More fan mail

A second missive from Billy Eger.

Dear Joel, you obviously don't know American history let alone world history,all your thoughts an reasoning are equal too that of a six year old but I expect that from a nutbag leftist Marxist fascist commie like you,let's see you are an infidel to the Muslim community , who will do nothing less than  chop your head off when thier done using you,democracies don't work, never have,we are a republic,something I know your 2 braincells can't  comprehend. So if you wanna prosecute someone start with yourself an charge yourself with treason to your country,oh wait you can't cause the commie fucks got rid of all the laws in their way too take over the country,you should be ashamed too being human cause obviously you don't have heart or truly understand what love is you'd rather spew your hate for your agendas of power,can't wait till the riots start here ,an for your sake you better hope are paths don't cross, shouldn't let words hurt you thier just words,be careful what you wish for.oh ps were you born an Asshole or did it come naturally?

billy from wickliffe

I should say: I welcome thoughtful and articulate disagreements with stuff I've written. I'll post such correspondence here when I get it. Until then, I'll post the thinly disguised threats and the like.

John Boehner unable to distinguish truth, untruth

Via Paul Waldman, a Sunday transcript:

MR. GREGORY: As the speaker of the House, as a leader, do you not think it's your responsibility to stand up to that kind of ignorance?

SPEAKER BOEHNER: David, it's not my job to tell the American people what to think. Our job in Washington is to listen to the American people. Having said that, the state of Hawaii has said that he was born there. That's good enough for me. The president says he's a Christian. I accept him at his word.

MR. GREGORY: But isn't that a little bit fast and loose? I mean, you are the leader in Congress and you're not standing up to obvious facts and saying, "These are facts. If you don't believe that, it's nonsense."

SPEAKER BOEHNER: I just outlined the facts as I understand them. I believe that the president is a citizen. I believe the president is a Christian. I'll take him at his word. But, but...

MR. GREGORY: But that kind of ignorance about whether he's a Muslim doesn't concern you?

SPEAKER BOEHNER: Listen, the American people have the right to think what they want to think. I can't--it's not my job to tell them.

 

I'm a 'whining liberal douchebag'

Fan mail:

from Phil  date Sun, Feb 13, 2011 at 3:05 PM subject I read your blog today....

And it just validates what a great  country America is. After all, where else in the world could a

whining liberal douche bag like your self get published in an urban newspaper.

Get over it Joel- the people spoke last November, and don’t want  your brand of liberalism.

Pussies like your self get your panties in a bunch over the Patriot Act and Gitmo, but both

have helped save the lives of Americans.

And give up the tired mantra about  Bush, Cheney, Yoo, etc. as war criminals!!!!

Most Americans don’t obsess over the thoughts of radicals from Switzerland.

(Joel adds: Yes, he did include the Churchill photo at the conclusion.)

Bag o' Books: Michael Chabon's 'The Mysteries of Pittsburgh' (McSweeney's iPad edition)

Three quick thoughts about Michael Chabon's 'The Mysteries of Pittsburgh':

* I read this old book in a new way: On McSweeney's new iPad app. A day after I decided to give up reading fiction in digital form, McSweeney's announced its updated app would include access to a small number of e-books--each specifically designed and formatted for the digital medium, rather than (like so many e-books) merely pour text into the electronic format. McSweeney's promises to get more adventurous with future books; this one amounted to little more than a glorified PDF reader. Even at that, though, the experience of reading was a little more pleasurable than what I usually find in the Kindle or Nook apps on my iPad. Thanks to the typesetting and illustrations, Chabon's book felt like it's own thing--even within the app--instead of the Standardized Literature Content you find in so many of the main e-reading applications. That's the good thing. The bad thing is that nobody seemed to copyedit the McSweeney's version of the book, and it is replete with what appear to be electronic transcription errors of the type that happen when you convert (say) a Word document to a new format. Irritating, and shockingly shoddy. Still, I commend McSweeney's for attempting to utilize the format to its best, and I'm intrigued to see where it goes.

* As for the novel itself: This is Michael Chabon's first novel--written waaaaay back in the 1980s--with all the good and bad it implies. The good: it's lyrically written, with the mixture of good humor and tragedy that Chabon brings to his art. The bad: It feels less than fully formed, or less than fully Chabon's own. It's a coming-of-age-sexual-awakening story with gay men and Jewish gangsters thrown in, and it feels a bit like how F. Scott Fitzgerald might've written 'The Great Gatsby' had he been a fresh-faced novelist some sixty years later. Don't get me wrong: Chabon can do pastiche and homage, and do it well. But he was less able to pull it off successfully early in his career; here it feels more like imitation than his own hat-tipping creation.

