In a nutshell

The recent flap over the Shirley Sherrod firing is a crystal clear example of everything that is wrong with the Democratic Party and why there appears to be no hope for it whatsoever.

Krugman nails it:

What’s shocking here isn’t the behavior of the right, which was par for the course. It’s the seemingly limitless credulity of the inside-the-Beltway crowd. I mean, there’s a history here: ACORN, Climategate, Vince Foster, Whitewater, and much much more. (Someone recently reminded me that the GOP held two weeks of hearing on the Clinton Christmas card list.) When the right-wing noise machine starts promoting another alleged scandal, you shouldn’t suspect that it’s fake — you should presume that it’s fake, until further evidence becomes available.

But no. That isn’t what happened. Without even so much as a phone call to Ms. Sherrod, without even a cursory examination of the evidence, and by evidence, I mean the full videotape, not some taken-out-of-context piece of crap on a rightwing web site. Without even a call to the NAACP, for crying out loud, to ask them what they knew of this, the Obama administration and Tom Vilsack believed the wingers. Hook. Line. Sinker. Then, without doing as much as your average Human Resources Specialist would do, they went straight for the nuclear option and forced her to resign. No investigation, just, OMG! We’re gonna be bad-mouthed on FOX tonight! You’ve gotta go!

Gawd.

Stupid, stupid, stupid!  And don’t even get me started on the flat out, in-your-face, racist and yes, sexist, bullshit this all was. That they would believe that this woman would stand up in front of the NAACP and tell a tale of how she got one over on Whitey is ridiculous to you and me. But it wasn’t to the beltway insiders. And it wasn’t to Tom Vilsack or Barack Obama.  Well of course they believed it. Well of course a black woman would do this. And they wanted her gone, because she made The O look bad.  Bastards.

Well now, they’ve realized that they have stepped in a big pile of shit, and they are in damage control.

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack personally apologized to the black USDA employee he ousted after a furor over an edited videotape of remarks she made in a March speech, saying he “did not handle this situation well.”

Vilsack said yesterday he called Shirley Sherrod to extend “my personal and profound apologies” and that he took full responsibility for turmoil caused when he demanded her resignation without fully investigating the circumstances. He also extended a job offer to Sherrod, 62, who had been the agency’s director of rural development for Georgia.

“This is a good woman; she’s been put through hell,” Vilsack said at a news conference in Washington. “I could have done and should have done a better job.”

President Barack Obama’s chief spokesman, Robert Gibbs, earlier issued an apology on behalf of the administration and said “a disservice” was done to Sherrod.

Vilsack fell on his sword to protect The O.

Vilsack said the White House didn’t pressure him to seek Sherrod’s resignation.

“This was my decision and I made it in haste,” Vilsack said. “I asked for Shirley’s forgiveness, and she was gracious enough to extend it to me.”

Tell me, why hasn’t Vilsak been forced to resign?

And these people are running the country? They couldn’t even do what your average Human Resources  investigate this and we think they can investigate the BP oil disaster? Rein in Wall Street? Reform Health Care?

Vilsack has offered Ms. Sherrod another job. If I were her, I’d find a good attorney instead.

So, what’s on your mind today? This is an open thread.

RQ: “Be the random guy”

The Red Queen speaks (and I concur):

I don’t have to imagine too hard how relieved a non het person might be sitting in that office and hearing someone who is not them calling out a douchebag on their douchebaggery. I think if some random dude ever told a street harraser that it’s not my job to smile on command for them, or said ‘hey chill with the fucking not funny sexist posts on facebook’ or maybe even just ‘ugh not another crappy apatow flickwhere all the men are loveable assholes and all the women are shrews’ i’d bake him a fucking cake. Seriously. It’s never happened. Not once. Actually, that’s not true. Deeks done it once or twice. But never a random guy.

Be the random guy (or white person or hetero person,etc.) Show a little courage, suffer a little bit of anger, and be a real ally.

Tuesday Tidbits

Oh please, spare me these stories of how people are embracing the uncertainty of the New Economy™

Michael Sinclair knows that in a few months, his stint in the marketing department of a health care manufacturing company here north of Atlanta is set to end.

