Be Careful Where You Point That Sarcasm

Image credit: The New Yorker (reduced by Cujo359)

Irony is a dangerous thing. Often when I use it I find the people whom I was denigrating are the only ones who aren't offended. The New Yorker probably feels that way this week:

Given that the political orientation of The New Yorker magazine is decidedly liberal, the cover of today’s issue is a bit jolting: a cartoon Barack and Michelle Obama fist-bump in a living room the Oval Office — he in Middle Eastern garb, she with a big Afro and AK-47 slung over her shoulder — as an American flag flames in the fireplace.

A New Yorker cover too cute by half

As I wrote in the comments to this article, the New Yorker's covers often feature a rather subtle form of satire - unless your sense of humor is wired in a particular way, you're probably not going to get it. Take that strikeout in the quote; originally, Lotus didn't realize that the picture was supposed to be the Oval Office. You need to look at the picture and take it all in to appreciate the sarcasm here. This cartoon is a compendium of all the shallow, factually wrong impressions that certain brain-dead portions of the population hold of the Obamas. I liked this cartoon, although I didn't find it side-splittingly funny. It was more of a smile-inducing jibe.

Based on some of the opinions in the lefty blogs, you'd think that the New Yorker had just painted Obama in whiteface or something:

Who knows if they'll get this in Dubuque, but they sure aren't going to like it in Chicago: This week's New Yorker cover features an image of Michelle and Barack Obama that combines every smeary right-wing stereotype imaginable: An image of Obama in a turban and robes fist-bumping his be-afro'd wife, dressed in the military fatigues of a revolutionary and packing a machine gun and some serious ammo. Oh yes, this quaint little scene takes place in the Oval Office, under a picture of Osama bin Laden above a roaring fireplace, in which burns an American flag. All that's missing is a token sprig of arugula.

The illustration, by Barry Blitt,is called "The Politics of Fear" and, according to the NYer press release, "satirizes the use of scare tactics and misinformation in the Presidential election to derail Barack Obama's campaign." Uh-huh. What's that they say about repeating a rumor?

Yikes, Etc. [see NOTE]

I don't know what they say elsewhere, but around here they say this:

If you repeat a rumor with enough sarcasm and a warning of the "Politics of Fear" sort, people learn that you think that they're drooling idiots if they believe it.

Of course, the folks who were the most enthusiastic about Obama aren't high on the psychological awareness scale to begin with. I've demonstrated that fact many times. Just read in the comments of these places how shocked, shocked I tell you, people were that Obama ran and hid on the FISA issue. To realize that was what he would do, all you had to do was look at his past. This is a point I've made numerous times, to no avail.

So, it's to no avail that I make this point now - this thing isn't going to matter. If Obama loses this election, it won't be because the New Yorker put a caricature of him on a cover that's too subtle for most people to find funny. Actually, I think the New Yorker did him a favor - someone else would have drawn such a cartoon eventually, and he wouldn't have been kidding. By beating them to the punch in a satirical vein, the New Yorker defused that visual.

If Obama loses this election, he'll do it by running from the very people who would be inclined to support him, to embrace some imaginary political middle ground. He could have convinced me and other skeptics that he deserved our support by making a real stand on FISA, and making it work. He didn't, and he didn't even try.

So, let the wailing and gnashing of teeth continue. I'll be over here laughing my ass off.

NOTE: To see the full title, click on the link. HuffPo has finally managed to make it impossible to cut and paste titles of their articles and I'm not going to type all that. Why is poorly thought-out writing often so overblown?

Free Speech?

Image credit: Free speech is available for $12.95 plus shipping and handling from RealEstateSuperCenter.com.

I was reading my town's local paper this evening and saw this little item:

The Land Use and Transportation committee will re-examine and possibly amend its sign code, which has recently upset several local real estate agents.

For the second time in the past month, real estate agents opposing the code piled into Federal Way City Hall on July 7 to request the city provide exceptions to agents who are struggling to sell homes in a slumped market.

