We wake up this morning remembering that it is 34 years to the day since John Lennon was killed outside the Dakota in NYC.
The Wrongologist and Ms. Oh So Right lived in a loft in the Wall Street area in 1980 when Lennon was killed. That night, December 8, 1980, we were listening to Vin Scelsa on the (at the time) free-form radio station, WNEW-FM, when Vinny announced that Lennon had been shot. He later announced that John had died.
Why kill Lennon? Certainly he was not everyone’s cup of Earl Gray. The common view of The Beatles was that Paul was cute, Ringo was funny and George was cerebral. John was the thinker and renegade, clearly too edgy for some. Here is a Lennon song that was sung at our wedding just the year before:
John did more than write and sing music. He was an advocate against the Vietnam War and marched with people in protest on the streets of New York. Nixon tried to get him deported. But that didn’t work, although Mark David Chapman had a different plan for sending John away.
Eight Los Angeles police officers who shot at two women over 100 times will not lose their jobs. They won’t even be suspended. They’ll just get some additional training.
Still thinking about the string of police cases, their very similar nature and outcomes. It isn’t a secret that America has a broad, diverse population and a terrible past trying to deal with our diversity.
Our past isn’t going away. Our diverse population isn’t going away either. It’s who we are. We occasionally celebrate it, boasting that we are a melting pot. But, we might be more accurately described as a smorgasbord, not a one pot dinner. That means you can avoid the pickled herring if you don’t like it.
But it’s always rude to ridicule people who like pickled herring. And many of us have moved way beyond rude to outright hostile, and the whole buffet table could be pulled down right in front of our eyes.
The food fight is already in progress, except it has real casualties. We are many kinds of American, and this is our home. Can we find a way to keep it?
Thinking today about the fact that the New York grand jury did not indict NYPD’s Officer Daniel Pantaleo for the July 17 chokehold death of Eric Garner, who died gasping “I can’t breathe” while in the custody of police outside a Staten Island convenience store. Here, from the indispensable MuckRock, is a screen shot from NYPD’s use of force policy:
So today’s question is: Are we having the oft-promised national conversation? Is there a fundamental contempt for the law among the people empowered to enforce it? And have we gone beyond just needing a discussion? We already have policies which should have prevented what happened toAmadou Diallo from happening to Michael Brown or to Eric Garner.
Police officers kill too many black people, and then too often, face little or no accountability, particularly when there’s no video to show America what went down.
To help you meditate over the weekend, here is Randy Newman’s “Jolly Coppers on Parade”. His music is a counterpoint to the images. Call it irony, call it disrespect by demonstrators or by the police, call it whatever you need. Obviously not all cops are like the ones we’re seeing in this video, but we all know they are out there:
NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio spoke Wednesday onto the media about the matter, talking about his 16 year old biracial son Dante: (brackets by the Wrongologist)
This is profoundly personal to me…I was at the White House the other day, and the president of the United States turned to me, and he met Dante a few months ago, and he [the president] said, ‘I know you see this crisis through a very personal lens.’ And I said to him, I did.
De Blasio went on to note that he and his wife, Chirlane McCray, who is black, “have had to talk to Dante for years about the dangers that he may face.” More from de Blasio:
Because Chirlane and I have had to talk to Dante for years about the dangers that he may face. A good young man, law-abiding young man who would never think to do anything wrong. And yet, because of a history that still hangs over us, the dangers he may face, we’ve had to literally train him—as families have all over this city for decades—in how to take special care in any encounter he has with the police officers who are there to protect him.
This has been going on for centuries, folks. Throwing both hands up in the air signals either “Don’t shoot” or simply despair for changing the way things are.
It’s impossible to tell the difference anymore.
Thought for today: “We are what we repeatedly do.” Aristotle
And some things, we repeatedly do over and over. Take Ferguson, possibly becoming a new Selma. Or take our bad economy, or take Afghanistan.
This month, Americans got some news the media spun as good: The US unemployment rate fell to the lowest level since late 2007. The 5.8% unemployment rate has been seen as proof of economic recovery. But, the jobs created were mostly part-time work, often at low pay. Yes, these jobs provided employment, but did little to improve the overall economy.
As a result, an increasing number of Americans – 800,000 more than last year– have taken a second or third job, according to the BLS. This is Americans taking jobs they don’t really want, unable to pay their bills despite work, and relying on food banks and welfare to make up the difference.
