The MacArthur Foundation announced the winners of their Genius Fellowships this week for 23 people. They each get $500,000 do whatever they want with the money.
What would you do with half a million dollars?
Well, first aside from the obvious such as pay off my debts, I’d contribute to a worthy college or university theatre department in support of playwriting students…right after they do a production of one of my plays, which I would, of course, help pay for.
Steve Thrasher in the Village Voice:
About 12:01 on the afternoon of January 20, 2009, the white American mind began to unravel.
It had been a pretty good run up to that point. The brains of white folks had been humming along cogently for near on 400 years on this continent, with little sign that any serious trouble was brewing. White people, after all, had managed to invent a spiffy new form of self-government so that all white men (and, eventually, women) could have a say in how white people were taxed and governed. White minds had also nearly universally occupied just about every branch of that government and, for more than two centuries, had kept sole possession of the leadership of its executive branch (whose parsonage, after all, is called the White House).
But when that streak was broken—and, for the first time, a non-white president accepted the oath of office—white America rapidly began to lose its grip.
In a larger sense, there’s always been a sense of entitlement among certain people, especially conservatives and those who live by the credo that all the rules they’ve put in place to run a nice polite society apply to everyone but them. (I had to sit through a rant from someone who has a marital history that rivals thrice-married Newt Gingrich on how outraged! he was that Bill Clinton got a blow job. It was hard not to laugh.) That’s why they feel entitled to tax cuts that will increase the budget deficit but refuse to approve of jobless benefits for the unemployed because they say we can’t afford it. They also presume to tell other people what to do with their bodies and their relationships while they’re fending off divorce lawyers and grand juries.
This irony-impaired phenomenon has been around for generations, but it’s always been relatively low-key; it was one thing to hear about the dangers of “class warfare” when it was on the level of the Buckleys chiding the Roosevelts or the Kennedys, but the arrival of Barack Obama took it to another level. All of a sudden those catch-phrases such as “All men are created equal” and “Equal rights under the law” took on a new dimension: they’re all well and good, but we didn’t actually mean it, and it’s absurd to think that they apply to everyone.
The story of Tyler Clementi is painful on so many levels that I find it hard to even contemplate it.
Bob Cesca takes down the false equivalency meme.
…it seems laughable on its face that otherwise smart people are going around these days and repeating this bullshit meme about how “both sides” are to blame for the insanity that’s overtaken American politics.
The DeMint one-man choke hold on the entire Senate is unmatched on the Democratic side. The filibustering is unmatched. The brazen, hubristic flaunting of obvious hypocrisy is unmatched.
But still it’s “both sides.” Somehow. And I’m directly referencing here left-of-center writers, pundits and, disappointingly, guys like Jon Stewart, who’s Rally to Restore Sanity is directed at “both sides.”
It seems as though whenever Democrats control Washington, liberals shift focus from attacking conservatives and Republicans to attacking “both sides,” perhaps out of some kind of hipster intellectual craving to seem fair-minded (falsely fair-minded in this case). Or maybe it’s out of a desire to not appear subservient to the majority party. I don’t know for sure.
[…]
Perhaps I’m missing something. But show me where there’s equal and precise equivalencies between “both sides.” Show me a TV pundit on the left with the same audience reach and capacity for wackaloon conspiracy theories as Glenn Beck. Show me a traditional media outlet on the left as massive as Fox News Channel or Clear Channel.
Sorry, “both sides” fetishists, but one viewing of her show proves that there’s no comparison between Rachel Maddow’s fact-based analysis and Sean Hannity’s Republican talking point hootenanny.
It’s also evident when you get a conservative pundit on TV whip out the “both sides” argument when they are confronted with the latest batshittery from Sharron Angle, Rand Paul, Tom Tancredo, or Christine O’Donnell, and the host or the interviewer nods sagely and lets it go by like a soft pitch. They do it either because they’re uninformed, which means they shouldn’t be hosting a TV show, or they’re under some delusion that they can’t be seen as being “biased” and that the guest is entitled to his or her opinion.
Not when it’s demonstrably false. Someone needs to call out the bullshit and it shouldn’t be the people at home shouting at their TV.
Rep. Louis Gohmert (R-TX) has come up with a brilliant plan for people on welfare.
