Jonah Goldberg does that thing where he pretends that words don't have plain meanings so that he can pretend liberals are confusing things

Jonah Goldberg defends Stanley Kurtz's new book about President Obama's socialism-drenched past. A couple of paragraphs need some attention:

Here’s my problem. Socialism isn’t the scare word Weigel and others (David Frum comes to mind) say it is. I will be honest and admit that I wish it was more of a scare word than it is, but it’s really not one. I don’t think Americans think of gulags, bread lines and Red Dawn when they hear the word “socialist.”  They think of those things when they hear the word “Communist,” which is a different thing than socialism (or at least that’s what every book on the subject and every sincere democratic socialist I’ve ever spoken to says).

This is an example of Goldberg being hyperliteral when he chooses to be. Yes, socialism is different from communism -- even if the two are related. But as used by much of the right, the "socialist" charge against Obama is clearly, unambiguous effort to conflate the two concepts and paint the president as a bit of a stealth Stalinist. That's why if you do a Google image search for "Obama socialism" you end up with lots and lots and lots of pictures like this. It's not liberals who are making those pictures, so Goldberg is being either A) naive to the point of stupidity or B) willfully disingenuous when he suggests that the conflation of socialism and communism, with regard to Obama, is because of liberal misunderstandings.

But now things are a bit mixed up. So even though leading liberals have talked openly about the possibility that Obama is a “liberal socialist” or might usher in a socialist era, when conservatives take these arguments at face value or make similar ones themselves, it isliberals like Weigel who insist that socialism must be seen as synonymous with Communism, the gulag, Red Dawn etc.

Er... which leading liberals have talked openly about the possibility of Obama being a "liberal socialist"? I'm open to the possibility it's happened, though I'd be surprised. I just want to know Goldberg's documentation for that assertion. But here's the capper:

For example, I’ve just been dipping in and out of Stan’s book, but nowhere I’ve seen does he call Obama a Communist. I’m sure Dave understands the distinction and he might have simply found the word-play irresistible, but it’s worth noting that the Hammer and Sickle are not symbols of socialism but of Communism.

Who is seeing Hammer and Sickles everywhere now?

Ladies and gentlemen: I give you the cover of Stanley Kurtz's book:

Right. Now, granted, there's no "hammer and sickle" on the front of Kurtz's book, but a red star is generally accepted as the next-best symbol of Soviet-style communism.  And granted, a book cover isn't a book's argument. What's more, I understand this book is well-researched, even if its arguments fall flat. But for Goldberg to suggest that there's no red-baiting going on by conservatives who charge Obama with socialism, well, that's literally unbelievable.

Yup.

Deep Thought

Dems have been (finally) moving major legislation so well during the lame duck session that perhaps we'd all benefit if they lost by historic margins in every election. Losing is apparently the only way to motivate them. Health care wasn't passed until Scott Brown won Kennedy's seat, after all.

Coffee and an ebook

Taken at Almaz Cafe

More on Haley Barbour and race revisionism

Like I said, Barbour is not dumb. If he's being a revisionist about race in Mississippi, he's not alone, and he's fighting back against a media standard that all conservatives hate -- this idea that Southerners and conservatives can never stop atoning for Jim Crow. Why should he have to apologize for this, after all? He wasn't in a Citizens Council. With the exception of some people, like Howell Raines -- who covered Barbour's 1986 Senate bid -- how many of these reporters know what they're talking about, anyway? And there are few things conservative voters hate more than being told they were on the wrong side of the Civil Rights movement.

Dave Weigel, via slate.com

I for one don't need Southerners to continually atone for Jim Crow. If Haley Barbour doesn't want to have to apologize for Citizens Councils because he wasn't in one, then the best thing he can do is ... keep quiet about Citizens Councils. Publicly reimagining them as a race-neutral instrument of civic stability keeps culture wars alive, because it tells minorities and white liberals that *Southern Whites* haven't moved beyond fighting the battles of the Civil Rights era.

