I was sitting in my favorite neighborhood bar the other night. Nearly every one in New Orleans does that. It’s a bit like your front room but with a few more people and a better liquor selection. Two long time friends were there. One owns the bar and the other is a lawyer and we have always agreed on nearly everything. We all supported Hillary in the primary. After a few minutes, it became obvious that I was the only hold out.
I mean it was really late. I had had quite a few glasses of wine. I knew they’d been drinking all day at the festival in the quarter. I don’t even remember how the subject came up actually. But I said it. I will not vote for Obama under ANY circumstance. You’d have thought some drug had been droppped into their drinks. I was suddenly confronted by the same nasty hate filled spews I’ve been putting up with for months now out here in blog land. At first I thought I could shake them off with, yeah, right Republicans will set up housekeeping in my uterus and my grandchildren will be dying in iraq 100 years from now. If we just stick a few references to 9-11 in there enough I’d think I’d gotten shoved in a time warp of 4 years ago in a black hole of fear tactics. Except, it wasn’t just all that fear-mongering. It was hateful and mean! Instead of being called a racist, I was asked how my ‘boyfriend’ (who happens to be a black longshoreman) would feel about this. I was called anti Roe v. Wade. I was accused of being a bad buddhist since I was obviously now a war-monger. I was double-teamed until I was called out on saying iran instead of iraq once and then you’d have thought I’d been caught skinning neighborhood cats alive for all the ruckus that created.
I could only take so much of that. I mention all the gaffes and flip-flops I catalogue here. I mentioned my favorite Obama sound bite about how we can’t have a timetable for Iraq and we should look at what it takes to be successful from April 2005. (See the youtube clip on the gaffe page because his website says he supported a time table in 2005.) Of course I got back THE story about sniper fire and she VOTED for THE war! All the things that I’m more than used to by now. I can list a dozen of his things to her one and it still doesn’t sink in, once you’ve been lOBAtaMAized. I finished the wine, leashed up my poor dog Karma, who by now was even the subject of wrath and simply walked out the door. But not before I unleashed my parting shot:
“Just THINK!” I said. “You thought I’d just go along and not question anything. Well, if you were wrong about me, how many more do you think you’re wrong about, because let me tell you, there are a lot of us out there.”
And the moral to this story is there are a lot of us out there. Even if some of your friends have gotten lOBAtaMAys, you can find a lot of support on the web. You can avoid all that ‘prepare to be assimilated’ Oborg stuff. Thankfully, Karma has Blue and I have all my friends at Bitterpoliticz, the Confluence, and No Quarter and … well. Just check the blog list right there on the right>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
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I wish we could all agree on certain rules in politics. They could operate much the same way the Queensbury Rules do in boxing. The seminal rule would be no hitting below the belt. It’s basically a way to say, win with fair play and by solid punches to your opponent.
One thing I would like to put forward as below the belt is ranting on candidate military records. This is especially true when the military ends those records with served honorably. Many good democrat vets were criticized by the Republican hate machine for honorable military service. John Kerry, John Murtha and Max Cleland all were treated unfairly by the bloviators in the right wing echo chamber. This is why it suprises me that the HuffPoop would allow the same treatment of John McCain.
Jeffery Klein blogs today:
“McCain apparently was not surprised when his Vietnamese captors went relatively easy on him compared to his fellow POWs.”
You would think that progressives would hold to some kind of principled standard where we realize it’s the apex of hypocrisy to do the same thing to others that we hated done to us and ours.
Now, I don’t think Dubya’s national guard record was quite in the same vein. He did receive special treatment during a draft time and there are questions if he even showed up for duty eventually. John McCain, however many planes he crashed, showed up for duty. I will never ever pretend that I could understand, criticize or hyperbloviate over time spent in Vietnam let alone time spent in a prison camp. It was all honorable service to me. I find plenty of his votes objectionable and if I criticize him, I will focus on that.
The second area which we could argue the use of some kind of Queensbury rule is on first ladies. Nancy Reagan, Hillary Clinton, and Laura Bush have all been swiftboated in their own way. Things that potential and sitting first ladies say as public figures are okay to criticize. Michelle Obama’s statement about the first time in her adult life she is really proud of her country is fair game. However, I don’t want to see another strong career woman swiftboated just based on the fact she’s a strong, black, intelligent, outspoken woman.
Again, Republicans, remember that Nancy Reagan was treated harshly. Hillary endured endless critiques of her hair, her outfits, her cookie recipes, etc. Cindy McCain is receiving similary treatment. So democrats, what Cindy McCain wears and does with the permission of her Dermatologist should be kept on pages concerning beauty tips. For political bashing, can we just stick to the content of their speeches please?
Here’s a youtube that I think we can talk about under Queensbury rules. Michelle made an outrageous statement. Criticize away! But please leave the rants about her hair, her dress, and those other sexist or racist statements back in the bathrooms of middle school where teachers can punish the stupid!
Michelle’s Hillary jab: Inexcusable and Low
This is all I’m asking of fellow bloviators, can we agree on something akin to the Queensbury rules?
Now shake hands and come out fighting!
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It’s not about towing the party line, Taylor. It’s about principles; democratic principles. Yes, yes, we know the Obamamites were threatening to take away your credentials to the DNC convention because you were too cozy with HIllary supporters. Yes, we know Hillary now ‘supports’ Obama, as she was told to do.
