Barack Obama | Periscope Depth

From the Blog

Jul

you never give me your money; you only give me your funny paper

Posted by Perich at 8:08 am

I was as virtuously given as a gentleman need to be; virtuous enough; swore little; diced not above seven times a week; went to a bawdy-house once in a quarter—of an hour; paid money that I borrowed, three or four times …

- Wm. Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part 1

A few friends shared David Brooks’s latest op-ed with some enthusiasm this week. So I gave it a read.

With Bobo it’s always a question of how far I can get without openly guffawing, spraying water out of my nose and upsetting the neighbors. In Monday’s column, it was this gem:

The members of this movement have no sense of moral decency. A nation makes a sacred pledge to pay the money back when it borrows money. But the members of this movement talk blandly of default and are willing to stain their nation’s honor.

Lawd. In the century that’s already given us the Iraq Civil War, the Military Commissions Act, the Wall Street bailout and Fergie’s solo projects, defaulting on a debt would “stain their nation’s honor.” Oh no! Failure to raise the debt ceiling! At long last, have you no sense of decency?

And whence this icky stain, Brooks? Not from the awkwardness that would result as China, Japan and the U.K. pass the debt to each other, unwilling to make the phone call that would collapse the world economy. No, this stain would come from the United States breaking its sacred pledge to pay back money it borr– ah ha ha, oh ho, ho ho ho, ha ha ha, hrrm, sorry, give me a second. Ah ha. Hooooo. All right, I’m good.

Anyhow, Brooksie’s confused because, to paraphrase ~~Mencken~~ Sinclair, his job requires that he stay confused. If he doesn’t believe in his heart of hearts that the Opposition Party really wants to shrink the size of government, he’s out of work. He has to keep mistaking pretext for cause. And sure, if you believe that the Opposition Party is driven by the principle of reducing the size of government, and that their only failure is extremism in the pursuit of frugality, then I’ll bet they look like they’ve been “infected by a faction” (Brooks).

But if you believe that the Opposition Party wants power not to enforce a small government agenda but for its own sake, that they’re taking advantage of a “fiscal crisis” in which any economic fallout will be blamed on the Ruling Party and that they’re refusing to compromise not out of fanaticism or dishonor but because refusal to compromise makes you look strong and voters love strength more than peace, then the present becomes less baffling.

The Opposition Party has not been infected by Tea Party madness, any more than a man with a leashed pitbull needs to check his own stool for worms, rather than the dog’s. The Opposition Party wants power. It sees inflexibility in budget negotiations as the road to power. The Ruling Party wants to keep power. It sees any crisis that can be linked to its refusal to raise the debt limit as a threat to that power.

I never thought I’d be quoting David Frum with approval, but he sums it up more tersely than I can:

[I]t looks like Obama has set up yet another lopsided bargaining table: He needs the Republicans to give him something, anything, that he can claim as a victory. This need, however, perversely puts the Republicans in the situation where if they give him something, anything, it will be represented as a defeat. The president’s own weakness has had this perverse effect on his political opponents: it has reduced the value of his own concessions (no matter how big) and hugely exaggerated the significance of any offset he achieves (no matter how small).

I agree with all of the above except Frum’s bitter sigh at Obama’s “weakness.” Obama’s not in the strongest position to help his party out, but his need for concessions doesn’t make him weak. When you’re in the top spot, you have the most to lose.

[P.S. I put this post on the spike on Wednesday, prior to Obama's announcement that sure, he'd be willing to cut some Social Security if it'd make the Opposition Party happy. Leaving the post as-is because I don't think this changes the context. Whether the Ruling Party cuts benefits by adjusting the COLA or whether this is just, as the Administration's biggest fans assert, Obama playing 11-dimensional chess, is irrelevant. Whether you would take to the streets if Social Security were touched or whether you want to dismantle the welfare state is irrelevant. What matters is that the fate of Social Security will be decided by people who, come age 65, would never notice its absence. Never forget where power is and what power wants.]

Jul

they’re all pussies, dicks and assholes

Posted by Perich at 8:01 am

MSNBC senior analyst suspended for calling the President “a dick”

MSNBC senior political analyst Mark Halperin was suspended on Thursday by the cable network after he called President Obama “a dick” on a popular morning show and then quickly apologized.

“I thought he was a kind of a dick yesterday,” Halperin, who also is an editor at large for Time, said on “Morning Joe,” referring to the president’s conduct during his press conference.