But I think Weigel, in his last sentence, gets at what's going on. "There are few things conservative voters hate more than being told they were on the wrong side of the Civil Rights movement." But they were! Barbour's way of telling the Citizens Council story, though, lets them feel like *they're* the real (and misunderstood) victims of racism in America -- and that's a lie.

If Republicans don't want to be tagged as racist, they shouldn't praise racist stuff

I know a number of conservatives and Republicans who get -- I think -- genuinely angry when Republicans and conservatives get smeared as racists. They tend to chalk it up as "race hustling" -- as though anybody who still complains about racism and its ongoing pernicious effects in our society is another Al Sharpton trying to make fresh hay over yesterday's grievances.

There's possibly an element of truth to that, on occasion. But if Republicans don't want to be tagged as racists, maybe a former RNC chairman, current Mississippi governor and possible presidential candidate like Haley Barbour shouldn't praise stuff that everybody knows was racist:

As Barbour recalls it in a new profile in The Weekly Standard, things weren't so bad in his hometown of Yazoo City, which took until 1970 to integrate its schools (though the final event itself is said to have gone on peacefully). For example, Barbour says that there was no problem of Ku Klux Klan activity in the town -- thanks to the Citizens Council movement, an organization that was founded on the basis of resistance to integration and the promotion of white supremacy.

"You heard of the Citizens Councils? Up north they think it was like the KKK," said Barbour. "Where I come from it was an organization of town leaders. In Yazoo City they passed a resolution that said anybody who started a chapter of the Klan would get their ass run out of town. If you had a job, you'd lose it. If you had a store, they'd see nobody shopped there. We didn't have a problem with the Klan in Yazoo City."

The White Citizens Council movement was founded in Mississippi in 1954, shortly after the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision that outlawed segregated public schools, and was dedicated to political activities opposing civil rights -- notably boycotts of pro-civil rights individuals in Barbour's hometown, as opposed to Barbour's recollection of actions against the Klan. It was distinguished from the Klan by the public self-identification of its members, and its image of suits and ties as opposed to white robes and nooses.

Maybe there's an upside to Barbour's, er, whitewashing of history. Nobody wants to have been on the side of racists, so the racist aspects of their actions -- and their forebears' actions -- are recast into something more benign so that everybody gets to be on the side of history's winners. That reinforces our modern societal norm that racism is wrong. So that's good. 

But maybe it's also bad, because it's a lie, and everybody knows it. Mississippi didn't burn because white businessmen were running the KKK out of town during the 1950s and 1960s. The violence and anger that consumed the state came about because black people wanted civil rights and white people didn't want black people to have them. The white people who worked against those civil rights are the villain of the story, period. It doesn't matter that, perhaps, they were well-meaning community leaders who loved their families and were simply raised and indoctrinated in a different era -- because they were wrong, and in their wrongness show us how banal evil really can be. There's nothing complicated about this. 

Joe Manchin is already America's worst senator

West Virginia Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin was missing in action when the Senate took two of its highest-profile votes on Saturday.

Manchin, who has been at odds with national Democrats several times since he was sworn in last month, was not present for votes on the DREAM Act and the repeal of "don't ask, don't tell".

A spokesperson for Manchin told the Charleston Gazette that the senator and his wife had "planned a holiday gathering over a year ago with all their children and grandchildren as they will not all be together on Christmas Day."

"While he regrets missing the votes, it was a family obligation that he just could not break," spokesperson Sara Payne Scarbro said. "However, he has been clear on where he stands on the issues."

Manchin did issue statements on Saturday making clear his opposition to both the DREAM Act and the repeal of "don't ask, don't tell"; his position on the latter bill made him the only Democrat to oppose repeal -- just as he was when the Senate voted on repeal last week.

The fact that Manchin was absent from the chamber while another Democrat, Sen. Ron Wyden (Ore.), made it in to vote despite being recently diagnosed with prostate cancer doesn't bode well for Manchin's relationship with his caucus.

via voices.washingtonpost.com

This, after last week's first vote against the DADT repeal, which he explained by saying that he'd only been in office three weeks and didn't know what West Virginians wanted on the issue. It's starting to look like Manchin is completely unprepared for and unserious about the responsibilities of his office. Good choice, West Virginia!

