Family Values

Sounds like a good idea to me, only I don't have any kids.  Maybe I should adopt.

Keep Your Government Hands Off My Catfood Commission!

Tom Tomorrow's latest cartoon baffles me.  It depicts Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles appearing in the Oval Office to offer a nonplussed-looking Barack Obama their help against the "arbitrary, self-imposed budget deadline" he faces. 

You'd think, looking at the cartoon, that Obama had nothing to do with the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform.  Of course it was his own bipartisan creation, packed with deficit hawks of his own choosing, including Paul Ryan.  ("Bipartisan" is a keyword in the cartoon, but only to mock Simpson and Bowles.  Obama's own bipartisanship-mongering is not mentioned.)

I looked around the web a little to see if I could find out whose idea the Commision was.  It looks like it was Obama's; he certainly made it his own.  One article I found was from last Monday's New York Times.  The title was a giveaway: "Obama's Unacknowledged Debt to Bowles-Simpson Plan."  Aha!  There was no "Bowles-Simpson Plan."  Another article I stumbled on, from a small newspaper, explained it very well:

“Simpson-Bowles” is shorthand for a bipartisan deficit commission co-chaired by Republican Alan Simpson and Democrat Erskine Bowles. While the commission never formally issued a report because it never reached consensus on a plan, Simpson and Bowles informally presented a memorandum of their ideas to the Congress and President Obama.

There, that wasn't so hard, was it?  And it's not exactly obscure.  Yet the notion that the Commission produced a report has gone viral in the corporate media.  (So much so that I bought it for a while myself.)  Even if you like the recommendations in their memo, Bowles and Simpson did not speak for the Commission as a whole.  Which hasn't kept them from touring the country giving speeches pushing their recommendations at $40,000 a pop.

The Times article never mentions this. Instead we get stuff like this:

It came just a few months after the president had opted not to endorse the recommendations of a deficit commission he had created in hopes of brokering a bold, bipartisan deficit deal. That gave rise to a portrayal that has stuck, popularized by Republicans, pundits and some Democrats: that the president, out of political timidity, snubbed his own panel’s plan.

There are also allusions to "the major tenets supported by a majority of the commission’s members", "the commission’s report in December 2010," and so on.

To repeat: the "recommendations" did not come from the commission; "his own panel" produced no "plan."  The memorandum the chairmen produced could probably have been written if the commission had never been appointed nor met in solemn convocation -- which would have saved a lot of money right there.  The writer quietly acknowledges reality further down:

On Dec. 1, 2010, Mr. Bowles and Mr. Simpson unveiled an ambitious package of spending cuts and revenue increases that was supported two days later by 11 of the 18 commissioners — five from each party, including all three conservative Senate Republicans, and an independent business executive. While three votes short of the 14 needed to force a Congressional vote, it raised hopes that the blueprint could lead to compromise between Mr. Obama and Republicans. 

The writer almost admits that the "package" was the work of the two chairmen, not the commission itself, and it didn't get the fourteen-vote supermajority required to force Congressional action.  The commission itself had been packed by Obama with deficit hawks (I mean, Paul Ryan?), without whom I suppose support for the memo would have been even weaker.  But it's an article of faith in the corporate media that Simpson-Bowles could have saved us, even if only by putting forth material for bipartisan compromise that could have ended the gridlock, but President Obama lacked the political will to face down his base.

Read the comments on the Times article if you have the chance and the stomach; they're even more demented, by and large, than the article itself.  Evidently the Times has Hope that President Obama will have the commitment to bring about real Change of the kind wealthy Republicans want: spending cuts of the right kind -- especially Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid -- while leaving the big moneymakers, high-tech industry and its evil twin the military, untouched.

At their recent lunch, Mr. Obama assured Mr. Bowles he would not give up. Mr. Bowles said the president talked of seeing “a real opportunity” for compromise after the election, when Republicans will be eager to avoid the expiration of Bush tax cuts and automatic cuts in military spending — suggesting another chance for a deal inspired by Bowles-Simpson. 

“To see his commitment,” Mr. Bowles said, “gave me real hope.” 

Grumpy Old Man

Oh dear, was I being grumpy again?  I promise you, I didn't mean to be, I was trying to be upbeat for a change.  The other day, a liberal friend on Facebook (not the law professor; this one's a local commercial artist) remarked that I must be on vacation, because I wasn't in "the grumpy chair" about one of his posts.  But that very same day he approved of my being "grumpy" about a right-wing GOP meme.  So it's only risible grumpiness to criticize right-wing Democrats; got it.

