Pre-season Steelers: Well, our third team is better than their third team. The starters and backups for the Steelers and the Arizona Cardinals (who last met in the Super Bowl, which--if you've forgotten--THE STEELERS WON--didn't do much against each other Thursday night. The Steelers highlight was this catch by Limas Sweed, looking good for the first team third receiver. It must be said however that Cardinal coach Ken Whisenhunt has again designed a sweet passing offense for quarterbacks Kurt Warner, Matt Leinart and rookie Tyler Palko that should make some waves in the NFL this year. Only former Steelers backup qb Brian St. Pierre, now with the Cardinals, was ineffective.

Still it was a very good night for the Steelers, as they saw several weaknesses in their world champion team potentially repaired: they got their punter back from injury and he boomed every kick, they may have found a new short yardage back (Isaac Redman) and a speedster to return kicks and catch passes (Mike Wallace) as well as lots of new pop on the defense. Injured backup qb Charlie Batch looked healthy but most of the game was played by second year qb David Dixon who showed poise and skills, and could be a star of the future. With lots of room to improve, the Steelers WON 20-10. Photo: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

The Right To Get Out of a Town Hall Meeting Alive

I lived through the assassinations of the 1960s, barely. I know what gun violence can do to our collective life and to our individual lives, even at a great distance. But we all have seen evidence in just the past week of what one violent person can do with a gun in a crowded space.

So I am utterly astounded at the spectre of people carrying guns to town hall meetings, one outside a meeting with President Obama in New Hampshire, and one actually inside a meeting with a Congressional Rep in Arizona,, where a holstered gun clattered onto the floor. And completely baffled by the apparent fact that in both cases, this gun-toting was legal.

There are two concerns here. First, the safety of the President and of Members of Congress. But second, the safety of the people attending town hall meetings.
How can it be legal to bring a loaded gun to such an event, even in the parking lot? But even more, how can it be legal to bring a gun into a town hall meeting? Does the right to bear arms trump the right to get out of a town hall meeting alive?

Presumably, there are fire codes that would prohibit someone from setting a fire in this crowd. But there is no law covering the clear and present danger of gun violence? In a heated situation, in which tempers are clearly on edge, and when people are being incited to go to these events with the most inflammatory public rhetoric I've heard in decades?

Presumably the Secret Service can prevent guns from getting much nearer than the parking lot outside an event where the President is appearing, but that's too close for me. That gun was loaded, and the man was holding a sign that made clear his advocacy for shedding blood.

But as we've seen in the coverage of other town hall events with Senators and Reps, there is little or no security. So there is no one to prevent guns from entering, and no one to deter their use inside.

This is a threat to participatory democracy and to the public safety. It must be addressed. Do we need video of bleeding bodies and panic to anticipate and correct this? I don't want to see the current insanity become tragedy for the innocent and their families as the result of some "lone gunman" at a town hall somewhere.

While it may be that the extremists showing up at these town hall meetings aren't doing much good for healthcare opponents, I'm afraid that stunned disbelief and ridicule are not sufficient responses. Somebody has to take the clear and present danger seriously.

Josh Horwitz has a column that narrates what's being going on, and how the fomenting of violence is a consistent theme. He concludes:

This year has already been marred by a series of horrific shootings involving individuals who hated our government and believed they had a constitutional right to strike against it: Richard Poplawski in Pittsburgh, James von Brunn in the District of Columbia, Scott Roeder in Wichita, Gilbert Ortez, Jr. in Texas, etc. With tensions escalating at town halls across the country, the overwhelming majority of Americans who wish to peacefully exercise their First Amendment rights must speak out against the violent, insurrectionist philosophy that has corrupted the Second Amendment.

I advocate more than that. Somebody important at the White House better be calling somebody important at the FBI who better be alerting law enforcement at the local level. These guys seem pretty good at spying on Quakers. Maybe they ought to be checking groups and individuals who have crossed the line and actually threaten violence, with the means to cause it.

Time Out

The insurance company-promoted violent mobs preventing citizens from hearing their (Democratic) members of Congress on the important pending healthcare legislation, the TV and radio traitors ginning them up, the rapid growth of Rabid Right terrorism--at the same time as headlines suggest a retreat to meaningless reform--is all so upsetting that my dear partner has warned me to stay off the news for awhile. So I will. In a minute.