The political indoctrination of America's police forces

Ramon Montijo has taught classes on terrorism and Islam to law enforcement officers all over the country.

"Alabama, Colorado, Vermont," said Montijo, a former Army Special Forces sergeant and Los Angeles Police Department investigator who is now a private security consultant. "California, Texas and Missouri," he continued.

What he tells them is always the same, he said: Most Muslims in the United States want to impose sharia law here.

"They want to make this world Islamic. The Islamic flag will fly over the White House - not on my watch!" he said. "My job is to wake up the public, and first, the first responders."

With so many local agencies around the country being asked to help catch terrorists, it often falls to sheriffs or state troopers to try to understand the world of terrorism. They aren't FBI agents, who have years of on-the-job and classroom training.

Instead, they are often people like Lacy Craig, who was a police dispatcher before she became an intelligence analyst at Idaho's fusion center, or the detectives in Minnesota, Michigan and Arkansas who can talk at length about the lineage of gangs or the signs of a crystal meth addict.

Now each of them is a go-to person on terrorism as well.

via projects.washingtonpost.com

That's more from the WaPo story about the rise of the police state. Apparently, taxpayers are paying half-assed "experts" in Islam to train police to be ready for the coming struggle against the Arabs for supremacy over America. This feels like a sick joke.

Big Brother has arrived. You just didn't notice it.

Suspicious Activity Report N03821 says a local law enforcement officer observed "a suspicious subject . . . taking photographs of the Orange County Sheriff Department Fire Boat and the Balboa Ferry with a cellular phone camera." The confidential report, marked "For Official Use Only," noted that the subject next made a phone call, walked to his car and returned five minutes later to take more pictures. He was then met by another person, both of whom stood and "observed the boat traffic in the harbor." Next another adult with two small children joined them, and then they all boarded the ferry and crossed the channel.

All of this information was forwarded to the Los Angeles fusion center for further investigation after the local officer ran information about the vehicle and its owner through several crime databases and found nothing.

Authorities would not say what happened to it from there, but there are several paths a suspicious activity report can take:

At the fusion center, an officer would decide to either dismiss the suspicious activity as harmless or forward the report to the nearest FBI terrorism unit for further investigation.

At that unit, it would immediately be entered into the Guardian database, at which point one of three things could happen:

The FBI could collect more information, find no connection to terrorism and mark the file closed, though leaving it in the database.

It could find a possible connection and turn it into a full-fledged case.

Or, as most often happens, it could make no specific determination, which would mean that Suspicious Activity Report N03821 would sit in limbo for as long as five years, during which time many other pieces of information about the man photographing a boat on a Sunday morning could be added to his file: employment, financial and residential histories; multiple phone numbers; audio files; video from the dashboard-mounted camera in the police cruiser at the harbor where he took pictures; and anything else in government or commercial databases "that adds value," as the FBI agent in charge of the database described it.

via projects.washingtonpost.com

That's from the Washington Post's blockbuster story this morning about the rise of a national security state that collects ever-more information about even the innocuous activities of its citizens.

I wonder what the Tea Party response will be to this. They shout a Iot about tyranny when it comes to marginal tax rates and helping poor people access health care, so -- to me, anyway -- it would be consistent of them to raise alarms about a burgeoning police state. I don't expect that to actually happen, though.

But for what it's worth, I don't think this means that Barack Obama himself is a tyrant. I just think the system itself is increasingly intrusive -- disproportionate to the gains in safety that we'll get. We'll be a free market society with a citizenry tightly under wraps. Welcome to Singapore.

I don't think this guy likes me at all!