“I think this is something we really need to look at,” committee member Dini Duclos said.

Federal Way real estate agents take issue with sign code

This is the sort of thing that town hall and city council meetings deal with all over the country. Ordinances are too restrictive, too unwieldy, or too unclear to enforce properly, and people complain about it. Or they just complain to complain. Other than that, the only interesting thing about this story so far was that it's a sign that things are getting bad in the real estate market. This area was one of the liveliest markets in the country until a couple of years ago. Now it's getting pretty bad.

What caught my eye, though, was this bit:

Sam Pace, with the Seattle-King County Association of Realtors, told the committee Monday that the city’s enforcement of the sign code is in violation of the First Amendment — freedom of speech.

Federal Way real estate agents take issue with sign code

The emphasis is mine, of course. Freedom of speech? These people are complaining about the city confiscating signs that they put up to advertise an open house or some other special event. Where's the speech?

Folks, this is free speech:

There's an idea there - end the war so that her husband and all those other spouses can come home.

image credit: Elvert Barnes






And heaven help us, this is free speech. It's not an idea that I'd be proud of, but it's an idea. It's a statement of principles, if you will.

Hanging a sign out on a lawn that says "Open House Here" isn't speech - it's an advisory. People looking for an open house know there's one there. It's not political speech, and it isn't even worthy of being called an idea.

Image credit: The Dread Pirate Bluto.





I've written before about advertisers who have the gall to term what they do "speech". Calling what they do "speech" cheapens the meaning of the word, I think, in ways even Fred Phelps couldn't manage.

In the case of this little local controversy, I think the realtors may have a point. They carry signs around to these events that they take up at the end of the day. Should those be treated the same as signs that are left unattended? Maybe not. It could even be argued that they're providing an important service, and that right now it's important to make it possible for people to move around to find new employment without being saddled by houses they can't sell. Maybe someone needs to fix the law here so it makes more sense.

But invoking free speech is a tasteless exercise in hyperbole. I wish they wouldn't do that anymore, but they probably will.

UPDATE (July 15): The author of the FWM article was kind enough to point out that what the realtors were actually complaining about was that the city were confiscating their signs. I changed the wording a bit to reflect that. Thank you, Ms. Howard.

RIP, Little Fella

Image credit: I Can Has Cheeseburger?.


In addition to Joe Barr, another acquaintance of mine died on Friday. Caramel, my sister's pet rabbit, died of what we can only assume is old age. Caramel loved to be among humans. The more who were around at the time, as long as they weren't really loud or careless where they stepped, the better he seemed to like it. He was so outgoing even visiting cats learned to like him, after he grew tired of intimidating them.

I'll miss ya, little guy.

Ian Welsh On Class Warfare

Class warfare. Who won? Unless you're one of these guys, not you.

Over the years, I've read and heard various conservatives lament about how actions proposed by progressives to help the poor and middle class are "class warfare". Over at FireDogLake, Ian Welsh has posted a treatise on what class warfare really means. Well worth the read, I think.

Goodbye, Warthawg

Image credit: Triple 3 Ranch.

Linux.com columnist and long-time free open source software (FOSS) evangelist Joe Barr died yesterday. While I never knew him personally, I've read his work, both at Linux.com and elsewhere.

Barr, who went by the appellation "Warthawg" for some reason, was a geek from the early days of personal computers. Anyone who writes a book entitled CLI For Newbies has all the geek credentials he needs. (For those who aren't all that computer-savvy, CLI is an acronym for Command Line Interface.) As someone who has worked with computers in one capacity or another for most of my career, I've encountered his writings over the years. I knew that he was a geek. What I didn't know until I looked at his website is that he was also something of a progressive. I'm not too surprised, though. Here's a sample:

I did something I never do any more last week, as I was driving into town. I tuned into the Mush Limbo — aka Rush Limbaugh — hatecast on WOAI AM in San Antonio.

