A quantum of umbrage: Drip . . . drip . . . drip . . .

It was eight days ago that the shooter opened fire at Umpqua Community College, down I-5 from where I'm sitting now.

Drip . . . drip . . . drip . . . 

This morning, I hadn't been up long when I read about the shooting at Northern Arizona University. It happened about 1:20am Pacific time.

Well, we made it over a week, I thought. That's better than our average for 2015. (I was wrong; there had been four mass shootings in the US – including three separate incidents in Baltimore – since the Umpqua CC incident last week. But we'll let my blissful ignorance pass for the moment.)

Then at or shortly after noon noon Pacific time today came a second shooting – the Texas Southern University announced the campus lockdown at 10:27am Central, making it roughly eleven hours after the first incident this morning.

Drip . . . drip . . . drip . . .

Jesus, I thought to myself, we can't even make it a full 24 hours without a shooting like this anymore. I expressed to a friend the dim hope that maybe the mass shooters in the US, like the rest of us, would be knocking off early on Friday afternoon, giving the 24-hour nobody-got-shot clock a break.

Nope. The campus-wide text alert for the third shooting today, this time at Jefferson Technical and Community College in Louisville KY, went out at 3:39pm Eastern – a little less than half an hour after the TSU lockdown.

Drip . . . drip . . . drip . . .

We don't need a 24-hour clock, I would have muttered into my drink, if I'd had one. We need an egg timer.

This is way we've chosen to live things in this country. We're not going to do anything about it. That's been clear for almost two years.

In retrospect Sandy Hook marked the end of the US gun control debate. Once America decided killing children was bearable, it was over.

— Dan Hodges (@DPJHodges) June 19, 2015

Yup. We're just going to let it happen. We feel terrible, and we waste no time Facebooking our thoughts and prayers, and we give the families and community time to mourn, and we probably create a new hashtag, and then . . . we reset the egg-timer and move on.

And, if we're gun fetishists and Obama-haters like the first-name-only dimwits in Roseburg today, we insist that even the merest hint of a suggestion of the possibility of considering it's finally time to consider initial steps to reigning in this disease is the very height of bad taste.

And if we're 2016 GOP presidential wannabes, we just want to change the subject.

Drip . . . drip . . . drip . . . 

Dead . . . dead . . . dead . . . 

Good news, everyone: I've arrived in a Mecca of a sort

Turns out the city I'm visiting has a special little place in history I never knew about:

On this day in 1958, Robert H. W. Welch Jr. founded the John Birch Society in Indianapolis, meeting with 11 other men from various states. This national organization adopted as its mission the protection of the United States against communism.

The Encyclopedia of Indianapolis (1994)

Ah, how well I remember that "Save the Republic: Impeach Earl Warren" billboard that once stood defiantly along 16th Street on the west side.

Since those days, of course, international communism has collapsed and the society has somewhat diversified its portfolio.

And yes, there is an Encyclopedia of Indianapolis, although my source for this tidbit was a "Today in Indiana History" item in this morning's Indianapolis Star.

Quote of the day: Rising to the bait, and other things

The fact of the matter is that Liz Cheney (daughter of Dick) is getting mau-maued by gay-hatin’ Sarah Huckabee Sanders (daughter of Mike) and Liz rose to the bait because she desperately wants to represent a state that likes their gays tied to a fence and left to die from exposure.

- the once and future Tbogg, tipping his hat to Tom Wolfe and summing up the evils of American political dynasties, socially-sanctioned homophobia, and the Electoral College all in one sentence. Not bad.

The unforgiving minute: Chicks and ducks and geese better scurry

(Updated below.)

Once again, a conservative homophobe (but I repeat myself) goes there (emphasis added):

And I pointed out, well, once you make it ten, then why would you draw the line at ten? What's wrong with nine? Or eleven? And the problem is once you draw that limit ; it's kind of like marriage when you say it's not a man and a woman any more, then why not have three men and one woman, or four women and one man, or why not somebody has a love for an animal?

Where Rep. Gohmert (R [of course] - TX [unsurprisingly]) started was complaining about the very idea of limiting clip-sizes for automatic and semi-automatic rifles.