Fan mail from Billy Eger:

Dear Joel, I'm having trouble understanding you commies,(liberals), they changed there names to liberals cause noone was voting for them. That's another story tho, what o don't understand is u hate this country Moooooo much an want socialist ideas implemented here ,why don't you move to China, where they kill every 4th women born ,I guess  ud rather destroy the only free country in the world ,to me your a disgrace too all the ww2 soldiers that died so you can write n say  your assinine comments that has NO COMMON SENSE,you truly are a moron an I hope sum1 destroys your family the way you stupid, ego fed,morons are trying too take this country down ,you would probably laugh at concentration camps,I hope you haven't reprodu,ced cause the world has enough stupid assholes in it.you've got 2 brain cells an 1 is looking for the other. To me u r UNAMERICAN,AN I NEVER WISH BAD ON SOMEONE BUT I REALLY HOPE PEOPLE LIKE U DIE,LIKE NOW,GO TO CHINA AN GET THEM TOO CHANGE THERE WAYS, NOW THAT'S A HERO, ANY1 CAN RUN THERE MOUTH IN A FREE SOCIETY,I COULD SEE U CRYING ON NORMANDY BEACHES FOR UR MOTHER,YOUR NOTHING MORE THAN A PUSSY.BIG PUSSY. PLAIN AN SIMPLE, U MUST'VE BEEN THE LITTLE BOY WHO CRIED AN STOMPED HIS FEET UNTIL HE GOT WHAT HE WANTED FROM MOMMY ,YOU MAKE ME SICK TOO MY STOMACH,SAME THING W GAYS,GO START UR OWN COUNTRY,U ARE GAY RIGHT?WELL U LOOK IT,OH AN IT'S MY RIGHT TO HATE THEM.ALL OF THEM . I CAN GO ON AN ON TOO YOUR BRAINWASHED SOUL BUT YOU CAN'T HANDLE THE TRUTH, UD RATHER MAKE IT UP. U WANNA FIX R PROBLEMS,CLOSE THE FEDERAL RESERVE,AN GET UN OUT OF ARE COUNTRY,BET U CAN'T PASS LAWS IN CHINA.

The remarkable thing about this is I have no idea what Billy is responding to. But I agree with him on one thing in the letter. I'll let you figure out what it is.

The DREAM Act, and justice

I didn't write about the DREAM Act before its death Saturday in the Senate, and I regret that now -- in part because, being a bleeding heart liberal, this photo made my heart bleed a little extra.

The bill would have created a path to citizenship for the children of illegal aliens -- young people who aren't legally citizens, but who are in most other respects what you'd reasonably call "American." They have been raised here. They have friends here. They speak English. They've been educated here. They didn't commit the crime that brought them here, their parents did; it's something they can't help, but they wouldn't necessarily be more more at "home" in their home countries. The path to citizenship would require them to demonstrate their willingness to contribute to American society, either by serving two years in the military or two years at a four-year college.

And it was defeated -- in one of those increasingly frustrating displays of Senate impotence, where "only" a majority of 55 senators supported the bill in a procedural vote.

I gather that many of those who opposed the DREAM Act did so largely because they don't want to somehow incentivize illegal immigrants into bringing their children to this country. It's a fair concern. But it doesn't really help us do anything about the situation that we face.

Right now, an estimated 65,000 illegal immigrants graduate from American high schools each year. We are not going to deport all, or even most of them. We just aren't, because we lack the kind of heavy bureaucratic machinery needed to do so. So those kids are here. But they can't go to college, and they can't get legitimate, on-the-books employment. So they're forced somewhat permanently into the underclass. And not for nothing: These kids end up having kids -- only this third generation, born in America, actually is composed entirely of citizens.

Like I said, they're here. For the most part, we're not getting rid of them. Offering them a path to citizenship isn't a perfect solution, obviously, because there is no perfect solution to the situation. But the status quo condemns many of these young people to economic servitude and actually alienates them from the country they live in. The DREAM Act could've helped make the best of a bad situation. Now we're just stuck with a bad situation. It's a tragedy.

The permanence of temporary workers

Despite a surge this year in short-term hiring, many American businesses are still skittish about making those jobs permanent, raising concerns among workers and some labor experts that temporary employees will become a larger, more entrenched part of the work force.

This is bad news for the nation’s workers, who are already facing one of the bleakest labor markets in recent history. Temporary employees generally receive fewer benefits or none at all, and have virtually no job security. It is harder for them to save. And it is much more difficult for them to develop a career arc while hopping from boss to boss.

