Robert.mccowen

In today’s Guardian, Paul Mason argues that you can apply the theories and methods of Marxist analysis to predict the ending of Game of Thrones:

If you apply historical materialism to Westeros, the plot of season five and six becomes possible to predict. What happened with feudalism, when kings found themselves in hock to bankers, is that – at first – they tried to sort it out with naked power. The real-life Edward III had his Italian bankers locked up in the Tower of London until they waived his debts.

But eventually the power of commerce began to squash the power of kings. Feudalism gave way to a capitalism based on merchants, bankers, colonial plunder and the slave trade. Paper money emerged, as did a complex banking system for assuaging problems like your gold mine running dry.

Mason points to some key factors – the bankruptcy of the monarchy, the rising power of the merchant class, the unrest among the vast majority of the population (known as the smallfolk) who are suffering the brunt of the seemingly endless War of Five Kings – which are slowly destabilizing the ground under the Iron Throne.

So far, so good. But here’s where Mason makes a very odd detour and undercuts his entire thesis.

Mason argues that, despite all of these factors, no social change will happen, because of the limitations of the genre:

So what Westeros needs is not an invasion of werewolves from the frozen north, but the arrival of a new kind of human being: they should be dressed in black, with white lace collars, stern faces and an aversion to sex and drink. In a word, Westeros needs capitalists – such as those who frown puritanically at us from Dutch portraits in the 17th century. And they should, as in the Dutch Republic and the English civil war, launch a revolution.

But that can’t happen in the secondary world of fantasy fiction. The thinning process can never be allowed to end; it must be perpetual for the conceit of the drama to work.

My jaw falls open at this point. Mason clearly knows that the Iron Bank of Braavos exists, how did he fail to see that those bankers were the same Dutch capitalists he’s looking for to start this revolution into modernity? As I describe in the essay linked there, the Braavosi are small-r republicans in a world dominated by monarchies and aristocracies, and their consciousness of their origins as a nation of runaway slaves has already led them to conduct their foreign policy with an eye to the abolition of that system. Indeed, if we read between the lines of the origins of the Faceless Men, they may have already brought down the Valyrian Empire because the religious cult heeded the cries of the mining slaves underneath Valyria’s soil for revenge against the masters.

Why does Mason think the Iron Bank has provided loans to Stannis? As Tycho Nestoris explains in Season 4’s “The Laws of Gods and Men,” the Iron Bank cares for the truth of ledgers over the truth of heralds’ rolls of genealogy. When, not if, the Iron Bank gets its due, they will have to remake much of Westeros’ economy and society just to raise productivity levels enough that the country can afford to pay its debts. (Incidentally, if you want to read more on exactly how and why the Iron Throne became bankrupt, you might want to pick up this new edited volume and read my essay “Who Stole Westeros?”)

Even more baffling is Paul Mason’s conception of George R.R Martin’s motivations for writing a fantasy novel, which he argues can be explained by the ennui of post-industrial capitalism:

There is a reason so much fantasy fiction adopts the conceit of a feudalism that is always in crisis but never overthrown. It forms the ideal landscape in which to dramatise the secret desires of people who live under modern capitalism.

Tolkien’s generation – scarred by industrial-scale warfare – craved the values of heroism and mercy associated with the face-to-face combat of yesteryear. For William Morris, whose utopian socialist novel News From Nowhere is set in a quasi-medieval Hammersmith, the craving was for skill, craft, beautiful individual objects – an escape from the brutalism of industrial mass production.

Future social historians, as they look back on the popularity of Game of Thrones, will not have much trouble deciphering the inner desires of the generation addicted to it. They are: “all of the above” plus multipartner sex.

Trapped in a system based on economic rationality, we all want the power to be something bigger than our credit card limit, or our job function. Nobody sits at home watching the these dramas imagining they are a mere slave, peasant or serving girl.

So why does George R.R Martin start his book looking through the eyes of a peasant who’s been drafted into the Night’s Watch for poaching, looking askance at an idiot noble officer who’s been set above him by rank rather than merit? Why are his chief point-of-view characters put on the outside of the power center of medieval society by their disabilities (Tyrion), their bastardy (Jon Snow), or their gender (Arya, Sansa, Daenerys)? Why include Davos Seaworth at all, if not to question the social structure that denied him the opportunity to read and, save for a stroke of luck, would have seen him dead on a smuggler’s gibbet? And if Martin is just another anti-modernist in the vein of Tolkien, why would he say this of the great master:

This was maybe my answer to Tolkien, whom, as much as I admire him, I do quibble with. Lord of the Rings had a very medieval philosophy: that if the king was a good man, the land would prosper. We look at real history and it’s not that simple. Tolkien can say that Aragorn became king and reigned for a hundred years, and he was wise and good. But Tolkien doesn’t ask the question: What was Aragorn’s tax policy? Did he maintain a standing army? What did he do in times of flood and famine? And what about all these orcs? By the end of the war, Sauron is gone but all of the orcs aren’t gone – they’re in the mountains. Did Aragorn pursue a policy of systematic genocide and kill them? Even the little baby orcs, in their little orc cradles? (GRRM, Rolling Stone, 4/23/2014)

As I have explain over and over again on Race for the Iron Throne, A Song of Ice and Fire is a deconstructivist fantasy series, one that questions all of the tropes about good kings and happy peasants and brave knights and fair maidens. The kings are secondary characters who are more often pawns than players and whose dreams of glory only end in the death of thousands, the peasants are harnessing religious millenialism to inspire revolution, the only people who uphold the values of knighthood are the ones who refuse to become knights (like Sandor Clegane), or who are barred from becoming knights (like Brienne of Tarth), or who were never knights to begin with (Duncan the Tall), and the traditions of chivalry and courtly love are pretty fictions stretched over gendered oppression and domestic violence.

So it may well be that Marxist analysis can predict the end of Game of Thrones. But unless Marxist analysts approach the material on its own terms and really pay attention to what George R.R Martin is doing, they’re not going to hit the mark.

I find this recipe for "Toast Soup" profoundly soothing. Just reading the copy, looking at the pictures, thinking about how manageable this could be, should I choose to get up and make myself food today, brings me great joy and great calm in equal, steady waves.

Toast soup -- containing both toast and soup -- ought to be the most primal of comfort foods, suitable to be fed to any ill person or baby. Not to mention the rest of us -- grown, technically-well adults who've maybe had a long day. And, yes, toast soup is all that its name implies: soothing, restorative, uncomplicated.

Read more Here Is A Recipe For Toast Soup at The Toast.

We’ve talked about Indiana’s “religious freedom” bill allowing people to not face penalties for discrimination against LGBTQ folks based solely on belief, so when similar legislation came up in front of the Georgia House of Representatives this week, one Republican bravely stood up and killed it with truth.

As in Indiana, proponents of Georgia’s bill have tried to argue that it has nothing to do with discrimination. Rep. Mike Jacobs, an LGBT-friendly Republican, decided to test this theory by introducing an amendment that would not allow claims of religious liberty to be used to circumvent state and local nondiscrimination protections. Supporters of the bill, like Rep. Barry Fleming (R), countered that the amendment “will gut the bill.” Nevertheless, the House Judiciary Committee approved the amendment with a 9-8 vote, three Republicans joining the Democrats in supporting it.

Fleming moved to table the amended bill, a motion that passed with 16 votes, making it unlikely the bill will proceed before the legislative session ends. With an exception for nondiscrimination protections, the “religious liberty” bill is dead.

Before the vote, the bill’s sponsor, Sen. Josh McKoon (R), joined the hearing to similarly argue against making an exception for nondiscrimination protections. He claimed that the bill’s religious liberty protections would no longer be “uniform” across the state, adding, “That amendment would completely undercut the purpose of the bill.” Rep. Roger Bruce (D) pressed McKoon: “That tells me that the purpose of the bill is to discriminate.” Without further explanation, he countered, “It couldn’t be further from the truth, no sir.”

Well played, Mr. Jacobs.  Well played indeed.