Whatever happened to the truth being its own defense?^* Did you see the press conference Halperin was referring to? Especially when Obama got on the subject of the ongoing war on Libya:

We have engaged in a limited operation to help a lot of people against one of the worst tyrants in the world — somebody who nobody should want to defend — and we should be sending a unified message to this guy that he should step down and give his people a fair chance to live their lives without fear. And this suddenly becomes the cause célèbre for some folks in Congress? Come on.

Shaming your political opponents as defending tyrants? The concern over misused funds, loss of civilian life and illegal embroilment in another country’s rebellion is a “cause célèbre”? And his response is a dismissive “Come on”? That’s a dick move.

Or, if not that, how about the DoJ backpedaling on the 2009 memo calling off the war on (legal) marijuana dispensaries? A memo released earlier this week affirms that no, the local laws don’t matter:

The June 29 memo, from Deputy Attorney General James M. Cole to U.S. attorneys, says a 2009 memo issued by Deputy Attorney General David Ogden — referred to as the “Ogden Memo” — remains in effect.

The Ogden letter advised prosecutors that enforcement efforts against people using marijuana to treat cancer or other serious illnesses in accordance with state laws may not be “an efficient use of federal resources,” according to Cole’s memo. The Ogden memo was “never intended to shield” larger scale cultivation, Cole wrote.

“Within the past 12 months, several jurisdictions have considered or enacted legislation to authorize multiple large- scale, privately operated industrial marijuana cultivation centers,” according to the June 29 memo. “Some of these planned facilities have revenue projections of millions of dollars based on the planned cultivation of tens of thousands of cannabis plants.”

The Ogden memo was largely irrelevant, as the DEA never stopped raiding legal, unarmed, medicinal marijuana dispensaries. Still: another dick move.

Anyhow, Halperin has been indefinitely suspended (read: canned). I’d comment on the air of faux civility that surrounds cable journalism – where you can give airtime to the most ludicrous theories about the President’s birth, call him a socialist, describe harmless gestures as “terrorist fist bump”s – but they can’t even keep up the faux anymore. It’s okay to be wrong about the President, just not rude to him.

__________________
* That was never the case, Professor; nothing has happened to it.

Apr

you sharp as a tack, you some type of lawyer or something

Posted by Perich at 7:00 am

I thought I had another post lined up for Friday, but I guess I’m talking about President Obama’s birth certificate.

In its racial aspects, this is an ugly moment. As Baratunde Thurston put it, it’s not shocking to hear a rich white man asking a black man for his papers in America, except that this is April 2011. And there’s no question that this is about race. Not to suggest that the Opposition Party is furious at Obama because he’s black. They’re furious at him because he’s Ruling Party. If he were white, they’d go after every alleged mistress of his until they found one that stuck. Different tactics, same intensity. But, being a black man, it’s easy to accuse him of Otherness. No one ever thinks to accuse powerful white men of secretly being foreign citizens, even if they were born in Panama.^*

But if we consider this as a narrative about power, it becomes more complicated.

Barack Obama was born in the United States. He knew that; it wasn’t a surprise to him. Knowing that, he could watch the manufactured furor over his birthplace with detachment. He had the ability to put it to a stop the first time it came up. But he let it go for two and a half years (not counting his candidacy). Why? We can construct a story about his need to focus on the real issues, and the weirdness of America’s radical fringe, but Ockham prefers simple explanation. He did it because it helped him. He let the speculation go because it furthered his interests, and he stopped it once he thought it didn’t.

Barack Obama is a President who surfed to Washington on a wave of progressive sentiment and Ruling Party enthusiasm. He has since broken or ignored several of his campaign promises (especially the ones about transparency), prosecuted wars in five separate countries, tossed America’s working poor to the insurance companies like a gristly bone into a pack of dogs, granted protections both explicit and implicit to criminal financiers, lawbreaking telecom companies and torturers, and increased government spending even more than the last guy, who we all agree was pretty bad. Doing things like that, consistently and flagrantly and energetically, tends to disillusion the base. And when you’ve got a disillusioned base, there’s only two ways to get them back to your side: live up to the things they expect of you, or make the other side look terrifying.