“We’re in a period where uncertainty seems to be going on forever,” said David Autor, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “So this period of temporary employment seems to be going on forever.”

via nytimes.com

What worries me is that I have no idea what incentives employers have to actually return to fully employing their work force. With temporary workers, they get all the production -- but without the same levels of pay, and certainly without having to pay so much for benefits. Temp workers -- even if they should turn out to be permanent -- end up being an economic plus for corporations.

The downside of that, of course, is that the economy won't get moving again until people start wanting to consume again. If you're in a "temp" job, what will be your capacity -- or inclination -- to spend? This might be bad all the way around.

E-books and holiday gift-giving

A Twitter friend of mine recently lamented that e-books suck as gifts. I can see how that might be the case for the gift-giver, who doesn't get to see a physical object unwrapped and then enrapturing. But I've been given my first Christmas present of the season by a dear friend - The Autobiography of Mark Teain, on my Kindle for iPad - and I can tell you that it is very pleasing to receive an e-book gift.

Misinformation and Fox News: The customer is always right (wing)!

According to the study, which can be reviewed online, in most cases, the more a person watched and read the news, the less likely they were to have been misled about the facts. But “there were however a number of cases where greater exposure to a news source increased misinformation on a specific issue,” the study’s authors wrote. In particular, they found that regular viewers of the Fox News Channel, which tilts to the right in prime time, were significantly more likely to believe untruths about the Democratic health care overhaul, climate change and other subjects.

via mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com

Lots of blogospheric chatter about this study over the weekend. Some of my liberal-slash-journalistic friends asked: What can we do to counter Fox News' misinformation machine?

My answer: Probably nothing. The people who go to Fox News don't go to Fox News because they want to be informed, by and large. They go there to hear what they want to hear. The fact that Fox News' viewers believe a lot of factually incorrect things may not be entirely because Fox News misinforms them, but because they believe those incorrect things and Fox News reinforces that. You can deliver a better truth-delivery machine than Fox News has, certainly, but you can't make Fox News' audience want to hear stuff they don't want to hear.

On 'working hard,' taxes, and wealth

One of the arguments against taxing the wealthy more heavily than we do is that they "work hard" for the money they've made and thus deserve full access to the rewards of their labor. This sounds extremely fair, really, but it seems that the wealthy people at the top of the business pyramid don't really follow that logic when it comes to the people further down the pyramid. Via Matt Yglesias, Alan Binder does the numbers:

When it comes to wages, the basic story of recent decades is redolent of Scrooge. Real average hourly earnings (excluding fringe benefits) now stand roughly at 1974 levels. Yes, that’s right, no real increase in over 35 years. That is an astounding, dismaying and profoundly ahistorical development. The American story for two centuries was one of real wages advancing more or less in line with productivity. But not lately. Since 1978, productivity in the nonfarm business sector is up 86%, but real compensation per hour (which includes fringe benefits) is up just 37%. Does that seem fair?

Emphasis in the original. No, it doesn't seem fair. 

I'm not sure off all the forces at play. I do know the bottom line: America's wealthiest are consuming an ever-larger slice of the economic pie. America's middle-class -- the people who make the stuff -- have been stagnating, economically, for more than a generation. I understand the liberty-based arguments against a government that redistributes wealth and regulates businesses. But my gut tells me that if we gut the government out of the equation, we merely hand control over our liberties and livelihoods to big corporations that have little interest in defending either. That's not really an acceptable outcome, I don't think.

But like I say: There's a lot I realize I don't understand about the forces at play. My plan is to spend 2011 reading about wealth, income inequality and the welfare state -- the better to understand those forces, and the better to be able to articulate and advocate for a version of society that gives entrepreneurs the freedom to create wealth for themselves and for their countrymen, but without all the ugly plutocracy.