I don't actually participate much at Daily Kos these days, but the alarm there is palpable and not entirely extreme. While the frontpagers catalog the parade of outright lies and fraud, as well as the accelerating threats and acts of violence, diarists like this one and this one and this one analyze the nasty direction. And I'm not going to let the historical echoes be preempted by the projections of the Rabid Right, because it all does remind me of what I've read about Germany in the 30s, when the Nazis were just starting to make their move.

Paul Krugman got a lot of attention with his column, and he rightly ascribed a lot of the emotion involved to racial paranoia and outright racism:

Many people hoped that last year’s election would mark the end of the “angry white voter” era in America. Indeed, voters who can be swayed by appeals to cultural and racial fear are a declining share of the electorate.

He also alluded to Yeats' scary apocalyptic poem:

But right now Mr. Obama’s backers seem to lack all conviction, perhaps because the prosaic reality of his administration isn’t living up to their dreams of transformation. Meanwhile, the angry right is filled with a passionate intensity.

And he concluded:

And if Mr. Obama can’t recapture some of the passion of 2008, can’t inspire his supporters to stand up and be heard, health care reform may well fail."

I have been getting emails from the Organizing for America organization that grew out of the Obama campaign, but they don't seem to be as creative and on top of stuff as they were then, or so it seems to me. Still, I've called my congressman as they requested (he's also had a town meeting disrupted, though that was far from here--this district is spread over an enormous area. Interesting that they shouted What's wrong with profit? which doesn't sound very populist, but goes pretty much to the heart of what's wrong with healthcare.) And yes, I've even contributed some money again, to pro-healthcare reform ads. But none of it seems like enough so far.

But I'm hoping to take the weekend off, for my mental health. And I'll give the last word to Bill Maher in his cogent column: New Rule: Just because a country elects a smart president doesn't make it a smart country.

R.I.P. film director John Hughes, who died of a heart attack at age 59. I was already older than the demographic for his youth movies in the 80s, but I loved The Breakfast Club and Ferris Bueller's Day Off. These works by the Chicago director were some of the few signs of life in the Reagan years. The "Twist and Shout" scene in Ferris remains one of the most joyful scenes in an American film, capturing the spirit as well as the music of the Beatles movies of the 60s.

Thursday's Notes

Caught on TV: "I like the organic industrialism of this piece." Organic industrialism? Is that like industrial farming?

Electronic media seems to turn everything into a circus. The Beer Summit. The woman who called police, the black officer who witnessed the arrest of Skip Gates, relentlessly and unfairly vilified, both sound hurt and both look like they've been run over by a steamroller.

Trenchant commentary on the subject by the Brown professor Rachel Maddow had on first. But the comment that will stay with me was made yesterday by Pulitzer Prize winning columnist (and black man) Eugene Robinson, after host Howard Dean tried to make it sound like all this was just a mistake all around. Robinson said that he did not know a black man who doesn't believe race was a factor in Professor Gates' arrest.

On the circus: Chris Matthews, while decrying such loud liars and amplified morons as the Birther people, also complained that Obama's press conferences were too dull. He said so to the tune of very loud background music, and it may have been during his "Politics Sideshow" segment. Someday he might put it together: it's news as entertainment that empowers and amplifies the lunatics and liars, and by complaining about substantive news conferences, he's encouraging the media atmosphere that gives the idiocies he decries their aura of legitimacy.


Despite the hoohaw about Obama poll numbers, the Gallup poll headline is Obama Gets High Marks on Leadership and Empathy. And while other numbers are down from the stratosphere, Pres. O and the Democrats still do significantly better than the GOP/ White Supremacist Party.

Farm Team

Way back when I was wearing the New York Times uniform, I had a one-on-one conversation with the General Manager of the Pittsburgh Pirates. He was telling me about his impossible problems: shrinking revenues in a market hemmed in by geography and population declining within it. The message was the struggle to keep the Pirates competitive. It was kind of shocking at the time, because it was 1980, and the Pirates were the reining World Champions.

But the Pirates had their last competitive team in 1991, when Barry Bonds, Bobby Bonilla and Andy Van Slyke patrolled the outfield, and they came within one out of winning the pennant. All three were soon gone, and the Pirates haven't been a first division team since.

