The cover image ended speculation about why Gov Timmy had been seen grimacing presidentially posing for photographers in scenic Frontenac State Park [...]]]> News that Minnesota’s soon to be ex- Governor Tim Pawlenty has written a book set to be released on January 11, 2011 was accompanied by a picture of the forthcoming book’s cover:

The cover image ended speculation about why Gov Timmy had been seen grimacing presidentially posing for photographers in scenic Frontenac State Park a few months ago.

Pretty as the cover is,  some felt it might be improved by the use of imagery more personally relevant to its subject, and asked me to create an alternate cover implementing their suggestions:

There.  Fixed it.

Not that the Pawlenty ppl would ever take my advice on effective graphics, for books or campaign signs or anything else…
~

~~~~

Perhaps one could theorize that — at least for Laura — Crawford wasn’t just a place but a state of mind?

From the WaPo yesterday:

Despite previous governors’ refusals, McDonnell issues Confederate history month proclamation

Gov. Bob McDonnell (R) has quietly declared April 2010 Confederate History Month, bringing back a designation in Virginia that [...]]]> In Virginia,  this month — yes, this means April of the year 2010 –  has been officially designated Confederate History Month. 

From the WaPo yesterday:

Despite previous governors’ refusals, McDonnell issues Confederate history month proclamation

Gov. Bob McDonnell (R) has quietly declared April 2010 Confederate History Month, bringing back a designation in Virginia that his two Democratic predecessors — Mark Warner and Tim Kaine — refused to do.

Republican governors George Allen and Jim Gilmore issued similar proclamations. But in 2002, Warner broke with their action, calling such proclamations, a “lightning rod” that does not help bridge divisions between whites and blacks in Virginia.

This year’s proclamation was requested by the Sons of Confederate Veterans. A representative of the group said the group has known since it interviewed McDonnell when he was running for attorney general in 2005 that he was likely to respond differently than Warner or Kaine.

“We’ve known for quite some time we had a good opportunity should he ascend the governorship,” Brandon Dorsey said. “We basically decided to bide our time and wait until we had more favorable politicians in Richmond.”

[Read the rest HERE]

See also

Brad Delong

Matt Yglesias

So.  Let’s all join in the festivities and celebrate some of that glorious Confederate history, shall we?  Coincidentally,  this past week I have been reading  The Bloody Shirt:  Terror After Appomattox (2008) a book by Stephen Budiansky about the Reconstruction which is not afraid to call the violence of the post-Civil War South exactly what it was:  terrorism.  

From a review by Liam at Panorama of the Mountains:

The accepted history has it that the Reconstruction of the South following the Civil War failed due to a vindictive Republican government saddling the helpless South with corrupt politicians, swindling businessmen, and allowing incompetent blacks to take government positions.  Author James Loewen even points out in his book  Lies My Teacher Told Me  how children’s textbooks use insults like “carpetbagger” and “scalawag” to describe people without any context of how these terms were used or mention of the many well-intentioned Northerners who came to the  South during Reconstruction.

Budiansky pops the bubble of this revisionist history showing instead a South defeated in battle but continuing to fight to prevent enfranchisement and political viability of the freedmen among them. Budiansky pulls no punches and calls the organized violent tactics terrorism. Furthermore, it was a successful terrorism that basically forced the federal government to give up,  laying the groundwork for another century of segregation and inequality.

The Bloody Shirt:  Terror After Appomattox
by Stephen Budiansky

Hardcover: 336 pages
Publisher: Viking Adult; First Edition, First Printing edition (January 24, 2008)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0670018406
ISBN-13: 978-0670018406

According to the Wikipedia article about the phrase “waving the bloody shirt” : 

In the history of the United States,  “waving the bloody shirt” refers to the demagogic practice of politicians referencing the blood of martyrs or heroes to inspire support or avoid criticism. In American history it gained popularity with an incident in which Benjamin Franklin Butler of Massachusetts, when making a speech on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives, held up a shirt allegedly stained with the blood of a carpetbagger whipped by the Ku Klux Klan.

Except, as Budiansky points out in his prologue,  the famous bloody-shirt-waving incident never actually happened. 

From FIRST CHAPTERS in the New York Times, January 30, 2008:

The title of this book refers to a small footnote to the brutal war of terrorist violence that was waged in the American South in the years immediately following the Civil War.