“I can’t vote against the Ruling Party! You saw what happened when I voted for Nader in 2000! What if Trump gets elected?” Donald Trump will never receive a Presidential nomination. It’s not going to happen. The Opposition Party may do a bit of VP stunt casting come sweeps week, but for the foreseeable future, the face of the ticket will be a craggy white politician who polls well in the South. Trump neither owes nor is owed favors by anyone of note inside the Beltway. None of the kingmakers want him in the palace. Once you’ve been in a Pizza Hut commercial, the Oval Office is forever barred to you.

Donald Trump is too dumb to be a threat. But letting the birth certificate “debate” go on for two and a half years is a great way to keep the Ruling Party afraid of Trump and his ilk. And ending the debate by producing definitive documentation – documentation that’s existed for nearly fifty years – is a great way to earn a quick win for Team Blue. It leaves the Opposition Party with little choice but to either disavow their most excitable faction or to double down on a ridiculous claim. “Why did it take him so long to produce it?” the birthers whine. “Why is it only surfacing now?” Because you’re no longer useful to the President, guys. Go home.

* UPDATE: Ed over at Gin and Tacos gives a few examples of prior presidents and candidates who had disputable citizenship by birth, if you wanted to make a thing over it.

Jan

you make me feel like I’m living a teenage dream

Posted by Perich at 7:00 am

James Wolcott in Vanity Fair (February 2011):

A blogger named David Seaton provided the keenest insight into the tactical superiority of Beck’s home-brewed surrealism. “To understand what Beck is doing, to understand him, you must suspend your capacity for rational thought and just let the emotions wash over you and try to take note of them as they assault your endocrine system,” Seaton wrote. As America enters the downward slope of empire—its debt mounting, the disparity between wealthy and poor continuing to chasm, the environmental ravages becoming irreversible, high unemployment becoming the cruel norm—the Richie Riches have a vested interest in misdirecting people by blaming the powerless for the sins of the powerful. Incoherence isn’t a bug in Beck’s software program, it’s the primary directive. Seaton: “That is what the Tea Party, Fox, etc is all about: keeping people from thinking straight. The idea is to play on people’s emotions: fear, hate, racism, xenophobia, just to keep them from doing the math. The Teabaggers, Beck, [Gingrich] and Fox [News] are often criticized for not making any sense This is not a failure of communication or an error on their part. That is the object of the exercise: to make rational thought difficult or impossible due to emotional overload.” ([Seaton's] italics.)

Oh, you.

Ezra Klein, January 2008:

Obama’s finest speeches do not excite. They do not inform. They don’t even really inspire. They elevate. They enmesh you in a grander moment, as if history has stopped flowing passively by, and, just for an instant, contracted around you, made you aware of its presence, and your role in it. He is not the Word made flesh, but the triumph of word over flesh, over color, over despair. The other great leaders I’ve heard guide us towards a better politics, but Obama is, at his best, able to call us back to our highest selves, to the place where America exists as a glittering ideal, and where we, its honored inhabitants, seem capable of achieving it, and thus of sharing in its meaning and transcendence.

Curtis Sittenfeld, Salon.com, November 2010:

But when I see Obama on television, I’m unfailingly struck by his intelligence and charisma, by his easygoing humor, by the magnificence of his megawatt smile. He just makes me proud, and perhaps this is where I should admit that if there are two categories of Obama critics—conservatives who never liked the guy and have in some cases become unhinged since he was elected, and centrists or Democrats who voted for him but now feel let down—I suspect that, in the visceral nature of my response to our president, I have more in common with the unhinged nut jobs. By this I mean that my Obama admiration is a kind of emotional inverse of the right-wing Obama antipathy: I can pretend it’s all about policy, but in truth, it’s much more personal. Where his detractors dislike him because of, say, that Muslim vibe he gives off, I like him for similarly nebulous, albeit slightly more factual reasons.

That’s … it’s … it’s just precious, is what it is.

Good try, Wolcott! See you next season!

(c/o Paul Campos at LGM)

Nov

everywhere I go, people know the game I’m playing

Posted by Perich at 7:00 am

Every nine months, I start talking about politics again. Roughly six months after that, I stop, realizing that my tone has become insufferable. As I slip further along into adulthood, I put a higher premium on being civil than on being right all the time. People can disagree with me – within earshot! – and not only will I not take it as an insult, I won’t even speak up. I don’t feel compelled to correct them. This makes me a lot more fun at parties. Smugness doesn’t keep the wine flowing.

This is my perennial promise to stop talking about politics for a bit.^* One last comment to tide me over.