In recent years they've been notable mostly for supplying contenders with star players, and this season they've outdone themselves, capping it all by trading away their last two good players in one day: today.

Not just good to great players, but fan favorites. When I was in Pittsburgh in June, the Pirates were so desperate to get people to games that they expanded their free-game-on-your-birthday promotion to include anybody who has a birthday all year. "Basically if you've been born, you can get a ticket," the TV announcer explained.

Now just why the Pirates can't compete in the same city that is home to the World Champion Pittsburgh Steelers and the World Champion Pittsburgh Penguins is something more subtle minds will have to explain. All I know is that the suggestion I made almost a decade ago--that the Pirates stop pretending, and just officially become a minor league team--is coming true, although the pretense is still there. After all, most of their players now are minor leaguers, and they are clearly a farm team for competitive teams in the Major Leagues.

Maybe they should concentrate on food and drink (they do seem to be doing that) and putting on a good show in that great new ball park, maybe have a ticket lottery with the winner announced during the seventh inning stretch, and a live band on the field between innings. A Ferris Wheel in the outfield and a tractor pull in the parking lot. While playing other farm teams.

California's Inept Deal with the Devil

The LA Times has a revealing story on how the California budget was passed in the state legislature:

" The power of Sacramento lobbyists was only one of several factors threatening to bring the Legislature to a halt. Steinberg turned aside the proposal from Intuit's representatives. But lobbyists for major interest groups were present throughout the night, seeking to influence the process. With hundreds of pages of legislative language passed with little time available for review, few knew what the fine print might contain.

Early proclamations that the cash crisis had forced lawmakers to transcend pettiness and partisanship devolved into hallway deal-making. Over and over, legislators with designs on higher office balked at measures that could be used in campaigns against them. Legislative leaders, inexperienced in their jobs, repeatedly found they could not deliver the votes of their caucuses.

Term limits have made this batch of lawmakers among the most inexperienced in decades, and many legislators, their attention focused on their next elected office, spent the night watching the moves of real or prospective opponents in upcoming primaries."

All this sordidness might be excused if they had passed a sane budget, with sane cuts and sane revenue increases. But even though they saved posh Santa Barbara beaches from oil rigs and maybe let localities fill some potholes this year, the budget forced on this hapless legislature by the cunning and shameless macho image-making of the Terminator will cost the poor, the sick, the old and the young in suffering as well as dollars, as well as stop any sort of economic recovery in the state for the forseeable future.

For this temporary respite (a few weeks vacation before they have to work on the next budget in October) they will reap the whirlwind: multiple lawsuits, costly court judgments and possible if not likely strikes by various public employees.

First stop: a spike in California's unemployment and a further decline in consumer spending, as the effect of state layoffs and income cuts ripple out. Count on it.

Coming soon: two crippled state university systems, damaging California and the United States' ability to compete economically, as well as consigning more students to dead end futures.

Health Care Reality Check

Opponents to healthcare reform talk about the cost. On Wednesday, President Obama emphasized the fact they ignore: healthcare reform will decrease federal debt, not increase it. And without reform, the deficit will balloon to unsustainable proportions.

Opponents parrot the old crap about a gubment program meaning people won't get to choose their doctors (a lie) and bureaucrats will determine care instead of doctors and patients. Though anyone who has even heard of someone who needed to invoke their health insurance, or who has talked to a doctor or just read a newspaper knows, this charge should be laughed out of the room. As
President Obama pointed out, insurance companies routinely dictate and often deny care, and their bureaucracy drives doctors and hospitals crazy. Which is one reason that the AMA and other medical organizations support the Obama plan.

Opponents demonize the Canadian system, actually saying on the floor of Congress that Canadians and Europeans "don't value life as we do," which is such a cliche of manufactured xenophobia that it's been parodied as something Romulans say about the Federation in Star Trek, using exactly those words.

The facts are that 85% of Canadians approve of their single payer health care system. Care is not denied nearly as often as it is here, and Canadians are not flooding the U.S. seeking care.

Spiraling health care costs and especially healthcare insurance costs are ruining businesses large and small, state and local governments, the federal government, and families across America to an outrageous degree. It's estimated that in 10 years, if the price spirals continue, half the income of American families will be absorbed by health insurance.