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• Science-denying U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz says his “music taste changed on 9/11” because he “didn’t like how rock music responded.” Cruz said this in a clumsy bid for the Toby Keith voting bloc, apparently, but it’s worth pointing out, specifically, what it is that Sen. Cruz doesn’t like.

Ted Cruz doesn’t approve of this:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Sen. Cruz does not want to come on up for the Rising. Nor does he wish to meet you at Mary’s place. And he is decidedly opposed (with these hands) to the idea that (with these hands) we should (come on) join together and (come on) rise up.

Good to know that about him.

• “Before I answer that question, I would like to say a few words: cattywampus, onomatopoeia, and antidisestablishmentarianism.”

• J.I. Packer is a theology professor at Regent College in Vancouver and he’s been a senior editor at Christianity Today since before I was born. If there is any such thing as an unassailable member in good standing of the white evangelical tribe, he would be it. He’s also an Anglican.

Just another data point to keep in mind when you see all those foolish hit-jobs attacking Rachel Held Evans for joining an Episcopal congregation.

• While contemplating the potential legal advantages that might accrue from proclaiming myself to be Pope Fred I of Fred’s Church, I stumbled across the book pictured here. OK, then. Here’s a taste of Mark Sanborn’s The Fred Factor: How Passion in Your Work and Life Can Turn the Ordinary Into the Extraordinary: “I want to be someone else’s Fred. Why? Because it’s the true measure of greatness. … It’s doing more than what’s expected. The Bible calls being a Fred a servant.”

As a general rule, I think you’re better off reading fortune cookies or horoscopes than you would be reading most self-help titles. But I may make an exception here.

• “Sometimes life just plays horrible, cruel jokes on decent people.”

• Target has joined Walmart and TJMaxx/Marshalls in raising its minimum wage to $9 an hour. This means people who work at Target and Walmart can now almost afford to shop at Target and Walmart.

The Big Box where I work hasn’t yet gotten on board this train. It needs to. Spring is a big deal at the Box – a time when they have to bring on a bunch of additional seasonal workers. But so far this year our branch of the chain has had four applicants. Two failed the drug test, one left abruptly when informed of it, the fourth was hired, but never showed up. Seems like the labor market is trying to tell them something.

• Mark Evanier considers “The Rainbow Connection,” deciding that despite the song’s dubious claims about dreams coming true, “It’s Kermit singing,” so don’t complain.

The key to “Rainbow Connection” is that Kermit is the Anti-Prufrock. Like Evanier, he knows that “When you wish upon a star, your dreams come true” is a lie, but he still dares to eat a peach and to disturb the universe.

This is explicit in the final verse. “I have heard the mermaids singing,” Eliot’s sad anti-hero said, “I do not think that they will sing to me.” But Kermit says different. “I’ve heard it too many times to ignore it,” he sings. Poor J. Alfred was asleep and dreaming “Till human voices wake us, and we drown.” But Kermit was only half asleep. And frogs can swim. 

Click here to view the embedded video.

 

And while we’re on the subject of Indiana today:

A major gaming convention, Gen Con, threatened on Tuesday to move its annual event out of Indiana if Gov. Mike Pence signs into law a controversial bill that would allow private businesses to deny service to homosexuals on religious grounds.

Pence has signaled he will sign the bill, possibly this week, after the Republican-controlled Indiana Senate overwhelmingly approved on Tuesday a lower-house version of the bill and moved it to the Republican governor’s desk.

Both houses had previously passed the bill, which supporters say will keep the government from forcing business owners – such as bakeries and florists who don’t want to provide services to gay couples – from acting in ways contrary to strongly held religious beliefs.

Opponents say the legislation is discriminatory. The Indianapolis Star has reported that big employers in Indiana, including tech giant Salesforce, diesel engine maker Cummins and Eskenazi Health, have opposed the measure.

On Tuesday, Seattle-based Gen Con’s Chief Executive Adrian Swartout said in a letter to the governor that diverse attendance is important to its annual convention, which it says has a $50 million yearly impact on Indianapolis.

You know, Mr. Swartout, Cincinnati is just a hour away from Indy if you’re looking for a nice centralized Midwest location to hold Gen Con in the future.  Ohio hasn’t managed to foul up on a Hobby Lobby bill quite yet.

Open thread.

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Paul Krugman is tired of Republican fraudsters powered by Magical Laffer Curve Fairies in general, but this year’s version of the Hunger Games is particularly bonkers.

So, about those budgets: both claim drastic reductions in federal spending. Some of those spending reductions are specified: There would be savage cuts in food stamps, similarly savage cuts in Medicaid over and above reversing the recent expansion, and an end to Obamacare’s health insurance subsidies. Rough estimates suggest that either plan would roughly double the number of Americans without health insurance. But both also claim more than a trillion dollars in further cuts to mandatory spending, which would almost surely have to come out of Medicare or Social Security. What form would these further cuts take? We get no hint.

Meanwhile, both budgets call for repeal of the Affordable Care Act, including the taxes that pay for the insurance subsidies. That’s $1 trillion of revenue. Yet both claim to have no effect on tax receipts; somehow, the federal government is supposed to make up for the lost Obamacare revenue. How, exactly? We are, again, given no hint.

And there’s more: The budgets also claim large reductions in spending on other programs. How would these be achieved? You know the answer.

It’s very important to realize that this isn’t normal political behavior. The George W. Bush administration was no slouch when it came to deceptive presentation of tax plans, but it was never this blatant. And the Obama administration has been remarkably scrupulous in its fiscal pronouncements.

O.K., I can already hear the snickering, but it’s the simple truth. Remember all the ridicule heaped on the spending projections in the Affordable Care Act? Actual spending is coming in well below expectations, and the Congressional Budget Office has marked its forecast for the next decadedown by 20 percent. Remember the jeering when President Obama declared that he would cut the deficit in half by the end of his first term? Well, a sluggish economy delayed things, but only by a year. The deficit in calendar 2013 was less than half its 2009 level, and it has continued to fall.

So, no, outrageous fiscal mendacity is neither historically normal nor bipartisan. It’s a modern Republican thing. And the question we should ask is why.

Well, the “why” part seems pretty obvious.  “Break the government, then blame the government for being broken” has been the game at least since Reagan, and the solution is always to take a larger hammer to the federal machinery.  Rolling back everything since the New Deal seems pretty much par for the course for these guys, if not cynically burning out the last of America’s consumerist resources before going on to new markets in China and India to exploit.  It’s always been about pillaging the treasury and setting the place on fire on the way out the door.

Krugman ends with this:

Look, I know that it’s hard to keep up the outrage after so many years of fiscal fraudulence. But please try. We’re looking at an enormous, destructive con job, and you should be very, very angry.

And our problem is that we’re always finding new and exciting ways to direct that outrage at President Obama and the Democrats rather than the Republicans trying to talk us into self-immolation.

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Previously in this series.

You are a wizard and practice magic. Even tourists who do not speak your language know how this will end: badly for you [urinating dog] [urinating dog] [urinating dog].

You are a wizard and do not practice magic, which means you’re in no danger at all of going Bursar.^[1]

No matter what country you find yourself in, someone always offers you a cutthroat deal on very dubious-looking sausages in buns.

You think it’s perfectly reasonable to try and kill Father Christmas the Hogfather.

Sometimes people die. Then they campaign for the rights of the undead.

Read more How To Tell If You Are In A Terry Pratchett Novel at The Toast.

The University of Pennsylvania is pretty old (by American standards), and with age comes ghost stories. But the ghost hunters of the Penn Ghost Project have still come up empty.

I do not believe in ghosts, but I’m still happy about this project:

“We want to understand it as a sociological reality and a cultural reality,” said Justin McDaniel, a professor and chair of the religious studies department at Penn. “It should be given a forum where people can talk about it.”

McDaniel’s group calls itself “the Penn Ghost Project” and later this semester, students will begin recording ghost stories on campus. The goal: to create an online ghost story archive for the ages.

“We want to kind of map out the ghosts at Penn, where are people saying they are,” said McDaniel, 42, a former Buddhist monk who isn’t sure whether he believes in ghosts. “If it goes well, we’ll start mapping the ghost history of Philadelphia, which is extensive, probably more extensive than any city in the country, just because it’s big and it’s old.”

