It’s worth remembering that “Labor Day” – the holiday weekend we are in the midst of – is supposed to be a solemn commemoration of the death of working people by the combined hand of government and business:

The first Labor Day in the United States was celebrated on September 5, 1882 in New York City. It became a federal holiday in 1894, when, following the deaths of a number of workers at the hands of the U.S. military and U.S. Marshals during the Pullman Strike, President Grover Cleveland put reconciliation with the labor movement as a top political priority. Fearing further conflict, legislation making Labor Day a national holiday was rushed through Congress unanimously and signed into law a mere six days after the end of the strike. The September date was chosen as Cleveland was concerned that aligning an American labor holiday with existing international May Day celebrations would stir up negative emotions linked to the Haymarket Affair.

Follow the links and read up on our history if you aren’t familiar with Pullman and Haymarket. Then take a minute and read Peter Laarman’s insightful words:

I want to stay focused on the specific hurts experienced by people who have internalized the rules, which all come down to one rule: in America you are on your own — it’s you against the world — so if you fail it means you are defective in some way.

I’ve lost a lot of focus with this blog – mostly because I haven’t been writing. But this is a good place to refocus. The Bible teaches us that labor must be respected. That depriving workers of their earnings is theft. That failing to care for the widows, the orphans, the homeless, and the poverty-stricken is an affront to God Himself.

Yet we have a political movement that likes to style itself as protecting our nation’s religious heritage, while with every word they utter they distance themselves from the overarching lessons of both history and the Bible. Wrapped in the pages of the Bible, they preach against the Word of God. Wrapped in the flag, they teach against the creed of America. They advance fascism while mongering fear of socialism.

Peter’s purpose is to move religion beyond platitudes and feel-good-ism. To acknowledge the pain, and hopefully move towards correcting the cause. Since my specialty is politics rather than religion, I’m more interested in protecting our liberties and the hard-fought rights our predecessors bequeathed to us.

So take in Peter’s words. Understand that he is trying to embrace the pain that threatens to overwhelm our entire culture. Where we find, it seems, that the world is still too much with us. We have met the enemy, and it is us. And our only hope of salvation – in this world – lie with our collective strength and refusal to lay down and die.

Chris Bowers, at Open Left, offered a supposed “Serious Question” today:

Does anyone here think that working to stop GOP from destroying the filibuster in 2005 was still a good idea?

Wasn’t that a mistake? Shouldn’t we have helped them instead?

Discuss.

It was also sent out on Twitter, and I responded thusly:

Yes. If Democrats knew how to message, they could paint the GOP as obstructionist and win even more seats. But they are too dumb

Within minutes, I received a Twitter reply that shows there is no seriousness involved and no discussion was ever wanted:

Oh yeah, better messaging would have led to huge Dem landslide in 2010, and / or forced GOP to cave on big policies. #um,no

Wow. Way to engage in an actual conversation. Before I go into detail, I’ll provide my two responses, just so anyone who actually reads this will have complete disclosure:
#1:

@openleft make a real argument. With 65 dems the gop could not filibuster.

and #2:

@openleft it isn’t about forcing gop to cave. Its about having a governing majority.

First, let’s deal with the issue of the filibuster…

The filibuster serves a real purpose in legislative proceedings. It prevents a mere majority from trampling over the concerns of a minority. It forces even a majority to build consensus – to appeal to the public and across partisan lines to forge agreements on important issues.

The problem that Democrats face in the Senate is threefold: 1) Republicans have locked arms in simply opposing everything put forth; 2) Their inept messaging lets Republicans frame things like the denial of unemployment benefits as a positive thing (or allows it to be ignored entirely); and 3) Their own partisanship is too weak, and their majority too small, to overcome Republican efforts. But not the filibuster.

And, yes, better messaging would have led to a very different political landscape in 2010. Democrats allowed Republicans to bottle up unemployment benefits for millions of Americans while our economic recovery was held in stasis by its “jobless” nature. What was the overriding news story? Lindsey Lohan going to jail. Under-regulation and under-enforcement of the oil industry led directly to the debacle in the Gulf. What is the news meme? “Is this Obama’s Katrina?” Republicans kill the campaign disclosure bill and Democrats’ messaging is no where to be found – meaning that Republicans can openly say that they are willing to denying corporations the ability to buy elections hurts Republicans and Democrats are too feeble – while holding a majority – to even put out a competing message.