I spend a lot of time making fun of things in the political arena that I find contradictory. I do this because it’s easy to find contradictions and because it’s easy to turn a contradiction into a joke. That’s what paradox is and from there absurdity grows. But it’s unfair to sit in the front row, lobbing peanuts at Billy Zane while he recites Shakespeare, without saying what I would find more dignified. Nothing says critics are useless to art. But a critic must assert as well as rebut.

So here’s what I want: an immediate, dramatic increase in American cynicism.

I try not to be a Europhile, but the quality of Britain’s political satires and dramas towers over America’s. It’s not even close. Here’s a short list: House of Cards, Sandbaggers, Absolute Power, The Thick of It, Yes Minister, In The Red, and so forth. What sorts of media critical of American government written over the last twenty years that belong on that list? Wag the Dog? Maybe?

Of course, I know I am being the Europhile I try not to be. The shows I’ve cited are excellent examples of political drama, but they’re the exception, not the norm. Britain is not a nation of witty sophisticates. It’s a nation a lot like America. But when you compare the best the BBC and ITV have to offer with the best that American broadcasters have to offer, it’s not even a close race.

That’s what I’m aiming for. I want every new season of American television to have one comedy or drama depicting the savage hypocrisy of representative government. I want The Weft Wing, an Office-style mockumentary about a bunch of ambitious Harvard and Georgetown grads who figure out new euphemisms for “bombing civilians.” I want The Big Push Theory, a sitcom about four nerds who run a think tank that drafts leading opinion polls. I want Reno 911 but played straight-faced and set in Atlanta. I want Larry David’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. I want stories without heroes, filled with awkward laughs and abrupt fades to black.

Why do I want all this? Because, to my cynical eyes, American politics would be easier to stomach – if not actually more humane – if Americans stopped believing politicians were better than they. They’re not. People who seek political office are no nobler, smarter or steadier than the people they govern. Picture your retired neighbor, that coworker who forwards you viral videos and the guy who sits in the deli all day and agrees loudly with talk radio. All three of them are in Congress. And more besides.

Americans claim not to be fooled. They say they’re hardened realists. But then they re-elect a guy by virtue of having been in office during a terrorist attack (which apparently means “leadership”). Or they elect a guy who sounds nice when he talks. When officials claim that they’ll lower taxes, reduce spending, bring the troops home and promote equal rights for all citizens, Americans believe them. Despite the fact that this has been promised in every election since America’s first.

A man who wants power over your tax dollars is not going to save you. He does not hold the secret to reducing unemployment. If there were a secret, we’d know it by now. That’s the thing about awesome discoveries that benefit everyone: you can’t keep them secret. Imagine if America had to hold an election every four years to rediscover penicillin.

I suspect most Americans know this or will admit it if pressed. But they still want to believe, despite a lack of empirical evidence or logical warrant, that One Man with One One-Hundredth of a Vote Over the Say of the Appointment of an Abstruse Federal Bureaucracy can make a difference.

The advantage of quality satire is that it gives the American popular culture a common language. When we encounter a ridiculous workplace situation, we can compare it to something from The Office. This makes our boorish boss, or our annoying coworkers, or our workplace bureaucracy, seem less like a trap. Most of the comedy of The Office comes from a character saying something that wouldn’t be at all out of place in a real office environment. This helps put the absurdity of our own jobs in context. “That’s right,” we remind ourselves. “This is ridiculous.” And being able to look around and admit our secret fear to our friends – that we’re participating in an absurd sham – is a relief.

People talk about disillusionment like it’s a bad thing. Who wants to stay illusioned?

Fortunately, Curtis Sittenfeld has taken the first steps, with this Swiftian bit of satire on Slate.com. After running down a laundry list of Obama’s failures within the first two years – a stimulus that wasn’t perhaps as urgent as the American public was led to believe; keeping Guantanamo Bay open; defending DADT; increasing troop presence in Afghanistan; and that’s not even counting the orders to assassinate a U.S. citizen residing in Yemen – Sittenfeld pulls back the lid on this solitaire diamond:

But when I see Obama on television, I’m unfailingly struck by his intelligence and charisma, by his easygoing humor, by the magnificence of his megawatt smile. He just makes me proud, and perhaps this is where I should admit that if there are two categories of Obama critics—conservatives who never liked the guy and have in some cases become unhinged since he was elected, and centrists or Democrats who voted for him but now feel let down—I suspect that, in the visceral nature of my response to our president, I have more in common with the unhinged nut jobs. By this I mean that my Obama admiration is a kind of emotional inverse of the right-wing Obama antipathy: I can pretend it’s all about policy, but in truth, it’s much more personal.

