Last weekend was my dude’s mmmmphnoneofurbizmmph birthday, and I went without mentioning it because I was busy waxing poetic over the Phenomenal Hand Clap Band’s latest, which was one of his presents.  But we went tubing for his birthday, and he had the mind to buy a cheap iPod player so that I could play a bunch of mixes made for the occasion while we floated along, drinking beer. 

In honor of that, one of the songs that I played that made all floating Texans happy. 

Original song: “Genius of Love” by the Tom Tom Club

1) “Mirror In The Bathroom"---The English Beat
2) “Bizarre Love Triangle"---New Order
3) “Close To Me"---The Cure
4) “Cannonball"---The Breeders
5) “Seether"---Veruca Salt
6) “And She Was"---The Talking Heads
7) “Private Idaho"---B-52s
8) “I Want To Be Adored"---The Stone Roses
9) “Groove Is In The Heart"---Deee-Lite
10) “Waiting On A Friend"---The Rolling Stones

So part of the fun will be playing videos by musicians actually mentioned in the song.  Below the fold.

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Don’t these guys have anything better to do? The church now thinks it has a renegade nun problem.

In the last four decades since the reforms of the Second Vatican Council, many American nuns stopped wearing religious habits, left convents to live independently and went into new lines of work: academia and other professions, social and political advocacy and grass-roots organizations that serve the poor or promote spirituality. A few nuns have also been active in organizations that advocate changes in the church like ordaining women and married men as priests.

Some sisters surmise that the Vatican and even some American bishops are trying to shift them back into living in convents, wearing habits or at least identifiable religious garb, ordering their schedules around daily prayers and working primarily in Roman Catholic institutions, like schools and hospitals.

And one inquiry seems to go out of its way say the nuns are simply not homophobic enough.

The second investigation of nuns is a doctrinal assessment of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, an umbrella organization that claims 1,500 members from about 95 percent of women’s religious orders. This investigation was ordered by the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which is headed by an American, Cardinal William Levada.

Cardinal Levada sent a letter to the Leadership Conference saying an investigation was warranted because it appeared that the organization had done little since it was warned eight years ago that it had failed to “promote” the church’s teachings on three issues: the male-only priesthood, homosexuality and the primacy of the Roman Catholic Church as the means to salvation.

The letter goes on to say that, “Given both the tenor and the doctrinal content of various addresses” at assemblies the Leadership Conference has held in recent years, the problem has not been fixed.

Somebody’s going to get in a lot of trouble for this.

High res screen capture here.

I never completely understood the early morning Starbucks run, myself---it always seemed to me faster to make your own coffee at home and drink it while getting showered and dressed.  99% of my early morning coffee runs over a lifetime are due to either to the fact that I’m moving and haven’t unpacked the coffeepot yet, that I just now discovered I’m out of coffee or creamer, or that I didn’t sleep at home.  There have been a few occasions when I overslept, ran to work, unlocked the office/flicked on the computer and then got coffee from the food stand while the computer warmed up.  But even that was rare. 

But the explanation for this carnage of Starbucks closings is that people are tightening their belts, financially speaking.

I got that graphic off FiveThirtyEight, where they’re relating it to a Harris poll (PDF) about how people are trying to save money during this recession.  19% of people have started to skip the morning coffee run.  Here’s some more statistics from the poll:

I usually think of myself as frugal.  I already had reduced to a cell phone, and I already have a habit of going to the hairdresser like 4 times a year.  I was never a huge fan of buying expensive coffee drinks in the morning, like I said, and I’m a fan of generics.  I reuse water bottles.  But I’m trying to find ways to save money, too, which has largely meant not going out to shows as much.  Which makes me feel a little antisocial to friends that I do that with a lot, which sucks, but it has redirected a lot of my energies to listening to music at home, which is a plus. And to save money there, I’m trying to buy some vinyl stuff for cheap in used record stores instead of buying everything new (though that happens, too). I’ve discovered that Amazon sells a lot of music for download cheaper than iTunes. Having friends over to make cheap vodka drinks instead of meeting them in a bar has happened a few times. We’re trying to avoid going to see movies in the theater just to do it, and staying in to watch DVDs from Netflix more often. But mostly I’m trying to find cheaper ways to eat.  I’m trying to find ways to use canned tomatoes instead of fresh ones for a lot of stuff, and eating more mac and cheese.  Trying to buy the cheap vegetables and then figure out what to cook with them, instead of just making a list based around what I’m in the mood for.

