Lean Left

When people wonder why liberals are skeptical, to say the least, of the purity of heart of people who use the terms “states rights” it because states rights have almost always been used to support people like the mob described here:

Fifteen minutes later, at the corner of 12th and Park Avenue, two blocks from Central, she hopped off. She’d often walked by Central—it was on the way to her grandfather’s store—and instantly she sensed something was awry: more parked cars than usual, the murmur of a crowd. Then the jeeps and half-tracks came into view, along with the soldiers ringing the school. She saw some white children pass quietly through the line, a sign that everything was al right. But the first two soldiers she approached rebuffed her. A mob of several hundred protesters that had gathered across the street quickly caught sight of her. “They’re coming!” someone shouted. “The niggers are coming!” Elizabeth walked down the street a bit, then approached a different group of soldiers. This time they closed ranks and crossed rifles. “Don’t let her in!” someone shouted.

Elizabeth’s knees started to shake. She walked toward Central’s main entrance and tried a third time; again, the soldiers blocked her way, but this time told her to cross the street. Now the crowd fell in behind her, shouting: “Lynch her! Lynch her!” “No nigger bitch is going to get in our school! Get out of here!” “Go back to where you came from!” Looking for a friendly face, she turned to an old woman, who spat on her. Before long, some 250 whites were at her heels. She knew she couldn’t go back the way she’d come. But if she could only get to the bus stop a block ahead, she thought, she would be safe. She wanted to run, but thought she might fall down. Recording it all was 26-year-old Will Counts of the Arkansas Democrat. He felt sorry for Elizabeth, but he had a job to do; he just hoped he had enough film. “Lynch her!” someone shouted. “Send that nigger back to the jungle!”

One white girl in the throng stood out: she was “screaming, just hysterical,” as Benjamin Fine of The New York Times later put it. It was Hazel Bryan. Unlike many in the crowd, rednecks from the sticks, Hazel was a student at Central—like Elizabeth, about to begin her junior year. Her father was a disabled vet; her mother made lightbulbs for Westinghouse. Hazel’s dress was fashionable and a bit too tight, as if to show off her figure. Her good looks brought her lots of boys and a certain license, and she’d always been a bit of a performer. Her racial attitudes mirrored her parents’: her father would not let black clerks wait on him, for instance, and when banks started hiring black tellers, he found himself another line.

Marching alongside Hazel, chanting “Two, four, six, eight—we don’t want to integrate!” were two friends, Mary Ann Burleson and Sammie Dean Parker. Sammie Dean, immediately to Hazel’s right in the picture and wearing a dark dress, was one of the ringleaders of the segregationist students; Mary Ann was largely along for the ride. Each of them was having herself a grand old time. But to Hazel—her friends called her “Kitty”—this was serious business, and her mood, and look, were dark. An alien federal government was foisting blacks into her secure, comfortable schoolgirl world, and she was outraged. While Mary Ann stared ahead amiably and Sammie Dean Parker turned momentarily toward her father, thereby protecting herself from ignominy and posterity, Hazel, her eyes narrowed, her brow furrowed, her teeth clenched as if about to bite, shrieked: “Go home, nigger! Go back to Africa!” Click. Will Counts had his picture.

That happened fifty years ago today. This happened a few months ago:

After white parents in this racially mixed city complained about school overcrowding, school authorities set out to draw up a sweeping rezoning plan. The results: all but a handful of the hundreds of students required to move this fall were black — and many were sent to virtually all-black, low-performing schools.

No violence, no hateful rhetoric, no threats of lynching. But a school system segregated just the same. Fifty years later we are not a post-racism society. Fifty years later, we are not a color-blind society. Fifty years later, school districts draw up plans that re-segregate schools and the civil rights jurisprudence wont stop them.

Here is the reaction white supremacists received:

No sooner did tens of thousands of African-American demonstrators depart the racially tense town of Jena, La., last week after protesting perceived injustices than white supremacists flooded in behind them.

First a neo-Nazi Web site posted the names, addresses and phone numbers of some of the six black teenagers and their families at the center of the Jena 6 case and urged followers to find them and “drag them out of the house,” prompting an investigation by the FBI.