But what I meant to write about was my Right Wing Acquaintance Number One's return to the political fray; apparently he's begun to recover from the devastating trauma of Obama's reelection.

Or maybe not.  He posted a couple of links about the "looming fiscal cliff crisis," one of which claimed that the real danger comes from the "looming debt crisis."  On this one RWA1 remarked "There is the real crisis, and the Democrats pretend it that it's all taken care of."  Of course the Fiscal Cliff is largely manufactured by the corporate media and their allies in Washington, including Obama himself.  I'm ready to blame the Democrats for their role in our economic troubles, but that role mostly consists of collaborating with the Republicans.  I pointed out that as far the debt goes, the Republicans raised the debt ceiling for Bush and Reagan, so their present concern about the debt is as deceitful as their concern about the future of Social Security and Medicare.  RWA1 ignored this, mumbling something about what will happen when "the Chinese stop buying our debt."  But it's all the Democrats' fault, even though the Chinese bought a lot of our debt from the Bush crime family.  That's a benefit of being on the losing side in a major election: you can blame everything on the other guys, though as the past four years show, even when you win you can blame everything on the other guys.  It's no substitute for thought, of course.

The other link, to an op-ed, called for the GOP to "force Obama's hand," with no comment from RWA1.  I remarked that I'm all for the GOP continuing to self-destruct, since it would leave the Democrats no excuse for screwing things up.  RWA1 replied, "I foresee a mess, as there is a paucity of courage on all [!] sides."  That was nice and vacuous, but also willfully irrelevant.  (Though "foresee" also means "I hope I hope I hope."  Apocalypse is a typical right-wing fantasy; it never seems to occur to them that a catastrophe could affect them too.)

As with principles, courage doesn't mean anything in itself if you don't exercise it in a good cause.  It's no recommendation to have the courage to destroy the economy; the deficit hawks of both parties have shown numerous times that they do have that courage.  The weird thing is that like so many people on both major parties, RWA1 overlooks the fundamental agreement between Obama and the Republicans: cut government spending, including on social programs; don't raise taxes on the wealthy too much; lower the deficit at all costs.  The main difference between them is that Obama is more willing to raises taxes on the rich.  He has already lowered spending (a disastrous policy in a troubled economy) more than any recent president; he has put Social Security and Medicare on the chopping block; he appointed a bipartisan commission to make recommendations on cutting the deficit, packing with deficit hawks -- and when it failed, even so, to reach conclusions, he accepted the report of the two chairmen.

I don't know what RWA1 thinks would be the courageous thing for "all sides" to do.  But it's clear that Obama is ready to do most of what the Republicans say they want done, and to defy his base in doing so.  It won't matter to him, since he doesn't have to appease voters to be re-elected again.  If the Democrats do badly in 2014 because of Obama's policies, the damage will have been done to the economy and it will be hard, nearly impossible, to repair.  I'd suspect that RWA1 still hasn't recovered from the elections, but he's consistently attacked a fantasy Obama for the past four years, so that can't be the explanation.

I confess, I didn't read either article he linked to; what interested me was what RWA1 was saying.  It's the same old swill.

The same day, my liberal law-professor friend linked to this Paul Krugman column, where he frets and whimpers about rumors that President Obama may already have sold the farm.

So this looks crazy to me; it looks like a deal that makes no sense either substantively or in terms of the actual bargaining strength of the parties. And if it does happen, the disillusionment on the Democratic side would be huge. All that effort to reelect Obama, and the first thing he does is give away two years of Medicare? How’s that going to play in future attempts to get out the vote?

I also hope the rumors turn out to be false, but I'm not betting anything on it; Obama has such a long record of selling out his base to his right-wing allies and donors that the rumors seem entirely too plausible.  And what does Obama care about future attempts to get out the vote?  That is not his problem anymore.  The only question is what can be done to block him, or to punish him afterward if he does it.  "Disillusionment on the Democratic side" and a dollar will get you on the bus, and if Obama does queer the deal, I fully expect all the Obama cultists out there to fall into line behind their guy, as they always have before: If Barack says it, it must be right.

I asked my friend why Krugman was undermining POTUS, though.  Even his timid and reserved criticism of President Obama could hurt the Democrats in 2014.  Nothing less than total devotion will do, or the Republicans will take over, and where will we be then?

