Deep Tweets

Didn't think I'd live to see the day...

The Presbyterian Church (USA) just approved gay marriage, effective Sunday. So. http://t.co/vGAmlC6TKf pic.twitter.com/juY4gsRrUL
— Peter Weber (@PJWeber) June 20, 2014

Sorry, not sorry kids, there's no free lunch

There are some conservatives who would call this a teaching moment. One wonders what lesson they think they're teaching these children.

Up to 40 kids at Uintah Elementary in Salt Lake City picked up their lunches Tuesday, then watched as the meals were taken and thrown away because of outstanding balances on their accounts — a move that shocked and angered parents.

ason Olsen, a Salt Lake City District spokesman, said the district’s child-nutrition department became aware that Uintah had a large number of students who owed money for lunches. [...]

As a result, the child-nutrition manager visited the school and decided to withhold lunches to deal with the issue, he said.

But cafeteria workers weren’t able to see which children owed money until they had already received lunches, Olsen explained.

The workers then took those lunches from the students and threw them away, he said, because once food is served to one student it can’t be served to another.

The kids who had their lunches confiscated by the child-nutrition manager were handed an orange and told to go get a milk instead.

The school apologized on facebook. They're very sorry all those deadbeat parents, who may or may not have been properly notified, forcced the school to humilate the children in this manner.

This is not new. It's been happening all over the country for some time now. Apparently the new front of the true conservative's war on the poor is literally taking the food out of the mouths of children. They'll fight to the death to force poor women to bear thebabies but once they're born, they're on their own.

The price of privatizing the public commons

The 73 year old grandmother denied cancer medication and being clapped into solitary confinement for an entire month in a private prison for complaining about it, is just one story in the long and sorry annals of private prison abuse. We're unlikely to close this book any time soon. The Prison Industrial Complex has no incentive to change.

Though a court has not yet heard Lester’s case, the two prison companies in question already face a string of allegations that they abuse or neglect inmates. Because private prison companies must turn a profit, health care and quality of life are often sacrificed for the bottom line. Corizon is already handling lawsuits and investigations all over the country charging that the health care company ignored inmates’ calls for help, left sick inmates in soiled bedsheets without any food or water, and even let a man die because calling an ambulance was deemed too expensive.

Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), meanwhile, was recently held in contempt for understaffing prisons, and a few months earlier paid $600,000 to settle another lawsuit over inmate abuse. The extremely profitable company has also been caught overcrowding prisons to the point that many inmates sleep on the floor, using gangs to police facilities.

CCA's revenue is  about 1.736 billion. It only employed 16,750 people as of 2011. A paltry fine of $600K is just another cost efficiency in the ledgers. I have no idea if private prisons are saving the government money in incarceration costs. But even if it is cost effective in dollars, it comes at the price of our humanity and our shared obligations. A civil society treats its prisoners humanely. [image via afsc.org]

Deep tweets

This may become a regular feature at irregular times. Some tweets just resonate for reasons unnecessary to explain.

GOPers in La. elect a new congressman based largely on his "Duck Dynasty" endorsement http://t.co/sjkBpXFOOn A great day for America!
— Will Bunch (@Will_Bunch) November 18, 2013

"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by reducing everything to 140 characters or less" -- @GinsbergToday
— Will Bunch (@Will_Bunch) November 16, 2013

Austerity politics proving fatal to recovery

If you missed it this week, Dr. Krugman consulted with the experts and their diagnosis for our future is grim. Good news is they've identifited the cause. Austerity is killing our economy.

What’s more, the authors — one of whom is the Federal Reserve Board’s director of research and statistics, so we’re not talking about obscure academics — put a number to these effects, and it’s terrifying. They suggest that economic weakness has already reduced America’s economic potential by around 7 percent, which means that it makes us poorer to the tune of more than $1 trillion a year. And we’re not talking about just one year’s losses, we’re talking about long-term damage: $1 trillion a year for multiple years.

True, debt can indirectly make us poorer if deficits drive up interest rates and thereby discourage productive investment. But that hasn’t been happening. Instead, investment is low because of the economy’s weakness. And one of the main things keeping the economy weak is the depressing effect of cutbacks in public spending — especially, by the way, cuts in public investment — all justified in the name of protecting the future from the wildly exaggerated threat of excessive debt.

The bad news is, austerity fiends still infect our policies and the cure requires political courage. Presently, there's a severe shortage of that inside The Bubble. Unfortunately, due to sequester cuts the Dept of Public Health will be unable to resupply the serum for some time.

We've come too far to turn back now

It wasn't so long ago that Republicans won an election by fearmongering about gays destroying "traditional marriage." So it's rather stunning that we've evolved so quickly to this level of public acceptance of equal marriage rights for gays.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg will become the first Supreme Court member to conduct a same-sex marriage ceremony Saturday when she officiates at the Washington wedding of Kennedy Center President Michael M. Kaiser.

The gala wedding of Kaiser and economist John Roberts at the performing arts center brings together the nation’s highest court and the capital’s high society and will mark a new milepost in the recognition of same-sex unions.

I imagine it will make the society pages. Wonder if Sally Quinn will be there.

Hope I die before I get old

We go through this every ten years, olds blaming the youth for what's wrong with everything. The new gen blame the olds for fucking everything up. They want to change the world. The olds are threatened by change and yearn for the good old days when everything was predictable and made sense. To them. So it has been and so it shall be probably for as long as humans inhabit this planet.

Apparently, while I've been busy with real life endeavors, there's been a spate of hit pieces against the Millenials on the intertoobz. So graphic artist Matt Bors, (who turns out to be much younger than I thought), posts a great take on the latest interation of intergenerational warfare rendered in his own inimitable style.