Then the leader of a white supremacist group in Mississippi published interviews that he conducted with the mayor of Jena and the white teenager who was attacked and beaten, allegedly by the six black youths. In those interviews, the mayor, Murphy McMillin, praised efforts by pro-white groups to organize counterdemonstrations; the teenager, Justin Barker, urged white readers to “realize what is going on, speak up and speak their mind.”

The reason that liberals support things like affirmative action and court supervision of school districts and voting rights in areas with proven pasts of racial discrimination is because, yanno, there are still a lot of racists in positions of power in this country. And we don’t think it it just or defensible that those people be allowed to keep minorities out of full participation in the public sphere. We don’t live in a color-blind society. Pretending that we do just helps the racists and bigots conduct their loathsome activities with impunity.

The UAW has gone out on strike:

Thousands of United Auto Workers walked off the job at General Motors plants around the country Monday in the first nationwide strike against the U.S. auto industry since 1976.

UAW President Ron Gettelfinger said that job security was the top unresolved issue, adding that the talks did not stumble over a groundbreaking provision establishing a UAW-managed trust that will administer GM’s retiree health care obligations. Gettelfinger complained about “one-sided negotiations.”

“It was going to be General Motors’ way at the expense of the workers,” Gettelfinger said at a news conference. “The company walked right up to the deadline like they really didn’t care.”

Gettelfinger added that the union and GM’s management would return to the table Monday.

GM wants cuts in pay and benefits, but apparently doesn’t want to offer anything — like job security or work rule changes — in return.

You take seriously things like this:

A Pentagon group has encouraged some U.S. military snipers in Iraq to target suspected insurgents by scattering pieces of “bait,” such as detonation cords, plastic explosives and ammunition, and then killing Iraqis who pick up the items, according to military court documents.

The classified program was described in investigative documents related to recently filed murder charges against three snipers who are accused of planting evidence on Iraqis they killed.

“Baiting is putting an object out there that we know they will use, with the intention of destroying the enemy,” Capt. Matthew P. Didier, the leader of an elite sniper scout platoon attached to the 1st Battalion of the 501st Infantry Regiment, said in a sworn statement. “Basically, we would put an item out there and watch it. If someone found the item, picked it up and attempted to leave with the item, we would engage the individual as I saw this as a sign they would use the item against U.S. Forces.”

So they are going to put down material and shoot anyone who walks away with it. Never mind that the material could be used for something other than military operations; never mind that many, if not most, of the people who come across this stuff will not know what it is; never mind that people are pack racks and just pick things up because; never mind that the Iraqi economy is a mess and people will be on the lookout for things to use or sell; never mind that people in a war zone tend to try and remove armaments from locations where people could get hurt. Never mind, in other words, that this program is absolutely guaranteed to kill innocents.

I shouldn’t have to say this, but apparently I do: you do not win against an insurgency by random, indiscriminate violence. All that does is make it easier for the insurgents to get help and to recruit. The fact that such an idiotic and obviously counterproductive program has been put in place means that the US Army is losing in Iraq. This is the kind of stupidity that only happens when an occupying power has become frustrated past the point of reason. It is mindless lashing out, driven by the desire to do something to hurt the bastards that are hurting you. But counter-insurgency cannot succeed without the support of the population. When you stop making plans with that in mind, you start losing the war.

Something tells me that Dvorkin will have an opinion about this.

…are greatly exaggerated. This article from the Times of London discusses the declining political influence of the American South. I think it’s entirely too optimistic. As much as I wish the 19th-century values of much of the South were on their way to irrelevance, I just don’t see it happening. Not yet, anyway. I won’t be ready to declare Dixie’s demise until a couple of presidential elections are won convincingly without carrying the South. (If only!) Until then, however, I fully expect politicians to continue pandering to a demographic that believes the Civil Rights era was nothing more than the federal government imposing injustice, rather than working to correct it.

Check out this headline: Democrats Fail to Pass Anti-War Bill. Isn’t it funny how a couple of years ago, when the Democrats were filibustering Republican judicial nominees, the headline wasn’t “Republicans Fail to Confirm Justice.” Rather, it was “Democrats Block Judicial Nominee.” But now that it’s the Republicans engaging in the obstructionism, we don’t see “Republicans Block Anti-War Legislation” — which is what actually happened. Instead we get this.

Liberal media, my ass.

