pav alexander

I’ve been wrong before, and I’ll be wrong again, but I may never have been as wrong as I was when I initially predicted that Mitt Romney’s heinous diatribe against 47 percent of America would have little direct impact on the election. It’s an absolutely crushing blow. Obviously it doesn’t guarantee his defeat — if a secret video surfaces depicting Obama promising to impose Sharia law in his second term, Romney will stand a good chance of coming back — but it destroys his public standing in ways that make a comeback nearly impossible.

… we couldn’t even imagine that the authorities would be so dumb that they would actually legitimize our influence by arresting us… . But unlike Putin, we’re not chickenshit—so we didn’t stop performing. The church performance was a perfect opportunity for Putin’s apparatchiks to claim that our motives were religious intolerance and not political protest. This way our persecution could be framed as a righteous burning of blasphemers, as opposed to just stifling free speech.

Not all of my bloggy energies are spent here at the Object. No, nor are they exclusive to the website of my employing organization. If you’ll recall, I also contribute to a little something called Friendly Atheist. I thought it was a little past due for me to highlight my posts there from the past month or so.

In recent weeks, I applauded the president for coming down firmly on the side of free expression and against blasphemy laws, but blasted a coalition of international organizations that pandered to religious oversensitivity. I stared with astonishment at the endless wonder that is Rick Perry’s Bronze Age idiocy. I reviewed the presidential candidates’ dueling answers concerning both science and religion, and learned a little something each time.

It’s a good gig, writing for Hemant’s blog, and I’m honored to be a part of it. Share and enjoy.

How are you going to vilify Romney as a heartless plutocrat unfit for the presidency, and then enthusiastically recommend a guy who held Bradley Manning in solitary and killed a 16-year-old American kid? If you’re a utilitarian who plans to vote for Obama, better to mournfully acknowledge that you regard him as the lesser of two evils, with all that phrase denotes.

But I don’t see many Obama supporters feeling as reluctant as the circumstances warrant.

The whole liberal conceit that Obama is a good, enlightened man, while his opponent is a malign, hard-hearted cretin, depends on constructing a reality where the lives of non-Americans — along with the lives of some American Muslims and whistleblowers – just aren’t valued. Alternatively, the less savory parts of Obama’s tenure can just be repeatedly disappeared from the narrative of his first term, as so many left-leaning journalists, uncomfortable confronting the depths of the man’s transgressions, have done over and over again.

Among the country’s stupefied elites, the bad news induces the wish to make time stand still, to punish the presumption of a future that presents itself as a bill collector. As self-pitying as Shakespeare’s melancholy king, they sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of money. Without it the future doesn’t bear contemplating, doesn’t include their presence in it and therefore doesn’t exist. How then can the banks be expected to lend money, the government to build hospitals and schools, the rich to pay taxes for comforts not their own? The suggestion is outrageous, an intolerable effrontery, out of line with the all-American revelation that the name of the game is selfishness. The surplus of resentment affords the excuses to do nothing and bids up the market in transcendence. Politicians in Congress stand around like trees in a petrified forest, or, if allied with the zeal of the Tea Party, console themselves with notions of biblical vengeance, the wrecking of any such thing as a common good a consummation devoutly to be wished. Secure in the knowledge that only the wicked shall perish, they press forward to the Day of Judgment when the host of the damned—variously identified over the course of the centuries as false priests, proud barons, profiteering capitalists, vile communists, and godless democrats—shall fall into the hands of an angry god and gnaw their tongues in anguish.

The Republican Party – not just the Romney campaign, but the party as a whole – is running on nothing. They are running on the presumption that the country has already rejected the Democrats, and that therefore it is their turn. They are behaving as if choosing Democratic governance was some kind of “experiment” that didn’t work out, and now the American people will, of course, come back to their natural home.

Galvanized by anger over the killing of the popular American ambassador here last week, thousands of Libyans marched through this city on Friday, demanding the disarming of the militias that helped topple the dictatorship but have troubled the country with their refusal to disband.

In a show of mass frustration at the armed groups, protesters seized control of several militia headquarters on Friday night and handed them over to Libya’s national army in what appeared to be a coordinated sweep.

Yes, there will always be hucksters. And spending all one’s time fighting them is a foolish enterprise.

