Yesterday I watched part of the PBS documentary on the Triangle Shirtwaist Co. fire of 1911. I don't think this is from the same feature, but these recollections of survivors of the factory demonstrate vividly what the workplace looks like when corporations are completely unfettered by regulations and organized labor:


Steven D. over at Booman Tribune blows a hole in all the Republican bullshit about jobs and economic growth and gets to the real agenda:

The Republicans in Congress, and in states across the country are making no bones about their agenda: they desire to kill unions and worker's rights. They desire to kill the EPA, and kill any regulation regarding worker safety, drug safety, food safety, environmental safety -- you name it. They want to destroy Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and healthcare reform with a thousand cuts until nothing is left but private accounts managed by by their buddies at Wall Street to which you are forced to contribute. They want to privatize prisons and schools.

They want an end to financial assistance to college students and their families (except football and basketball players, of course). They want to kill any investment in alternative fuels and public transportation. They desire the awarding of no-bid contracts to their "friends," i.e., the people who contributed the most to their political campaigns. Oh, and they want to make it ever more difficult, if not impossible, for innovative small businesses to compete with the corporate behemoths that dominate our political landscape. Indeed, without a middle class how can small businesses not dedicated to serving the desires of the rich survive?

In short, the goal of the New and Improved Tea Party Republican Governors and Legislators is to drive a stake through the heart of anyone who still believes he or she is a member of the middle class. As one of their own recently remarked those of us "slobs" in the middle class are a "different breed" the implication being that we are parasites on the body of corporate wealth and power rather than the collective engine of human labor and productivity that made that wealth and power possible.

It's long, but it's worth your time to read the whole thing.

(via)

Labels: corporatism, history, Wisconsin 2011

There are days when I wake up and read something, and I'm about to write about it, but it pisses me off to such a degree that I just can't. Today, Ross Douchebag writes about how young people aren't having sex because they are developing a strong moral code. In Douchebag world, it has nothing to do about the slut/whore rhetoric coming out of the Republican Party, the churches, and right-wing pundits like Douchebag that keeps the double standard alive. It has nothing to do with the right-wing war on contraception that makes birth control less available to young women. It has nothing to do with a judgmental climate that allows David Vitter and John Ensign to remain Senators while casting judgments on girls who won't keep their legs closed. Nor does it have anything to do with the fact that they're tending to live with their parents longer because they can't find jobs and it's icky to have sex in mom 'n' dad's house. In Douchebag-world, it's all about finally embracing what is inevitable: that the only way a woman can be moral is to not have sex.

I'm quite sure Amanda will have something more cogent to say about this, but for now I'm going to leave it to TBogg, who is always my first source for concise Douchebag analysis and translation:

Shorter Ross Douthat:

If Chunky Reese Witherspoon was a teenager today, she probably wouldn’t want to fuck me. I mean for reasons besides the most obvious ones. This gives me great comfort.

Don't forget to click the link embedded in that quote. And also be sure to click TBogg's name for some serious graphic fun.

Labels: assholes, faux moral outrage, Republican men, Ross Douthat, sexism

If you are too young to have waited in line for gasoline in the 1970's, if you don't remember odd/even gas rationing, signs reading "NO GAS"; if you don't remember when the price of gasoline went from thirty-nine cents a gallon to a dollar practically overnight, you can perhaps be forgiven for feeling that gasoline is an endless resource and that life without it is unthinkable.

But if you are old enough to remember gas lines, even if you were too young to have to actually wait in one, you have no excuse for griping about the price of gas as you spend close to a hundred dollars to fill up your SUV.

We've had blips of high prices before. We usually see price spikes when there is trouble of any kind in the Middle East. We didn't see them so much after last summer's BP oil spill, largely because there was so much outrage at BP that they never would have gotten away with it. But the combination of instability among oil-producing nations, opportunistic oil companies, diminishing supplies of the kind of light sweet crude that's most easily refined, and markets that are more fickle than a prom queen, mean that we have to get it through our spoiled, lunkheaded skulls that the era of cheap oil is over. In fact, the era of even expensive oil is coming to an end -- and if it doesn't it will mean ruin for all of us.

For one brief shining moment, it seemed that the message had gotten through. Suddenly we had a huge selection of smaller cars from which to choose. Suddenly we had hybrids and electric cars and Smart Cars and Mini Coopers to go with the Civics and Corollas and Accents. It even seems as though Ford may have a winner in the Fiesta. And yet the minute the price started to go down, people started buying and leasing SUVs again. I guess it's hard to give up being a bully on the road once you've had a chance to do so.

But there aren't charging stations for the Nissan Leaf yet, and it's about $2000 to put an outlet at your house to charge it up. Most electric cars can still go only about 40 miles on a charge. But a good small car with a twelve-gallon fuel tank that gets a combined city/highway 30mpg will cost you about $48 to fill up at $4/gallon, assuming you don't wait till the little red needle is point to "E", and it'll take you about 360 miles for that $48. Insist on even a small SUV that gets 20mpg, like a Nissan Rogue with a 16 gallon tank, and you'll go forty miles less and pay $64 to fill it up. Insist on a Ford Expedition with combined city/highway 16 mpg and a 33.5 gallon tank, and when gas is $4, it will cost you a whopping $134 to fill it up, but you will go over 500 miles on a tank. Still -- that's a lot of money to pump into a vehicle at least once a week.

It's all part of the reality that the world in which we've been living, one with cheap gas and cheap food and cheap airfares is gone, and gone for good. We've been propping up dictators in the Middle East for a half-century to gain access to oil -- and now we're seeing the results, just as we did when the Shah of Iran was toppled. In 2008 John McCain and Sarah Palin ran for president on a platform of "Drill, baby, drill" -- so that no piece of land can ever be spared to slake our addiction to the stuff. Even if you want to argue that drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Preserve, or off the coast of Florida, or wherever else Republican want to allow drilling so their friends in the petroleum industry can get even richer, is this really where we want to put our energies and our resources? Do you really think that being able to tailgate people like me on the Garden State Parkway is worth $134 a week and all the waters of all our coasts being in the same condition as the Gulf of Mexico is off the Louisiana coast after the folly of BP?

We have been so accustomed to what we perceive at any given moment as "cheap gas" (which now seems to be anything under $3/gallon) that the minute it goes above that, people start clamoring for someone to "do something about it", and that something usually seems to be tapping the strategic petroleum reserve:

White House Chief of Staff William Daley said today the Obama administration was considering tapping into the U.S. strategic oil reserve as a way to help ease soaring oil prices.