I kind of like being an innovator in the “cheap bastard” department.  I sold my truck after spending $50 to fill it up and then, after alarming everyone in the area by shaking a turnip at the sky and saying, “Never again!” I have an entire cabinet to stash shampoo, conditioner, and body wash that I buy up when it’s deeply discounted so that it can last me for months.  A lot of my clothes are secondhand.  But what this means is that I can’t think of interesting new ways to avoid spending money. 

So I ask you, Pandagonians, to help me out.  Do you have ways you save money?  Just learned, always have done it, I don’t care.  The weirder, the better.  And do you think that people who are reacting to the recession by tightening their belt are being wise, or is this just a panic reaction?  Do you give a flying fuck if Starbucks closes? 

The Washington Post is selling its access to its own reporters and to Obama administration officials:

For $25,000 to $250,000, The Washington Post is offering lobbyists and association executives off-the-record, nonconfrontational access to “those powerful few” — Obama administration officials, members of Congress, and the paper’s own reporters and editors.

The astonishing offer is detailed in a flier circulated Wednesday to a health care lobbyist, who provided it to a reporter because the lobbyist said he feels it’s a conflict for the paper to charge for access to, as the flier says, its “health care reporting and editorial staff.”

The offer — which essentially turns a news organization into a facilitator for private lobbyist-official encounters — is a new sign of the lengths to which news organizations will go to find revenue at a time when most newspapers are struggling for survival.

This makes the Dana Milbank/Nico Pitney throwdown doubly (maybe triply!) juicy now - the same newspaper that fired Dan Froomkin for basically being popular and well-read while castigating itself over running too many pictures of things that are happening and letting Milbank get away with running anonymously sourced inaccurate quotes is now revealed to have sold its constitutionally protected access to government officials for the relative bowl of pottage.  It is insinuated (or outright stated) that bloggers are terrible, awful people because we might say mean things on the internet, or we might not actually delete all of our archives to avoid the terrible shame of accountability or maybe say things approving of a candidate who is paying us to say those things, except that we say them (after we’ve clearly broken ties with our private blogs) on campaign websites.

That’s the critical difference between blogs as media watchers and major media itself - as much as big media might like it, bloggers have neither the ability nor the desire to engage in the sort of ethical lapses that are available to outlets like the Washington Post every day.  We may sit in our mothers’ basements watching torrented Thundercats episodes, but we do it honestly.

She lambastes liberal commentators for not saying the exact thing I said yesterday.  Which is cool, whatever.

It’s tempting to dismiss this audio clip of Rush Limbaugh saying that Michael Jackson “flourished under Reagan,” “languished under Clinton and Bush,” and “died under Obama” as the irrelevant rantings of a drug-addled mad man.  He does claim, after all, that Jackson was an individual and not part of a group, completely ignoring the fact that Jackson built his name up as the star attraction of the Jackson 5.  But I would remind anyone who feels the tug of the temptation to remind yourself that this man is de facto head of the Republican party, and adjust your alarm accordingly. 

No, what we’re seeing here is the Cult of Reagan moving into the actual deification phase.  Reagan is more than a former President, more than a beloved statesman, but now a god with magical powers.  He’s apparently the god of individualism and initiative, because Limbaugh’s statement is that Jackson’s very weirdness made him an individual, which is why their god smiled upon him and granted him 7 hit singles off one album and a whole pile of money.  Knowing the way Limbaugh and his audience think, this statement has racial undertones, too.  It’s been a long-standing right wing argument that black poverty is caused by “dependence” on the “nanny state” and a lack of initiative, so there’s not just a little hint here that Limbaugh is suggesting that “true” Republicans not only break welfare dependency, they hand out hit records as rewards for showing the proper spark of initiative. But I’m just guessing.  It’s possible that, for once, Limbaugh wasn’t stewing in his own racist obsessions and just popped this one off strictly as a form of Reagan deification.