And the problem is growing. In October, about 7 million Americans had part-time jobs but wanted to work full-time. Over 2.1 million Americans rely on two part-time jobs to see them through. Another 4 million have one full-time job and one part-time job, a number that increased by 444,000 since last year.
These workers earn minimum or near-minimum wage, bringing home less than $1,000 a month. In 2013, 468,000 retail workers earned minimum wage or lower. According to Pew Research Center, 1.4 million cashiers – the most common part-time job – earn less than $10.10 an hour. Part-time Walmart workers often bring home between $200 to $400 every two weeks. This is a weak contribution to our economy. These workers, despite being employed, end up relying on government assistance in the form of food stamps and housing subsidies. And when the food stamps run out, they turn to their communities and the local food banks. So, there were Black Friday demonstrations atWalmart stores all across America, and some cities had this response:
Part of your taxpayer dollars are paying Wal-Mart employees the money that the Walton’s refuse to pay them. This isn’t complicated. If you have a job at Wal-Mart and you still need Medicaid, food stamps and subsidized housing, then you aren’t just getting shafted by the Walton’s. You’re also being paid your missing wages by the federal government. Another piece of your tax dollars supported military-style protection at Walmart as a partial response to the Black Friday demonstrations.
As Aristotle said, we are what we repeatedly do. Americans aren’t deadbeats. The Walton’s are the deadbeats.
Black Friday means something radically different to the homeless:
It is a tradition on Thanksgiving at the Mansion of Wrong to play “Alice’s Restaurant” by Arlo Guthrie. It was on November 28, 1965 in Stockbridge, MA that Arlo was convicted of littering:
Sample lyric:
27 8×10 color glossy pictures with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining what each one was to be used as evidence against us.
Milk is the new Coke: Why, yes, we are happy to pay twice as much for milk! If there’s one company you can trust to produce milk that is lower in sugar and higher in good things for you, it’s Coca-Cola.
Dogs sloppy water bowl action is smart: Dogs extended more of their tongues to whack the water with a much wider surface area, then use their tongues to pull the water upward into a column at high speed, hitting an acceleration of roughly five to eight times that of gravity.
What to be thankful for this week? No Benghazi. Rep. Darrell Issa, (R-CA) and Chair of the House Intelligence Committee concluded the Benghazi affair by finding that the CIA and the military acted properly in responding to the 2012 attack on a U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, and asserted no wrongdoing by Obama administration appointees. So, there was no intelligence failure, no delay in sending a CIA rescue team, no missed opportunity for a military rescue, and no evidence the CIA was covertly shipping arms from Libya to Syria.
A few things that will come up this week: First, the Grand Jury in Ferguson will finally give us the slow “He didn’t kill Michael Brown” decision. Who knows what will happen then. Tory Russell, co-founder of resistance group Hands Up United, Ferguson, MO said:
How can I prepare kids for the world if I’m not preparing the world for the kids?
Next, we could have a decision on Iran’s nuclear program. If the P5+1 make a deal with Iran, it will transform the Middle East. Don’t hold your Thanksgiving dinner waiting for it to happen. Finally, the mud wrestling in Washington will continue.
Immigration has always involved executive orders:
Why are Republicans so upset about Immigration?
Here’s why: They now have a very safe majority in the House, and an unsafe, but possibly sustainable majority in the Senate. If they actually pass an immigration bill, they will be primaried from the right in many of their less-than-safe House districts. So, the posturing about Obama being a “king” and “shredding the Constitution”.
Calls for meeting in the middle are meaningless:
Keystone and Immigration may be intimately connected:
Today’s Monday Wake Up is for the Democratic Party. Trevor LaFauci at The People’s View compared Democrats to a bad first date:
They’re like a bad first date: They know what they want to say, they know they have a lot going for them but when it comes time to talk about themselves they do it meekly and awkwardly, so much so that the other person just assumes this person doesn’t have a lot going for them.
What’s worse is the Democrats try hard not to suck at funds-raising. The Wrongologist’s in-box is crammed with pleas by Democrats for more money, even after the Tuesday That Shall Not Be Named disaster.
I Need You. Three magic words. They light up our brain, they grab our attention, and they initiate action. But they’re being corrupted by the ease of reach and the desire by some organizations to grow at all costs… Political fundraisers have turned this from an art to a science to an endless whine.
