Masson's Blog
As the weather gets nicer, I find that I care less about Internet stuff. Maybe it’s the cognitive dissonance between the online world of ZOMG the world is in an existential crisis, everything sucks on the one hand and my immediate circumstances being quite pleasant on the other.
Maybe once the existential crises come spilling out from the Internet and into my real world I’ll be singing a different tune.
Jon Easter has a good post on Senate candidate Joe Donnelly’s position on marriage equality: Donnelly’s agin’ it. (So is gubernatorial candidate, John Gregg.) For what it’s worth, Libertarian gubernatorial candidate, Rupert of Survivor (blanking on his last name at the moment) is in support.
Maybe it’s a way of capturing the middle. And, in any event on this, I expect it’s simply what the various men believe. But, it seems year after year, the GOP does what it can to fire up its base while the Democratic Party does what it can to depress its base. Bold strategy. Let’s see how it works!
The Romney in high school story is a little bush league, but I guess if we’re going to worry about Kerry’s swiftboat and how he eats a cheese steak, or Obama’s eating dog or birth certificate or Bush’s DUI and national guard service and generally let horse race and personality coverage displace more boring, work-intensive substantive coverage about how they’d govern if elected then I guess this kind of thing is part of the landscape.
My opinion isn’t colored by whether a candidate was or was not a dick in high school. The story is that Romney, in high school, was fairly vicious in holding down an effeminate kid who had a non-conforming hair style at Romney’s prep school and forcibly cutting the kid’s hair.
Romney march[ed] out of his own room ahead of a prep school posse shouting about their plan to cut Lauber’s hair. Friedemann followed them to a nearby room where they came upon Lauber, tackled him and pinned him to the ground. As Lauber, his eyes filling with tears, screamed for help, Romney repeatedly clipped his hair with a pair of scissors.
Some of the news reports I’ve seen following up on the Washington Post story are referring to this as “a prank.” Even in 1965, I can’t think that this constitutes a “prank.” That’s not a disqualifier for office. Teens can be vicious little assholes. Part of growing up is learning empathy. As a kid, you are necessarily self-centered and limited in your understanding of people who aren’t you.
I remember in maybe third grade, on the way home from school, an incident where I was picking on the effeminate kid in our class; the one who hung out with all the girls. Me and some other guys started pelting him with snowballs – and not in a playful way. He ran away and the incident didn’t amount to much. Not long after, I think he moved out of town. A few years ago, I saw that he was on Facebook. I recalled the incident, and just felt awful about it. Even though it had been about 30 years, I thought the right thing to do was to make contact with him to tell him I was sorry for being such a jerk. People grow up and develop a better sense of right and wrong.
Romney’s problem, as is so often with these things, is his reaction now. According to his campaign’s spokesperson, he has no memory of this incident. (“Governor Romney has no memory of participating in these incidents.”) I imagine that’s a lie. I’d be more horrified if it was true that he didn’t remember. I can’t imagine an incident like that being so unremarkable to me as to not leave a lasting impression. Then, Romney himself confirmed his lack of memory to Fox News and suggested that sometimes his “pranks” went too far. Again, of the many things this story describes, “prank” is not one of them.
His ability to apologize in a straightforward manner is limited by his purported inability to recall having held the crying boy down to forcibly cut his hair:
Back in high school, I did some dumb things, and if anybody was hurt by that or offended, obviously I apologize.
Because he can’t acknowledge remembering, he can’t say something like, “that was an awful thing to do. No one should be treated like that. Obviously I’m older now and know better, but I still regret what I did and, if he were still alive, would apologize to that boy.” Apology taken care of and recognition of wrong-doing acknowledged, he could pivot to a focus on how it’s a little ridiculous our political system focuses on events from so long ago instead of on current problems.
President Obama made a statement today on marriage equality. Some have given him grief for previous statements that his views on marriage equality are evolving. I get it. For a politician to talk about “evolving” views on something suggests lightly held convictions of Romney-esque malleability.
But, because of my own evolution of thinking on this subject, I completely understand the President. Back in 2010 when discussing Indiana’s marriage discrimination amendment, I said this:
I’ve described my progression before, but for those just tuning in: Growing up, I thought of myself as anti-gay, because I didn’t know any gay people. Or, more accurately, I didn’t know I knew any gay people. Turns out a non-trivial number of guys I knew growing up and in college were gay. (Sorry if I said or did anything to offend, gentlemen). Once I met a guy I new to be gay, being “anti-gay” quickly seemed silly. He was, in most respects, just like anyone else I knew, and it seemed awfully small of me to dislike him simply because of who he loved. But, from there, I probably only got as far as indifferent to gay issues. I wasn’t against them, but they weren’t important to me either.
