Monday, December 31, 2007

The Legal Contortionists (1:33 pm)

My guess is Dahlia Lithwick had a helluva time coming up with her year-end list: the Bush Administration’s dumbest legal arguments of 2007. Read ‘em here.

posted by Jarrett | 1 comment

Friday, December 28, 2007

Mike Huckabee: Christian Fascism Finds Its Man (8:27 pm)

Mike Huckabee creeps me out. There’s something more, something unsettling, behind the straight-talking, bass-guitar-jamming, warm-and-fuzzy Christian teddy bear act Huckabee kicks out for voters and the media. I’m thinking Lindbergh in Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America. Something feels unhinged here.

I don’t know, maybe it’s some of his beliefs, like the one about how homosexuality and necrophilia are, ehhhhh, about equal weight on the scale of human aberration, or maybe it’s his classic extremist/anti-choice line about how abortion = slavery. And then of course there are his statements about isolating individuals with AIDS from the general public. See, ol’ Huck says AIDS should be viewed as a public health issue, not a political issue, and that the most effective way to combat the spread of the disease is through isolation of afflicted individuals from the general public. OK, that sounds clever and very logical, minister, but let’s think for a minute about the engineering of this “public health policy” program you propose. First, everyone in America must be tested by the government, yes? Otherwise, how would we know who’s sick and who’s not? Then, what, the positives go through Door A and the negatives through Door B? Haven’t we heard of something like this “isolation” you propose before?

I’ve always wondered why any truly religious person would want to drag their faith through the fetid cesspool of American politics. How can we believe the faith of someone who would do that to something they claim to hold so dear?...   read more

posted by Jarrett | 5 comments

Monday, December 24, 2007

So Long To A Giant (1:50 pm)

Oscar Peterson, piano-jazz legend, has died at the age of 82. The Verve re-issue of Peterson’s Night Train has been in rotation in my CD player for months now; it’s a great collection of songs, one which jazz historian Benny Green describes in the liner notes thusly: “If the dominant emotion of the album is Pastness, its dominant form is the Blues in all its shades of intensity…” It’s an album on which Peterson grapples musically with the songs and performers whose impact shaped his style. And what a style it was. Green continues, “The first time I ever saw Peterson perform, in London in 1953, he opened with a medium-tempo blues, and I have never forgotten the impact he made…”

In George Saunders’ recent collection of essays, The Braindead Megaphone, he describes the duality of The Ambitious American. He writes that our history is often the story of the two sides to our national ambitious character. It’s an often times just crazy spirit that defines us - the same spirit that gave us Rhapsody In Blue and Absalom! Absalom! also gave us the Vietnam War and some of our greatest economic, social and political failures.

Peterson proved it’s partially a story not limited to Americans. After all, he was Canadian. With his loss the world loses an artist whose work, dreams, talent, style, and ambition fell on that timeless, astonishing side of the coin described by Saunders. Dick Katz, also in the liner notes for Night Train, writes that Peterson’s musical imprint comes from “the overall perfection attained by really hard work and prodigious talent; not just technical prowess, but control of the musical materials.”

Here’s saying so long to a musical giant, one of the greatest jazz pianists of all time.

posted by Jarrett | start the discussion

Saturday, December 22, 2007

Third Shock’s The Charm (12:21 pm)

Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, one of our picks for most hard-hitting, must-read books of 2007, (if you haven’t read it yet, don’t let it slip by - pick it up today, buy one for your loved one too), has her take on the destruction of public housing in New Orleans at Huffington Post:

Readers of The Shock Doctrine know that one of the most shameless examples of disaster capitalism has been the attempt to exploit the disastrous flooding of New Orleans to close down that city’s public housing projects, some of the only affordable units in the city. Most of the buildings sustained minimal flood damage, but they happen to occupy valuable land that make for perfect condo developments and hotels.

- First came the shock of the original disaster: the flood and the traumatic evacuation.

- Next came the “economic shock therapy”: using the window of opportunity opened up by the first shock to push through a rapid-fire attack on the city’s public services and spaces, most notably it’s homes, schools and hospitals.

