November, 2010 archive

Markos tells why he left the Republican Party:

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November 30, 2010 | Posted by: Frank | Posted in: Political Theatre | Bookmark this post

Andy Borowitz has the latest:

Amid growing public outrage over the conduct of airport security in the U.S., the Department of Homeland Security today transferred all responsibility for screening passengers from the TSA to TMZ, the popular celebrity gossip website.

In announcing the change, Homeland Security chief Janet Napolitano said, “We believe that TMZ can do the same job that TSA did, but they’ll be less invasive and more respectful.”

Follow the link for the details.

The rich are different from you and me.

They’re entitled.

A letter to the Editor in the Boston Globe points out that

. . . the opponents of wealth and inheritance taxes usually overlook the common practice of taxing working-class wealth (home ownership) every year through property taxes — even when that wealth is owed (rather than owned) as mortgage debt.

Any tax in isolation looks unfair to someone.

In the St. Petersburg Times, Bill Maxwell considers the pipedream, popular during the late presidential election, that Mr. Obama’s candidacy somehow indicated that the United States had entered some kind of “post racial” era.

It was a pleasant fantasy for those who wanted to pretend to themselves that racism was somehow over; a lot of the pipedreamers were white folks, who want the white history of chattel slavery and oppression to just somehow disappear,

But anyone who pays attention to day-to-day life knows it just ain’t so. Public racism may no longer be fashionable in polite society, where it was accepted less than my lifetime ago, but racism and bigotry live with us still. Usually, they are undercurrents to public discourse, but they still sometimes come forth as over-currents.

An excerpt from Mr. Maxwell’s column:

Many whites, the “birthers” in particular, are so angry that a black man is in the White House, they continue to challenge Obama to prove he is a natural-born American citizen. Their street demonstrations have come with virulent racial epithets and crude placards.

Former President Jimmy Carter, alluding to the attacks on Obama, told students at Emory University last year that he believes race is a huge problem for the nation’s first black president: “I think people who are guilty of that kind of personal attack against Obama have been influenced to a major degree by a belief that he should not be president because he happens to be African-American. It’s a racist attitude.”

Then, the tea party entered the fray with its attacks against Obama. Because some of the movement members’ language was laced with racism, the NAACP declared in a report released in October that the tea party was “permeated with concerns about race” and that some of its affiliates “have given platform to anti-Semites, racists and bigots.”

Now comes a must-read new book from the University of Chicago Press, Obama’s Race: The 2008 Election and the Dream of a Post-Racial America, by Michael Tesler and David O. Sears, showing that the 2008 election was more polarized by racial attitudes than any other presidential election. The authors argue that there were two distinct sides to this racial divide: resentful opposition to and racially liberal support for Obama. No postracialism in that equation.

Unfortunately, he doesn’t go into what evidence the book uses to support its thesis and I was unable to find a scholarly review of the book (a scholarly review would have dissected its arguments; apparently, the book is too new for detailed reviews to have hit the web).

Nevertheless, given that the 2008 election represented the first time that a black man was a credible candidate for the nomination of a major party–let alone the nominee and ultimately the victor in the election–I would not be surprised if that election was. indeed, “more polarized by racial attitudes than any other presidential election.”

The only other one I can see being in contention would be the election of 1860.

At Pscyhology Today, Alison Rose Levy considers at TSA patdowns.

It’s the first item I’ve stumbled over that tries seriously to address the issues of sex and sexuality that underlie some of the unease with the procedure. In most fulminations I’ve read, those have been implied, but not stated.

Earlier this week, Congressional staffers averted their eyes, too embarrassed to watch Transportation Security Administration (TSA) staff demonstrating a patdown.

(snip)

Experiencing or even witnessing a patdown may be disturbing to healthy members of a community for good reason — because this behavior is defined as sexual abuse by the legal and psychological professions; the “Encyclopedia of Forensic and Legal Medicine” lists as sexual abuse “fondling of breasts and genital areas.”

This incident raises questions about why TSA personnel consider the patdowns “not too bad,” while others are shocked. Does the TSA harbor a culture of denial around the invasiveness of these behaviors?

Field sums up Sarah Palin’s “support for our North Korean allies” statement quite nicely:

. . . there in lies the problem: She is a intellectual lightweight who has been elevated to a status by her followers that she cannot live up to. And,of course, she knows this, she has to be aware of her limitations. But it’s too late for her to come clean now. She is like a grifter who is too deep into the con to reveal her true self.