Friday Catchbasin

Pet Peeve--I can't stand people who drive while talking and texting on cellphones. Here in Virginia, where no one uses their turn signals, these characters cause more accidents than anyone. How bad is it? Worse than 9-11. Between 2001 to 2007, 16,000 Americans died in accidents solely attributed to a driver texting while driving. In 2008, over 5,870 died because of cellphone and texting use. This about the total American fatalities in all of the Iraq War.

The Catholic Church in Minnesota is mailing out 500,000 DVD against same-sex marriage. What's next a church DVD in defense of pedophilia? Maybe they paid for it with the money laundered by the Vatican. Does anyone remember the anti-islam DVD circulated around the 2008 election time and stuffed in Sunday newspapers? Did anyone watch it?

Nancy Pelosi said she's reserving the right to push a middle class tax cut before the election. She will demand the procedure that calls for a two-thirds vote to prevent Republican amendments. Then this will force the Republicans to go on the record. Read a blogger saying that skipping the whole thing is probably better for the Democrats because the sight of Bluedogs and Leiberman types siding with the rich will provide a mixed message. Take your pick.

A gay male chastises the left for slamming Obama on gay rights when he says numerous changes have occurred. In particularly, he notes that now gays don't need the kindness of strangers or hospital administrators to visit their sick partners. One of the changes of healthreform was that gays would have the right to visit their partners. This is a big deal if you have ever known gays people who have been deprived this right by hospitals. In the freest country in the world, this was/is a common practice, especially encouraged by angry family members.

Another gay wrote that the gay/lesbian community is being foolish for criticizing the Obama DOJ in its response to the judge's ruling on DADT. He wrote that an appeal might end up in the Supreme Court, which might rule DADT was constitutional. This way the President as Commander-in-Chief can decide the issue.

Alan Grayson, who I find annoying on occasion, wrote a funny op-ed on the Dailykos called Caligula's Horse. Grayson argues that all the corporate funding of election campaigns really doesn't require sentient candidates. He quite rightfully says that corporate America would back Caligula's Horse against himself and Democrats if need be. This tracks with the wild and zany candidates of the Tea Party. Corporate America really doesn't need these people to have any understanding of the economy as long as they are pliant to corporate lobbyists once they come to town. This is the same belief of the Washington GOP leaders, who believe these people will be pliable to a corporate agenda.

How can you get any more bizarre than Glenn Beck? Beck is back bashing "progressives" with his little 'history" lessons. Yesterday,he decided to attack Edward House, an adviser to Woodrow Wilson, who is said to be responsible for creating the Federal Reserve. Beck urged his listeners to read Secrets of the Federal Reserve to understand how nefarious the Fed is. The book argues that the Fed was the creation of a conspiracy of a family of Jewish bankers. Of course, the Rothschilds have to factor into this. Normally, this would be the place where I go into a rant how Mormons were the only protestants allowed to proselytize in Hitler's Germany, which might explain Beck's fascination with all things Hitler. But, it's really the story of the author.

The Left has tagged Eustace Mullins a 9-11 truther and a follower of Lyndon LaRoche. Both true. But the story is more complicated. Secrets is dedicated to Ezra Pound. In fact, the book was funded by Ezra Pound when he was a patient at St. Elizabeth's Mental Hospital in Washington. During that period, doctors and Ezra's literary friends were trying to avoid a treason trial because of his broadcasts in favor of Mussolini, primarily, and Hitler and against the American forces in WWII. During that time, he cultivated a circle of young admirers, who respected him not for his aesthetics but for his economic theories. Personally, his economic theories and his anti-semiticism ruined some of his most beautiful Cantos. But this coterie started small publications to disseminate his economic theories, which were heavy of blaming the Jews for changes in 20th century America. One such person was Eustace Mullins, who wrote the book Beck recommended to his audience. Later, the LaRocheites adopted this book,

Maybe Glenn Beck will end up like Ezra Pound. Pound was released from the mental hospital and allowed to return to his home in Italy. He gave a fascist salute as he boarded the ship and then entered into decades of self-enforced silence--literally not speaking to anyone other than his wife and mistress. Allen Ginsberg tracked Pound down in Venice at the end of Ezra's life and managed to get him to listen to Allen's poetry and music. He finally asked Ezra about his anti-semiticism. Breaking his silence, Pound replied, "It was a suburban prejudice." Pound died believing all his poetry was "botched".

Pound's treason and his cultivating this young group of followers is one of the most unpleasant episodes in our own intellectual history. Not only were the followers anti-semites but were linked with militantly racist groups, which alarmed Pound's former friends like William Carlos Williams, who tried to intervene with first Ezra , then his wife to stop him meeting and funding them. Maybe it's appropriate all this garbage be raised again with Glenn Beck, the perfect acolyte of the demented. Notice how the fascist thread keeps appearing in Glenn Beck's rants and among the teabaggers. Just the other day, Rand Paul said that an economic collapse would lead to another Hitler. His own separate history records a fixation of Hitler.

The cultic nature of our recent politics is beginning to resemble Christian fundamentalism. Both the Left and the Right have criticized Markos Moulitsas for likening the Republicans and the Right to the Taliban. But the similarities are too broad to be dismissed. I've already written about the Christian Right's Biblical literalism, which is non-Biblical, being absent in Jewish and early Christian tradition. The Christian Right makes a totem of the Book of Revelation, a false idol if you will. On the political side, the other totem is the American Constitution. But this must only be seen through the ideology of "originalism", which didn't exist in American history until conservatives invented it in the late 1960s and early 1970s to counter more liberal interpretation of the Constitution. You can see how ideological it is by the anti-historical reasoning in the Citizens United case and some of the recent pronouncements by Fat Tony Scalia. And the last totem is the Free Market, which again doesn't exist in reality. The Right used to remember Adam Smith's invisible hand guiding the markets but never mention the visible hand, which he wrote about also.