Baleful quote of the day

'A democracy survives when its citizens have access to trustworthy and impartial sources of information, when it can discern lies from truth, when civic discourse is grounded in verifiable fact. And with the decimation of reporting these sources of information are disappearing. The increasing fusion of news and entertainment, the rise of a class of celebrity journalists on television who define reporting by their access to the famous and the powerful, the retreat by many readers into the ideological ghettos of the Internet and the ruthless drive by corporations to destroy the traditional news business are leaving us deaf, dumb and blind. The relentless assault on the “liberal press” by right-wing propaganda outlets such as Fox News or by the Christian right is in fact an assault on a system of information grounded in verifiable fact. And once this bedrock of civil discourse is eradicated, people will be free, as many already are, to believe whatever they want to believe, to pick and choose what facts or opinions suit their world and what do not. In this new world lies will become true.' - Chris Hedges, "Lies Become Truths"

Did Washington D.C. eat Barack Obama's soul?

Circumstances have conspired to keep me from returning to regular blogging, which has prevented me from covering the continuing habit of President Obama to do things that Senator and candidate Obama was previously opposed to. Hopefully, anyone reading this blog is already following Glenn Greenwald's blog, as he has been covering this topic already.

But if you have not been following along, this article - via Greenwald's twitter feed - perfectly epitomizes the pattern of betrayal that has become the Obama presidency.

In Barack Obama's rise to national prominence, when he criticized the Bush Administration for its false claims about WMDs in Iraq, its torture of detainees, and its illegal program of spying on American citizens without warrants, he owed a particular debt of gratitude to a New York Times national security reporter. In a series of scoops as impressive as any amassed during the War on Terrorism, James Risen reported in 2004 that the CIA failed to tell President Bush about relatives of Iraqi scientists who swore that the country had abandoned its weapons program; the same year, he was first to reveal that the CIA was waterboarding detainees in Iraq; and in 2005, he broke the Pulitzer Prize winning story about the secret NSA spying program.

These scoops so embarrassed and angered the Bush Administration that some of its senior members wanted Risen to end up in jail. They never managed to make that happen. But President Obama might. He once found obvious value in Risen's investigative journalism. Its work that would've been impossible to produce without confidential sources and an ability to credibly promise that he'd never reveal their identities. But no matter. The Obama Administration is now demanding that Risen reveal his source for a 2006 scoop about CIA missteps in Iran. If he refuses to cooperate, which is his plan, he faces the possibility of jail time.

This is the sort of thing that makes me hope that Mr. Obama becomes a one term president. Yes, the Republican presidential candidates are worse; but if we continue to elect persons who feel at liberty to break campaign vows, to grant immunity to criminals while persecuting the journalists who exposed the malfeasance, how can we expect so see any different result?

[President Obama] might not be in the White House today if the Bush Administration would've succeeded in keeping all its secrets: the torture, the detainee deaths, the abuses at Abu Ghraib, the spying on Americans, the faulty pre-war intelligence in Iraq, and all the rest. One would expect Obama of all people to see the value in Risen's reporting - the real ways in which he has helped to preserve civil liberties, American freedom, and accountability in government - and to weigh that against the national security implications of reporting in 2006 on a bungled CIA effort that happened way back in the year 2000.

Instead, a president who once championed whistle-blowers has adopted Cheney's view, and as Glenn Greenwald puts it, "the Obama administration appears on the verge of fulfilling Dick Cheney's nefarious wish beyond what even Cheney could achieve." All this while failing to prosecute the much more serious Bush era illegal acts that Risen has uncovered in his reporting.

The sad reality is that the institution of the presidency is now set in such a manner that it seems to guarantee that we will have presidents who behave as presidents should not behave.

A couple more Kindle sales to consider

In addition to the fantastic deal you can still take advantage of regarding Daniel Goldhagen's latest book, Mark Vuletic - who apparently can read at the same pace as Johhny 5 from Short Circuit - has spotted several other bargain priced Kindle books:

Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement that Shattered the Party by Max Blumenthal for $1.79

The Language Instinct: How The Mind Creates Language by Steven Pinker for $2.99

In Republican Gomorrah, Blumenthal examines the history of the Christian right, how it captured the Republican party, and the personality defects of some of its leading figures. Before I read the book, I was sold on it by Frank Schaeffer's review, so I'll simply let that link do my talking for me.

I have not read The Language Instinct, but I have read several other of Pinker's works, including The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature; his works are always deeply engaging, lucid, and richly humanistic - I consider Pinker one of the best science popularizers around.

Quote of the day

"It requires little effort to condemn the Nazis. Moral outrage comes cheaply. It is more difficult, and surely more valuable, to address those features of the human condition that precipitated the tragedy." - David Livingstone Smith, Less Than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave and Exterminate Others

Today's discount book purchase

Gaming the Vote: Why Elections Aren't Fair (and What We Can Do About It) (hc) by William Poundstone for one dollar.

The persecuted rich

Today, I have twice been reminded of the vast suffering of the wealthy in America, victims of the communist forces that have seized control of the United States (at least that's what I've learned from AM radio and Fox News).

First, I turned on the tv and saw Jenna Bush Hager reduced to working as a reporter for NBC's Today show. Obviously, being the daughter of a president, the granddaughter of a president, and the great-granddaughter of a senator qualifies Hager for a job as a correspondent with a news program, especially over those who are educated and trained as journalists and have years of experience in the news business, but it is a terrible shame seeing her and other such American royalty forced to such base labor.

Secondly, I read this article at the Washington Post (h/t Jim Lippard), in which I see that the communists who run everything are now whining about how their employers salaries go up and up and up while theirs declines.

Even Lenin would blush at the terrible persecution that America's beleaguered corporate class suffers.

American press corps saves the Republic

As anyone who has turned on a tv, the internet, radio, or read a newspaper over the last several weeks knows, the United States of America has been in a state of crisis, with our democracy hanging in the balance.

But thanks to the American news media, those civic minded journalist avatars of liberty and freedom, our long dark national nightmare has come to an end. That is correct, worry no more, America: Rep. Anthony Weiner has resigned after having accidentally publically sent a lewd photograph of himself in boxer briefs to one of his twitter followers and then having it become national news that he has had cyber-sex relations with women who are not his wife.

Democracy is saved.

America may be a country which lets war criminals responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of human beings, torture, and the illegal mass surveillance of its citizens go freely about their business; where the President can wage illegal wars in which bombs, missiles, and bullets end human lives, but we will not tolerate an elected official doing something in his personal life that may be of interest to TMZ or the National Enquirer.