The scandal of the U.S. health insurance system must be confronted and ended. It is the only responsible recourse.

La salute non si paga: Health is not for sale.

Healthcare is Happening

Bumps in the road etc. but the headlines? As Nate Silver notes, "The fundamental weakness of the White House press corps is that they can rarely see beyond the current 24-hour news cycle..." I happened to hear two correspondents, including Chuck Todd, admit as much, and that the throughline in this here drama is that a healthcare bill is more likely than not.

Meanwhile, E.J. Dionne writes about the multiple reasons that President Obama is justified in saying, "don't bet against us," on healthcare and other big issues.

Taking Sides

It's pretty obvious who is going to pay for the California budget crisis by class: the rich and near rich reap the benefits of intact programs and corporate subsidies, while programs for the poor and the working middle class are cut or killed.

The winners and especially the biggest losers are divided by age: the very young whose nutrition and health programs are cut, the young whose education is shortchanged, and the elderly who may see home health care killed entirely.

But the losers are also visible by race, that most obvious and ugly remnant of how America apportions its bounty. This is not only because the social and health programs being cut and killed disproportionately affect blacks, Latinos and Native Americans. It's because cuts to education also deprive them most directly. Education is their path to a better life, that the well off already have.

But in taking sides, the Terminator is deeply wounding the state of California, and the country's future. Every layoff by the state is lost revenue as well as lost talent. California cannot prosper without good schools and an educated population. But schools from primary through college are in state-caused chaos, as well as suffering from decades of neglect. That California is close to becoming a majority non-white state, a mainly black and brown state, makes these decisions destructive to education all the more racist.

As for the national economy and the nation's future, President Obama made this point in his stirring address on the 100th anniversary of the NAACP:

"The state of our schools is not an African American problem; it is an American problem. Because if black and brown children cannot compete, then America cannot compete... We used to rank number one in college graduates. Now we are in the middle of the pack. And since we are seeing more and more African American and Latino youth in our population, if we are leaving them behind we cannot achieve our goal, and America will fall further behind -- and that is not a future that I accept and that is not a future that the NAACP is willing to accept."

But it a future that the Terminator's California is not only willing to accept, but a future it invites.

Hell Freezes Over

It must have, because the American Medical Association has endorsed the House version of the healthcare bill, which not only provides a public plan option but finances it partly by taxing the wealthy, especially those making above a million bucks.

The AMA has been a notorious foe of any reform, going back to their opposition to Medicare in the 1960s. Everything was "socialized medicine" with them. But as insurance companies soaked up all the bucks, doctors lost out, and lost their autonomy not to government bureaucrats but--wait for it--corporate bureaucrats.

Further evidence of the temperature change in hell is that the infamous Harry and Louise are back--but this time supporting comprehensive healthcare reform. Their ads were famous for attacking the Clinton healthcare plan, and though they weren't likely to have been decisive, they became a symbol of that defeat. Click to see the ad.

Tuesday's Notes

If you're looking for a site that is tracking the ins and outs of healthcare legislation in brief summaries, you're looking for TMP/DC.

TG's Political Wire notes a lovely bit of theatre at the Sotomayor hearings. When GOPer windbag Sen. Sessions sententiously quoted the philosophy of another woman jurist to counter the caricature of S's approach he was trying to create, S. noted that the jurist he quoted was a friend, and in fact was in the audience at the hearing supporting her. Sessions is not considered the brightest bulb in the Senate, so maybe this one was too easy, but it was a nice piece of one-up-showmanship.

A couple of Kos diarists, Blue Texan and Turkana, have made the point that I've suggested before, but with Sarah Palin as the proof. Here's how Turkana put it, referencing a Peggy Noonan column deriding Palin: "Noonan herself played right along, pretending the ultimate elitist Bush was a man of the people, pretending his lack of intellect or intellectual curiosity was somehow laudable, pretending that she herself gives a whit about anyone living outside her own income bracket or social circle. Had it not become possible for someone as manifestly unqualified and incapable as George W. Bush to become president, it would not now be possible for Sarah Palin to be taken seriously as a national political figure. Had Bush been dismissed as the caricature he was, no one outside of Alaska would know Sarah Palin's name."