Now, I’ve progressed to being affirmatively in favor of allowing gay marriage. There just isn’t any rational basis for opposing it. If your God tells you to work against gays, I guess that’s between you and him. But the State’s supposed interest in promoting procreation is just hogwash. If that were anything but a pretext, you’d see prohibitions on marriage by post-menopausal women and sterile men. Working from the presumption that sexual orientation is a birthright and not a “lifestyle choice,” denying gay people such a fundamental right for no good reason seems gratuitously mean.
The President’s statement today made me feel a little better about what happened in North Carolina yesterday. The primary voters of North Carolina decided they wanted a constitutional ban on marriage equality. One of my good friends from elementary school is gay. (We had a bit of a falling out in 6th grade fighting over a girl, amusingly enough). He is in a committed relationship with his significant other in North Carolina. That the people of North Carolina would rebuke my friend because of who he loves made me angry on a personal level. That the President of the United States would take a political risk by publicly expressing his personal opinion that “same-sex couples should be able to get married” helps diminish that anger somewhat. The President said:
“I had hesitated on gay marriage in part because I thought that civil unions would be sufficient,” Mr. Obama told Ms. Roberts. “I was sensitive to the fact that for a lot of people, the word marriage was something that invokes very powerful traditions and religious beliefs.”
But he added that “I’ve always been adamant that gay and lesbian Americans should be treated fairly and equally.”
Politically, I don’t know how this plays. But it’s the right thing for him to do if that’s what he believes. I tend to think that the people who would withhold their votes from President Obama based on this position probably weren’t going to vote for him anyway. On the other hand, maybe I’m just letting my current views color how I perceive voting tendencies of people who hold my past views.
By the same token, this might have the potential to drive a bit of a wedge between libertarians and the younger conservatives on the one side and the older conservatives on the other side. A lot of the types of conservatives I talk to just don’t honestly seem to care about gay rights, pro or con. They aren’t marching in the streets demanding equality for gay people; but they seem to wish they could ignore the conservative wing that spends a lot of energy opposing gay rights. It creates a stumbling block when the younger conservatives want to talk about government staying out of peoples’ lives. If marriage equality becomes a prominent difference between the Republican and Democratic Parties; they might not be able to shrug off the issue as easily.
Indiana is a Republican state. But, it seems that the right wing of the Indiana Republican party almost seems to be daring the state to vote for Democrats. They chose Richard Mourdock over Republican institution, Richard Lugar, for the 2012 Senate campaign. My views on Mourdock’s antics during the Chrysler bankruptcy proceedings are well known. On top of that kind of economic acumen, Mourdock has vowed to bring more partisanship to Washington and featured in his campaign his determination to end the EPA. He’ll be a nice complement to Mike Pence on the ballot.
For those whose tastes run more to the center-right of the political spectrum, the Democrats will be offering blue dogs, Joe Donnelly and John Gregg. If you like center-left, far-left, or radical left; well, I’m sorry, but Indiana has nothing for you.
Update Mourdock, speaking to Chuck Todd, on his governing philosophy:
I certainly think bipartisanship ought to consist of Democrats coming to the Republican point of view. […] Bipartisanship means they have to come our way […] To me, the highlight of politics, frankly, is to inflict my opinion on someone else with a microphone or in front of a camera. […] Even those Republicans who more often than not vote the right way aren’t coming back into their states or their districts and getting in front of the unfriendly crowds and unfriendly microphones to make the point as to why our point of view is good. […] I feel I can defend the purpose of conservatism, and more Republicans should be doing it just as I want to.
An example of the old quip about declaring that government doesn’t work and seeking office so you can prove it.
Today, I read a column by Noam Chomsky entitled “Jobs aren’t coming back”. Fairly or unfairly, there were three items in the column that made me think of Richard Mourdock.
First, he talks about a number of occasions where companies were shutting down businesses. According to Chomsky, there were efforts afoot by the workers and communities in which the businesses were located to essentially have the workers buy them out instead of allowing them to close, but that these efforts were rebuffed by the owners of the businesses in question.
In one of the suburbs of Boston, about a year ago, something similar happened. A multinational decided to close down a profitable, functioning facility carrying out some high-tech manufacturing. Evidently, it just wasn’t profitable enough for them. The workforce and the union offered to buy it, take it over, and run it themselves. The multinational decided to close it down instead, probably for reasons of class-consciousness. I don’t think they want things like this to happen.
In terms of class-consciousness, Chomsky talks about how Alan Greenspan referred to middle class economic insecurity as a good thing, financially speaking — insecure workers don’t ask for raises, among other things. [Disclaimer: I don’t know a lot about Noam Chomsky. Observation: If we truly had a liberal media, I’d probably know a lot more about Noam Chomsky.]