I admit I used to listen to Mush irregularly in the early 90s, just for the shock of hearing opening racist, neo-con ispired hate speech advocating greed as the highest “family value” and worshipping Reagan for all the wrong reasons. It was sort of like poking a snake with a stick, and I got tired of it, and stopped listening.

Does the Limbaugh meltdown mean the end of hate radio?

He was also an animal lover. He and his wife Susan raised miniature donkeys and rescued puppies. In an article about the pregnancy of one of them, Joe wrote:

And here’s [a photo] of me, reading the book explaining the gestation period to Anna, when she refused to produce her foal on our schedule. It didn’t work. She took her time and gave birth when she was good and ready.

About The Triple 3 Ranch

He clearly had both the instincts and the sense of humor of a geek. I know I'll be missing him, and I'm sorry that our paths never crossed.

UPDATE (July 18): Here's another tribute to Joe by someone who met him a time or two.

Making Common Cause

Over at her blog, Dana Hunter pointed out that not every conservative is, to use her phrase "a demented fuckwit pandering to religious frothers":

One of those stalwarts is John Derbyshire. You might recall him from the Expelled debacle - he's the one who nearly gave me heart-failure, and brought tears to my eyes with an impassioned defense of science.

I nearly missed it, but he rose to the defense of science again when LA Gov. Bobby Jindal was about to sign that noxious "academic freedom" bill into law - and he's just turned Bobby over his knee for a sound spanking for actually putting pen to IDiot bill[.]

John Derbyshire Rides Again

[links from original]

Dana deserves credit for going out and finding these sorts of opinions. I find it's usually not worth the dangerous bile levels I experience. That's because there seems to be so little respect over on that side of the political divide for anyone else's opinions. One mistake that we should not make is to be that way ourselves. Serious, considered opinions deserve serious responses. On the issue of creationism, I wrote some time ago:

To me, this isn't an issue about Democrats versus Republicans. I don't care what party you belong to, there are certain constants in this world, and one of them is that science deals in the realities of our existence.

Unbelievable

As I wrote yesterday, conservatives aren't nearly the woodenheaded block of voters some folks on the left think they are. The really odd part of how Republican congresscritters vote is how much unanimity there is on issues that don't really fit liberal/conservative schisms:

[W]e don't need more Democrats in Congress and the White House, we need better people. If even ten Republican Senators had joined the Democrats who voted against cloture, this FISA bill would have died a well-deserved death. There should have been that many among them. Frankly, there should have been enough on both sides to defeat the bill outright. But the other guys have voted so consistently with the Administration that it's difficult to even imagine that happening today. We don't just need better Democrats, we need better Republicans, too.

Homer Simpson Is A Republican, For Now

Liberalism in its modern form is the idea that government should set policies and implement programs that improve society. That's actually a fairly narrow perspective. Similarly, conservatism is about not doing that. Yet things like human rights, war (and defense budgets), and abortion are cast in terms of "liberal" or "conservative" ideology.

For whatever reasons, though, that's how modern political discourse typically casts such issues. In reality, liberals can be pro- or anti-war, depending on the war. They can, conceivably, be anti-abortion (though few are, thankfully), or in favor of more defense spending. That's one of the reasons I tend to use the word "progressive" when describing political views that agree with what one typically associates with liberalism - progress toward something better. Even that label has its limitations, of course.

Similarly, "conservatives" can be against particular wars or big defense budgets, and can be pro-abortion. As some have proved, they can be against FISA for their own reasons.

That's a long way of saying that I'm not in the least surprised that there are conservatives like Mr. Derbyshire out there. What I'm somewhat surprised at is how little we hear from them. And it's sad how little influence they seem to have on the Republicans in Congress.

One thing we progressives need to do is to find such conservatives, and make common cause with them when we can. The Strange Bedfellows campaign for accountability on the gutting of FISA is one such effort. The August 8th moneybomb is part of that effort. By clicking on the banner at the top of this article, you can pledge to give money on August 8th to buy advertising that criticizes the role of Congressional "leaders" like Steny Hoyer and Jay Rockefeller for their roles in creating this legislation.

