Ruth Rosen at AlterNet ponders “Why Women Dominate the Right-Wing Tea Party.”

Rosen finds at least a half-truth in the conservative womens’ claim to be the true heiresses to Susan B. Anthony and co., who had campaigned for Prohibition with the same fervor with which they had fought for women’s suffrage.

In the ’80s, the late antiporn crusader Andrea Dworkin wrote an essay called “Right Wing Women.” She admired those women for many things. She particularly admired their sexual prudery and also their dream for a world driven less by macho posturing and more by rules and traditions.

The left-O-center conventional wisdom is that there is, or ought to be, a singular collective entity of Women. This big gender-encompassing entity would, by its very nature, be of one mind on most major sociopolitical issues. This mass of Women would always support gay rights, progressive politics, peace, ecology, humanitarian aid, legalizing pot, outlawing fructose, and every other left-O-center stance.

I say fifty-two percent of the species won’t ever think exactly alike.

Gender is but one of countless factors influencing a person’s social and tribal identity. There’s also family, education, religion, economic caste, nationality, ethnicity, culture, subculture, sub-subculture, et al.

Every culture has included women who identified themselves as traditionalists. These women have always sought relative security from a hostile world in the realms of home, family, and clear rules for behavior. The lobbyists and politicians backing the various non-unified tea party strands know how to market their wares to these women.

And so should we.

What do progressives have to offer to traditionalist women?

We offer more careful stewardship of the land.

We offer more economic opportunity for more people, including working-class families.

We offer greater personal freedoms for everyone, including those who follow various religious faiths.

And as (non-Hispanic) whites slowly lose majority status in this country, we offer a vision of cultural diversity that respects minority cultures, including minority cultures that used to be majority cultures.

Once again, we celebrate the anniversary of colonial business bosses’ forcible  secession from the government that had made their success possible.

And once again, the American ideology of bottom-line-above-all has us in a mess. Several messes, in fact, and huge ones at that.

We now have a national economy based on, as Intel cofounder Andy Grove puts it, “highly paid people doing high-value-added work—and masses of unemployed.”

We have wars for oil, or more precisely for geopolitical alliances based on oil.

We have massive amounts of this self-same gunk polluting a seabed of incalculable value. We now know that it’s not one company’s fault. The entire industry was spending as little money or effort as legally possible on safety and cleanup (expenses which don’t immediately contribute to profits). The particular two or three companies behind Deepwater Horizon were simply the ones that happened to lose at this very American version of Russian roulette.

And around the country, state and local governments spar over how many social safety nets they can get away with letting rot—because, after all, asking anything from Sacred Business just isn’t done. Especially not here in the state By the Upscale, Of the Upscale, and For the Upscale.

But still, there is hope.

There is always hope, so long as America’s primal contradiction continues to hold.

I speak of the contradiction between America’s ugly realities (a nation built by financiers, conquerors, slavers, and merchant middlemen) and its lofty ideals (a nation professing devotion to freedom, justice, and democracy).

We came dangerously close in the Bush era toward resolving this contradiction in the worst way possible, by junking the ideals and becoming unabashed, unshameable mega-hustlers.

It didn’t work.

Even the furthest reaches of the Far Right found they could not win even core base support for their assorted schemes without making at least nominal appeals to citizens’ more noble natures.

That’s what the professional organizers and corporate lobbyists behind the faux-populist “tea party” nonsense understand. That’s why they disguise their ultra-corporate agenda in images of patriotic kitsch.

Even the money-grubbers’ and power-grabbers’ last remaining loyal followers believe in (at least the symbols 0f) America’s higher ideals.

This is an opportunity for those of us who wish to promote a more progressive agenda.

It’s why I still believe in what this land can become.

Seattle’s about halfway through an ambitious timeline to somehow end homelessness. As you may have guessed, the scheme’s nowhere near its lofty goals.

Following Tuesday’s minimal 26-page edition, Wednesday’s SeaTimes grew to a slightly less pathetic 34 pages. Still only six and a half pages of paid advertising, though.