* As for the Jewish gangster subplot: I'd rather see a full Chabon novel about these guys than what we get here. Instead, the thread feels designed to lend narrative structure to what would otherwise be a lovely, perhaps slightly rambling novella about The Summer I Started Having Sex With Men. But it feels churlish to complain; an early, half-formed Chabon is still strikingly readable. He's one of our best novelists, and it's fascinating to peek back in time to watch the seeds of his career start to sprout.

Matt Yglesias on the 'Obama apology tour'

I don’t even remember the president apologizing for our country. That conservatives are really pissed off at Obama for raising taxes is explained, in part, by the fact that bills he’s signed into law do in fact schedule large tax increases. But rage at the president’s non-existent habit of apologizing is a pure psychological manifestation of acute sensitivity around this issue. It’s a very pure distillation of the raw, hysterical, absurd atavistic nationalism that lies at the core of contemporary conservatism.

I mean, I assume Pawlenty doesn’t raise his kids to never apologize for their conduct. Apologizing is the right way to respond to wrongdoing. Sometimes I make factual errors in my posts and I try to apologize for them. I stepped on a woman’s foot by accident yesterday and apologized. That’s life. You apologize. Is it seriously an article of faith of the American conservative movement that the American government has never done anything worth apologizing for? That’s the official view of the political movement that allegedly thinks the other movement is too statist?

via yglesias.thinkprogress.org

Conservatives don't own a love of freedom in the Middle East

Charles Krauthammer plays fast and loose:

Today, everyone and his cousin supports the “freedom agenda.” Of course, yesterday it was just George W. Bush, Tony Blair, and a band of neocons with unusual hypnotic powers who dared to challenge the received wisdom of Arab exceptionalism — the notion that Arabs, as opposed to East Asians, Latin Americans, Europeans, and Africans, were uniquely allergic to democracy. Indeed, the Left spent the better part of the Bush years excoriating the freedom agenda as either fantasy or yet another sordid example of U.S. imperialism.

This is a gross distortion—maybe even a lie about—arguments surrounding the Iraq War.

Here's the truth as I see it:

* Liberals, generally, have never been opposed to the greater freedom and democracy in the Middle East. We *have* disputed whether the United States can impose its vision of democracy on the region, whether it can do so without the long and hard work of building up the supporting institutions of that make liberal democracy possible, and—most notably—whether or not the United States and its allies could impose freedom and democracy at the point of a gun.

And we were right to raise those questions.

* To the extent that there's a loud argument that Islamic culture is incompatible with democracy, it's come almost exclusively from the right, from Mark Steyn and Andy McCarthy and Newt Gingrich and others who run around screaming about sharia law. The term "islamofascism" originated in those precincts, and it's a term that doesn't really exist on the left, except when used to parody the right.

It's not "freedom" that was questioned by liberals. It was the "freedom agenda," which is something else entirely. The debate is about not ends, but means, but Krauthammer—who is a smart guy—would rather conflate the two in order to score a political point.

The American Prospect's proposal to stifle press freedom

I think a lot of good work comes out of The American Prospect, but holy cow is this a bad idea:

Because of the important role the press is supposed to play in democracy, the courts have made it virtually impossible for those misrepresented in the press to win a defamation lawsuit. On one hand, this deference has created a free and vibrant press, uninhibited by fear of retaliation. But there's a flip side: With no accountability, false stories crowd out the truth, end up misleading the public, and leave victims without recourse. Freedom of the press, it turns out, often amounts to the freedom to deceive. Given that outright partisanship increasingly crosses the line into pure falsehood, shouldn't it be easier to sue?

The Prospect's Pema Levy proposes that a journalistic code of ethics be established—she doesn't say by whom, but I presume the government—which would create a standard of "substantial truthfulness" that could then be used by juries when the lawsuits inevitably come.

The problem with the proposal is that we have substantial evidence that making it easy to sue journalists doesn't do much to make them more truthful—instead, it makes it harder for them to actually report controversial truths. Look no further than the United Kingdom, where journalists get sued for reports that defendants merely don't like. The result is that U.S. publications with international readerships are routinely sued in Great Britain for reports that would be laughed out of court here.

Levy is right that it is sometimes more difficult to get the truth out once a lie has been established. I'm not sure how you solve that. But her proposal seems more likely to stifle the truth than to help it blossom. The process is messy and ugly at times, but it beats the alternative.

Mr. Mom Chronicles: This is why it is occasionally difficult to do freelance writing from home.

I didn't pose this picture. He just decided to crawl up the back of my chair while I was working.