He has been with the company for only six months, but he is not dismayed. In fact, he actually prefers his life as an independent contractor — constantly being laid off and rehired, sometimes juggling multiple jobs — to his old corporate position.

“I think it’s far less risky than being in a full-time job somewhere and cut at will and left with nothing,” Mr. Sinclair said. “I see this as the way more people will work in the future.”

Economists believe that Mr. Sinclair’s situation has become increasingly common. What is known as “contingent work,” or “flexible” and “alternative” staffing arrangements, has proliferated, although exact figures are hard to come by because of difficulties in tracking such workers. Many people are apparently looking at multiple temporary jobs as the equivalent of a diversified investment portfolio.

Tell that to the single mom working three jobs to keep food on the table. Oh wait, they aren’t. This sort of thing is for people with a cushion.

The notion that the nature of work is changing — becoming more temporary and project-based, with workers increasingly functioning as free agents and no longer being governed by traditional long-term employer-employee relationships — first gained momentum in the 1990s. But it has acquired new currency in this recession, especially among white-collar job seekers, as they cast about for work of any kind and companies remain cautious about permanent hiring.

[...]

Others, however, would vastly prefer permanent jobs. They have struggled to deal with the instability, the second-tier status often accorded contractors and other temporary workers and the usual lack of benefits. In most states, they are ineligible for unemployment insurance and worker’s compensation. Indeed, it is not at all clear that the shift to these kinds of arrangements is good for workers.

I think it’s pretty damn clear who it is good for.

Federal and state officials have recently stepped up efforts to crack down on companies that have sought to save money by avoiding paying taxes and benefits on behalf of workers they classify as independent contractors who should actually be treated as full-time employees.

The universe of contingent work and alternative employment arrangements is broad. The largest segment appears to be independent contractors, which includes consultants like Mr. Sinclair, as well as freelance writers, nurse practitioners, information technology specialists and myriad other professionals. In 2005, the last time the Bureau of Labor Statistics tried to track these kinds of workers, independent contractors accounted for 7.4 percent of total employment.

2005 was a completely different economy. What are the numbers now?

There is also a much smaller group whose ranks have been expanding in recent months — workers who draw their paychecks from temporary help agencies. Still others are employed directly by contracting firms, and there are also temporary workers, like seasonal retail hires, brought on directly by companies.

Meanwhile, Gold In Sacks continues to make money hand-over-fist by pushing money around.

Earnings for the Wall Street giant rose 91 percent in the first quarter of 2010, to $3.46 billion or $5.59 a share, up from $1.81 billion or $3.39 a share in the same period last year. Revenues increased 36 percent to $12.78 billion, up from $9.42 billion in the quarter a year ago.

[...]

Goldman also said that it had set aside 43 percent of revenue in the first quarter for employee salaries and bonuses, down from 50 percent for the period a year ago.

Poor babies! A cut!

In other news …

We always knew they’ve sought world domination. Cat brain inspires computer of the future

Electronic devices that mimic how brain cells in a cat work could allow computers to one day learn and recognize information more like humans do.

Such brain-like devices might accomplish more complex decisions and perform more tasks simultaneously than conventional computers are capable of, researchers added.

“We are building a computer in the same way that nature builds a brain,” said researcher Wei Lu, a computer engineer at the University of Michigan.

Well, of course. Rahm wants to be Chicago’s mayor. Someday, he says.

In explaining his desire to be mayor of Chicago, Emanuel said that he misses the interaction with constituents.

Uh Huh.

Rest in Peace: Dorothy I. Height

Dorothy I. Height, 98, a founding matriarch of the American civil rights movement whose crusade for racial justice and gender equality spanned more than six decades, died early Tuesday morning of natural causes, a spokesperson for the National Council of Negro Women said.

Ms. Height was among the coalition of African American leaders who pushed civil rights to the center of the American political stage after World War II, and she was a key figure in the struggles for school desegregation, voting rights, employment opportunities and public accommodations in the 1950s and 1960s.

[...]

As a civil rights activist, Ms. Height participated in protests in Harlem during the 1930s. In the 1940s, she lobbied first lady Eleanor Roosevelt on behalf of civil rights causes. And in the 1950s, she prodded President Dwight D. Eisenhower to move more aggressively on school desegregation issues. In 1994, Bill Clinton awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor.

