Left Analysis: Who is worse, Obama or Clinton

A fellow lefty friend of mine and I had this discussion leading up to the Obama election: which would be the biggest sellout to the corporate right, Obama or Clinton. Actually, we framed it as 'who was worse, Clinton or Obama'. But I realized that just saying it like that would be an invitation for rightwing trolls, wingnuts, and tea-baggers to come boiling out of the woodwork and saying 'BOTH', and that's not the point.

I said in 2008 that we would have to wait for a little bit to see, like two years into the term. Which is about now!

So we've got to come up with the criteria for analysis. And some kind of judging system. We've wagered a night out on this, so it's something we need to give some thought to.

This is just a starting post, so he and I get on with it.

Quick recommended link: Juan Cole on BP and Iraq

Juan Cole is worth reading for a number of reasons - he's a lefty prof who understands the middle east from serious experience (living there many years, extensive reading of sources in their native languages) and every so often he goes off on the right-wing in wonderful, hard-hitting, factual but passionate rants.

And so when he draws the correlations between Iraq, an oil-based deadly disaster, and the BP oil spew, another oil-based deadly disaster, he does it with style.

Here's one hot paragraph. Read the whole thing.

Both the Iraq tragedy and the BP tragedy are testimonies to greed and hubris. They speak of gigantic endeavors undertaken with insufficient forethought and too few resources. They are enterprises that made a handful of ruthless men wealthy, and impoverished everyone else. In the cutting of corners for short term petty profit, in the extractive determination, in the disregard for any rule of law or prudent regulations, these two projects were both stamped with the personality of Dick Cheney (who met with energy corporations and worked tirelessly to remove them from regulatory oversight, so that he is at the matrix of both disasters).

Two gay kids in New York elected prom king and queen

Aww... this is so sweet. Look at the pictures! (credit to the Albany Times Union)

On June 5, what began as a lark turned into a celebration of their courage to attend high school as openly gay young men. Seniors Charlie Ferrusi and Timmy Howard were crowned Hudson High School's prom king and queen in an open vote of their classmates.

"It was so cool when they called our names. Kids were screaming and cheering for us," recalled Ferrusi. "I gave Timmy the biggest hug ever. I was shaking with excitement. People were taking our picture. Everyone was going crazy."

Read more: http://www.timesunion.com/AspStories/story.asp?storyID=940461#ixzz0qrvb1BS7

Now, kids across the country have been denied the opportunity to run as gay couples, or boys running for prom queen or girls for prom king. This school had a close vote a couple of years ago where a young man narrowly lost for prom queen. But apparently the superintendant got the clue and he said this:

"The principal and I are in full support of the outcome of the prom vote," Howe said. "The students had a great time and they selected the prom king and queen they wanted. We are a diverse student body and we celebrate our diversity."

Good going, Hudson High! And hat tip to Shakesville!

Pseudonymity

Well. I started a statement on pseudonymity that looked as arrogant as heck. Even though I have the ability to be a total dickwad (see photo) I still try not to. At the same time that I think - oh, it is all about me. (Well, who doesn't?)

I am choosing to blog under nihilix for a couple reasons - journalistic voice and I can just vent more freely. If you have any feedback about this, let me know.

But FB's minutia-based communication system is definitely infecting how I'm writing this post - a long status update!

Anyway, Penny Arcade is what I'm reading right now, and they get credit for the image: I quit keeping up with various webcomics etc. some years ago, and I'm on a 'crawl out of the archives' there. I'm up to about 2007. I'm also reading Questionable Content, from 2003 to 2006. Questionable Content is going faster, because I'm also reading Tycho's web posts, which slows things down.

I'm also gardening, getting the last of the Friend's Plant Sale plants in the ground (or in pots).

I've been following the Israeli/Gaza blockade story, the imprisonment of Peter Erlinder, reading about race at a couple places (Ta-Nehisi and Racialicous) and playing WoW. My newest character just hit level 65.

There you go - FB style minutia with links!

Ohhh....

There's this one vocal track at the beginning of Irresponsible Hate Anthem from Marilyn Manson's Antichrist Superstar... that's the sound of me coming back to the blog...

ohhhh.... ohhhh....

Feel like a zombie blogger coming back to the windlass that I used to wind when I was alive...

(probably partially a result of listening to Marilyn Manson) (as well as not blogging in like FORever...)

Anyway, I'm getting bored with WoW for not being self-improving enough. See if I start doing stuff here.

(I've been bookmarking articles. Much like a bird gathering twigs, this is an indicator that I'm feeling the itch again...)

(corporate zombie credit nikholmes)

Healthcare

My first thought - fuck, TPM has big headlines - Senate Passes Healthcare, House to Adopt Senate Plan - fuck that!

The reason you get good language out of the House is so you can fight for a compromise in committee! This is the most progressive House we've had in quite a while, and their public option was good, and the funding was better, and were it the bill, I'd be thrilled.

But all this 'roll over' language, it was getting to me. And then good old Progressive Left Democrat himself, Markos Molitsas on the TV. And his message - keep fighting, heck ya!

Once we have a final bill, and things are set in stone, then we can re-examine that bill. But right now, things can still change. To stop fighting for that change, to me, is patently ridiculous.

Any positive change from here on out is going to be because we keep pushing from the left not because we say, "Good enough. Let’s pass it."

Hear, hear. I'ma call Ellison and McCullom and tell them to stand up for this. Ellison in particular should.

My amazing new avatar

This came from the Mariowiki, where it's someone's user ID.Here's the link.

Robocop's Vocals, Super Pain Ray, Pittsburgh G-20

This is fascinating - the robocop vocals. And the tweetling - is this going to be the audiotrack of the suppression of people's movements?