Via Atrios who rightly reminds the crackpot cranks, "And, no, olds, you would not be able to work yourself through college without help or debt today. Public university used to be free or cheap, it no longer is."

Seriously. This new generation has been so screwed by the olds, don't see how anyone can blame the kids for anything. They have every right to be pissed off.

The kings of click-bait journalism

New Republic posts an interview with Politico's head honchos John F. Harris and Jim VandeHei that illuminates their business model. It's an interesting piece if you have a high tolerance for smug pricks, but this is the graf that explains why Charlie Pierce dubbed their rag, "Tiger Beat on the Potomac."

JH: We have an obligation to be interesting. We don’t think of ourselves as the electric company or the water company: Well, we have a responsibility ...”2 That was a mindset in a previous generation of journalists. That mindset might have even been legitimate. There really were only a handful of establishments reporting on this stuff and making judgments on its relative importance. People were looking to editors to say, “Tell me what I should think about.” We are in an era where everyone is his or her own editor and will decide what they care about. If we are boring, ... there is no market for that. Nor is there a public calling to be boring.

In other words, informing the public isn't their job. Informing the public with actual facts presented in context is a loser's game. Won't get a Drudge link with real news. All the money is in useless insider gossip and creating fake controversies. For this crapola we give them special protections under rule of law. And they expect a Pulitzer for it too, which isn't as unlikely as it should be since I think one of them sits on the damn prize committee.

I could mock this at great length but, as usual, Charlie Pierce's scathing takedown of the gruesome twosome already says it all.

NRA losing its firepower

Alec MacGillis takes a long look at the battle over gun safety reform and finds NRA is losing its might in the fight. It's a longish read but this is the big takeaway.

The narrow defeat of the background-check bill, it turns out, was not the end of hopes for gun reform, but the beginning.

Newtown really did change everything and the the conventional wisdom is outdated. The NRA's power to swing elections is waning.

Senator Chris Murphy, a rookie Connecticut Democrat who has taken a lead on the issue since the Newtown massacre, points out that, of the 16 Senate races the NRA participated in last year, 13 of its candidates lost. “The NRA is just all mythology,” he says. “The NRA does not win elections anymore.”

The forces for gun sense are gaining strength. Their resolve was not broken by one legislative defeat, it's hardened into a determined force that will prevail in the end. From Bloomberg's Mayors Against Illegal Guns to Gabby Giffords' group to Moms Demand Action and a growing list of gun safety activists, a coalition is growing larger every day. Their tactics are improving. The NRA's gun absolutists are loud but their numbers are shrinking. The gun sense lobby is determined to prove to the political class that aligning with that minority comes at a greater cost than defying it. We'll all be safer because of their good work.

Wherein Pope Francis wins me over

As I've said before, I'm not an atheist. Neither am I particularly religious though I did suffer from Catholic envy when I was young and I collect Catholic religious items now. Because they're beautiful. However, I've never had any great love for the Pope. In fact I found the whole concept of the papacy somewhat insulting. So I'm surprised to find myself liking Pope Francis so much. He doesn't talk or behave like the others before him, at least in my lifetime.

This homily he gave on the theme culture of encounter is the foundation of peace rather knocked me out. I mean when have you heard words like this from the Vatican?

"The Lord created us in His image and likeness, and we are the image of the Lord, and He does good and all of us have this commandment at heart: do good and do not do evil. All of us. ‘But, Father, this is not Catholic! He cannot do good.’ Yes, he can. He must. Not can: must! Because he has this commandment within him. Instead, this ‘closing off’ that imagines that those outside, everyone, cannot do good is a wall that leads to war and also to what some people throughout history have conceived of: killing in the name of God. That we can kill in the name of God. And that, simply, is blasphemy. To say that you can kill in the name of God is blasphemy.”

...And we all have a duty to do good. And this commandment for everyone to do good, I think, is a beautiful path towards peace. If we, each doing our own part, if we do good to others, if we meet there, doing good, and we go slowly, gently, little by little, we will make that culture of encounter: we need that so much. We must meet one another doing good. ‘But I don’t believe, Father, I am an atheist!’ But do good: we will meet one another there.”

I was genuinely shocked by the reaction to this on my social nets. Whole lot of angry atheists sneering at him for being condescending, or demanding moral authority. I read it a whole different way.

He's not saying dear atheists, I absolve you. He's talking to the whole damn world saying don't sit in judgment of good works just because the doer doesn't share your belief system. Not all that different from Mr. Rogers saying look for the helpers. And it's powerful, because the Pope is saying it. Millions of people do give him moral authority, while even those who don't will hear the words. Perhaps it will even make some people reconsider their self-claimed absolute righteousness in their own beliefs. Surely, that would be a good thing.

Charles Ramsey: Cleveland's real life hero

It's like an TV crime show episode playing out in real life but I'm not going to recap the escape of the three abducted women after 10 years in Cleveland. This will be a big story for days and the details will be well covered. But huzzah for Charles Ramsey who chose to intervene in what he assumed was an ordinary domestic dispute. These days most people would have ignored the cries of Amanda Berry, not wanting to get involved. So I do want to preserve his epic interview for the archives.



And a transcript of his 911 call is here.

If he hadn't acted, those women could still be prisioners or worse, have been killed for trying to escape. Ramsey was especially brave to get involved because he's a black man rescuing a white woman. Just being on a street while black and poor is a risk in a big city. One of the most telling moments in the video was when the police siren bleeped twice and you could see his flight instinct kick in for a few seconds. But he heeded the plea for help and took the chance. He saved their lives.

We need more Charles Ramseys in the world today.

Bookplates worth a thousand words

I just can't with the intertoobz today. Everybody pissed off about something different and sniping at each other. Too much noise. Not enough contemplation. So here's bookplates of the famous. Worth the click to see all 34 more (all on one page) at the link.