[...]

In the turmoil of the civil rights struggles in the 1960s, Ms. Heights helped orchestrate strategy with movement leaders including the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Roy Wilkins, A. Philip Randolph, Whitney Young, James Farmer, Bayard Rustin and John Lewis, who later served as a Democratic member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Georgia.

Ms. Height was arguably the most influential woman at the top levels of civil rights leadership, but she never drew the major media attention that conferred celebrity and instant recognition on some of the other civil rights leaders of her time.

In August 1963, Ms. Height was on the platform with King when he delivered his “I have a dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial. But she would say later that she was disappointed that no one advocating women’s rights spoke that day at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Less than a month later, at King’s request, she went to Birmingham, Ala., to minister to the families of four black girls who had died in a church bombing linked to the racial strife that had engulfed the city.

“At every major effort for social progressive change, Dorothy Height has been there,” Lewis said in 1997 when Ms. Height announced her retirement as president of the National Council of Negro Women.

[...]

She was also energetic in her efforts to overcome gender bias, and much of that work predated the women’s rights movement. When President John F. Kennedy signed the Equal Pay Act in 1963, Ms. Height was among those invited to the White House to witness the ceremony. She returned to the White House in 1998 for a ceremony marking the 35th anniversary of that legislation to hear Clinton urge passage of additional laws aimed at equalizing pay for men and women.

“Dorothy Height deserves credit for helping black women understand that you had to be feminist at the same time you were African . . . that you had to play more than one role in the empowerment of black people,” Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.) once said.

[...]

“She not only expected us to keep going, she instructed us to keep going,” Herman said. “She would ball that fist up and say that the National Council of Negro Women wasn’t about one or two persons. She balled her fist to say that you can strike a mighty blow when you make a fist and work together.”

On a personal note, madamab and chatblue have asked to join them at The Widdershins as a contributor. I began yesterday and regular readers will recognize my introductory post. I will continue to post here, but key issue-type posts here will be cross-posted at The Widdershins

Eye of the Storm

42 years ago a third grade teacher conducted an exercise with her class to show them the power and pain of racism.

Pat Robertson is not a human being.

Nor is the woman who sits there blankly nodding at his spew. 

Violet expounds on Haiti’s real history.

The Haitian Revolution was the third great republican rebellion of the late 18th century, or at least that’s how the Haitians saw it. Hi, France and the United States! There are three of us now! Isn’t it great? Heh. The French thought it was cool for about ten seconds; then they remembered that they needed to keep their sugar plantations going to prop up the economy. Whoops! Forget what we said about all that liberté, égalité, fraternité stuff; we were just talking about white men.

A similar thing happened with the Americans. The U.S. was friendly to the Haitian rebellion for a little while — John Adams was into it, and Alexander Hamilton helped draft the Haitian constitution — but all that changed when the Sage (and Slaveowner) of Monticello became president. Jefferson reneged on Adams’s deal with Toussaint L’Ouverture, cut off trade and contact, and offered Napoleon help in putting down the revolt. We can’t possibly have a black republic down in the Caribbean, he wrote. What will our slaves think? They might get ideas!

The French poured thousands of soldiers into Haiti in an attempt to re-establish control, and damn near all of them died from yellow fever. The Haitians cut down the rest. By 1804 the French were sick of it and Haiti declared its independence. It was the first black republic in the modern world.

And everybody ignored them. Haitian independence was an offense to the status quo: a free black republic of former slaves who had successfully thrown off their masters. Dear god. Black people? A black republic? Former slaves? No fucking way.

So Haiti was isolated: no diplomatic recognition, official embargoes on trade. “You don’t really exist,” said the French. And the Americans. And the British. And the Spanish. The economy foundered. Then the Bourbons started making noises about re-conquering the island. Finally, in 1825, the Haitians signed a deal with France: recognize us diplomatically, call off the gunboats, and in return we will reimburse you for the loss of us as your slaves. The price? One hundred and fifty million francs.