I've pledged. Have you?

Homer Simpson Is A Republican, For Now

Image credit: Do I really have to explain this one?

They own the news. They get a pass nearly every time broadcast news looks at them. They've dominated talk radio for decades. It took all that to make the Democratic Party and liberalism labels that some Democratic politicians considered slanderous. Yet all we needed to do was let the Republicans run things for a while to make the Republicans ashamed of their own party affiliation:

You know it’s a bad political climate for Washington Republicans when even the man at the top of their state ticket has chosen to officially deny his affiliation with the party. Dino Rossi filed for governor this week, and under the bizarre rules of our new top-two primary has declared his affiliation as “Prefers G.O.P. Party.”

The G.O.P. Party…? What the hell is that? The “Grand Old Party Party” …?

Dino Rossi quits Republican Party!

Dino Rossi was the Republican candidate for governor of Washington in 2004. He lost be a few hundred votes out of several million cast. Yet he's afraid to be seen as a Republican now. It's easy to see why they might want to avoid the Republican label, though:

Here's yet another sign of just how abysmal the map is for Senate Republicans this year: They are openly saying there are exactly zero safe seats this year -- not even Kansas, a red state that hasn't elected a Democrat to the Senate since 1932.

"We have no safe seats right now," NRSC spokesman Scott Bensing told the Kansas City Star. "In a normal election year, we would not be concerned at all. But those are the cards we're dealt. We're not taking any states for granted."

Top GOPer Concedes That Party Has No Safe Senate Seats

The Republican Party has been in control of the Federal government for most of the last fifteen years. They've controlled either Congress or the Presidency, and sometimes both. Yet in all that time, what have the accomplished?

• Lost a war that they never should have gotten us in to begin with.


• Because they were too distracted by the thought of invading a country that wasn't a threat to us, they are losing a war that they should have won.


• Trashed the economy.


• Made it harder to attract new talent from the rest of the world, at a time when it's more important than it's been for a century.


• Failed to improve our security against terrorism.


• Failed to help one of our great cities when it was hit by a natural disaster.

Leaving the Republicans in charge of the government has been like leaving Homer Simpson in charge of a nuclear reactor. It's worse, in fact - you have to try to make a nuclear reactor do something dangerous, and in contrast to the Republicans he isn't that ambitious.

This all sounds like great news for the Democrats, doesn't it? It does until you consider what the Democrats have done with their turn in the driver's seat in Congress.

Did they stop our involvement in Iraq? Aaaaah!.

Did they impeach the President and Vice President for the most lawless actions any Administration has ever engaged in? Bzzzzzt!.

Did they stand up for our rights? Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!

Did they make the lives of folks in New Orleans any better? Thank you for playing!

Despite having a clear majority in the House and a slim one in the Senate, the Democrats accomplished none of the things we needed them to do. We weren't expecting universal health care or an end to poverty. Just fix the fucking government and try to stop an illegal and unnecessary war. What did we get in return?

An upraised middle finger.

I see a lot of joking around the lefty blogs about how the average Republican voter is dumb as a post, or things along those lines. I know a good many Republicans, and have worked with quite a few. Many are very bright people. I think the reason they vote the way they do comes down to differences in personalities and priorities.

What's more, they weren't the ones who whittled down a great field of Presidential contenders to pick the least among them. I'm not just talking about this election cycle, either. That's been the story of the last three, at least. Who in blazes thought Al Gore or John Kerry were the best choices? In this election, when I wasn't hearing about how divisive Hillary was, it was how boring it was that the other candidates were all still white men. Who the fuck cares about that?

As I've written before, the fact that two of the leading candidates of one of the parties were a black man and a woman is great news. The talent field has effectively doubled for what has to be one of the world's most difficult jobs. That doesn't mean, though, that this particular black man or woman are the best qualified for the job. In fact, while said black man was hiding behind the sofa, it was this white guy who was never considered seriously by most voters, and this white guy who probably wouldn't have been had he run, who led the opposition to FISA.