As someone who actually remembers the 80s better than Limbaugh apparently does, even though I was a child, I have to point out that Jackson was not actually weird in the 80s.  He probably felt a little weird to some people, because contrary to Limbaugh’s assertions, Reagan voters were inspired by conformist attitudes and a desire to return to a fantasy version of the 50s. From that perspective, pretty much all pop stars inspired a “kids these days get off my lawn” attitude, even amongst some of the younger Republican set.  But I don’t really see how the iconic Jackson fashions like the red jacket or the single glove were particularly weird (and what about his other favored 80s get-up---the jacket and tie?) were weirder than cardigans over T-shirts (Kurt Cobain’s thing) and the hat craze of the 90s.  In fact, it all makes a lot more sense than the hat craze.* Jackson’s career actually slipped the weirder and more disconnected from reality he got.

But when you’re deifying a President and granting him superhuman powers, I guess minor factual errors like this are small compared to the major factual error---the Reagan had superhuman individualism powers!---that you’re touting.

*Sorry, we caught part of “Singles” on TV yesterday, and looking at early 90s fashion will make you long for the 80s, at least the early to mid 80s. 

I’m pretty sure there’s no reaction to this that I can post and not get in trouble with someone, so...check out pictures 1, 3 and 7. 

UPDATE:  The caption to picture number two:

“I used to joke around with John McCain during the campaign about coming jogging with me. And once I asked him what his favorite exercise was, and he said, ‘I go wading.’ Wading. He lives on a creek in Arizona, so he goes wading. That cracked me up.”

Ha ha 72-year-old torture victim and cancer survivor with your wading!  So silly.

Ezra has a new column (again!) at the Washington Post called “Gut Check”, on the politics of food.  I’m pretty sure that by Thanksgiving, Ezra will be the ombudsman, advertising director, editor-in-chief and yet still not able to fire Charles Krauthammer.  This week’s article focuses on the desire for transparency in food production, using Food, Inc. as a touch point.

One of the interesting things about Ezra’s article is that the worry about what’s in our food is treated as a worry that’s arising just now, or at least gaining a more significant cultural place because of a handful of films and books written by upper-middle class white people.  There’s a strong tendency, especially with the rise of progressive-slanting documentaries, to believe that the politics of food revolve primarily around agribusiness policy and the purity (or lack thereof) of what we eat.  In the black community, food has been an inherently political commodity since slavery (well, technically, since forever, but this is America, so we talk American). 

From the variety of urban legends about how certain foods are targeted towards black people (for instance, brightly-colored fruit drinks), to the belief that certain additives in nearly-omnipresent fast food restaurants are addictive/mind-controlling, the paucity of good grocery options in many predominantly-black neighborhoods to the deep meaning that food holds in black churches, there’s little about food that isn’t inherently political in the black community.  The same factors exist in every community, but the politics of food are not just about whether your chicken has hormones or not - it’s about the fact that you eat fried chicken rather than baked chicken because of longstanding cultural mores; that your local grocery store only has frozen chicken with preservatives rather than fresh chicken because of housing policy going back to the 1930s; that efforts to diversify one’s diet fail not just because of agricultural policy which privileges cheap meat and dairy over vegetables and fruits but also because of sociopolitical mores that create pressure to eat the former rather than the latter. 

I’m looking forward to Ezra’s column, I just hope that “the politics of food” extends beyond what’s in our food to how and why we put it on our plates in the first place.  And with that, Nas’ “Fried Chicken”:

So this video has been making the rounds, and my initial urge was to bucket this kind of rhetoric into same right wing tendency to allow their overactive, violent, hypermasculinity-worshiping imaginations to get the better of them.  Which it totally is in no small part.  They ache for war because of the drama, which makes them feel alive and important.  It’s not a coincidence that there’s a huge market on the right for 9/11 memorabilia, because the day was experienced mostly as high drama, with the tragedy of it only slightly mitigating the wingnut enthusiasm.  Which isn’t to downplay the danger of this at all, because as the recent spate of domestic terrorism shows, right wing fantasists can and do drift into acting out violent fantasies.  And frankly, I think more would if they weren’t such cowards.  Then again, if they weren’t such cowards, they might not be so drawn to violent fantasies to make them feel less cowardly.