Where he wound up, in three short sentences, is his worry that gay marriage will lead to people having sex with barnyard animals. This is a problem which has long troubled such moral thinkers as Gohmert, Rick Santorum, and Mike Huckabee, and has raised some equally disturbing questions of its own, which I must ask again here:

Why is it that this is the first place their minds go?

Can you really be this worried about stopping something that you haven't already been thinking about -- a lot?

(Update: Oh, yeah -- and this.)

Quote of the day: Meanwhile, under the table

American conservatism has been playing footsie with polite sedition for going on four decades now.

 - Charlie Pierce, sitting at the battlefield at Gettysburg at midnight as the fog slowly rolls in (perhaps for the second time?).

Reading: The outsourced party

In today's NYTimes, Kevin Baker has a real head-smacker of an argument -- the kind that, even though all the pieces of the puzzle have been sitting in plain sight for a few years (in some cases, a few decades), you don't see it until someone slides those pieces around. See? This fits here, and this fits here. . . .

Baker's ironic point is this: The Republican Party, for decades the staunch defender of industry outsourcing as a way to cut costs, weaken labor, and avoid taxes and regulations, without regard to how damaging its effects might be on the country as a whole, has become “the outsourced party,” turning the development of ideas, the screening of candidates, and the mobilization of voters over to entities it now discovers it can no longer quite control.

The Republican effort to rally every conceivable outside entity to the party’s cause was wildly successful. Again and again over the years, conservative policy institutes have armed the party’s candidates with intellectual arguments, while the conservative media barrage has blasted a way through to high office for even the most lackluster Republican nominees.

Yet increasingly this meant that the Republican Party was outsourcing both body and soul. Both what the party believed in and its ability to do the heavy lifting necessary to win elections was handed over to outside interests — outside interests that did not necessarily share the party’s goals or have any stake in ameliorating its tactics.

This has become suddenly and painfully evident this year. Party leaders may not have liked Rush Limbaugh’s disgusting attacks on a Georgetown law student — calling her a “slut” and a “prostitute” for advocating that insurance companies provide affordable birth control — but what does he care?

If the Republicans lose the election, it will most likely mean all the more angry conservatives tuning in and driving up the ratings for Rush and his fellow radio ranters.

Ideas? There are think tanks now. Agenda-setting? FOX News handles that. Candidate grooming and vetting? Endless sponsored reality-show debates serve that function now. Legislative muscle? K Street lobbyists get paid for that. Mobilizing voters? Talk radio. Campaign funding? A handful of single-issue billionaires can each keep their own preferred candidate in the race, no matter how long past the sell-by date. And no one in the old GOP establishment quite knows how to get the genie back into the bottle, even if they dared try.

Thanks to their inventiveness, Republicans have stumbled into the brave new world of American politics. From primaries to photo ops, from direct mail to voter suppression laws, the Republican party has almost always been the real innovator in electoral politics, usually leaving their slower brother, the Democrats, in the dust for at least a campaign season or two.

Now they’ve achieved the political equivalent of shuttering that foul old steel mill and shipping the hard work off for others to do while they dabble in these fascinating new derivatives. Now their candidates and their ideas are seen as so many junk bonds, and they don’t seem to have the wherewithal to make the party over from within.

Note that Baker's choice of terms is particularly apt. As Will Bunch points out, this is but the logical extension of allowing entertainment to blend with, and finally drown, our politics and news as a form of discourse.

Baker didn't mention the late 20th Century media critic Neil Postman, but this is exactly the world that Postman predicted and feared in "Amusing Ourselves to Death," that entertainment -- and entertainment values -- would eventually overwhelm politics. The 2012 GOP race has been the epitome of this -- interest in the race soared when the candidates help weekly TV debates that were frighteningly like a reality show, and that interest has plunged now that the "reality show" is over. And life or death issues like a possible military action in Iran are discussed the way a talk radio host would discuss them.

And a Rush Limbaugh really does get the last laugh -- he stays in the radio while the rest of us amuse ourselves to death.

The hook that Postman uses to launch his book is this riddle: Why has America spent over half a century fearing that the brutal oppression of Orwell's “Nineteen Eighty-Four” would come to pass here, when it should have been obvious that Huxley's “Brave New World” -- a parody and retort to the optimism of the utopian novelists of his time, in which Huxley imagined a world of infantilized, materialist, overmedicated narcissists -- struck so much nearer to the realities of our age?

