[found via a post to PEN-L by Jim Devine]

Also available for download.

House Chairman Failed to Report $75,000 in Income – NYTimes.com

Representative Charles B. Rangel has earned more than $75,000 in rental income from a villa he has owned in the Dominican Republic since 1988, but never reported it on his federal or state tax returns, according to a lawyer for the congressman and documents from the resort.

House politics strikes ones of its savviest players:

House Tables Resolution to Censure Rangel – New York Times

The House of Representatives decided on Thursday afternoon to table, by a vote of 254 to 138, a Republican resolution to censure Representative Charles B. Rangel, the powerful New York Democrat who is chairman of the Ways and Means Committee. The resolution said Mr. Rangel “dishonored himself and brought discredit to the House,” citing a report in The New York Times on July 11 that Mr. Rangel occupied four rent-stabilized apartments in a Harlem building, including one that he used as a campaign office.

Rangel, to refresh your memory, is the same toad who thundered against Hugo Chavez (whose generosity fuels his constituents, unlike the lack of compassion of the leader he defends) in favour of the Imperial Presidency:

“You don’t come into my country, you don’t come into my congressional district and criticize my president,” Mr. Rangel, a Democrat, told stunned reporters on Capitol Hill.

Thanks to her bad-mouthing incisive commentary on Brangelina, Roseanne’s blog is gaining (as she notes) a lot of new audience. I am one of them. And I plan to stay!

As the five of you who read this blog know, the Hillary Clinton primary experience pissed the hell off of an old-fashioned feminist like me and my spouse. And neither of us can stand Hillary, but that is exactly not the issue, as Maureen Dowd and every other “post-feminist” or n-th wave feminist who ♥s Obama but has to find some high-minded justification for the infatuation, don’t get. Roseanne on the other hand, gets it, and that’s why I am staying. Below are two bits from her blog:

Women’s struggle for equity and dignity will not be silenced, cowed, or stopped by any man, or any woman hating females like Peggy Noonan, Maureen Dowd, Arianna Huffington, Oprah Winfrey, Randhi Rhoades, Nancy Pelosi, or a host of other running dog lackeys of corporate whoredom. Have a nice day!

And:

It’s all a set up to get the females to think that they are being listened to, but it’s all planned canned and fixed. Obama is the nom, and there is no getting rid of him for the dems. If he had any brains he would announce right now that a vote for him is a vote for hillary, because she is his choice for vice, or his nominee for the supreme court…some triangulation would work for him. He has a blindspot where feminism and females are concerned, and he figures that claire mccaskill (sp) is all he needs. (kind of like when people say…”i asked my maid what she thinks of immigration, and she said”…..). He just doesn’t get it that it is female boomers that have kept the dem party alive since the sixties, and that he has insulted their intelligence. He just doesn’t get it, and neither does david axelrod. I do not think any men get it at all. As it was for me in Hollywoodland, men in power are not comfortable with any woman that is not serving them coffee. They tried to fire me off of my own show, like they have done to hillary clinton. It was her show and they fired her. they got all heady over winning against her, but that was all the winning they could do. now they have to crawl back to her and ask her to win it for them. they look like weak mama’s boys, which they are…however, america loves weak mama’s boys though…john mccain is the embodiment of that…

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… “shock and awe” is called “disproportionate and dangerous”:

AFP: Georgia offers ceasefire as Russian blitz intensifies

Russia faced fresh criticism from the West, with the United States warning that the “disproportionate and dangerous escalation” of the conflict could damage relations between the two countries.

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Seed: Noam Chomsky + Robert Trivers

Robert Trivers: So you’re talking about self-deception in at least two contexts. One is intellectuals who, in a sense, go through a process of education which results in a self-deceived organism who is really working to serve the interests of the privileged few without necessarily being conscious of it at all.
The other thing is these massive industries of persuasion and deception, which, one can conceptualize, are also inducing a form of either ignorance or self-deception in listeners, where they come to believe that they know the truth when in fact they’re just being manipulated.