But after watching this video a few times, I realize that what Glenn Beck and Michael Scheuer mean when they say that Osama bin Laden is their last hope as a savior, is that they mean as the savior of the Republican Party.  Which I find interesting, because I’ve argued for a long time that neocons and Al Qaeda may be sworn enemies, but functionally they have a codependent relationship and really rely on each other for their own justification for existing.  In that sense, they’re working together for each other.  But I never thought I’d actually hear a wingnut basically come out and admit this.  But there you go---they get it.  Osama bin Laden is both an enemy and an ally, and they’re practically begging him to attack us so that they’re relevant. 

Again, my fear here is that this sort of open longing for terrorism will help push someone, domestic or foreign, to take them up on it.

After reading all the posts about it at Double X, and also Jesse’s post from this morning, I went ahead and read all 16 pages of Todd Purdum’s Vanity Fair profile of Sarah Palin.  Jesse’s right about the thick layer of bullshit piled onto the piece, and I’m glad he alerted me to the fact that Palin isn’t the first politician that Purdum has diagnosed from afar as a narcissist.  (I thought having a giant ego was a mandated part of being a politician, and let’s face it, McCain’s huge ego is also what drove him to pick Palin in the first place.) This is too bad, because in focusing all his energies into showing us how fucked-up Palin is, Purdum misses the larger story, which is that politicians like her are inevitable as long as the Republicans continue to rely on the growing fundamentalist community to cough up the votes required to keep them in office.  Because it’s not just Palin.  The Mark Sanford situation (and Larry Craig and David Vitter) shows that when you lay down with the Christian nutters, you wake up in a swirl of fantastical bullshit, corruption, and sordid sexual drama.

The right wing evangelical community has been perceived as a godsend by the more staid Republican punditry for a long time.  It’s easy to see them as a dream constituency for Republicans, since they’re motivated strictly by having their egotistical belief that they’re the Real America stroked, and don’t really care very much about any policies.  They’re “fiscal conservatives” by default, because they’re easy to motivate by the idea that Not Real America is a bunch of welfare cheats and losers who don’t deserve their piece of the pie.  But what really gets them going is anything where they get to write their “values"---i.e. a bunch of religious dogma to mark their tribal identity---into law. The purpose of abstinence-only, abortion bans, school prayer, faith-based funding, creationism, etc. seems to be less about creating actual changes to people’s behavior so much as establishing that they’re the only Real Americans, and our laws reflect their tribal dominance over the competing tribe of secular humanists (who don’t generally think of themselves as a tribe fighting for cultural dominance, though that’s changing under an onslaught of evangelical abuse).  Not that they don’t want to see these actual changes, but as the Palin situation shows, particularly with the Bristol Palin baby situation, what you do is fundamentally less important than what you say.  What outsiders perceive as hypocrisy---okay, well, it really is hypocrisy---is experienced differently on the inside.  I think it has a lot to do with the fantasist elements of evangelical Christianity, the deliberate breakdown between reality and fantasy.  A lot of churches practice demon exorcism and speaking in tongues, and observers are confused by how participants both believe and don’t believe in what they’re doing all at once.  (Speaking in tongues is supposed to be a channeling of the Holy Spirit; however, you’re instructed to practice it so that you can perform it better.  Just one example.)

I find this space between belief and not-belief to be an interesting thing, and it crops up more with adolescents than anyone else.  You’ve probably been there---it’s not like suspending your disbelief at all.  It’s having the experience of believing something while functioning as if you don’t believe it.  When teenagers tell each other ghost stories, they are in this space.  A lot of urban legends rely on people entering into this space, which is why urban legends proliferate in evangelical circles.  Living in this space is encouraged in these circles, which is dangerous, because it instills a disrespect for the truth and it encourages a lot of drama and bullshit.  To make things worse, the people that are drawn to evangelical churches in the first place are often a mess to begin with, which is why they crave the structure.  But the community has come to terms with the idea that having a bunch of rules doesn’t imply that people follow them. If anything, the gap between rules and behavior is exciting, because it means non-stop drama.  The Bristol Palin situation is pretty typical, actually---impossible standards are set, people don’t even try to meet them, there’s a cycle of guilt and recrimination, but the standards are never questioned, in no small part because that would deprive everyone of the cycle of excitement and guilt.  Take abstinence, for instance.  It’s a big deal for the evangelical community, and getting your chastity ring is a big rite of passage.  Evangelical teenagers, it turns out, also have sex at younger ages than pretty much any other group of kids.  Is this hypocrisy, or just a natural outgrowth from living in a space where reality, statement, and fantasy are collapsed into each other, and high emotion and drama matter more than boring things like truth?