Anti-American extremist Glenn Greenwald had written of Weiner:

Can one even imagine how much different -- and better -- our political culture would be if our establishment media devoted even a fraction of the critical scrutiny and adversarial energy it devoted to the Weiner matter to things that actually matter? But that won't happen, because the people who comprise that press corps, with rare exception, are both incapable of focusing on things that matter and uninterested in doing so. Talking about shirtless pictures and expressing outrage about private sexual behavior -- like some angry, chattering soap opera fan furious that one of their best-known characters cheated -- is about the limit of their abilities and their function. And doing so is so easy, so fun, so self-justifying, and so exciting in that evasively tingly sort of way.

Like what Greenwald? Like the context of why Anthony Weiner was being hounded by conservative bloggers for months leading up to their uncovering and disclosing his twitter cyber relations, that being his calls for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas to recuse himself from healthcare decisions because of conflicts of interest.

Or maybe the allegation from a former CIA official that the Bush 43 White House requested that he dig up damaging information on Iraq war critic Juan Cole by illegally spying on him and Cole's response that "It is sad that a politics of personal destruction was the response by the Bush White House to an attempt of a citizen to reason in public about a matter of great public interest."

Or how about the FCC commissioner approving the merger of NBC and Comcast then leaping into a job with Comcast as a lobbyist?

Our watchdog press will not be distracted by such trivialities.

The most heartwarming aspect of this Weiner scandal has been watching the media rehabilitation of pathological liar Andrew Breitbart (who once tried to get climate scientist James Hansen killed by the government) as a credible source of "news."

As we all know, lewd conduct in one's personal life is far more grave a concern, far mor indicative of the democratic spirit in a nation, than how casually it tolerates members of its pundit class advocating political murder.

Quote of the day

"There are many ways to improve the current welfare program ... Considering welfare recipients lazy, government money-hoarding second-class citizens is not one of them." - Michael De Dora

But don't blame Beck for inspiring violence ...

From Glenn Beck's show today:



Did you catch that? That was Glenn Beck, after a few minutes of conspiracy-mongering, pointing to photographs of President Obama and Cass Sunstein as reasons to own a gun.

From Democracy Now (Oct. 12, 2010)

JOHN HAMILTON: I think this is one of the most important points, that, no, Glenn Beck doesn’t advocate explicitly for violence, but in Byron Williams’s mind, Glenn Beck gives you every ounce of evidence that you could possibly need.

BYRON WILLIAMS: You know, I’ll tell you. Beck is going to deny everything about violent approach, deny everything about conspiracies, but he’ll give you every reason to believe in it. He is protecting himself, and you can’t blame him for that. So, I understand what he’s doing.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Byron Williams, recorded by you in the Santa Rita Jail. Go on with what he’s saying.

JOHN HAMILTON: I think Dana Milbank of the Washington Post put it best. He has a compendium of Glenn Beck quotes. Here is some of the rhetoric that you’ll hear on Glenn Beck’s radio program or see on his TV show: “The war is just beginning," "Shoot me in the head if they try to change our government," "You have to be prepared to take rocks to the head," "The other side is attacking," "There is a coup going on," "Grab a torch," "Drive a stake through the heart of the bloodsuckers," "They are taking you to a place to be slaughtered.” I mean, these are quotes, and I could go on. I mean, there’s any number of these from Glenn Beck.

So, I think we have to ask ourselves, if this is the level of discourse on the Glenn Beck program, and if the statements about, for example, George Soros, you know, starting the Tides Foundation thirty-five years ago, which wasn’t the case, or that he’s laundering money through “his” Tides Foundation, when he’s given less than five percent of the funds, of the foundation’s total funding, those two things in tandem beg the question, does Glenn Beck bear culpability for the actions of his audience?

Legal or ultimate culpability, no. An ethical and intellectual culpability, a culpability of personal responsibility for normalizing and encouraging paranoid hate, very much so.

Byron Williams was arrested and accused of plotting to kill ACLU workers and Tides Foundation employees.

Justice as unspeak

One of the posts that I had hoped to write but have not been able to get to is a response to the death of Bin Laden, with one of the key points being how disturbing I find it that Bin Laden's killing has been described - and is accepted - as justice. The reasoning being similar to that which I expressed before when the same was said about the death of al-Zarqawi (a killing which appears to me to be more legitimate than Bin Laden's, whom I believe could have been apprehended):

In the video you will notice that President Bush says that Al-Zarqawi has been brought to justice. He has not been brought to justice, he was killed. This may have been, and for all I know, most probably was the only way to stop the horrors being committed by al-Zarqawi, but killing him has nothing to do with justice. Bringing him to justice would have meant having him stand trial for his crimes against humanity, holding him accountable before a court of law. That is the concept of justice that the civilized world has adopted. The other is punitive and vengeful - the Biblical conception of justice - and we know that for much of time that the Biblical conception of justice dominated Western society, society was not just, but unjust.

I am pleased to see that I need not bother writing that portion of such a future post, because Steven Poole, author of Unspeak, has already addressed it and come to much the same conclusion.

Responding to President Obama's claim that "justice" had been done by Bin Laden's death, Poole writes

It is worth pausing to admire Obama’s masterful rhetorical conflation here of two different conceptions of justice. One sense of “justice”, of course, has to do with courts, legal process, fair trials, and the rest. This has to be the sense invoked in Obama’s reference to the desire to bring Bin Laden to justice. In this spatial metaphor, justice is a place: implicitly, a courtroom, or at least a cell with the promise of process. (Or even, in extremis, Guantánamo Bay, still not closed, where indefinite “detention” or imprisonment is Unspeakily palliated with the expectation of some kind of tribunal.) To bring someone to justice is to put them in a place where they will be answerable for their alleged crimes. To be answerable in this sense, it helps to be alive.

But it is quite another sense of “justice” — meaning a fair result, regardless of the means by which it was achieved — that is functioning in Obama’s next use of the word: the quasi-legal judgment that justice was done. On what sorts of occasion do we actually say that justice was done? Not, I suppose, at the conclusion of a trial (when it might be claimed, instead, that justice was served); rather, after some other event, away from any courtroom, that we perceive as rightful punishment (or reward) for the sins (or virtues) of the individual under consideration. (Compare poetic justice.) The claim that justice was done appeals, then, to a kind of Old Testament or Wild West notion of just deserts. What, after all, happened between the desire to bring Bin Laden to justice and the claim that justice was done? Well, Bin Laden was killed. He was not, after all, brought to justice. Instead, justice (in its familiar guise as American bombs and bullets) was brought to him.

In case you were wondering

You may have noticed that I'm still far behind on my posting. As renovation continues on my home, I currently have my computer and all but about five of my books in storage. On top of that, last month I was busy taking a course for work that required reading a textbook over a three week period on top of homework, training, testing and such. I've been busy.

I'll get back on schedule eventually ...