I do not believe in ghosts, but I do believe in ghost stories. Searching for ghosts is bound to be a fruitless waste of time. But searching for ghost stories can be important and meaningful.

My alma mater is a few stops west of Penn on the R5 line. Eastern University has one decent campus ghost legend, but it’s basically a storytelling exercise working from a Hollywood template. The same is true for the much better ghost story across the street at Cabrini College.

But the best campus ghost story around here is even further west along the original Main Line railroad — at Immaculata University in Malvern. That story involves the ghosts of the workers who built that railroad — legends of spectral Irish laborers dancing in the woods.

That story, it turns out, is a genuine haunting. I don’t mean that actual ghosts are haunting those woods, but that the community had, for more than a century, remained haunted by the memory of an otherwise forgotten tragedy — and an otherwise forgotten crime. The memory of that crime was retained in folklore — in ghost stories.

And those ghost stories helped two Immaculata professors locate a mass grave. Duffy’s Cut, along the rails in the Malvern woods, is the burial site of 57 Irish immigrants. They landed in Philadelphia in 1832 and signed on as railroad workers with a contractor named Duffy. Six weeks later, they were all dead.

The historical marker (about 8 miles from where I’m sitting) says the men died in the cholera epidemic that swept through the area that year. That’s true, sort of. But as Janet Monge — an anthropologist from Penn who is studying the site — says, “If they had cholera, it didn’t kill them.”

Monge has found injuries on the bones of some of the workers — bashed skulls and axe wounds — that suggest these men met a violent end. A 2010 Smithsonian article notes that the workers likely tried to flee the area when cholera arrived: “When cholera swept the Philadelphia countryside in the summer of 1832, railroad workers housed in a shanty near Duffy’s Cut fled the area, according to Julian Sachse, a historian who interviewed elderly locals in the late 1800s. But nearby homeowners, perhaps fearful of infection … turned them away.”

It seems they did more than turn them away. It seems likeliest that after a few of the workers died from cholera, the rest were killed. Murdered, in fact. But we may never know the true story.

What we do know is that 57 men were buried, all at once, in an unmarked mass grave kept secret by the railroad company and almost entirely forgotten. The only record of the crime was preserved in folklore — in ghost stories and legends that circulated for more than a century and a half before those Immaculata professors took them seriously enough to start digging.

So I don’t expect the Penn Ghost Project to find any ghosts, but I’m glad they’re cataloging ghost stories, and looking for the stories behind them. American labor history is full of ghosts.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I haven’t spent very much time in St. Louis and haven’t been there at all since 2006. That seems too bad since it is evidently the food capital of all the universe with the best Italian food on the planet and of course pizza equal to if not greater than that of New York. Everyone knows provel is better than real cheese. How great is St. Louis?

Fun fact: Jesus actually came to St. Louis first. Both mainstream Christians and Mormons got it wrong. I mean, why else would the second-highest position in the Catholic church be called Cardinals?

It’s that great. Can we start using St. Louis pizza for communion wafers in churches? It’s basically a cracker anyway.

How soon is too soon to begin introducing basic theory and Lacanian self-definition to an infant? A primer.

ME: what do we need to understand before we can understand post-structuralism
BABY: fnehhh
ME: very good
we need to understand structural linguistics
now what does "fnehhh" mediate between
BABY: fnehhh
ME: that's right
it mediates between abstract ideas and reality
BABY: fnehhh
ME: you've made your point, don't belabor it

Read more How To Talk To Babies About Post-Structuralism at The Toast.

I didn’t put the puppies in my room last night because they were sound asleep on a pillow, and when I woke up at 4 am to go to the bathroom, I found this:

Who needs a feather bed and a down comforter with the fat snoring human when you have this?

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On March 10, 1925, the New York Times first reported the story of the so-called Radium Girls, as U.S. Radium Company employee Marguerite Carlough had sued her employer for $75,000 for the horrific health problems caused by her work with radium that would soon kill her. The story would garner national headlines and would demonstrate both the awfulness of working conditions in the early 20th century and the failures of the workers’ compensation system to deal with health problems caused by poisonous work.

The 1910s saw the development of two phenomena that would come together in horrible ways for workers. The first was the wristwatch, invented during this decade. The second was the entrance of radium into the marketplace. Because radium glowed in the dark, it became a popular method of painting watch faces, since it made the watches useful at night. For soldiers in World War I, these watches were a godsend and this made them popular nationwide.

The Radium Luminous Materials Corporation (later U.S. Radium Corporation) plant in Orange, New Jersey caused a lot of problems in the neighborhood. Residents complained the company’s emissions turned their drying clothes yellow. For the workers, the radium was as much a delight as it was to the consumers. With little health research into its effects on the workers, the young dialpainters suffered heavy exposure to it. They were taught to hold the paintbrush with their mouths as they worked, wetting it with their tongues and thus ingesting the radium that way. They also played with the radium paint. They’d paint the fingernails with it. One woman had a date with her beau. So she painted radium on her teeth so her smile would glow in the dark when they were alone that night.

Advertisement for radium watch.

As early as 1922, workers began falling sick. The dialpainters were the first industrial victims of radium poisoning. Katherine Schaub and her cousin Irene Rudolph started working in the new dialpainting studio at the Radium Luminous Materials plant in 1917. They were both 15. In 1920, both Schaub and Rudolph quit, finding nonindustrial jobs, although Schaub would briefly return to dialpainting the next year. By 1922, they were both 20 years old. That year, Rudolph had mouth pain. She had a tooth extracted. The socket never healed. Her jaw begin to fester with rotting bones. Other dialpainters began coming down with the same problems. Randolph died in July 1923 after a year and a half of suffering. Schaub started to have health problems in November 1923. By this time, other dialpainters such as Amelia Magggia, Hazel Vincent Kuser, and Marguerite Carlough had died or were dying. Schaub’s continued mouth problems began to be known as “radium jaw.”

Workers at U.S. Radium, 1922 or 1923.

Medical researchers began to pay more attention to these sick women. So did the New Jersey Consumers’ League, the largely women-led industrial reform movement of the Progressive Era. That era had ended, at least in the years as it is classically classified by historians, but the national and state level organization still existed. The sole paid employee of the New Jersey branch was Katherine Wiley, but she was effective. In 1923, she had successfully lobbied for a bill banning night work for women. After hearing the legendary industrial reformer Alice Hamilton talk about workplace health, Wiley began exploring this in her home state. She soon found the dialpainters. In 1924, Wiley went to the commissioner of the New Jersey Department of Labor, Dr. Andrew McBride. He was furious that these meddlesome women were getting involved in these cases and denied that the radium companies had anything to do with the women’s illnesses.

Working with Hamilton, Wiley began trying to access the medical research. At Harvard, researchers working with U.S. Radium had done initial studies on the substance’s health effects. Wiley and Hamilton sought to acquire that data. The main researcher was loyal to the company and refused to release most of the information. But Frederick Hoffman, a researcher for the U.S. Department of Labor, did find at least some connections, although he was pretty sympathetic to the company too. All of this work did lead to the state labor department closing U.S. Radium, although it just moved to New York. Katherine Schaub kept pushing, convincing Hoffman to write to U.S. Radium about her condition. The company had her visit one of their doctors, who promptly told her that none of her illnesses had anything to do with radium.

Based on this research, in 1927, Schaub joined a dialpainters’ lawsuit organized by the New Jersey Consumers’ League in the state Supreme Court. But this was a difficult task. Not only had the statue of limitations passed since all these workers had quit several years earlier, but the dialpainters needed to prove both that U.S. Radium had caused their illnesses and that the company was negligent in their actions. The lawsuits were a struggle because workers’ compensation generally did not cover health related issues. The workers’ compensation came about as a way for corporations to cut their losses and enter a rational system for dealing with workplace health and safety because after 1890, workers were increasingly suing them successfully for compensation, a slow rejection of the doctrine of workplace risk established early in the nation’s industrial period.