Speaking on NBC television's "Meet the Press," Daley said: "We are looking at the options. The issue of the reserves is one we are considering. It is something that only is done -- and has been done -- in very rare occasions. There's a bunch of factors that have to be looked at. And it is just not the price."

"All matters have to be on the table when you see the difficulty coming out of this economic crisis we're in and the fragility," Daley added.

What Mr. Daley doesn't realize is that if petroleum traders and speculators and oil company executives have decided that they WILL have one-party Republican government after the 2012 election, it doesn't matter if they release EVERYTHING from the strategic petroleum reserve so that spoiled suburbanites can drive an SUV to the A&P.

So what's to be done? Unfortunately, very little in the short run. More investment in public transit, increased routes for buses and trains, bicycle paths, flexible work hours, more telecommuting, corporate schedules that make car-pooling viable, solar and wind power -- all these are things that in the long run can help us wean ourselves off oil. The problem is that those who own our government don't WANT to wean us off of oil, because there is just too much money in it.

Labels: America After Oil

I'm still waiting for someone to say to Barack Obama, "If you want to earn your Nobel Peace Prize, Mr. President, now's the time."

Indeed, President Obama could be taking advantage of once-in-a-lifetime opportunities handed to him both domestically and abroad by the always dysfunctional Republican Party and the rioters in the Middle East and northern Africa. Yet it seems the Constitutional Law Professor President's grasp of history is as rusty as his equally dysfunctional grasp of the US Constitution.

Let's look at the Republican Party's recent attempts to shut down the government until a stopgap bill was passed by the Republican House. The Republican "Young Guns", apparently led by an already fractious Tea Party caucus, were setting up a showdown on Main Street, USA, the bait and switch of this generation, in claiming, "We really don't want to shut down government but we will if we have to to teach them evil lib'rals Dutch Uncle lessons in fiscal responsibility."

As Frank Rich said in his last article for the New York Times, Republicans weren't so much blind to history as taking a jaundiced squint at their other failed revolution of 1995, when they actually had shut down government with major political fallout, and tried to engineer it as a tail to be pinned on the Democrat donkey if it ever did come to pass.

After the stopgap bill passed, it worked to some degree: The MSM were eager to declare the averting of a crippling government shutdown as "a stunning victory" for the Republican Party with the Democrats portrayed as losers gasping in the dust of Republican fiscal brilliance and heroism.

But nothing could've been further from the truth. The Republicans still have not even begun drawing up a plan to create jobs (the unemployment rate being lowered from 9.6 to 9% last month was merely incidental and, as always, misleading), still have not come up with a plan to reduce runaway spending that's adding to our nightmarish deficit and national debt, still have no workable alternative to the Obama health care overhaul and still have not addressed the root causes of our budgetary shortfalls (***coughtaxcutsfortherichcough*** ***cough gaspIraqAfghanistancoughahem***).

Obama could be taking full advantage of this just as Slick Willie had done in the wake of the Republican shutdown of government over 15 years ago. Then House Speaker Newt Gingrich proved to be a foil worthy of Clinton just as Tip O'Neill was to Ronald Reagan a decade before that and President Clinton, a masterful political infighter if ever there was one, climbed through the ropes with alacrity.

Yet it seems the president's reserve of special venom is reserved for liberals and those of "the professional left" who criticize him and his dysfunctional, pro Wall Street policies far less effectively and viciously than Republicans and Tea Baggers who keep screaming for the birth certificate and tell one outright lie after another about him.

If Obama was worth his weight in Koolaid powder, he'd call out these Republican hustlers and grifters and ask them for solutions to our budget woes other than cutting funding for Planned Parenthood, PBS and Medicare. Then again, the president preemptively cut himself off at the knees last year when he once again caved to still-minority House Republican demands to extend the crippling tax cuts for the wealthiest 2% for another two years. Obama hardly even addressed the fact that the GOP was shamelessly holding a critical unemployment extension hostage to these reckless and greedy demands.

Another issue, this one foreign policy-based, is one on which our Nobel Peace Prize president has no authority. After saturninely clucking his tongue and serenely observing the carnage in Iran in the summer of 2009, Obama is now calling for Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi's resignation and publicly deploring the violence in Libya and directly insinuating his way into pro-democracy Arab unrest for the first time since the riots in Tunis.

But then again, if whiteboarded history is any guide, perhaps Obama is hoping that he'll be retroactively hailed as a law-giver by future generations for merely stepping in only after the spoils have been seized and the dead buried. Such a useful fiction worked for Reagan and the inevitable fall of Communism and still does.

But hanging back in the wings and waiting to address Libya almost exclusively is not stemming the tide of human blood that ran down the streets of Cairo, Tunis, Bahrain, Jordan and Yemen and certainly not to this day in Libya. And you'd think the Libyan strongman ought to make this a nobrainer. If his bizarre umbrella speech and conspiracy rhetoric of the unrest being plotted by Osama bin Laden and hallucination pills didn't reveal Gaddafi to be the Michael Jackson of dictators, nothing will. The only thing Gaddafi knows how to do effectively these days is to kill his own people.

Obama could be seizing the unrest and thirst for democracy in the Arab/Muslim world as a mandate for the end of dictatorial and/or monarchical tyrannies, to have his State Department lead the way toward diplomatic rather than military solutions like Carter did with Begin and Sadat at Camp David.

But Obama is living up to Maureen Dowd's caricature of him as statecraft's answer to Mr. Spock and seems loathe to take on even unworthy straw men like the Republican Party and clearly insane and clueless dictators who have clung to power for far too many decades. And Obama, aside from the soaring but empty rhetoric that inexplicably earned him a Nobel Prize nomination a week and a half in office, has shown himself to be an even less forceful and effectual leader than Jimmy Carter and that's saying something.

Obama has proven to be a miserable failure on every front. He is a disgrace in the ring, overhyped, and over powered by inferior opponents, the political version of the 1990 Mike Tyson versus the GOP's Buster Douglas, a man who only snarls and counterpunches against his own backers in his corner.

I know I keep hammering away at this image of a ladder where the guys at the top are exhorting you to look a few rungs down at their demon-du-jour -- Medicaid queen at the CVS drive-thru in a BMW/immigrant/teacher while they take the last few twenties out of your wallet and stuff them in their already-bulging pockets, but every day it's clearer that this is the right-wing agenda for America -- a few preoposterously rich guys and everyone else scrambling for scraps.