Some of us, however, have principles. Some of us vote not for the party label and not even for a single issue if there are bigger principles at stake –like democracy, justice, truth, and the American Way.
The American way is winning an election by getting the most votes when every voter counts as a voter. Justice is NOT taking your name off a ballot then having a group of party insiders give you pledged delegates from that state and taking away votes cast to another candidate for rhetorical voters. Truth is NOT going on and on and on about how unfit and unqualified one candidate is one minute, then switching to a completely different line seconds after a speech.
Democracy is NOT a decision made by party insiders. Democracy is election not selection.
There are some principles worth standing up for and worth doing things that may not be in your individual interest if it is in the interest of the country you love. For me, it’s not voting for Obama under ANY circumstances because of his character, his poor judgement, his continual storytelling, his lack of achievements, and the folks he chooses as counsel. Clear enough? I’m not selling my country out so I can attend the DNC convention or get an abortion in Louisiana instead of having to fly to New York City. No amount of gold can get me to sell out my principles. But then Taylor, I have them. I’m not sure you do.
PUMA!
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I think that there’s going to be a lot of senior theses and doctoral dissertations coming out of journalism departments on the media coverage of this primary (sic) season. I think it was about as bad as the lead up to the Gulf War in which the MSM wanted so badly to get their Walter Cronkite in the trenches badge they just didn’t vet anything. We all know how costly and unpopular that debacle has become. We also are beginning to see some soul searching going on in some journalism classrooms.
One of the first things we teach in microeconomics classes is the dysfunctional markets created by oligopolies and monopolies. They lead to severe inefficiencies in the market and can create extraordinary profits for the owners of businesses or factors in those markets. That is usually why we go after them with anti-trust legislation and regulation. Even the famed free marketeer, Adam Smith discussed their dangers. They run up prices, restrict quantities, practice price discrimination, and take advantage of information asymmetries.
The creation of information asymmetries in a market for information is not only a problem in an economy, it is a weapon of mass destruction in a democracy. Concentration of media in a few big players is not only wrong, it is dangerous and threatens the very principles we cling to as Americans.
We were warned, remember … rosebud? Concentration in any market limits information and hurts those who demand the service. First, it makes information and the product costly. If the producers of this product can practice price discrimination, they can offer various products and various prices. In other words, the rich and educated can find other sources of information, the masses are stuck with CNN, FOX news, and USA today. Additionally, when rivalry is intense, the agents frequently spend more time focused on their rivals than on their consumers. I believe this is most evident among the cable news stations who seemed to have identified their niche, then they just spin whatever else the other channel says to appeal to their clientele. When they find a channel gets big ratings doing the latest missing blonde, the latest OJ adventure, or beating up on Hillary Clinton, they just go with it because their business is not about the customer, it’s about beating the rival.
I’m not a professional journalist. I took journalism in high school and wrote on the school newspaper. One year, I was fortunate enough to have some of that experience with Kurt Anderson because he and I attended the same high school. However, that’s the extent of my journalism resume. I am a trained economist and that is now what I teach. I can’t look at media concentration, with authority, from any other position. I can tell you all that economic theory says concentration in markets leads to highly inefficient outcomes. In economics, that’s as bad as it gets. As a U.S. citizen, I aver that it’s as bad as it gets for a country based on the principle of a free, plentiful, and active press.
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If Paul Krugman says there was sexism in this campaign, it has to be true! I have to put you on notice. I let folks criticize Hillary and even me, as long as it’s not nasty. Criticisms of my hero Paul Krugman are not allowed on my blog. So with that, here we go. A link to his blog is included. Praise him profusely!
June 13, 2008, 9:08 am
Sexism? Who, us?
By Paul Krugman
No sexism here
The 2008 campaign has been a very disillusioning experience for a lot of people. You can make a very good case that Barack Obama was the right person for the Democrats to nominate, and Hillary Clinton the wrong choice. But the way we got there was terrible. The raw sexism, in all too many cases coming from alleged progressives — see above — was part of it. So, too, was the inability of many alleged progressives to see that the news media created the narrative of Hillary Clinton as race-baiter in much the same way that, 8 years ago, they created the narrative of Al Gore as congenital liar — by assembling a montage of quotes taken out of context and willfully misinterpreted.
This whole story shouldn’t affect peoples’ votes in the general election: there are huge substantive issues at stake, and a wide difference between the candidates on those issues. So this is no time for a protest vote. But 2008 was definitely the year in which the progressive movement lost a lot of its innocence.
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The Sky Dancing banner headline uses a snippet from a work by artist Tashi Mannox called 'Rainbow Study'. The work is described as a" study of typical Tibetan rainbow clouds, that feature in Thanka painting, temple decoration and silk brocades". dakinikat was immediately drawn to the image when trying to find stylized Tibetan Clouds to represent Sky Dancing. It is probably because Tashi's practice is similar to her own. His updated take on the clouds that fill the collection of traditional thankas is quite special.
You can find his work at his website by clicking on his logo below. He is also a calligraphy artist that uses important vajrayana syllables. We encourage you to visit his on line studio.
No sexism here
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