There has been a complete lack of messaging and outreach on everything Democrats have undertaken since George W. Bush left office. Can anyone actually believe that Americans were protesting having the ability to see a doctor if they actually wanted to see one? Death panels – that was where the meme went. The Obama Cadillac of Messaging that drove him to the White House stayed in the garage. No one in the House or Senate has done anything, either.

So Democrats will likely lose this November, and they might even lose their majority in both Houses. But it won’t be because of the filibuster. It will be because they let a crippled and crumpled GOP dictate the public tone of the debate…while they stamped their feet and said, “But we have a majority!” and mocked anyone that pointed out their own failures.

The White House at least has the decency to try to make amends to Shirley Sherrod. The problem is that they never should have put themselves in a position to do so. The “story” was “broken” (i.e., fabricated) by an activist who was upset that the Tea Party has been called to task for failure to condemn racist comments/persons/thoughts in their membership.

A fuller examination of Sherrod’s remarks display a much different story than what the Tea Party activist portrayed them as. Yes, Sherrod is admitting to having racist thoughts that impacted her job performance. However, her full story is that: 1) She had second thoughts and went back to give full aid to the person in question; and 2) She says that it taught her that racism is wrong, no matter which side of the color-line a person lives on.

It’s a story that is unusual in its candor and its topic. First, to have a public official of any level admit to ever having had a racist thought is practically unheard of – even when they are caught doing and saying things that are blatantly racist. Second, it’s a story about black against white racism, which is also a topic that is practically taboo. Third, it’s a story where a poor white person went to the government for held (more taboo). Fourth, it’s a story where the person involved comes to understand that racism is a double-edged sword that damages the person wielding it as well as the person on the receiving end.

In short, it’s the type of story we, as a nation, need to hear more of so we can understand ourselves better. It’s the type of candid conversation on race that can actually move us forward rather than having the same stupid arguments again. Unfortunately, it has turned out to be nothing of the sort because a nitwit with an agenda was looking for something he could manipulate, rather than a story to tell.

It’s one thing to fabricate things to use as a general illustration – as long as the audience is told that it is a fabrication. It’s quite another to purposefully ruin a person’s life because they happen to say or do something that fits into a political agenda. It wouldn’t even matter if the other side had done the same – it is wrong, bordering on evil to shatter someone’s life for a cheap moment in the sun.

Almost as disgusting as the origination of the non-story has been the right-wing’s reaction to the revelation of a hoax. It is filled with equivocations and hyphenations and parenthetical remarks that make it clear they are really hear to bury Ceasar, not praise him. No one needs to say that the activist’s future work might stand on its own merit – let us see it and judge it in the light of this atrocity.

It’s a statement on our total inability to see the other political side as people rather than as pawns. And it’s a statement on how some people on the left are still stuck in reacting to those on the right rather than in doing the hard work of public education and framing. In other words, it’s an example of everything that’s wrong with our political system, and our nation.

I haven’t been writing much here lately. Not to offer a lame excuse, but I’ve been doing other things. Obviously.

American political scientists sometimes like to talk about something they call “realignment.” It’s a concept that seeks to explain, and perhaps predict, when an entire generation will suddenly and irrevocably change their political identity. It was first identified in the sudden switch of New England “rock-ribbed” Republicans to Democratic New Dealers. It was extended to explain how a generation of black voters left the Party of Lincoln to become the most reliable pro-Democratic voting bloc in the country. There was even a theory that American politics lent itself to a periodic and regularly occurring realignment.

But then there was the missing realignment. Sometime in the 1970s, or perhaps 1980s, we should have seen a massive shift. But we didn’t. Oh, there were the “Reagan Democrats” – but they were simply the conservative Democrats that were always there. And they remained Democrats, for the most part. This led to the idea that we were in a period of dealignment. A time when partisanship didn’t really matter so much.

But, for realignment to happen, there has to be stark differences between the two parties. For most of the 70s, 80s, and 90s, there really didn’t seem to be that much of a difference at all. Or, to be more correct, the differences seemed to revolve around social issues – abortion, welfare, etc. There was an ideological basis for these arguments, but while those issues created a cleavage between the two parties, they only forced a roughly equal alignment between the them.

Michael Gerson thinks that may be changing. But it will not be the ascendancy of Obama that causes it, so much as it will be the self-destructive realization of the disparate parts of the Republican coalition…specifically, the anti-government tea-party segment that has given the long-standing libertarian segment a popular voice.

Gerson cites Sharron Angle (GOP Senate candidate in Nevada) and Rand Paul (GOP Senate candidate in Kentucky) as being prime examples of this – and he’s right. Both are being severely limited in their press time because they don’t want their actual beliefs to come under public scrutiny. It isn’t that they make good old fashioned gaffes, like Joe Biden – those can be explained away and tend to become endearing in an odd way. And it’s telling that both of them are running well behind where they were expected to run.