Baker's article is going on the Readings list at the right.

Don't kid yourself for a moment

(Updated twice below.)

Jeffrey Goldberg's piece at The Atlantic's website, with more background on the machinations by anti-choice top brass at Susan G. Komen for the Cure to cut off the organization's support for Planned Parenthood's breast exam services, has already been picked up around the web.

It includes the following quote from a former senior communications adviser for SGK. Goldberg presents it without comment, and I haven't seen any of the online commenters who've recirculated the story pay it any notice.

But I find it very surprising.

The Komen board of directors are very politically savvy folks, and I think over time they thought if they gave in to the very aggressive propaganda machine of the anti-abortion groups, that the issue would go away.

If the first half of this statement is true, the second can't be.

It doesn't speak terribly well for the members of the SGK board, if this has to be pointed out to them, but “politically savvy groups” (on either side of the issue) know perfectly well that “the very aggressive propaganda machine of the anti-abortion groups” is simply not in the business of “going away.”

That is not, as they say, how they roll. They do not grasp the concept of "Even-Steven."

The former communications adviser added, in a stunning bit of understatement, "It seemed very short-sighted to me."

Indeed, available evidence now points to the cut-off of support Planned Parenthood breast cancer screening as something that has been in the works for months by anti-abortion forces both within and without SGK, as something that was going to be accomplished by hook or by crook. In fact, in all likelihood, they're ramping up the same kind of attack on stem-cell research funding.^*

That's why the anti-abortion groups have succeeded to the extent that they have. The latest concession by their enemies is never enough. It only sets the groundwork for the next attack.

And whatever short-term price they may pay for their tactics -- I'm thinking of the almost-inevitable plunge in SGK's donor support and reputation -- you can rest assured it won't be enough to make them suddenly slap their foreheads and ask, "Wait -- could we have gone too far this time?"

Trust me. They're not going away. These people are the very opposite of "short-sighted."


^*Update #1: About 90 minutes after this post went up, here's the headline at DailyKos: "New Komen Foundation policy also refuses funding for embryonic stem cell research". Well. That didn't take long, did it?

Update #2: I'm not sure from whose point of view Jeffrey Goldberg writes, in the first sentence of his article, when he describes this controversy as "entirely avoidable, and deeply regrettable." From the point of view of anti-abortion activists within and without SGK, it's not anything they wanted to avoid (indeed, they'd been looking for the right opportunity to spring the trap for months). Nor is it something they now view with anything much resembling regret (except in the narrow sense that it will mean a heavy cost in money and credibility to an organization they evidently viewed with the deepest cynicism already).

Quote of the day: Distractions versus issues

Charles Pierce examines the criterion by which Serious Republicans distinguish between “distractions” (e.g., Birtherism, an obvious political loser) and “issues” (e.g. Swift Boating, a disgusting but surprisingly effective tactic):

Make no mistake. Swift Boatism is different from birtherism only in two ways. First, the target is obviously different. But, second, and most important, there was serious money behind Swift Boatism and there is little behind birtherism. (In Republican campaigns, the difference between an "issue" and a "distraction" is whether the Koch Brothers have busted out the checkbook yet.)

And there you have it.

Quote of the day: Locking it in

Here's Charles Pierce on the competition for the most gimmicky tax plan among the GOP presidential candidates:

This isn't really about taxes. It's about establishing a permanent plutocracy and about locking in income inequality. And "starving the beast." Oh, and about looking tough for the mouth-breathers.

Tough to argue with that.

The unforgiving minute: Devolution deniers

The conservative base believes that dinosaurs and humans once shared the planet, but refuses to acknowledge that reasonable Republicans walked the earth in our own lifetimes.

To fully comprehend the sad spectacle that has become American politics since the 1980s, you need not peruse the politics section of major periodicals. Or the opinion, news or business pages of illustrious publications.

No, lately you’d be best served by heading on over to the obituary section.

