Now enter the world of quantum conservatism, where commonsense [...]]]> Quantum mechanics suggests that as you bore down deeper into matter, Newton’s laws break down. You enter a quirky, alternate universe of gluons and quarks, of probabilities and spin, and particles with “flavors” like charm and strangeness where the rules governing ordinary reality no longer apply.

Now enter the world of quantum conservatism, where commonsense rules of logic and evidence do not apply. It is a world of belief, not fact, where up is down, black is white, in is out, wrong is right.

To you and me, a cat locked in a box might be dead or alive. But quantum conservatism finds it easy to argue that Schrödinger’s Cat is both alive and dead … at the same time. For example, quantum conservatism believes government never created a job … and has too many people on its payroll. Quantum conservatism believes in freedom of religion, and that Muslims shouldn’t be able to put up mosques wherever they want to.

Quantum conservatism argues that we should follow the clear language of the Constitution … and that, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States,” are not citizens under the 14th Amendment when those persons are born to undocumented immigrants. Quantum conservatism complains that President Obama hasn’t done anything to curb entitlement spending, and in the next breath complains that Obama cut Medicare. Quantum conservatism (especially in Arizona) believes any employer should be able to fire a woman who uses contraceptives to prevent pregnancy … as well as to fire her if she actually gets pregnant.

And finally, quantum conservatism believes that Kentucky Fried Chicken is a person – headquartered in Louisville, in a bucket.

And that’s my sermon.
(Cross-posted from Scrutiny Hooligans.)

Friday, a friend put me on to a musical bit that I know by heart, but he gave me a fresh perspective on it. I had never seen it in a modern political context, in a cable news/talk [...]]]>

The Music Man "Ya Got Trouble"

Friday, a friend put me on to a musical bit that I know by heart, but he gave me a fresh perspective on it. I had never seen it in a modern political context, in a cable news/talk radio context.

In one, short speech — building intensity as he goes — Professor Harold Hill gathers a crowd of onlookers and rattles off a litany of big city sins “the right kinda parents” worry about corrupting their children and their small town: sloth, drinking, gambling, being “stuck-up,” smoking, loose morals, and indecent pop culture. In a fevered crescendo, Hill warns parents of “shameless music • That’ll grab your son, your daughter • With the arms of a jungle animal instink!”

Mass-staria!

Harold is selling something. And in four minutes he creates a market for it out of thin air — among people he calls “as green as the money.” Moments earlier…

HAROLD HILL: Now, Marce, I need some ideas if I’m gonna get your town out of the serious trouble it’s in.

MARCELLUS: River City ain’t in any trouble.

HILL: We’re going to have to create some.

Hill presses every button the people of River City, Iowa have to press, plus appeals to patriotism and God to create a city-wide moral crisis that four minutes earlier the townspeople didn’t know they had. Sound familiar?

Now strike pool . Insert contraception , voter fraud , death panels , or a half dozen other right-wing bogey men and the grifter’s pitch works the same. Today, Harold Hill would be working for Fox News or Americans for Prosperity. He’d be running American Crossroads, and making a lot more money.

Eat your heart out, Karl Rove. Watch the video here. Lyrics here.

(Cross-posted from Scrutiny Hooligans.)

President Richard Nixon once observed, “Flexibility is the first principle of politics.” But that brings up [...]]]>

No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon. – Matthew 6:24

President Richard Nixon once observed, “Flexibility is the first principle of politics.” But that brings up something I notice about some right-wing antagonists: how lithe they are in debate.

It is behavior progressive talk show hosts know well, particularly when it comes to hot-button social issues. Right-wing callers dial in hoping to score a few on-air points against the liberal. If one tack isn’t working, they quickly pivot and launch into another argument they hope will get more traction – the first was disposable. And then another, almost as if they are getting paid by the talking point. These exercises are not about the truth, or even about being right. This is about winning.