A loyal reader of the Wrongologist, David Price, replied to an email plea for more money from Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Chair of the Democratic National Committee, saying that more money wasn’t the answer for Democrats:
Running away from the progressive agenda may have seemed like smart politics, but it turned out to (1) make once attractive candidates look like phonies, (2) make our party seem apologetic for its accomplishments and ashamed of its ambitions, (3) demoralize those progressives who have traditionally identified the Democratic Party as the most effective vehicle for their hopes and (4) arguably have been bad politics after all, even in the shortest-run, most pragmatic, down-and-dirty sense.
More from Trevor LaFauci:
And so Democrats, the choice is yours: You can cater to the centrist, middle-of-the-road, kinda-sorta progressive voters in your party or you can go all in on issues that the American people actually care about…If you go middle of the road, know that you’re putting the millennial vote in play, especially for a generation that, for the most part, remains politically independent.
If Democrats can’t choose, then the 2016 presidential election is in play for anyone who appeals to independent voters. That could be how we end up with President Romney, or President Rand Paul.
It’s time for the Democratic Party to wake up. To help them, a song by the late Gary Moore, a great Irish guitarist and former member of Thin Lizzy who is barely known in the US. Here is “Still Got The Blues”:
Using a DOJ program called Equitable Sharing, state and local forfeiture restrictions are lifted when the DOJ gets a cut. The practice of seizing a person’s money or property without accusing them of a crime is called civil forfeiture. Some states have tough restrictions on what forfeiture proceeds can be used for, some are very liberal. Agencies enrolled in the Equitable Sharing program can petition a DOJ agency to “adopt” their seizure. In an adoptive seizure, they get to keep 80% of the profits to use for any purpose, while the DOJ takes the rest.
Certain older drugs, many of which are generic and not protected by patents or market exclusivity, are becoming extremely expensive.
The Wrongologist is reading Jay Winik’s April 1865: The Month That Saved America. It is about the end game in our Civil War. Winik describes how Lincoln, Lee and Grant actively decided to save America from the terrible fate that has befallen other countries afflicted by Civil War – countries like Bosnia, or Northern Ireland. Winik also reminds us of how old and durable the political split in this country has been.
And how breathtakingly vehement. And our current bitterness is consistent with our past bitterness. The names change, the parties re-configure, the particular issues in contention vary. And if you think you’ve seen the worst of it, well, read some history. They say it tends to repeat:
They say you have a mandate:
Keystone Pipeline looks like it will pass:
We either did, or did not, get an emissions deal with China:
Throughout his campaign for reelection, Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell said it would be foolhardy to raise carbon dioxide emissions standards on American companies as long as China was sticking to business as usual. But now that China has agreed to take a big step away from using coal as its primary fuel source, McConnell still wants to fight implementation of the new agreement.
Then there is the collegiality shown by Mr. Boehner:
Plenty of people consider YouTube the best music site on the Web. It is featured here on most Fridays.
Yesterday, the NYT reported that YouTube unveiled YouTube Music Key, a fee-based service that will include higher-quality audio for most songs and the option of paying $8 a month for extra features, chief among them removing YouTube’s ubiquitous ads. The Wrongologist has no strong objection to paying for YouTube, as long as they don’t mess up what they already have. So here is a wish for MUSIC KEY: Please don’t screw YouTube up. That’s not asking too much, is it?
Yesterday was also Neil Percival Young’s 69th birthday. Young is an artist who has always been blatantly political, from “Ohio (Four Dead in Ohio)” recorded in 1970, to “Who’s Gonna Stand Up (and Save the Earth)” published last month.
The key to any Neil Young music is the reedy high tenor and the hammering guitar. When you can get those two with politics, so much the better. Here is his “Rockin’ In the Free World” from 1989:
“Rockin in the Free World” was written to criticize the George Bush I presidency. It is regularly covered by Pearl Jam, often in their encores. It hit #2 on the US rock charts in 1990.
Finally, “Hey, Hey, My, My”, from his “Rust Never Sleeps” album, recorded in 1991. The line from the song, “it’s better to burn out than to fade away,” became infamous after it was quoted by Kurt Cobain in his suicide note. Young later dedicated his 1994 album “Sleeps with Angels” to Cobain. Here is “Hey, Hey, My My“:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0O1v_7T6p8U
In total, NY has 40 albums. If and/or when the Great Pumpkin welcomes Wrongo to Pearly Gates and asks: “Out of all the recording artists who ever lived, who did you listen to the most throughout every decade of your life?”