Haiti spent the next 122 years paying off that indemnity. The final installment was in 1947. Nineteen forty-fucking-seven. The entire history of modern Haiti is about paying off that goddamn debt. They borrowed money from European and American bankers to make the installments, took out more loans to pay the interest, and the whole thing turned into a century-long bankrupting of the country. Imagine a giant straw jammed into the Haitian economy, with white bankers sucking hard on the other end for a hundred-plus years, and that’s the story of Haiti. The U.S. even occupied the country for awhile to make sure the goddamn money kept coming. Gotta make those debt payments. By the time Papa Doc Duvalier came to power in 1957, Haiti was a hollowed-out mess. (more at link)

Susie provides more history and suggests we contact our Congress Critters in support of the Jubilee Act.

Yes! Yes! Yes!

Anglachel (my emphasis in bold italics):

But here is the irony – the moralistic and non-political use of racism as a shaming mechanism by party leaders in combination with the passionate rejection of “white trash” (the working class) by those same leaders has made the Republicans’ political strategy just that much more effective. We’re doing their work for them. Instead of policies, like universal health care, that materially improve the lives of people in their current socio-economic location, there are half-assed half-measures that tie provision of common social goods to obtaining stable, high-paying, white-collar career employment. Sure, if you are one of the “creative class” types who provides a service the people with the money consider important, you, too, can have the perks that make life comfortable. If you don’t choose to improve yourself (Organic food! More exercise! Fewer children! Higher education! Better dental hygiene!), then you don’t deserve a better life. If you don’t like the policies being proposed, well, you’re probably just a racist who doesn’t want benefits going to “those people.”

That’s a moralistic argument, not a political one. It offers an insult where there should be a promise of material goods. When people voice, however awkwardly, fears and resentment about being treated unfairly by social and political institutions, their discontent is dismissed as individual failings (clinging to guns and God) instead of organizing that discontent into a movement against the real sources of racism – entrenched economic elites who interests are anti-D/democratic.

The Southern Strategy has become the de facto operating principle of the Democratic Party. Divide the working class on racial lines and designate these groups as deserving and undeserving. Focus on individual failings rather than the deep structures of power. Make people pick tribes.

Go. Read.

A Fine Line

I started writing this post yesterday morning, but Sweetie and I had to leave for the Air Races and I was too pooped to finish it last night. Because of other obligations, I’m not at the races today and can spend a little more time fleshing this out.  (Edit: I’m not crazy about my post title, but it’s what I started with, and everything else doesn’t fit either.)

Let’s start with the most recent meme being pursued by the Democratic leadership and other Obama boosters.  Jimmy Carter:

When a radical fringe element of demonstrators and others begin to attack the president of the United States as an animal or as a reincarnation of Adolf Hitler or when they wave signs in the air that said we should have buried Obama with Kennedy, those kinds of things are beyond the bounds. 

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, and my hope is and my expectation is that in the future both Democratic leaders and Republican leaders will take the initiative in condemning that kind of unprecedented attack on the president of the United States.

First of all, the signs did NOT say bury Obama with Kennedy. They said bury ObamaCare…

Folks, that is not the same thing.  So can we please dial this back a bit? Honestly, did these Dems who are labeling as racism every push-back to Barack Obama sleep through the 90′s? Jeebus on a triscuit, Bill Clinton was called every name in the book, including murderer and rapist, and had Hillary Clinton been elected I would have expected the same sort of reaction from the rightwing lunatic fringe to her and anything she proposed. It’s what they do. Doesn’t everyone remember the term “Hillarycare“ that was bandied about by the right back then? As a matter of fact, I seem to recall a great many Clinton opponents in the Democratic party using that very same term during the primaries to refer to Hillary’s failure to get health care reform passed in 1993.

Boorish behavior is not always racism, nor is criticism, and it’s stunning that some Democrats are so willing to play the race card.  Shades of the primaries! (Just see Marc’s comments in my About section, to see what I mean). Are there racists amongst the tea partiers? That there are is self-evident. But mostly I just see a bunch of ill-informed, frightened, and pissed-off people. 

Further, those people were never in Obama’s court, and they’ve always felt this way. What’s happening now is that they are once again being played by the powerful on the right, just as these same Powers played the evangelical right before (link).

Now, with 30 percent of Americans defining themselves as “spiritual but not religious,” according to a recent Newsweek poll, the organized right has branched out once again, giving its latest incarnation, in the form of the Tea Party movement, a more secular face — a good move at a time when the population is more distressed about economic than cultural issues.