For example, this past week, a legislative giant from an earlier and more evolved Republican Party - that is to say, one in which dazzling audiences with tales of cantering saddleback on the family T-Rex was not considered “reaching out to the base” - former Senator Charles Percy, passed away. This sad news has come not long after the passing of another Republican legend, former Oregon Senator Mark Hatfield.

Minute's up.

Censoring "1776:" Cool, cool, considerate men

Remember when "politically correct" meant it was approved by the radical left?

Those days are gone -- they've been gone for a long time. For longer than a lot of people realize, "politically correct" has come to mean "not offensive to the Old Confederacy-based GOP and its electoral 'Southern Strategy:'"

In the musical "1776," the song "Cool, Cool, Considerate Men" depicts Revolutionary War era conservatives as power-hungry wheedlers focused on maintaining wealth. So it's not surprising that then-President Richard Nixon, who saw the show at a special White House performance in 1970, wasn't a big fan of the number.

What is surprising is that according to Jack L. Warner, the film's producer and a friend of the president, Nixon pressured him to cut the song from the 1972 film version of the show--which Warner did. Warner also wanted the original negative of the song shredded, but the film's editor secretly kept it intact.

Here are the lyrics:

Dickinson:

Oh say do you see what I see?

Congress sitting here in sweet serenity

I could cheer; the reason's clear

For the first time in a year Adams isn't here

And look, the sun is in the sky

A breeze is blowing by, and there's not a single fly

I sing hosanna, hosanna

Hosanna, hosanna

And it's cool

Come ye cool cool conservative men

The likes of which may never be seen again

We have land, cash in hand

Self-command, future planned

Fortune flies, society survives

In neatly ordered lives with well-endowered wives

We sing hosanna, hosanna

To our breeding and our banner

We are cool

Come ye cool cool considerate set

We'll dance together to the same minuet

To the right, ever to the right

Never to the left, forever to the right

May our creed be never to exceed

Regulated speed, no matter what the need

We sing hosanna, hosanna

Enblazoned on our banner

Is keep cool

What we do we do rationally

We never ever go off half-cocked, not we

Why begin till we know that we can win

And if we cannot win why bother to begin?

Rutledge:

We say this game's not of our choosing

Why should we risk losing?

All:

We are cool

To the right, ever to the right

Never to the left, forever to the right

We have gold, a market that will hold

Tradition that is old, a reluctance to be bold.

Dickinson:

I sing hosanna, hosanna

In a sane and lucid manner

We are cool

All:

Come ye cool cool considerate men

The likes of which may never be seen again

With our land, cash in hand

Self-command, future planned

And we'll hold to our gold

Tradition that is old, reluctant to be bold.

We say this game's not of our choosing

Why should we risk losing?

We cool, cool, cool

Cool, cool, cool

Cool cool men

Here's the footage you couldn't be trusted to see:

If you're reading this in FB Notes, you'll need to click View Original Post to see the video.

Hat tip to Doctor Beyond.

The unforgiving minute: Freedom means someone else always pays the price

It's like there's no longer any attempt to avoid self-contradiction, even within the same day's news cycle. Words like "policy" and "plan" simply don't apply anymore.

First, Atrios observes, with an understandable sense of bemusement:

Occasionally the conservative worldview clashes with itself in ways I can't resolve. Texas conservatives, who don't trust public school teachers to educate their kids, want to empower them to hit their kids.

Doesn't seem like you can really be for both at the same time, does it?

And here's another pair of items, both from today (emphasis added):

First this:

House progressives are trying to draw attention to language Republicans have included in an annual must-pass defense bill, which they say will dramatically expand Presidential power in the war on terrorism.[…]

With Osama bin Laden dead, [House Armed Services Committee Chairman Buck McKeon (R-CA)] et al want to update the AUMF, so that it doesn't phase itself out as the connection between existing terrorist groups and the September 11 attacks themselves becomes more and more tenuous over time. That's exactly what some Democrats hope to avoid.

The new language eschews references to September 11, and instead centers the authorization on "armed conflict with al-Qaeda, the Taliban and associated forces," though "associated forces" is not defined. It replaces the authority to target "organizations" and "persons" domestically with the power to target "all entities that continue to pose a threat to the United States and its citizens, both domestically and abroad."