A fantastic book deal

I just noticed that Daniel J. Goldhagen's Worse than War: Genocide, Eliminationism, and the ongoing Assault on Humanity - a book I previously spotlighted - is only $2.60 for the Kindle edition. For a book that has 672 pages, that is practically a steal.

Most recent discount book buy

The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How The War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals (hc) by Jane Mayer for three dollars.

I've already read this before but did not own a copy. Given that I consider this one of the most important books to have been written during the Bush administration and how well researched it is, having a copy for my bookshelf was a no-brainer.

High praise for Dawkins

Over at Slate, A.C. Grayling, the philosopher who edited the vast history of secular western literature to create a humanist bible, 'singles out five titles that, in their various ways, provide useful perspectives "on how to live a satisfying and morally good life."'

One of the five listed is The Greatest Show on Eath: The Evidence for Evolution by Richard Dawkins. It was included because it is an excellent book explaining the development of life on Earth by evolution; I'm not sure Grayling could have given Dawkins higher praise than including him among Aristotle and J.S. Mill as seminal reading for living a good life without god(s).

Having previously read a third of the book (still waiting for a chance to finish the rest of it) I can attest that it is supremely engaging and well written. The most entertaining and informative book on the subject that I have encountered, with a close possible second being The Ancestor's Tale, also by Dawkins.

A perfect example of why I despise (some) movement conservatives so very, very much

"I never cease to be amazed by the right-wing's ability to - in unison - decide that a previously uncontroversial position is now anathema" - Anonymous Liberal

"The point of departure for permanent status negotiations to realize this vision seems clear: There should be an end to the occupation that began in 1967. The agreement must establish Palestine as a homeland for the Palestinian people, just as Israel is a homeland for the Jewish people. These negotiations must ensure that Israel has secure, recognized, and defensible borders. And they must ensure that the state of Palestine is viable, contiguous, sovereign, and independent." - George W. Bush, Jan 12, 2008

A contiguous Palestinian state, based upon 1967 borders, has been the basis of US policy and a proposed peace solution in the Middle East for decades. As indicated by the above statement by President Bush, there was nothing controversial about the position. When President Bush made that statement prominent media conservatives did not declare that Israel would soon cease to exist, that America had "thrown Israel under a bus" or that the the 1967 borders were "indefensible" and "Auschwitz borders" tantamount to the forced genocide of the Israeli populace.

But when a black Democratic president with the middle name "Hussein" said nearly the same thing:

We believe the borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps, so that secure and recognized borders are established for both states. The Palestinian people must have the right to govern themselves, and reach their full potential, in a sovereign and contiguous state.

American right-wing media react with mass, immediate faux hysteria.

Limbaugh: Obama Urged Israel To "Destroy Itself" And "Submit Its People To Potential Genocide." On his radio show, Rush Limbaugh said of Obama's speech: "What kind of president urges a country to destroy itself and submit its people to potential genocide?" [Premiere Radio Networks, The Rush Limbaugh Show, 5/19/11, via Media Matters]

CNN's Dana Loesch: Obama "Sided With Terrorists." During her KFTK radio show, CNN contributor Dana Loesch claimed that in his Middle East speech Obama "sided with terrorists" and "people who believe that Israel doesn't have a right to exist." [KFTK, The Dana Show, 5/19/11, via Media Matters]

Beck: Obama's Policy On Israel Ends With "The Destruction Of Israel" And "The Western Way Of Life." ...

Geller: Obama's Middle East Policy Is "Obama's Final Solution." In a May 19 post to her Atlas Shrugs blog on President Obama's Middle East speech, Pamela Geller wrote that Obama was dooming Israel to "Auschwitz borders" and "Obama's final solution."

Presidential candidate Mitt Romney said that "President Obama has thrown Israel under the bus." I don't recall Romney saying the same of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert when he proposed the same plan.

Always setting the bar in terms of mindless dissemination of dishonest partisan propaganda, Steve Doocy of Fox "News" falsely asserted that President Obama is the first United States president to call for a peace solution based upon the 1967 borders.

The speech is also being characterized as taking sides with the Palestinians, when in reality the general plan has widespread Jewish support.

Yet it's not this derangement and dishonesty that is the most frustrating, but that these individuals continue to exist comfortably in our political media because our press generally does not have the stomach to call the deranged and the dishonest deranged and dishonest.

And so it goes.

Quote of the day

"My argument is pretty simple, Amy. I don’t torture because it doesn’t work. I don’t torture, because it’s immoral, and it’s against the law, and it’s inconsistent with my oath of office, in which I swore to defend the Constitution of the United States. And it’s also inconsistent with American principles." - Matthew Alexander

Alexander is the former military interrogator who led a team that gained the intelligence necessary to find al Zarqawi; I previously reviewed his book on the subject, here.

Quote of the day

"Ayn Rand is essentially the L. Ron Hubbard of American conservatism." - Michael Stafford

h/t Ebert (via Lippard)

And now I get it

Whenever Keith Olbermann would refer to Glenn Beck as Glenn "Lonesome Rhodes" Beck on his show Countdown I knew that Olbermann was making some kind of pop culture reference, but never bothered to look up what exactly he was alluding to. But thanks to a recommendation from Spocko, I now get it.

The reference is to Larry "Lonesome" Rhodes, played by Andy Griffith in his film debut A Face in the Crowd (1957). The movie is about the rise and fall of a radio-then-television star who uses folksy charm, false sincerity,zany energy, and every-man wisdom to cynically sell commercial products and reactionary politics. Rhodes starts out as mostly an entertainer, but as he realizes he can use his show as a vehicle for wielding influence, he becomes drunk with power. Eventually, he is undone by his own power-mad hubris and contempt for the very people that he pretends to be a champion of. (Sound familiar?)

If you are only familiar with Andy Griffith from his role as Sheriff Taylor, then his brilliant performance alone is worth seeing the movie for. And on top of that, the movie itself still provides relevant commentary on the way that demagogues function within our media culture.

That being said, there are some key differences between Beck and Rhodes. First, Rhodes shoots to the top because of his own natural ability to draw an audience. As Alexander Zaitchik noted in Common Nonsense, Beck, however, failed in market after market and only was catapulted to stardom after media deregulation (signed into law by President Clinton) allowed his employer Clear Channel to gobble up radio markets, thus eliminating Beck's marketplace competitors.

Secondly, while Rhodes had a mean streak, he was careful (for the most part) to not reveal it to his audience. Beck, on the other hand, frequently lets his audience see just how rotten he really is.

Completely baffled

I'm logging onto my blog today - just now - and see my most recent post about having finally seen A Face in the Crowd is now missing. Entirely: not even the Google cache of it appears.

I am at a complete loss to understand how this happened. The post was up last night when I went to bed. Now it's gone.

