The trial’s begun over a cop knocking a Critical Mass participant off his bike two years ago and it looks like the biker might win this one.

Now, I’m by no means a fan of Critical Mass, but herein lies the dangers of indicting a whole movement in a legal trial that demands the specificity of one single actor: Sure, on the whole they’re counter-productive to their cause and incendiary, but policemen must always be consummate professionals else they look like dicks, and in this case officer Pat Pogan looks like a dick. Mainly because he is one.

While I’m calling people dicks, I’d like to get something else off my chest after n+1 arguments about this, where n is too many: Yes, people protested George W Bush, myself among them. Yes, a number of them did things slightly less than savory, tho specific instances outside of shouting matches with parade police elude me at this moment. (They certainly didn’t brandish loaded firearms in Town Hall meetings.)

But there’s where the similarities end. The anti-war and anti-globalization protests were attacking Bush’s policies. The anti-tax protests today are attacking Obama.

Never mind the hypocrisy of claiming the illegitimacy of Obama’s status as a citizen as he won a mandate majority of the vote, when the previous president actually got fewer votes than his competitor and was handed the election in an unprecedented decision by a state governed by his brother. Never mind the Tea Partiers claiming taxation without representation after they voted (and lost). Never mind the hypocrisy of Medicare recipients protesting against government health care, unemployment and welfare recipients protesting against government spending, and anti-tax zealots protesting tax cuts. Never mind the deficit hawks who voted for two wars right after a massive upper class tax cut.

Because they’re not attacking Obama on his policies. That’s the difference. They’re attacking Obama. When liberal protesters had placards comparing Bush with a monkey, they were criticizing his judgment, not his heritage. Just like Clinton, where a year’s worth of policies were held up not because of any legitimate reason of governance but because of the political ramifications when he tripped and fell into an intern. Except this time Clinton’s not just “Black” but Black. Which apparently makes all the difference in the world with some people. Or to quote Gene Wilder in Blazing Saddles:

You’ve got to remember that these are just simple farmers. These are people of the land. The common clay of the new West. You know… morons.

The Voice has been doing two articles on the city’s worst landlords (something it writes on fairly regularly, and for the most part the culprits tend to fall into one of three narratives:

• Real estate sharks who over-leveraged during the housing boom.
• Real estate sharks whose business model involves converting rent-stabilized apartments into market apartments.
• Orthodox Jews who discriminate against non-Orthodox Jews.

Perhaps Lieberman is more right than he thinks: Perhaps East Jerusalem isn’t so much like Queens as Washington Heights (and Williamsburg) are like East Jerusalem. Two of the three listed are basically aggressive efforts at mass eviction*. All you need’s a bulletproof bulldozer and the similarities become apparent.

On a more positive news front, Obama and Pelosi** have won the first battle for health care in this country in over 50 years, despite the McCarthyite Red Scare and the John Birch Society-esque race baiting (and misogyny and gaybashing and…), making yet another historical step forward under Obama’s belt – making the grand total three now: Being elected and not shot, saving us from a second Great Depression, and now doing more for Health Care than Clinton and indeed anybody since LBJ.

I’m not so optimistic that this battle won will finally nail the coffin of the Republican Party, and I’d like very much to believe that their extremism and fear-mongering and incitement to violence (up to and including a call to arms against the government as illegitimate, itself a treasonous accusation) is mere desperation that they have finally lost touch with the people – and I yet do indeed believe that the Tea Party Movement, filled with bigots as it is, is mere Astroturf under the hands of moguls with power to lose – but what I see shocks me, and I just wish it over and done with.

*And the last – the over-leveraging – is proof positive that rich people have no concept over how much they’re truly and directly screwing the poor, because I’d much more easily accept that they’re ignorant rather than they don’t care. If it is indeed the latter, then I don’t need to advocate violence – violence will come anyway.

**And might I say how much it sickens and angers me how much casual vitriol and cavalier hatred has been directed towards Nancy Pelosi’s gender – as had been previously laid on Hillary Clinton – not unlike how Barack Obama, since entering office, has dealt with every single piece of cynical badgering that Clinton had to put up with, plus an unending torrent of race-baiting that has flowed down to just about every Black member of Congress, to say nothing of liberals in general. Are we really so backwards as a people?

I, like, many people to the left of the Democratic party tend to caucus Democrat, vote Democrat and become active in the Democratic party. It’s the closest thing this country has to a populist party (as counterpoint to the Republicans’ party of money) and as such tends to have the most representative of this nation’s representatives – especially considering its checkered past with ward politics, xenophobia and racism amongst the different factions of the working class.

But having largely gotten past those hurdles, what I see destroying the Democratic party is co-option with the GOP. The Democratic party still attracts the same people, but I see vibrant New Yorkers full of spit and anger – Al Franken, Andrew Cuomo, Anthony Weiner, Eliot Spitzer – either turning into politically-debauched players – Bill Clinton, Barney Frank, Chuck Schumer, Chris Dodd – or thrown out of the proceedings altogether – Dennis Kucinich, Howard Dean – based on how willing they are to play to money.