We have people on welfare and I know there’s some that just don’t wanna work, but there’s some that do. How ’bout if instead of the welfare, we give ’em an alternative. We’ll give you so many acres that can provide land where you can live off of it, make a living and we’ll give you seed money to start, but you have to sign an agreement that you’ll never accept welfare again. How ’bout that? We got plenty of land.
Of course, you do realize that when I said this was “brilliant,” I was being sarcastic.
James O’Keefe thinks he’s either James Bond or G. Gordon Liddy.
A conservative activist known for making undercover videos plotted to embarrass a CNN correspondent by recording a meeting on hidden cameras aboard a floating “palace of pleasure” and making sexually suggestive comments, e-mails and a planning document show.
James O’Keefe, best known for hitting the community organizing group ACORN with an undercover video sting, hoped to get CNN Investigative Correspondent Abbie Boudreau onto a boat filled with sexually explicit props and then record the session, those documents show.
The plan apparently was thwarted after Boudreau was warned minutes before it was supposed to happen.
“I never intended to become part of the story,” Boudreau said. “But things suddenly took a very strange turn.”
O’Keefe is best known for making a series of undercover videos inside ACORN offices around the country in 2009. The 40-year-old liberal group was crippled by scandal after O’Keefe and fellow activist Hannah Giles allegedly solicited advice from ACORN workers on setting up a brothel and evading taxes.
The videos led to some of the employees being fired and contributed to the disbanding of ACORN, which advocated for low- and middle-income and worked to register voters.
But prosecutors in New York and California eventually found no evidence of wrongdoing by the group, and the California probe found the videos had been heavily and selectively edited.
I don’t think he even comes up to the level of Maxwell Smart.
HT to CLW.
The terror threat in Europe is seen as “credible.”
Congress is adjourning without dealing with the tax cuts.
On again — Stem cell research can continue while the case to halt it is in court.
JP Morgan Chase halts foreclosures pending paperwork reviews.
Meanwhile, foreclosures are still high in South Florida real estate.
Cuba plans to drill deeper than BP.
Another world — Astronomers have evidence of another planet out there that is possibly capable of sustaining life.
R.I.P. Tony Curtis, 85, actor (Spartacus, Some Like It Hot) and father of Jamie Lee Curtis.
Tropical Update: After dumping a lot of rain on South Florida, what’s left of TS Nicole heads up the east coast.
The Tigers lost the doubleheader to the Indians. Tonight they head to Baltimore for the last series of the season.
In honor of the slow and steady rain we’re getting here in South Florida thanks to Tropical Storm Nicole….
It looks like TD Sixteen will bring a lot of rain but not a lot of wind with it when it crosses South Florida today. Flash flood advisories are posted, but schools are open in Miami and Fort Lauderdale.
There are a lot of people on the progressive side who understandably feel angry, frustrated, and just plain pissed off by what they’ve seen coming from the Obama administration. I won’t argue with them; there have been some real disappointments and unpleasant moments, up to but not limited to Rahm Emanuel’s outbursts. I know exactly what they’re talking about, and I’m not here to defend them or rattle off the talking points.
But I do think we have to look beyond what we wanted or what we expected and realize two things. First, nobody could live up to the hype that accompanied Barack Obama’s run for the White House. The combination of a dynamic speaker and the revulsion at the failure of the Bush administration made the perfect climate to sweep him into office with the expectations of miracles and deliverance. So no matter what he did, even if he accomplished everything in the first one hundred days and relegated Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, and Sarah Palin to selling Christmas goodies on HSN, there was bound to be disappointment and unmet expectations. In some ways we set ourselves up for the let-down, and that made the missteps and the screw-ups even more painful and aggravating.
Second, I think we woefully underestimated the visceral hatred that would erupt when it dawned on the right wing that America had actually elected a black man with a centrist/liberal agenda. I remember writing a post back when Barack Obama started his run for the nomination in 2007 that if he got elected, the Republicans and the hard-core wingers would go to heights unimagined to denigrate and slander him and possibly even threaten his life, but I don’t think we really understood the depths of depravity that would come out. Even the worst things that the rudest left-wing bloggers said about George W. Bush amount to gentle chiding compared to what we’re seeing. And it’s not just from the fringes. We have elected members of Congress who are questioning everything from the president’s place of birth to his faith, and we have an entire industry devoted to churning out this crap. (Ironically, it’s probably good for at least one segment of the economy; there’s money to be made in Wingnuttia.)