When You've Got a Ph.D., Everything Looks Like an Intervention

I'm now well into Heterosexual Africa?: The History of an Idea from the Age of Exploration to the Age of AIDS (Ohio, 2008).  The author, Marc Epprecht, also wrote Hungochani, a highly-praised book on homosexuality in Southern Africa which I have on my shelves but haven't read yet.  In Heterosexual Africa? Epprecht takes on the doctrine, spread by Africans and non-Africans alike, that homosexuality is unknown in Africa, with an emphasis on the impact it has had on responses to the HIV/AIDS pandemic.  In many ways it's a valuable book, and I suspect I'll be writing more about the book in the next few days, but one sentence on page 117 brought me up short, and I want to discuss it now.

In his chapter focusing on HIV/AIDS in Africa, Epprecht surveys the quasi-scientific literature on modes of transmission, which he says ignored male-to-male sexuality almost entirely; at best, this literature mentioned the possibility merely to dismiss it.  What research did mention (usually male) homosex was itself ignored, as though it had never been published.

In an article on African AIDS patients in Europe, from 1981 through 1985, for example, Jean Sonnet and H.Taelman ... noted that one out of forty-two patients in their study admitted to not being heterosexual. The WHO study noted above found even more. Out of 117 African African patients in Europe who were tested in the first nine months of 1986, 5 percent were found to have contracted HIV through homosexual or bisexual transmission, and a further 1 percent either that way or though intravenous drug injection ... 

So far, so bad.  Epprecht repeatedly stresses the inadequacy of terminology like "heterosexual" and "homosexual" for traditional cultures in Africa, invoking the authority of queer and post-colonial theory; he even has wit enough to recognize that "sex" is problematic, since most societies, including the "West," tend to recognize only penis-in-vagina penetration as "sex."  Even that doesn't work outside English-speaking parts of the world, and researchers working in other languages with informants whose first language is not a European one, are often unclear about the languages they use to elicit information.  In this case I have the added difficulty that Epprecht is paraphrasing his sources, though since they were in European languages "homosexual" or its cognates were probably used.

Even among white Americans and Europeans, however, there's considerable ambiguity about a phrase like "not being heterosexual."  Does it mean that the subject is exclusively homosexual in his or her desires and behavior, or simply not exclusively heterosexual?  Considering the number of Americans who don't consider themselves homosexual because they've never been penetrated although they have penetrated many other males, or who have been penetrated but it doesn't count because they "avidly" penetrate females, some more care, if not precision, with terms is desirable here.

"Homosexual or bisexual transmission" is even worse.  Bisexual transmission would require a rather exotic sex life, even for the decadent West: it would mean that both a male and a female partner were involved (simultaneously?) in transmitting the virus to the recipient.  If he got it from a male, it doesn't matter whether he or his partner were "bisexual," which I suppose is what was meant by "bisexual transmission."  As Kinsey wrote in 1948, the word bisexual "should, however, be used with the understanding that it is patterned on the words heterosexual and homosexual, and, like them, refers to the sex of the partner, and proves nothing about the constitution of the person who is labeled bisexual [657]."

Which brings me, in more ways than one, to the sentence by Epprecht that made me see red, emboldened below:

These figures are very low compared to the epidemic in Europe and America.  But they can more usefully be compared to what Alfred Kinsey found in American men in the days before gay rights (that is, 4 percent admitting to homosexuality as a predominant orientation).

I had been wondering why Epprecht hadn't mentioned Kinsey before in this book, aside from a passing allusion seven pages earlier.  Kinsey understood the problems of studying human sexuality better than every researcher Epprecht discusses in this book (including, I fear, himself).  Long before AIDS, Kinsey rejected Western notions of sexual essence that ignored the widely differing experiences and practices of men who have sex with men and women who have sex with women.  He didn't, as far as I know, ask any of his interviewees whether they were homosexual, bisexual, or heterosexual. (If he had, most of the heterosexuals would have had no idea what he meant, and would probably have said no.)  He didn't ask them if they'd had homosexual (or heterosexual) experiences.  He asked them what they had done, and with whom.  He was, if I recall correctly what his colleague Wardell Pomeroy wrote, ready to use non-clinical vernacular terms for sexual acts when the interviewee didn't understand clinical terms.  (Asking a farmer or a convict how many times he'd received fellatio, for example, would probably have drawn a blank most of the time.  I kinda wonder if some of the later sex surveys dodged this little problem by not interviewing lower-class or uneducated subjects.)  In short, Kinsey grappled with the very problems that stymied researchers during the AIDS epidemic four decades later, in large part because they'd ignored Kinsey as outdated and irrelevant.  He recognized that many people had a lot of same-sex experience without thinking of themselves as homosexual or bisexual, and he recognized that this counted against the notion of homosexual or bisexual persons, not against their experience, which he rightly considered primary.