I see the same with Barack Obama: His fantastic rise is marred both by the decimation of liberals in his cabinet like Van Jones (and the shocking influence Goldman Sachs has over the US Treasury) and by the nagging worry that even then – even with all the compromises – he may be Jimmy Carter’d for attempting to push what little regulatory reform he is still working on.

Not that any of this is new. Anybody who’s been alive in the last 40 years knows this narrative. What gets me is how, like conservatives have declared racism ‘dead’ because we elected a Black president (forgetting all the shit we talk about him now), it’s almost immediately become passe to point out the raging class war going on – as if we’ve made a U-turn in the 90’s and ended up back in the 80’s again, where ‘liberal’ is a bad word – because Democrats are in office and thus classism cannot exist. It’s hard not to be cynical in witnessing the denigration of what is and by all rights should be a historic movement in American history.

It is unfathomably depressing how we went from gloating that the Republican machine that gave us the deregulators and short-sighted neo-cons was all but dead to now, with unlimited power for money to get its message heard (and the amazing ability for the electorate to believe anything they’re told), watching the Republicans – with their barefaced alliance with money and in spite of their utter inability to govern – diligently continue to bury what chance this country has of digging itself out of ruin.

And it all has to do with what keeps people in office. Bogged down by lobbyism, media propaganda and overall poor education, I don’t see a progressive means for lifting ourselves, vibrant as the new Democrats are, out of this dysfunctional hellhole: It’s a Democratic majority but it’s a Republican system; still the very same one they’ve worked on and perfected all these past 40 years. Their hubris got them voted out (but not before destroying the country) but their system is still in place, giving anyone still willing to play their game immense powers over those doing it honestly. If reform comes (-if-), it’ll be excruciatingly slow; a gradual process that will take decades, and that angers me.

It’s at times like this that it’s not hard for me to want Obama to use the extended executive rights of his office (granted to his office by the Republican machine, natch) to by decree shut the flow of money down, damn the consequences: Declare an emergency – a national crisis of faith! – and bring in international inspectors to determine that elections are held free and without the taint of farce.

That’ll be the day.

The State Department got involved with Google’s issues with China, and China took note.

Setting aside the sovereignty issues of imposing what they view is an explicit attempt by America to undermine their media control – in that the US views Twitter, Google, YouTube et al as tools to encourage citizens of the world to clamber for freedom of press and expression – they simply point out that only once in their history has a foreign power succeeded at breaking into the Chinese market.

So the question I suppose is, is internet addiction as powerful as heroin?

The NYTimes reported that the numbers are in and NYC is now experiencing a 16-year high in unemployment at 10.3%.

A 16-year high, eh? What was 16 years ago?

Oh, right: Clinton’s first year in office, dealing with the recession the elder Bush left him.

Funny how that works.

Good news, though: The state bailed out the city of Philadelphia – the libraries stay open.*

Just minutes ago, the Pennsylvania State senate passed bill 1828 by a vote of 32 to 17. For all of you who have been following the saga over the city’s budget crisis, this is indeed the legislation that was needed for the City of Philadelphia to avoid the “Doomsday” Plan C budget scenario, which would have resulted in the layoff of 3,000 city employees and forced the closing of all libraries.

Posted yesterday at 4:26pm. Truly 11th hour saviors.

*And to hammer the point home of the importance of literacy, this is the first comment: “Good luck to you and your library’s..”

Ouch.

As the GOP masterminds yet another offensive in their endless campaigns of disinguinuity and disinformation, the question of race rears its ugly head in the presidency and the public.

However, I’m sick of hearing about Birthers and Astroturf rent-a-mobs and the culture of fear, so I’m going to link an article Henry Gates wrote fifteen years ago for the New Yorker wherein he posits, among other things, that OJ was famous rather than Black before his trial, and that he was reverted to Ur-Blackness in a national debate on the rifts of race relations at that time.

Funny then, that Gates’ recent foray into the national stage was prompted in a situation where he wasn’t famous enough to be other than Black when he was arrested, and that the national brouhaha that ensued turned him so. The rifts are indeed still there, in some ways subdued and in others just brimming and biding, but the debate finds new paths to take.

For starters, we have not even begun to discuss politics without identity politics: Obama is the first Black president. Scratch that surface, Obama is the first Hawaiian president from Kenya born to a mixed race family and has spent his youth in a Muslim country. After that we may then add that he’s intelligent and somewhat nerdy.

This has inflamed national debate rather than subdued it. The fear Gates mentioned fifteen years ago is far more potent, and while its purveyors have been somewhat more marginalized, it is given a free ride and amplified yet still. Clinton was treated similarly, what with the endless campaigns to destroy and discredit him, and Clinton deftly exploited identity politics to bouy himself on populism despite being impeached (for a blowjob!), and yet even he didn’t have to deal with the explicit racial elements of which the current campaigns are absolutely slathered.

The framing of the Gates issue speaks to a conservative backlash* which is disconcerting in its scope, especially considering the current fiascoes, and belies a problem that looks like it may well get uglier before it gets better. As the debate rages on.

*This article really is insufferable, in my humble opinion