Texas immigration bill has an escape clause

As explained at Yglesias:

Under the House Bill 2012 introduced by a tea party favorite state Rep. Debbie Riddle — who’s been saying for some time that she’d like to see Texas institute an Arizona-style immigration law — hiring an undocumented maid, caretaker, lawnworker or any type of houseworker would be allowed. Why? As Texas state Rep. Aaron Pena, also a Republican, told CNN, without the exemption, “a large segment of the Texas population” would wind up in prison if the bill became law.

“When it comes to household employees or yard workers it is extremely common for Texans to hire people who are likely undocumented workers,” Pena told the news giant. “It is so common it is overlooked.”

I get so tired of the rampant and unrelenting hypocrisy of American legislators that I almost can't bring myself to continue reading such articles, much less blog them. 

Via ravings of a semi-sane madwoman.

Voting patterns and income

Data from CNN's 2010 exit polls, via Frum Forum and The Daily Dish.

Remembering the words of Ronald Reagan

The photo above shows Madison resident Philippa Bergman writing her words of protest on the pavement near the capitol.  For "paint" she is cleverly using mud, which will be washed away with the next rain. Here is her text:

"These are the values inspiring those brave workers in Poland ... They remind us that where free unions and collective bargaining are forbidden, freedom is lost." - Ronald Reagan

The words come from Reagan's 1980 Labor Day speech, during which he reminded listeners that he was president of his union (the Screen Actors Guild).

Photo credit Nataraj Hauser, in eyeDance - an excellent Madison blog for monitoring the activities of the legislature and the protests.  Lots of great pix.

Wisconsin protestors carrying inflatable palm trees

They are doing so in response to this segment from Bill O'Reilly's program on FOX -

- which showed footage of unruly protestors in Sacramento, California (with palm trees in the background), while discussing the protests in Madison.

p.s. - several people have emailed me to ask me to blog the events in Madison.  I've assembled a bunch of links, but it will be a while before I can get everything (including my thoughts) organized.

Prank phone call

Found at Blogging via Typewriter.

Where are Obama's comfortable shoes ??

Video excerpt from a 2007 speech, which included these words:

And understand this: If American workers are being denied their right to organize and collectively bargain when I’m in the White House, I will put on a comfortable pair of shoes myself, I’ll walk on that picket line with you as President of the United States of America. Because workers deserve to know that somebody is standing in their corner.

One wag at the Firedoglake source suggested that the shoes have waffle soles.

Watson solves the debt crisis

Credit to Nate Beeler, The Washington Examiner, with a big hat tip to The Pajama Pundit.

"City-states" and voter representation

A map presented by Samuel Arbesman showing states that are dominated by single metropolitan areas:

For example, the state of Illinois is a city-state because, despite its large physical area, two-thirds of its population lies within the counties that make up the Chicago metropolitan area... These are the fourteen states (plus the District of Columbia) where over the half the population of that individual state lies within a single metropolitan area...

More generally, these city-states don’t fit a single category in my mind: they are on both coasts as well as being landlocked, and encompass the non-contiguous states of Alaska and Hawaii.

More discussion at the link, along with the numerical data for each state (MN = 59%, WI = 27.6%). Further commentary at Yglesias, who notes -

I think this is mostly a glance at how poorly designed our currently political boundaries are. The definition of a metropolitan area is bound to be somewhat arbitrary around the margin, but these are real social and economic phenomena. But we make important political decisions at the state level. That’s not just state government, it’s senators and the electoral college as well. Some states—California, Texas, Florida—are way too big and encompass multiple major metro areas...  There’s a huge continuous swath of land in Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana, and Wyoming that gets ten senators and has fewer residents than the Detroit MSA which doesn’t even get to dominate a single state.

Something worth noting is that while overrepresentation of low population states was obviously part of the original constitutional bargain for a reason, this is a different phenomenon. Late 18th century America was such an overwhelmingly rural country that the whole question would have been irrelevant. Meanwhile, some of the metro-dominated states are also low-population states.

End (some) tyranny

Via The Frustrated Teacher.

"Palin" is Greek for "again"

You learn something every day.  Last night I was using the apparent last hours of free access to the online OED to look up words, including "ecpyrosis," which turned out to be a Stoic belief in the periodic destruction of the cosmos by a great conflagration, recreated by palingenesis.

