James Fallows has promised to publish the best four or five rationales for going to war with Syria, so perhaps some of the specialists in international law who have been advocating intervention in the comments here might want to give it a shot. Meanwhile, our vestigial Congressional appendage has sent a strongly-worded letter begging the President to consult Congress. Perhaps I was asleep during the Schoolhouse Rock that explained how the whole legislating thing works, but I thought there was another way for Congress to express its will, something to do with putting a card in a slot and pressing a button.
Archives for August 2013
‘Cause the Bible Tells Me So
Tom posted about the church in Texas that had a measles outbreak. Here’s a little update:
[…] According to several reports, however, at least some congregants of Eagle Mountain were opting out of vaccinations — because church leader and televangelist Kenneth Copeland exhorted his followers to eschew them. In one 2010 webcast, Copeland describes immunizations as “criminal,” saying that “as parents, we need to be a whole lot more serious about this … in being aware of what is good and what isn’t, and you don’t take the word of the guy trying to give the shot.” He goes on to discuss a potential link between vaccinations and the growing rates of autism among American children.
Even though multiple media outlets have found that video, Copeland’s spokesman is denying that he’s anti-vaccine. The official pastor of the church where the sick children’s parents attended is Copeland’s daughter, Terri Copeland Pearsons. She issued this greasy non-denial denial:
“Some people think I am against immunizations, but that is not true,” the statement said. “Vaccinations help cut the mortality rate enormously. I believe it is wrong to be against vaccinations. The concerns we have had are primarily with very young children who have family history of autism and with bundling too many immunizations at one time. There is no indication of the autism connection with vaccinations in older children. Furthermore, the new MMR vaccination is without thimerosal (mercury), which has also been a concern to many.”
Copeland Senior, pictured above with his wife Gloria, preaches the prosperity gospel, and has been the target of an IRS investigation over use of the two private jets he flies out of Kenneth Copeland Airport near Fort Worth, Texas. Since no kids have died, this dust-up will probably be just a little bump in the road in Terri’s quest to continue the family scam.
Thursday Morning Open Thread: Pack Your Lunch
Natali Rivers, Uptown:
… The timing is significant. August 28 marks the 50th anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington. African Americans disproportionately work in fast food jobs in this country. The movement felt that the strike would mirror the $2 wage demands of the organizers in 1963. Adjusted for inflation, that demand would be $15.26 today.
Fast food is a $200 billion per year industry, yet most employed within the industry earn minimum wage or just above it. According to the New York Times, the nationwide median wage for fast food workers is $9.05. The industry leaders argue that these entry level jobs are a stepping stone to better opportunities, but according to a report from the National Employment Law Project, only 2.2 percent of all jobs in the entire industry are managerial.
“We are united in our belief that every job should pay workers enough to meet basic needs such as food and housing,” said Nancy Salgado, a single mother of two who has worked at McDonald’s in Chicago for 10 years and makes Illinois’ minimum wage of $8.25 an hour. “Our families, communities, and economy all depend on workers earning a living wage.”…
Harold Meyerson:
… Those who seek to conservatize the March on Washington in modern memory either gloss over or neglect altogether its consistent emphasis on economic as well as social egalitarianism. A. Philip Randolph, the union leader and lifelong democratic socialist who conceived of and chaired the march, made this clear in the speech with which he began the rally. “Yes, we want all public accommodations open to all citizens,” he said, “but those accommodations will mean little to those who cannot afford to use them. Yes, we want a Fair Employment Practice Act [banning racial discrimination in hiring], but what good will it do if profit-geared automation destroys the jobs of millions of workers, black and white?”…
Of the more than 200,000 Americans who came to the Mall 50 years ago, tens of thousands were active in organizations that espoused and embodied an indissoluble link between civil and economic rights. That link was embraced by more than black churches and the NAACP. The United Auto Workers, garment and textile workers, the Packinghouse Workers and the still-fledgling teacher and public worker unions brought their members to Washington on hundreds of chartered buses and trains. They heard speeches not only declaring that Southern blacks should have the right to vote and to sit at the front of the bus but also calling for public employment programs to shrink unemployment and a hike in the minimum wage to reduce the incidence of poverty-level work….