Similar cases were happening at the Waterbury Clock Company in Waterbury, Connecticut (I can’t drive past this factory on I-84 without thinking of dead radium workers) and at Radium Dial in Ottawa, Illinois. Workers at all three plants struggled to achieve compensation. But in New Jersey, all the bad publicity convinced the company to settle with most of the workers in 1928, although it also made it very difficult for workers to prove any corporate culpability. In more conservative Connecticut, women played a much smaller role in state politics and despite a longer statue of limitations provision in the workers’ compensation law of 5 years, business controlled the state. Workers here received only relatively small settlements, even if Waterbury Clock admitted it had caused 10 deaths by 1936. In Illinois, the workers compensation system was such a mess that not a single sufferer received a cent until 1938.

Newspaper article publicizing plight of Illinois radium poisoning victims.

In the 1980s, high levels of radon were discovered in homes near the old plant in Orange. The company had long ago been purchased by Safety Light. Homeowners and the current corporate owners of the old plant sued Safety Light. In 1991, the New Jersey Supreme Court found U.S. Radium “forever” liable for the radium near its old factory. Workers laboring with radium however continued having problems, even as safety nominally improved. In the 1970s, radium workers in Ottawa, Illinois were found having radiation levels 1666 times the Nuclear Regulatory Commission-approved levels.

This post is based on Claudia Clark, Radium Girls: Women and Industrial Health Reform, 1910-1935.

This is the 136th post in this series. Previous posts are archived here.

McClatchy/Marist shows HRC's lead plummeting from 62-11 over her closest competitor to 60-13, mostly post-blowup. http://t.co/xibB6go4l4

— Sean T at RCP (@SeanTrende) March 8, 2015

Before any knickers get knotted, make sure the snark meters are properly calibrated.

And then look to the (Not Very) Loyal Opposition, as described by the NYTimes:

In their first major test of governing this year, Republicans stumbled, faltered — and nearly shut down the Department of Homeland Security.

And that vote may have been the easy one.

In April, physicians who treat Medicare patients face a drastic cut in pay. In May, the Highway Trust Fund runs dry. In June, the charter for the federal Export-Import Bank ceases to exist. Then in October, across-the-board spending cuts return, the government runs out of money — and the Treasury bumps up against its borrowing limit.

All will require congressional action, and while many of these measures used to be pushed through in an almost unthinking bipartisan ritual, there is no such thing as simple in Congress anymore.

“We really don’t have 218 votes to determine a bathroom break over here on our side,” said Representative Charlie Dent, a Pennsylvania Republican. “So how are we going to get 218 votes on transportation, or trade, or whatever the issue? We might as well face the political reality of our circumstances and then act accordingly.”…

That would explain all the soiled diapers, I guess.

While we’re stocking up on cleaning supplies & earplugs, what’s on the agenda for the start of the new week?

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#Selma50

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Obama's speech.

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A letter from Black America:

The shots stopped as quickly as they had started. The man disappeared between some buildings. Chest heaving, hands shaking, I tried to calm my crying daughter, while my husband, friends and I all looked at one another in breathless disbelief. I turned to check on Hunter, a high school intern from Oregon who was staying with my family for a few weeks, but she was on the phone.

“Someone was just shooting on the beach,” she said, between gulps of air, to the person on the line.

Unable to imagine whom she would be calling at that moment, I asked her, somewhat indignantly, if she couldn’t have waited until we got to safety before calling her mom.

“No,” she said. “I am talking to the police.”

My friends and I locked eyes in stunned silence. Between the four adults, we hold six degrees. Three of us are journalists. And not one of us had thought to call the police. We had not even considered it.

We also are all black. And without realizing it, in that moment, each of us had made a set of calculations, an instantaneous weighing of the pros and cons.

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Read more Link Roundup! at The Toast.

Yesterday the Justice Department released the results of a long and thorough investigation into the killing of Michael Brown by Officer Darren Wilson. The investigation concluded that there was not enough evidence to prove a violation of federal law by Officer Wilson. The investigation concluded much more. The investigation concluded that physical evidence and witness statements corroborated Wilson's claim that Michael Brown reached into the car and struck the officer. It concluded that claims that Wilson reached out and grabbed Brown first "were inconsistent with physical and forensic evidence."  

The investigation concluded that there was no evidence to contradict Wilson's claim that Brown reached for his gun. The investigation concluded that Wilson did not shoot Brown in the back. That he did not shoot Brown as he was running away. That Brown did stop and turn toward Wilson. That in those next moments "several witnesses stated that Brown appeared to pose a physical threat to Wilson." That claims that Brown had his hands up "in an unambiguous sign of surrender" are not supported by the "physical and forensic evidence," and are sometimes, "materially inconsistent with that witness’s own prior statements with no explanation, credible for otherwise, as to why those accounts changed over time."

Unlike the local investigators, the Justice Department did not merely toss all evidence before a grand jury and say, "you figure it out." The federal investigators did the work themselves and came to the conclusion that Officer Wilson had not committed "prosecutable violations under the applicable federal criminal civil rights statute, 18 U.S.C. § 242."

Our system, ideally, neither catches every single offender, nor lightly imposes the prosecution, jailing, and fining of its citizens. A high burden of proof should attend any attempt to strip away one's liberties. The Justice Department investigation reflects a department attempting to live up to those ideals and giving Officer Wilson the due process that he, and anyone else falling under our legal system, deserves.

One cannot say the same for Officer Wilson's employers.

The Justice Department conducted two investigations—one looking into the shooting of Michael Brown, and another into the Ferguson Police Department. The first report made clear that there was no prosecutable case against one individual officer. The second report made clear that there was a damning case to be made against the system in which that officer operated:

Ferguson’s law enforcement practices are shaped by the City’s focus on revenue rather than by public safety needs. This emphasis on revenue has compromised the institutional character of Ferguson’s police department, contributing to a pattern of unconstitutional policing, and has also shaped its municipal court, leading to procedures that raise due process concerns and inflict unnecessary harm on members of the Ferguson community. Further, Ferguson’s police and municipal court practices both reflect and exacerbate existing racial bias, including racial stereotypes. Ferguson’s own data establish clear racial disparities that adversely impact African Americans. The evidence shows that discriminatory intent is part of the reason for these disparities...

Partly as a consequence of City and FPD priorities, many officers appear to see some residents, especially those who live in Ferguson’s predominantly African-American neighborhoods, less as constituents to be protected than as potential offenders and sources of revenue...

The "focus on revenue" was almost wholly a focus on black people as revenue. Black people in Ferguson were twice as likely to be searched during a stop, twice as likely to receive a citation when stopped, and twice as likely to be arrested during the stop, and yet were 26 percent less likely to be found with contraband. Black people were more likely to see a single incident turn into multiple citations. The disparity in outcomes remained "even after regression analysis is used to control for non-race-based variables."

One should understand that the Justice Department did not simply find indirect evidence of unintentionally racist practices which harm black people, but "discriminatory intent”—that is to say willful racism aimed to generate cash. Justice in Ferguson is not a matter of "racism without racists," but racism with racists so secure, so proud, so brazen that they used their government emails to flaunt it.

The emails including "jokes" depicting President Obama as a chimp, mocking how black people talk ("I be so glad that dis be my last child support payment!"), depicting blacks as criminals, welfare recipients, unemployed, lazy, and having "no frigging clue who their Daddies are.” This humor—given the imprimatur of government email—resulted in neither reprimand, nor protest, nor even a polite request to refrain from reoffending. "Instead," according to the report, "the emails were usually forwarded along to others."

One should resist the urge to clutch pearls and carp about the "mean people" of Ferguson. Bigoted jokes are never really jokes at all, so much as a tool by which one sanctifies plunder. If black people in Ferguson are the 47 percent—a class of takers, of immoral reprobates, driving up crime while driving down quality of life—then why should they not be "the sources of revenue?" In this way a racist "joke" transfigures raw pillage into legal taxation. The "joke" is in fact an entire worldview that reveals that the agents of plunder, the police, are in fact not plundering anyone at all. They are just making sure the reprobates pay their fair share.