Then of course I needed to find out what palingenesis was.  The Stoics used the term for the continual re-creation of the universe by the Creator after its absorption into himself, and...

"In biology, it is another word for recapitulation - the phase in the development of an organism in which its form and structure pass through the changes undergone in the evolution of the species. In theology, the word can be used to refer to reincarnation and Christian spiritual rebirth during baptism."

I wonder if she knows that?  Could she incorporate it into her campaign?  If so, she will need to be aware of a politically incorrect aspect of the word...

Although Josephus used the term for the national restoration of the Jews, the core tenets of the political ideology of fascism earn its description as a "palingenetic ideology", primarily as a result of the notion that fascism itself is the rebirth of a state and/or empire in the image of that which came before it - thus, the ancestral political underpinnings. Specifically academic political theorist Roger Griffin refers to fascism as "palingenetic ultranationalism". The best examples of this can be found with both Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany - Italy looking to establish a palingenetic line between the 20th century regime under Benito Mussolini as being the second incarnation of the Roman Empire, while Adolf Hitler's regime was seen as being the third palingenetic incarnation - beginning first with the Holy Roman Empire ("First Reich") then with Bismarck's German Empire ("Second Reich") and then resulting in Nazi Germany ("Third Reich").

Mubarak's wealth

When I posted a query last week asking why Mubarak doesn't just leave Egypt, I commented that "he must have gobs of money."  Even though I'm a seasoned cynic, I was startled by the number cited by ABC News:

Experts say the wealth of the Mubarak family was built largely from military contracts during his days as an air force officer. He eventually diversified his investments through his family when he became president in 1981. The family's net worth ranges from $40 billion to $70 billion, by some estimates...

"The business ventures from his military and government service accumulated to his personal wealth," said Jamal. "There was a lot of corruption in this regime and stifling of public resources for personal gain."

Jamal said that Mubarak's assets are most likely in banks outside of Egypt, possibly in the United Kingdom and Switzerland...

Gross national income is $2,070 per family in Egypt, according to the World Bank.

Republican presidential hopefuls

Things will change in the coming year, but for now this is a convenient plot of the current Republican presidential hopefuls, created by Nate Silver at the New York Times.

One dimension is obvious: we can classify the candidates from left to right, from relatively more moderate to relatively more conservative. But another dimension that is often salient in the primaries, and perhaps especially so for Republicans next year, is what we might think of as the insider/outsider axis: whether the candidate is viewed as part of the Republican establishment, or as a critic of it...

There are two more kinds of information embedded in the chart. First, the area of each candidate’s circle is proportional to their perceived likelihood of winning the nomination, according to the Intrade betting market...

Finally, the color of each circle reflects the region the candidate is from: blue for the Northeast, red for the South, green for the Midwest, and yellow for the West.

The source link continues with a more detailed analysis of the various candidates.

We learn more about Nancy Reagan

The wife of the late President had a greater role in public affairs than most people realize.  From an article at PBS Newshour:

[I]nterviews with dozens of people who worked with both Reagans, as well as historians and journalists who have studied them, confirm she was far more influential in personnel decisions and even some policy, than the public knew. And she herself now acknowledges she worked behind the scenes, making personnel decisions that later helped moderate U.S. policy toward the then-Soviet Union, at a time when conservative Republicans were in fierce opposition...

Indeed, the extent of her influence in the campaigns, and especially as first lady, virtually unknown until recently, places her among the top three most powerful first ladies of modern times, according to historian Allida Black, who ranks her after Eleanor Roosevelt and Hillary Clinton.

It was Nancy Reagan who persuaded her husband to make political moderate Baker the chief of staff, rather than the more conservative Ed Meese. It was Mrs. Reagan who five years later helped push out the next chief of staff, Don Regan, when she felt he was more interested in his own career than her husband's. And it was Nancy Reagan who helped orchestrate the removal of National Security Adviser William Clark over differences in dealing with the leaders of the Soviet Union. In fact, she worked quietly to make sure then-Secretary of State George Shultz, who shared her pro-détente views, got more face time with the president...

