Fighting a rear-guard action to protect the English language

NEW ARRIVALS

  JUST IN 

Sign in an overpriced casual men's 

store on Newbury Street in Boston

Thanks for the clarification.  We should never have known.

.....

You will almost certainly read or hear that Japan is marking the one-month anniversary since the country was devastated by the earthquake and tsunami.  Even the Voice of America used that locution.

Well, no, the Japanese aren't.  There's no such thing as an anniversary for a period of less than a year.  "Anniversary" comes from annus, Latin for year, and versus, which did not mean "against" as it does now, but "turning."  (There's no 18-month anniversary, either.)

Oh, and 12 months from an event is not the one-year anniversary--a clumsy and ugly phrase that is an outgrowth of the mis-use of anniversary.  It's the first anniversary.  

Read this

John Thompson, the unjustly and illegally convicted man whose $14 million verdict against the New Orleans DA was stolen from him by the reactionaries on the Supreme Court a couple of weeks ago, had an op-ed in yesterday's Times.  He destroys the decision, not in legal but in human terms.  And those are the terms that matter, because in the end the law deals not in abstract principles, but in real life.

Read his article.  Read it even if you have to sign up and pay to get the Times on line.  (As ab aside, why shouldn't we on-line users be prepared to pay the cost of bringing us the news?)

Bad policy, bad politics

The deal that congressional leaders and the White House signed off on last night is bad policy, because the budget cuts on which Democrats caved will hamper economic recovery and hurt the very people that government is supposed to help.

It is bad politics for Democrats, because having signed on they cannot criticize Rebuplicans for hampering recovery, and cannot blame Rebuplicans for reviving the shades of Herbert Hoover.  

And the Rebuplicans can go on, virtually unfettered, with their war on working- and middle-class Americans, women and anyone else who is not in their base.  

Once again, Democrats--including President Obama--have failed to draw a line in the sand.  

The bullies won.  Again.

The Best

The best--I mean it, the best--commentary I have seen on the Rebuplican program and what Americans really think of it appears in, of all places, something called the Ironton Tribune.  Ironton seems to be in southern Ohio.  (There's also one in South Dakota, I think.)

Read it and see what you think.  If you scroll down through the comments, you'll see that I could  not resist.  And you'll see that I was the only one of those commenting who agreed with the writer.

Bad sign

I just sent an email to the White House, telling the President to show a little backbone and stand up for the people who elected him.  But when I went to the White House site, I found that when entering the topic of my message, there was no option for "budget."

HAVE THEY TAKEN LEAVE OF THEIR SENSES?

Or only their backbones?  Just heard Larry O'Donnell say that negotiators--presumably including Democrats in the Senate, and the White House--are now discussing budget cuts of 35 to 39 billion dollars to avoid a government shut down.

It's hard to agree with the Tea Party demagogues, but Shut It Down.  Make the case--it shouldn't be that hard, because it's true--that Rebuplican intransigence, duplicity and selfishness are responsible.  Put it to them.  

If we Democrats don't have the guts to stand up for those who are forced to depend on government for the essentials of of daily life, we don't deserve to govern.

What a disgrace.

A different angle

Most of the attention given to Rep. Paul Ryan's (R, WI) budget proposal has been focused on his plan to turn Medicare into yet another subsidy for health insurers.  (Why are Rebuplicans so sure that Americans like health insurers more than gummint bureaucrats?  Seems to me that if there is one group below bureaucrats in the popularity scale, it's health-insurance people.)

I'd like to focus on another aspect of the proposal:  Ryan wants to reduce the top corporate and personal income tax rates to 25%.  That's because, as we all know, the rich and powerful don't get enough reward for what they do.  Remember, these are The Folks Who Brought You the Great Recession.

What's really interesting is that Ryan and his ilk reason that slashing the top rates will encourage economic activity and so there will be no net loss of tax revenue (although even more of it will come from people at the bottom end of the income curve).  In fact, they argue that net tax revenues will actually increase.

Think of the implications:  Slash the top tax rate to zero and what would we have?  So much tax revenue that we'd be able to pay for every imaginable government program (well, at least for huge DOD cost overruns, subsidies for corporate farmers and other assorted boondoggles).  Indeed, the government would be taking in so much money that we'd have to RAISE taxes to CUT government revenues, before government has ALL the money!