About the radicalizing right wing

Pandagon? Rocks when it's rocking like nothing. Great writing there. This one - Amanda Marcotte gets this shit backwards.

Here's a big clip. Go read the whole thing

The widespread unwillingness, particularly in the mainstream media, to accept that anti-choicers are rather mean-spirited right wing nuts has led to a disturbing unwillingness to label anti-choice terrorism as “terrorism”. It seems there’s a sense that the obsessiveness of anti-choicers should work to contain their anger and violence, so they only aim at sexually active women and those who provide them medical care---which shows how much our society still devalues women, but that’s a topic for another post. But right wing paranoias are rarely self-contained. People who come in because they’re obsessed with female sexuality are open to being paranoid about Islam, and people who turned into right wing nuts after 9/11 often find themselves slipping into anger over women’s rights, anger they may not have felt before.

There was a lot of hubbub over this guy who brought a ginormous gun to an Obama event, and now it turns out that he’s a member of this church that Pam’s been covering, a church where the pastor is an over-the-top homophobe who has preached that Obama should die. What I want to point out is that the violent rhetoric that drove this man to actually threaten the President with his big gun is very specifically anti-choice rhetoric:

.....you’re going to tell me that I’m supposed to pray for the socialist devil, murderer, infanticide, who wants to see young children and he wants to see babies killed through abortion and partial-birth abortion and all these different things—you’re gonna tell me I’m supposed to pray for God to give him a good lunch tomorrow while he’s in Phoenix, Arizona?

Nope. I’m not gonna pray for his good. I’m going to pray that he dies and goes to hell.

The New Mob Order

After Bill Clinton was re-elected, American conservatives launched the impeachment campaign that tied up government for most of his second term. Now, with the town-hall meeting disruptions and campaigns like the 'birthers', American conservatives are trying to tie up Obama by destabilizing the rule of law.

Why is reining in bad practices of the insurance industry and cutting their profit margins for the purpose of public health something that triggers a neo-fascist conservative movement? Well, for no good reason at all.

As Hunter at Kos pointed out (commenting on a Ta-Nehisi Coates story)

Now, how it is that a healthcare reform debate has managed to raise a viciously angry, assertively fact-hostile and debate-hostile political climate that brings back national memories of American desegregation seems outright baffling. Except that many of the paranoid healthcare protestors are "teabaggers" as well, and many of those "teabaggers" are "birthers" besides, and the whole parcel is, from polling, clearly a fringe movement based most substantially in the southern states, the only remaining stronghold of the party that contains them. And -- there is no way around it -- America has just now elected the first black president.

The biggest log on the fire, and you can see it so clearly in the birthers - and my blog continues to get hits because I used these words in the title - is we elected a nigger president. (And about fucking time, if you ask me.) You see, the birthers have the idea that if they could only look at Obama's real birth certificate, they would discover that he's ineligible to hold the office of President on account of him being Black, and therefore only 3/5ths of a citizen. But not only is Obama a Negro, he's also smart, savvy, and about to make a level attempt to reign in the excesses of US Capitalism.

Which is the second log on the fire, which we see in the accusations of socialism. They're perfectly right, as are the birthers - Barack Obama's economic policies would, if carried out, somewhat diminish the vicious savaging of our throats (and the planet) by the piranha capitalists that have had the upper hand since Reagan. Since socialism is really defined as "Whatever the Rich Don't Want" I guess that setting up a low-overhead Muni Insurance shop is the equivalent of nationalizing pro sports.

So the racists and the rich get together and form an alliance, and the level of right-wing violence goes up, and the right-wing media aids and abets it, and they try to pre-empt us calling them fascists by calling US fascists.

I went back into the back catalog here because I was sure I'd written about this before. I went and found this, written on November 11 of last year, one week after the election. Fascism, Palin, and Right-Wing Paramilitaries: a glimpse of the near future. The basic thrust was that since they've lost control of the Presidency and the House and Senate, the conservatives will turn to extra-legal violence to gum things up.

Not to long ago, one of the fellows who would have been at one of these townhalls took himself out of the running. Jim Adkisson went out and shot up a Unitarian church in Tennessee. When these folks in the townhalls just claim to be using their freedom of speech, while they prevent the democratic process from happening, think about this man's manifesto. This is from his 'suicide note'

Know This If Nothing Else

I: This was a hate crime
I hate the damn left-wing liberals. There is a vast left-wing conspiracy in this country and these liberals are working together to attack every decent and honorable institution in the nation, trying to turn this country into a communist state. Shame on them.

II This was a Political Protest
I'm protesting the liberal Supreme Court Justices for give the terrorists at GITMO constitutional rights. I'm protesting the major news outlets, ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, PBS for being the propaganda wing of the Democrat Party. It's criminal what they're getting away with. They're traitors. They must be stopped. I'm protesting the DNC running such a radical leftist candidate. Osama Hussein OBama, yo mama. No experience, no brains, a joke. Dangerous to America. Hell, he looks like Curious George!

III This was as Symbolic Killing:
Who I wanted to kill was every Democrat in the Senate, and house, the 100 people in Bernard Goldberg's book. I'd like to kill everyone in the Mainstream Media. But I knew these people were inaccessible to me. I couldn't get to the generals and high ranking officers of the Marxist movement so I went after the foot soldiers, the chickenshit liberals that vote in these traitorous people. Some one had to get the ball rolling, I volunteered. I hope others do the same. It’s the only way we can rid America of this cancer, this pestilence!

Well, Jim, looks like you might have gotten that ball rolling.