I recently found myself enjoying the PBS production of Downtown Abbey, one of those classy period British soapy things with impeccable acting, costume and set design all inatended to make you forget that you're essentially watching a soap opera. Downton is essentially Upstairs Downstairs for a new audience (though I understand that the original series is being remade for some strange reason), but I'm a great deal older than I was in the 1970's. When you look at a series like this from the perspective of America 2011, watching its upper class that takes for granted its wealth and position, and its working class where the older servants delude themselves that spending your life in service to people who can't fathom being in any state of want that doesn't involve lust is perfectly OK, and younger servants find themselves with doors slammed in their faces if they dare dream of a better future, it's hard not to see the BEST scenario for the future we face.

In 2003, PBS dipped its toe into the waters of reality TV with a group of series in which they took contemporary people and put them in vintage settings, including the mores and social class structure of the time. The best of these, Manor House, showed its cast actually living this kind of socioeconomic divide. It's worth the time to go over to the show's site and poke around, because there's a wealth of information about actual life during a time of this kind of class divide and income inequality.

Yesterday we saw some improving job numbers, and the "official" unemployment rate finally dropped below 9%. But as Robert Reich points out, these numbers don't tell the real story:

Overall, the number of unemployed Americans – 13.7 million – is about the same as it was last month. The number working part time who’d rather be working full time – 8.3 million – is also about the same.

But to get to the most important trend you have to dig under the job numbers and look at what kind of new jobs are being created. That’s where the big problem lies.

The National Employment Law Project did just that. Its new data brief shows that most of the new jobs created since February 2010 (about 1.26 million) pay significantly lower wages than the jobs lost (8.4 million) between January 2008 and February 2010.

While the biggest losses were higher-wage jobs paying an average of $19.05 to $31.40 an hour, the biggest gains have been lower-wage jobs paying an average of $9.03 to $12.91 an hour.

In other words, the big news isn’t jobs. It’s wages.

For several years now, conservative economists have blamed high unemployment on the purported fact that many Americans have priced themselves out of the global/high-tech jobs market.

So if we want more jobs, they say, we’ll need to take pay and benefit cuts.

And that’s exactly what Americans have been doing.

Employers have demanded wage and benefit concessions from their unionized workers and often got them. Detroit is creating auto jobs again — but new hires are getting about half the pay that auto workers were getting before. Airline workers are taking home 30 to 50 percent less than they did years ago. And so on.

Conservatives say it’s not enough. That’s why unions have to be busted – and why some governors are seeking to abolish laws requiring workers to become dues-paying union members in order to get certain jobs. Hence, the fights brewing in the Midwest.

Meanwhile, millions of non-union workers have accepted cuts in pay and benefits just to keep their jobs. Health benefits have been slashed, pension contributions from employers dramatically cut, wages dropped or “frozen.”

Millions of private-sector workers have been fired and then re-hired as contract workers to do almost exactly what they were doing before, but without any benefits or job security.

The current attack on public-sector workers should be seen in this light. The charge is they now take home more generous pay and benefit packages than private-sector workers. It’s not true on the wage side if you control for level of education, but it wasn’t even true on the benefits side until private-sector benefits fell off a cliff. Meanwhile, across America, public-sector workers have been “furloughed,” which is a nice word for not collecting any pay for weeks at a time.

At this rate, the unemployment rate will continue to decline. But so will the pay and benefits of most Americans.

And that is the reason for the finger-pointing at union workers. These people are the canaries in the coal mine, only because they are vocal and organized. People like the long-distance truck driver now working as a dishwasher at a Red Lobster aren't heard from, but while they work minimum-wage jobs where the hours are kept just low enough that they don't have benefits are understandably going to be resentful of those who still earn a living wage and have benefits and a defined retirement benefit. The problem is that stripping these things away from unions is not going to solve the problem. Because if your new job that you finally find after being unemployed for a year pays ten bucks an hour, so your take-home is around $350 a week, where are you going to even find a place that's habitable to live, let alone pay for groceries and an old jalopy to get yourself to that job? Yet this the source of the "job growth" for which Barack Obama was patting himself on the back yesteerday. And Americans are getting tired of pundits like Thomas Friedman and David Brooks, whose jobs are never going to be outsourced or eliminated, telling the people who go to "the Applebee's salad bar" that they have to suck it up because The World is Flat or that older people (presumably excepting Brooks himself) are going to just have to shut the fuck up and die already.

I'm currently involved in a rather spirited discussion at my local Patch site with people who simply refuse to give me a decent answer about why "shared sacrifice" simply cannot involve even one penny more paid in taxes by billionaires. First, these people challenge me on "What do you regard as 'rich'?" This, for those who do not live in the New York metropolitan area, is designed to Get The Liberal To Cite What Is A Middle Class Salary Here. If the mortgage on a POS cape cod like mine is $2000/month, and you're paying ten grand a year in property taxes, and you have three kids, two of whom are in college, $150,000 or even $200,000 a year in salary doesn't make you "rich". So you cite a figure like $10 million per year, which I think we all can agree makes you "rich". So then they cite people like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett and their foundations. First of all, voluntarily setting up a foundation to do good works may mean you're not the kind of rich scumbag that, say, Dick Fuld is, but somehow I don't think that Bill Gates' lifestyle has suffered one iota since diverting a good chunk of his money towards his foundation. It's not really a "sacrifice" if you don't feel it.

What I've told these people is that if I had to pay, for example, $2000 more a year in federal taxes at my income level, but within five years our nation's economy would be on a sound footing, I'd do that in a heartbeat. And I don't even have children who are going to need a nation that doesn't look like a Mad Max movie. If I had to pay more in state taxes to get my state back on even keel within five years, I'd do it. And those numbers really WOULD make a difference to what I take home. So why is it such anathema to ask the wealthiest Americans to pay a few thousand more a year?

(Bonus read: Paul Farrell.

Labels: economic death watch, The Right Wing War on the Middle Class

A stimulus that seems to finally be showing signs of breaking up the job drought logjam just a wee, tiny bit. A health care reform bill that isn't great, but ought to be a start towards more affordable health care for all. These are things that were labeled "liberal overreach" by conservatives and other reactionaries, and the media.

So what, then, do you say about investigating women who have miscarriages, or forcing them to listen to rants by Christofascist zombies before they can get an abortion, or about threatening to strip opposition state Senators of their seats so you can stack it with members of your own party and elmininate even the ILLUSION of choice that we currently have? What do you say about the gutting of education, or health care programs for the poor, of cuts in funding for meals for housebound seniors? If what we're seeing from the Republicans isn't overreach, what is?

