Journal of Post-Ralphaelite Thought

Back when I was in college, a couple of my hippie friends decided they'd vote in the Republican primary, with the intention of boosting the prospects of the Republican candidate they felt would be least electable in the general election. They pulled the lever for former California governor Ronald Reagan. Whoops. In the 2000 election, a number of "progressive" voters (my dear wife among them) turned up their collective noses at Al Gore and voted for Ralph Nader. Enough of them did in Florida to usher in 8 years of George W Bush. Whoops. Despite years of voting primarily for Democrats (with a few notable exceptions ) I found Gary Johnson, Libertarian presidential candidate intriguing - fiscal conservative, socially progressive, and to all appearances, not a bad sort. I reasoned that since Obama had a snowball's chance in hell of carrying Texas, it didn't really matter if I abandoned him to vote for Johnson. Besides, I found myself somewhat incensed at seve...

Okay, kids, today we are going to discuss the differences between being a shill and being a tool. Wikitionary has a couple of definitions for "shill" : A person paid to endorse a product favorably, while pretending to be impartial. An accomplice at a confidence trick during an auction or gambling game. I was in advertising for years -- I am (sad to say) well acquainted with the art and science of shilling. A classic example: back in the day, my then employer had as a client a very large brewery, which I shall call "A-B." When a proposal to require a 5 cent deposit on non-returnable bottles appeared as a referendum item on the Oregon ballot one election year, A-B took a very dim view, since they were a major producer of non-returnable bottles. Their response? They set up and bankrolled some phony grassroots committee ( "Citizens for Sensible Packaging" or some such bullshit) to oppose the measure. This is now referred to as "astro-turfing. A-...

Former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum, a Canadian Libertarian and resident fellow of the American Enterprise Institute has this analysis on how Republicans (and other opponents of the recently passed Obama healthcare package) blew it. Could a deal have been reached? Who knows? But we do know that the gap between this plan and traditional Republican ideas is not very big. The Obama plan has a broad family resemblance to Mitt Romney's Massachusetts plan. It builds on ideas developed at the Heritage Foundation in the early 1990s that formed the basis for Republican counter-proposals to Clintoncare in 1993-1994. Barack Obama badly wanted Republican votes for his plan. Could we have leveraged his desire to align the plan more closely with conservative views? To finance it without redistributive taxes on productive enterprise – without weighing so heavily on small business – without expanding Medicaid? Too late now. They are all the law. Further on he observes: We followed the ...

This will shock some of my friends, but there was a time when I had little use for Edward Kennedy. His flaws were many and it seemed readily apparent that initially he rode on the coattails of his older brothers. Mike Royko, the Chicago columnist (known generally as a liberal), regularly heaped abuse on Teddy, and (like some others) sneeringly suggested if his name had been Edward Slabotnik instead of Kennedy, he'd never been elected. There's no doubt the Chappaquiddick incident guaranteed that he'd never be president. His abortive run against the floundering Jimmy Carter in 1980 was the proof of that. Perhaps the knowledge eventually lifted a burden from him, because he ultimately became the third-longest-serving senator in U.S. History. His career had its ups and downs (some of these fueled by Kennedy's drinking habits). His marriage to his second wife is credited by many with turning his messy personal life around. He was not the smartest of the Kennedy brot...

A short history lesson, courtesy of Wikipedia. The Freikorps were nationalistic organizations primarily composed of disaffected, disenchanted and angry German combat veterans who believed that their government had betrayed Germany and sold them out... The Freikorps were in opposition to the new Weimar Republic. The SA [Stormtroopers/Brownshirts] evolved out of the remnants of the Freikorps movement. During the 1920s and 1930s, the SA functioned as a private militia that Hitler used to intimidate rivals and disrupt the meetings of competing political parties. Sound familiar?

Much has been made in wingnut circles about the supposed "beating" of Kenneth Gladney at a St. Louis town hall meeting. Mobs of union thugs beat him! He was hospitalized! Yeah, right. MediaMatters has a clip of the incident as well as a pretty damning analysis which puts the lie to the hordes of rightwing media and blogosphere all foaming at the mouth. To quote from MediaMatters : Go watch the YouTube video. (Or, the "shocking video," as Power Line hypes it.) The first thing you notice when the camera starts rolling is a union member already sprawled out on the ground with somebody standing over him. No explanation of how he got there (pushed, shoved, punched?) and Ham couldn't care less. Then yes, Gladney is pulled to the ground by somebody wearing a union shirt. (At the :06 mark.) But instead of Gladney being beaten and punched, as his attorney describes, and instead of union "thugs" standing over him and threatening him, Gladney bounce...

Rep. Steve Buyers claims smoking tobacco is no more dangerous than smoking lettuce. I wonder what this guy smoked while he was in college? Hat tip to Salon.com , where I saw this clip.

Hear that howling sound in the distance? It's the sound of entrenched interests realizing we may actually see some healthcare reforms come down the pike. The usual suspects: the Republicans and their friends in the immense healthcare insurance industry are making most of the noise. The noise is still faint and distant but it will get louder, much louder, as the debate warms up. Cries of Socialism, fraud, rationing of care and third hand horror stories about places where universal healthcare is the norm will abound. Bogus grassroots organizations, bank-rolled by huge corporations will miraculously spring up. Tons of postage will be spent sending out handsome glossy color mailings. Of course the Libertarians are squawking since they don't want to pay for anything, even though when push comes to shove none of them ever seems to turn down any of the government's supposed largess. You'll hear things like: Government healthcare will create a huge bloated bureaucracy Fact: in ...