That is precisely what Ferguson's officials told federal investigators:

Several Ferguson officials told us during our investigation that it is a lack of “personal responsibility” among African-American members of the Ferguson community that causes African Americans to experience disproportionate harm under Ferguson’s approach to law enforcement. Our investigation suggests that this explanation is at odd with the facts.

On the contrary the investigation "revealed African Americans making extraordinary efforts to pay off expensive tickets for minor, often unfairly charged, violations, despite systemic obstacles to resolving those tickets." And while the investigation found no lack of "personal responsibility" among black residents of Ferguson, it did find that the very same people making the charge were often busy expunging fines for their friends:

• In August 2013, an FPD patrol supervisor wrote an email entitled “Oops” to the Prosecuting Attorney regarding a ticket his relative received in another municipality for traveling 59 miles per hour in a 40 miles-per-hour zone, noting “[h]aving it dismissed would be a blessing.” The Prosecuting Attorney responded that the prosecutor of that other municipality promised to nolle pros the ticket. The supervisor responded with appreciation, noting that the dismissal “[c]ouldn’t have come at a better time.”
• Also in August 2013, Ferguson’s Mayor emailed the Prosecuting Attorney about a parking ticket received by an employee of a non-profit day camp for which the Mayor sometimes volunteers. The Mayor wrote that the person “shouldn’t have left his car unattended there, but it was an honest mistake” and stated, “I would hate for him to have to pay for this, can you help?” The Prosecuting Attorney forwarded the email to the Court Clerk, instructing her to “NP [nolle prosequi, or not prosecute] this parking ticket.”
• In November 2011, a court clerk received a request from a friend to “fix a parking ticket” received by the friend’s coworker’s wife. After the ticket was faxed to the clerk, she replied: “It’s gone baby!”
• In March 2014, a friend of the Court Clerk’s relative emailed the Court Clerk with a scanned copy of a ticket asking if there was anything she could do to help. She responded: “Your ticket of $200 has magically disappeared!” Later, in June 2014, the same person emailed the Court Clerk regarding two tickets and asked: “Can you work your magic again? It would be deeply appreciated.” The Clerk later informed him one ticket had been dismissed and she was waiting to hear back about the second ticket.

It must noted that the rhetoric "personal responsibility" enjoys not just currency among the white officials of Ferguson, but among many black people ("black-on-black crime!") who believe that white supremacy is a force with which one can negotiate. But white supremacy—as evidenced in Ferguson—is not ultimately interested in how responsible you are, nor how respectable you look. White supremacy is neither a misunderstanding nor a failure of manners. White supremacy is the machinery of Galactus which allows for the potential devouring of everything you own. White supremacy is the technology, patented in this enlightened era, to ensure that what is yours inevitably becomes mine.

This technology has proven highly effective throughout American history. In 1860 it meant the transformation of black bodies into more wealth than all the productive capacity of this country combined. In the 1930s it meant the erection of our modern middle class. In Ferguson, it meant funding nearly a quarter of the municipal budget:

The City has not yet made public the actual revenue collected that year, although budget documents forecasted lower revenue than 10 was budgeted. Nonetheless, for fiscal year 2015, the City’s budget anticipates fine and fee revenues to account for $3.09 million of a projected $13.26 million in general fund revenues...

In a February 2011 report requested by the City Council at a Financial Planning Session and drafted by Ferguson’s Finance Director with contributions from Chief Jackson, the Finance Director reported on “efforts to increase efficiencies and maximize collection” by the municipal court. The report included an extensive comparison of Ferguson’s fines to those of surrounding municipalities and noted with approval that Ferguson’s fines are “at or near the top of the list....” While the report stated that this recommendation was because of a “large volume of non-compliance,” the recommendation was in fact emphasized as one of several ways that the code enforcement system had been honed to produce more revenue.

The men and women behind this policy did not approach their effort to "produce more revenue" somberly, but lustily. As the fruits of plunder increased, Ferguson officials congratulated and backslapped each other:

In one March 2012 email, the Captain of the Patrol Division reported directly to the City Manager that court collections in February 2012 reached $235,000, and that this was the first month collections ever exceeded $200,000. The Captain noted that “[t]he [court clerk] girls have been swamped all day with a line of people paying off fines today. Since 9:30 this morning there hasn’t been less than 5 people waiting in line and for the last three hours 10 to 15 people at all times.” The City Manager enthusiastically reported the Captain’s email to the City Council and congratulated both police department and court staff on their “great work.”

It is a wonder they did not hand out bonuses. Perhaps they did. The bonus of being white in Ferguson meant nigh-immunity from plunder. The bane of being black in Ferguson meant nigh-inevitable subjugation under plunder. Plunder is neither abstract nor theoretical. Plunder injures, maims, and destroys. Indeed the very same people who were calling on protestors to remain nonviolent were, every hour, partner to brutality committed under the color of law:

We spoke with one African-American man who, in August 2014, had an argument in his apartment to which FPD officers responded, and was immediately pulled out of the apartment by force. After telling the officer, “you don’t have a reason to lock me up,” he claims the officer responded: “N*****, I can find something to lock you up on.” When the man responded, “good luck with that,” the officer slammed his face into the wall, and after the man fell to the floor, the officer said, “don’t pass out motherf****r because I’m not carrying you to my car.”

The residents of Ferguson do not have a police problem. They have a gang problem. That the gang operates under legal sanction makes no difference. It is a gang nonetheless, and there is no other word to describe an armed band of collection agents.

John Locke knew:

The injury and the crime is equal, whether committed by the wearer of a crown, or some petty villain. The title of the offender, and the number of his followers, make no difference in the offence, unless it be to aggravate it. The only difference is, great robbers punish little ones, to keep them in their obedience; but the great ones are rewarded with laurels and triumphs, because they are too big for the weak hands of justice in this world, and have the power in their own possession, which should punish offenders. What is my remedy against a robber, that so broke into my house?

What are the tools in Ferguson to address the robber that so regularly breaks into my house? One necessary tool is suspicion and skepticism—the denial of the sort of the credit one generally grants officers of the state. When Darren Wilson shot Michael Brown there was little reason to credit his account, and several reasons to disbelieve it. The reason is not related to whether Michael Brown was "an angel" or not. The reasons are contained in a report rendered by the highest offices of the American government. Crediting the accounts of Ferguson's officers is a good way to enroll yourself in your own plunder and destruction.

Government, if its name means anything, must rise above those suspicions and that skepticism and seek out justice. And if it seeks to improve its name it must do much more—it must seek out the roots of the skepticism. The lack of faith among black people in Ferguson's governance, or in America's governance, is not something that should be bragged about. One cannot feel good about living under gangsters, and that is the reality of Ferguson right now.

The innocence of Darren Wilson does not change this fundamental fact. Indeed the focus on the deeds of alleged individual perpetrators, on perceived bad actors, obscures the broad systemic corruption which is really at the root. Darren Wilson is not the first gang member to be publicly accused of a crime he did not commit. But Darren Wilson was given the kind of due process that those of us who are often presumed to be gang members rarely enjoy. I do not favor lowering the standard of justice offered Officer Wilson. I favor raising the standard of justice offered to the rest of us.

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/03/The-Gangsters-Of-Ferguson/386893/

Buzzfeed, of course, specifically Kate Nocera & Ben Smith, on “Bernie’s Reasons Why Not“:

If Bernie Sanders decides not to run for president, it will be for one of two reasons.

First, the dour Vermont socialist worried during an interview with BuzzFeed News Tuesday, he might wind up doing more harm than good to the progressive movement.

“If I do it, it has to be done well. And that’s not just for my ego,” he said, seated in his airy Senate office on blue couch beneath three indifferently framed Vermont tourism posters. “The worst thing I could do is run a poor campaign without the organizational support, without the money — and then have people say that the ideas themselves are ideas that people don’t support.”

So Sanders, who has spent his career fighting money in politics, who handily won his re-election without running a single television ad, will run only if he thinks he can raise “tens of millions” of dollars for the primary. And this brings us to the second reason.