In Wisconsin, it seems to be regarded as overreach, because there is the biggest case of buyer's remorse up there since the first unfortunate sap in the late 1960's bought the first Chevy Vega off the assembly line:

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker's efforts to strip public employee unions of most of their collective bargaining rights appears to be so unpopular, that a Rasmussen poll now finds that almost 60% of likely Wisconsin voters disapprove of his job performance.

That finding shows just how quickly Walker -- who was elected to his first term last November with 52% of the vote -- has sunk just in his first two months in office. And it comes one day after Rasmussen released results from the same poll, all of which showed public opinion firmly on the side of the unions in the labor rights battle that has deadlocked the state capitol for the past few weeks.

In the poll, 57% of respondents said they disapprove of Walker's job performance -- including 48% who say they strongly disapprove. Meanwhile, only 43% said they approve of the job Walker is doing.

Not surprisingly, respondents who said they belong to a public union sided heavily against Walker, with roughly eight in ten giving him negative marks on job performance. Yet not only were public sector union members opposed to Walker, but a majority of private sector union members also disapproved of the governor by a 53% to 43% margin.

Also interesting to note -- the overwhelming opposition from people with children in Wisconsin public schools. Sixty-seven percent of people in that demographic disapprove of Walker, including 54% who strongly disapprove.

Could it possibly that people are looking up from beating people just like themselves to a pulp and are stopping to look up the ladder at the guy lifting the twenties out of their back pockets? Ratings for cable news indicate that this just might be so:

Yesterday, another milestone was reached. The Rachel Maddow Show on MSNBC drew 39,000 more viewers in the key advertising demographic of 25-54 year olds. Beck did manage to draw more total viewers, but even that statistic is revealing. It shows that Beck’s audience is comprised of only 21% of the young demo. That compares to Maddow’s 31%.

This is further evidence of Beck’s accelerating collapse. Last week it was reported that Beck declined 32% (25-54) and 26% (total viewers) year-to-year for the month of February. And that’s on top of a January year-to-year drop of 50% (25-54) and 40% (total viewers).

The public is obviously tiring of this manic-paranoid’s freak show. As a result, many staunch conservatives are becoming bolder with regard to their criticisms of Beck. And some are even recognizing that Beck may be just the tip of the iceberg and that anyone who hitches their wagon to Beck is equally deserving of ridicule and revulsion. That applies particularly to Beck’s primary benefactors, Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch, but also to those who work with and/or defend Beck. They will all learn that this stench is unremitting.

As for Maddow, this is just one day, so it will take some time to see if her strength continues. Pessimists will whine that Maddow’s primetime scheduling gives her an advantage, but the fact is that this is the first time she has outdrawn Beck and that makes it significant. For now she deserves to celebrate and I congratulate her.

Me too.

Labels: American workers, liberalism

In case you had any doubts that the GOP is now the Punish the Dirty Whores Who Won't Keep Their Legs Closed party, now Scott Walker has joined the Punish the Unchaste Sluts brigade:

Walker's proposed biennial budget, released Tuesday, would eliminate $1.9 million in state grants for birth control and health screenings, which go to Planned Parenthood and other providers. With federal matching funds, the grants amount to about $4 million a year, said Amanda Harrington, spokeswoman for Planned Parenthood.

The budget also would repeal a law that went into effect last year requiring commercial health plans to cover prescription birth control. The law affects about a third of the state population, as the other two-thirds are uninsured or covered by self-insured plans or government insurance.

Lindsay Beyerstein notes that this is right in character for Scott Walker, who used to be an activist in the fetophile movement:

You may not know that Walker is also a longtime anti-abortion crusader. Andy Kroll of Mother Jones reports that Walker, a former president of his college’s chapter of Students for Life, has a long history of campaigning against abortion, contraception, and sex ed. As a gubernatorial candidate, Walker won the endorsement of the hardline Pro-Life Wisconsin, which even opposes abortion to save the life of the woman.

As I reported in RH Reality Check, Walker’s anti-union “budget repair” bill also contains an all-out attack on a popular and successful Medicaid program to provide birth control to Wisconsinites whose incomes would qualify them for Medicaid if they became pregnant. The program saves Wisconsin an estimated $45 million a year in maternal and infant health costs alone and brings in 9 federal dollars for every on dollar spent by the state.

So what else are we to conclude other than that Republicans think women who have sex ought to be punished for their sin with the burden of motherhood. Kind of an odd sentiment for a party that's been running on "family values" for the last thirty years, isn't it?

And while we're on the subject, go read Sharon Lerner, here.

Labels: The Republican War on Women

I'm a focused American with a folder full of current coupons. Did you know the Koch Brothers, evil underwriters of the anti-union Republican Teabagger Revolution, peddle consumer products you can boycott? Here's a delightful and terrifying list. Let's have a quick look, shall we?

















Wouldn't now be an excellent time to switch to recycled paper products?

Crossposted at Poor Impulse Control.

Because I got up at 4:30 AM this morning, I'm tired, and my customary prowl around the Intartoobz this morning has me so pissed off already I just can't even speak.

Let's start with Amanda today, as the Republicans start to show their true colors about abortion: that they believe women are just a bunch of dirty sluts.

Driftglass takes on David "No End of Life Care for Geezers" Brooks (who doesn't seem to realize that he is one).

If you haven't checked out Keith Olbermann's new blog, FOK News Channel, you should do it now, and bookmark it. Sure, he's a Big Name and linking to him isn't exactly in the spirit of Blogroll Amnesty Day (or in the case of this blog and many others, Blogroll Amnesty LIFE), but he's a damn good blogger. Start here.

Mike Stark calls Rush Limbaugh again.

As Republicans start feeling safe saying that all women who have sex are whores, and all public school teachers (most of whom are still women) are lazy bitches who shouldn't get paid; as the Republican jihad against women really kicks into gear, Shelby Knox kicks off Women's History Month.

Speaking about Republican jihads against everyone who isn't one of them, here's Digby on Haley Barbour and the resurrection of Ronald Reagan's welfare queen meme.

Ted Frier on the hostile corporate takeover of Wisconsin -- and elsewhere.

And in closing: This segment from The Last Word made me wonder if I'd entered a time warp and gone back in time to 1968, since we once again have Republicans talking about unwashed smelly hippies:

Have as non-shitty a day as you can.

Labels: America Gone Mad, Big Blue Smurf Blogging, despair, We Are So Screwed

Yesterday's David Brooks column had me so angry I thought the back of my head was going to explode. I was so angry it rendered me speechless. Fortunately, Tom Scocca has more intestinal fortitude than I do, and that makes him today's honoree.

