Arkansawyer

It’s a darned shame they don’t have this sort of technology in Iran. It would’ve made stopping those demonstrators a whole lot easier.

And those civil rights people in the south? They never would have been out of the observation of the police. The KKK would’ve had a field day, when their allies in the police force passed this information on. Why, if they’d had these tools, black people still might not be able to vote.

So don’t worry, citizen. It’s all being done for you!

(And for the well-connected towing companies:

I told them to build a bigger impound yard because we’re going to fill it up.

Cash flow city!)

Read the whole thing:

As several people have noted, in a sane world Sanford’s previous attempt to increase the misery of the poor people in South Carolina would be a much greater disability than his forgetfulness about his marriage vows.

This one, too:

Ken Starr set a rotten example, and it would be too bad if his critics now became his imitators.

As you can see from the Michael Yates post I linked to yesterday, many of us on the left are rooting for the people of Iran who went out in the streets to protest what they believed to be a stolen election.

Now, here’s a thought experiment for you: What do you think would have happened in 2000 if we here in America who believed our presidential election had been stolen had done the same thing?

In a very thorough post by Middle East expert Juan Cole, he gets around to that sort of question:

Moreover, very unfortunately, US politicians are no longer in a position to lecture other countries about their human rights. The kind of unlicensed, city-wide demonstrations being held in Tehran last week would not be allowed to be held in the United States. Senator John McCain led the charge against Obama for not having sufficiently intervened in Iran. At the Republican National Committee convention in St. Paul, 250 protesters were arrested shortly before John McCain took the podium. Most were innocent activists and even journalists. Amy Goodman and her staff were assaulted. In New York in 2004, ‘protest zones’ were assigned, and 1800 protesters were arrested, who have now been awarded civil damages by the courts. Spontaneous, city-wide demonstrations outside designated ‘protest zones’ would be illegal in New York City, apparently. In fact, the Republican National Committee has undertaken to pay for the cost of any lawsuits by wronged protesters, which many observers fear will make the police more aggressive, since they will know that their municipal authorities will not have to pay for civil damages.

The number of demonstrators arrested in Tehran on Saturday is estimated at 550 or so, which is less than those arrested by the NYPD for protesting Bush policies in 2004.

I applaud the Iranian public’s protests against a clearly fraudulent election, and deplore the jackboot tactics that the regime is using to quell them. But it is important to remember that the US itself was moved by Bush and McCain toward a ‘Homeland Security’ national security state that is intolerant of public protest and throws the word ‘terrorist’ around about dissidents. Obama and the Democrats have not addressed this creeping desecration of the Bill of Rights, and until they do, the pronouncements of self-righteous US senators and congressmen on the travesty in Tehran will be nothing more that imperialist hypocrisy of the most abject sort.

Now, does anyone want to try this trick at home?

If so, and I think you’re serious about making an unlicensed peaceful demonstration, I’ll help you organize it. If you’re in my neighborhood, I’ll be there. If you get carted off for it, I’ll get carted off with you.

We’ll need a slogan, and here’s the one I suggest:

Fair Elections and Freedom of Assembly are Human Rights, from Iran to the United States, from Tehran to <your hometown here>!

I think that’s worth getting arrested for.

Don’t forget to bring your kids. After all, civics classes aren’t what they used to be.

Michael Yates posts infrequently, and when he does, it’s meaty:

Economists never say much about work. They talk about the supply of and the demand for labor, but they have very little to say about the nature of the work we do. Like most commentators, they seem to believe that modern economies will require ever more skilled work, which will be done in clean and quiet workplaces, by educated workers, who will share in decision-making with managerial facilitators. We should disabuse ourselves of such notions. In the world today, the overwhelming majority of workers do hard and dangerous labor, risking the health of their bodies and minds every minute they toil.

Sound like empty rhetoric? Hardly. It’s followed up by example after example, some recent, some from well in the past, of people being worked to misery, exhaustion, and death.

Here’s another:

Soon after taking power, the Reutherites signed the “Treaty of Detroit,” a long-term contract with General Motors that gave the workers considerable wage gains, but conceded the management of the corporation to the bosses. What this meant, in effect, was that the union agreed to confine bargaining to the terrain of the labor market, demanding only that the companies pay a high price for the labor the workers had to sell. There were work rules, of course, and a worker who thought these were being violated by the company could file a grievance, which wold be handled by a union staff person, often with little input from the aggrieved member.. But the nature of the product, how the cars were produced, the speed of the assembly line, the prices of the automobiles, and most importantly, the nature of the work that the employees performed, were all off limits in the bargaining, the sole prerogative of the employer. So, the mechanisms of control described in the first quote above were beyond the reach of the union. Whatever human qualities the work had were stripped away to enhance managerial control, and whatever human qualities the work might have been made to have were not even considered. This not only alienated the workers along the never-ending assembly line, but it also denied them any chance to develop their capacities to run the industrial machine themselves.

And since Iran is the trendy topic of today:

What should we make of all this? First and notwithstanding the fact that millions did vote for the current president and have rallied behind him, this is indeed a popular uprising, aimed at creating a more democratic and less oppressive society. As such, it should be embraced by all radicals and progressives. No one should doubt that the United States has been trying to destabilize the Iranian government for many years and has agents inside the country to help this along. But the demonstrations have been too large and spontaneous to have been the product of CIA machinations. Second, we should abandon the argument that supporting the demonstrators gives aid and comfort to the imperialists. It may be that Mousavi would be as bad as Ahmadinejad, but it would be a mistake to believe that he would have become a stooge of the United States. This isn’t possible in Iran today. And in any event, Ahmadinejad’s anti-imperialist rhetoric has always rung a bit hollow, more for domestic consumption than a matter of principle. Plus, we must recognize that it is up to the Iranian people, not us, to decide what to do now. I used to work for the United Farm Workers union. Cesar Chavez ruled with an iron hand, brooking no dissent either from staff or rank-and-file farm workers. When workers pushed for control of their own union, Cesar crushed them. Was it wise for some who should have known better to stifle their concern about what Chavez was doing because his allies said that openly criticizing him gave aid and comfort to the growers? The internal collapse of the union tells us otherwise. Those who use a parallel argument now for Iran will be judged harshly by the Iranian people.