As you no doubt recall (those of you over 30 anyway), this is the same crock that the supply-siders sold in the 1980's.  It was discredited then and it's still dreck.  Yet the Republicans, shameless as ever, go on peddling it.  Clearly, we need not only to slay this idea--and all of the junk that the Rebuplicans are trying to put over on us--but to drive a huge wooden stake through its heart.

Now, what are we going to have to do to get what passes for mainstream media to see this?

Is this the message she wants to be sending?

Bristol Palin earned more than $260,000 for warning about the dangers of teen pregnancy in 2009.  

Hmm.  What do you think she would have made if she hadn't been pregnant as a teen?

It's war

"Don't fire unless fired upon, but if they mean to have a war, let it begin here."

                                                                                                    
                                                                                                     Col. John Parker   

                                                                                                     Lexington Green

                                                                                                     April 19, 1775

In case you haven't noticed, the Right has declared war on the rest of us.

Last week, an assistant district attorney in Indiana had to resign after it came out that he had sent emails to Gov. Scott Walker (R.WI) suggesting that an agent provocateur be employed to carry out a mock attack on the governor as a means of discrediting union supporters.  He was the second prosecutor from the Hoosier State to be forced out over the tumult in Wisconsin; earlier, another assistant district attorney resigned after we learned that he had suggested that the protesters in Madison be met with "live ammunition."

These images of violence are not isolated.  Remember Sharron ("Obtuse") Angle suggesting "Second Amendment remedies" during last year's campaign?  

Half-serious (?) suggestions for violence are a small and--so far--minor part of the assault on those who do not share the agenda of the hard Right and their allies (implausibly, the banks, Wall Street, most large corporations).  There is, as you have heard at great length, the attack on labor rights being waged in such at first blush unlikely venues as Wisconsin, Michigan and Ohio.  The war on labor and working people is not an isolated phenomenon.


There is a bill in the US House that would make it impossible for unions to win representation elections; the White House has threatened a veto, a very unusual move for this administration.  


While Tea Party extremists in Congress say they will accept nothing less than a $61 billion slash at the parts of the budget that aid those who cannot help themselves, investments for the future and other worthwhile objects, Democrats are touting a "breakthrough" to avoid a government shutdown that will involve a whack of $30 billion.  


The best description of the effect of Rebuplican extremism that I have seen came from, of all people, the food writer Mark Bittman.  In an op-ed piece in The Times, Bittman notes that "The budget proposes cuts in the WIC program (which supports women, infants and children), in international food and health aid (18 million people would be immediately cut off from a much-needed food stream, and 4 million would lose access to malaria medicine) and in programs that aid farmers in underdeveloped countries. Food stamps are also being attacked, in the twisted 'Welfare Reform 2011' bill."  He goes on to state the simple truth:

These supposedly deficit-reducing cuts — they’d barely make a dent — will quite literally cause more people to starve to death, go to bed hungry or live more miserably than are doing so now. 

That is what we have come to.


The Right's war is total.  It ranges from sanctifying the rights of wealth to destroying women's privacy in the quest to outlaw abortion.  While we may chortle over the silliness of Newt Gingrich's contortions over Libya, they are symptoms of the single-minded aim of those on the Right not simply to overawe and defeat their opponents in elections, but to crush them.  When Scott Walker and his cronies--allegedly heirs of the law-and-order Rebuplicans of the 1960's and 1970's--threaten to ignore a court order holding up their cherished union-busting law, they make it clear that the ends are all, and that means have become meaningless.


Yes, friends, it's war.


What will we do now?  Will we continue to be nice guys?  Will we continue to assume that those on the other side of the divide (it's much more than an aisle) are reasonable people?  Or will we remember Col. Parker and tell the Right that if it wants a war, it will have one?

Doesn't look good

Video of what appears to be a low-level flyover of the stricken nuclear plan in Japan.  The damage is much more widespread and obvious than the photos we've been seeing, probably file photos and videos.

Dumb questions department

Rep. Louie Gohmert (R. TX), a man who is a walking argument for an IQ test for members of Congress, asked FBI director Robert Mueller, "How is your outreach going with Baptists or Catholics?"  Gohmert was trying to question the FBI's overtures to American Muslims, and by implication associate Muslims with violence, disloyalty, whatever.  Clever guy.