Yet, once again, Democratic primary voters unerringly zeroed in on the least of the candidates available. It wasn't hard to figure out what Obama is. I was onto him months ago. All you had to do was look at what he'd done, and then assume that the past is prologue. But did the average Democratic voter do that? Not a chance.

If the average Republican voter is as dumb as a post, so is the average Democratic voter.

All of which leads me to this conclusion - we don't need more Democrats in Congress and the White House, we need better people. If even ten Republican Senators had joined the Democrats who voted against cloture, this FISA bill would have died a well-deserved death. There should have been that many among them. Frankly, there should have been enough on both sides to defeat the bill outright. But the other guys have voted so consistently with the Administration that it's difficult to even imagine that happening today. We don't just need better Democrats, we need better Republicans, too.

Most of all, though, we need better voters.

What's more, if the Democrats continue their record of non-achievement, they'll find that their fall happens as quickly as their rise. And frankly, in that event I may be part of the vote that gave gravity an assist.

(h/t to Dana at En Tequila Es Verdad for this lead to the TPM story.)

UPDATE: Added the bit about Dino Rossi. Leaving it out was an oversight.

UPDATE 2: It's not entirely related to this article, but Selise has put up an interesting diary at Daily Kos about the path of the new FISA legislation through the House this session. Well worth the read, I think.

ACLU To Dispute FISA

Image credit: National Archives

This is the Constitution. The Senate didn't miss its chance to take a dump on it today. We'll go over the results later, but for now, I'll just say that there are about seventy Senators who don't remember the oath they took. Either that, or they thought it all pretty funny.

It's almost like non-news, but the American Civil Liberties Union is going to take the new abortion of a FISA law to court:

Today elected officials in Washington sold out the Constitution -- again.

Cowed by the Bush administration's pre-election scare tactics, the Senate passed privacy-stealing FISA legislation undermining your Fourth Amendment rights.

It's outrageous, unconstitutional and un-American. That's why the ACLU is prepared to challenge this law the moment George Bush signs it -- and you can rest assured, they'll be meeting our lawyers in court.

Our lawsuit will send a powerful message to those in Congress who played it safe when they had the opportunity to defend the Constitution. You can join the ACLU in sending that message by signing on to our ad letting Congress know that if they won't stand up for freedom, you and the ACLU will.

We'll be taking out a full-page ad in a major national newspaper announcing our lawsuit and expressing our outrage at this abandonment of Constitutional principles. Our goal is to run an ad that contains the names of tens of thousands of Americans who believe in the Constitution and want Congress to hear us loud and clear: next time, stand up for our rights.

Click here to include your name in the ACLU's FISA newspaper ad.

The bill that Congress passed and George Bush is about to sign codifies a Nixonian view on executive power that states, "if a president does it, it is not illegal." The ACLU doesn't believe that, and I'm guessing you don't either.

Letter From ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero

[link and emphasis from original]

Yes, I guess you could say I don't believe that. I'd like to think that there are millions of us out there who are aware that the reason there's a Constitution and a Bill of Rights is that without it we'd just be another banana republic. Maybe if the prostitutes who voted for this bill today saw an ad with hundreds of thousands of names on it, they'd finally realize how badly they've fucked up.

If you value your freedom, click here and stand up for it. If you don't agree, or don't value it, then hit the back button and go back to wherever you came from.

Missionary Empiricists

http://abstrusegoose.com/31

I've been visited by the darkside version of these guys so many times that I feel like leaving a few flaming Bibles on stakes on my front porch as a warning. Needless to say, I laughed my ass off. Click on the link above to go read the rest of the cartoon.

FISA, And Another Button

Strange bedfellows?

