Marta and the Iowa State Fair Corndog Queen

Some recent items 8-17

Aziz in City of Brass, "Obama's Muslim Outreach Advisor Resigns":

Chalk up another victory for the scalp-hunting Islamophobe right: Mazen Asbahi, appointed as national coordinator for Muslim American affairs by the Obama campaign, has resigned from his volunteer position because of claims that he has "ties" to the Muslim Brotherhood, and served on the board of advisors for an Islamic fund at the same time (8 years ago) as another member, Jamal Said who is a fundamentalist imam. Asbahi actually resigned from that position after only a few weeks, once he learned of allegations against Said. In other words, Asbahi got the jihadi cooties, which are kind of like a mixture of anthrax and herpes.

Obama continues to disappoint on this score. He still remains unable to state publicly that "no, I am not a muslim but it would make no difference even if I were." It would have truly been a hope-inspiring change to see him defend Asbahi and take on the whisperers, because caving to them makes them all the stronger. That would be audacity I can believe in.

Yes, 12% of voters still think Obama is muslim (incidentally, 1% think he's Jewish). So whats the better strategy? Try to distance yourself from muslims at all costs to try and make that 12% think, "hmm. ok so he threw his volunteer outreach guy under the bus. I'm convinced!" ? Or to try and undermine the reasoning that says "if Obama is muslim, then I cannot vote for him, because muslims are not acceptable" ?

If any politician had the power or the pulpit to take on the ugly, dark side of American culture that Islamophobia represents, it's Obama. Given the confluence of events of war and energy and security, a sane outreach to Islam is in our collective best interest. Yet Obama runs away. Again.

This item from "Dr iRack" of Abu Muqawama very succinctly frames the issue of the fight regarding provincial elections in Iraq, which are tentatively scheduled for this fall:

Back on June 23, a guest poster on Abu Aardvark (now revealed to be Sam Parker at the United States Institute of Peace) usefully framed Iraq's central political cleavage as a clash between the "Powers That Be" (PTB: Dawa, ISCI/Badr, IIP, the Kurds) and the "Powers That Aren't" (PTA: Sahwa/tribes/SoIs, Sadrists, independents, secularists, etc.). This paradigm overlaps with, but greatly complicates, the standard Shia vs. Sunni and Arab vs. Kurd dichotomies typically used to define ongoing communal struggle in Iraq.
[...]

He goes on to recommend:

1. Reidar Visser's excellent discussion of the Kirkuk issue, provincial elections, and the PTB/PTA paradigm.

2. Michael Gordon's NYT Magazine article on the PTB/PTA clash within the Shia community.

3. A very good WaPo piece by Sudarsan Raghavan and Ernesto Londono on how the PTB/PTA conflict plays out regionally across Iraq.

The security improvements in Iraq are real but reversible. They cannot be sustained if the PTBs lock the PTAs out of politics. Period.

Joe Bageant quotes an anonymous political consultant regarding the Obama phenomenon in "Life in the Post Political Age"

Insofar as the style-over-substance post-political age we supposedly live in is a construct imposed on voters by elites, the degree to which people buy into it is debatable. Large numbers of people don't vote, and large numbers of the people who do vote do so in spite of lacking confidence in the basic health of the system, thinking they have no other choice. But it's worth reading-- an excerpt:

The underlying social change that led to the Obama victory is the unprecedented extent to which the narrative of popular consumer culture, and the media that drives it, has become the dominant influence on how Americans think, formulate their ideas and understand the world around them.

The most important result of this process has been the steady and consistent depoliticization of American society, to an extent that we can make the case that we are living at the dawn of the post political age.
The two primary features of the post political age are a politics completely drained of all its contents and ability or willingness to be used as an agent of change in social or economic policy, and its full integrations into the world of American popular, consumer and entertainment culture.[...]

It is a result of this dynamic that the two consistent winners in American politics over the last 30 years have been the cultural left and the economic right.

I'll miss this guy

George Carlin, May 12, 1937 – June 22, 2008.

"There are no bad words. Bad thoughts. Bad intentions," he said. Yet, out of 400,000 words in the English language, there are seven: "That will infect your soul, curve your spine and keep the country from winning the war...."

