Pansynthesis

[In case it needs to be said: I don't agree with every word of everything I link to. --L.]

Softball, the Gateway Ball (Talking Points Memo)

Pat Buchanan and other well-known cable news gender theory experts discuss the well-known connection between softball and lesbianism. [video]

Cypress Hill cancels Arizona concert over SB 1070 (Crooks and Liars – John Amato)

Howie and I have been on the phones asking musicians to cancel any gig they have in Arizona. Some are contractually stuck, but some aren’t, and this revenue will sorely be missed. The outrage is slowly building, and in the end, money talks for these xenophobes.
BIG h/t to Cypress Hill for stepping up to the plate….Please support Cypress Hill, dog.

La Migra es Muy Popular (Balloon Juice)

That poll is not an outlier. A Pew poll released yesterday found that 67% of people think it’s fine if police detain people who can’t prove they’re in the country legally (that includes 55% of Democrats).

We like to laugh at the mentality of Medicare-receiving teabaggers carrying signs decrying “socialism”, but they’re just the tip of the iceberg. These polls show that two-thirds of Americans have the same “I’m so fucking special” attitude…

It’s Not About You (Paul Krugman)

So Republicans are coming out to oppose US participation in a bailout of Greece — which is interesting, given that nobody is asking us to participate. (Yes, we’re part of the IMF, which will provide part of the money — but that’s a fraction of a fraction, and it’s a really bad idea for IMF members to start picking and choosing which programs they’re part of.)

Franken Amendment pass 64-35. (Crooks and Liars)

[A victory for financial reform. -L]

Murkowski Blocks Oil Spill Liability Cap Increase (Firedoglake)

Just now, as expected, Robert Menendez sought unanimous consent for the Big Oil Bailout Prevention Liability Act of 2010, which would raise the liability cap on oil spills from $75 million up to $10 billion. And it would have surely passed. Big Oil needed one Senator to raise an objection and fend off those who want fair compensation for people unwittingly affected by the underwater gusher in the Gulf and other disasters in the future. And they found her in Lisa Murkowski: amazingly, the Senator from Alaska, the site of the last major oil spill in America, the Exxon Valdez disaster.

“I don’t believe that taking the liability cap from $75 million dollars to $10 billion dollars… 133 times the current strict liability limit, isn’t where we need to be right now,” Murkowski said, objecting to immediate consideration of the bill.

Film Corner! (Shakesville)

Below is the trailer for the new film Easy A. Which looks GREAT. Just great. It’s about an unpopular girl who does this awesome favor for the bullied gay dudes in her school by fake-fucking them at parties, only to discover that everyone totes hates SLUTS as much as they hate QUEERS. Except for the hot and popular dude who’s secretly on to her, and if she’ll totes make out with him, he won’t spill her secret—which is definitely not coercion and is quite obviously romantic, because he is cute. And other things happen, too. I can’t tell how it ends from the trailer, but I SURE THINK IT WOULD BE SWELL if everyone learned a lesson about Being Yourself and Not Judging Other People—and also super if that bitchy blond girl got horribly humiliated, preferably by getting dumped very publicly and/or having something spilled on her.

Miley Cyrus < Betty Friedan: On the Search for a Feminist Pop Star (Tiger Beatdown)

…if quasi-feminist messages sell records, isn’t that proof that feminism has seeped into popular culture? Not really. It’s proof that quasi-feminist messages sell records when paired with same-old-crap videos. And that’s fine, I suppose. The slow infiltration of popular culture by a watered-down version of feminism is better than no infiltration at all. But it’s hardly reason for celebration, and we shouldn’t kid ourselves…

Gloria Steinem once famously said that feminism is not a public relations movement. What she meant was that feminism is too important to water down or cushion with sexism in an attempt to make it more appealing.

What’s with conservatives’ fetish for the Founding Fathers? – War Room – Salon.com

…this fantasy for the 18th century is probably at its most unadorned among Tea Partiers. After all, their very name is borrowed from the prelude to the Revolutionary War, and it’s not uncommon to see them in mock-up Revolutionary-era garb. And how often have we heard people from the Tea Party insist that healthcare reform is unconstitutional because, after all, healthcare is mentioned nowhere in the Constitution?