If they go down in defeat, then more moderate elements may regain power in the GOP. If they win, they will be seen as THE path to victory. And THAT, more than anything else, may actually cause the realignment that political scientists have been looking for.

But I’d note – it’s a change of parties, not of ideology. A failing GOP will lead to a more conservative Democratic Party. The ideology realignment, if it happens, will happen later.

I’ve given up on watching TV news, at least until the “BP Gulf Oil Spill” saga is over. I’m simply tired of hearing earnest-sounding news anchors earnestly intone “the largest oil spill in American history.” With absolutely no background information – other than a vague idea about the Exxon Valdez – those words are pretty meaningless to the average American.

Today CNN was saying that the spill is “roughly the size of South Carolina.” Again – most people simply don’t have a clue how big South Carolina is…especially compared to the Gulf of Mexico. Here’s some data to put things in perspective: South Carolina contains 32,020 square miles (more or less) while the Gulf of Mexico covers over 615,000 square miles. The United States, alone, is over 1,680 miles long.

The reason the newsies are saying “the worst in American history” is that the US has been relatively clear of oil-related disasters. It has already surpassed the Exxon Valdez, but that isn’t saying much, in global terms. Only about eleven million gallons of oil were released. Compare that to the “granddaddy of them all: The Persian Gulf spill during the Gulf War released well over 240 million gallons of oil. The BP Gulf spill currently ranks about 19th.

It is informative, however, to understand that the current number two spot is held by Ixtoc 1 – also an offshore well blowout. That started in June of 1979 and it wasn’t fully under control until after relief wells had been completed in March of the following year. Over 3.5 million barrels were spilled. And that was with an intact blowout preventer (that was closed, but had to be reopened because of high pressure).

I’m not trying to say that things aren’t going to be desperate for folks in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama (and parts of Florida). Where the slick hits, it is going to be really, really bad. What I’m trying to say is that the coverage of the disaster is a disaster of its own. The real question, in my mind, is why no one involved had a plan for dealing with a blowout. After that, it’s why they had no plan to deal with containment. Beyond that, I’m asking why the Gulf States apparently had no plan in waiting for dealing with such a problem.

This post started out with an unbelieving laugh:

Now, I think Arizona’s actually gone off the deep end, or they’re playing a practical joke on us now. Because now they’re going after minotaurs.

Following the link gives you this:

The Arizona state Senate on Thursday passed a bill making it illegal for a person to “intentionally or knowingly creating a human-animal hybrid.”

The bill, which passed 16 to 12, would prohibit anyone in the state from “creating or attempting to create an in vitro human embryo by any means other than fertilization of a human egg by a human sperm.”

The measure would also outlaw “transferring or attempting to transfer a human embryo into a nonhuman womb,” “transferring or attempting to transfer a nonhuman embryo into a human womb” and “transporting or receiving for any purpose a human-animal hybrid.”

The stupidity here is astounding.

First, there is nothing about minotaurs. That line indicates the author really hasn’t bothered to learn much about genetics research.

Second, the law is stupid on several accounts. A human embryo, whether created in vitro or anywhere else, can only be made by joining a human egg and a human sperm. If someone manages to figure out how to join a human egg with a non-human sperm (or the other way around); then the result would not be a human embryo. Example – a donkey egg is joined with a horse sperm and the result in a mule…not a donkey and not a horse.

Then there’s the part about transferring human embryos into a nonhuman womb is a bit of a red herring, as well. Sort of. It depends on how one defines “human embryo” and based on the problem immediately above, I don’t put a lot of faith in the Arizona legislature’s ability to define it properly. What the law literally means is that some other mammal can’t be used as a surrogate mother for a human embryo – the living result of a human egg being fertilized (it should be obvious that this would have to be by a human sperm).

What I think it is aimed at is outlawing the use of human stem cells in lab animals. Why would anyone do this? There are reasons. I don’t know enough about the research to comment on its benefits or costs, but I don’t think it’s entirely unreasonable to try and regulate this area of research.

The problem, of course, is that such regulation must be done with an understanding of the subject matter. None of the research described in the National Geographic article, I believe, would be banned by the Arizona law. Even injecting mice with human brain cells to see if they develop human brains is so far from the actual definitions of the words in the Arizona law that it wouldn’t be impacted – unless, of course, the law is widely construed. And if that is the case, then heart surgeons are going to have to quit using bovine and porcine valves to save human hearts.