I suppose I'll try to rewrite it later today if I can muster the energy. This is somewhat frustrating.

Update: Using a combination of memory and Google's search feature (a tedious process), I was able to recreate my original post. We'll see if it remains this time.

Most recent discount books buys

Eight Little Piggies: Reflections in Natural History (pb) by Stephen Jay Gould - $0.50

Censoring Science: Inside the Political Attack on Dr. James Hansen and the Truth of Global Warming (hc) by Mark Bowen - $1.00

Coming of Age in the Milky Way (hc) by Timothy Ferris - $1.00

Cruel and Unsual: Bush/Cheney's New World Order (hc) by Mark Crispin Miller - $1.00

Pretty soon I will need to start culling my book collection; in other words, donating books I can live without back to the library. I'm running out of space.

Quote of the day

From The Good Book

The books that help most are those that prompt most thought.
The virtue of books is to be readable.
There is no frigate like a book to take us to lands far away.
Wear the old coat and buy the new book.

Proverbs 22: 9 - 12

Humanist Genesis

From The Good Book: A Humanist Bible (Genesis, Chapter 1) made by A.C. Grayling

9. So all things are gathered into one thing: the universe of nature, in which there are many worlds: the orbs of light in an immensity of space and time,

10. And among them their satellites, on one of which is a part of nature that mirrors nature in itself,

11. And can ponder its beauty and significance, and seek to understand it: this is humankind.

Have they no decency?

A while back I noted how atrocious it was for Glenn Beck to posit a deranged conspiracy theory that Rachel Carson - one of the founders of the environmental movement - campaigned against DDT because she secretly wanted to reduce the global human population.

This is malicious pure rotten hate that Beck is spreading. He is saying that everyone that doesn't share his deranged, delusional world view are totalitarian monsters. (You can see that Beck is full of it regarding DDT by taking a look through the archive of posts at Deltoid on DDT.) Really, how dare he defame Carson like this? Saying that a dead woman who can no longer defend herself wanted to kill people to reduce the human population and came up with a secret plot to get DDT banned to accomplish that goal. That's just so utterly despicable.

That's the sort of evil slander that is on a level with the Protocols of Zion. And just as New World Order conspiracy helps the anti-semite manufacture a world that justifies his bigotry, Beck's DDT conspiracy helps him manufacture a world that justifies his anti-environmentalist bigotry.

The thing is that it's not just Beck who engages in this sort of despicable defamation: there are entire organizations that have taken to calling Rachel Carson a mass murderer.

As Oreskes and Conway (2010, Chapter 7) document in detail, since 2007 the right-wing and libertarian organizations are calling Rachel Carson a mass-murderer. What? Did they even read about her life? This shy, humble scientist a mass murderer? Their “reasoning”: because her work led to the banning of DDT, thousands of Africans died of malaria, which might not have happened if DDT were available to them. I won’t rehash the entire ill-informed and crazy, convoluted thinking of these people, since Oreskes and Conway (2010) have done it already. The reality of the whole argument is that even if DDT had not been banned, its use would have stopped anyway because insects had evolved resistance to it. DDT was already being phased out at the time of the ban, and other pesticides that worked better and didn’t damage too many harmless animals were being used instead—because DDT didn’t work! If, as these people propose, DDT had been sprayed across the waterways of Africa, it would not have saved any lives whatsoever because of the evolution of resistance. In fact, many other pesticides that have since been used over the years are now useless because insect pests (especially mosquitoes) evolve resistance so quickly. Yet these people manage to distort history as badly as any Holocaust-denier[s]—except instead of trying to exonerate the Nazis of genocide, they turn Rachel Carson into a mass murderer.

Such strange revisionist thinking wouldn’t even be worth mentioning if it were not so common in the public discourse these days.

What enrages me is that in our mendocracy persons who engage in this sort of behavior get to be media stars and can so easily inject their ideological propaganda into the mainstream.

In the meantime ... book spotlights

Things are a bit hectic again for me (just gave up on the drafting of a post in response to bin Laden's death that I'll have to shelve for a few days or so) but I do have time for a couple of book spotlights:

Via his new twitter feed, Mark Vuletic of The Atheologian recommends a book that I had not heard of previously, but now have a copy of: Atheism in Pagan Antiquity by A.B. Drachmann. You can have a copy, too, if so inclined, as the book is public domain and available in several e-text formats (e.g. Kindle or iBooks).

Believing Bullshit: How Not to Get Sucked into an Intellectual Black Hole by Stephen Law. Just saw the title and thought it looked interesting.

The Good Book: A Humanist Bible made by A.C. Grayling. I am anxiously awaiting my copy of this one. Here Grayling has used some of the same tactics of editing that went into the canonization of the Bible in order to create a similarly structured text but comprised of secular writings that span the history of humanist thought in civilization. As the New York Times review put it

At first, “The Good Book: A Humanist Bible” (Walker & Company, $35) looks like the Bible that Christians believe in, politicians take oaths on and the Gideons put in hotel rooms. It is divided into books like Genesis, Lamentations and Proverbs. Each book is organized into chapters and verses. It is written in the stately cadences that signal the presence of important, godly matters.

Begin to read, however, and you immediately see that God is not present. Instead, there are uncredited quotations from Aristotle, Darwin, Swift, Voltaire and hundreds more pre-Christian, anti-Christian or indifferent-to-Christian thinkers, assembled into an alternative genealogy of nature, human origins and ethics. Here are history and wisdom, without the divine attribution.

Grayling has mixed in some of his own writings, too, and you will need to make use of Google in order to discover the original sources of the rest; a choice that I believe that Grayling made not merely because it mirrors the way that the Bible is a collection of writings by uncredited authors but because it encourages an active engagement with the material, setting a curious reader on a path of intellectual discovery.

To get an idea of the book's humanist charm, one need only follow the book's twitter feed or go straight to this page which provides brief excerpts of the text. A sample:

It has been well said that we should contemplate what the great did in the past, not just out of curiosity but to educate ourselves for the present. Nobility and moral beauty have an active attraction, and invite all who live in later times to nobility again; not by imitation alone, but by stimulating thought about how to live, out of bare contemplation of how some of the great once lived. Acts 1: 1- 3

A new way to read a book

If you own an iPad (or enjoy reading on an iPhone or iPod Touch) then I highly recommend downloading the newly released - and for a limited time, lowly priced at $5 - iTunes app version of Al Gore's Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis.

The Our Choice app redefines the reading experience, creating an interactive multimedia resource comprised of "animations, interactive info-graphics, pictures, audio, text, an hour of documentary video and more." Being able to easily and quickly zip around the material with a literal swipe of the finger is quite an enjoyable experience.

Not to mention that the book is an excellent, informative resource, providing invaluable insight into what might possibly be the greatest challenge facing humanity today.