So, anyway, this class resistance reminds me of Mourdock’s huffing and puffing about Chrysler, in effect demanding that secured creditors get paid less so that workers could be left with nothing. Maybe class warfare explains Mourdock’s efforts, I don’t know. But, maximizing the return for the State of Indiana as a secured creditor certainly does not seem to be a moving force inasmuch as scotching the federal government bailout would have left secured creditors with the reduced liquidation value of Chrysler. But, from Mourdock’s perspective, maybe the reduced dollar return on the secured investment would have been worthwhile so long as unions got stiffed entirely and manufacturing laborers were less secure in their jobs.
The second item mentioned by Chomsky is the threat of nuclear weapons. He doesn’t think much of the policies of the Obama administration on this, by the way. But, attempting to reduce the supply of nuclear weapons has been one of the main policy efforts of Senator Lugar. And, in pursuit of this policy, he has worked with Russians and, possibly even more damning, with Democrats. For this scrap of bipartisanship, Mourdock stands to beat Senator Lugar in today’s primary. (Stanley Weiss wrote an open letter speaking, in part, to this issue. (“The shame of it is that the challenger, state Treasurer Richard Mourdock, has been allowed to turn “statesman” into a dirty word. He mocks Lugar for his work to build a bipartisan coalition to keep nuclear weapons out of the hands of terrorists, stating flatly that “The time for being collegial is past — it’s time for confrontation.””)
And, finally, Chomsky notes the environmental catastrophe.
Practically every country in the world is taking at least halting steps towards trying to do something about it. The United States is also taking steps, mainly to accelerate the threat. It is the only major country that is not only not doing something constructive to protect the environment, it’s not even climbing on the train. In some ways, it’s pulling it backwards.
Mourdock’s position on the environment? According to his ad campaign that seems to be littering the Internet, he’s eager to get rid of the Environmental Protection Agency.
I have been following Mike Kole’s updates at the Libertarian National Convention via Facebook. Mike is working for the Mark Rutherford for party chair team. A few days ago, Mike offered this bit of foreshadowing:
One thing I really like about the Libertarian National Conventions is that things are very rarely decided before the voting starts. These are real conventions- not the coronations that the Rs & Ds host. Gary Johnson is the frontrunner for the presidential nomination, but I’ve been at conventions where the frontrunner was surprised very late in the day (e.g.: when Michael Badnarik overcame Gary Nolan in 2004). The Chair elections are always contentious. This one will be no different, as Mark needs to unseat current Chair Mark Hinkle, so I will have to work to earn votes for him.
The nominating process for Presidential and Vice-Presidential candidates was apparently uneventful. The nominee is former New Mexico governor Gary Johnson who unsuccessfully participated in this cycle’s Republican primary campaign before jumping ship to the Libertarian party’s system. Former Orange County, California, judge James Gray – himself a refugee to the Libertarians after a failed 1998 Congressional campaign as a Republican, is the Vice-Presidential nominee.
But, true to Kole’s prediction, all hell broke loose when the Libertarians got to voting for a national party chairman.
After a relatively uneventful president and vice-presidential nominating process, all hell broke loose at the Libertarian National Convention when the Libertarian Party attempted to pick a new national committee chair. The race between current chair Mark Hinkle and vice chair Mark Rutherford fell into disarray when a group of delegates associated with Lee Wrights made a push for the option of None Of The Above.
Wrights was the last remaining challenger to Johnson for the Presidential nomination. Speculation is that he’s involved in upsetting the nominating apple cart so he can take the party chairmanship if Hinkle and Rutherford are procedurally barred by a successful “None of The Above” (NOTA) vote. He apparently denies involvement.
(Mark Rutherford is a Hoosier, former Libertarian Party of Indiana chairman and current vice-chair of the national party; otherwise, I probably wouldn’t be taking much of an interest.)
In the first round of voting, Hinkle was eliminated but Rutherford didn’t get over the 50% mark, so it went to a second round. At that point, a guy seen as a Wrights surrogate spoke on behalf of None of the Above. Second round, NOTA beat Rutherford 273-269, but improprieties were alleged. A revote put Rutherford on top. The other side alleged improprieties. The recount was thrown out. And a third round of voting was underway which, if I’m reading the stories correctly, yielded a Rutherford win over NOTA 278 – 277 but then the chair declared a write-in vote valid which created no winner for failure to carry a majority. The meeting was adjourned for the night.
While Mike said this process was always contentious, I have to think that this one is going to leave a mark.
Update So, it looks like on Sunday, the results were essentially vacated and nominations from the floor were accepted. Lee Wrights, Mark Rutherford, Geoff Neale, Bill Redpath, Ernest Hancock, and Wes Wagner were nominated. Wrights declined and endorsed Neale. By the fifth round of voting, Neale and Mark Rutherford were the two left standing. The vote that round was Neale 212, Rutherford 205, NOTA 29. Rutherford was eliminated and, head to head with “None of The Above,” Neale won with 264 – 159 and is now the chairman of the Libertarian National Party.