What we discovered is that this woman who took pains to appear most focused on throwing elegant state dinners and later, the "Just Say No" to drugs campaign, was in fact playing a crucial daily role in ensuring the success of her husband's career, which just happened to be the most important job in the country...

More at PBS, which will be airing a documentary about her this weekend.  I bet that will be quite interesting.

Misremembering President Ronald Reagan

This weekend will be Ronald Reagan's 100th birthday.  Joan Walsh at Salon is presenting a series of articles about the former president.  Here are some excerpts from today's article:

Despite his reputation as a tax slasher, Reagan raised taxes three times, and tripled the deficit during his eight years in office. Sadly, his working-class "Reagan Democrat" admirers don’t seem to remember that one of his tax hikes raised payroll taxes, which hurt poor and middle-class Americans and shielded the wealthy. The main reason he's remembered as a tax-cutter is because of what he did to tax rates for the uber-rich: He slashed the top rate from 70 percent to 28 percent, and income inequality has soared ever since...

If that 70 percent rate sounds a little high, it's useful to remember that the top rate was 94 percent at the end of World War II, and after a brief drop to 82 percent, it stayed in the 90s under Republican Dwight Eisenhower; it was Democrat John F. Kennedy who slashed it to 70 percent... Those are the tax rates that powered the postwar boom -- the expansion of public education and universities, highway construction and home-ownership, government-funded research and development -- that we think of as the American dream...

To review: Under Reagan, income inequality began to grow, household savings dwindled, household debt correspondingly began to rise, and the clout of the financial industry exploded. The top 0.1 percent of Americans saw their share of income climb higher than it was before the Great Depression. And here we are...

More at the link.

Dissatisfaction with President Obama

Excerpts from a column by Michael Brenner at HuffPo:

Wall Street's takeover of the Obama administration is now complete. The mega-banks and their corporate allies control every economic policy position of consequence. Mr. Obama has moved rapidly since the November debacle to install business people where it counts most. Mr.William Daley from JP Morgan Chase as White House Chief of Staff. Mr. Gene Sperling from the Goldman Sachs payroll to be director of the National Economic Council. Eileen Rominger from Goldman Sachs named director of the SEC's Investment Management division...

Mr. Obama last week obediently recited the Chamber of Commerce's liturgy about governmental regulation being the cause of what ails the American economy in the pages of the Wall Street Journal. This public oath of allegiance signaled his now admitted complicity with those who supposedly had been his opponents...

He chose this path. It conforms to his behavior from the very start of his presidency. It was a newly-elected Obama who hand-picked Geithner and Summers. Who installed as his right-hand man Rahm Emanuel from the board of scandal-ridden Freddie Mac and deal-maker at Dresdner Kleinwort. Who declared at a press conference on the eve of his inauguration that he would not seek to repeal the Bush tax cuts but rather let them drain Treasury revenues until they expired, which of course he has conspired to prevent. Who met clandestinely with Big Pharma to cut a secret deal that ruled out the government's bargaining on drug prices. Who met clandestinely with health industry giants to cut a secret deal that ruled out the public option...

In short, all the evidence is that an old-school "moderate" Republican occupies the White House...

The Vermont legislature tackles "corporate personhood"

A year ago today, the Supreme Court issued its bizarre Citizens United decision, allowing unlimited corporate spending in elections as a form of “free speech” for the corporate “person.”...

In Vermont, state senator Virginia Lyons earlier today presented an anti-corporate personhood resolution for passage in the Vermont legislature. The resolution, the first of its kind, proposes "an amendment to the United States Constitution ... which provides that corporations are not persons under the laws of the United States." Sources in the state house say it has a good chance of passing...

The resolution goes on to note that "large corporations own most of America's mass media and employ those media to loudly express the corporate political agenda and to convince Americans that the primary role of human beings is that of consumer rather than sovereign citizens with democratic rights and responsibilities."

Denouncing this situation as an "intolerable societal reality," the document concludes that the "only way" toward a solution is the amendment of the Constitution "to define persons as human beings.”...

There is a groundswell of support: 76 percent of Americans, according to a recent ABC News poll, said they opposed the Citizens United decision.

Excerpted from an article at AlterNet.