He’s got the left-wing case for supporting the protests in Iran nailed. It’s a good analysis, and I’m with it.

So: Michael Yates. Check him out.

This came to me through an email list Michael Yates and I are on:

A few years after our move, I suffered a bout of depression. I thought that this was because of some problems with our children and disgust with my job. It got so bad that I went into therapy. The therapist and I began to talk, and the psychiatrist prescribed Paxil. The talk helped, and so did the drug. The knot in my stomach went away, as did the anxiety. However, the side effects of the drug were soon apparent. Some were benign enough. I could drink as much coffee as I wanted without getting hyper and without stomach distress. I was able to concentrate on my work to a remarkable degree. One day when Karen took the kids on a trip, I stayed at my desk working intently for hours, until I looked up and said to myself, “something is wrong here.” Other side effects were not so harmless. Night sweats, overly vivid dreams, indifference to sex. And something very odd. I lost all interest in music. In fact, I could barely stand to hear it. And if I did, some song or other would keep running through my head, in an endless loop, for days at a time.

Read it.

Could you be a member of the lunatic fringe?

Here are some symptoms:

Are your comments longer than the article to which you respond?

Do you cut and paste huge amounts of text?

Do you write more than all other commenters combined?

Do you have these symptoms? Does someone you love? Get help now! It’s never too late to leave the lunatic fringe!

Wendell Griffen is a prinicipled and outspoken man, a potent combination which cost him re-election to the Arkansas Court of Appeals. Now he has a blog and we are the better for it:

The fact that dangerous people exist who will do dangerous and even deadly things is no excuse for contaminating the gospel of God’s love and truth with a Jack Bauer approach to faith. So I suspect that Dr. King never contemplated having a “bring your gun to church Sunday.” He rightly understood that the gospel of Christ calls for “a more excellent way” to affirm freedom than to parade symbols of fear and death around while singing “Have Thine Own Way.”

Much the better:

Fox Television is part of the commercial broadcasting industry which has long defined excellence and virtue by commercial profit-making, not justice, truth, and mercy. So I do not expect Fox Television to create a Jack Bauer who lives according to the grace and truth of Jesus Christ.

But I do expect worshippers who answer to the name of Christ to recognize that Jack Bauer is not Jesus. I expect people who fuss about biblical inerrancy to respect the life, ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ enough to know that torture violates the essence of Christianity.

A bit about Obama and the difference between “color-blind” and “race-neutral”:

Obama did not transcend race, nor did the Americans who cast their votes for him, because no person can transcend racial identity, either their own or that of anyone else. What Obama and most American voters did was refuse to allow the decision on who should lead our nation to turn on racism, meaning the view that Obama is somehow less worthy to be trusted to lead the nation on account of his racial identity.  Theirs was not color-blind decision-making which ignored the reality of Obama’s racial identity, either for Obama or the voters who supported him. Rather, it was race-neutral decision-making, which acknowledged Obama’s racial identity but refused to vest it with the illegitimate power to disqualify Obama from being elected on account of his racial identity.

We are fortunate that Wendell Griffen has not left public life.

I’ve been following this terrible, terrible story with the sick dread a parent of a young child feels*, and looking for something good that might come from it. In the follow-up, I may have found it:

On Monday at 4:35 p.m., Katrina Markley reported her two children missing from their duplex at 347-A Sage St. The siblings were found in the trunk of the family’s car about a half hour later by their grandmother. They were pronounced dead at the scene.

The mother told police the children went outside to a neighbor’s house about 4 p.m. and she couldn’t find them 30 minutes later. Police searched door to door in the neighborhood until the bodies were discovered in the trunk.

Now, think this through with me. If a child is missing, where is the first place to look? Other people’s homes? No. If they’re with someone from the neighborhood, they are almost certainly okay, and a delay in finding them is not critical. But on a hot day, a child locked in a car, or a car trunk, or some other place is in immenent danger of death, time is of the essence, and therefore those are the first places to look.

The police started looking where they expected the children would be found, maybe where they hoped the children would be found. The grandmother looked where she hoped they would not be, in a life-threatening place. If the police search had begun there, and these children were found half an hour sooner, quite likely they would have lived.

I don’t blame the officers who searched. I assume they were following whatever training they’d gotten for finding missing children. I do question the training and those who designed it. There may be blame there.

You know the old joke, about the man looking for his car keys under the streetlamp, not because he thought the keys were there–he was sure they weren’t–but because the lighting was better? Same thing.

The police can do better than this, but they’ll need better training. For that reason, I make this proposal:

The Springdale Police Department should review and revise their training and procedures in searching for missing children, with an emphasis on searching quickly in places which are life-threatening for the child.

My heart goes out to the Markleys and their family, and their friends and neighbors, and the police involved in the search–what a horrible thing they had to deal with–and, well, really anyone involved. I’m sure there’ve been nightmares all around for everyone. But sympathy is not enough. There is a clear action to be taken in order to save the next child’s life.

*I’ve also been following the comments with a different sick feeling, from the utter lack of compassion in so many of the commenters. That’s another story. I’ll try to write that one someday soon.

Barack Obama, exposed! Ten minutes in, the fraud becomes clear..

(via Mashable)

At least it bespells it correctly.