There is something else that enhances their flexibility: the unholy marriage of Christianity, libertarianism and Austrian economics. What the latter two have to do with Jesus is beyond me, but the order of argument depends on the particular bent of the person doing the arguing. It goes something like this:

When it is convenient to argue from Christian morality, they argue morality. If that isn’t scoring points, they change the subject and argue personal freedom. And if that isn’t getting traction, they switch to free-market economics. And if that isn’t working, it is back to morality, or else cry socialism. This is the rock-paper-scissors of right-wing rhetoric.

I got into an online debate with a tea party supporter over the proposed Arizona law allowing employers with moral objections to opt out of offering employee insurance plans that include contraception coverage. I asked, as an employer, how it is any of my business how employees spend the compensation they’ve earned and, in a contractual arrangement, I agreed to pay? Well, first it was about freedom, then it was about morality (and hair-splitting about whether employer or employee buys coverage with the employee’s earnings), then it was about how the government offering employer tax benefits distorts the free market.

For all the moral posturing, why is it that economics dominates right-wing debates about values?

As a businessman, I am also free today not to have any employees or to offer any benefits besides cash if my morality is that big an issue. Just because there is a tax advantage doesn’t mean the government is holding a gun to my head to take it. If I have moral qualms and will lose sleep over it, I am free to drop the health benefit altogether – and if I am a free market supplicant, let the free market have its ever-lovin’ undistorted way with me. But by my choices people will know which I value more, my morals or my money.

That sort of world exists, you know. The Amish eschew electricity and automobiles out of their sense of morality. They freely choose to limit interactions with the rest of society and with the government, and that’s just fine by them. And they freely accept the consequences for their lifestyle and their bottom line. They don’t need to spout off about their values on TV and talk radio because they are too busy living them and letting the “English” live theirs. They refuse to compromise their beliefs to improve their social status, or to gain political power, or to impose their views on others, or to build their portfolios and boost the bottom line. Because their beliefs are their bottom line.

So, you want a society as free as possible from government interference – a real one, not a fictional one? (And with less anarchy than Somalia?) Where families are stable, where everybody looks like you and shares your Christian faith, where peer pressure, not law, keeps people in line, and where the government pretty much stays out of your business? Well, there it is, not in some Randian fantasy, but in Lancaster County, PA and Holmes County, Ohio.

Go for it. Show us all what you really value.

And that’s my sermon.

(Cross-posted from Scrutiny Hooligans.)

Socialist is like that. Conservatives started throwing the word around with [...]]]> The late George Carlin had this comedy bit involving a four-letter word starting with S. He marveled at how it was this all-purpose expletive. He provided lots of examples. What fascinated Carlin was how everyone used the S-word figuratively. Almost never literally.

Socialist is like that. Conservatives started throwing the word around with gusto when Barack Obama began running for president. Socialist is the conservative all-purpose epithet beginning with S.

Of course, they never use it literally, either. Most could not define socialism if you put their own guns to their heads. But as an all-purpose slur, precision is not the point. As in, “If I ever get my hands on that socializing, socialistic socialist, I’m gonna shove my socializing boot right up his socialist butt!”

Conservatives complain that, after they worked so hard for so long to turn the word liberal into a four-letter word, a lot of liberals just started calling themselves progressives. But you don’t have to be Lee Atwater to figure that one out. Progressive is just the L-word with a P.

Conservatives used to prefer communist as an epithet. But using it now makes them sound silly, since not even the Chinese are communists any more (and they own stock in corporations that partner with the Chinese), so a lot of conservatives just started using socialist. Makes it sound like they know a secret, like they got their inside information by waterboarding Boris Badenov.

The great thing about socialist is -– they have workshops on this stuff at CPAC, don’t they? –- it’s a four-letter word you can get away with saying out loud on radio and television. (See, that’s because socialist has eight letters — heh-heh, as President George W. Bush might say.)

Lately, they have traded their dog whistles for bullhorns. Clowns in powdered wigs may think saying “knickers” with a sly wink is high comedy at CPAC: “What, ‘knickers’? I can say knickers because I wear knickers.” Newt Gingrich will call Barack Obama the “food stamp president” and feign offense at the suggestion his phrasing is racist. Not even Fox News would let you on TV again if you used the actual N-word on the air. But you can call the president of the United States a socialist all day and never have to explain what you really mean. Which is good. Because sometimes socialist is just the N-word with an S.