UPDATE: After weighing Ted’s criticism, it seems I wasn’t quite clear. Although most of the important details are, in fact, reported in the story, a lot of people [far too many, but I digress] get the pulse of the news just by browsing headlines, without really reading the stories. My complaint is specifically with the headline, because it’s a misleading summation of what actually happened. The Democrats had enough votes for passage, just not enough for cloture. But you wouldn’t know that from the headline. When you think of a headline like you think of what scrolls across a news ticker, you should start to see my point.

This is perhaps the best piece on the Jena 6 I have seen today (for those of you who have not seen the news, there is a massive protest going on today over this case. The article in question has a good summary of the facts, and here is a post we did on this back when we first heard about the story.)

Indeed, the Jena 6 case, like the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, is a violent reminder that our country is actually many nations. Despite all of the progress that has been made, racism is still a part of too many American kids’ ideological diets. A noose, even in 2007, struck these good ol’ Southern boys as an apt symbol for the fear of “the other” that had been bred in them from birth. And their elders — the school administrators, city officials, and parents — called their inexcusable hatred by cutesy names: pranks, child’s play, boys will be boys. It is a wake-up call to us all: The work of ending racism is far from over.

The enduring white-brown-black, urban-rural, Northern-Southern, rich-poor divides are exposed here — abysses that keep America from truly realizing its dream of equality for all. For those of us who live in urban centers where ethnic segregation, while common, at least appears self-imposed, the idea of a modern day “whites only” drinking fountain is shocking.

But our shock only further proves our denial. The children of Northeastern privilege go to Ivy League or small liberal arts schools, take courses in African American history, and pat each other on the back for knowing a few financial aid-strapped immigrant upstarts, while Southern frat boys beat their chests at the big game and remember their black nannies with patronizing fondness, though they would never bring a black girl home. This is our America. It is a place where overt racism — like the kind we are seeing displayed so dramatically in Jena — has mostly died out (at least publicly), but the complex dynamics of opportunities, relationships, and power still play out along an often denied, though undeniable, color line.

Just consider some of the statistics. According to Human Rights Watch, one in 10 black men in their 20s and early 30s is in jail or prison. Thirteen percent of the black adult male population has lost the right to vote because of felony disenfranchisement. The nationwide college graduation rate for black students is a pathetic 43 percent, according to the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, a full 20 percent lower than that for white students. According to sociologist Dalton Conley, the average black family has only one-eighth the net worth of the average white family. Taken together, these discrepancies paint a grim picture of the enduring gap — culturally, economically, psychologically — between the lives of black and white youth in this country.

We have somehow gotten to a point where nothing short of white sheets and cross burning is taken as a sign of racism. We have somehow reached an equilibrium in which everyone publicly agrees that racism is bad but that racism has no effect on anything today, even when racists are at the forefront of the issue. We are not a post-racism society, not matter how much we want to pretend that we are. That we are better on this issue than we were is undeniable. That we are good enough is laughable.

If you think otherwise, then ask yourself why school re-segregation is taking place again and why Republican presidential candidates wont debate in front of brown people and why police officers kept black refugees trapped in New Orleans and why, why, why there could ever be such a thing as a whites only tree.

The thing about putting Lashawn Barber on The Daily Show is that you don’t really even have to make fun of her. All you have to do is let her talk; the comedy’s self-contained:

P.S. Why should we listen to Barber anyway? I mean, she’s only a woman. Those are probably just her hormones talking…

I haven’t laughed this hard in a VERY long time:

NASCAR Coach Reveals Winning Strategy: ‘Drive Fast’

You know, this country survived a foreign invasion, civil war, two world wars, and a cold war with an enemy that possessed enough nuclear weapons to turn every inch of the planet inot glass a hundred times over. It survived these threats without throwing away the Constitution. But when a couple of failed goat herders got lucky once, our Congress pissed their collective pants and willingly voted away the Fourth Amendment. Senators tend to be concerned, sooner or later, with their legacy. It might help if you pointed out to them that, right now, their section of the history book is entitled “Notable Cowards of the Early 21st Century”

The cloture vote –the vote to break the GOP lead filibuster, just to be clear — is apparently sometime this morning. There are phone numbers at the link above. Please, call your Senators and remind them that we aren’t supposed to be a nation of cowards.