Unfortunately, instead of picking at the legislature for passing a law on a topic they obviously don’t understand enough to even write a sentence about competently, TAPPED decided to just view the whole topic with derision. To adapt Jeremy Rifkin’s quote in National Geographic, one does not need to be a radical religious freak to wonder about the wisdom of possibly growing a human brain in a mouse.

Self-deception, by definition, is impossible to see without someone else’s help. And, all too often, it is likely that the person who helps us see that will, in the short term, anger us. This is part of being human.

Rufus, over at the League of Ordinary Gentlemen, ties this self-deception, or lack of self-criticism, to the tea-party movement. I label it self-deception because the tea party folks believe they are rebelling against an unjust system…in which most of spurned active participation. Don’t believe me?:

Earlier today, Tea Party Nation President Judson Phillips, organizer of the convention, told a crowd, “Complaining is not enough. We need to replace bad leadership with good leadership.”

He asked, “How many of you – before the tea party movement – were never involved in politics?”

Phillips smiled and scanned the room as more than 90 percent of people in the crowd eagerly raised their hands. To which he responded: “Thank you, Barack Obama.”

Even their name is seeped in self-deception. The Boston Tea Party was an act of sabotage in protest for the British government awarding a monopoly over colonial trade and for taxing the colonies without allowing them representation in Parliament. Compare that with today when the protest is…kind of muddied. But no one can accurately say that they don’t have representation in Congress. It may not be good or the kind of representation they want, but it is there.

In short, the Boston Tea Party didn’t happen because people had some input into the government and were rebuffed, or lost an electoral cycle. It happened because they had absolutely no input, by design, in their political system.

These sorts of things are easy to dismiss. Except that we are confronted today with two examples of how self-deception can have deadly consequences.

The first is from Kansas City. The short version is that a man, known to be violent and use weapons, was confronted by the police. He grabbed a woman and held her hostage, putting a knife to her throat. The cops shot him.

If you read the story, you’ll discover the tragic fact that the hostage was also the man’s mother. She was, understandably, distraught at her son’s death by police sniper. But, honestly, only someone lost in the depths of self-deception could have seen any other outcome. I know it was her son, but this guy was a career criminal. Anger at the police is simply misplaced…better to be angry at the dead son who willfully decided to cause destruction in the lives of those around him (what sort of son takes his own mother hostage?). It doesn’t change the tragedy, but the way it ended shouldn’t surprise anyone. Sadly.

The same is true for Joseph Andrew Stack. His manifesto is riddled with self-deception, leading to blaming other people for his own shortcomings. This isn’t to say he didn’t get a raw deal a time or two. He did. Tellingly he riffs on the “taxation without representation” issue…all the while neglecting the fact that he did have a representative.

He talks about how hard he worked to get a Congressman, any Congressman, to talk to him. This shows his political ignorance. No Congressman other than your own ever wants to talk to you. They aren’t there to represent people outside of their district. He’d have been better served to simply trying to elect a more responsive person in the single district in which he lived.

A bit later on, we find that he willfully entered into a tax evasion scheme, believing it was legal, but with the purpose to keep from paying taxes. Only the self-deceived would take that action and then be surprised when they earned the ire of the IRS. Yet, it seems, he was exactly that.

Ignorance has consequences. And mixing ignorance with flammable rhetoric is irresponsible because it leads to predictable tragedy. My friends from Armenia once told me that a wise man has the duty to share his wisdom, otherwise all of society will end up run by very likable fools. I think it’s time the wisdom was shared a bit more broadly. Even if it angers a few people to tear down their self-deceptive calves of gold.

This post is the fallout from a Facebook discussion. The issue at hand had to do with “Don’t Ask; Don’t Tell” (DADT) and its purpose. After all, no soldier, sailor, marine, or airman’s job is to get laid for their country. So serving in the military is not inherently dependent on sexual orientation.

In concept, DADT was a step forward for gay rights. When I signed my enlistment papers, I was asked, point blank, if I was or ever had been gay. If I’d have said, “yes,” I wouldn’t have been allowed to serve, no matter what. For comparison, a person could also be disqualified for being a drug addict, but in the case of drugs, it could be waivered. Not so for being gay.

The idea was that, under the old rule, a person had to actively lie to be both gay and in the military. If we just didn’t ask people; then it would simply be a lie of omission – since you could still be discharged for being gay. I suppose, in the rank of things, lies of omission are less onerous than lies of commission, but they are both lies.