The terror began almost as soon as the Civil War ended in 1865; it lasted until 1876, when the last of the governments of the Southern states freely elected through universal manhood suffrage was toppled in a well-orchestrated campaign of violence, fraud, and intimidation—thereby putting an end to Reconstruction, erasing the freedmen’s newly won political rights, and securing white conservative home rule to the South for a hundred years to come.

In some ways the small incident in question was no different from thousands of others like it that took place in those years. At ten o’clock on the night of March 9, 1871, a band of one hundred and twenty men on horseback, disguised, heavily armed, even their horses cloaked in white sheets to conceal any identifiable markings, surrounded the house of one George R. Ross deep in the river-cut country southeast of the town of Aberdeen in Monroe County, Mississippi. Allen P. Huggins, a Northern man who had settled in Mississippi after the war, was staying the night there, and he was awakened by a loud voice calling upon Ross to bring out “the man who was in the house.”

Huggins looked out the window and, by the bright moonlight, saw the porch crowded with men in white hoods and robes. They told him that, unless he came out to receive their “warning,” they would burn the place down.

Ross—“a good, respectable Democrat”—pleaded with Huggins to do as they asked and spare his frightened wife and children. So after securing a promise that “not a hair of your head shall be injured,” Huggins agreed to go down to the gate to hear what the men had come to tell him. It was just this. The men—whom Huggins would later describe as “gentlemanly fellows, men of cultivation, well educated, a much different class of men than I ever supposed I would meet in a Ku-Klux gang”—did not like his “radical ways,” they said. As superintendent of schools for the county, Huggins had instituted public schooling, was trying to “educate the negroes,” they said. They had stood it just as long as they were going to. Now he had ten days to leave—leave the county, leave the state altogether—or be killed.

Huggins replied that he would go when he was good and ready to go.

So the men marched him down the road, and when they reached a small hill a quarter of a mile away, one of them came toward him from where the horses were being held, and in his hand was a stout stirrup leather. And without any further ceremony, he began beating Huggins with the stirrup, with all his might.

Then the men took turns, each eager to get their licks in. “They said they all wanted to get a chance at me,” Huggins recalled afterward, “that I was stubborn, and just such a man as they liked to pound.” Counting aloud each stroke, they stopped after twenty-five and again asked him if he would leave and again he refused; and so after fifty, and so after seventy-five, until he was left senseless, more dead than alive. When he came to, the men trained their pistols on him and repeated their warning that if any of them laid eyes upon him in ten days’ time, he was a dead man.

The sequel was this—or at least this was the story everyone in Monroe County believed, and in time everyone in Mississippi and the whole South had heard it, too. That a U.S. Army lieutenant who was stationed nearby recovered the bloody night-shirt that Huggins had worn that night, and he carried it to Washington, D.C., and there he presented it to congressman Benjamin F. Butler, and in a fiery speech on the floor of the United States Congress a few weeks later in which he denounced Southern outrages and called for passage of a bill to give the federal government the power to break the Ku Klux terror, Butler had literally waved this blood-stained token of a Northern man’s suffering at the hand of the Ku Klux. And so was born the memorable phrase, “waving the bloody shirt.”

Waving the bloody shirt: it would become the standard retort, the standard expression of dismissive Southern contempt whenever a Northern politician mentioned any of the thousands upon thousands of murders, whippings, mutilations, and rapes that were perpetrated against freedmen and women and white Republicans in the South in those years. The phrase was used over and over during the Reconstruction era. It was a staple of the furious and sarcastic editorials that filled Southern newspapers in those days, of the indignant orations by Southern white political leaders who protested that no people had suffered more, been humiliated more, been punished more than they had. The phrase has since entered the standard American political lexicon, a synonym for any rabble-rousing demagoguery, any below-the-belt appeal aimed at stirring old enmities.

That the Southerners who uttered this phrase were so unconcerned about the obvious implications it carried for their own criminality, however, seems remarkable; for whoever was waving the shirt, there was unavoidably, or so one would think, the matter of just whose blood it was, and how it had got there. That white Southerners would unabashedly trace the origin of this metaphor to a real incident involving an unprovoked attack of savage barbarity carried out by their own most respectable members of Southern white society makes it all the more astonishing.

Most astonishing of all was the fact that the whole business about Allen Huggins’s bloody shirt being carried to Washington and waved on the House floor by Benjamin Butler was a fiction.