Sickening.

And this monster made his 13 year old record this, even participate in it.

As if we needed any more evidence that the housing bubble is bursting, today we get this report:

The number of foreclosure filings reported in the U.S. last month more than doubled versus August 2006 and jumped 36 percent from July, a trend that signals many homeowners are increasingly unable to make timely payments on their mortgages or sell their homes amid a national housing slump.

A total of 243,947 foreclosure filings were reported in August, up 115 percent from 113,300 in the same month a year ago, Irvine, Calif.-based RealtyTrac Inc. said Tuesday.

There were 179,599 foreclosure filings reported in July.

…snip…

The national foreclosure rate last month was one filing for every 510 households, the company said.

[Bold mine.]

I’ve blogged about this before, and it’s only getting worse. But what I wonder is, does this really surprise anyone? Further, is it really a good idea for the Fed to cut interest rates at this time, thereby encouraging even more borrowing in an economy that’s already too heavily loaded with debt? (Yes, I know that the prime interest rate doesn’t directly impact consumer interest rates, but it does indirectly, and a great deal of consumer debt is tied to it.)

In the absence of strict regulation, this is what laissez-faire economics gets you: irresponsible borrowers and predatory lenders potentially taking the entire economy down, all in the interests of short-term profits. There will doubtless be Libertarians who object that this is simply one of the risks of free-market capitalism, and that the borrowers and lenders should have known the job was dangerous when they took it. But with the whole economy potentially at risk, I fail to see how that’s supposed to be any comfort. In fact, I’m beginning to believe that this sort of Libertarianism is utterly incapable of concerning itself with anything other than short-term profit; anything beyond next quarter is irrelevant. Is that really good for the long-term health of our economy and our society? I don’t think so.

I stand by my previous remarks. A sizable chunk of the lending industry is just shy of a criminal enterprise, making a few billion quick bucks at the low, low cost of ruined lives and a ruined economy. But hey, that’s what “freedom” is all about, right?

Do your good deed for the day:

This week, we have a critical opportunity to restore habeas corpus.

The Habeas Corpus Restoration Act gives us a chance to reverse one of the Bush Administration’s many assaults on our civil liberties.

We all want to make America safe from terrorism, but becoming a nation that sanctions the unlawful detention of its own residents — detaining and jailing them without the chance to appear before a judge — does not make us safe. Instead, it violates a value that we have held dear for centuries — safeguarding our individual freedom before arbitrary state action.

Please sign-on below as a citizen co-sponsor to the bipartisan Leahy-Specter-Dodd Habeas Corpus Restoration Act.

The right to challenge the government’s ability to detain you is fundamental to freedom. In a very real sense, no freedom can exist without it. Without it, the government can lock you away for ever and ever, with no hope of ever getting out, with no requirement that they justify that detention. The destruction of habeas corpus is the goal of men like Pinochet and Hussein. And our government willingly voted it away for a class of people. That’s not something to be proud of whatever the GOP frontrunners may tell you. The name for people who would vote away their foundational freedom is serf, not citizen.

Be a citizen, today, and help Dodd restore habeas corpus.

Link via Digby.

For some reason, when I click on HTML links in programs like Outlook, Word, or even Thunderbird, it opens them in IE, even though I have Firefox set as my system default browser.

Any easy way to fix that?

Not so much, actually:

* Sixty percent of the nation’s daily newspapers print more conservative syndicated columnists every week than progressive syndicated columnists. Only 20 percent run more progressives than conservatives, while the remaining 20 percent are evenly balanced.
* In a given week, nationally syndicated progressive columnists are published in newspapers with a combined total circulation of 125 million. Conservative columnists, on the other hand, are published in newspapers with a combined total circulation of more than 152 million.2
* The top 10 columnists as ranked by the number of papers in which they are carried include five conservatives, two centrists, and only three progressives.
* The top 10 columnists as ranked by the total circulation of the papers in which they are published also include five conservatives, two centrists, and only three progressives.
* In 38 states, the conservative voice is greater than the progressive voice — in other words, conservative columns reach more readers in total than progressive columns. In only 12 states is the progressive voice greater than the conservative voice.
* In three out of the four broad regions of the country — the West, the South, and the Midwest — conservative syndicated columnists reach more readers than progressive syndicated columnists. Only in the Northeast do progressives reach more readers, and only by a margin of 2 percent.
* In eight of the nine divisions into which the U.S. Census Bureau divides the country, conservative syndicated columnists reach more readers than progressive syndicated columnists in any given week. Only in the Middle Atlantic division do progressive columnists reach more readers each week.