Sanders is weighing a primary challenge to Hillary Clinton, a prospect with massive advantages — attention, a place on the debate stage — and the huge handicaps of facing a giant political network and a candidate whose super PAC plans to raise as much as $500 million. And then, after that, there’s the conservative money that would pour into a general election…

And yet, despite his lack of ordinary political skills and the deck that he sees as badly stacked against him, sometimes Sanders thinks he could pull it off. There have been sparks, lately, of a kind of leftism not seen in America for a generation — the Occupy movement, the surge of excitement for Elizabeth Warren’s candidacy, the daily feedback from Sanders’ own buzzing, under-the-radar Facebook page, which — with 906,000 likes — is the biggest of any Democratic senator’s official Facebook presence.

“We do very, very well on Facebook. We may have on some days more people talking about us than the rest of the Senate combined,” Sanders said. “It tells me, that is just one example, that there is a great deal of interest out there about the ideas we are talking about.”…

“I think there is a great deal of support for the necessity of taking on the billionaire class,” Sanders said, “for bringing people around the progressive agenda which talks about rebuilding our infrastructure, for creating jobs, for a national health care program, raising the minimum wage to a living wage, to dealing all the way with climate change, dealing with Wall Street. There’s a lot of support for those kinds of ideas.”..

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Previously in this series: Love You Forever. Original text by Jeanne-Marie LePrince de Beaumont.

There was once a rich merchant, who had three daughters. Being a man of sense and careful daughter-husbandry, he kept them well, for he always made money on his investments. The girls were exceedingly handsome, particularly the youngest. When she was little everybody admired her, and called her "The little Beauty;" so that, as she grew up, she still went by the name of Beauty, which made her sisters very jealous.

She would answer to no other name. She did not know how to protect herself from the envy of others, which is to say she did not know how to survive. Instead she read books.

The two eldest had a great deal of pride, because they knew their own worth. because they were rich. They went out every day to parties of pleasure, balls, plays, concerts, and so forth, and they laughed at their youngest sister, and they made themselves happy. They answered to their given names.

All at once the merchant lost his whole fortune, excepting a small country house at a great distance from town, and told his children with tears in his eyes, they must go there and work for their living.

Beauty at first was sadly grieved at the loss of her fortune; but she had ever found that if she made herself smaller, life would trouble her less. Beauty rose at four in the morning, and made haste to have the house clean, and dinner ready for the family. No one paid her for it, and no one thanked her for it, either, and so gradually she ceased to think of it as work and began to think of it as her nature. She expected it from herself as others expected it of her, and who can be grateful for what is supposed to come naturally?

After she had done her work, she read. Reading was, as ever, her great comfort. And still she only answered to Beauty. Her reasons were her own.

Read more Children’s Stories Made Horrific: The Beauty And The Beast at The Toast.

Take a Sarah Palin CPAC speech, have Mark Halperin write a review of it, and you can see why I’m objectively pro-meteor (h/t David Koch):

Best moment: Crowd erupted when she slammed the president’s foreign policy as too meek: “They say we can’t kill our way out of war? Really? Tell that to the Nazis. Oh wait, you can’t. They’re dead. Because we killed them.”

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In no particular order, here are sixteen excerpts from back issues of Cat Fancy and Playboy magazines. Can you guess the source of each one?

1. She mesmerized me the first time I laid eyes on her.
2. She has a sweet, gentle nature and is very interested in what you are doing.
3. She is used to playing dress-up.

Read more Playboy or Cat Fancy? at The Toast.

The results of the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921

So the Oklahoma Legislature has voted overwhelmingly to ban an Advanced Placement course on American history because it contains too many of the "negative" aspects of history and is not overwhelmingly "positive." In its place, the lawmakers propose replacing the course with a farrago of blather, half-truths, and right-wing religious propaganda.

One could say, "Only in Oklahoma." But not. Already it's spread to Texas. And look for other state legislatures to take up the torch, so to speak.

But one can easily imagine WHY this began in Oklahoma. After all, there's more than a little "negative" history that the white right-wingers of the state have long ago swept under the carpet there, and they bygawd intend to keep it that way.

Here are some important moments in Oklahoma history that future students in the state will almost certainly not learn about, because they decidedly fall into the "negative" category.

The Tulsa Race Riot of 1921

Like so many of the "deadly ethnic riots" that erupted in America between 1890 and 1930, this one had its beginnings with a young black man offending virtuous white womanhood, bringing a mob of angry white men in vengeful pursuit. In this case, it was 19-year-old black shoeshiner named Dick Rowland who got onto an elevator at the building where he worked that was operated by a young white woman. Upon his arrival at the ninth floor, a nearby clerk heard her shriek and saw Rowland fleeing; upon arriving at the elevator, he found the young woman in a "distraught" state, and assumed she had been assaulted. (In fact, he likely had only stumbled upon leaving the elevator and the woman had shrieked out of concern for him.)

Nonetheless, authorities were summoned and briefly investigated the matter. Rowland was held in jail a few hours and questioned and then released.

But the Tulsa Tribune was on the case. "Nab Negro for Attacking Girl In an Elevator" shouted the front-page headline. Though no copies of this have survived, an editorial warning that Rowland might be lynched, headlined "To Lynch Negro Tonight", reportedly ran on the paper's interior pages.

Soon gangs of angry white men were seen roaming the area around Greenwood, the black commercial area known as the "Negro Wall Street" for its stunning financial success. Dick Rowland lived in a neighborhood there. And soon armed bands of black men had begun gathering too, determined not to permit another young black man to be lynched at the hands of whites for an imagined crime.

One of these groups of black men approached the white sheriff and offered their assistance in maintaining order. Not only did the sheriff refuse the offer, but a white man at the scene demanded one of the black men hand over his gun. When the man refused, shots were exchanged. Soon a full-scale riot erupted.

Rampaging whites brought guns and torches and began destroying everything and everyone in Greenwood. For the remainder of the day, groups of armed blacks and whites were squaring off and firing at each other. The next morning, a siren sounded at daybreak, which seemed to signal a fresh assault by whites on the black neighborhood. Soon they were setting fires and the black residents began fleeing in panic. Mob members entered people's homes and forced them to flee in the streets. A couple of biplanes flew overhead, dropping incendiary bombs on the black neighborhood and shooting at people below.

At the end of the violence, hundreds of people were dead, though the numbers remain in dispute. News reports at the time counted 173 dead, most of them black. The NAACP estimated that between 150 and 200 black people were killed. Some estimates run as high as 300.



The entire commercial section of Greenwood was destroyed, including 191 businesses, a junior high school, several churches and the only black hospital in the district. Some 1,256 houses were burned to the ground.

The surviving black populace, about 6,000 in all, were arrested and herded into several detention centers. These included injured blacks, who were unable to seek medical help because the black hospital had been destroyed, and the local white hospitals would not admit them.

A subsequent grand jury blamed the riots on the negligence of the police chief, and he was fired. That was the extent of any white accountability for the riot.


The Osage Reign of Terror

Rita Smith, left, and her housekeeper, Nellie Brookshire, both killed by an assassin

The Osage Indian tribe, whose reservation is located in the northeastern part of Oklahoma, are perhaps best known to Americans as the ragtag band of remainders who populated some of the pages of Laura Ingalls Wilder's 'Little Home on the Prairie' books. Wilder wrote disparagingly of the Osages, upon whose lands, in fact, the Ingalls family were actually squatters, and were eventually thrown off their first 'little home on the prairie' for doing so.

What most Americans don't know is that by the 1920s, the Osage Indians were fabulously wealthy, the beneficiaries of having oil under the lands that had been designated their official reservation. The oil was discovered in 1894, and by 1920 it had become a major source of income for the tribal members who retained the mineral rights to the parcels of land each had been given in their original treaties. Some tribal members built mansions, bought fancy cars, hired servants, and sent their children to Harvard.

But by the mid-1920s this great gusher of wealth attracted the usual vultures who come to feast on the greed that permeates when large sums of money are involved. These included a large number of white men who realized that a number of these oil "headrights," as they were called, belonged to women, and would pass to their descendants upon their deaths.

William K. Hale

So these white men would move to Osage County, marry these Osage women (sometimes by plying them with liquor) and then, when the time was right, simply disposed of them. At least, that was the most common scam run by white men circling around these oil rights, but some of them -- notably a character named William King Hale, who called himself "King of the Osage" because he had managed to collect so many of these headrights -- came up with a variety of schemes to obtain them, including murder.