On DADT: Perhaps President Obama is more capable than I thought

Liberals will no doubt celebrate Obama's #DADT victory with the same passion they brought to bitching about his compromises. Yes?

via twitter.com

Er, maybe not the SAME passion, Dave Roberts, but yes: One should give credit where it's due. And I've criticized President Obama quite a bit this last year for moving with something-less-than-alacrity regarding gay-rights issues, so it's only fair for me to acknowledge that his strategy worked.

Unlike Bill Clinton who rushed -- and faltered through -- the issue of gays in the military, President Obama took his time, marshaled support from *enough* of the military's top leadership to be convincing, and went through a process that showed the appearance (at least) of listening to the troops. And when surveys showed that the troops were a lot less bigoted towards gays than they'd been a generation ago, opponents of a DADT repeal had very little rational ground to hold.

Still, I'm not sure how much of this is due to Obama's strategy, how much is due to the passage of time and the liberalizing of opinions about gays in America, and how much is due to the legislative savvy of Joe Lieberman. (No, really!) But it's a victory -- an important and historic one -- and it's one that will be credited in large part to President Obama. So ... good job, Mr. President. Keep it up.

Now, if we can just get you to start picking up the pace of judicial appointments....

Why Mitch McConnell can't suport the START treaty

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky voiced opposition Sunday to the New START - a nuclear arms treaty with Russia - saying that members of his party need more time to consider the legislation.

"I've decided I cannot support the treaty," McConnell said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” "I think if they'd taken more time with this, rushing it right before Christmas strikes me as trying to jam us."

via politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com

Of course, the treaty was signed back in April. There's been no rush -- unless you count the GOP's "rush" to obstructionism. Which is just plain wearying.

Me @Macworld: Hands on with Google Chrome OS

Like at least half the nerds in America, I applied to be part of Chrome OS beta testing program as soon as it was announced last week. On the surface, at least, I figured myself to be an ideal Chrome user—to a sometimes-scary extent, my life is already lived in Google’s cloud. Even on a Mac I default to the Chrome browser, where I write in Google Docs, check my feeds in Google Reader, and even sync Google Calendar and Contacts to my iPhone and iPad instead of paying for MobileMe. The company’s cloud-based operating system seemed the next logical step.

via macworld.com

Click the link to read the rest of my review of the Chrome, and what it says about the state of cloud-based computing.

The Ben and Joel Podcast: The Gift That Keeps on Giving Edition

Ben and Joel are joined by a stellar panel to discuss the books they would give as gifts this Christmas. Guests in this episode include Rick Henderson, editor of the John Locke Foundation's Carolina Journal; Pia Lopez, editorial writer for the Sacramento Bee (and Ben's weekly sparring partner in the Bee's "Head to Head" column, where they discussed books on Dec. 8); and Sam Karnick, editor of The American Culture and director of research at The Heartland Institute.

Music heard in this podcast:

• "Santa Claus is Coming to Town," Joseph Spence
• "Gabriel's Message," Sting
• "Little Drummer Boy," Los Straitjackets
• "O Little Town of Bethlehem," Shawn Lee's Ping Pong Orchestra
• "Must Be Santa," Bob Dylan
• "A Holly Jolly Christmas," Burl Ives

via blog.infinitemonkeysblog.com

PolitiFact calls 'government takeover of health care' its lie of the year

"Government takeover" conjures a European approach where the government owns the hospitals and the doctors are public employees. But the law Congress passed, parts of which have already gone into effect, relies largely on the free market:

• Employers will continue to provide health insurance to the majority of Americans through private insurance companies.

• Contrary to the claim, more people will get private health coverage. The law sets up "exchanges" where private insurers will compete to provide coverage to people who don't have it.

• The government will not seize control of hospitals or nationalize doctors.

• The law does not include the public option, a government-run insurance plan that would have competed with private insurers.

• The law gives tax credits to people who have difficulty affording insurance, so they can buy their coverage from private providers on the exchange. But here too, the approach relies on a free market with regulations, not socialized medicine.

PolitiFact reporters have studied the 906-page bill and interviewed independent health care experts. We have concluded it is inaccurate to call the plan a government takeover because it relies largely on the existing system of health coverage provided by employers.

via politifact.com