Money quote:

What happens when there is no money to give to the people who have no money? That is the moral question. It's fine to say that the old people should have saved more, they should have worked an extra job, they should have done without cable TV, they should have invested more wisely. Saying that doesn't change the fact that there will be old people who do not have money. These old people will believe that they need food and shelter and medical care.

Will they get it? At the arch-plutocrats' end of things, the Koch brothers' end, the end occupied by the most devout worshippers of Ayn Rand, the answer is: no. That's the goal. It's long since time for the sloppy, implicit, badly supported social contract to go away. Rich people have been trimming their contribution to the general revenue for decades now. They are not interested in paying the premium that keeps old people and ailing people or just backward people out of the streets. If the day comes that they have to travel to and from their various compounds in armored helicopters, they can afford the helicopters. It's not their problem.

David Brooks do not believe they are that kind of person. David Brooks are responsible. David Brooks care about the need to "invest" in "effectiveness" for all.

Alas, living is not effective. Employers have stopped paying people for their post-productive years. They have done this, welfare-capitalistically, with the sense that the cost and responsibility they are shedding will be picked up by...someone, somewhere.

Labels: Big Blue Smurf Blogging, David Brooks, economic death watch, heartlessness, scumbaggery

Regular readers of this blog are well aware of our good friend jurassicpork's travels through the publishing industry, and of finding doors slammed in his face.

Most of those of us who write have the dream of someday holding the first bound copy of our first book in our hands. When we hear of others achieving that goal, it's hard not to feel at least a twinge of envy. My supervisor at my last job achieved a publishing deal for his memoir about his garden -- a real, honest-to-goodness book deal, with an agent and a contract and a tour and frontage at Barnes and Noble and a review in the Sunday New York Times book review section. His publisher also picked up the option on his second book as well. If you think I didn't do at least a little bit of teeth-gnashing about it, you're attributing a level of sainthood to me that I lack, for all that my Unfinished Novel In Which I Throw Everything But the Kitchen Sink at my protagonist will probably always be unfinished. The closest thing I'll ever get to a published book is when I compile what used to have a working title of The Drapes are Winning: The Best of Brilliant at Breakfast until I found that Oscar Wilde never said that. And so it goes.

There are those who have done reasonably well with self-publishing. My sister's book, Visioncrafting: A Self-Guided Journey, can be purchased on Amazon.com, just as Donald Rumsfeld's can. We mere mortals can probably sell as many books self-promoting as we're likely to get being buried in the racks at Barnes and Noble. And with Borders going out of business, the idea of Seeing Your Book In The Store doesn't have the same thrill it used to, since Barnes and Noble is going to give most of its prime space to celebrity authors.

The other nasty aspect of book publishing these days, and about one's odds of appearing on the New York Times Bestseller list, is bulk sales. Conservative book clubs often buy tens of thousands of copies of books by right-wing authors. Mitt Romney has exchanged bulk sales for speeches. Right-wing groups bought George W. Bush's memoir in bulk. This makes it next to impossible for nonfiction authors who aren't celebrities to ever make it onto that list. For fiction writers it's worse. For every Jodi Picoult, who cranked out a book every nine months for years before becoming a reliable bestseller, or Fup, a book picked off the slush pile with much fanfare by Morgan Entrekin in 1983 (and which subsequently bombed), there are tens of thousands of people who will never, ever get that first break.

But perhaps it's time to stop revering the publishing industry as the ultimate seal of approval. Celebrity book publishing has always been the cash cow of the industry. When I worked at Simon & Schuster in the 1980's, books like the Jane Fonda Workout Book and Arnold Schwarzenegger's Pumping Iron and the novels of Judith Krantz paid the bills so that Erwin Glikes could publish his neocons.

But now all you need do is be a marginal celebrity and you can be a published author, because name recognition is everything. This is how people like Kim Kardashian and Snooki and that woman who's on one of the Real Housewives show get book contracts.

Or for that matter, the barely 20-year-old Bristol Palin:

The daughter of former Alaska governor Sarah Palin has signed with William Morrow to publish "Not Afraid of Life," to come out this summer. Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins, announced Tuesday that the memoir would provide "an inside look at her life."

"Bristol gives readers an intimate behind-the-scenes look at her life for the first time, from growing up in Alaska to coming of age amid the media and political frenzy surrounding her mother's political rise; from becoming a single mother while still a teenager to coping as her relationship with her baby's father crumbled publicly — not once, but twice," according to Morrow.

A listing for the book briefly appeared last month on Amazon.com and on an online HarperCollins spreadsheet. HarperCollins has published two best-sellers by Sarah Palin, the Republican vice presidential candidate in 2008: "Going Rogue" and "America by Heart."

Bristol Palin, 20, has become a celebrity in her own right, through her broken relationship with her child's father, Levi Johnston, and through her time as a contestant on "Dancing With the Stars."

"Bristol talks about the highs and lows of her appearance on ABC-TV's 'Dancing With the Stars,' including the aching hours of practice, the biting criticisms, and the thrill of getting to the show's finals," Morrow announced. "She speaks candidly of her aspirations for the future and the deep religious faith that gives her strength and inspiration.

"Plainspoken and disarmingly down to earth, Bristol offers new insight and understanding of who she is and what she values most."

It's a fait accompli that this tome will end up on the New York Times bestseller list, because conservative groups will make sure it does.

So if this is the company that book publishers are keeping, perhaps it's time for aspiring authors to stop casting pearls before swine?

Labels: arts, commerce, media whores

The idea of personhood is clearly somewhat fluid on the right. We know how the right worships not just fetuses, but zygotes; not just zygotes, but fertilized eggs -- to the point that some of them want to make miscarriage a felony. We also know how once fetuses find their way into the world, they're on their own.

Last year the Supreme Court decided in the Citizens United case that corporations are people who can contribute as much as they like to political campaigns without attribution. But yesterday, in a completely inconsistent decision with their lean towards unfettered corporate power, the Court decided that corporate personhood only goes so far, and doesn't include the ability to claim "personal privacy" and bar release of federal documents about corporate activities from Freedom of Information Act requests:

Corporations do not have a right to "personal privacy," the Supreme Court ruled unanimously, at least when it comes to the Freedom of Information Act and the release of documents held by the government.

Last year's ruling giving companies a free-speech right to spend money on campaign ads prompted liberal critics to say the court's conservatives were biased in favor of corporate rights.