At least they’re restoring a full op-ed page on Wednesday now, as well as Friday and Sunday. The Wednesday op-eds will, through the election season, carry electoral-themed material under the rubric “Reset 2010.” It’s all billed as a forum for strong advocacy pieces about changing the direction of local/state government.

Of course, when the SeaTimes talks about changing the direction of government, it means dumping them pesky libruhls wherever possible, and instilling the backers of “common sense,” “realistic” solutions. Said solutions, in Blethenland, invariably involve slashing gov’t. payrolls, busting unions, and generally reducing the public sphere to little more than cops and firefighters and big-business “support” schemes.

As if the Blethens and their hirelings still controlled the voice of the regional business community. Or even knew what that voice was saying.

The book industry site Publishing Perspectives wrote recently about Barry Eisler, a liberal blogger and an author of “political thriller” novels.

He’s got a new novel out called Inside Out. It’s about, among other hot topics, America’s use of torture during the previous decade.

Eisler’s plugging the book on other lefty sites and radio shows.

Publishing Perspectives‘ take on this campaign: Why haven’t the  liberal media plugged books before?

Well, they have.

Ed Schultz, Jim Hightower, and the pre-senatorial Al Franken have each put out several essay collections.

Olbermann and Maddow are always interviewing authors and recommending titles. They sometimes plug the same book on three or more consecutive cablecasts.

The Nation has had at least two book-preview issues a year for as long as I’ve been reading it.

Huffington Post and Daily Kos each have plenty of book pieces.

As for this site, we’ll get back to looks at books soon. Promise.

Some commentators have claimed Rand Paul’s not really a libertarian.

They say his way-beyond-the-bounds-of-acceptable-discourse thoughts on corporate rights, including the right to discriminate and the right to pollute, aren’t what libertarianism’s really about.

I believe they are.

I’ve had arguments with big-L and little-l libertarians at several occasions over the past couple of decades. They’re particularly plentiful on the Microsoft campus, where the idea of a pro-corporatism that doesn’t want to ban pot smoking is popular.

And yes, a few of these gents and ladies believe there should be as few restrictions as possible on what businesses can do. In an ideal world, they feel, there would be no such restrictions at all, except when they would unduly infringe upon the rights of other businesses.

So yeah, by these folks it should be quite all right for restaurants, hotels, gas stations, and stores to refuse service to nonwhites.

And oil spills? Unfortunate, and wasteful, to be sure. And they do infrringe on the rights of other businesses, including those in the fishing and tourism industries. But, this line of reasoning goes, that’s no reason to seek vengeance against any poor li’l oil company—a company that didn’t mean any harm, but was just trying to make a buck.

Being “only in it for the money” is some libertarians’ all purpose guilt dissolver. In the mid ’80s I had a spirited chat with an ad saleswoman, about some international arms dealer who’d been accused of funneling weapons to Iran or Libya or such. This woman insisted he’d done nothing wrong, because he hadn’t personally taken sides for or against these countries. He was just out for the money. Nothing wrong with that, right?

In the past two or three years, some of us have learned there can be a lot that’s wrong with that.

The U.S. ruling philosophy of “I Got Mine, Screw You” is older than the second Bush Presidency. Heck, it’s older than the first Bush Presidency. And it needs to be replaced.

Here’s one potential replacement ideology: Bertrand Russell’s Ten Commandments.

Online pundit Mike Lux asks, “Why Are So Many Christians Conservative?”

The question should really be, “Why Do So Many Conservatives Claim to be Christians?”

The answer is simple: It’s the “default option” among America’s more conformist strains, at least outside of NYC. It represents obedience to the established authority system.

I should have written about this topic back last November, around the 10th anniversary of the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle, and of the surrounding protests that totally upstaged it.

It was the peak of what could, in retrospect, be called “grunge politics.”

There were plenty of other movements and philosophies at work during the WTO protests, but this particular trend is one that had its greatest moment that week.