But what bothered me about the sentence I quoted above is that Epprecht -- who, you'll recall, has spent over a hundred pages denying the validity of homosexuality as an identity for purposes of studying sexuality in Africa -- is still trying to impose homosexual and bisexual identity on Westerners.  His reference to Kinsey (without a citation in the text or endnote) is incorrect.  It is false that 4 percent of males admitted "to homosexuality as a predominant orientation."  Kinsey didn't use the word "orientation" (to be scrupulous, he used it once in Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, in a different sense) in connection with homosexual or heterosexual experience.  What he found was that 4 percent of his male sample had exclusively homosexual outlet throughout their adult lives.  If he asked them how they "identified" (also a word that would have made no sense in that context in the 1930s and 1940s), it wasn't a factor in his numbers or in his homosexual-heterosexual scale.  Additionally, he found that another 6 percent of his male sample had at least as much homosexual as heterosexual outlet for at least three years of their adult lives.  This meant that 10 percent had predominantly homosexual experience for at least three years of their lives; it's the source of the popular claim that Kinsey found that ten percent of the population was gay or lesbian.  Thirty-seven percent of males had at least one homosexual experience to orgasm during their adult lives; I guess they were "not heterosexual." (This includes the 4 percent and the 10 percent, which I mention because I've encountered people who tried to add all the percentages together: 4 percent plus 10 percent plus 37 percent and so on.)

The point I want to make here is that if you're writing about the diversity and fluidity of human sexuality, Kinsey is fundamental.  True, his work was flawed in certain respects, most of which he knew full well (the absence of people of color in the sample, for one).  But he mapped out the understanding and approach that would be vital during the AIDS pandemic, and had to be largely reinvented from scratch because the researchers had ignored him.  Even thirty years into the pandemic, research professionals keep rediscovering that OMFG, there are totally men who have sex with other men and they aren't gay!  Anyone who treats this as a new revelation has just informed you that they don't know what they're talking about, and need to go back to sex-research kindergarten for remedial study of the basics.  Until they do, they are wasting money and time and human lives.

All The Other Rogue States Are Doing It!

As Israel continues to make itself a shame unto the nations, Democracy Now! reported briefly on the Palestinian Authority's protest against a new wave of Israeli settlements in the West Bank.  At least five European countries have "summoned their Israeli ambassadors."  The Obama administration has responded with the speed and force of a closing steel trap, calling the new settlements "counterproductive."  Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman mounted a revealing defense:

Now I want to remind you that building (settlements) in Jerusalem is with accordance to Israeli law. If anyone wants to investigate further, they can go to the Bush letter and see all those settlements blocks and the changes in the territory which the U.S. president spoke of.

In very much the same way, the mistreatment of German Jewry in the 1930s was "with accordance to" German law.  Slavery and the destruction of the American Indian peoples were "with accordance to" American law.  Lots of terrible state crimes have conformed fully to the laws of their respective nations, because by an amazing coincidence, those nations wrote their laws to enable them to do what they wanted to do.  And citing George W. Bush as authority for your actions is unlikely to persuade anybody.

For Better and For Worse

A gay friend of mine posted this photo today from US Military Buddhists.  Yeah, that sounds oxymoronic to me too, but Buddhists have been official state killers for millennia.  Here's the caption:

Let us pause for a moment and remember Pearl Harbor. Let us remember this and move on to creating a world of love, compassion, and peace.

(Pearl Harbor veteran Dick Fiske,right, hugs Japanese bomber pilot Zenji Abe, left, during ceremonies at the Hilton Hawaiian Village. The pair became friends after meeting on the "Today" show in 1991 and became a symbol for the war's reconciliation.)

My first guess on seeing the picture, of course, was that it was another of the "cute old gay couples get married in Washington State" pictures that have been all over my wall the past day or two.  Too bad; these guys are so adorable together.

Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood

As I'm sure everyone has noticed, after the elections there was a flurry of pronouncements by several corporate bigwigs, more in anger than in sorrow, that they were just going to have cut costs some more because of Obamacare.  Probably the most notorious was Papa John's CEO John Schnatter, but there were others.