I recently saw a statistic that was fairly startling to me; that 40% of American women have had an abortion. I did a small amount of web-based research that suggested maybe the number is more like 30%.
This made me recall a conversation I had recently (with another guy) where we were musing about the strong reaction to the War on Women (or caterpillars, if you prefer) that was engendered when access to birth control was implicated. Whereas support for access to birth control is fairly strong, support for access to abortion is often very tepid even among those who support such access as an intellectual exercise. My friend said that abortion was just something that felt so alien.
If that statistic is accurate, maybe it’s something that’s alien to middle aged guys but not so alien to America’s women. I’m one of those people who support access to abortion as an intellectual exercise because I don’t regard a fetus in its early stages to be morally equivalent to a human even though it has the potential to become human. But, I don’t have the emotional response to restrictions on abortions that I do to restrictions on birth control because the former is nothing I’ve had to deal with directly and, so far as I recall, only one person I know has talked to me directly about her own experience.
It’s easy for me to say because I don’t have to deal with the backlash, but I think we could have a more honest discussion about abortion if the people having them were more open about the experience. The unknown horrors conjured up by your brain in ignorance are usually more terrifying than reality. I’ve told the story before about how I was something of a homophobe before getting to know some honest to god gay people. (Or, rather, people I knew were gay — I had known them, I just didn’t know that I knew them.) In much the same way, I expect that real atheists are less foreign to believers than whatever notions they have in their heads in the absence of real-world examples. And, I expect the people who actually have abortions present more sympathetic cases than the baby-murdering monsters currently occupying the void and informing public discourse.
You can still condemn abortion if you’d like, but such condemnation should be informed by the reality that 30-40% of the women you know may have participated in the exercise.
Nick Martin, writing for TPMMuckraker has an article entitled JT Ready Identified As Gunman In Arizona Massacre. The background is that yesterday, apparently, Ready killed himself and four other people: his girlfriend, her daughter, her daughter’s boyfriend, and the daughter’s 18-month old baby. It appears that he took measures attempting to make it look like the killings were the work of Mexican drug runners.
The article gives quite a bit of detail about Ready’s anti-immigrant fervor and ties with white supremacist organizations. But what really caught my interest was the opening paragraph:
Longtime white supremacist and border vigilante JT Ready saw himself as part of a war that few others would fight. He amassed weapons. He donned a uniform. He formed his own brigade of volunteers to walk alongside him as he hunted what he described as “narco terrorists” flowing across the Arizona-Mexico border.
It seems to me that, with some people, there is a driving need to see one’s self as a heroic figure in the consequential drama of one’s life. And that need leads to a view of the world that doesn’t comport with reality which, in turn, leads to interactions with the world that aren’t healthy and which aren’t helpful to others.
In this category, I also see the fervent believer with a personal relationship to God that helps them withstand the persecution that is everywhere while they are engaged in a noble effort to stand against evil; perhaps through a desperate battle to save America by battling its destructive cultural decline.
I’m sure there are plenty of other examples, religious and non-religious; left-wing and right wing. We’re all protagonists in our own story. That’s inevitable. Noted philosophers Jethro Tull explained that we’re “looking for a sign that the Universal Mind has written us into the Passion Play.” But, the self-focus and need to be central figures in the larger story can lead to destructive behavior and detract from our ability enjoy and participate in the reality that is actually around us.
Eric Bradner, writing for the Evansville Courier Press, has an article about Lugar challenging Mourdock’s Chrysler antics.
A couple of critiques. First, it characterizes the argument that secured creditors would have gotten less under Mourdock’s proposal as a Joe Donnelly argument. Certainly Joe is pointing it out; but this was a central finding of the bankruptcy court. (pdf) Second, it lets Mourdock skate on his explanation of how Chrysler would have been saved and how secured creditors would have gotten paid more if Mourdock had gotten his way. Mourdock says vaguely, “I’m sure someone would’ve stepped up if the government hadn’t been involved.” (I’m paraphrasing.) But there was nobody. Chrysler had been looking for investors for years; nobody. The bankruptcy court took offers. It was early 2009 – nobody was investing in anything. The assets were wasting.
This was a political move by Mourdock. His complaint wasn’t that secured creditors were getting less than they would have otherwise. His complaint was that the government was being used to benefit unions in any way. His acts were an effort to cut off the nose to spite the face — it would have been fine, under his scenario, for secured creditors to get less so long as the unions got nothing.
It was short sighted, and he should be more accountable for what he was trying to do and why; not be allowed to say vaguely that the money fairy would have appeared to give secured creditors more money if only the socialist Obama administration hadn’t interfered. If he thinks secured creditors would have gotten more under his proposal, he should show us the math.
As for Lugar using this angle against Mourdock; it’s about time.