It was a time when busting a window at Niketown seemed like a provocative act, when white kids could dress up like Mexican Chiapas insurgents and imagine they were overthrowing something bigger than any mere government. They were, in their own minds, driving a stake into the diseased heart of global commerce itself.

This was a movement, or trend, that was less about changing the world and more about personal expression. It was about expressing strongly felt, if one-dimensional, notions of good vs. evil and us vs. them.

They insisted they were not a target market, that they would not be defined by corporate marketing. Even if they were defining themselves in large part on the basis of their consumer choices in music, attire, transport, food and drink.

The typical proponent of this attitude/lifestyle (male version) was the sort of dude I met a lot at places like Linda’s Tavern and the Six Arms in the late 1990s, and then later at the old Tablet newspaper.

The ideology for the grunge-politics adherents I knew only partly overlapped the ideology of the Olympia radicals and Riot Grrrls from earlier in the 1990s. These Capitol Hill folks I knew weren’t as big on gender issues as the Olympia kids had been, and weren’t at all into the “straight edge” scene (clean and sober partying).

Mostly they had no agenda, because they weren’t vocally in favor of much of anything. What they were “for” was being against stuff.

I’m thinking of one particular guy. We’ll call him Geoff (not his real name). He and I would get together occasionally at a Pike/Pine bar or coffee houes, to agree to disagree.

He firmly believed everything in the world beyond him and his own subculture was the enemy—that big, amorphous enemy that the hippies had called “the Man,” and that the Riot Grrrls had called “the Patriarchy.”

Everything wrong in the world was the fault of Those People. You know, those sap masses out there in Mainstream America. Eating meat. Watching television. Unquestioningly obeying the dictates of the corporate media.

Geoff repeatedly expressed contempt for everything he felt Those People stood for. This included America’s mainstream political system. Organizing, building coalitions, persuading people from other walks of life to join together in a common cause, were things he found boring and useless. He thought of himself as “too political” for any of that.

No, to him “being political” meant publicly protesting, and privately complaining, about everything he was against. Which was a lot.

The things he spoke out against ranged from the epic (wars) to the personal (commercial “alternative” fashion accessories on sale in the malls).

There was one thing he was unquestioningly for. At the time, it was called “hemp.” In more recent years, it’s been called “medical marijuana.”

Of course, Geoff’s reasons for being for it had little to do with the carefully prescribed alleviation of physical pain, and had nothing to do with the promulgation of industrial fibers.

I once argued with Geoff about pot smoking. I said it turned too many people into pacified submissives, and that no real movement for true social change could come from it. He stared at me vacantly and asked me in a droning monotone if I had some.

Which leads to the current marijuana initiative, I-1068.

Its proponents are now gathering signatures across the state. It doesn’t claim any noble non-recreational justification. It’s about pot, and asserting the right for any adult in the state to have and use it, for any purpose. No excuses, no sanctimonious fronts.

This is actually progress.

This is a generation, or a piece of a generation, getting up off of its collective protests and actually doing something.

Which is what I told Geoff, those several years ago, I didn’t expect him and his pals to ever do.

I was wrong.

(Cross-posted with the Capitol Hill Times.)

Someone named Fred Clark (no relation) ponders the phenomenon of right-wing hotheads who’ve denounced the idea of empathy toward others, and how and why the rest of us should express empathy toward them.

The American political/cultural landscape is To Sir, With Love.

Obama is Sidney Poitier.

The tea partiers and the far-right wingnuts are the classroom rabble.

The middle-of-the-road Democrats are the other teachers, cowering in the faculty lounge, willing to put up with the abuse until retirement age.

Timothy Harris says Seattle should NOT follow a trend from San Francisco! (Specifically, its virulent crackdowns against the poor.)

There was a bizarre little bake sale in Belltown this past Wednesday. It takes a little explaining.

Real estate mogul Bruce Lorig fired his only African American female employee after eleven years on the job. She sued, claiming racial discrimination and harassment. She joined up with the Seattle Solidarity Network, a local activist group, to publicize her cause.