This is not so much a school of legal thought as it is a wish to escape the modern world. The Constitution in its original form stands in for all that was once good, but has been lost under the attacks of whoever the convenient enemy is: “progressives,” if Beck is talking, “activist judges,” if it’s a Supreme Court fight.

There is something upsetting about how eager folks on the right have been to say it’s all been downhill since the 1780s. Sure, if called on it, as in the Marshall-Kagan business, they’ll backtrack and say that they obviously think emancipation and women’s suffrage were good things. But they appear mainly unperturbed about the fact that in 1792, the percentage of the population with full citizenship was probably less than one-fourth. It’s an afterthought.

I can come up with two different ways of understanding this. One’s more charitable, one’s less, but neither is that great.

Here’s number one: Maybe the right wing loves the 1700s because government was smaller. The point isn’t that there was no civil rights law — that’s an unfortunate side issue. The point is that there was no income tax, and America was a paradise of free enterprise. This is, unfortunately, an ass-backward misreading of history. In the early days, the big government debate worked much differently. Back then, if you wanted free market capitalism, you were for big government. Lots of people were just living off their land and not doing much buying or selling, and to drag them into the market required using state power…

[Option two...] Even if the past had been a free market paradise, it still only would’ve applied to the small fraction who were seen as full human beings and allowed rights as such. It’s hardly a free market if you’re forced to work in the fields for no pay, or forbidden from owning property. Casually dismissing these things because they get in the way of worship of the original Constitution seems revealing of something worse than being uninformed.

GOP Votes Against Protecting Home Buyers (Booman Tribune ~ A Progressive Community)

This morning the Senate approved the Merkley-Klobuchar amendment to the Restoring American Financial Stability Act of 2010. The amendment is pretty common sense and very consumer friendly, which is why 36 Republicans opposed it.

[...] I don’t know if there can be any clearer indication of where the Republicans stand. They voted against banning no-doc mortgages, and they voted against prohibiting loan originators from ripping consumers off by giving them higher interest loans than what they should get based on their credit risk.

Arrest of 13 CIA Agents Sought in Spain (Harper’s Magazine – Scott Horton)

Prosecutors attached to the Audiencia Nacional in Madrid are reportedly requesting that Judge Ismael Moreno issue an order for the arrest of thirteen CIA agents involved in an extraordinary rendition operation from 2004, the newspaper El País reports this afternoon, citing sources within the court.

The case relates to Khaled El-Masri, a greengrocer from Neu-Ulm, Germany, seized by the United States as a result of mistaken identity while he was on vacation in the former Yugoslavia. [...] While held in the notorious CIA prison known as the Salt Pit, El-Masri was apparently tortured during extensive interrogations before intelligence officers realized that they had seized the wrong man. [...]

The Spanish prosecutors have been closely studying the prosecution in Italy of 23 American agents in connection with another extraordinary rendition, involving an Egyptian cleric known as Abu Omar, who was seized off the streets of Milan and taken to Egypt, where he was tortured. The Italian proceedings occurred in absentia after the Americans fled to avoid arrest. The trial resulted in the conviction of 23 Americans, 21 of them intelligence operatives. A criminal proceeding relating to the kidnapping and torture of El-Masri is also underway in Germany.

Hurting – Literally – Kids and Seniors To Protect Tax Cuts for the Rich

There’s no better illustration of the priorities of Arnold Schwarzenegger than this report from Shane Goldmacher and Evan Halper in the LA Times, explaining that this Friday’s May Revise is likely to include a proposal to eliminate health care services for children and the elderly…

The article included a lot of whining from the governor’s office, including Susan Kennedy, about the fact that there is such a thing called “the law” and that these pesky, obnoxious people called “judges” are using “the law” to prevent the governor from destroying the lives of California’s elderly and children by denying them health care.

But the key takeaway here is about the cuts themselves, and not about the legal fight over those cuts.