Unfortunately, Mueller blew the opportunity, replying lamely that the FBI's citizens academies involve "individuals  from a wide segment" of local communities.

What he should have said was, "Congressmen, we don't need outreach programs to those communities, because they haven't been stigmatized by bigots like you and your political allies."

No flies on us

The world dithers while Muammar Khadaffi batters the Libyan people.  It's always easy to find reasons to do nothing.  (My favorite is the widely-heard observation that no-fly zones in Iraq and Yugoslavia were followed by more military action.  If that sounds like an attractive piece of reasoning, look up post hoc ergo propter hoc in your dictionary.)

Meanwhile the ever-shifting eye of the MSM has shifted to Japan.

But think of it this way:  If Khadaffi gets his way, more people will die in the Libyan revolt (in a nation of only six or six and one-half million) than in Japan from the earthquake and tsunami.  And probably the nuclear catastrophe, too.  

The difference is, we can do a lot to prevent slaughter in Libya.

NPR under attack

I see that the Rebuplicans in the House are going to vote on denying federal funds to NPR (and, I assume) CPB tomorrow.  If they succeed in this, and in getting the Senate to go along, we leftists will just have go get together and make up the difference.  Then we can turn NPR into the kind of liberal news and cultural outlet that the wingnuts have ways thought it is.

Echoes

The House Homeland Security Committee, chaired by Rep. Peter King (R, Lon Guyland), began its hearings into the purported radicalization of American Muslims.  TONE is mightily tempted to dilate at length on the absence of hearings on the radicalization of the Rebuplican Party, but it seems more appropriate to remember the words of Joseph Welch to Joseph McCarthy at a similar juncture in our history:

Have you no sense of decency, sir?  At long last, have  you left no sense of decency?

That sound you heard from Madison last night

was the door closing on Rebuplican hopes to recapture the White House next year.  (The sound was not too loud, because the GOPhers' chances were already slim to the vanishing point.)

I think it's safe to say that Americans don't like bullies.  And if there were any doubt to fair-minded people--who still hold the balance in this country--the Rebuplican steamroller of workers' rights in the Badger State put an end to them.  Not to mention any question about the party's respect for truth.  As a Wisconsinite told talkingpointsmemo:  

It's not just the budget bill needs a quorum -- the big issue is that *any* bill with fiscal implications is supposed to have a quorum in the Wisconsin state Senate. So there are two choices here:

1. Collective bargaining has fiscal implications, and so the bill will be blocked in the courts and ruled unconstitutional.

2. Collective bargaining DOES NOT have direct fiscal implications, and Gov. Walker has been lying this entire time by making the case that it's fiscally necessary.

So either the state R's just passed an illegal bill, or Walker has been lying this entire time and really is just interested in union-busting.

For another example of the Rebuplican respect for truth, see todays NYT.


The trouble with lies is that they catch up with you.  That's why David Mamet has one of his characters say to another in Glengarry Glenross:  "Always tell the truth--it's the easiest thing to remember."

Every day, more Americans come to realize that the GOP stands for three things:  1) Money; 2) Power; and 3) The power of money.

Sometimes there is progress

Illinois Governor Pat Quinn has signed a bill--passed by both houses of the legislature--abolishing capital punishment.  He has also commuted the sentences of 15 men on death row.  This is a major step forward--a major state abolishing the death penalty through legislative, not court action.  

Somebodies being dumb

Mitt Romney is going around the country trying to run away from his past.  Specifically, from his history as governor of Massachusetts.  More specifically, from the healthcare reform that he sponsored, which was one of the progenitors of the national reform that Congress passed in 2009.  


For a smart guy, the Mittster is being remarkably dumb.  The more he tries to avoid his history, the more his opponents will tag him with it; he'll have to spend more time defending himself than he would if he were straightforward.  (Those who followed Mitt's campaign in 2008 will recall that that was a feature of his effort then.  He has not learned from his history.)