While not alluding to the criticism, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. took a scalpel to a corporate-rights claim from AT&T Inc. that its "personal privacy" deserves to be protected. The ordinary meaning of "personal" does not refer to an impersonal company, he said.

"We do not usually speak of personal characteristics, personal effects, personal correspondence, personal influence or personal tragedy as referring to corporations or other artificial entities," he wrote. "In fact, we often use the word 'personal' to mean precisely the opposite of business-related: We speak of personal expenses and business expenses, personal life and work life, personal opinion and a company's view."

The decision means the Federal Communications Commission may release documents that were compiled during an investigation in 2004 over whether AT&T had overcharged schools and libraries for use of the Internet. The company paid a $500,000 settlement.

No right to privacy for corporations? Perhaps the Court thinks corporations are female.

Labels: privacy, Supreme Court

An Open Letter to Literary Agents Who Think They’re All That

OK, OK, we get it. Your job is a tough one and, admittedly there are idiots who aren’t qualified to play with sidewalk chalk who are sending you shit that even Sarah Palin wouldn’t post on her Facebook account even on her laziest day. Between the perfumed, glitter-laden, colored stationary, the bribes of chocolates, coffee cups that say, “World’s Greatest Literary Agent!” and even money, not to mention the dreck that ludicrously tries to pass for evidence of baseline literacy, a literary agent's lot, to paraphrase Gilbert and Sullivan, isn’t a happy one.

These are the peckerheads, pretenders and poseurs who deserve the form rejection letters, the rabble, the 98% that we all try to avoid getting swept into. We get it. They don’t make your job any easier.

But these people who swell the teeming shores of the slush piles of literary agencies from coast to coast don’t make our jobs any easier, either. And by “our”, I mean us serious novelists who take both our craft and research seriously.

You know, the ones who get a size 10 wingtip pasted across our teeth and keisters when it’s established that our names aren’t Sarah Palin, Christine O’Donnell, George W. Bush or some other over-exposed right wing quitter, loser or Third Reich-class war criminal.

But in virtually every instance when I do my research I have to listen to what agents will and won’t represent and in many of those instances, I have to wade through what is avowedly their pet peeves and prejudices.

By this, I’m not talking about those agents who refuse to represent the next Stephanie Meyers and Twilight or a thriller whose title begins with, The Girl Who… Those agents get a firm salute from me, the proud, the few who insist on not being the first to do something second.

I’m talking about the type of all too common literary agent who pointedly refuses to represent a property in a genre or subgenre that they find personally repugnant or who refuse to even look at a first novel once it crosses the 100,000 word threshold.

First of all, get the fuck over yourselves. No one gives a shit what you like or don’t like. You do not represent the book buying public any more than I represent all novelists. Even if you don’t like a certain genre or sub-genre, you still ought to be professional enough to be able to sell a property that certainly meets or exceeds a high standard in originality and execution. When I read, “I do not represent thrillers, especially when children are endangered,” you’re acting and speaking very unprofessionally and does not exactly fill me with confidence that you even belong in the literary representation business.

Any agent that doesn’t represent a book that features child endangerment is speaking as a mother and not as a professional agent. Consider how many modern day classics have featured children in danger: The Shining, It, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon or virtually every other book by Stephen King. How about Nathan’s Run by John Gilstrap? Hell, virtually everything by Jonathan Kellerman or Andrew Vachss features one child or another in danger. Kellerman and Vachss as well as their respective protagonists Alex Delaware and Burke have made entire careers on endangered children. Are you saying you would’ve turned down John Grisham’s The Client because the juvenile protagonist, Mark Sway, was chased by mobsters? If so, then you are a fucking idiot, a pox and a plague upon our nation’s casual reading public and ought to be tarred, feathered and bombarded with unsold copies of The Bridges of Madison County until you finally take down your shingle.

I actually once had a proposal rejected out of hand by an agent who shall remain nameless (but her initials are Diana Finch) who told me that American Zen was much too long to be a first novel because it exceeded her subjective word count threshhold by 20,000 words. I responded that it was fortunate Leo Tolstoy, Margaret Mitchell and Stieg Larssen didn't have her as an agent (an observation that, typically, never met with a rejoinder).

And, secondly, this is the problem: You literary agents have gotten so arch, so arrogant, so fucking hermetically solipsistic that your own personal tastes have somehow supplanted what editors go crazy looking for every day. You have hijacked what editors want and need to your personal tastes and biases. In a way, they made themselves responsible for this self-centered archness and arrogance when they made you their unpaid weeding out process.

Thirdly, another age-old gripe from writers that also references your professional laziness and cowardice: It’s a given to anyone who’s spent even a minute in this mug’s game that you cannot get a publishing contract unless you have an agent. The problem is, more and more agents are working only by referral or taking on clients with a publishing history, making it increasingly impossible to get an agent without the publisher who won’t talk to you except through an agent. Somewhere up in heaven, Joseph Heller is weeping over this real life mutation of his Catch 22.

Oh, but that’s not my problem, you all say. There are still plenty of literary agencies out there that’ll accept queries and proposals from firsttime authors. We just don’t want to know what they have to say, what they’ve written and otherwise have no interest in hearing of them being alive.

Remember the authors I mentioned above. At some point, proven winners and money makers like King, Grisham, Gilstrap, & Co were once firsttime authors. Same goes for any author currently on the bestseller lists from James Patterson to JK Rowling to Stephanie Meyer. Imagine what their agents would’ve lost if they’d closed their doors to everyone who didn’t have the secret knock or password to the clubhouse?

This displays cowardice on your part, a fatal quality that would be a deal breaker with any but those writers most desperate for representation. I wouldn’t seriously entertain for a second a proposal from any agent or agency that closes its drawbridge to the unwashed rabble at the moat because they say, in essence, “Wah, wah, you’re untried and untested. You’ll make my job too hard.”

Fuck you. So’s ours.

As I’ve said before, you chose to do this for a living. We do this in our spare time in between shifts at the factory or hospital, walking the dog, taking the kids to the dentist or paying bills. That includes, aside from the time it takes to write a manuscript you insist be camera-ready (there’s no such thing in the business, by the way, as all editors have their own ideas of what someone’s else’s vision ought to look like), the time it takes to research the 400-500 agencies appropriate for our material.

And part of that research involves listening to what the agent will or won’t represent which, if it isn’t an overt turnoff to more professional authors like me, ought to be. It is professional cowardice to an unforgivable degree and all we hear back is, “This business turns on feelings and if the feeling isn’t there, if I’m not madly enough in love with your manuscript and don’t want to take it to bed with me and get half the pages stuck together, well, it wasn’t meant to be.”