And to further motivate you to give the app a try: Gore is "donating 100% of the proceeds I would otherwise receive to the Alliance for Climate Protection," an organization he founded with the purpose of raising awareness about the threat of global warming to humanity.

Words vs. actions: Barack Obama edition

Words

My Administration is committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in Government. We will work together to ensure the public trust and establish a system of transparency, public participation, and collaboration. Openness will strengthen our democracy and promote efficiency and effectiveness in Government.

Actions

Chronicle editor Ward Bushee says the White House has threatened to exclude the paper from pooled coverage of its Bay Area events because it posted a video of last week’s protest at a San Francisco fundraiser for President Obama. The footage — shot by Chronicle political reporter Carla Marinucci — shows a group of protesters interrupting Obama with a song complaining about the administration’s treatment of Pfc. Bradley Manning.

The San Francisco event last week was “in a public place with hundreds of people,” Bushee said. The White House policy regarding video, he said, “is objectionable and just is not in sync with how reporters are doing their jobs these days.”

He also said the White House rules are “not in the spirit of what the Obama administration is trying to project” in its claims to be the most transparent administration ever.

There is a reason the administration does not want video posted of citizens protesting the unjust treatment (bordering on torture) of Bradley Manning, who has been held in confinement (aka prison) for about a year despite not being convicted of a crime: It's more difficult to hold a political prisoner - which is pretty much what Manning is at this point - when the public's attention is drawn.

After all, democracy dies behind closed doors.

Mendocracy: rule by liars

'When one side breaks the social contract, and the other side makes a virtue of never calling them out on it, the liar always wins. When it becomes "uncivil" to call out liars, lying becomes free.' - Rick Pearlstein

'There is but one thing of real value - to cultivate truth and justice, and to live without anger in the midst of lying and unjust men' - Marcus Aurelius, The Meditations

Over at Mother Jones, Rick Pearlstein has written a short history of what he perceives to be the rise of unaccountable political lying. The whole thing is worth reading, but this is the key part I'd like to focus on:

[R]ight-wing ideologues "lie without consequence," as a desperate Vincent Foster put it in his suicide note nearly two decades ago. But they only succeed because they are amplified by "balanced" outlets that frame each smear as just another he-said-she-said "controversy."

And here, in the end, is the difference between the untruths told by William Randolph Hearst and Lyndon Baines Johnson, and the ones inundating us now: Today, it's not just the most powerful men who can lie and get away with it. It's just about anyone—a congressional back-bencher, an ideology-driven hack, a guy with a video camera—who can inject deception into the news cycle and the political discourse on a grand scale.

Sure, there will always be liars in positions of influence—that's stipulated, as the lawyers say. And the media, God knows, have never been ideal watchdogs—the battleships that crossed the seas to avenge the sinking of the Maine attest to that. What's new is the way the liars and their enablers now work hand in glove. That I call a mendocracy, and it is the regime that governs us now.

That a significant political movement, existing in a realm of near total fabrication, dominates the political discourse of the United States is one of the primary things that I have blogged about for the last five years. It is beyond frustrating, well into the realm of maddening. With all due respect to the Emperor, he didn't have to live in the midst of Fox "News" and Rush Limbaugh, or the "liberal" institutions which defend them.

Take for example, this: some conservative media outlets have attacked President Obama for not issuing a proclamation recognizing Easter (Link 1, link 2, link 3). This is another example in the never-ending stream of manufactured bullshit that comes from such outlets; there is no controversy. Presidents do not and have not issued proclamations for Easter. The only point of this pseudo-news created by Fox Nation is to depict President Obama as a foreign, unChristian other, in other words, a somewhat naked appeal to prejudice and bigotry.

In the first link, you get a fantastic example of the rotten core of the mendocracy Pearlstein has identified. Intellectual cretin Sean Hannity leading a panel consisting of a Republican strategist, a slimeball plutocrat Democrat, and a Democratic strategist who formerly advocated illegally murdering Julian Assange, all agreeing that this was an oversight on the part of President Obama.

The consequences of the ease with which liars, bullshitters, and their enablers exist within our political and media culture has significant, deleterious effects on our country. For example, two thirds of Republicans - at a national level - are unsure that President Obama is a citizen. This is indicative of a collective, national derangement. And at the same time, Donald Trump has been getting much media attention and polling well as a leading Republican presidential candidate, simply by opportunistically saying the sort of ridiculous, racist conspiracy nonsense (Obama not a citizen, didn't write Dreams of my Father, didn't have the grades to get into college, etc.) that in a more sane world would get him vaulted out of the spotlight, not into it. And I think this kind of dissemination of stupid ignorance has something to do with Trump's conspiracy-baiting.

There is no end to examples of the process Pearlstein describes. Witness here, for example, for a perfect example of Pearlstein's mendocracy in action.

I don't know where I'm going with this, other than to once again note the democracy eroding effects of getting citizens to engage civically on false beliefs. Mother Jones also features a lengthy article about the so-called "Climategate" incident in which a criminally manufactured faux controversy has become part of an axiomatic faith for conservatives that man-made global warming is a hoax and a conspiracy. Again, I cut to the key point:

SO DID THE SCIENTISTS DO something more diabolical than gripe about critics and fret over how their research would be interpreted? Not according to seven separate inquiries on the subject, each of which found that the researchers' work was not in question—though several concluded that their behavior was. An independent probe organized by the University of East Anglia (PDF) found that some had turned down "reasonable requests for information" and had, at times, been "unhelpful and defensive." It noted "a consistent pattern of failing to display the proper degree of openness."

But none of the exonerations mattered: The scientists had lost control of the narrative. The percentage of people who believe that the world is warming has fallen 14 points from its 2008 high, according to polling (PDF). Gallup's annual poll in 2010 found that 48 percent of Americans said they believe that fears of global warming "are generally exaggerated"—the highest figure since pollsters began asking that question in 1997.

Most significant, however, has been the long-term hardening of the political divide on the issue. In 1997, the percentage of Republicans and Democrats who believed in climate change was nearly the same—47 percent and 46 percent, respectively. By March 2010, 66 percent of Democrats and only 31 percent of Republicans agreed that global warming was already occurring. Half of the new House GOP members flatly deny that the planet is warming, and only four say they accept the science of climate change.

Meanwhile

Scarce water supplies in the western US will probably dwindle further as a result of climate change, causing problems for millions in the region, a government report has said.

Baleful quote of the day

Amy Davidson, on leaked documents further documenting the injustice and incompetence of America's concentration camp at Guantanamo.