Ladies and gentlemen, the Bush Presidency!

Just in case you forgot, from a fabulous new tool created by the Economic Policy Institute:

I'll return to income inequality writing this weekend.

Cutting government, Tea Party-style

Friend and sparring partner Rick Henderson suggests I wouldn't give the Tea Party credit for anything under any circumstances. Not so. I am kind of impressed by this, if it holds:

House Appropriations Chairman Hal Rogers (R., Ky.) has announced that the continuing resolution coming out of his committee — and likely to the floor sometime next week — will contain $100 billion worth of spending cuts for the remainder of the fiscal year (through September). This marks a significant political victory for House conservatives like Reps. Jeff Flake (R., Ariz.), RSC chairman Jim Jordan (R., Ohio), and freshman members who insisted that the cuts previously announced by party leadership were insufficient.

That's not to say that I'll like the proposed cuts. I certainly reserve the right to criticize the specifics. But I've been critical of Republicans for awhile because of their habit of shouting about the need for cuts but failing to come up with specifics or, you know, cut anything. There's political risk in cutting dollars from programs that have constituents, and every program has constituents. It would appear the fresh-faced Tea Party GOPers are willing to actually do something—and even if I think it might be the wrong thing, I can at least acknowledge that it's not cynical.

What the Tea Party can do to prove it's serious about liberty

Some Tea Party Republicans joined Democrats in defeating a renewal of Patriot Act provisions this week. That's the topic of my column with Ben Boychuk. My take:

It is appropriate the Patriot Act renewal was defeated the same week reports emerged that former President George W. Bush had canceled a trip to Switzerland, largely to avoid the possibility of criminal charges for approving the torture of terror suspects in the aftermath of 9/11.

For one week, at least, the gap between the Tea Party's rhetoric and the reality of Republican governance was narrowed. It had been embarrassing to see conservatives decry "tyranny" in the form of slightly higher marginal tax rates and entitlement programs, all while offering silent acquiescence -- or full-throated support -- to the government's efforts to conduct warrantless wiretaps on Americans, operate secret prisons abroad, waterboard terror suspects, and then to try those suspects before the kangaroo courts known as military commissions.

The gap remains, however. While nine new Republican lawmakers voted against the Patriot Act renewal, 78 other GOP freshmen -- many backed by the Tea Party -- voted for it. And as President Bush's failed trip to Switzerland demonstrates, the United States has still failed to come to terms with the fallout from its worst actions after 9/11.

If those Republicans want to strike a blow for freedom -- and embarrass President Obama in the process -- they can push to close down Guantanamo Bay prison, hold public hearings about White House plans to assassinate American terror suspects abroad, and call for the prosecution of Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, John Yoo, and anybody else suspected of breaking the law (and American values) in the name of the War on Terror. They'd be striking a blow for freedom that many liberals hoped would come from a Democratic president.

Anybody can vote against the Patriot Act. Real civil libertarians prosecute Dick Cheney.

Ben would rather see the Tea Party focus on reducing government spending. Read the whole thing for his take.

Why income inequality matters

See Part One of this series.

So we’ve established that there’s growing income inequality in the United States. The second question is: Does it matter?

This isn’t a question that’s well-answered in Paul Krugman’s “The Conscience of a Liberal.” He does a good job demonstrating that the inequality is growing, and he makes a reasonable case for why that’s happening—something that we’ll examine more closely in the next installment of this week’s series. And he talks a lot about pre-New Deal America (the Gilded Age, a time of extreme income inequality) being a time where the people on the low-end of the scale faced crushing poverty.

But Krugman doesn’t really make the case that the current growth of inequality is bad, so much as he takes it as a given. And while he laments the 1950s as a time when the middle class shared broadly in American prosperity, he seems more interested in seeing the country’s richest men and women get their comeuppance. He has, perhaps, not-bad reasons for that, but I’m not so much interested in keeping the elites reined in as in ensuring that the rest of Americans can fairly expect to provide for their families.

Can they or can’t they?

Relative to the rest of the world, they can. Here’s a chart that was posted last week in the New York Times’ Economix blog:

What’s notable about this chart is two things. First: America’s inequality is growing rapidly, but it’s still not quite as startling as the inequality in some emerging nations. (Although it is still massive, really massive, compared to other developed nations.) And relative to those emerging countries, America’s poorest workers are still doing quite well. Says the Times’ Catherine Rampell: “Yes, that’s right: America’s poorest are, as a group, about as rich as India’s richest. Kind of blows your mind, right?” The cost of living is higher here, of course, but it does suggest that poorer workers here have a better shot at clothing and feeding their families than people in much of the rest of the world. Not to suggest that it’s easy or fun.