Murder one

Melinda Henneberger writes in Slate:

On today's episode of "Hey, a Girl Can Dream", my man Benedict decides that as long as he's in the neighborhood, he should stroll on over to the Supreme Court and spend a couple of minutes protesting the death penalty, by lethal injection or otherwise. The high court is a short walk from the White House, where the president told the pope that Americans "need your message that all of life is sacred.'' And what better way to get that message out?

Maybe Il Papa didn't say anything because he knew the court was discussing capital punishment and child rape, the latter a sore point for the Catholic church. I have to believe ole JP2 would've spoken out, irrespective of the fallout. In a related article, "The Supreme Court jump-starts the machinery of death", Dahlia Lithwick writes:

Fisher says that if you look at the pair of recent cases that banned capital punishment for mentally retarded offenders (in 2002) and juvenile offenders (in 2005), it's clear the social consensus is trending away from the death penalty. Then, Roberts jumps in to argue that the "evolving standards of decency" test should not be a one-way ratchet. Does this trend "only work one way?" he asks. "How are you ever supposed to get consensus moving in the opposite direction? … Do 20 states have to get together and do it at the same time?"
[...]
Roberts says the clear trend that matters is not the one Fisher points to but rather that "more and more states are passing statutes imposing the death penalty in situations that do not result in death."
[...]
Roberts continues in this vein: The cases declining to allow capital punishment for minors or the mentally retarded, he says, are "qualitatively different" from the distinction here between child rape and murder, because they focus on the "culpability of the offender" as opposed to the nature of the offense. And Kennedy adds that "even the countries of Europe which have joined the European Convention on human rights" permit the death penalty for treason. He says that on the continent, "You can slaughter your fellow citizens, but if you offend the state, you can be put to death." Then, Scalia asks Fisher if he thinks "treason is worse than child rape." Fisher replies that all the professional sex-assault groups and social workers have lined up against making child rape a capital crime.

Why Kennedy and Scalia decided go down the nonsensical side road of comparing treason with child rape is beyond me. It makes me wonder if it's a gesture of contempt for the plaintiff(and the defense), suggesting their minds were made up. Lithwick's article is 1695 words, and not once does she mention anybody discussing the question of whether or not a mandatory death sentence for child rape makes rapists more likely to kill their victims. My sense is this is in fact the case, and it's a much more important than Scalia's asinine question about child rape and treason.

The court upheld the law regarding lethal injection, and although they discussed allowing child rape to be a capital crime that's not what this past week's decision(Baze v. Rees) was about, at least not principally.

I don't know if the death penalty is wrong in the abstract. Certainly most of the people sentenced to death are probably terrible characters, and there is some evidence it can have a deterrence effect. But I note the series of overturned convictions for capital crimes, and I believe that the death penalty as it's practiced certainly is wrong, and part of that is us. People lie, or hide rather than testify, or forget or conflate or confuse events. Zealous cops and prosecutors make mistakes, evidence gets lost, or even worse, "lost", juries decide based on prejudices, etc. There's no reason to believe that putting together some blue-ribbon panel of experts to "fix" the death penalty will fix human nature. The Dallas Morning News says that there have been 16 overturned cases in Dallas county alone :

The disturbing spate of DNA exonerations of Texas inmates is the most powerful argument for freezing Texas' machinery of death. Dallas County has the distinction of having more discredited cases than any county nationwide. Just this week, a 16th wrongful conviction was announced here. Thomas Clifford McGowan Jr. spent 23 years imprisoned by the state stemming from a rape in Richardson that he didn't commit.

How many people have been wrongly executed without getting that review of evidence after 6 or 10 or 17 years? We'll never know, but we can be pretty sure the number isn't zero.



The same problems exist with child rape convictions, although possibly to a lesser degree. But for a different practical reason, executing child rapists is a terrible idea. I'm flabbergasted that so many people think of it in terms of vengeance and don't seem to be concerned that a child rapist, having raped his victim and knowing he's liable to be executed if he's caught even if he lets her live, now has the perverse incentive to kill his victim and dispose of her to make sure she never talks. When the law encourages this, the law acts to protect the righteousness of the uninvolved.