After the 2008 election, liberal pundits declared the religious right dead, as if its primary focus eve was religion. It was not: its primary focus is, and always was, power — power that ultimately serves the interests of Big Business via the goal of defunding and disempowering those forces that argue for regulation and a social safety net — in other words, the forces that enact the ideals of liberals and progressives.

They are being played  just as much as the “progressives” on the left who bought into Obama’s Hopey-Changey shtick were played (all the while ignoring his words, his record, and his corporate sponsors). Joe  on Obama’s sinking approval ratings:

Obama’s drop in popularity among white people is not, in my view, due to racism. The true racists were never among that 63%. No, those sagging polls can be attributed to Obama’s stances on domestic spying, the increasingly unpopular war in Afghanistan, the failure to fix Wall Street and — especially — the health care sell-out.

The Dems risk a lot by this ploy. It’s a strawman argument to say that people are disagreeing with Obama (and calling him a liar), because at heart they are racists. I disagree with Obama, and have indeed tagged him a liar (especially when talking about “choice” in our health care options). I am not a racist.  IN the same post linked above Joe Cannon quotes Gene Lyons:

Democrats who cry racism risk looking like whiners fearful they’re losing the argument. Not to mention illogical. If Obama’s approval rating among white voters has dropped from 63 to 43 percent, as the Los Angeles Times recently documented, it’s not because they suddenly heard about his African father.

In the meantime, it appears that no one is happy about what I like to call HIPPA II (Health Insurance and Pharma Protection Act). Maven has a good run down on the reaction to the Baucus bill which by many’s reckoning, including my own, is Obama’s bill of choice. Here’s what I had to say about the Baucus bill last June.

Dakinikat asks a very good question: Why Force the Poor into Subsidizing Insurance Companies?

So, let me ask this question.  Why are we supposed to support any of this?  What is in it for any one but the President who gets to say he did something and the insurance companies who get windfall profits that would make the CEO of Chevron Exxon blush?

Can we just scrap all of this and start all over? Can HR 676 at least get to the floor for a vote?  Can Single-Payer have a seat at the table this time?

Meanwhile…it isn’t just health care you’ve got to worry about.

How is MSNBC any different from Fox News?

I ask that in all seriousness. Go, read Violet’s post about the people carrying guns outside one of Obama’s health care town halls and then come back. I’ll wait.

High roads, low roads, pots, kettles

The Reclusive Leftist has an intriguing series called “If you vote for Obama this is what you’re voting for.”  So far the series has 11 “reminders.”

This Link will take you to all of them except for #6. Click here for that one.

The latest (#11) covers the names being bandied about as being on Obama’s short list for cabinet and SCOTUS positions. Oy.

Incompetent Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick is on the short list for Attorney General, which makes me wonder if Obama and Patrick chipped in together for some kind of package deal with Axelrod. Obama’s entire propaganda line (hope and change, etc.) was an ad campaign dreamed up by Axelrod and first used by Patrick. Obama bought the whole shtick second-hand — even the text of the speeches — and we can only hope he got a good used-car price on the deal. I see no earthly reason for Patrick to be in an Obama administration, unless maybe that was in the fine print back when Obama purchased the rights to Patrick’s speeches.

But the number one pick for Attorney General isn’t Deval Patrick, but Virginia Governor Tim Kaine. That’s right, Tim Kaine: the pro-life, anti-abortion, pro-abstinence-education Tim Kaine. For Attorney General. Hey, you Stockholm Syndrome ladies over at NOW — are you paying attention? Maybe ask the patriarchy to adjust the duct tape so you can see better, ‘kay?

The Supreme Court short list includes Deval Patrick again (definitely some kind of package deal thing there), but the most terrifying possibility, and the real front-runner, is Cass Sunstein. Sunstein is an intellectual trainwreck of a man who is notorious for defending President Bush’s right to torture, imprison, and spy on anydamnbody he wants to with impunity.

Number 10 starts with the Bobby Kennedy smear, and then touches on all the smears of the Obama campaign during the primary.