(Compared to other developed nations, though, the poorest 10 percent is actually … poor, with a median income below the median income of the poorest 10 percent for that group of countries. Our richest 10 percent, however, blow away the richest decile of every other nation.)

If we grant that low-income American worker aren’t quite so impovershed by worldwide standards, though, there’s still reasons, I think, to be concerned about widening income inequality. Here’s a few.

The text of the Equal Rights Amendment

Doing some reading about feminism tonight, which prompted me to look up the text of the Equal Rights Amendment. At the barest beginnings of my consciousness—back in the late 70s—I can remember some hubub. But I didn't know what the hubub was about. 

This is it:

	Section 1. Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.
	Section 2. The Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.
	Section 3. This amendment shall take effect two years after the date of ratification.

Doesn't seem like that should've been that big a deal. So why was it?

The problem of income inequality: Day One

When I pledged to make 2011 the year of my reading about income inequality and the welfare state, I thought I’d be able to contain myself to, oh, a dozen or so really smart books—representing a range of viewpoints—to give me a solid grounding. And I thought I’d start with Paul Krugman’s now slightly dated 2007 book, “The Conscience of a Liberal.” What I didn’t realize is that once I started thinking about these related topics, I’d start seeing good reading on them everywhere.  There’s been lots of magazine articles and blog posts to take note of just in the first month of this project. So this month’s installment will also draw on some recent magazine articles — “The United States of Inequality” by Timothy Noah at Slate, “The Rise of the New Global Elite” by Chrystia Freeland at The Atlantic, and “Business Is Booming,” by Harold Meyerson at The American Prospect—as well as Tyler Cowen’s new mini e-book, “The Great Stagnation.” (Other sources will be cited, as needed.) Instead of reviewing Krugman, he is the jumping-off point for the project.

 My sources generally come from the left side of the spectrum. Obviously I do to. But I’m going to try not to put my thumbs on the scale, because my aim is to understand the issues and what solutions, if any, are best suited to resolving them. Which is why, in coming months, you’ll see texts from the right of center, as well.

 That said, I had a series of questions in my mind when I started reading, and I’m going to take them one-by-one each day this week.

* Is there an issue of growing income inequality in the United States?

Yes. Next question?

OK, let’s add some depth. Here’s what it boils down to: Since 1980, the United States economy has grown quite a bit — even when taking the recent Great Recession into account. But those gains have gone almost entirely to the country’s ultra-elite: 80 percent of the gains went to the richest 1 percent of Americans. Wages for everybody else, on the other hand, have more or less stagnated. Case closed.

Here is one of a million charts that make the case:

“In the 1980s, however, it gradually become clear that the evolution of America into a middle-class, politically middle-of-the-road nation wasn’t the end of the story,” Krugman writes. “A small number of people were pulling far ahead, while most Americans saw little or no economic progress …. those trends continue to this day: Income inequality is as high as it was in the 1920s, and political polarization is as high as it has ever been.”

I have a white whale no longer

Longtime readers will know of my continuing disdain for the work of NYT Magazine's Deborah Solomon. Looks like I'll have to find a new target for my ire:

"My immediate plan is to devote myself to my long-overdue, almost-finished biography of Norman Rockwell, which will be published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. I had eight great years writing the column, and I have been encouraged by the paper's top brass to continue writing for the paper. Naturally, I also plan to continue asking as many impertinent questions as possible."

The problem with Solomon's work wasn't that her questions were impertinent. It's that they were often impertinent for their own sake, journalism as a kind of masterbatory pugilism. As I wrote when I first got on my Deborah Solomon high horse, her interviews "are performance art pieces, designed to elicit discomfort in interviewees and readers to no good purpose at all." Good riddance.

 

Me @ Macworld: I review Rupert Murdoch's new The Daily

Announced on Wednesday, The Daily was touted by its creators at News Corp. as a rethinking of journalism for a new audience and new technology. There’s just one problem with the hype: Rupert Murdoch’s new iPad newspaper closely resembles other—often unsuccessful—attempts over the last decade to “reinvent“ the news. The only difference, from a user perspective, is that a few semi-new digital flourishes have been thrown into the mix.

via macworld.com

'Democracy' in Iraq

There's a lot to say about how American conservatives have been coming out of the woodwork to suggest that regime change in Iraq veeeeeeery slowly sparked the protests in Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere around the Middle East in recent weeks. (A variant on this theme is offered by NRO's Jay Nordlinger, who writes: "It seems that a democratic revolution is sweeping the Middle East — spurred, I am sure, by American and allied actions in Iraq.")