Thursday Morning Open Thread: Pack Your LunchPost + Comments (33)
Oh, Hey. Here’s Steve Using Rosie’s Ass as a Hat
Not sure if you have ever been around Jack Russell Terriers, but their back haunches always look like they are wearing fluffy pantaloons. At any rate, Steve decided that Rosie’s fluffy bum makes a perfect pillow, and used it as such for a while:
It’s only been six weeks since Steve came here, and he already has every damned one of us trained. As a point of reference, it took the collective might of the United States military fourteen weeks of OSUT before I became this obedient.
Oh, Hey. Here’s Steve Using Rosie’s Ass as a HatPost + Comments (43)
Just Out of Curiosity
Do any of you ever have to walk to the front door, turn the light on, open the door, the whole time saying “THERE IS NOTHING THERE ROSIE!” Obviously none of you say that unless you have a dog named Rosie, so sit back down, pedants (I realize I just killed 45 potential comments, at least, you anal retentive jackasses). But insert your dog’s name, and do you have to do this? Then, when the door is wide open, I try to shame her- “SEE? NOTHING THERE. AGAIN. JUST LIKE AN HOUR AGO. AREN’T YOU EMBARRASSED AND ASHAMED?” And then she looks down and pretends to feel guilty for roughly 3-4 seconds before running back to the couch.
On the other hand, maybe she is just trying to get me to exercise? Sometimes I wonder if it would have been nicer if I found a Golden Retriever or some stupid happy dog by the side of the road, but then I realize no one else would have put up with Rosie’s bullshit for two years before her “better” side came out. Plus, I already have one really stupid and loving dog.
*** Update ***
Here’s another question. My dogs have zero sense of time when I go away. An hour, a day, three months- they react the same way every time I get home. So in that way, they have no sense of time. But I will be damned if I do not get a cold nose to the armpit at 7:20 – 7:30 every morning from Lily, and every night at 11pm, they start milling around me between 10:55 and 11:05 because they know it is time for the late night potty and bedtime treat.
So how can they have this rigid daily schedule they adhere to when they clearly have no sense of time whatsoever?
Thanks A Bunch, Hank
@tinyrevolution A career-long ambition that so far as eluded him.
— billmon (@billmon1) August 28, 2013
Andrew Ross Sorkin, professional NYT courtier to the One Percent, softballs former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, who has a book to sell:
Five Years After TARP, Misgivings on Bonuses
“There was such a total lack of awareness from the firms that paid big bonuses during this extraordinary time.”That is what Henry M. Paulson Jr., former Treasury secretary, said last week. We were discussing the 2008 financial crisis in light of the approaching five-year anniversary of those white-knuckled days, when Lehman Brothers collapsed and the government stepped in to bail out the American International Group and then the banking system….
Five years on, Mr. Paulson, assessing the success of a bailout program that clearly helped stabilize the economy, said that the bonuses that the banks paid after the bailouts — a record $140 billion in 2009 — were a primary reason for the public outrage over the program he worked so hard to persuade Congress to pass and the country to support.
“To say I was disappointed is an understatement,” he said. “My view has nothing to do with legality and everything to do with what was right, and everything to do with just a colossal lack of self-awareness as to how they were viewed by the American public.”…
Asked why he held his tongue until now about his misgivings on the way Wall Street paid bonuses after the crisis, Mr. Paulson, who was formerly the chief executive of Goldman Sachs, said he didn’t want to be “piling on.”
Banking is “not only a very honorable profession,” he said, “it’s a very necessary profession.”
He said the hardest part of the bailouts for him was in the disconnect between the bailouts’ ugly image with the public and his faith that the bailouts would help keep the economy from collapsing.
“I understood that people were angry,” Mr. Paulson said. “They wanted to hear that those that made the mistakes were going to be held responsible. Then on the other side was stability. It’s hard to punish and save the banks at the same time.” He paused for a moment. “I was much more concerned with stability.”