It's been a long time since I paid attention to the baseball All-Star game, but I found myself watching both the home run derby and the old timers/celebrity softball game yesterday, so I expect to watch at least the first few innings of the game tonight. I remember watching the home run derby as a kid, although I'm not sure it was associated with the All Star game yet. But those All Star games I watched, black and white images from one camera high above home plate, featured Mantle and Mays, Maris and Musial, and other famous players whose names didn't start with M. The idea of putting young celebrities in with the old timers helped the entertainment value of that game, but at my age the most fun was watching gray-bearded Ozzie Smith playing shortstop with style.

Terminator Lies

Pushing his suddenly rabid right agenda, the Terminator (who is currently governor of California) is lying about fraud and abuse, demonizing a program to help the elderly and confined by asserting that a quarter of its funding is wasted. His own administration's study says it's more like 1%.

Rabid Right shock doctrinaires are trying to scare investors etc. by claiming that California's businesses are leaving in droves. It's not true. Neither are the rich. And why would they? What is true is that the rich are avoiding any responsibility or payment for the budget crisis, while the poor and the middle class state employees are paying everything, including their health.

The poor can't do anything about it, although some courts are defending them and state employees. But the middle class state employees can at least strike.

Today's Notes


Andrew Sullivan's blog continues to be an excellent source of news on the continuing protests in Iran.


And thus it must follow as the day the night... A day after several stories on the ramping up of lobbying mega bucks by insurers etc. on health care, there are stories about how the House or Senate proposals are in trouble. With remarkably little substance. Meanwhile, the Senate Health committee Kennedy/Dodd plan cuts costs and includes more people than earlier plans, and Speaker Pelosi promises a bill in August with public option passed by the House. She delivered on cap and trade.


Speaking of which, an excellent, precise analysis of the cap and trade bill by a Harvard economist in an oddly titled interview in Salon.

Memorial

The Michael Jackson mania has mostly passed me by. Although I thought his moment in the 80s--"Billie Jean," the moonwalk and his other moves, "We Are the World"--was brilliant and energizing, those were the last years that I followed what's new in pop music. He would have meant more to those who were younger and starting to pay attention then.

Mostly I felt the response was inflated and overwrought, with such patently false claims as, his was the only music shared by several generations, children to grandparents. That's been true of a lot of popular music going way back, but the most obvious case in point is the Beatles. And I guess that's my generation's point of reference. The Beatles had many more memorable songs and a series of breakthrough albums that dominated popular culture for a decade, etc.

So I was prepared to just wait this media circus out. But I did hear some words from the memorial in Los Angeles today that made me take notice. Those words came from black people--musicians but also sports stars Magic Johnson and Kobie Bryant--paying tribute to Jackson as a breakthrough artist for all black entertainers, paving the way for global stardom. They would know that history better than I, though I do remember that black artists didn't get on MTV until Michael Jackson broke that barrier. So for that, and for his charity work, I make my peace with Rest in Peace, Michael Jackson.

The Delusional Enabled

Here are two examples of two trends. The trends are: the Republican congressionals' increasing detachment from reality, and the latest Internet/blogosphere/Twitter/instant messaging technologies tendency to enable and propel their delusional politics, wasting everybody's time, energy and public money.

The two examples are in one dispatch on Tuesday's congressional follies by TPM: first, the GOPer noise machine amping the volume on a Congressional Budget Office report that by the end of the day was proven not to exist, and an equally delusional panic button Twitter-storm on a vote that was never scheduled and never happened.

The Terminator

As California continues to sink financially, economically and with social consequences accruing for a long time to come, it's clear who is responsible now: Governor Arnold.

The legislature, the voters, the system, are all culprits in the larger problems, but on this specific budget crisis, it is the Terminator's recalcitrance and attempts to shock doctrine the situation that's the sole reason California doesn't have a budget.

It could have happened weeks ago, but the Terminator refused to consider any new revenue streams, which legislators proposed along with cuts, to avoid the Terminator's catastrophic cuts.

Then Democratic legislators gave up their revenue additions, and the governor appeared to give a little on cuts. But since then he has demanded additions to the deal that he couldn't get passed otherwise, and that have little or no bearing on the current budget.