President Obama's anti-terrorism policies

Excerpts from an extensive post by Glenn Greenwald at Salon:

...everyone (other than his hardest-core followers) was forced to acknowledge that Obama was embracing and even expanding -- rather than reversing -- the core Bush/Cheney approach to Terrorism. As a result, leading right-wing figures began lavishing Obama with praise -- and claiming vindication -- based on Obama's switch from harsh critic of those policies (as a candidate) to their leading advocate (once in power)...

And now Dick Cheney himself -- who once led the "soft on Terror" attacks -- is sounding the same theme. In an interview last night with NBC News, Cheney praised Obama for continuing his and Bush's core approach to Terrorism:

I think he's learned that what we did was far more appropriate than he ever gave us credit for while he was a candidate... I think he's found it necessary to be more sympathetic to the kinds of things we did.

Gen. Hayden put it best, as quoted by The Washington Times:

"You've got state secrets, targeted killings, indefinite detention, renditions, the opposition to extending the right of habeas corpus to prisoners at Bagram [in Afghanistan]," Mr. Hayden said, listing the continuities. "And although it is slightly different, Obama has been as aggressive as President Bush in defending prerogatives about who he has to inform in Congress for executive covert action."

And that list, impressive though it is, doesn't even include the due-process-free assassination hit lists of American citizens, the sweeping executive power and secrecy theories used to justify it, the multi-tiered, "state-always-wins" justice system the Obama DOJ concocted for detainees, the vastly more aggressive war on whistleblowers and press freedoms, or the new presidential immunity doctrines his DOJ has invented...

Aside from the repressiveness of the policies themselves, there are three highly significant and enduring harms from Obama's behavior. First, it creates the impression that Republicans were right all along in the Bush-era War on Terror debates and Democratic critics were wrong...

Second, Obama has single-handedly eliminated virtually all mainstream debate over these War on Terror policies. At least during the Bush years, we had one party which steadfastly supported them but one party which claimed (albeit not very persuasively) to vehemently oppose them. At least there was a pretense of vigorous debate over their legality, morality, efficacy, and compatibility with our national values. Those debates are no more...

Third, Obama's embrace of these policies has completely rehabilitated the reputations and standing of the Bush officials responsible for them...

If Obama has indeed changed his mind over the last two years as a result of all the Secret Scary Things he's seen as President, then I genuinely believe that he and the Democratic Party owe a heartfelt, public apology to Bush, Cheney and the GOP for all the harsh insults they spewed about them for years based on policies that they are now themselves aggressively continuing.

More at the link.

I would also like to note that Glenn Greenwald is currently holding the annual fundraiser for his blog: "relying on reader support is what allows me to maintain full independence... also enables much-needed assistance for the work that is done here, including having a regular research assistant... It also means that one can work full-time on journalism, analysis and activism without any concern for accommodating the interests of corporate employers and advertisers..."

TYWKIWDBI has made a smaller-than-we-would-like contribution to that fundraising drive.  Others who wish to do so will find a Paypal "Donate" button at this link.

Antislavery button

This daguerreotype with an abolitionist motif may be one of the first political buttons made in America to incorporate a photograph. Believed to be unique, the miniature daguerreotype shows two hands held together, one black, one white resting on a book assumed to be the Bible. The photograph is set into a two-piece gold-washed brass frame with a loop on the reverse for sewing to a garment...

The button was discovered in the early 1980s in a flea market in Massachusetts.
Like the piecework quilts made by women's antislavery societies, this button may have been produced to raise money for the abolitionist cause and sold at one of the popular antislavery fairs organized by women.

From the Metropolitan Museum, via A Polar Bear's Tale.

Pelosi and Boehner greet during the transfer of power

Offered without comment. 

Found at Mother Jones; credit Zuma/Yuri Gripas

Ralph Nader comments on the new Republicans

In an interview on FOX News, Ralph Nader suggests that the "Tea Party" Republicans will not necessarily follow the party line of the Republican establishment.  He believes they will "go after the Federal Reserve," the military budget, and corporate welfare.

I remain skeptical.  In my experience polticians who arrive in Washington seem to regress toward the mean, and tend to join the establishment rather than shaking it up.  Time will tell.