On the right today, they are so numerous, prominent and shameless, their pathologies so ingrained in right-wing media and politics, their wealth so corrupting to young talent, and their pathologies so seldom challenged by those who know better, that Republicans are operating at a persistent information disadvantage. (Too many believe even their own bullshit.) The Bush Administration showed that it’s possible to win at the ballot box anyway — but that the victory isn’t worth much, save an ill-conceived war in the desert, exploding deficits, and a financial crisis. Improving on this metric won’t solve all the right’s problems, or answer every question about the right way forward, but it would go a long way toward mitigating its least defensible excesses. For some, the resulting improvements would be enough to make the GOP preferable to the Democrats.

As yet, I say to hell with them both.

Romney was recorded saying this:

There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That that’s an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what…These are people who pay no income tax.

Josh Marshall says this:

… this is a fine distillation of the most rancid version of the libertarian conservative worldview. Democrats are moochers and losers who can’t get their act together and think the government owes them food, board, health care and basically whatever else they want. You don’t need to look long to find this version of reality on the web. But this isn’t some right-wing blogger. It’s the Republican candidate for President of the United States.

Yeah. Agreed. But Marshall concludes this:

This is the caricature of Mitt Romney, who was born on 3rd base (in Ann Richards memorable phrase), thinks he hit a triple and thinks the broad middle class who’ve relied on government for student loans or social security or anything else are losers who can’t get their act together and take responsibility for themselves. Only this tape says that caricature Mitt Romney is the real Mitt Romney.

Big problem.

He says also in the piece, “This tape strikes me as absolutely devastating.” I don’t necessarily think Marshall is wrong that it’s a problem, but I’m not nearly as confident as he is about the impact it’ll have on Romney.

Here’s why: What if rather than angering all Obama supporters (who, as Mitt says, are already lost), a few feel the sting of the stigma, and start to wonder, well, gee, I don’t feel that way about government and work and yadda yadda. Maybe I’m not for Obama after all.

Who — that is now a Romney supporter — is going to change their mind as a result of this statement? Presumably they already feel some shade of this sentiment if they’re planning on voting for the guy.

And then you have the only folks who really matter, the uninformed undecideds who have no idea what’s going on, and aren’t informed enough to understand the real differences between the candidates. I don’t think it’s necessarily a given that those folks will dismiss Romney for an elitist prig for this, and not instead decide (if anything) that they would rather not be seen as the very caricature Romney describes.

Maybe I’m wrong, but I certainly don’t think it’s clear-cut.

His desire to hear out junior people is a warm personality trait as much as a cool tactic, of a piece with his desire to play golf with White House cooks rather than with C.E.O.’s and basketball with people who treat him as just another player on the court; to stay home and read a book rather than go to a Washington cocktail party; and to seek out, in any crowd, not the beautiful people but the old people. The man has his stat­us needs, but they are unusual. And he has a tendency, an unthinking first step, to subvert established stat­us structures.

Om Malik argues that Bezos is the inheritor to Steve Jobs’s crown. I agree. Not because Bezos has copied anything Jobs did, but because he has not. What he’s done that is Jobs-like is doggedly pursue, year after year, iteration after iteration, a vision unlike that of any other company — all in the name of making customers happy.

Though, I admit, perhaps a bit insensitive of me to post today. Nonetheless.

me, just now, looking at google calendar: Patriot Day? What is… Oh my God, those bastards attacked us on PATRIOT DAY.

— Alison Forns (@alisonforns) September 11, 2012

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXr1kmuqGcU

parislemon:

Apple has been known to poke fun at itself by showing a comical video before an event. Something tells me they won’t be showing this one though.

Wow. Just. Wow.

(via @StevieWLevin)

I’ll say that again: Shirley Chisholm, the first black woman in Congress, and George Wallace, the most notorious segregationist politician of the 20th century, worked together to raise wages for domestic servants, probably the most abused and unregulated sector of the workforce. (Chisholm’s immigrant mother, in fact, had been a domestic worker, while her father toiled in a factory that made burlap bags.) Was that an unrepeatable one-off event based on a bizarre personal connection, or an example of a cross-racial, North-South, class-based political coalition that might have been? We’ll never know, although it’s tempting to imagine the revolutionary potential of a Chisholm-Wallace ticket – the disabled good ol’ boy and the steely-eyed schoolmarm – which really might have caused the American political universe to explode.