-Now we see that as residents of New Orleans try to resist these attacks, they are being met with a third shock: the shock of the police baton and the Taser gun, used on the bodies of protestors outside New Orleans City Hall yesterday.


Thanks to Facing South for the catch.

By the way, if you’re looking for another non-fiction must-read, don’t miss Daniel Brooks’ The Trap: Selling Out To Stay Afloat In Winner-Take-All America.


posted by Jarrett | start the discussion

Tuesday, December 18, 2007

The First Rule About Campus Conservatives… (4:48 pm)

A lot of folks are having a laugh over this story, about Francisco Nava, a campus conservative, anti-condom activist at Princeton, who beat the crap out of himself in order to blame it on “thuggish,” pro-sex activists. (The New York Sun, Robbie George and—wait for it—David Horowitz all bought Nava’s pretty transparently dubious story hook, line and sinker.)

I wonder, however, if there isn’t a deeper, more profound and quite radical political logic at work in this incident, something along the lines of Slavoj Zizek’s reading of Ed Norton’s self-flagellation in Fight Club—that “in order to attack the enemy, you first have to beat the shit out of yourself.” Perhaps leftists can learn something from Nava, when it comes to committing ourselves to the point of physical sacrifices if that’s what it takes to realize our political ideals. Perhaps…nah, nevermind. This dope’s antics are just too frickin’ hilarious.

posted by Brian Cook | 3 comments

Monday, December 17, 2007

I Can Has Book Deal? (4:42 pm)

Ooh, boy. Jonah Goldberg’s long-awaited book appears to have finally hit the printer and the early leaks are just fantastic:

Fascism was an international movement that appeared in different forms in different countries, depending on the vagaries of national culture and temperament. In Germany, fascism appeared as genocidal racist nationalism. In America, it took a “friendlier,” more liberal form. The modern heirs of this “friendly fascist” tradition include the New York Times, the Democratic Party, the Ivy League professoriate, and the liberals of Hollywood. The quintessential liberal fascist isn’t an SS storm trooper; it is a female grade-school teacher with an education degree from Brown or Swarthmore.


Deep stuff, for sure. I think conceptually, though, Jonah’s really onto something here: Fascism = Stuff I Don’t Like. Brussel sprouts? The most fascist vegetable on the planet. Televised figure skating? Wholly fascist programming. Paper cuts? Oh yeah, they’re fascist too.

The last word goes to Jon Swift in one of my favorite blog posts of all time.

posted by Brian Cook | 1 comment

Wednesday, December 12, 2007

Conflict of interest? (8:49 pm)

I’m not quite sure why Conde Nast Portfolio would publish Michael Lewis’ profile of Dimensional Fund Advisors — Wall Street’s biggest nightmare — and the transformation of ex-trader Blaine Lourd, but I’m sure glad they did. The fascinating analysis of DFA, and their rather intuitive efficient-market theory, eviscerates the very concept of money managers. At least if you buy into, you know, capitalism.

Ellis, who had spent 30 years advising Wall Street firms, went on with charts, graphs, and more evidence than he needed to convince Blaine of the truth of that statement. The problem wasn’t Blaine; the problem wasn’t even the firms he worked for. The problem was the entire edifice of modern Wall Street, in which some people—brokers, analysts, mutual fund managers, hedge fund managers—presented themselves as experts and were paid fantastic sums of money for their expertise. But essentially, Ellis argued, there was no such thing as financial expertise. “I read this book,” Blaine says, “and I thought, My whole life is a lie, and everyone around me is facilitating this lie.”

A must read, as they say in the trade.

posted by Adam Doster | 1 comment

Nobel Laureate George W. Bush? (11:20 am)

Former Vice President Al Gore received his Nobel Peace Prize on Monday. (Read excerpts of his acceptance speech.)

The next day, in a surprising move, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 to revoke the Nobel and award it to George W. Bush instead. Justices cited peace in Florida’s electoral process as the reason for their decision.

posted by Sanhita Sinharoy | 7 comments

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