Democrats and advocates highlight these seemingly subtle changes and argue that they will allow the President to initiate military action even more broadly, and without the consent of Congress -- effectively perpetuating the war indefinitely.

And then this:

Republicans say they've found the problem in America -- and that problem is the basic framework of the Union as we know it today.

A group of Republicans in the House and Senate are proposing an amendment to the Constitution that would allow a vote by two-thirds of the states' legislatures to override any federal law they did not agree with.

The proposed constitutional amendment, a tea party favorite, is being touted by Sen. Mike Enzi (R-WY) in the Senate and co-sponsored by Sens. John Barasso (R-WY) and Orrin Hatch (R-UT). In the House, Reps. Rob Bishop (R-UT), Morgan Griffith (R-VA) and Paul Broun (R-GA) are leading the charge.

The goal, according to proponents, is to stop the tyranny of Washington over the economy and circumscribe other federal powers.

So which is it? Either the government's already too powerful, too unchecked, too big (and, of course, Obama's too . . . everything), or else there should be no practical limits on arguably the most important Executive Branch power (and certainly one with direct implications for the economy and the extent of federal powers).

I think the only thread holding this legislative rag-bag together is the urgent adolescent desire to have it both ways: To want all the control for oneself, while reserving the right to push the hard decisions onto someone else.

Minute's up. Actually, that was more than a minute. No charge for the extra.

Separated at birth: On the descent of conservatism

Separated at birth: 1950s ur-conservative writer/intellectual William F. Buckley Jr., whose legacy has neither aged well nor passed into the hands of people who are up to the job, and 1950s ur-conservative writer/intellectual Ayn Rand, whose legacy has neither aged well nor passed into the hands of people who are up to the job.

(Images: Buckley and Rand.)

Quote of the day: Threat assessment

Steve at No More Mister Nice Blog on whether apocalyptic rage is becoming passé on the extreme right:

Wingnuts have had a really hard time deciding whether they're personally threatened more by the status quo or by those challenging it.

Quote of the day: On elections and consequences

Here's Steve at No More Mister Nice Blog on the right and that whole democracy thing:

At the national level, this is the third presidency in a row that the right has approached on the assumption that elections should be only incidentally related to consequences.

Quote of the day: You go with the Gipper you've got, not the one you wish you had

Esquire's Tim Hefferman on why a President who did so many things the current GOP and Tea Party claim to despise is now their religious totem:

I suspect that the Republican mythmakers deify Reagan not out of desire, but simple necessity. The reality of living Republican leadership is hypocrisy and disaster; might as well take a shot at riding to legitimacy on a pack of lies strapped to a dead man's back. If nothing else, he can't complain.

Three years later: Arizona's still "looking down the barrell"

[Updated below.]

I don't remember seeing this 2008 story get mentioned much during the aftermath of the Arizona shootings last month. I only stumbled across it myself because I was hunting for something else.

Following a shooting at Northern Illinois University in spring of that year (too far back to remember?), Arizona State Senator Karen Johnson had a plan:

Horrified by recent campus shootings, a state lawmaker here has come up with a proposal in keeping with the Taurus .22-caliber pistol tucked in her purse: Get more guns on campus.

The lawmaker, State Senator Karen S. Johnson, has sponsored a bill, which the Senate Judiciary Committee approved last week, that would allow people with a concealed weapons permit — limited to those 21 and older here — to carry their firearms at public colleges and universities. Concealed weapons are generally not permitted at most public establishments, including colleges.

Ms. Johnson, a Republican from Mesa, said she believed that the recent carnage at Northern Illinois University could have been prevented or limited if an armed student or professor had intercepted the gunman. The police, she said, respond too slowly to such incidents and, besides, who better than the people staring down the barrel to take action?

Because, as I commented at the time,

There are some people so dim that they think they could take a terrible and dangerous situation like the Northern Illinois shootings and make it better by throwing in a hail of crossfire and potshots from freaked-out amateurs for good measure.

We could call her bill The Full Employment for Arizona Attorneys Specializing in Wrongful Death Suits Act of 2008.

Update: It's hard to say Arizona has seen much daylight on the subject since 2008. I haven't tracked down what became of Senator Johnson's bill, although I believe it wasn't passed. Her State Senate seat is now filled by Republican anti-immigrant enthusiast Russell Pearce.