Eventually this faction had complete control of Osage County, including law enforcement, leaving the majority of the tribal population in abject terror that they too might be targeted for death because some white man lusted after his headrights and could get away with killing him. By the time that federal authorities finally moved in and got control of the situation, it's estimated that over 60 Osage tribal members had perished.

One of the most notorious of these involved Hale's assassination of his most vocal critic, a local man named Bill Smith who had been a close friend of a previous Hale victim, and whose wife owned a headright that Hale was scheming after. Hale sent a man to bomb the Smiths' home as they slept, which he did.

These crimes, in fact, constituted the newly-formed Federal Bureau of Investigation with its first big case, and the FBI maintains a fascinating archive of documents related to that investigation. 

What Learning About These Incidents Means

An understanding of Oklahoma history would not be complete without at least some knowledge of these incidents, particularly because they loom so large in the history of race relations in America as a nation.

It also would give young people a clearer and fuller picture of the scope and nature of how history has shaped modern race relations in America. At a bare minimum, it will prevent privileged and sheltered whites from asking ignorantly: "Why haven't blacks done any better since we ended slavery?" or asking: "Why do Native Americans insist on clinging to their reservations?"

This and similar kinds of examinations of the darker chapters of American history actually do a great deal to shed light on our current dilemmas, particularly when it comes to issues of race, ethnicity, and religion, and particularly by white folks. By understanding our own culpability in creating current conditions, and confronting them honestly -- which includes embracing the moral responsibility that comes from being the long-term beneficiaries of this history -- there's at least a glimmer of hope of finding real solutions and creating a future that works for all our children.

Or ... we can just embrace the ignorance and doom ourselves to repeat history.

And believe me, there are a lot of ugly chapters in it.

Justice Ginsburg could not be more right here:

GINSBURG: Inaccessible to poor women. It’s not true that it’s inaccessible to women of means. And that’s the crying shame. We will never see a day when women of means are not able to get a safe abortion in this country. There are states – take the worst case. Suppose Roe v. Wade is overruled. There will still be a number of states that will not go back to old ways.

[…]

CARMON: Well, now there’s lots of legislative activity, right? And it’s mostly in the direction of shutting down clinics, creating new barriers –

GINSBURG: Yes. But –

CARMON: – in front of women.

GINSBURG: – who does that- – who does that hurt? It hurts women who lack the means to go someplace else. It’s almost like – remember the – oh, you wouldn’t remember, because you’re too young. But when most states allowed divorce on one grounds, adultery, nothing else. But there were people who went off to Nevada and stayed there for six weeks. And they got a divorce. That was available to people who had the means, first to get themselves to Nevada, second to stay there for some weeks.

Finally, the country caught on and said, “This isn’t the way it should be. If divorce is to be available for incompatibility, it should be that way for every state.” But the situation with abortion right now, by all the restrictions, they operate against the woman who doesn’t have freedom to move, to go where she is able to get safely what she wants.

The ability that affluent women inevitably have to obtain safe abortions should be extended to all women. The end.

You can thank buddy h for this one.

If your screen melts from the cuteness, don’t come complaining to me.

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My old colleague Ross Douthat has offered a response to Barack Obama's speech at the National Prayer Breakfast. It does not damn Ross with faint praise to say he has, at least, avoided the drunk festival of ideas—American racism was actually pioneered by Gozer the Gozerian, Jim Crow was "a thousand years ago"—presently circulating. But if Ross's argument enjoys the virtue of sobriety, it is still injured by the vice of being wrong.

Ross is disturbed to see the president drawing an "implied equivalence" between the barbarism of ISIS and the "the incredibly complicated multi-century story of medieval Christendom's conflict with Islam." This will not do. The present conflict in the Middle East is also an "incredibly complicated multi-century story." And yet that fact does not (and should not) prevent Ross from drawing conclusions about the morality of burning a man to death in the name of God. The president's comments are no different: "During the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ." This is a manifestly true statement—just as true as: "During the Middle East conflict, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Allah." The first Crusade was anointed with a pogrom against the Jews of the Rhineland. The Spanish Inquisition included the executions of thousands, and led to the expulsion of Jewish communities from the country. I do not believe one needs a degree in medieval studies to deplore pogroms and ethnic cleansing, any more than one needs a degree in Middle Eastern studies to deplore the taking or beheading of hostages.

Beneath Ross’s claim of “incredible” complication is a plea for context and nuance on behalf of the murderers of Jews—one he does not make on behalf of ISIS. Either way, Ross does not think Obama should be in the business of self-criticism at all because it fails as a matter of policy. "Self-criticism doesn’t necessarily serve the cause of foreign policy outreach quite as well as Obama once seemed to believe it would," writes Ross. Maybe. Maybe not. The implicit logic here holds that an American president should only speak forthrightly when some mean, tangible, and immediate benefit is obvious. Whatever one thinks of that claim, it is at war with the rest of Ross's column. He cites Dwight D. Eisenhower's parting speech on the military-industrial complex as an example to Obama, but by Ross's lights that speech was a failure since it effected no real change in the pace of military build-up.

But Ross believes it makes a great example for Obama because it features Eisenhower criticizing his own party. Unlike Ike, Obama is a partisan attacking "crimes he doesn’t feel particularly implicated in ... and the sins of groups he disagrees with anyway (Republican Cold Warriors, the religious right, white conservative Southerners)." Ross thinks Obama would be better served by criticizing groups to which he is sympathetic. In fact Obama has spent much of his presidency criticizing the most loyal sector of his party, and often doing it in church. I have, with some vehemence, argued that much of this criticism is bunk. But Ross is condemning Obama for failing to do something which has, in fact, been one of the most remarkable and consistent features of his presidential rhetoric.

More importantly, Jim Crow and slavery were not merely the sins of Southerners and the religious right, but the sins of America, itself. Enslavement was not merely a boon for the South, but for the country as a whole. (During the Civil War, New York City was a hotbed of secessionist sympathy mostly because of its economic ties to the South.) And there is simply no way to understand segregation in this country without understanding the housing policies of Democratic president Franklin D. Roosevelt and the G.I. Bill signed by Democratic president Harry Truman. Barack Obama is a Christian and the president of the United States and thus the inheritor of the full legacy of that grand office. He is neither, as Ross tries to position him, an outsider to American sin nor Christian sin. It’s his heritage too, and Obama is wise enough to know that he can’t simply charge off the bad parts of that heritage to intransigent Southern bigots.

It has been enlightening to watch this entire spectacle play out over the past week. There are now intelligent people going on television to tell us that the president should not use the word "crusade" to describe ... The Crusades. The problem is history. Or rather the problem is that there is no version of history that can award the West a stable moral high-ground. Some of the most prominent Christian leaders in this country used their authority to burnish the credentials of South Africa's racist regime—not in the 1960s, in the 1980s. At this very moment, there are reports that Uganda's attempt to make sex between men a capital offense is tied to the very sponsors of the Prayer Breakfast where Obama spoke. In such a world, a certainty about which "side" is always good and which "side" is forever evil doesn't really exist. And in an uncertain world, Obama is making a wise appeal for vigilance—vigilance against the death cult of ISIS, and vigilance against the allure of death cults period—even those inaugurated in the name of one's preferred God.

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/02/no-escape-from-history/385352/

Check out this wee hedgie:

He can roll up into a spiky sphere, making it impossible to tell where his head or feet are. He’s a freaky little critter.

Open thread.

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People who wonder why the president does not talk more about race would do well to examine the recent blow-up over his speech at the National Prayer Breakfast. Inveighing against the barbarism of ISIS, the president pointed out that it would be foolish to blame Islam, at large, for its atrocities. To make this point he noted that using religion to brutalize other people is neither a Muslim invention nor, in America, a foreign one:

Lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.