But in the general course of things, a person’s sexual orientation shouldn’t even pertain to their job…so DADT was a perfect answer, right? Yeah, if you totally ignore the nature of life in the military. When I was on board the USS Saipan I slept in a berthing compartment with well over a hundred other men. We saw each other naked, we saw each other in the bathroom, and – if I can be blunt here – we knew when the guy in the next bunk was masturbating. It’s sort of difficult not to know. Now, what other job have you ever had that you knew when your coworkers were pleasuring themselves?

But it’s more than just that. As a work-center supervisor, I was told that I could not allow my men to hang up photos of women that they had ripped out of Playboy because it might force someone to reveal their sexual orientation. Just telling everyone that made them all wonder about the guy next to them. As far as I know, no one in our shop was gay, but it was a valid consideration.

But here’s the thing: At one point, I was cleaning up and I found a gay porn mag in the head (toilet room). If I had known who it belonged to I would have been required to report them to the Master-at-Arms and they would have been prosecuted and thrown out of the Navy, losing all of their veteran benefits in the process. If I failed to do so, I could have been prosecuted in exactly the same manner for failing to uphold the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ).

Another point: While I was serving on the Saipan a ranking officer who deployed with us was thrown out of the Navy because he was forcing some of the enlisted men that worked for him to pleasure him sexually. Not a single one could actually lodge a complaint because, if they told the Master-at-Arms that they had actually had sex with another man, even if it was coerced, then they would be thrown out for being gay. So the DADT policy not only failed to protect my fellow sailors (who may or may not have been gay), it actively promoted this predator’s ability to control his victims.

I can also tell you that a large number of my fellow sailors hit the nearest whore-house every time we pulled into port. Anyone who didn’t go with them was suspect…unless they were known to have a wife or girlfriend back home. Anyone who didn’t fit in was subjected to ridicule and harassment.

Could a complaint be lodged and the harassment stopped? Well, it isn’t that simple. In a perfect world, yes. In the world we live in, supervisors can actually be the people who instigate harassment. So a formal complaint can actually be a risk to someone’s life or well-being.

For all of these reasons, DADT does not work, and it is not effective. The idea was that DADT would let gay people serve with honor. It hasn’t worked out that way. That’s why it needs to be repealed.

The latest word is that John and Elizabeth Edwards are now separated and will likely divorce. The descent of John Edwards has been stunning. From one step away from VP to a viable Presidential candidate, he is now simply a rich man who can’t keep his pants up. Worse, with all the money at his disposal necessary to provide for a child he fathered out of stupidity, he chose to obfuscate and perhaps commit fraud – even drawing others into his web of lies. Are we now to believe that his “work” in Haiti is motivated by Christian charity…or simply by a desire to be out of media contact when this story hit the fan?

Sometimes the grilling our candidates takes pays off. Thank God this man never made it to the White House.

In case you haven’t heard about Sen. Harry Reid’s comments on Barack Obama, here’s a recap:

[Reid] told staff to brace for a tough weekend and instructed them to go into damage-control mode. He then hunkered down at his home in Searchlight, Nev., and began working the telephone, apologizing for saying Obama had a good chance to be the first black president because he was “light-skinned” and spoke with “no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.”

So is it racist? Well, I don’t think Reid is racist for saying that a light-skinned black would probably be more acceptable than a dark-skinned black. What gives a troubling insight into Reid is his terminology – exactly what is a “Negro dialect?”

The comparison, politically, is with Trent Lott:

Lott stumbled into trouble seven years ago when he declared at a tribute for former Sen. Strom Thurmond (R-S.C.) that the nation would have been better off if Thurmond won the presidency as a segregationist candidate in 1948.

Lott’s comments were little noticed at first but soon began to snowball into major scandal after civil rights leaders condemned the Republican leader. Wade Henderson, of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, said Lott “betrayed his role as the majority leader.”

I think the attack on Lott was overblown because I don’t think he was endorsing segregationism. He was trying to compliment Strom Thurmond on being a staunch conservative. But his comment was stupid and ill-thought and he was hung out to dry.

Well, can we say the same thing about Reid? Is his comment about “no Negro dialect” just referring to something else? Hardly. To even contend such a thing would stretch credibility to the breaking point. He was complementing Obama on not sounding black. Which means that Reid believes he can tell if someone is black or not by the way they speak.

Cue the soundtrack on Oprah or Gwen Ifill. Review the OJ trial for Johnnie Cochran objecting to a LAPD officer saying a caller “sounded black.”

Yes, Harry Reid should step down. But he won’t. Because he’s a Democrat.