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Redstate is threatening to blackball anyone from the McCain campaign who can’t prove they didn’t talk to Vanity Fair, because they make the hiring decisions.  And the double negatives. 

I’ve been trying to make sense of exactly why Wal-Mart is endorsing employer mandated health care and, more importantly, why the SEIU is playing along.

Wal-Mart, the nation’s largest private employer, joined hands with a major labor union Tuesday to endorse the idea of requiring large companies to provide health insurance to their workers, a move that gives a boost to President Obama as he is pushing for health legislation on Capitol Hill.

“Not every business can make the same contribution, but everyone must make some contribution,” Wal-Mart’s chief executive, Michael T. Duke, wrote in a letter to White House and Congressional officials, adding that he favored “an employer mandate which is fair and broad in its coverage.”

The letter was issued jointly with Andrew W. Stern, president of the Service Employees International Union, which represents two million workers, many of them in the health care industry, and John D. Podesta, who ran Mr. Obama’s transition to the presidency and leads the Center for American Progress, a Democratic policy organization here.

I would think that if Wal-Mart was going to endorse any healthcare plan, it would be a single-payer plan, which would effectively allow them to stop (directly) paying for healthcare altogether.  But this is Wal-Mart, and so why do something that helps their workers when they can just pretend and gain a competitive edge.

The likely employer mandate that Wal-Mart wants to see would cost every business that doesn’t provide benefits to part-timers, particularly those that finagle hours so that full-time employees are nominally part-time.  The clearest example of this?  Retailers, particularly grocery stores.  If there’s one operational tactic that Wal-Mart has perfected, it’s short-term loss for long-term gain.  Five years of an employer mandate on most small margin retailers around the country will put many of them out of business, leaving Wal-Mart with an effective monopoly across most of the country.

The real question is why SEIU is letting themselves get played like this.  An employer mandate is one of the worst possible ways to achieve universal health insurance, forcing everyone into the current terrible private health insurance system through employers, which is like curing your polio by going around smacking other kids in the knees with hammers. 

Let me a wild guess—this ad was approved by a boardroom full of guys who thought this was a great, subtle play on frat boy humor.  The details of the ad:

“IT’LL BLOW YOUR MIND AWAY. Fill your desire for something long, juicy and flame-grilled with the NEW BK SUPER SEVEN INCHER. Yearn for more after you taste the mind-blowing burger that comes with a single beef patty, topped with American cheese, crispy onions and the A1 Thick and Hearty Steak Sauce.”

What are the odds that Burger King execs appealed to men with a similar ad? Ummmm. Zero—though I would have liked to have seen the target audience’s reaction to that. Womanist Musings:

Why don’t they just say choke on it bitch, because that is clearly what the image and the language of this advertisement is implying?  Using sex to sell is a common tactic in advertising, however this particular ad is demeaning and reductive. This woman isn’t fulfilling her needs by consuming this meal, she is performing a service.

This ad was run in Singapore—what dolts at BK thought that image wasn’t going to get loose on “the Internets”? It has now hit the MSM, and somehow, the rep from Burger King thinks that because it appears in a foreign country and was produced by a local ad firm that somehow the 7-inch-sandwich seller is off the responsibility hook (Faux News):

Lauren Kuziner, a spokeswoman for Burger King, said the campaign was produced by a local Singaporean agency and not by the company’s U.S. advertising firm, Crispin Porter + Bogusky.

“Burger King Corp. values and respects all of its guests,” Kuziner said in a statement to FOXNews.com. “This print ad is running to support a limited time promotion in the Singapore market and is not running in the U.S. or any other markets. The campaign is supported by the franchisee in Singapore and has generated positive consumer sales around this limited time product offer in that market.”

Kuziner declined to identify the Singapore-based firm and did not respond to requests for comment on whether Burger King had received complaints in connection to the advertisement.