The "all too often" could just as well be "almost always." There were a fair number of pretexts given for slavery and Jim Crow, but Christianity provided the moral justification. On the cusp of plunging his country into a war that would cost some 750,000 lives, Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens paused to offer some explanation. His justification was not secular. The Confederacy was to be:

[T]he first government ever instituted upon the principles in strict conformity to nature, and the ordination of Providence, in furnishing the materials of human society ... With us, all of the white race, however high or low, rich or poor, are equal in the eye of the law. Not so with the negro. Subordination is his place. He, by nature, or by the curse against Canaan, is fitted for that condition which he occupies in our system. The architect, in the construction of buildings, lays the foundation with the proper material-the granite; then comes the brick or the marble. The substratum of our society is made of the material fitted by nature for it, and by experience we know that it is best, not only for the superior, but for the inferior race, that it should be so.

It is, indeed, in conformity with the ordinance of the Creator. It is not for us to inquire into the wisdom of His ordinances, or to question them. For His own purposes, He has made one race to differ from another, as He has made "one star to differ from another star in glory." The great objects of humanity are best attained when there is conformity to His laws and decrees, in the formation of governments as well as in all things else. Our confederacy is founded upon principles in strict conformity with these laws.

Stephens went on to argue that the "Christianization of the barbarous tribes of Africa" could only be accomplished through enslavement. And enslavement was not made possible through Robert's Rules of Order, but through a 250-year reign of mass torture, industrialized murder, and normalized rape—tactics which ISIS would find familiar. Its moral justification was not "because I said so," it was "Providence," "the curse against Canaan," "the Creator," "and Christianization." In just five years, 750,000 Americans died because of this peculiar mission of "Christianization." Many more died before, and many more died after. In his "Segregation Now" speech, George Wallace invokes God 27 times and calls the federal government opposing him "a system that is the very opposite of Christ."

Now, Christianity did not "cause" slavery, anymore than Christianity "caused" the civil-rights movement. The interest in power is almost always accompanied by the need to sanctify that power. That is what the Muslim terrorists in ISIS are seeking to do today, and that is what Christian enslavers and Christian terrorists did for the lion's share of American history.

That this relatively mild, and correct, point cannot be made without the comments being dubbed, "the most offensive I’ve ever heard a president make in my lifetime,” by a former Virginia governor gives you some sense of the limited tolerance for any honest conversation around racism in our politics. And it gives you something much more. My colleague Jim Fallows recently wrote about the need to, at once, infantilize and deify our military. Perhaps related to that is the need to infantilize and deify our history. Pointing out that Americans have done, on their own soil, in the name of their own God, something similar to what ISIS is doing now does not make ISIS any less barbaric, or any more correct. That is unless you view the entire discussion as a kind of religious one-upmanship, in which the goal is to prove that Christianity is "the awesomest."

Obama seemed to be going for something more—faith leavened by “some doubt.” If you are truly appalled by the brutality of ISIS, then a wise and essential step is understanding the lure of brutality, and recalling how easily your own society can be, and how often it has been, pulled over the brink.

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/02/the-foolish-historically-illiterate-incredible-response-to-obamas-prayer-breakfast-speech/385246/

Our rapid descent into a fully fledged wingnut run state continues:

The West Virginia House of Delegates began moving a bill Thursday to ban abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy. The bill is very similar to one that was passed last year, only to be vetoed by Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin.

The bill is one of 11 introduced so far this legislative session that seek to restrict women’s access to abortion.

A similar bill passed both houses of the Legislature last year with overwhelming bipartisan support but was vetoed by Tomblin, who said he had been advised that it was unconstitutional.

The House Health Committee held a public hearing on the bill before discussing it and ultimately passing it 20-5.

The public hearing had 25 speakers against the bill and 8 speaking in favor, although neither side seemed likely to change the other’s mind.

This year’s bill (HB2568) would ban abortions that occur more than 22 weeks after the woman’s last menstrual period. While that is a change in language from last year’s bill, it does not seem to be a change in practice, as the bill defines that time as “generally consistent with the time that is twenty weeks after fertilization.”

The bill contains some exceptions for medical emergencies or non-viable fetuses.

In medical emergencies the bill says, somewhat quizzically, that “an abortion …shall terminate the pregnancy in the manner which, in reasonable medical judgment, provides the best opportunity for the fetus to survive.”

An amendment from three Democratic delegates that would have added an exception for cases of rape or incest failed, largely along party lines.

The bill is named the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act. Some fun facts about West Virginia:

• In 2011, there were 4 abortion providers in West Virginia; 2 of those were clinics. This represents no change in overall providers and a no change in clinics from 2008, when there were 4 abortion providers overall, of which 2 were abortion clinics.

• In 2011, 89% of U.S. counties had no abortion clinic. 38% of American women lived in these counties, which meant they would have to travel outside their county to obtain an abortion. Of women obtaining abortions in 2008, one-third traveled more than 25 miles.

• In 2011, 98% of West Virginia counties had no abortion clinic. 90% of West Virginia women lived in these counties.

This is dated, and to my knowledge, there are only two places to have an abortion in WV now (.pdf), and both are in Kanawha county. Neither of them provides abortions after 20 weeks, and Women’s Health Services in WV only provides abortions up to 16 weeks.

So, in other words, this bill, if it is not vetoed by Tomblin, will accomplish nothing. It will not “save” one life. It’s just another way to gin up the culture wars and keep the godbotherers happy, and is a total waste of time, energy, and resources, because it will have ZERO impact on anything other than let some religious nuts babble on about the culture of life.

Speaking of the culture of life, it’s too bad those unborn fetuses don’t drink WV water, because then the fanatics in the legislature might stop doing shit like this:

As few as 90 of the thousands of chemical storage tanks across West Virginia might be covered by new state Department of Environmental Protection safety requirements passed after last year’s Freedom Industries leak, if legislation introduced this week passes, according to a new analysis of DEP data.

That’s 0.2 percent of the nearly 44,000 tanks listed in a database the DEP put together with owner registrations.

Downstream Strategies, a Morgantown-based environmental consultant, analyzed the data and released its findings in conjunction with the West Virginia Rivers Coalition.

“Senate Bill 373 passed with the promise that our water supplies would be protected,” said Angie Rosser, executive director of the Rivers Coalition. “The fact that the Legislature is now introducing bills that exclude 99.8 percent of tanks is a betrayal of that promise. We cannot accept our lawmakers turning their back on public safety and ignoring what we learned last year about the vulnerability of our water.”

More on that bill:

Thousands of chemical storage tanks across West Virginia would be exempt from the law passed in the wake of the Freedom Industries spill, under legislation introduced Tuesday in the House of Delegates.

The bill (HB2574) would rewrite the definition of “above-ground storage tank” so that only tanks located within “zones of critical concern” near public drinking water intakes would be subject to new state safety standards and inspection requirements.

“The bill is an extreme gutting of the protections the Legislature passed unanimously last year,” said Angie Rosser, executive director of the West Virginia Rivers Coalition. “It makes us question if anything was learned at all from the water crisis, as this essentially returns us to where we were with underregulated above-ground storage tanks threatening our water.”

The bill, which was sent to the Judiciary Committee, has 11 co-sponsors. The lead sponsor is Delegate Bob Ashley, R-Roane. The four Democratic co-sponsors include House Minority Leader Tim Miley, D-Harrison.

Industry lobbyists have been pushing for months for changes in last year’s landmark law, despite the fact that the state Department of Environmental Protection is still writing rules to implement that law. DEP officials are using a “risk-based approach” that mandates registration with DEP for all tanks, but reserves the strongest regulatory oversight for tanks whose size, location and contents makes them potential public health threats.

Among other things, the 40-page bill would exempt from the law any above-ground storage tanks with a capacity of 10,000 gallons or less. Current law is much broader, covering tanks with a capacity of 1,320 gallons.

“That’s a bit much,” DEP Secretary Randy Huffman said of the proposed change in the size of tanks covered by the law. “That takes a lot of tanks that do pose a risk to our public drinking water supplies out of the regulatory structure.”

Mind you, this legislation is in RESPONSE to the leak that poisoned the water of 300,000 West Virginians. A bill gutting existing laws and hampering future laws designed to protect drinking water.

That, folks, is what it looks like when Jesus and Big Business take the wheel.

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