OK, we just had our bi-annual vote to rearrange the deck chairs, and boy, people were angry. But what good will come of it is difficult to guess. This we do know: According to a CNN exit poll, 8 in 10 Americans disapprove of how Congress has been handling its job, while almost 6 in 10 are displeased with President Obama; 44% have a positive view of Democrats; 40% have a positive view of Republicans.
So, Americans elected the party they like the least to run the part of the government they trust the least.
There’s a lot of discussion of how and why Democrats did so badly, and much of it focuses on messaging. The litany of excuses is long: Democratic candidates were arrogant. The White House failed to transfer money, or stump effectively. The GOP caught up in the technology race, or the GOP recruited excellent, disciplined candidates.
Democrats ran on everything but?policy. Did the Democrats run the government well? Are the lives of voters better? Are Democrats as a political party credible when they say they’ll do something?
Their message was based on a group of poll-tested ideas that they thought would appeal to mainstream voters. But, the message, “vote for us, we’re not right-wing fanatics” didn’t cause the majority of us to turn out for the election. In fact, turn out was the lowest it had been in 40 years.
Liberal ballot propositions won in various parts of the country last Tuesday, from marijuana products (like https://www.cheapbudcanada.com/marijuana-products/vape-pens/fatboyz-disposable-thc-vape-pen/, for instance) to the minimum wage. Democrats didn’t. That should tell the Democratic Party something. Liberal policies can resonate with the public. It would be nice if there was a party which could embody and fight for those ideas.
So what would be a winning message? The economy. There’s infrastructure work to be done. The private sector could hire people to do it with government money. There are hungry people who need to be fed, and homeless people to be housed. And, ending our adventures in the Middle East would improve our lives.
“Vote for us, we bring peace, prosperity, and weed” – that slogan just might get you somewhere.
Keeping with the spirit of a new politics, here is your wake-up tune of the day. It is “Uprising” by Muse, released in 2009. So get upright and rock out:
Sample lyrics:
Rise up and take the power back
It’s time the fat cats had a heart attack
You know that their time’s coming to an end
We have to unify and watch our flag ascend
(so come on)
They will not force us
They will stop degrading us
They will not control us
We will be victorious
A case for treating health care and hospitals as utilities: Conservatives have won the battle to eliminate much of the government control in quasi-monopolistic markets like telecom and electric power. You be the judge about whether you are better off with de-regulation of those industries. Health care is a de facto monopoly, should it be treated as a utility?
Wikipedia is the sixth most popular website in the world, with 22.5 million contributors and 736 million edits in English. It’s as if the entire population of Australia (23.6 million) each contributed 30 times. 36 people run Wikipedia. Who are they?
Transparent solar panels could make solar power more competitive. CSEM, a Swiss technology company, have developed solar panels that you can see through and have no visible connections, which gives architects a lot of room to incorporate solar power into the walls of buildings without having to give up any aesthetic goals.
Many people believe that medical malpractice reform is the key to cutting cost from the health care system. But evidence shows that belief could be mistaken. However, if you have been affected by medical negligence, you’ll want to consider your options. Some people contact the hospital directly to complain about the medical professional who failed to take suitable care of them. A better alternative to this idea is actually to contact a personal injury lincoln ne service, or a lawyer more local to you. Seeking legal assistance can help you to strengthen your claim against the staff member in question.
The US currently has 30 declared presidential states of emergency. The University of Michigan explains why this is a bad idea. The National Emergencies Act requires the Congress to vote every six months on whether a declared national emergency should continue, Congress has done this only once in the nearly 40-year history of the Act.
Protect us from the media: CNBC’s “Squawk Box” anchor (Joe Kernan) shows complete ignorance of Ireland while talking to Martin Shanahan, head of the Irish Industrial Development Authority. Then he insists he is correct: CNBC: You have pounds anyway don’t you still? Shanahan: We have Euros. CNBC: You have Euros in Ireland? Shanahan: Yes. We have euros, which is eh… CNBC: Why do you have euros in Ireland? Shanahan: A strong recovery…. CNBC: Why do you use euros in Ireland? Shanahan: Why wouldn’t we have euros in Ireland? CNBC: Huh. I’d use the pound. Shanahan: We use euro. CNBC: What about Scotland? I was using Scottish eh… Shanahan: They use Sterling. CNBC: They use Sterling? Shanahan: They use Sterling. But we use euro. CNBC: What? Why would you do that?
And some of you use CNBC for investment advice!
Here is your thought for the week. It is from George Orwell:
The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to the long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink. In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.
Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemisms, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable…