That’s on the second page of the article. Not since “A Modest Proposal” has a satirist buried the punchline so deep within the prose, stretching the anticipation out until it snaps with a laugh.

Brilliant satire, Sittenfeld. The rest of you: this is what we have to emulate. Get to work.

_________
* The day after everyone’s stopped campaigning in the midterm elections, Professor? Oh, how generous of you. You absolute saint.

Sep

god’s left hand wasn’t made to get by

Posted by Perich at 7:00 am

Glenn Greenwald:

At this point, I didn’t believe it was possible, but the Obama administration has just reached an all-new low in its abysmal civil liberties record. In response to the lawsuit filed by Anwar Awlaki’s father asking a court to enjoin the President from assassinating his son, a U.S. citizen, without any due process, the administration late last night, according to The Washington Post, filed a brief asking the court to dismiss the lawsuit without hearing the merits of the claims. That’s not surprising: both the Bush and Obama administrations have repeatedly insisted that their secret conduct is legal but nonetheless urge courts not to even rule on its legality. But what’s most notable here is that one of the arguments the Obama DOJ raises to demand dismissal of this lawsuit is “state secrets”: in other words, not only does the President have the right to sentence Americans to death with no due process or charges of any kind, but his decisions as to who will be killed and why he wants them dead are “state secrets,” and thus no court may adjudicate their legality.

Radley Balko:

There are no mitigating factors, here. Obama is arguing the executive has the power to execute American citizens without a trial, without even so much as an airing of the charges against them, and that it can do so in complete secrecy, with no oversight from any court, and that the families of the executed have no legal recourse.

[...]

So yeah. Tyranny. If there’s more tyrannical power a president could possibly claim than the power to execute the citizens of his country at his sole discretion, with no oversight, no due process, and no ability for anyone to question the execution even after the fact . . . I can’t think of it.

Barack Obama:

The idea that we’ve got a lack of enthusiasm in the [Ruling Party] base, that people are sitting on their hands complaining, is just irresponsible. . . . .If we want the kind of country that respects civil rights and civil liberties, we’d better fight in this election.

I think Obama’s going about this the wrong way. al-Awlaki’s a U.S. citizen. If Obama wants him killed, just send some Chicago PD to arrest him. Or have someone phone an anonymous tip to Atlanta PD that he was seen smoking a joint in Sana’a. Sucker’s dead in a week, tops.

Mar

it's the answer to the neverending story

Posted by Professor Coldheart at 7:00 am

God damn it. God damn it. I almost made it the entire week without saying anything about the health care reboot bill. And then:

Obama signs order on abortion in health care bill (AP):

With little fanfare, President Barack Obama signed an executive order Wednesday designed to ensure that no federal money can be used for elective abortions under the nation’s new health care legislation.

The order had been demanded by a key bloc of anti-abortion Ruling Party members as the price for their support for the health overhaul legislation that narrowly passed the House Sunday night.

Since then it’s been criticized by anti-abortion groups who say it has no actual impact other than restating restrictions on abortion funding already in the law. Rep. Bart Stupak, leader of the anti-abortion Ruling Party caucus, insists that’s not the case, but lawmakers supporting abortion rights did not object to the order because they said it made no difference.

Pro-choicers made quite a few complaints about the explicit denial of federal funds for abortions in this new health coverage bill. The Ruling Party acknowledged these issues but said hey, it’s cool, let’s just pass this shoddy bill full of pro-insurance-company graft first, and then we’ll fix it. And while this makes sense – Roe v. Wade became settled case law nearly forty years ago, and a woman’s legal ownership of her own body has only become stronger since then – it still sounds just a little dismissive when you put it that way.^*

I know, I know. We can’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Women just need to wait their turn. After all, the important thing is that the Ruling Party passed a healthcare reboot that helps pay for itself by taxing high-income earners. Right?

Meanwhile, debate was under way in the Senate on a companion bill to the landmark law, with Opposition senators forcing the Ruling Party to run a gantlet of politically dicey votes on a long list of amendments. Major components of the “fix-it” legislation include scaling back a tax on high-cost insurance plans opposed by labor unions, eliminating a special Medicaid deal for Nebraska, closing the coverage gap in the Medicare prescription benefit, and imposing higher taxes on upper-income earners.

[...]