Mitt would be smarter to take the opposite tack.  He should say, "The Massachusetts healthcare reform package was imperfect.  So is Obamacare [let him use the word; to digress, I think Democrats should take the name on as a badge of honor].  But it has many good features.  In today's world, everyone needs healthcare, and insurance is the way we pay for it.  No one except an insurance executive wants people to be denied coverage because of a pre-existing condition.   No one wants a cancer patient to be told that he can't get more treatment, because his insurance has a limit and that limit has been reached.  So, let's reform Obamacare, not repeal it.  And, you know, if you look at my home state of Massachusetts, almost everyone does have health insurance, the state has a lower unemployment rate than most, it did not suffer as much from the recession and it is coming out of the recession better than other comparable states.  The work we did in Massachusetts had a lot to do with that."


Mitt won't say that, of course.  He doesn't have the guts to go against the Rebuplican tide.  And he's probably right that the message I have outlined will not get him the nomination.  But the one he is trying to peddle won't, either, and if by some mischance he is nominated, he'll go down to ignominious defeat against President Obama.  


Oh, and the Rebuplicans are being dumb in their refusal to recognize the need for real reform of the nation's healthcare system.  As in their refusal to recognize reality in so many other forms.  Don't be misled by the mid-term elections:  Americans are waking up to the intellectual bankruptcy of what used to be the Grand Old Party.

A new motto for the GOP

IGNORANT AND PROUD OF IT!

(See following post for one example.)

Is this the same guy?

As I recall from 2008, Mike Huckabee was a very conservative but decent guy, characterized by good humor and a tolerant attitude. He sure has changed. I'd guess that the presidential bug has really dug deep in him, but maybe this is what comes from too much time hanging around the toxic precincts of Fix Schmooze.

You probably saw this story: Huckabee was asked by a "conservative radio host," Steve Malzberg, about President Obama's background. (Republicans have not paid so much attention to a president's upbringing since Abe Lincoln, "the Railsplitter.") Malzberg, whose grasp of facts is at best shaky, said, " How come we don’t have a health record, we don’t have a college record, we don’t have a birth certificate — why, Mr. Obama, did you spend millions of dollars in courts all over this country to defend against having to present a birth certificate?"

None of those assertions is true, but Huckabee didn't bother to correct his host, or to enhance the radio audience's understanding. Instead he wandered off: “I would love to know more. What I know is troubling enough," he began. Then he said, “If you think about it, his perspective as growing up in Kenya with a Kenyan father and grandfather, their view of the Mau Mau Revolution in Kenya is very different than ours because he probably grew up hearing that the British were a bunch of imperialists who persecuted his grandfather.”

That statement, too, is devoid of facts. Mr. Obama did not grow up in Kenya; he did not set foot in that country until he was 26, and then on a short visit. He did not grow up with his father, whom he met only twice after the man left the President's mother when Mr. Obama was a baby. Clearly, he did not hear tales of the Mau Mau at his father's or grandfather's knees.

One of the things notable about this story is Huckabee's amazing ignorance of American history; I mean the guy is a conservative who achieved high office and is seeking an even higher office. But the former governor seems to think there is something essentially different about stories of British imperialists persecuting freedom-loving fathers and grandfathers in Africa from the stories we hear as children, about British imperialists persecuting our forefathers. (Coincidentally, today is the anniversary of the Boston Massacre.)

When it was pointed out that Mr. Huckabee had engaged in fiction, his spokesman, Hogan Gidley, the executive director of the former governor's PAC, said that Huckabee "simply misspoke," and that “he meant to say the president grew up in Indonesia."

Now, that makes sense. It's so easy to confuse a nation in Africa characterized by high plains, large mountains and people with a pastoral background with one strung through Asia on more than 1,000 islands. And who of us has not mistaken the Serengeti Plain for Borneo? Or British overlords with the Dutch?

What really gets to me is the utter contempt for the American people that Huckabee shows. "Simply misspoke?" Huh? At least he could have asserted that he spoke in ignorance--although that is highly unlikely as well; too much thought must have gone into the comment about Kenya and the Mau Mau movement (the leader of which, Jomo Kenyatta, became the first president of an independent Kenya). The fact is that Mr. Huckabee lied (that is, he told a knowing and intentional untruth), and that he tried to cover it up with another lie.

Sadly for the party that gave us Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt and Eisenhower, this incident is now par for the course for today's Rebuplicans. They have become the Party of Ignorance.

Anniversary

Abraham Lincoln was inaugurated as President (for the first time), 150 years ago today.

FDR was inaugurated for the first time 78 years ago today.*

They still live in our hearts.

*The date of inauguration was changed to January 20th during FDR's first term.