We live in a pretty evenly divided country, one that actually is more center-left now than it has been in the recent past, so economics probably cannot explain this by itself. This is a complicated issue, involving the phony ‘liberal media’ campaign of the right, but I don;t think that anyone can see a discrepancy this large and not notice that newspapers tend to be owned mainly by rich people and large media corporations. And I don;t think it will come as a surprise that such people tend to like conservative economic policies because those policies redistribute wealth up the economic ladder. Newspaper owners pay for the news they want and, especially, for the opinions they want. They want conservative opinions and news and they get it.

Again, this more complicated than anyone issue, but it would be astonishing if the economic/political desires of the owners were not reflected in the editorial page choices. For some reason, the notion of “objectivity”, that news papers should provide both sides of the story, dies on the editorial page. It makes perfect sense that conservative owners would take that loophole in journalism ethics and use it to try and get the political outcomes that they desire.

Link via Atrios.

It’s been six years since terrorists killed 3000 people. Bin Laden is still alive and free. Al Qaeda has regain their strength and might actually be stronger than on 9/11. The recommendations of the 9/11 Commission still have not fully been implemented. Our foreign policy establishment is still dominated by people arguing about how big our empire should be instead of reacting to the realities of the new world. Public perception of this country is as low as any time in my memory. Iraq is a disaster with a theocracy being the best case outcome and violence form it serving as both a daily recruitment tool and a graduate level course in terrorist tactics. Katrina demonstrated that we are still incapable of responding to a terrorist attack.

The best you can hope for after every tragedy, after the funerals and the shock, is for justice and improvement. If the tragedy was the result of people, those people need to be held accountable. Lessons have to be learned, to make sure that every failure has been identified, every weakness addressed, every assumption and pre-conceived notion re-evaluated, every problem and process has been corrected and tested. Six years after 9/11, the country has neither.

The people in the Pentagon, in the towers, in the planes, and the men and women who risked their lives and health to try and save them deserve better than that.

I’m off to Chicago to go see Richard Cheese on Saturday night. In the unlikely event that anyone in the readership is interested in seeing the show and will be in Chicago, I have a few extra tickets. Let me know at tgirsch-at-gmail-dot-com.

P.S. The non-flash version of the web site is hilarious.

Cross-posted at SayUncle.

I don’t have any profound comments about her place in literature or her works. I just know that they were very good and brought me a great deal of pleasure in my childhood. We should all do so well.

Via Scalzi.

Salon reports that Tenet told Bush that there were no WMDs in Iraq — in October of 2002:

On Sept. 18, 2002, CIA director George Tenet briefed President Bush in the Oval Office on top-secret intelligence that Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction, according to two former senior CIA officers. Bush dismissed as worthless this information from the Iraqi foreign minister, a member of Saddam’s inner circle, although it turned out to be accurate in every detail. Tenet never brought it up again.

Nor was the intelligence included in the National Intelligence Estimate of October 2002, which stated categorically that Iraq possessed WMD. No one in Congress was aware of the secret intelligence that Saddam had no WMD as the House of Representatives and the Senate voted, a week after the submission of the NIE, on the Authorization for Use of Military Force in Iraq. The information, moreover, was not circulated within the CIA among those agents involved in operations to prove whether Saddam had WMD.

This makes me extremely angry, so angry I actually hope it is not true. I knew they exaggerated and withheld contradictory data and hyped weak evidence — and all of that was bad enough. But I always assumed a kind of warped good faith - -that they were actually convinced and just fell into the all too human trap of confirmation bias. Bad enough in the leaders of the country, and something that they should have been hounded out of office for a long time ago.

But this, this would be a difference of kind, not just degree. This isn’t confirmation bias; this is rejecting reality and trying to substitute their own. If this is true, its hard to find words strong enough to condemn what Bush did, so perhpas I’ll just stick with the entirely accurate, if somewhat understated, war criminal.