Why don't people think about this? Do they see it as an irrelevant question?


see also Reuters: "The death penalty in the United States" and

Wall St. Journal Lawblog:"should the death penalty extend to non-homicides?"
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Barzun at 100

And...today(11.30) is Jacques Barzun's 100th birthday. The TIME cover is from 1956, and the inset photo(courtesy incidentlights.com) is from 1997. Incidentally Barzun settled in my home town, San Antonio, when he retired in 1996. I used to know a guy whom I like to call Lothar Scruggs, who served as a research assistant for him not so long ago. (Barzun has continued(continues?) to crank out books well into his 90s, even though he retired from publishing and teaching.)

If you are reading this Lothar, you should look ole Barzun up and get him a cake or something, and maybe some Sprite. I mean, if you haven't already. I'll bet he'd like to hear from you.

Barzun was fully "alert to the irony of aging," commenting from experience that: "Old age is like learning a new profession. And not one of your own choosing."

Age of Reason by Arthur Krystal in The New Yorker, October 22, 2007, p. 103

via Wikipedia's Barzun entry.

and a Jacques Barzun interview on Charlie Rose, here.

meow.

I have finished my 1st movie. (No, this isn't it(above), but for some reason it came up as related content(?)* on youtube.) I uploaded it to Youtube, but I may fiddle with the editing some more. I sent the url off in an email to some persons I know who I hope might give me a sense of whether the edits are too fast or too slow.

(I have a very poor sense of this, as I tend to favor faster edits than what most people are accustomed to, at least for my generation. By contrast, young people these days, who knows-- they might think my edits are too slow.)

Anyway, I liked this video, even though I don't think it's really similar to mine. If you really want to see mine, it's here: "v. primitive".

*I have since replaced the "flying cats" video since I figured out that it just came up, not as related content, but as something they were promoting. So here's an interview with Claude Lévi Strauss(pt 1) Here's pt 2 and pt 3.

Incidentally, Lévi-Strauss will be 99 on Wednesday the 28th(!)(I guess I shouldn't refer to "young people these days" as I'm just a pup compared to him...)

Naomi n' Naomi

If you are a good liberal-- and naturally I hope you are-- then you probably (1) care about being able to tell Naomi Klein and Naomi Wolf apart, and (2) occasionally have some difficulty doing so.

So as a public service and an excuse to post a picture of a couple of Naomis, I am offering this simple primer to help you tell these Naomis apart:

1.Naomi Klein(on the left), born in Montreal, is Canadian. Naomi Wolf, born in California, is American.

2.Naomi Klein is probably best known for No Logo, published in 2000. Naomi Wolf is probably best known for The Beauty Myth(1990).

2b.Unfortunately, Naomi Wolf is also known for a bit of righty/MSM misinformation: for supposedly having advised Al Gore to "wear more earth tones" when she was an advisor to him during the 2000 campaign. Although she was in fact an advisor to Gore, there is no actual evidence that she said this, and it was just another example of the idiotic big media narrative about how Gore was less authentic and out of touch when compared to the "authentic" George Bush, Jr. [...]

3. Naomi Klein is married, whereas Naomi Wolf is divorced.(Yes, I noticed the lack of a wedding ring in Naomi Klein's photo, above. But I wouldn't read too much into it-- she probably just doesn't want her new book to be jealous, since they probably spent a lot of time together.)


4. Speaking of new books, they each put out a new book in September of 2007, possibly out of a desire to confuse people. Klein's is The Shock Doctrine, and Naomi Wolf's is The End of America:a letter of warning to a young patriot.(This past summer Ms. Wolf had an article in the Guardian discussing the premise of her then-forthcoming book-- here: Fascist America in Ten Steps.


5. They're both very talented and smart and pretty and should send me free copies of their books to review. Don't you think so?


see also

Critical Thinkers: "Naomi Wolf resources"

Naomi Klein article in Harpers:Baghdad year zero: Pillaging Iraq in pursuit of a neocon utopia