The Ruling Party is vowing to bat down the amendments one-by-one, and also hope Opposition won’t succeed with any procedural objections, because any change to the fix-it bill would send it back to the House, a complication Ruling Party leaders want to avoid.

Oh, wait: so the higher taxes aren’t settled law yet? Senate still needs to pass that? Well, it’s not like the Ruling Party has a history of caving, so I’m sure that’s set.

(Check the text of the House Resolution, HR 3590, if you like. There’s a new excise tax on “Cadillac” insurance plans, taking effect in 2018. How many people do you think will be demanding those kind of plans eight years from now?)

And what sort of principled objections will the Opposition Party mount in this last-ditch defense?

Sen. Tom Coburn wants a vote on his amendment to prohibit coverage of Viagra for sex offenders. Sen. Judd Gregg wants savings from Medicare cuts plowed back into the health care program for seniors, instead of being used to expand coverage to the uninsured.

Viagra for sex offenders? That’s the most crucial issue facing America today – making sure sex offenders can’t get Viagra. I can’t even come up with a joke for that.

But what’s really laughable are the pundits on the Opposition Party side who call this America’s first steps toward socialism. Guys! You were awake in history class, right? Because creating a massive body of bulletproof legislation that funnels money from the working poor to a small oligopoly of insurance providers isn’t “socialism.” The reason nobody takes your Party seriously anymore is because you don’t know what words mean.

I really need to stop reading the news. I have enough stressors in my life that I can change without spending my free hours worrying about things I can’t.^** But there’s a word for people who form their opinions of the world before age 30 and then stop thinking. And while it’s not the worst thing you could call me, I’m not sure I feel like donning the ratty jacket and settling into the rocking chair just yet.

Still: you got me talking about politics again. Damn it, damn it, damn it. God damn.

____________
^* In case it’s not clear just how insidious this is: it’s the poor and working poor who have typically had the hardest time getting pregnancies safely terminated. And it’s the poor and working poor who’ll be most likely to need federal subsidies to acquire their (soon-to-be-mandatory) health insurance. It’s not like they’ll have the option of not buying any. And just in case anyone thought this was a wily ruse that he later planned to abandon, President Obama signed a (largely redundant) executive order yesterday stating, “No, really, we weren’t kidding, no federal funds can be used on abortions.”

^** “But Professor, blah blah voting.” Did voting for Man-Palin stop the healthcare reboot from passing? Did voting for Obama make single-payer an option?

Dec

and if the law don't get her then I will

Posted by Professor Coldheart at 7:00 am

To get a car registered in Massachusetts, you will need to do the following:

Acquire auto insurance. This isn’t hard; you can do this online. But I should caution that it’s not quite as easy as buying a book on Amazon. Every insurance company wants to give you a quote if you enter a few vague details. This draws you in, making you a lead. Once you start the application process, giving your driving history and VIN, shit gets real. “Oh, you’re that Professor Coldheart? Yeah; double the quote we just gave you.” Seriously.
E-mail the insurance company to get proof of insurance.
Presuming you got collision insurance – you’re not dumb, are you? – go get a photo inspection of your car. This isn’t very hard, but it takes some time out of a busy day. You will receive a form that you need to fax to your insurer, which, given the number of people who still use fax machines every day, won’t be a problem at all.
Go to the RMV and collect a number.
Spend some time browsing in Best Buy and Target next door, waiting for your number to get called.
Approach the RMV lady with your title and proof of insurance. What’s this? My insurance doesn’t take effect until tomorrow? Well, then I guess there’s nothing I can do with the rest of my day, is there? Certainly not the nine other errands that hinged on my having proof of registration of the car that I drove here.
Stomp into the rain.
Sigh, accept the hand that you’ve dealt yourself, and go buy groceries.
Take a nap.
The next day, go to the RMV first thing. Collect a number.
Spend some time browsing in Best Buy and Target.
Approach the RMV lady with your title and proof of insurance.
Fill out a form to waive any sales tax that you might owe on this car that you bought out of state.
Fill out the same details on a second form that you already filled in on a first. Whatever.
Get your plates! And your registration!
Affix these plates to your car.
Get your car inspected for the Massachusetts safety and emissions test.
What’s that? My car will fail the test if I don’t replace this one $12 light bulb, out of the eight light bulbs in the rear window? Well, go to town, buddy!
Get a parking permit for your apartment complex.
Get a parking permit for the town you live in.
Go home; park your car.