Here’s another question: why didn’t Obama declassify these documents himself? His Administration has professed to be frustrated at its inability to convey to the public, early on, why Guantánamo should be closed. (See Eric Holdier’s press conference last month for an example.) Might it have helped if Obama had pointed to close-up pictures of the fourteen-year old, or the taxi driver, and really told their stories? He can be good at that, after all. Maybe it wouldn’t have been enough; maybe, clumsily handled, it could have backfired. But it could have shifted the narrative, and it would have been true. Instead, Obama never effectively challenged the image of Guantánamo as a sort of Phantom Zone of super villains, rather than the humiliating hodgepodge it is. When confronted with scare tactics, his Administration, as the Washington Post recounted in a long piece Saturday, retreated again and again; and then it just gave up. The White House feared the fear itself.

And so, instead, on Sunday the Administration released a statement to “strongly condemn” the leak. It made a point of noting how cautious it had been about the prisoners, and how the Bush Administration had transferred many more of them out of Guantánamo than the Obama Administration had—as if that were a point of pride.

Abigail Adams comments on the transformation of Barack Obama

Again and again, President Obama does things that candidate Obama said that a president should not do, such as the use of signing statements to abrogate laws, the launch of unilateral wars without Congress, looking the other way at torture, and the persecution of whistleblowers. Adams would not have been surprised by this:

'I am more and more convinced that man is a dangerous creature; and that power, whether vested in many or a few, is ever grasping, and, like the grave, cries, “Give, give!” The great fish swallow up the small; and he who is most strenuous for the rights of the people, when vested with power, is as eager after the prerogatives of government.'' - Abigail Adams, letter to John Adams (November 27, 1775)

Pardon the interruption

I'm still trying to get my home back in order and haven't been able to get back to blogging yet. And, unfortunately, I'm about to travel for a few days, so posts will continue to be sparse for a little while longer.

Fundamentalist same difference

From The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power by Jeff Sharlet

And then there was Kate. She wrote asking to have cofee with me because she was a fan. When a gorgeous blonde walked into the restaurant we'd agreed on and immediately said she loved my article, I thought, journalism has its rewards. But an hour into our conversation, I started making connections. She'd been living in Annapolis, Maryland, where the Family has a group of homes much like the compound in Arlington. She'd recently left a job at the national Security Agency. She'd been raised fundamentalist, but she'd left it behind; she wanted a relationship with Jesus untainted by tradition. So I asked her, "Do you know anyone in the Family?" Silence. I asked her again. For whatever reason - Christian conscience? - she confessed that she did know someone in the Family, [organization leader] David Coe. "He's like a father to me." In fact, she admitted, she'd been sent to spy on me.

We ended up talking for three more hours and drinking a lot of wine. I tried to persuade her that the Family was a secretive, undemocratic organization that aided and abetted dictators. She agreed, only she thought that was a good thing. She said the Family still loved me. I told her about some of the killers the Family had supported. She rallied by pointing out that we're all sinners, and thus shouldn't judge those whom God places in authority. "Jeff," she said, holding my eyes, twisting her wine stem between her fingers, "in your heart, have you ever lusted for a woman? Isn't that just as bad?"

Point of reference: One of the killers the Family supported is the genocidal dictator General Suharto, who may have killed close to a million people. But if you've ever been physically attracted to someone you're not married to, that's just as bad.

A few more days

It will be a few more days before work is done (for now) on my home and it will likely take me a day or so after that to get my stuff settled back in, at which point I will resume normal blogging.

One more for the road

Good bye, and good riddance. 27 plus months of tv insanity is finally coming to an end. Too bad the damage Beck has done to this country in that short period will take much, much longer to repair.

Because the truth is that Beck's ouster isn't really the end of the nightmare, but just the beginning of the end. Over the last 27 months, Beck -- and let's be clear that he had a lot of help from the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin and Sean Hannity and Rand Paul and all the folks in the Tea Party Movement -- managed to do incalculable harm to the American body politic, that Beck was exactly like Tom and Daisy Buchanan in "The Great Gatsby" who "smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness.."

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Barack Obamayan
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Limited blogging this week

Despite having plenty of topics I want to comment upon and a couple of book reviews I'd like to have posted this week, I'm going to have little time to get to any of that due to some renovation that is being done on my home, which is leaving me with limited access to the internet.

Quote of the day

"While nothing is easier than to denounce the evildoer, nothing is more difficult than to understand him." - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

I've seen this quote attributed to Dostoyevsky multiple times - and it sounds like something Dostoyevsky would say - but have been unable to source it. If anyone knows where this comes from, please let me know.

Further adventures in book gluttony

Picked these up today at the library book sale (hc - 1.00; pb - .50):

Mistakes Were Made (but not by me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts (hc) by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson

Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq (hc) by Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor

The Ascent of Man (hc) by Jacob Bronowski

Triumph: Life after the Cult - A Survivor's Lessons (hc) by Carolyn Jessop

The Political Mind: Why You Can't Understand 21st-Century American Politics with an 18th-Century Brain (hc) by George Lakoff

Origins: Fourteen Billion Years of Cosmic Evolution (hc) by Neil DeGrasse Tyson and Donald Goldsmith

What Are Journalists For? (hc) by Jay Rosen

A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq and the Abuse of America's Intelligence Agencies (pb) by James Bamford

Two Treatises of Government (pb) by John Locke

The only ones I've read previously are Mistakes Were Made and The Political Mind; the former I consider to be an essential item on any skeptic's bookshelf and the latter an accessible (though flawed) 21st century explication of a principle long ago recognized by David Hume: "Reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions."

Update: Went back and picked up two more items:

They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-45 (pb) by Milton Mayer

The Mismeasure of Man (pb) by Stephen Jay Gould

Unfortunately, this is the original edition of Mismeasure and not the revised/updated version that features a critique of The Bell Curve.

Corporate tax rate of negative 60 percent proof corporate taxes too high

As we all know from watching Fox News and listening to AM radio, America is currently being assaulted by the socialist revolutionaries of the Obama administration. Yes, welcome to the communist revolution, comrades, and witness the terrible suffering of corporations under this left-of-Lenin regime:

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This is the New York Times article that inspired the above

The company reported worldwide profits of $14.2 billion, and said $5.1 billion of the total came from its operations in the United States.

Its American tax bill? None. In fact, G.E. claimed a tax benefit of $3.2 billion.

An impressive increase in its tax benefit from the previous year

Last year the conglomerate generated $10.3 billion in pretax income, but ended up owing nothing to Uncle Sam. In fact, it recorded a tax benefit of $1.1 billion.

And, of course, GE has suffered terribly about this from the communists at left-wing MSNBC and NBC, right? Har har.

Asked about GE paying no taxes, Sen. Ron Johnson, the plutocrat who with his own wealth and the corporate money allowed into the political process by the Citizens United ruling was able to buy his way into Sen Feingold's seat, gave a zombie answer that corporate tax rates are too high. There is apparently no reality that can get in the way of the belief of our plutocrat class that they are being persecuted and victimized, all the while wealth continues to flow upwards into the hands of fewer and fewer and austerity measures are claimed as necessary and as a "shared sacrifice." And to claim that President Obama represents radical Marxist, anti-business forces is beyond laughable.