Click link for video and full conversation.

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Democracy Now! | Race, Politics, Dr. King and the Primaries in South Carolina

AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking right now to Kevin Alexander Gray in Columbia, South Carolina. The Republican primary is January 19th. The Democratic primary January 26th. Talk about your congressman, James Clyburn. He is the only African American congressman from South Carolina, one of the leaders in Congress. He’s overseas right now, appears to be extremely angry about what has been happening.

KEVIN ALEXANDER GRAY: Well, he hinted that he might support Obama, but I don’t think that that’s going to happen. Jim—first of all, you know, people say Jim was involved in the Civil Rights Movement. Jim was the head of the State Human Affairs Commission before he ran for Congress. And Jim has kind of been the pick of the status quo established white community for a long time. So I don’t see Jim leaving too far off of that plantation and bucking the party establishment in the state by picking somebody.

[ Link ]

Hillary bashing is the sport of the day and here is Barbara Ehrenreich taking her best shot:

Hillary Revealed That Women Can Be Nasty, Deceptive Candidates Too

Hillary Clinton smashed the myth of innate female moral superiority in the worst possible way — by demonstrating female moral inferiority.

In case you are tickled by this awesome scientific generalisation (Hillary’s campaign tactics are a demonstration of not her individual moral inferiority but “female moral inferiority”), there is good news — the article is chock full of them, as we have Ehrenreich once again attempting to rationalise her arbitrary preference for Obama, this time using an ill-reasoned attack on Hillary. There are a lot of reasons to reject Clinton’s candidacy, but the problem for such intellectuals (as opposed to the garden variety hipster, who constitutes a good part of the Obama fan base, and who is pleased with the warm fuzzies of “hope” and “unity” and all that rot) is that almost all of those reasons ably apply for Obama as well (hence Ehrenreich’s first attempt, a while ago, to support Obama with a “change for its own sake” argument). So, Hillary’s silly story about Bosnia becomes a damnable lie, in Ehrenreich’s (and Maureen Down and every other self-proclaimed feminist opponent of Hillary’s) defensive arguments that equate “fall guys” like Karpinski and England, the ones who were punished, to the perpetrators of the crimes, Rumsfeld and Bush, who remain unpunished.

A whopping 87% of violent crime (as of 1999) is committed by the male of the species. Comparable, in Ehrenreich’s analysis, to “women’s capacity for aggression”, trivialised as “bitchiness” or “inexplicable, hormonally-driven, hostility”. Not that different, we presume, from rape and murder, 87% of which is accounted for by men. The counter-examples of Thatcher and Clinton, the Ehrenreich reasoning seems to suggest, nullify such statistics.

In one logic-defying stroke, Ehrenreich using the same example(s) — to wit, Hillary Clinton — both rejects female superiority (England, Karpinski and Clinton are the counter-factuals of this hard science) and also proves female moral inferiority.

Supporters of Hillary (and I am not one of them) are told that they should not be supporting her “merely” because she is a woman. That would be foolish, it seems. Is one to prefer then the all-out delusion that is the stock of those who equate Obama to Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King as a man “who best upholds” virtues?

Writings of women like Ehrenreich and her less intellectual counterpart in the Obama fanbase, Maureen Dowd, are a milder form of the betrayal of feminism that are seen in the actions of Rice or Allbright. Few (among feminists) have the goal of elevating woman as an ideal. The goal has always been to defend her against such unfairness as Ehrenreich’s singling out of England and Karpinski or her presentation of Clinton as an aggressive bitch in comparison to the mythical virtuous persona of Obama.

As has become the norm these days, most of the media is agog over Obama’s Race In America speech. To his credit, the man tackled some of the controversies that led to this speech more directly than employ his usual forceful repetition of uplifting trivialities. The intent of this blog post is to ponder on the trend (in the way we talk about things) that seems to have reached its nadir in the rhetoric surrounding his campaign. I will offer two examples, at least one of which any member of the broad left will appreciate.