People who deny that are only lying to themselves. Everyone is wise to them except them.

Over at Daily Kos, Zwoof has seen a rash of chain emails about “welfare junkies” who are “drug-fueled slackers.” Obligingly, Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) has introduced the Welfare Reform Act of 2011 to discipline deadbeats on food stamps.

This is old news. It is Ronald Reagan’s “welfare queens” (1976) [...]]]> So much misdirected anger.

Over at Daily Kos, Zwoof has seen a rash of chain emails about “welfare junkies” who are “drug-fueled slackers.” Obligingly, Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) has introduced the Welfare Reform Act of 2011 to discipline deadbeats on food stamps.

This is old news. It is Ronald Reagan’s “welfare queens” (1976) revisited. It is the Lee Atwater/Roger Ailes revolving door, “Willie Horton” campaign ads from 1988. It is the right blaming hurricane victims in New Orleans’ poor Lower Ninth Ward in 2005 for not leaving town in their SUVs and checking into Shreveport or Dallas hotels until Hurricane Katrina blew herself out. It is conservatives blaming the 2008 financial meltdown on the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act. The government, you see, forced private mortgage lenders and Wall Street to fatten themselves on CDOs built from the “liar loans” they invented and sold to shiftless poor people. In the United Kingdom, it is BBC’s 2010 “The Scheme,” a series critics described as “poverty porn,” depicting welfare recipients that London’s tabloid Daily Mail calls “welfare junkies” (Well, what do you know?) and “foul-mouthed, lazy scroungers, cheats, layabouts, drunks, drug addicts” leeching off “the goodwill of taxpayers.”

In 2012, it is Newt Gingrich again calling President Obama “the best food stamp president in American history” at appearances last week in New Hampshire:

“And so I’m prepared if the NAACP invites me, I’ll go to their convention and talk about why the African American community should demand paychecks and not be satisfied with food stamps,” Gingrich said earlier today in Plymouth, N.H.

Echoing Lee Atwater, Gingrich again denied any tinge of racism in his phrasing. “This is not an attack … It’s not negative, it’s a fact.” But Newt knows his Republican base grinds its teeth to nubs over the thought that a lesser someone, somewhere is getting something for nothing from programs that government thugs force god-fearing conservatives to pay for with money they earned with no help from anyone anywhere since being born in little log cabins that they built themselves.

Which brings us to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) program. Food stamps. In 2009, the New York Times reported, “Even in Peoria, Ill. — Everytown, U.S.A. — nearly 40 percent of children receive aid.” In 2009, 94 percent of the program’s budget was spent on benefits. Thirty-two percent of recipients were white, 22 percent were African American, 16 percent Hispanic. Forty-seven percent of recipients were children. Another forty-four percent were nonelderly, working-age adults (ages 18 to 59), and nearly two-thirds of those were women. The rest were 60 years-old or older. SNAP provided food assistance to about 40 million Americans at a cost of $53.6 billion, 1.7 percent of $3.1 trillion in federal expenditures. (FY 2009 budget figures used for consistency among available data sets.)

Just for comparison, the Pentagon had a “base” budget of $515 billion in 2009 to staff and maintain 545,000 facilities at 5,300 sites both in the United States and around the globe (not including tens of billions in GWOT supplementals and other off-budget and “black” budget costs). Thus, it is not easy to determine how much all U.S. security agencies spend on defense annually, nor to separate out how much the Pentagon alone spends just to maintain the offshore portion of our global empire. But drawing on various sources, assumptions, and the fact that one-quarter of U.S. troops are stationed abroad, the Institute for Policy Studies estimated the 2009 costs of our overseas operations (wars included) at $250 billion annually “to maintain troops, equipment, fleets, and bases overseas.”

So, the Pentagon spent almost half of its “base” budget, or (at least) 8 percent of the FY 2009 federal budget to maintain 865 or more military bases scattered among the world’s nearly 200 countries outside the United States. And many of those outposts are in countries most Americans cannot even name or find on a map. Strategic planner Thomas P.M. Barnett (“The Pentagon’s New Map“) calls security America’s greatest export commodity.