Lorig countersued her, and sued Seattle Solidarity to prevent the group from publicly criticizing him.

In response, Seattle Solidarity put up flyers claiming Lorig had to really be in bad fiscal shape if he has to go around trying to drum up cash from his own ex-worker. Hence, the snarky “Lorig Aid.”

It was held in front of Lorig’s First Avenue offices. Seattle Solidarity members “sold” donuts and cupcakes and sang a little folk ditty:

So won’t you please help Bruce Lorig

He has fallen on hard times

He has to sue his former secretary

So won’t you spare a dime

We haven’t discussed this topic since before the Xmas advertising season, during which the SeaTimes looked almost like a profitable venture again.

Then came the post-holiday letdown. SeaTimes ad volume dropped back toward their mid-’09 nadir. Skimpy 26-page Mon.-Wed. papers were the norm again.

The local news content of these editions also steadily shrank, particularly once the mayoral election was done. A typical day’s story lineup would consist of little more than a couple of politician press conferences, some new rant against the Seattle School District by an irate parent, a few crimes and fires, a couple of human-interest photos, and at least one long obituary.

Which brings us to this Sunday’s paper.

We get a reprise of the paper’s big shocking story from last December, that most Olympics tickets went to the rich and the well-connected (gasp!).

We get the 100th anniversary of the 1910 Stevens Pass avalanche, which killed more people than any other natural disaster of its specific type.

And, in the editorializing-disguised-as-coverage department, we get an upbeat, spin-ful ode to  a far-right political rally outside Northgate Mall. The story gleefully depicted the anti-choice, anti-health-reform gang as daring rebels against the “liberal establishment.”

A couple weeks ago, the SeaTimes only gave a couple paragraphs to a much larger anti-budget-cut rally in Olympia, and only referred to it in passing as a counter-demonstration to an anti-tax-cut rally held the same day.

At least today we get columnist Danny Westneat, respectfully calling his paper’s editorial page to task for deliberately misinterpreting opinion polls about health reform. Citizens in the poll said they thought the current national health reform scheme doesn’t go far enough; the SeaTimes editorialized that that meant “the people” don’t want any reform at all.

That’s nice on Westneat’s part, but it isn’t enough.

And neither is this.

We need more than some online media sites that take the conservative paper to task for its failings.

We need a real “mainstream” news source that depicts our city and region as they really are.

Air America Radio, the high-profile attempt to build a national network devoted exclusively to left-O-center talk, suddenly shut down all its live programming on Thursday. Affiliate stations will be supplied with rerun shows through Monday evening, while the company plans an orderly shutdown.

This is NOT the end of liberal talk radio.

The local stations (such as the CBS-owned KPTK in Seattle) that had carried AAR’s shows have also carried liberal shows from other distributors. These shows, such as those of Ed Schultz and Stephanie Miller, will continue. Several former AAR hosts are also now with other distributors (including Randi Rhodes, Thom Hartmann, and Mike Malloy).

The remaining AAR personalities are now free to sign with these other distributors. They include the Seattle-based Ron Reagan, the last AAR host still carried on KPTK’s pre-midnight weekday schedule.

So what did AAR in? Why did it flail about in fiscal instability for six years?

From the start, its reach was bigger than its grasp.

It wanted to start up from scratch as an all-day, coast-to-coast, unified force in broadcasting. That’s not how antenna-based broadcasting works. You’ve gotta start one station at a time, and build each show in each region. That’s what the conservative talkers did, back in the 1980s and 1990s. That’s what the syndicators of Schultz, Miller, et al. do.

Robert McChesney was one of the founders of The Rocket, Seattle’s erstwhile rock n’ roll tabloid bible.

Then he went off to Wisconsin to be a radical scholar and professor of media studies, writing several books about the evils of corporate-controlled news and broadcasting.

Now, he and John Nichols have cowritten a manifesto book suggesting federal government subsidies for news organizations, presumably including the Seattle Times—which co-presented the authors’ Town Hall appearance Tuesday night.

How would an already fiscally flailing government find the funds for this? Not specified.