So it's worth taking note of today's New York Times story that gives us a picture of what "democracy" in Iraq actually looks like:

Iraqi security forces controlled directly by Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki continue to hold and to torture detainees in secret jails despite his vows last year to end such practices, according to a statement from Human Rights Watch released Tuesday.

The statement renewed longstanding criticism of Mr. Maliki that he has violated the Constitution by having some security forces in charge of pursuing terrorists report directly to his office. About 280 detainees are being held at Camp Justice, a military base in northern Baghdad, with no access to lawyers or their families, according to the report. They are being held by brigades that are supposed to report to the Defense Ministry, it said.

After the disclosure of a secret prison last year, Mr. Maliki said the detainees would be transferred to the Ministry of Justice, under which they were expected to receive proper legal representation. But Human Rights Watch, citing internal government documents and interviews conducted in Iraq with government officials and detainees, said that this has not occurred. 

I'm going to go ahead and suggest that Egyptians aren't really all that inspired by a US-backed "democratic" (remember, Maliki didn't actually win the last election) government that tortures its enemies. That's what they're protesting against! I'm guessing the sparks of the recent waves of protests involve a complicated set of kindling that I don't fully understand, but I do know that Iraq War apologists will never stop trying to extract "victory" from a very bad war.

 

The Inky takes on the death penalty

I'm just a touch perplexed by today's editorial in the Philadelphia Inquirer. The ed board there is apparently extra-horrified by the way Ohio now plans to execute its death-row prisoners:

The continued practice of capital punishment got even more unsettling with Ohio's announcement that it will become the second state that executes convicts with a drug typically used to euthanize animals.

Pentobarbital is well-known to veterinarians, who use it to euthanize terminally ill pets.

Comparisons between executions and putting a pet out of its misery might be unfair, but they're unavoidable now. Some people call murderers "animals," which is how they will be treated when Oklahoma and Ohio dispatch them to eternity.

The whole apparatus of state-sanctioned executions is awful to comprehend, but even more so with the use of a drug pulled from your local vet's medicine cabinet.

I think the Inquirer is trying to say that the death penalty is bad, and I agree. But I don't get this particular set of quibbling. Is the death penalty really worse because states have exchanged one set of lethal chemicals for another? It's hard to see how. It would be one thing if the Inquirer wanted to argue the new chemicals will some how increase a convict's suffering during execution, but that's not what is being said here, and I'm not sure that's even the case. There are a host of reasons to believe that states shouldn't have the power of life or death over their citizens; I'm not sure that squeamishness is really going to rank that highly among them.

TSA backlash watch: Is the TSA getting it right?

Maybe the Transportation Security Administration is getting it, after all. The agency is debuting new body scanners that don't show so much ... body: 

The machines now produce a gray, cookie-cutter outline of the human form. The silhouette appears on a screen about the size of a laptop computer that is attached to the scanning booth.

If a passenger is cleared by the scan, the screen will flash green with an "OK." Suspicious items detected by the scanner appear as little boxes outlined in red, showing their location on generic front and back silhouettes on the screen.

Please do watch WaPo's video of TSA head John Pistole announcing the new scanner. Nice how they demonstrate it by showing a white woman going through the scanner without weapon — and a black man going through the scanner while concealing "suspicious objects." Way to be sensitive and avoid stereotypes, guys.

That said, this seems much less intrusive than the scanners that let airport officials see your nude body underneath your clothing. My family might be more willing to get on airplane if we aren't subjected to a virtual strip search prior to flying. But this technology is still in the testing phase; we'll see how long it takes to get all the way to Philadelphia

 

 

The Daily News takes on 'power' in Philadelphia

Still love the Daily News, and Lord knows I hate bullies. Still, I can't help but feel a bit off-put by this story in today's paper:

Upper Darby police yesterday arrested a seventh and final teen in a horrific bullying incident caught on video, and Police Superintendent Michael Chitwood said the tough guy was crying and vomiting when he was brought to the police station.

The 14-year-old was charged with kidnapping, aggravated assault and related offenses for allegedly being one of seven boys who shoved 13-year-old Nadin Khoury (right) in a tree and hung him on a fence on Jan. 11, police said. The entire incident was videotaped by one of the attackers on a cell phone, according to police.

I'm glad the kid is being brought to justice. But budding thug though he may be, he's still just a kid. And it just seems weird and unseemly for a major metropolitan newspaper to use its platform to mock an adolescent. The DN is ostensibly siding against bullies -- and I'm with them! -- but it ends up acting like a big bully itself. Uncool.