Since Obama was inaugurated, the Dow Jones has increased more than 50% -- from 8,000 to more than 12,000; the wealthiest recieved a massive tax cut; the top marginal tax rate was three times less than during the Eisenhower years and substantially lower than during the Reagan years; income and wealth inequality are so vast and rising that it is easily at Third World levels; meanwhile, "the share of U.S. taxes paid by corporations has fallen from 30 percent of federal revenue in the 1950s to 6.6 percent in 2009." During this same time period, the unemployment rate has increased from 7.7% to 8.9%; millions of Americans have had their homes foreclosed; and the number of Americans living below the poverty line increased by many millions, the largest number since the statistic has been recorded. Can you smell Obama's radical egalitarianism and Marxist anti-business hatred yet?

Then there are those whom Obama has empowered. His first chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, is a business-revering corporatist who made close to $20 million in 3 short years as an investment banker, while his second, Bill Daley, served for years as JP Morgan's Midwest Chairman. His Treasury Secretary is undoubtedly the most loyal and dedicated servant Wall Street has ever had in that position, while Goldman Sachs officials occupy so many key positions in his administration that a former IMF and Salomon Brothers executive condemned what he called "Goldman Sachs's seeming lock on high-level U.S. Treasury jobs." Obama's former OMB Director recently left to take a multi-million-dollar position with Citigroup. From the start, Obama's economic policies were shaped by the Wall Street-revering neo-liberal Rubinites who did so much to serve corporate America during the Clinton years. Meanwhile, the President's choice to head his Council on Jobs and Competitiveness -- General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt -- heads a corporation that "despite $14.2 billion in worldwide profits - including more than $5 billion from U.S. operations - [] did not owe taxes in 2010": an appointment the White House still defends.

And f.y.i., GE is able in part to avoid paying taxes thanks to the questionable efforts of its auditor KPMG. That would be the same KPMG who previously helped their clients short the United States government of at least 2.5 billion dollars.

But no worries, Congress helped kill ACORN. Sure they only received upwards of 50 million dollars in recent years and didn't misuse the money, but everyone knows that the poor and minorities are the most powerful and corrupting influences in American politics.

P.S.: I forgot to mention this

After not paying any taxes and making huge profits, ThinkProgress has learned that General Electric is expected to ask its nearly 15,000 unionized employees in the United States to make major concessions.

This year, 14 unions representing more than 15,000 workers will negotiate a new master contract with General Electric. Among the major concessions GE has signaled that it will ask of union workers is the elimination of a defined contribution benefit pension for new employees, a move the company has already implemented for its non-union salaried employees. Likewise, GE is signaling to the union that it will ask for the elimination of current health insurance plans in favor of lower quality health saving accounts, a move the company has already implemented for non-union salaried employees as well.

In addition, General Electric may ask some workers for a wage freeze.

You know, shared sacrifice, and all that.

That didn't take long

I noted the other day that notorious liar Andrew Breitbart was being promoted as a front-page contributor at the Huffington Post. He no longer is; but not because he's a dishonest propagandist, but apparently because he insulted a friend of Arianna Huffington.

Quote of the day

'SIR – We should be wary of appointing Mormons to positions of high public office (“When the saints come marching in”, March 5th). Mormonism is a strange religion. Its adherents fail to understand that the only authentic way to receive divine revelations is on stone (not gold), up a mountain (not in a wood) and during a period of history when the reliability of eyewitness accounts was so much greater than it is today.' - David Hulbert, letter to The Economist

h/t Jim Lippard

Baleful quote of the day

"It’s perhaps surprising that the Obama administration, which has rightly been scolding other countries for their lawless surveillance programs, is arguing in American courts that the judiciary has no role to play in ensuring that American surveillance statutes comply with the Constitution. But it’s reflective of a broader effort on the part of the Obama administration to exempt government surveillance from the checks and balances that apply in other contexts. It’s not just the courts that the administration has been trying to sideline; it’s the public, too." - Blog of Rights

Quote of the day

"I congratulate Mr. [James] O'Keefe for upholding his values: faith in the power of video to mislead." - Steve Inskeep

via Media Matters

Today's discount book buys

The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power, and the Future of the World (hc) by Michelle Goldberg for 3 dollars.

The Men Who Stare at Goats (pb) by Jon Ronson for 4 dollars.

Terror and Consent: The Wars for the Twenty-First Century (hc) by Philip Bobbitt for 2 dollars.

Turkmeniscam: How Washington Lobbyists Fought to Flack for a Stalinist Dictatorship (hc) by Ken Silverstein for 2 dollars.

Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (And Stick You with the Bill) (pb) by David Cay Johnston for 1 dollar.

The Gamble: General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006-2008 (hc) by Thomas Ricks for 6 dollars.

Of these, the only one I've read before is Free Lunch. However, I've been interested in reading The Gamble since watching Ricks lecture on the book.

Regarding Philip Bobbitt, I am not all that sympathetic to what I perceive to be his views on the national surveillance state, but have found myself desperate to find some intellectually challenging views that are not deranged after years of listening to AM radio and watching Fox News.

Quote of the day

"Eating industrial meat takes an almost heroic act of not knowing or, now, forgetting." - Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma

Juan Williams: deliberately obtuse hack

Juan Williams continues to cement his transformation into a fully functioning Fox News "liberal" who parrots conservative rhetoric, now calling for defunding NPR on the grounds of its supposed liberal bias.

Rep. Steve Israel (D- N.Y.) chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee sent out a fundraising letter with the following argument for maintaining public funding of NPR:

“They [Republicans] know NPR plays a vital role in providing quality news programming – from rural radio stations to in-depth coverage of foreign affairs. If the Republicans had their way, we’d only be left with the likes of Glenn Beck, Limbaugh and Sarah Palin to dominate the airwaves.”

With that statement Congressman Israel made the case better than any Republican critic that NPR is radio by and for liberal Democrats. He is openly asking liberal Democrats to give money to liberal Democrats in Congress so they can funnel federal dollars into news radio programs designed to counter and defeat conservative Republican voices.

I bolded those bits to help draw out the obviousness of what Williams is doing here. Notice that what Rep. Israel is doing is asking to fund members of Congress who will preserve NPR because NPR is one of the only places citizens can obtain "quality news programming" and that without it the radio airwaves will be dominated by idiot demagogues and propagandists; note that he does not say that NPR is designed to counter conservative AM radio, but to provide a function that it does not.