Meanwhile, Scott Purvis, president of Gallup & Robinson, a marketing and advertising research firm in New Jersey, said the print pitch went “too far” and seemed unusual for a global brand like Burger King.

“This would be the kind of ad you might see for a smaller brand trying to get itself noticed,” Purvis said. “It’s probably something that wouldn’t see the light of day in this country.”

Burger King Corporation
5505 Blue Lagoon Drive
Miami, Florida 33126

Corporate Headquarters - 305-378-3000
Marketing/Advertising Information Requests - 305-378-7200
Consumer Relations - 305-378-3535
HAVE IT YOUR WAY® Cards Consumer Help Desk - 1-800-522-1278

Click here for the board of directors.

Todd Purdum, whom you’ve probably never heard of, wrote a piece about Sarah Palin declaring her a moose-devouring narcissistic beast of the id.  Saying anything bad about a Republican woman, of course, makes the person who says it a mean, nasty sexist and probably a giant gay, because liberal gay men hate women. 

Todd Purdum, whom you’ve now heard of, wrote a piece about Bill Clinton declaring him (wait for it) an attention-devouring narcissistic beast of the id.  Because he’s a peach.  Just a great guy. 

Bill Kristol has gotten totally pissy about the Palin article, mainly because Steve Schmidt got to run the McCain campaign into the ground, and Bill Kristol only almost got to do that.  This has sparked a family feud within the ranks of the old McCain campaign, which is largely provoked by Unka Bill showing up drunk and ranting about how his pinko nephew is a “communiss”.  A sample:

Here’s a highlight of Purdum’s reporting: “More than once in my travels in Alaska, people brought up, without prompting, the question of Palin’s extravagant self-regard. Several told me, independently of one another, that they had consulted the definition of ‘narcissistic personality disorder’ in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders--’a pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), need for admiration, and lack of empathy’--and thought it fit her perfectly.”

Is there any real chance that “several” Alaskans independently told Purdum that they had consulted the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders? I don’t believe it for a moment. I’ve (for better or worse) moved in pretty well-educated circles in my life, and I’ve gone decades without “several” people telling me they had consulted the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

Kristol, however, had a chance to reply to Purdum’s article on Clinton last year, which was basically about how Clinton had bought a moped and was traveling around with Hot Springs’ worst youth gang, peeking on the girls’ soccer team after Hillary Clinton wasn’t President.  This was Kristol’s response:

HUME: And that doesn’t even include the unkind things that Mr. Clinton had to say about Todd Purdum, the “Vanity Fair” correspondent who wrote an unflattering piece in the forthcoming issue about Bill Clinton. He referred to him, I think, among other things, as a quote, “scumbag.” So the question arises, this is a man who was noted, justly so, for the perfect choice of words, for always being able to frame the issues deftly and with an incredibly light political touch. What has happened to the big dog?

KONDRACKE: Well, I mean, there is speculation in the Purdum article in “Vanity Fair” that his heart surgery had some neurological effect, and that he is off his rocker a little bit, that his temper is worse, that he is not firing on all cylinders.

HUME: That is pure speculation.

KONDRACKE: It is pure speculation, but there have been other people about whom that has been said as well in similar circumstances. What has happened? Who knows? He has made mistake after mistake after mistake in this campaign. He has not been the usual deft Bill Clinton. And you could, if you wanted to speculate, you could say he has a political death wish for his wife. That’s been speculated, too.

HUME: But what effect, then, on Barack Obama has he made of the prospect of having her as a running mate and potentially as his vice president--Bill?

KRISTOL: It has to be a little worrisome. I personally loved this. I think it would be great to have a Bill Clinton--this is much more lively then you’re typical spouse of the defeated candidate. I don’t know. I think it’s the biggest drawback of putting Hillary on the Clinton ticket, honestly. They are not certain if they can control him for those two months. If she becomes vice president, having him sitting there in the vice president’s mansion could be a problem. Though I suppose he could be appointed to replace her as Senator from New York. And then he would be in the Senate and out of her hair and out of his hair. Maybe McCain will win and spare us all these scenarios.

So, as you can see, Kristol is reacting to Vanity Fair’s allegations deep psychological issues with prominent politicians purely out of principle, and in no way out of pissy internecine grudges from a failed presidential campaign.