Dear Mr. President,

Remember when you compared mandatory purchase of health insurance to auto insurance? That’s not helping.

Yours,
Professor Coldheart.

Oct

it all depends upon your appetite

Posted by Professor Coldheart at 7:00 am

HOPE
Twice in the span of eight hours on Sunday I saw “Yes You Can!” used as a marketing slogan. Once for a dry cleaning special, once for an online dating site. Aside from the sheer silliness of appropriating a Presidential campaign slogan for, well, dry cleaning or online dating, I have two follow-up questions:

Why now? The election was a year ago. Obama’s lost a lot of credibility recently, what with failure to institute the Ruling Party’s health care plan, waffling on the Defense of Marriage Act, upholding the Opposition Party’s stance on indefinite detention of enemy combatants, trillion dollar national debt, et cetera. Is now the time to invoke his image? Or is the lead time on creating the display copy for sandwich boards and banner ads one year? I can assure you that, for banner ads, it ain’t.
Why “Yes You Can!”? Why would a dry cleaner or an online dating service want to invoke that sense of civic optimism, sweeping social change or racial harmony? At long last – affordable same day dry cleaning! America has entered the Twenty-First century, now that you can browse webcam pics of 22-year-olds in the privacy of your home.

“My Fellow Americans, Let’s Roll … To The Olive Garden” would be equally weird.

fubar

Fed by the Invisible Hand
Pemberton Farms had their annual customer appreciation day on Saturday. I can never turn down free food, and the deli couldn’t be any closer unless I lived above it, so off I went into the rain. I intended to merely scarf as much free food as I could – two burgers, one hot dog, lots of bread and brie and hummus – and then scamper. But then a kind gentleman offered me a Dixie cup of Trapiche malbec which went down so smooth, so sweet. And when he told me it was only $8.99, what was I going to do? Not buy it?

The gents at The Second Glass have trained me to never pay more than $15 for a bottle of wine. This has the unintended side effect of compelling me to buy every bottle of wine (that tastes good) that’s below $12. I have collected three unopened bottles of red in this way. You bring the cheese and crackers, I’ll bring the kung fu movies.

Nov

it's not a habit, it's cool; I feel alive

Posted by Professor Coldheart at 7:00 am

In part of a slow effort to improve my productivity, I cut myself off from as many political weblogs as possible over the last month or so. I refused to let myself get drawn into the minutiae that amateur pundits obsess over (OMG Palin’s expensive wardrobe! WTF Obama socialism!), because I knew it would only make me angry.

But I had a few minutes to kill on Monday morning so, in a moment of weakness, I revisited IOZ.

Oh, sweet mother of Motown, that felt good.

From Moving to Montana Soon:

If the election of Barack Obama makes America “socialist,” then this blog makes me Tom fucking Clancy. I mean, here you have a dude who basically says he’s going to tinker a little bit with the marginal tax rate and try to close some corporate loopholes (yeah, uh, bon chance, yo), but who otherwise promises to invade Syria and Afghanistan and Pakistan and Iran and the Moon and Kupier Belt, to expand the death penalty to include absentee fatherism, and to have the NSA eavesdrop on everyone in the universe. Ohmigod, America has been taken over by a dude who believes in American primacy and hegemony, who calls Israel our double-super-BFF-forever, who embraces a narrative of National Greatness that should give Canadian bagman David Frum the biggest only hard-on he’s ever had. Are we really in for four years of the chest-puffing closet cases of the putative right trying to convince us that a Wilsonian is some kind of crypto-Leninist?

From Phallibertarians:

Male libertarians who denigrate the pervading social constraints on women and people of minority racial groups and people with less common sexual predilections–i.e., most male libertarians–do so because their ideology is grumpy and reactionary; it is forged of the same stuff as crybaby conservativism; its concerns with genuine liberty are purely tactical, and entirely personal. These scattershot beliefs, which consist principally of disliking taxes, regretting surveillance, and smoking weed hardly constitute a political identity at all. Sometimes they involve opposition to imperialism abroad; sometimes not. They’re the reason libertarianism in general is routinely mocked as a kind of solipsism: it is!

[...]

Many, many self-identified libertarians are in fact bourgeois white men firmly ensconced in a patriarchal heteronormative social order that they fundamentally do not wish to change.

Holy hell, my hands are shaking. Someone keep me away from the devil in that needle because, after the two weeks leading up to this past election, this shit got me hooked again.