politics

You may have heard about Ty making the Obama kids into Beanie Babies. (Ty, of course, claims the names are just a coincidence.)

My first reaction was amazed disgust. But Ruth Marcus makes an excellent point:

...It's impossible to read about "Sweet Sasha" and "Marvelous Malia" without being reminded of the famous psychology experiment cited in Brown v. Board of Education. Offered dolls of differing skin tones, black children overwhelmingly chose to play with the white doll; they picked the white doll when asked to identify the "nice" doll and selected the brown doll when asked which was the "bad" doll.

...

When a high school student named Kiri Davis repeated Clark's experiment with 4- and 5-year-olds at a Harlem child-care center for her 2005 documentary, "A Girl Like Me," she found heartbreakingly similar results.

In the video, a little girl in a lavender sweatshirt identifies the "bad" and "nice" dolls. "Why does that look bad?" Davis asks. "Because it's black," the girl replies. "And why do you think that's a nice doll?" "Because she's white."

Then comes the real gut punch. "Can you give me the doll that looks like you?" The girl touches the white doll. Her hand lingers on it for a few seconds. Slowly, she slides the dark-skinned doll across the table.

...

Then again, if hawking "Sweet Sasha" and "Marvelous Malia" encourages children of any hue to want an African American doll, or to admire two African American girls whose father just happens to be president, maybe that's not such a bad trade-off.

After John Roberts screwed up the administration of the oath at Obama's inauguration, some people suggested - some jokingly, some seriously - that Obama wasn't legitimately president. Well, now there's no doubt (discarding wacko conspiracy theories about how Obama was really born in Kenya or on Mars or something) because they went back and did it again:

The decision to repeat the oath was taken out of an abundance of caution, an official said.

But Mr Obama joked: "We decided it was so much fun...." before adding: "We're going to do it very slowly."

...

"We believe the oath of office was administered effectively and that the president was sworn in appropriately," said White House counsel Greg Craig.

"Out of the abundance of caution, because there was one word out of sequence, Chief Justice John Roberts will administer the oath a second time."

Two other presidents, Calvin Coolidge and Chester Arthur, have had to repeat the oath because of similar problems.

If all goes well, in a few hours we will see the return of a democratically elected President to the United States for the first time in eight years. Hooray! That's something to celebrate regardless of your opinion of Obama.

And as for him...after the Rick Warren fiasco, I was with with those who called for an furor to be raised. And that seems to have had at least some impact.

Obama just might be teachable - besides the symbolic gesture of inviting Rev. V. Gene Robinson, the gay Episcopal bishop, to deliver the invocation at a concert at the Lincoln Memorial we've seen the nomination of several LGBT folks to positions in the Administration.

We're still hearing promises - though vague ones - to end the travesty of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell". Just not immediately - as if it would take a long time for him to issue an executive order, in his role as Commander in Chief, stating that discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation will not be tolerated in the armed forces of the United States.

Of course I'm not expecting any radical change. But let's face it, it wouldn't take much for Obama to be the best president to hold office so far during my life.

So: I'm setting my inauguration response to "hooray for the return of democratic governance, with a slight and cautious optimism as to the anticipated quality of that governance".

Happy new year!

Zelda's Inferno exercise: write the poem that gets you disqualified from consideration as poet laureate

"considering the poet laureate"

the state is the opposite -
the polar opposite, the antithesis, the additive inverse, the eternal opponent -
of poetry

it was the state that put Thoreau into a jail;
it was poetry that kept him free inside those walls

music art and poetry can
only free a soul
only bring us closer to
that angelic state
that bodhisattva state
where every man and woman and child and dog
knows and acts the lovingkindesswisdom way

and what need then for guns of governence?
what purpose then to the state's violent threats?

poetry steals Caesar's thunder from him
makes empty the angry threats of kings
when every person knows their gods directly
there's no place left for fear of church or state

so, no:
propaganda is not the poet's place
non servium

Letter to the editor, Washington Post:

Besides slaughtering civilians, Israel has deliberately killed Palestinian Authority police in the Gaza strip. Targeting civil authorities in the occupied territories - the only people who could enforce a political solution, who could stop rogue attacks from being launched - shows that the current Israeli leadership has no interest in a peaceful settlement, and makes Charles Krauthammer's claim ["Moral Clarity in Gaza", Jan. 2] that Israel has some sort of moral high ground nothing short of nauseating.

