tales of copper city

McCain is running against...Obama!

I heard about this yesterday from a friend, the radio ads of John McCain declaring that he's running against Obama. Not against health care reform, not against anything specific, just against Obama. This sounds to me like nothing more than the covert racism that runs throughout the right wing today.

McCain is facing right-wing opposition in the Republican primary, and he's taking up the clarion call of the Tea Parties: O.B.A.M.A. (One Big Ass Mistake America)--- the mistake of electing a man of color to the nation's highest office.

There are kids standing on the street corners of the neighboring town of Sierra Vista, where Fort Huachuca is located, and they are wildly waving One Big Ass Mistake America hate signs at street corners. It takes me back to the big smear days of Senator Joseoph McCarthy, and later, in California, to the days of the John Birch Society and "Impeach Earl Warren!" billboards.  

The way forward for health care reform?

Here's a good explanation (two actually) of how the House and Senate could get it done, given the disparities between the two bills.  It's from Kevin Drum and Mother Jones.

Back to the election maps and the future

It helps from time to time to recall the differential distribution of election results as filtered through our system of 50 states and the electoral college.  It's complicated but it reminds us that even though public opinion may be skewed toward, say, reforming the health care system, the fortunes of the two parties are so equally distributed that a more conservative democracy may lose in a presidential election yet lose because conservative democracy has a fallback position: stalling, obfuscation and outright lying.

And the winning party may be less than skillful in countering these fallback maneuvers on the part of the losing party.

In time the public may grow so frustrated, disgusted, and mistrustful of the winning party for its inability to deliver on its promises and even administer a punishing rebuke to the winning party in a state like Massachusetts that should have been perfectly safe. 

The book to read about our political stalemate

If I were to recommend one book for anyone to read about our political stalemate it would be Off Center: The Republican Revolution and the Erosion of American Democracy by Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson. 

There is a sad irony in my recommendaton because Jacob Hacker, of Yale, is the person who more than anyone else gave life to the "public option" now so in contention in the Senate.  Hacker's idea was in fact ingenious; use the "frame" of competition to create a public plan that would keep private insurance honest and begin to break up the monopolistic tendencies of health insurance in the United States. 

The real world of crazy conservatives

Kevin Drum at Mother Jones on the sad fact that, while some conservative writers hold nuanced views on the issues of the day, in the real world that liberals live in, they are fighting some truly crazy ideas.  Here's an excerpt from Drum's piece, which is a must-read:

The brain, the environment, and life itself

I have long been interested in what I term "life itself," a bracketing of the word life to bring our attention to the existential experience of life as well as to heighten our appreciation of the miracle we are "given," engaged in, dancing with, and so forth. Life itself is in front of us, is something that we experience, even enact.

I am also interested in consciousness and the unconscious, or the brain or what some call "the shadow" and in what ways does consciousness produce what we think of as life itself.

Alva Noë is a philosopher at UC Berkeley and he warns of making the serious error of assuming that we are our brains;  this is a serious fallacy. We have a brain and with remarkable capacities but consciousness and our awareness of the processes of life are an achievement, an upshot of the interaction with our environment that we participate in, not something that is produced within our brains.  

Drinking games, or what the anthropologists saw

Apparently there is nothing that Malcolm Gladwell is not interested in.

Take his latest book,  What the Dog Saw and Other Adventures. There are nineteen essays there, all of them written for his employer, The New Yorker. The essay from which the title is taken, "What the Dog Saw," is about Cesar Millan, the “Dog Whisperer” and television personality, about how he works, which turns out to be so complicated and intricate that it requires the skills of not just ethologists---people who analyze animal behavior---but also psychologists, Millan's wife, dance movement experts, former clients and so on.

Getting rid of Rahm

Leslie Gelb has written the best piece around on how President Obama can save his presidency.  And he needs to save his presidency.   Gelb's article is in The Daily Beast.

Why Washington loves the filibuster

Jonathan Chait of the The New Republic has an excellent piece on why official Washington is reluctant to give up the filibuster.  Meanwhile the nation lies in gridlock.  An impressive electoral victory by President Obama is dribbling away, which, of course, is why the Republicans love the filibuster.

And Obama refuses to retaliate with recess appointments over the Senatorial "holds" on his appointments.  

Barack Obama seems harder to understand the more we get to know him.  He lets the Republicans have their way with him.  

What's Spanish for quagmire?

Jorge Casteñeda, a leading Mexican intellectual and professor of politics at the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City and Global Distinguished Professor of Politics and Latin American and Caribbean Studies at New York University has written a fascinating analysis of the violence attendant to the "war on drugs" in Mexico.  

The subtitle of the article is Five Myths that Caused the Failed War Next Door.