Again, it is the height of fallacy and an unforgivable slap to our collective intelligence when you insist that the tens of millions of books that have been sold since agents became the necessary evil they are today were madly, impetuously and recklessly loved by every agent who sold them. At some point, there had to be acting involved.

And if you can’t fake enthusiasm for an excellent property with which you’re not subjectively enthralled, then, once again, you need to buy a train ticket to Bumfuck, Wyoming and get the fuck out of the business. Business is run by a bottom line, a fat, healthy profit margin and publishing, while more illogical than most, is still a business. It is not run on “feeling.” Even mood rings don’t run on feelings. Publishing is a business that’s motivated by money and profit. Stop pretending that you’re literary matchmakers who fall in love with your clients. We all know you do not look a manuscript’s actual literary merit but its salability. You work for 15% commission, not so you could match up the next Hemingway with Max Perkins.

And that’s another thing, a problem in perception: I can understand not wishing to be second-guessed by your clients, most of whom not being nearly as pragmatic as you in the art of negotiating contracts and pitching book properties. But stop acting as if you’re the boss. In the real world, the guy who makes 85% of the pelf is the boss. The guy who makes the 15%, he’s the hired help.

Since most writers have, at most, one, maybe two agents and most agents dozens to hundreds of clients, it’s easy to get arrogant and to assume since you’re richer than most of them that you’re more important than any one of your clients. But to us individually, you’re raking in just 15% of our royalties and to us that makes you our employees, limited partners at best. It is a business arrangement. No one ever flocked to a book store because of a literary agent. No one ever rushed to a movie based on a book written by a literary agent. We are the talent, we are the boss and all decisions have to be ultimately made by us, your clients. You are not the leader of a stable of writers. You are someone who has many bosses. You are the glorified help indentured to genteel servitude six months to a year at a time. That is your role and station in life. Know it.

Form rejection letters and outright silence: As proof that we understand the time constraints placed on agencies that often get 300 or more submissions a week, let me say that I understand the need for the boilerplate rejection letter. If you go back to paragraphs one and two, you’ll note that I fully understand the need to summarily reject the circus clowns who masquerade as writers.

But form rejection letters or outright rude silence to people of obvious talent and conscientiousness is also unforgivable, especially after they play your one-sided game and personalize every query letter with a specific agent’s name, sometimes even quoting the agent from their website and did enough research to make it apparent that a lot of work and time was invested in every query letter and proposal. You do not get to ignore or imperiously dismiss through a flunky those who send you letters addressed to you. No time to do your job? Hire college interns who’ll work for free and would jump at the chance to cut their teeth at a top shelf literary agency. Encourage them to take their work home with them. MAKE the fucking time and stop disrespecting our time and effort.

(A true story: I once got a form rejection letter from some clown named Gordon Warnock at the Andrea Hurst Agency from his Blackberry. In order to relate getting shabbier treatment, I have to go back 20 years to when I got a poetry manuscript sent back with a shoe print on the title page.)

Another thing that bugs me is that, like serial killers (only without the sociopathic killer instinct of agents), literary agents often like to relive the Big Deals and often expect us, the writers, to help them relive their crimes against literacy by proving they’d scanned their client list and know what they’ve sold. Again, this is rude and solipsistic and almost completely non-germane. I do not give a shit who you’ve helped publish or who you’ve made rich. That just encourages your already out of control arrogance. Such success has nothing to do with me and, with me, respect and awe need be earned, not deferentially given on command as if it was a birthright or entitlement.

In short, get the fuck over yourself and stop thinking you’re the whole show, that everything devolves around your subjective tastes. They do not nor should they. You are merely jaded and tiresome gatekeepers artificially empowered by other jaded gatekeepers. Your time is limited and if ebook sales continue to skyrocket at the same time dead tree publishing is taking a nosedive, then you will, to the delight of many of us, go the way of blacksmiths and buggy whip makers.

Remember: Virtually all the greatest writers who ever lived, including almost all Nobel laureates, did perfectly fine without literary agents. And, mark my words, the day will come when the literary lions of the not too distant future will be able to say the same thing.

or Why Glenn Beck Ought to be Anally Raped With Edward R. Murrow's Microphone.

Yesterday on his bile delivery system, Glenn Beck called the protesting teachers "useful idiots" and accused the police of having "thrown in with the Socialists."

Wisconsin was spared from this lunacy on WTDY. But setting aside the fact that this is obviously a lot of axe grinding against Wisconsin for dropping Beck for insulting Wisconsin and his shameless plugs for Fox "News", let's concentrate on the phrase "useful idiot."

Everyone who works at Fox "News" is a useful idiot of some sort at some time. For years, Alan Colmes, the token "liberal" on Hannity and Colmes was a mere foil a la Charlie McCarthy. Five nights a week, Hannity's lips moved while conservative America drank the Koolaid as Colmes sat on his lap. Megyn Kelly and the other bubble-headed bleach blonde bimbos in Rupert Murdoch's stable of libertarian lovelies is there merely to fill the horny conservative male 25-55 demographic.

But Glenn Beck's time has come and gone. He's been jettisoned from four states, including Madison, Wisconsin because he's just getting too, well, "out there" even for him. In short, he's been living in his own private Wisconsin.

Now, Glenn Beck makes $33,000,000 a year as a picked scab of the McCarthy era. Like Ann Coulter and that ilk, his job is to stoke fear and panic in people over Obama's Socialism and the impending economic crash, over George Soros, over the Tide Foundation, over the ACLU, over anything more viable than a wet firecracker that can possibly be yeasted up into a conspiracy that will unravel the fabric of this great Republic.

Here's Beck's take on his own private Wisconsin:

We talked today about the police in Seattle. We haven’t talked yet about the police in Wisconsin who are now throwing in with the socialists and the teachers. I mean some of the people who are there are just useful idiots. They don’t know what’s really going on. They don’t know that this is a coordinated effort, and the police, unfortunately in Wisconsin have now thrown in with the protesters in the capitol, and they are not forcing them to leave, which they have to leave. They’re calling this now social justice. No, that is the problem. It is justice for all. Equal justice for all, not special justice. If the Tea Parties were there and they were camped out in the rotunda, they should leave if they’re supposed to, and I’d be the first to say it, obey the law, period, but now the police aren’t forcing them out.