Papa John's CEO John Schnatter says that Obamacare will result in a $0.11 to $0.14 price increase per pizza, or $0.15 to $0.20 cents per order, Pizza Marketplace, a trade publication, reports ...

“We're not supportive of Obamacare, like most businesses in our industry,” Schnatter was quoted as saying in Politico. “But our business model and unit economics are about as ideal as you can get for a food company to absorb Obamacare." 

Schnatter has thrown his weight behind Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney this election season, even hosting a campaign fundraiser at his Louisville-area mansion in May. "Don’t you love this country?" Romney, who attended, asked during the event. "What a home this is, what grounds these are, the pool, the golf course."

Not too surprisingly, Schnatter backtracked almost immediately, and claimed he'd been misquoted and misunderstood.  Poor baby.  (It's hard for me to believe that a damn pizza-industry publication would misquote or misunderstand one of its own, but maybe some Communists infiltrated it.)

Today I stumbled on an interesting article, also from an industry source, which reported that

The brand perception of Papa John's, Applebee's and Denny's took a beating after high-ranking representatives of the companies said Obamacare would force them to stop building restaurants, cut worker hours and raise prices.

As the article reports, correlation doesn't equal cause, so it isn't certain that the lowered approval of these brands was a reaction to the announcements.  But it's noteworthy that people like Schnatter found it prudent to repudiate their earlier remarks, even to pretend that they hadn't made them, even before data like this turned up.  But there's something else that I take from this story.

Not all the Obamacare warnings came from the top dogs: some came from franchise owners who ran numerous restaurants, and some came from individual restaurant owners in the franchises.  We hear a lot about the practical common sense of those great job creators, the small businesspeople of America, no less than we do about the wisdom of the great entrepreneurs.  But I think that stories like this should make us all skeptical about what we hear on that score.  Schnatter, for example, claimed that Papa John's would have to raise pizza prices by 11 to 14 cents apiece to make up for increased costs entailed by providing insurance to their employees.  Those numbers have been disputed, but who knows?  Some will call me just a reflexive hater of rich people, but that's not true; I only reflexively hate rich people who are stupid, vicious, and dishonest. 

Just from a shareholder's point of view, there'd be good reason to have doubts about a CEO who took advantage of his prominence to run to the media and make Scrooge-like pronouncements that made the company look bad.  Papa John's stocks took a dive right after he vented, which probably had something to do with his recantation.  (I took that information from the same Forbes article I just linked to -- again, a business-friendly source, not the Daily Worker.)  I suspect that Schnatter pulled the 11 to 14-cent numbers out of his ass, just because he felt like throwing a tantrum over Obama's survival and the very idea of having to provide health insurance to his employees.  Which is his right in a free society, just as the reactions he got were everybody else's right.  It's nice to be reminded, though, that it wasn't just the little people, the mob, who were put off by the hysteria of Schnatter and his ilk; even the real America, the 1 percent, turned against him.

Still, the next time you hear someone babbling about the wisdom of entrepreneurs, their competence, their practical common sense, remember that you're hearing about people like John Schnatter, and he's evidently not unrepresentative of the breed. Rich guys all over America are stamping their expensively-shod feet and screaming like two-year-olds at Obama's socialist agenda.  At the very least, this is imprudent of them, since he is all that stands between them and the pitchforks.  (O faithful servant! no matter how much they abuse him, still he offers himself as a human shield, again and again.  I trust he has his reward in the life to come, by which I mean after January 20, 2017.)

Speaking of Obama, he's still making it clear whose side he's on.  The other day he told the Business Roundtable:

We’ve seen some movement over the last several days among some Republicans. I think there’s a recognition that maybe they can accept some rate increases as long as it’s combined with serious entitlement reform and additional spending cuts. And if we can get the leadership on the Republican side to take that framework, to acknowledge that reality, then the numbers actually aren’t that far apart. Another way of putting this is, we can probably solve this in about a week; it’s not that tough.

The key word for my purpose here is "entitlement."  Several of my liberal friends have been throwing tantrums of their own over that word as used by Republicans, typically having hissyfits over words rather than what they refer to.  (This, for instance.)  But they're less attentive to their god-king's use of the word.  Bear in mind that part of what Obama means by "serious entitlement reform" is cutting Social Security benefits for new retirees by raising the age of eligibility -- again -- as part of his program to cut the deficit, though Social Security has nothing to do with the deficit.  The reason for making such cuts is to appease people -- mostly, but not all, Republicans -- who want to get rid of Social Security, Medicare, and other social programs for other, Scroogier reasons.