Update #2:  Did I say "Republican anti-immigrant enthusiast Russell Pearce?"  My bad.  I meant to say Republican secessionist and anti-immigrant enthusiast Russell Pearce. p3 deeply regrets the error.

I’m a little surprised it took the Tea Party even 12 days on this one

Here's my tweet from the 9th:

And here's yesterday's news:

Arizona Tea Partiers Seek to Recall Sheriff for 'Politicizing' Giffords Case
By Lindsey Boerma
Friday, January 21, 2011 | 6:03 p.m.

The latest in the war of words sparked by the Tucson tragedy: Local tea party groups are actively working to recall Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik for "politicizing a tragedy" after he pointed a finger at Rush Limbaugh and other conservatives after the January 8 shootings of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, D-Ariz., and 18 others.

On Friday, the nation's attention was focused on Giffords's move from the Tucson hospital where she was initially treated to a Houston rehabilitation facility. In Arizona, meanwhile, tea party activists are planning a “Dump Dupnik 2012” rally for January 28 outside the Pima County Sheriff’s Department. Dan Baltes, executive director of the Utah organization Americans Against Immigration Amnesty, is taking it a step further: He is organizing a recall effort.

It's not that much fun being right when they make it that easy.

(h/t to Open Left.)

Quote of the day: Needle, pursed, and prim

Matt Tiabbi:

With his needle nose, pursed lips and prim reading glasses, [Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell is] a proud wearer of the "I'm an intellectual, but I'm also a narrow-minded prick" look made famous by George Will.

(See also; and also.)

Why the rise of modern conservatism is like 'Star Wars'

And it has nothing to do with Reagan's "Strategic Defense Initiative."

This has been my Summer of Cold War Reading. I haven't written up all I've read, and I haven't done it in order, and I've taken some liberties with the whole concept of cold-war fiction.

It began with my decision to finally work through the canonic Ian Flemming/James Bond novels and short stories and -- here's the tough part -- in order. That means that I've been hanging out for a while waiting for 'Diamonds Are Forever' to come in on interlibrary loan.

It's in, but right now I'm in the middle of Rick Perlstein's history of the modern conservative movement -- Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus and Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America. It's good, although it needs an editor (like me); it jumps around just enough that you can't be sure if you're in, say, late 1966 or early 1966 and, believe me, that makes all the difference. And its index is kind of spotty too, which is only a problem because he likes to spring now-well-known names on you in the context before they were well known, and sometimes that works and sometimes it doesn't. (I don't have either book in front of me, so the examples I've bookmarked will have to wait for another post.)

Both "Before the Storm" and "Nixonland" are good reads; Perlstein has a somewhat Tom Wolfe-ish gift for letting his narrative voice occasionally lapse into that of one of his historical objects, at which point the prose usually lets slip what you guessed the characters are thinking anyway.

But the experience of reading them now is a lot like re-watching "Star Wars" and "The Empire Strikes Back" (I refuse to use either "A New Hope" or any Roman numerals to refer to them; there's "the three good ones," and "the three crappy ones," and that's it).

"Before the Storm" is like "Star Wars:" Even though Vader (Nixon?) is able to escape the destruction of the Death Star (the 1964 apparent rout of the Goldwater/Nixon/Reagan/Birchite conservative movement?) at the last moment, it still looks pretty upbeat. Johnson wins by a landslide. The punditocracy declares the conservative wing of the Republican party dead as a doornail. The Princess and the leaders of the Rebellion give medals to Han, Luke, and Chewy, and you can leave the theater humming John Williams music with a bounce in your step.

Then comes "Nixonland," the "Empire Strikes Back" of the narrative arc. The story-telling is still fun, but you know where this one's going to wind up: the Revolution's been dealt a crippling blow, Han's encased in carbonite, Luke's got the whole lost-a-hand-gained-a-father thing to deal with, and Nixon's going to narrowly win in '68, and win big in '72. I'm only about 100 pages in, the chronology is in early 1969, and yet there is already, one might say, a sense of impending doom.

More later, including thoughts on the birth of the "liberal elites think they're smarter than you" meme.  (Hint: They did. They do.  It didn't help, and it still doesn't.)