It seems to be customary over time that blogs become festooned with various little symbols and buttons that you can push to go to all sorts of interesting places. The latest one to arrive here is for the Accountability Now PAC, which has been formed to bring accountability to those congresspeople who have sold out our freedoms to the telecommunications industry. This is the Strange Bedfellows campaign that I wrote about earlier.

The FISA Amendment bill, HR6304, which is the latest in a long string of bad bills that have made it onto the Senate floor, is to be voted on tomorrow. If you haven't already, call or write your Senators to urge them to reject this nonsense. Here's what I wrote my Senators:

Once again, I'm writing because the Senate seems determined to prostitute itself and the country to the telecommunications industry. The current FISA bill is wrong. It will let both the telecommunications executives and, by extension, President Bush off the hook for disobeying the law.

The Democratic leadership have offered a number of pathetic excuses for this bill. None pass the sniff test.

They have insisted that it is needed in order to renew FISA. This is a farce. FISA has no sunset provision. It has been on the books, with modifications, since the late 1970s.

They insist that it will define FISA as the law concerning all telecommunications monitoring. This is also a lie. FISA is the law concerning telecommunications now, as it has always been. It expressly says so in its scope.

They insist, as does the Bush Administration, that telecomm companies will not perform wiretaps in the future if they are not indemnified. This is also patently false. FISA requires that they obey all lawful requests for surveillance.

That the Democrats are offering such phony excuses is a sign of just how little they have accomplished since we sent them there to fix what the Bush Administration have broken. Rule of law is one of the things they've broken. Fix it by rejecting this bill, and by aiding Senators Dodd and Feingold in whatever way you can.

The New York Times wrote an editorial explaining why this is a bad bill. They encapsulate the problem well in these paragraphs:

The Senate should reject a bill this week that would needlessly expand the government’s ability to spy on Americans and ensure that the country never learns the full extent of President Bush’s unlawful wiretapping.

The bill dangerously weakens the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA. Adopted after the abuses of the Watergate and Vietnam eras, the law requires the government to get a warrant to intercept communications between anyone in this country and anyone outside it — and show that it is investigating a foreign power, or the agent of a foreign power, that plans to harm America.

Compromising the Constitution

What's worse, it's not just about telephones any more. Nowadays, all voice and data communications in the modern world flow over the same lines. It's all data now. The same tap can watch both telephone and Internet communications. Today, your "papers", as described by the Fourth Amendment, pass over these lines. Ars Technica elaborates:

Specifically, the new legislation dramatically expands the government's ability to wiretap without meaningful judicial oversight, by redefining "oversight" so that the feds can drag their feet on getting authorization almost indefinitely. It also gives the feds unprecedented new latitude in selecting eavesdropping targets, latitude that could be used to collect information on non-terrorist-related activities like P2P copyright infringement and online gambling. In short, the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 opens up loopholes so large that the feds could drive a truck loaded down with purloined civil liberties through it.

Telco immunity is the icing, not the cake

Unfortunately, as the NYT observes:

Proponents of the FISA deal say companies should not be “punished” for cooperating with the government. That’s Washington-speak for a cover-up. The purpose of withholding immunity is not to punish but to preserve the only chance of unearthing the details of Mr. Bush’s outlaw eavesdropping. Only a few senators, by the way, know just what those companies did.

Restoring some of the protections taken away by an earlier law while creating new loopholes in the Constitution is not a compromise. It is a failure of leadership.

Compromising the Constitution

As my letter said, all the Democratic leadership have offered on this issue are pathetically false excuses. They call it a "compromise", even though the Republicans were happy to proclaim victory the moment it passed in the House. The title of that New York Times editorial explains what's really being compromised here. That they are willing to offer such feeble excuses tells me that they think this thing is going to pass.

The Accountability Now PAC is about holding the people who have prostituted our rights to the telecomms and the Bush Administration accountable for these actions. You can help by clicking the Strange Bedfellows button and pledging to donate on August 8. More money means more clout. Congress clearly doesn't care about our rights, so maybe it's time that we owned the Congress.