So now we’re coming up on the mid-term elections. There’s been a lot of talk about the enthusiasm gap; Democrats are demoralized and disappointed, the Republicans are ginned up, and it’s all Barack Obama’s fault. The Democrats aren’t going to vote and the Republicans will vote twice (and suppress voters where they can just for good measure). If that happens, the results will be even worse than what’s going on now because no matter what happens — even if every teabagger candidate out there loses by double digits and the Democrats cling to the House and Senate — the Republicans will claim it as a win and, like George W. Bush did with his “mandate” in 2000, take every pound of manure and sell it as gold. And, true to form, if the Democrats manage to pull it off, they will breathe a huge sigh of relief and not feel as if they deserved to win.
So let me be perfectly blunt: your feelings don’t matter, and failing to vote because of your disappointment will only empower the wingnuts. In fact, they’re counting on it.
Footnote: Of course, Digby says it better.
Matt Taibbi heads to Kentucky to get a handle on the Tea Party and comes away with this conclusion:
Vast forests have already been sacrificed to the public debate about the Tea Party: what it is, what it means, where it’s going. But after lengthy study of the phenomenon, I’ve concluded that the whole miserable narrative boils down to one stark fact: They’re full of shit. All of them. At the voter level, the Tea Party is a movement that purports to be furious about government spending — only the reality is that the vast majority of its members are former Bush supporters who yawned through two terms of record deficits and spent the past two electoral cycles frothing not about spending but about John Kerry’s medals and Barack Obama’s Sixties associations. The average Tea Partier is sincerely against government spending — with the exception of the money spent on them. In fact, their lack of embarrassment when it comes to collecting government largesse is key to understanding what this movement is all about — and nowhere do we see that dynamic as clearly as here in Kentucky, where Rand Paul is barreling toward the Senate with the aid of conservative icons like Palin.
I’ve been saying that all along.
Everybody is providing a link to the interview in Rolling Stone with President Obama, so I might as well, too.
Something for everyone: Tea Party, Fox News, Wall Street, Afghanistan, climate change, the oil spill.
Pakistan generals want to shake up the government.
Senate Republicans blocked the outsourcing bill.
Poll: The race for Congress is getting tighter.
Former President Jimmy Carter was hospitalized after getting sick while flying to Cleveland.
The Grand Ole Opry re-opens after last spring’s flooding in Nashville.
Poverty is up in South Florida.
Tropical Update: South Florida is under a tropical storm warning with TS Sixteen bearing down.
The Tigers were rained out against the Indians. They’ll play a double-header today.
This is our first tropical storm that’s looking like it will directly hit Miami. It will be called Nicole.
Following up on the post below…
What was the first “grown-up” book that you read?
I think it was To Kill a Mockingbird. My mom gave it to me after the movie came out. I was ten or so.
Via Bryan, who got it from Ellroon, I’m reminded that this is Banned Books Week.
Actually, the people behind removing certain books like The Catcher in the Rye, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and To Kill a Mockingbird from libraries and schoolrooms don’t like to use the term “banned.” According to them, it has negative connotations. They prefer “challenged.” The result is usually the same.
A challenge is a formal, written complaint requesting a book be removed from library shelves or banned from the school curriculum. Since 1990, the American Library Association’s (ALA) Office for Intellectual Freedom has recorded more than 11,000 book challenges, including 460 in 2009. About three out of four of all challenges target material in schools or school libraries, and one in four target material in public libraries. The Office for Intellectual Freedom estimates that less than one-quarter of challenges are reported and recorded.
Unfortunately, losing the right to choose reading materials for ourselves and our families is a reality in the United States.
Frankly, I don’t care if there are parents out there who don’t want their kids reading certain books. I don’t agree with it, but they’re the ones raising their kids, not me. What I really despise, though, is their presumption that somehow they have the right to tell other parents what their kids can or can’t read. It says a lot more about them as parents if they can’t teach their kids effectively than it does about the schools or the public libraries.
Not only that, it is an attempt to tell authors what they should or shouldn’t be writing and demanding that they crank out the bland crap that passes their muster until all we have to choose from are Sarah Palin biographies and pale imitations of The Da Vinci Code. But we writers are an ornery bunch, and for many of us, nothing motivates us so much as to hear that our books have been banned. You can’t buy publicity like that.
CNN has the results of a poll by the Pew Forum that shows while Americans may be the most religious people out there, a lot of them don’t really know much about their own faith.