Many conservative Americans regard killing a police officer as the ultimate crime, an attack on society itself. What will they think when they learn that the government of Israel is a cop-killer over 100 times over, that Israel's latest terror attacks have targeted Palestinian police, the only body that might keep Palestinian resistance fighters under control in a political solution to the conflict?

Well, it's a moot point, since they probably won't. They're hear about "Hamas operatives" being killed. I suppose that if a Palestinian Authority police officer is a "Hamas operative" by virtue of Hamas being the majority party in the Palestinian elected government, then as of January 20th all federal agents will become "Democratic operatives".

Today. by the way, is the anniversary of the Wounded Knee Massacre, when the U.S. government killed over 200 men, women, and children of the Lakota Sioux. There are sad and obvious parallels between the brutal U.S. genocide of the Native nations in the name of manifest destiny, occasionally interrupted by equally brutal, but ineffective, resistance by Indians; and the brutal Israeli genocide of the Palestinian people in the name of Zionism, occasionally interrupted by equally brutal, but ineffective, resistance.

Maybe in 100 years Palestinians will be running casinos in the West Bank.

At the Huffington Post, Jeffrey Feldman reports how the bigots behind Proposition 8 are demanding that the California Supreme Court nullify the 18,000 same-sex marriages that went through before the ballot initiative - and how that state's Attorney General Jerry Brown is sticking up for the notion of constitutional government, asking the court to invalidate the Proposition 8 because it "deprives people of the right to marry, an aspect of liberty that the Supreme Court has concluded is guaranteed by the California Constitution...Proposition 8 must be invalidated because the amendment process cannot be used to extinguish fundamental constitutional rights without compelling justification."

Thank you , Jerry Brown. The will of the majority of voters cannot remove citizens' basic rights, such as equal protection under the law.

Montgomery County high school students have been "pimping" spped cameras by creating duplicate license plates of people they're pissed off at, taping the on cars, and whizzing by automated speed traps. According to the Montgomery County Sentinel, the automated traps started in March; cameras are set up in residential zones and near schools, and a $40 ticket is mailed to the owner of a car that trips the machine.

Not the driver, mind you, in the usual gross violation of basic due process, but the owner. Or rather, as this "prank" the owner of the car with the license plate bearing the number that

Might I suggest that an excellent protest of this bit of nonsense would be to duplicate the license plates of the Montgomery County Executive Isiah Leggett and County Council President Phil Andrews and zip by a few speed cameras?

Researchers at Santa Clara University have replicated the findings of the famous Milgram experiment, where by using the trappings of authority they were able to get volunteers to administer torturing electrical shocks to innocent people. (The shocks were simulated, the victims actors.)

If you've never heard of the Milgram experiment, you should stop and read about it right now. Unless you're in a burning building, there is nothing more important you can do - without this understanding of authority, little in the world of human action makes sense.

Is this tendency to blindly follow authority just a laboratory artifact? Sure, there's Abu Ghraib, but maybe that was the result of military conditioning.

Sadly, the case of the fast-food joint strip searches demonstrates that very ordinary people will do horribile things on command of authority, in real life without any special training or conditioning. In over 70 cases spanning a decade, a caller was able to manipulate managers and employees of fast food restaurant into performing strip searches and other abusive acts merely by posing as a cop over the telephone.

And this, my friends, is why we must question authority. Make a habit of it.

Dear Mr. Obama and company:

You blew it.

You almost had me. I was on your side, all set to back you up. I was willing to overlook the backpedaling on telecomm immunity and on cannabis decriminalization. I gave money, did some canvassing for the Obama campaign on Election Day.

I wept when Barack Obama gave his Election Night speech. In that moment, hell, I would've taken a bullet for him.

I've stood up for him in the weeks since the election, defended some questionable Cabinet appointments with the idea that we should wait to see what policy decisions will be made, that some compromise would be necessary to get things done.

But for you to endorse a bigoted, anti-science, anti-choice, anti-religious liberty figure like Rick Warren by choosing him to give the invocation at the Inauguration...

Nope. I'm out.