Now, there's about a whole jumbo jet hangar full of bullshit in that one paragraph but what sticks out the most to me is Beck claiming in a way that would make Winston Smith proud that smashing collective bargaining for public unions is "justice for all" seems even more beyond the pale than we're used to from Beck.

Apparently, to Beck and his odious ilk, "justice for all" means justice for the Tea Baggers whose presence was merely theoretical, justice for the Koch Brothers, justice for the Republican Party who wants to butt-fuck public unions and the entire middle class back into the days of Stonehenge.

No, Glenn, if the Tea Baggers were there, they wouldn't have left until they realized they were outgunned. If there was a Democratic Governor in office and he wanted to raise the pay of union workers and actually strengthen collective bargaining rights for the unions, they would've been throwing bricks through his window, they would've been holding up their own misspelled, badly Photoshopped Nazi signs and they would've been screaming like a horde of zombies on fire at the end of a George Romero movie.

We got more than a taste of that in the summer '09 during the health care town halls. What Beck seems to miss is the fact that if the Madison teacher's union and the other protesters acted like typical Tea Baggers, the police wouldn't be siding with them and would've had no choice but to eject them regardless of their private sympathies. But police and civilians are literally lying side by side in the state house every night.

Beck is obviously the useful idiot here. There's a great need for social justice in Wisconsin, as well as in Indiana, Ohio and other states now in the clutches of radical right wing Governors who are engaged, with the Koch Brothers, in their own "coordinated effort" to undermine unions and union support for Democrats in 2012. If there's any "special justice" being screamed for, it's that for union workers, not the right wing industrialists and politicians who want to strip them of their half century-long rights.

Billionaires, Tea Party-backed union busters like Scott Walker and actual useful idiots like Glenn Beck don't need justice. They thrive in the absence of justice with every union they bust, every lie they tell and every time they pollute the air, sea, sky and airwaves.

Now, I say we all march into Beck's office, bend him over his desk and shove Edward R. Murrow's microphone up his blubbery, pasty ass and ram home an unlubed message from Eddie from beyond the grave. Because Murrow wouldn't have had any patience with this fear-stoking, fat fascist any more than have, to date, four radio stations and over 300 of Beck's sponsors.

Last month Amanda had a bang-up post on Rush Limbaugh kicking and screaming about how he won't, he won't, he WON'T eat his vegetables:

There’s something kind of awesome about listening to Rush Limbaugh kick and scream like a 4-year-old child being told to eat his spinach instead of shovel cookies into his face. This entire bit is hilarious, listening to him whine and cry about how terrible and disgusting it is to put OMG actual plant matter in your mouth. While it’s funny listening to him be a little baby about this, though, there’s more to be concerned about here. Limbaugh has taken to suggesting that the advice to eat fruits and vegetables (and to exercise) is conspiracy organized by scientists that are hiding the truth, for nefarious purposes. It’s hard not to wonder if he’s trying to kill his listeners by ranting at them about how their diet should be nothing but junk food and their physical activity levels shouldn’t exceed picking up the remote control and pressing buttons.

[snip]

My feeling about this is that one of Limbaugh’s talents is to take his own psychological issues and to project them out into political rants that rationalize himself to himself, and this tends to work because a lot of what makes him such a pathetic figure affects members of his audience. 

There's been a petulant child aspect to Republicans that goes back decades. I remember George H.W. Bush ranting about broccoli. The fears and resentments of childhood are part and parcel of right-wing talk radio. The way they talk about terrorists, the resentment of those who are prettier -- it's all part of a very primal mindset that they have that most of us outgrow by the time we reach adulthood. I don't know if people on the right really HAVE stopped developing emotionally at the age of four, or if it's just what you have to do in order to tap into that reptilian brain.

We all know that right-wing Republicans have a serious problem with anything that smacks of conservation or of trying to leave a smaller footprint. It seems to offend their sense of manhood, which demands big gas-guzzling vehicles, big consumption of big food, and leaving huge piles of garbage behind. So it's hardly surprising that as part of the Giant Republican Tantrum that's been thrown ever since January 20, 2010, one of the first things the Republican House is doing is restoring non-biodegradable styrofoam cups to the Capitol cafeteria:

In the first move toward phasing out part of Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi's (D-Calif.) "Green the Capitol" program, polystyrene cups were reintroduced this week as an option for coffee drinkers in the Capitol Carry-Out, the building's mini-cafeteria.

The basement eatery had been part of Pelosi's "Greening" program since 2007, when Democrats took control of the House. The program brought climate-friendly vending machines and compact fluorescent lightbulbs to the Capitol; caused the Capitol Power Plant to switch from burning coal to natural gas; and reduced energy and water consumption in Capitol buildings by 23 percent and 32 percent, respectively, according to an April 2010 report.

But it was the $475,000 composting program in the House-side cafeterias that stirred the most controversy. Designed to cut down on waste, the program instituted the use of biodegradable utensils and trays made of cornstarch -- an idea that may have worked better in theory than in practice, as it led to take-away boxes that leaked, spoons that melted and forks that broke when stuck into so much as a chicken tender.

Bullshit. The company I work for also uses these biodegradable utensils and trays. Yes, the forks can bend if you jab a piece of chicken too hard, but they don't break. But I've eaten chili and stew and some pretty wet foods out of the degradable cardboard containers and they do NOT leak through. Most places that have these things also offer cardboard take-out trays that protect the container even further. The larger picture, though, is that this is a relatively minor inconvenience compared to adding to the massive piles of non-degradable garbage that we produce every year.

I have the sense that this is less about outrage over bent forks and damp food containers than it is about just sticking one of these forks metaphorically into Nancy Pelosi's eye.

And somehow I'll bet that not one Republican puts so much as a pea into those containers -- because Rush Limbaugh thinks vegetables are for sissies.

Wonkette puts it all into perspective:

“Foamed polystyrene” is a miraculous invention that manages to be completely awful through every step of its near-eternal “life cycle” — it is manufactured with petroleum that must be imported from Middle East dictatorships, toxic “styrene oligomers” migrate into the food it holds, it’s highly flammable and produces black poisonous smoke, and most of the 25 billion polystyrene cups tossed every year will take more than half a millennium to degrade. And that’s why the Republican-led House of Representatives made it an immediate priority to cancel the House cafeteria’s four years of biodegradable food and beverage packaging. It’s part of the GOP leadership’s “return to the mid-1990s” program. Nancy Pelosi sure was a yucky woman trying to do some sane environmentally-minded things, wasn’t she? Thank the American Jesus that woman is no longer in charge of anything.

Go read the whole rant.

Labels: assholes, environmental death watch, Republican WATBs