If only we peons understood what a demanding, thankless task it is to continually apologize for our lack of appreciation!
Open Thread: More On the March, and Dr. King
Thanks to commentor LAMH36. Here’s some other stories worth reading:
From one of the many excellent stories at the Washington Post:
The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech inspired the world. It also galvanized the FBI into undertaking one of its biggest surveillance operations in history.
Initially approved in October 1963 by then-Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, the FBI’s wiretap and clandestine microphone campaign against King lasted until his assassination in April 1968. It was initially justified to probe King’s suspected, unproven links to the Communist Party, morphing into a crusade to “neutralize” and discredit the civil rights leader…
William Sullivan, head of the FBI’s domestic intelligence division during the King surveillance program, told the committee in 1975, “No holds were barred. We have used [similar] techniques against Soviet agents. [The same methods were] brought home against any organization against which we were targeted. We did not differentiate. This is a rough, tough business.”…
David Corn, at Mother Jones, goes deeper into Hoover’s ugly obsession:
… For years, Hoover had been worried—or obsessed—by King, viewing him as a profound threat to national security. Hoover feared that the communist conspiracy he was committed to smashing (whether it was a real danger or not) was the hidden hand behind the civil rights movement and was using it to subvert American society. He was fixated on Stanley Levison, an adviser to King who years earlier had been involved with the Communist Party, and in 1962 the FBI director convinced Attorney General Robert Kennedy to authorize tapping the business phone and office of Levison, who often spoke to King. Then Hoover, as Tim Weiner puts it in his masterful history of the FBI, Enemies, began to “bombard” President John Kennedy, Vice President Lyndon Johnson, Bobby Kennedy, and leading members of Congress with “raw intelligence reports about King, Levison, the civil rights movement, and Communist subversion.” Hoover’s priority mission was to discredit King among the highest officials of the US government. Though King scaled back his contacts with Levison—after both RFK and JFK warned King about associating with communists—Hoover kept firing off memos, Weiner notes, “accusing King of a leading role in the Communist conspiracy against America.”…
TNR reprinted the late, underrated Murray Kempton’s report on the original march, including a vignette of a much younger John Lewis:
… If the march was important, it was because it represented an acceptance of the Negro revolt as part of the American myth, and so an acceptance of the revolutionaries into the American establishment. That acceptance, of course, carries the hope that the Negro revolt will stop where it is. Yet that acceptance is also the most powerful incentive and assurance that the revolt will continue…
The result of such support—the limits it placed on the spectacle—was illustrated by the experience of John Lewis, chairman of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. Lewis is only 25; his only credential for being there was combat experience; he has been arrested 22 times and beaten half as often. The Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee is a tiny battalion, its members gray from jail and exhausted from tension. They have the gallant cynicism of troops of the line; they revere Martin Luther King (some of them) as a captain who has faced the dogs with them and they call him with affectionate irreverence, “De Lawd.” We could hardly have had this afternoon without them.
Lewis, in their spirit, had prepared a speech full of temereties about how useless the civil rights bill is and what frauds the Democrats and Republicans are. Three of the white speakers told Randolph that they could not appear at a platform where such sedition was pronounced, and John Lewis had to soften his words in deference to elders. Equal rights for the young to say their say may, perhaps, come later.
Yet Lewis’ speech, even as laundered, remained discomfiting enough to produce a significant tableau at its end. “My friends,” he said, “let us not forget that we are engaged in a significant social revolution. By and large American politics is dominated by politicians who build their careers on immoral compromising and ally themselves with open forums of political, economic and social exploitation.” When he had finished, every Negro on the speakers’ row pumped his hand and patted his back; and every white one looked out into the distance….
Never realized MLK & marchers overwhelmingly supported by Kennedy, DC establishment, vast majority of right thinking Americans. Thanks MSM!
— billmon (@billmon1) August 28, 2013
Open Thread: More On the March, and Dr. KingPost + Comments (75)