Bill Ayers, Chris Matthews, Hardball

i am really interested to see what you people think of this little word-prance between these two dandies.

one thing, and then, by all means go ahead and watch the thing and tell me what you think. just one thing:

1. Couldn't Bill A. have slapped on a collared shirt for the big national television interview? Or is it somehow integrally important to him and his vibe that he appear to be "keeping it real.?" (Of course after the interview the pundits got all snobby about Bill's demeanor and I quickly sprung to his defense.)
   

3 Yes/No Questions post-Election

With Apologies to Greil Marcus, Here Comes the "New Weird America"

To be perfectly honest, I've felt little beyond weird, foreboding vibes since BHO's election. I kind of lead a catharsis-less life, tho, so that's not unusual. (Election Night did induce vomiting, if that means anything to anybody.)

That said, I'm completely enthralled by the new constellation, or the new conjuncture, or whatever-the-crap people want to call this moment besides "this moment." There is a Weird New series of questions floating out there in front of an insipid, Weird New Government - questions that pertain as much to the changing fate of neoliberalism as they pertain to the office of the presidency. Here goes:

1) Will Max Baucus lead us to universal health coverage for every damn man, woman and little woman/man? Avowed health-wonk-jedi Ezra Klein has been way out front, early and often, in profiling Committee Chairman Baucus and "bringing it" with the live coverage of the opening salvos. See for yourself.

2) Can a weak dollar, an energy crisis and a progressive government somehow cause manufacturing to "come back" to the USA in general, and bolster the labor movement in particular? Is it right to think of labor-management partnership when talk emerges of a cabinet-level "automotive czar"? Probably not, right? For some union activists, the question of manufacturing is fraught with a wide array of both hopeful and depressing connotations. If nothing else, the collision of the EFCA debate and the ongoing Detroit bailout guarantees that the media discourse around the labor movement will continue in the reified form of Movement conservatives and centrist pundits' endless riffing on "Big Labor" as a special interest akin to the gun lobby or evangelical christianity. Can somebody, for chrissakes, maybe once interview somebody from a labor union when they're talking about the labor movement?

3) Is Hank Paulson's recent bailout two-step a positive thing? We've moved from the so-called TARP initiative involving govt buyouts of "toxic" assets, to a new strategy of buying up preferred (but non-voting?!?) shares of bank stock. This sounds more like "nationalizing the banks," and thus might seem sensible to some of us. But at the same time, Paulson is certainly "calling an audible" when it comes to how the bailout and the buy-backs were framed. And while I am for nationalizing just about everything (including my hair and teeth), it would be nice if "our" stock in the banks allowed "us" some sort of authority vis a vis corporate governance.

Is Anything Weirder than Liberalism?

Human history is full of earlier, hierarchical regimes…But the progress of what we call modernity, in its different forms, undermines all these traditional ideas and eventually makes them incredible. In the end, the only basis for stable legitimacy we can fall back on turns out to be that we should obey our rulers because in doing so we are really obeying ourselves.
- Charles Taylor, "Cultures of Democracy and Citizen Efficacy" in Public Culture 19 (1).