So let's recap that: partisan, fiercely ideological Republicans and conservative activists can wage a baseless smear campaign against NPR to cut off its federal funding for political and ideological reasons, but if Democratic members of Congress attempt to preserve NPR and defend it from its critics that constitutes proof NPR is a propaganda arm of "liberal Democrats" and deserves no federal funding.

That's some fantastic head I win, tails you lose reasoning there.

Arianna Huffington vs. the values of Arianna Huffington

Arianna Huffington's 2008 book Right is Wrong: How the Lunatic Fringe Hijacked America, Shredded the Constitution, and Made Us All Less Safe (And What You Need to Know to End the Madness) contains a chapter - the second chapter, in fact - titled "The Media: Equal Time for Lies." It opens

It has become more difficult to ignore the likes of Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter, and Rush limbaugh; they're no longer lonely kooks wandering in the wilderness; they've got access to the halls of power, and they're staying for dinner. Their infinite string of distortions, spin, and outright lies has left no doubt about whose side these guys are on.

The bold emphasis is mine and I'll return to it in a moment.

Huffington continues, adding that worse than the development of a fiercely ideological and untruthful "right wing" propaganda media is a mainstream media that enables it by adhering to the notion that there are two valid, dichotomous perspectives to every issue; "and [that] both deserve to be given equal weight." A neutral stance in the presentation of views is fine for issues of honest debate, she writes, "but there are other issues that quite simply do not have two sides." Such as the reality of global warming or the lack of an imminent threat from Iraq. "It's the quaint notion that both sides are arguing in good faith with at least some of the facts on their side that has been cynically exploited by the Right."

Right.

Which is why I found it so curious that in the wake of the Huffington Post merging with AOL for 315 million dollars one of the first apparent changes would be Andrew Breitbart becoming a columnist.

And so now we get back to the quoted material that I put in bold emphasis. Andrew Breitbart - now given a platform at Arianna Huffington's website - is one of the leading "zealots" with an "infinite string of distortions, spin, and outright lies" that Arianna Huffington denounces in her book. As I noted before, Breitbart is a "cretinous, pathological liar;" an apparently sociopathic liar who casually called for the execution of climate scientist James Hansen in response to a faked global warming scandal that Hansen had no involvement in.

Virtually everything he says appears to be bullshit and he is part of the "lunatic fringe" that Huffington opposes in her book title and content. His reckless, shameless and remorseless lies, spin, and dishonesty have helped to devastate ACORN and defame Shirley Sherrod and lose her her job.

And what is Breitbart doing in his first post at Huffington Post? Engaging in apologetics for the latest dishonest smear video from his collaborator James O'Keefe, a truly heinous and despicable individual who excels in lies and bigotry.

I quote from an article that appeared on the Huffington Post a year ago to sum:

Andrew Breitbart has a job to do and he does it well. Breitbart's job is to lie and distort the truth in order to advance a right-wing agenda, embarrass liberals, and undermine the Obama administration.

Breitbart is not a journalist, researcher, or pundit. He is a propagandist. He operates several websites (BigGovernment, BigJournalism, and BigHollywood), where he and other right-wing bloggers spew their political pornography. The articles that appear on these websites are contemporary versions of what historian Richard Hofstadter called, in a famous 1964 essay, the "paranoid style" of American politics practiced by extreme conservatives.

I'm all for challenging one's views with different perspectives and opinions; I'm not for rewarding an intellectual villain with a platform, not for lending credibility to known prevaricators and the truth disinclined. Somehow I got the impression that Arianna Huffington felt the same way.

But this is not the only issue that has arisen since AOL's acquisition of the site.

The Newspaper Guild is calling on unpaid writers of the Huffington Post to withhold their work in support of a strike launched by Visual Arts Source in response to the company’s practice or using unpaid labor. In addition, we are asking that our members and all supporters of fair and equitable compensation for journalists join us in shining a light on the unprofessional and unethical practices of this company.

Journalist Chris Hedges had already excoriated Huffington on this subject, also noting what seems like a contradiction between what Huffington has written in a book and done in practice

Any business owner who uses largely unpaid labor, with a handful of underpaid, nonunion employees, to build a company that is sold for a few hundred million dollars, no matter how he or she is introduced to you on the television screen, is not a liberal or a progressive. Those who take advantage of workers, whatever their outward ideological veneer, to make profits of that magnitude are charter members of the exploitative class. Dust off your Karl Marx. They are the enemies of working men and women. And they are also, in this case, sucking the lifeblood out of a trade I care deeply about. It was bad enough that Huffington used her site for flagrant self-promotion, although the cult of the self has reached such dizzying proportions in American society that such behavior is almost expected. But there is an even sadder irony that this was carried out in the name of journalism.

...

This latest form of “liberal” exploitation exposes yet again the liberal class for who they really are—opportunists whose operating methods are as callous as those used in running the textile mills in southern China. Is it any wonder that working men and women, who have been abandoned and betrayed by these self-identified liberals, hate the liberal class and its transparent hypocrisy? Is it any wonder that the some 40 million Americans who live in poverty are invisible to the wider culture? Is it any wonder that the tea party and all the lunatics on the fringe of our political spectrum put their cross hairs on the liberal class and its purported values? Let’s not forget the title of Huffington’s latest book: “Third World America: How Our Politicians Are Abandoning the Middle Class and Betraying the American Dream.”

Liberals like these deserve the rage they engender.

The argument made to defend this exploitation is that the writers had a choice. It is an argument I also heard made by the managers of sweatshops in the Dominican Republic and Mexico, the coal companies in West Virginia or Kentucky and huge poultry farms in Maine. It is the argument made by the comfortable, by those who do not know what it is to be hard up, desperate or driven by a passion to express one’s self and the world through journalism or art. It is the argument the wealthy elite, who have cemented in place an oligarchic system under which there are no real choices, use to justify their oppression.

See also the Guardian's explanation of why its writers have gone on strike against Huffington Post.

Huffington has brilliantly and gracefully exploited at least hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of otherwise bright and qualified professional writers. She is revelling in both wealth and celebrity, having been lifted by the combined efforts of this army of the uncompensated. Brava, Madame Capitalist. But as a very public voice, she has suddenly morphed from being a soul sister of progressives into a Koch sister, contributing to nothing so much as that betrayal of the middle class.

We have enjoyed our own audience in this corner of the cultural universe for some time, and have done what we can to cut the writers in on the action because we think it is only right. With $300m of working capital in hand, I can assure both our writers and readers that this piece of the action would only increase. Thus, we have decided to call for a strike of the unpaid, non-unionised and unemployed Huffington Post contributors. Let all writers cease to contribute for now, and until the executives at the Huffington Post negotiate a proper contract with those writers, and establish proper content and quality controls, they ought to deny them the profit-generating benefits of unpaid labour.