Arnold Schwarzenegger is proposing to eliminate health care for the elderly and for kids – risking the health and, ultimately, risking the lives of these people. And for what purpose? So that he can avoid raising taxes on the rich.

UDS-M: Bye, bye F-Spot, Hello Shotwell (OMG! Ubuntu!)

Popular photo manager Shotwell will be replacing F-Spot as the default photo application for Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat.

[Good. I just kicked F-Spot due to its instability. I have, um, about 3000 pictures now... -L]

Air Force may suffer collateral damage from PS3 firmware update

ars Technica: “When Sony issued a recent PlayStation 3 update removing the device’s ability to install alternate operating systems like Linux, it did so to protect copyrighted content—but several research projects suffered collateral damage.”

A Case of Abuse of Power in Texas (ACLU Blog)

Today, the ACLU of Texas released its report analyzing the new curriculum standards proposed by the Texas State Board of Education. The report finds the board’s ability to insert members’ own ideological and religious beliefs into the public school curriculum a “systemic abuse of discretion,” and advises the state legislature to check this abuse of power.

Over 50 years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court reminded us, in Brown v. Board of Education, that “education is perhaps the most important function of state and local governments.” Unfortunately, the recent actions of the Texas State Board of Education, the government body charged with adopting policies and setting standards for Texas’ public schoolchildren, demonstrate that it is incapable of fulfilling this mandate. From manipulating textbook content to inserting personal ideological beliefs into Texas’ curriculum standards, the board has repeatedly shown that it places its activist agenda ahead of the educational well-being of Texas’ schoolchildren.

Next week, the board is scheduled to vote on social studies curriculum standards that will govern, for 10 years, what information students must learn in order to progress in public school. If the board gets its way, students and parents in Texas can look forward to a curriculum that will transform subjective beliefs into objective facts, stifle debate, risk leaving students underprepared for college-level coursework, and exacerbate Texas’ already unacceptable dropout rate (approximately four out of every 10 students do not graduate). As the Texas affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers stated, the board proposed “substandard standards.”

This problem is even bigger than the Lone Star State. Texas’ size and buying power has made it uniquely powerful within the textbook industry. As Jim Kracht, Associate Dean and Professor in the College of Education and Human Development at Texas A&M University, has remarked, when it comes to the content of textbooks “Texas governs 46 or 47 states.” As a result, the personal beliefs of some board members may soon be imposed in classrooms and homes of students across the U.S.

…Please visit the ACLU’s action center to learn how you can take action.

WARNING: The Government Will Do Unspecified Incoherent Things To You (Pandagon – Jesse Taylor)

Telecoms have gone full Tea Party on net neutrality: [video]

The FCC has released a national broadband plan recently, part of which included very, very mild proposals about net neutrality, focused almost entirely on preventing content discrimination by ISPs (short version: any resource a user wants to access should be treated equally by the ISP, regardless of its content).

…There’s a reason this ad provides no specifics and its script could double as a sign at a tax day rally in Sarasota: the actual specifics of net neutrality (the government ensuring that the Internet works the way it has since you were arguing what powers Thor’s hammer had on AOL forums in 1996) so entirely undercut the telecom position in such an embarrassing way that an actual defense of their position would be the equivalent of revealing that the real reason you want to go to Dairy Queen is to stuff Oreo chunks and soft serve into your underwear and tell small children about your Chilly Willy.

Say It Ain’t So, David… (Brad DeLong)

Any story about the U.S. deficit today that does comparisons between the U.S. and Europe aiming to inform its readers really needs to make six points…

The Contrast in Mood Between Today and 1983 (Brad DeLong)

Back [in 1983] it was a genuine national emergency that unemployment was so high–real policies like massive monetary ease and the eruption of the Reagan deficits were put in place to reduce unemployment quickly, and everybody whose policies wouldn’t have much of an effect on jobs was nevertheless claiming that their projects were the magic unemployment-reducing bullet.

Today…. nobody much in DC seems to care.

The Link(s): Thu, May 13th, 12pm by Lee Salazar, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. Terms and conditions beyond the scope of this license may be available at leesalazar.com.