His destructive stubborness finally led to Assembly Speaker Karen Bass shutting her door to his blather. Until the Terminator actually negotiates, there's no point in holding negotiations. So far the governor has apparently been winning the perception game, but maybe now the truth of it is clear: he is single-handedly terminating California, and dismantling the lives of countless Californians.

Palintology

Sarah Palin picked Friday July 3 to announce she's stepping down as governor of Alaska after 2 and a half years of her first term. Her logic was completely bogus: she's not going to run in 2010, so she's a lame duck, and a lame duck governor does nothing but travel a lot. First of all, a lame duck is an officeholder who can't legally run again. She can. And she wouldn't be even perceived as a lame duck unless she announced she wasn't running, which there was absolutely no reason to do. She made herself a lame duck, and then used that as an excuse to quit.

The pundocracy is somewhat divided: she's committed political suicide, or she's freed herself up to build a national base to run for the presidency in 2012. I think she wants a national profile, but as a media celebrity. She's got some sort of deal in her pocket. She made sure she had her $7 million book deal signed before she made this announcement. She can make a lot of money catering to the Rabid Right: book sales, speeches, some sort of Rush Limbaugh type media presence. It became clear, with the Vanity Fair article, that she has no future within the Republican Party. And it's a long time to 2012. Who knows what can happen. This is just the first shoe to drop, though. Another is coming.

Lakers

Phil Jackson will be back as coach, which is good. But the Lakers signed Ron Artest from the Rockets and let Trevor Ariza go to the Rockets, which is bad. I tried to say so on a Lakers blog yesterday, but my post apparently didn't make some sort of cut. So it was left to a LA Times regular columnist to make precisely the points I did, with the same memory: the attempt of a championship team to augment with Big Names past their prime (Karl Malone, Gary Payton). Besides which Payton was an asshole, and so is Artest.

The rationale might be buttressing the "physical" element (i.e. the muscling, pushing around, flying elbows, etc.) for the finals next year. The Eastern contenders have strengthened themselves since the end of the season: Cleveland, Orlando and Boston. The Lakers may not even be tested much in the West, but it's going to be very competitive among these three teams in the East. The Lakers will have to be plenty tough to beat the winner, because the winner from the East is going to be plenty tested.

It also looks like either the Lakers management screwed up, or Ariza's manager is an asshole, or most likely both. So this past year's Lakers may be its team for the ages, particularly with its team play and various players rising to the occasion. Ariza thrived as a Laker and was likely a big star in their future. In the NBA anything can happen, and he could wind up back in LA, though he has a three year contract in Houston. Artest may be popular with a certain segment of the Lakers fan base. But not with me.

The Terminator's California Shock Doctrine

Governor Terminator and his Republican minions are ignoring the efforts of the Democratic majority in the California legislature to address the state budget with a mix of cuts and new revenue, which is just simple sanity. The Terminator is trying to force deeper and more extensive cuts, with no new revenue. Today he is succeeding a little more.

At least one writer at Caltics is now using "shock doctrine" as a verb, as in the Governor is shock doctrining the budget. And it's all too apt. Naomi Klein's book, The Shock Doctrine, shows how the political forces of predatory capitalism used economic and other major shocks in one country after another--causing some, taking advantage of others--to institute severe measures that benefit them, but that the people would not allow under ordinary circumstances. We saw the Bushites institute their own Shock Doctrine after 9-11, leaving us with a legacy of torture, the Patriot Act, a wrecked economy after billions returned to the rich, and billions more flowed to the contractors who profited from Iraq and the war on terror.

The Terminator is bringing the Shock Doctrine to California. And the message he and the Republicans are sending is clear: when times are tough, take it out on the poor. The Terminator wants to balance the budget on the backs of the poor, the sick and the working middle class.

Like other shock doctrine changes, it is self-defeating and massively destructive in the long run. In this case, the state will be pissing away billions in federal funds, and tying the state up in court cases for years, many of which it will lose, as it has already. There are laws against penalizing the poor and the sick to such an extent. Everyone loses from deteriorating public health and education, part of the community's basic infrastructure.

These are days of shame for California, in uncountable ways. Self-destruction, which began slowly with Prop 13 a generation ago, is accelerating. There is no solution in sight.