The survey is full of surprising findings.
For example, it’s not evangelicals or Catholics who did best – it’s atheists and agnostics.
It’s not Bible-belt Southerners who scored highest – they came at the bottom.
Those who believe the Bible is the literal word of God did slightly worse than average, while those who say it is not the word of God scored slightly better.
Barely half of all Catholics know that when they take communion, the bread and wine literally become the body and blood of Christ, according to Catholic doctrine.
And only about one in three know that a public school teacher is allowed to teach a comparative religion class – although nine out of 10 know that teacher isn’t allowed by the Supreme Court to lead a class in prayer.
I suppose you can make the argument that the atheists and agnostics came to their conclusions after being inundated with religion and decided, after weighing all the evidence, that there was no there there, while the evangelicals were more likely to take it to a level of emotional connection rather than a journey of scholarly research. It may also explain why people who can’t get through the first act of Romeo and Juliet because of the Elizabethan English can parse every syllable of the King James bible, which uses pretty much the same language, and divine the intent of God. It is all the more irritating when you realize that some of the people who are making a living by using religion as a cudgel against everything from same-sex marriage to Sunday car sales have no clue as to what they’re talking about.
There are some questions from the quiz at the site. I got 10 out of 10. How about you?
Michael Crowley at Time points to three headlines that leave the ACLU and, frankly, a lot of people, unhappy with the Obama administration on issues that involve privacy and civil liberties.
1. “U.S. Tries to Make It Easier to Wiretap the Internet”
2. “Money Transfers Could Face Anti-Terrorism Scrutiny”
3. “Critics Balk at Obama’s Justification for Killing American Terrorist”
Anyone who thinks that there aren’t bad people out there with malicious intent is fooling themselves, and Mr. Crowley makes the point that the president, knowing he’s perceived by both critics at home and enemies planning attacks as a weak-willed fighter, has to be a extra vigilant. It’s ugly, and it’s not what this country stands for, and it’s the wrong reason to push them. But as someone who knows a little something about the business once told me, there are people who work for our government and our interests who do things you really don’t want to know about but keep us safe. I have to take his word for it, because, as Glenn Greenwald notes, it’s not our goal in life to emulate some of the worst excesses of dictators.
We know this stuff goes on regardless of who’s in the White House. We’ve known this has been going on in some form or another since the founding of the nation; indeed, throughout history. I think we all would just rather not know about it so we can spend our time wondering what’s in the next clip of Christine O’Donnell that Bill Maher will pull out next Friday night.
Alan Grayson isn’t shy about taking on his opponents.
Democratic Rep. Alan Grayson, an Orlando-area lawmaker who has employed flamboyant rhetoric against the GOP since winning office in 2008, is running an ad on broadcast and cable stations in central Florida that highlights state Sen. Dan Webster’s views on social issues. The ad says Webster would force women to carry to term a fetus resulting from rape and would bar abused women from seeking abortions, medical treatment or divorce.
“Daniel Webster wants to impose his radical fundamentalism on us,” the announcer says. “Taliban Dan Webster — hands off our bodies and our laws.”
[…]
The ad cites votes from 1990 in favor of covenant marriage, which bars couples from divorcing except in the case of adultery.
The black-and-white ad also includes video of Webster reading a Bible passage: “Wives, submit yourself to your own husband. … She should submit to me. That’s in the Bible.”
Grayson, who won office two years with 52 percent in a district President George W. Bush carried in 2004, is one of the Democrats’ top incumbents to defend. But unlike other endangered House members, Grayson has neither cooled his rhetoric nor focused on the economic issues Democrats hope will help them defend majorities in Congress.
Instead, Grayson has delivered a string of fiery interviews and speeches, including one on the House floor several months ago describing the GOP health care plan as “don’t get sick, and if you do get sick, die quickly.”
It’s actually not a lot different than some of the ads I saw running in South Florida put up by conservative groups against various candidates, although I have to say that “Taliban Dan” is a bit much. But then, there’s never been much about Alan Grayson to suggest he’d go for the subtle approach. He knows what gets his name out there — and on the blogs — and it works, obviously.
The good folks over at First Draft are holding their annual fund-raiser. They were one of the first blogs to show up here to welcome me to the blogosphere nearly seven years ago and they’re still going strong, so if you can, stop by and drop some coin. Good work over there.