The first example is that incongruous claim of Fox News: that they are Fair and Balanced. It is not arguable (I hope) that even those who disagree on whether Fox can make this claim will agree that Fair and Balanced is a good goal for a news organisation. I believe that is not necessarily so. Why not instead Objective and Factual? We are aware of the valid critique of notions of objectivity and fact as offered by philosophers, post-modernists and relativists. Yet, all that suggests is that a fair and balanced approach is a good means to the end of informing the public in a critical manner of events and issues. Instead, a subtle (or perhaps not so subtle) substitution of terms occurs, where Objective is replaced by Neutral or Centred. As some have said: “Nazis and gypsies/Jews get equal time — we report, you decide!”.

Similarly, you have this class of political citizens now known as “independents” — the name denotes that these individuals are independent of political parties and (by some extension) ideologies. But where do they stand on right and wrong? After all, those who support this or that party or ideology do so (typically) not because of some arbitrary preference, but because they believe their ideology to be right or just. It should perhaps be unsurprising then that independents tend to be those who are least affected by issues of truth and justice.

A second example is the appeal, via Obama, of the term “unity”. We, the public, are “yearning for unity”, some sort of “middle path” (as one New York Times writer, Ron Klain, puts it), implying either that disunity is the primary problem facing us, or that unity can simultaneously serve as both the means and end. The real problem however is that it can be neither, exactly because it cannot be produced from thin air (or hot air, for that matter!), for the resolution of the issues of contention rightly preclude unifying behind a programme, agenda or methodology towards a common goal. We are often offered the analogy of ‘herding cats’ to highlight the problems of extreme fractiousness, and it is not an entirely invalid argument, but it is not the central problem. Feminists, labour activists, minority rights advocates, animal welfare activists and others are not acting out of a sense of feline disobedience, but rather constantly working on reconciling the righteous demands of their cause with the limits of immediate political change.

As in the case of creationism vs evolutionary theory, the divisions among political groups reflect fundamental disagreements in the way we see and project the world, how it is and how it should be. Unity cannot resolve the issues but rather the resolution of these issues can bring about unity: if the parties involved can agree upon a mechanism for resolution. And that, in my humble opinion, is the real issue. The divisions among groups remain intractable because these groups do not even share a methodology for resolving disputes. The routine fallback, in the face of this block, is the invocation of allegedly shared “values”, common roots, mythical glorious pasts, and such bromides. Which incidentally are a large part of many of Obama’s “inspiring” speeches. If you don’t believe me, here are the “greatest hits” from the Race in America speech as they appear in the first few paragraphs:

• Obligatory introductory reference and eulogy to founding fathers
• Unite for “our children and grandchildren” — childless need not apply!
• “Unyielding faith in the decency and generosity of the American people”
• “… no other country on Earth is my story even possible” (why not?)
• “we saw how hungry the American people were for this message of unity” (this is a leap of rhetoric even for Obama, that people hunger not even for “unity” but for a “message” of unity. Jon Stewart pointed out something puzzling about George Bush’s speeches: the man would arrive at various spots facing emergencies and proclaim that he was there to reassure the people, and so on. What Stewart found strange was that Bush would tell us what he was there for, which is more or less obvious, but fail to give us a clue on how he planned to go about this task!).

Obama is possibly a more honest chap than many others in his sphere. Rather than capitalise on the Geraldine Ferraro controversy, by continuing the ongoing “framing” of her comments in a racist context (no doubt ably aided by her continued blathering), he astutely nails the crux of the criticism:

On one end of the spectrum, we’ve heard the implication that my candidacy is somehow an exercise in affirmative action; that it’s based solely on the desire of wide-eyed liberals to purchase racial reconciliation on the cheap.

In case it isn’t obvious, I don’t speak for Ferraro or her psychologist, but the above is the legitimate form of what I would like to call the “Obama as a non-threatening black man advantage” thesis. And as noted in a previous post, this is the promise offered explicitly by Obama supporters like Oprah Winfrey: “[you] are free from the constraints of gender and race”.