Now, if there is something else besides personal weakness conservatives cannot abide, it is deadbeats. So one wonders why they focus so much of their ire on the moral hazard of providing food assistance to American compatriots (mostly children) when they spend five times as much on a wide, multicultural world that sleeps under the very blanket of security they provide, and for which the rest of the world pays nothing.

It’s ironic. The conservative [...]]]> Have you heard about Zombie ACORN? The conservative media is a-twitter with ACORN sightings over a year and a half after the right wing succeeded in killing off the voter-registering, community organizing group. Behind the 99% in the Occupy movement is ACORN, did you hear? They just won’t die.

It’s ironic. The conservative “pimp” with the video camera wore the outrageous outfit, but it’s Zombie ACORN conservatives report seeing everywhere like Elvis. (Elvis isn’t really dead, you know.)

Conservatives must have been the inspiration for the “Halloween” movies. For one, because of what Siskel and Ebert called the Calvinism berserko world view. That is: think about having sex and die. And two, because you can’t kill the Boogie Man.

Half a century after the Red Scare, American conservatives are still looking for Reds under their beds before they crawl beneath their sheets.

Two decades after the Berlin Wall came down and they declared that Saint Ronald of Reagan won the Cold War, conservatives are still fighting it. They’re still looking for commies in the woodpile.

Not even the Chinese are commies anymore. Have you seen Shanghai? They must have cornered the free market in concrete, glass and steel skyscrapers and the cranes to build them. They sure as hell cornered the market in capitalist jobs. And still, conservatives can’t get their heads out of their anti-communism.

They’re always resurrecting dead enemies, and rallying around the flag to fight things like the Boogie Man. Things that aren’t there.

Forty years after the Summer of Love, conservatives are still looking to punch hippies who aren’t there for wearing love beads that aren’t there, and for sticking daisies in gun barrels. Some memories are timeless, I guess.

The Bushies spent upwards of $1 trillion dollars that wasn’t there to look for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq that weren’t there because Saddam Hussein had an al Qaida connection that wasn’t there, in a war that wasn’t there until they invaded.

Now conservative legislators are rewriting election laws all across the country to prevent so-called voter fraud that isn’t there, obstructing Congress and slashing state budgets to ensure jobs aren’t there for millions of Americans, all so they can put a Marxist president who isn’t there out of a job.

The party of ideas that aren’t there would have you believe they are the only people prepared to lead America forward in the 21st century. Fourteen million Americans are out of work, desperate, and looking to their leaders for help. And where is the party of the 1% when the 99% needs them?

They aren’t there.

As I am standing [...]]]> We were sitting in a Waffle House in Staunton, Virginia discussing the state of the nation over breakfast. I had just read an Ed Kilgore column in Salon  about the nationwide Republican war on voting rights, and the conservative debate over whether voting is even a right or not.

As I am standing in line to pay my tab, a African-American man in his forties slides into an occupied booth next to the register and sits opposite an older white man. They share a brief exchange about how his shift went. Two smiling, white waitresses come over to take his order and start a friendly argument over how he likes his toast. He is a regular.

“Toast, not grits?” remarks the older white man.

“It’s Filmore,” smiles one of the waitresses to the cook. “Burn it. He likes it burnt.”

“Dark, not burnt,” Filmore insists.

This is Virginia — the capitol of the Old South. Black man. Restaurant. Sharing a table with a white man. White women competing over who will wait on him.

It occurs to me that the prospect of the very everydayness of such a scene horrified many Virginians and others across America 50 years ago.

Some people need an “other” to fear or they don’t know who they they are themselves. It’s not just generational. It is a personality type. Many of the same types today fear poor people, gays, Muslims and Mexicans.

We are on our way to see the Gettysburg battlefield where two American armies slaughtered each other, where the Army of Northern Virginia lost its war over the right to deny rights to an entire class of “others,” and to hang onto a people’s irrational fear of the future I saw at a northern Virginia Waffle House.