His writing is lucid, but typical of many in the field: filled with tidbits of questionable veracity which serve to reinforce the idea that not only is everything not all well, but the exact source of what is making things unwell is sitting in the crosshairs of a Google Earth window open on Kenn Thomas’s laptop at that very moment.  Again, as I said before, most of it is nonsense, but I still greatly appreciate the point of view of a Kenn Thomas on politics; it’s refreshingly free of the thought-terminating pablum that a Larry King or a Chris Matthews regularly serves up.  It’s an admittedly poor comparison, but under the absolute best circumstances, Thomas serves the same role for politics that Charles Fort served for science.  Fort, a writer of the early 20th Century, collected all sorts of “weird” tidbits of science gone screwy and subjected them to a whimsical yet skeptical analysis…and then proceeded to wheel the guns to stern and apply the same mix of amusement and logic to the sacrosanct precepts that scientists all agreed upon.  He angered many who needed to be angered, demonstrating in the process that sometimes “science” didn’t have as much science in it as perhaps it should’ve.

Thomas calls his branch of study “parapolitics”, and he equates the term directly with “conspiracy theory”.  It’s a good word as a term; however, I’m not sure if that properly describes what actually happens in most of the political world.  The proper way to describe it from my experience would be not as a conspiracy nor an orthodoxy, a la CNN, though both do exist, but a sort of weird hybrid between the two.  It compares to conventional politics in the same way that abnormal psychology compares to everyday consciousness.  There are a few who are on the up-and-up, and there are a few who are just evil…but most is just deeply, deeply wrong, forced into all sorts of contradictory, unintended, out-of-control situations without intending to be or even being aware of their conditions in many cases.  The film The Corporation logically extends the doctrine of “corporate personhood” to psychoanalysis and comes up with the diagnosis that corporations are sociopathic; I think if we did the same for governments, we’d get a diagnosis of schizophrenia.

I call it the Librarian Syndrome, named after a particular scene in All the President’s Men where Dustin Hoffman, in persona as Carl Bernstein, calls the Library of Congress to ask questions about the circulation activities of E. Howard Hunt, the CIA political black ops guy and all-around dick who was implicated heavily (and correctly) at the beginning of the Watergate investigation.  He reaches a librarian who is quite cooperative at first, but then turns around and stonewalls completely, obviously at the order of a superior, which of course is the tip-off to Bernstein that he’s onto something.

Watergate is good to study because it was what it was: a conspiracy, involving multiple actors within a corrupt structure, at the highest levels of government, controlled from right at the top…in other words, the sort that regularly gets debunked by most within the orthodox news community as an impossibility on its face.  Another impossibility is supposed to be that covering up illegal actions by a governmental or quasi-governmental structure involves a huge cast of characters, all working in perfect, unquestioning synchronization – and given that governments are noted for inefficiency and people are noted for self-interest, this just can’t happen…and yet, the tip-off for Watergate was, in part, a nameless librarian at the LoC.  Conspiracy theorists would have us believe that Richard Nixon called this poor librarian and instructed her or her supervisor exactly what to say when a Washington Post reporter called.  The debunkers would say this didn’t happen and therefore the whole “conspiracy”, with the hardy-har quotes, obviously vanishes in a puff of superior and self-satisfied logic, of which they are the sole repository.  Both are wrong.  In a “parapolitical” structure, logical processes can’t be assumed, either for or against.

There’s more to say on this later.  This kind of analysis is extremely apt for the Obama administration, given the climate into which it was birthed and the type of campaign it ran.  There will be quite a few Emperors on all sides to expose as naked in the coming year or so.  The secret is to know how things work.

-OR-

Election Results with Mr. Peabody…

Again I laugh [1]…  followed a link from an article on the current google news page and found this:

The Myth of Stagnant Wages

Got down to the third paragraph, to wit:

consider this: If the standard of living of the average American really had not improved for more than three decades, wouldn’t there have been a tremendous political backlash by now? Wouldn’t the Democratic Party have fully mutated into a full-scale social democratic party—nationalized healthcare, a return to superhigh tax rates—rather than moving right over the past three decades?

At which point I looked and saw the dateline on the article is  September 20, 2007

[1] Like the Comedian (Ob Watchman reference)