Obama’s team pushed the RFK smear aggressively, just as they had pushed all the other smears against Hillary: the Somali garb smear, the Muslim smear, the darkening of Obama’s photo smear, the Bosnia smear, the fairytale smear, the MLK/LBJ smear, and on and on and on. The Obama machine functioned smoothly in all its parts, from campaign headquarters to media outlets, from netroots astroturfers to hysterical commenters shrieking for blood. They’d done it all before, but the RFK business ratcheted things up to a new level. The public hatred of Hillary reached a fever pitch. The sheer noise drowned out all rational speech. And the Obama camp’s cynical exploitation of race, history, and our nation’s tragedies made it virtually a thought-crime to point out that the whole thing was a put-up job — not to mention that if anyone was playing the role of Bobby Kennedy in this election, it was Hillary herself.

People who had been watching the race closely (as opposed to watching Obama campaign ads and gazing adoringly at copies of Dreams of My Father) already understood that behind the “hope and change” propaganda, the Obama folks were hard-core Chicago machine types, experts in dirty politics, ruthless and utterly without scruple. About as far from “a new kind of politics” as you could possibly get. But even so, the RFK smear was eye-opening.

This alone would have been enough to turn my heart stone-cold toward Barack Obama. Aside from all his flip-flops (FISA, public financing, et al), the smears against the Clintons and Hillary’s supporters were unconscionable, and not something to which I could ever give my approval or think of condoning with my vote.  Worse yet, we hear Obama, who has willingly allowed all of this to go on in his campaign, NOW saying that he did once admire John McCain – in 2000 – when he [McCain] ran a “clean” campaign against George W. Bush.  He thinks McCain has run a “dirty” campaign? Wow. Is this the pot calling the kettle black? (Am I a racist for using that age-old adage?)  Frankly, I’m amazed that the RNC has’t been running Reverend “God Damn Ameri-k-k-k-a” Wright ads 24/7. Frankly, it’s what I expected from the Republicans (based on past history).  If John McCain were running those sorts of ads, I might consider that he had taken the low road. But he has held back. Oh yeah, sure, he’s running the usual mantra that Obama will raise your taxes (standard Republican talking points, really, and to be expected), but he hasn’t gone for the jugular. And it’s not as though Obama hasn’t provided him with plenty of ammunition (Wright, Ayers, Rezko).  Still Obama accuses McCain of “slash-and-burn, say-anything, do-anything politics.”  Sound familiar? It should. It’s what they said about Hillary too.

Barack Obama has wasted no amount of air time to tell us constantly the John McCain voted with Bush 90% of the time [omigod, that ad is on every fifteen minutes, I swear]. Click here for what Barack doesn’t tell you about his voting record in the Senate. Hint: 40% no vote and an amazing rate of avoiding controversial votes (ie: 75% no vote on choice issues) - post at link cites Project Vote Smart. 

And then there is the question of Barack Obama’s fundraising. Though he is not required to do so, McCain released the names of all his small donors. Obama will not. Why not? It’s a legitimate question. Especially in light of this Washington Post story.  Are we talking campaign finance fraud? Money laundering? 

So, no, I do not approve, condone, nor rationalize that the “ends justifies the means.”

The only card they have?

This is a couple of days old, but I just found out about it. Unbelieveable.  The man just called all gun owners and hunters racists. Is this the only card that they can play? 

If Sarah Palin isn’t enough of a reason for you to get over whatever your problem is with Barack Obama, then you damn well had better pay attention,” Rep. Alcee Hastings of Florida said at a panel about the shared agenda of Jewish and African-American Democrats Wednesday. Hastings, who is African-American, was explaining what he intended to tell his Jewish constituents about the presidential race. “Anybody toting guns and stripping moose don’t care too much about what they do with Jews and blacks. So, you just think this through,” Hastings added as the room erupted in laughter and applause.

What happened to that New Kind Of Politics™?

And does this include African American hunters as well?

National Hunting Demographics

Over one-third of the nation’s hunters live in the South, along with disproportionate numbers of African-American, Hispanic and female hunters. The US Fish and Wildlife Service reports that approximately 35% of the nation’s hunters live in the South, as do 73% of the African-American hunters, 39% of the Hispanic hunters and 29% of the female hunters. Individual states with major outdoor recreationist populations, according to TravelScope, include California, Texas, New York, Michigan and Florida.