The story about Huggins being whipped by the Ku Klux was true enough. Huggins was whipped on that bright moonlit night so ferociously that he could barely walk for a week or two afterward, so ferociously that in a burning anger that overcame any fear of his own death he traveled to Washington to testify before Congress and then returned to Monroe County with a deputy U.S. marshal’s badge and a determination to arrest every man he could lay his hands on who had been a part of the reign of Ku Klux murder and terror in those parts. And Benjamin Butler—“Beast Butler,” as he was invariably called in the Southern press, the man who had committed the unpardonable insult against Southern womanhood as the Union occupation commander in New Orleans during the war with his order that the next Southern woman who insulted his troops on the street would be “regarded and held liable to be treated as a woman of the town plying her avocation”— this nemesis of the South, now a congressman from Massachusetts, did indeed make a long, impassioned speech about the Ku Klux outrages on the House floor that April, and did tell the story of Huggins’s brutal beating in the course of it.

But nowhere in the Congressional Globe’s transcripts of every word that was uttered on the House floor is there any allusion to a bloody shirt; nowhere in the press accounts of the leading papers of the time is there any mention of a crazed congressman waving a blood-stained garment, on the floor or off; nowhere in any reports of Huggins’s appearances before Congress does such a story appear. That part never happened.

Amazement: because such an outcome was not inevitable or foreordained; because, in the end, Reconstruction did not fail, but was overthrown, with impunity and audacity, in one of the bloodiest, darkest, and still least known chapters of American history.

[...]

The bloody shirt captured the inversion of truth that would characterize the distorted memories of Reconstruction that the nation would hold for generations after. The way it made a victim of the bully and a bully of the victim, turned the very blood of their African American victims into an affront against Southern white decency, turned the very act of Southern white violence into wounded Southern innocence; the way it suggested that the real story was never the atrocities white Southerners committed but only the attempt by their political enemies to make political hay out of it. The mere suggestion that a partisan motive was behind the telling of these tales was enough to satisfy most white Southerners that the events never happened, or were exaggerated, or even that they had been conspiratorially engineered by the victims themselves to gain sympathy or political advantage.

[...]

A bald fact: Generations would hear how the South suffered “tyranny” under Reconstruction. Conveniently forgotten was the way that word was universally defined by white Southerners at the time: as a synonym for letting black men vote at all. A “remonstrance” issued by South Carolina’s Democratic Central Committee in 1868, personally signed by the leading native white political figures of the state, declared that there was no greater outrage, no greater despotism, than the provision for universal male suffrage just enacted in the state’s new constitution. There was but one possible consequence: “A superior race is put under the rule of an inferior race.” They offered a stark warning: “We do not mean to threaten resistance by arms. But the white people of our State will never quietly submit to negro rule. This is a duty we owe to the proud Caucasian race, whose sovereignty on earth God has ordained.”

“No free people, ever,” declared a speaker at a convention of the state’s white establishment a few years later, had been subjected to the “domination of their own slaves,” and the applause was thunderous. “This is a white man’s government,” was the phrase echoed over and over in the prints of the Democratic press and the orations of politicians denouncing the “tyranny” to which the “oppressed” South was being subjected.

A bald fact: more than three thousand freedmen and their white Republican allies were murdered in the campaign of terrorist violence that overthrew the only representatively elected governments the Southern states would know for a hundred years to come. Among the dead were more than sixty state senators, judges, legislators, sheriffs, constables, mayors, county commissioners, and other officeholders whose only crime was to have been elected. They were lynched by bands of disguised men who dragged them from cabins by night, or fired on from ambushes on lonely roadsides, or lured into a barroom by a false friend and on a prearranged signal shot so many times that the corpse was nothing but shreds, or pulled off a train in broad daylight by a body of heavily-armed men resembling nothing so much as a Confederate cavalry company and forced to kneel in the stubble of an October field and shot in the head over and over again, at point blank.

So saturated is our collective memory with Gone With the Wind stock characters of thieving carpetbaggers, ignorant Negroes, and low scalawags, that it comes as a shock not so much to discover that there were men and women of courage, idealism, rectitude, and vision who risked everything to try to build a new society of equality and justice on the ruins of the Civil War, who fought to give lasting meaning to the sacrifices of that terrible struggle, who gave their fortunes, careers, happiness, and lives to make real the simple and long-delayed American promise that all men were created equal—it comes as a shock not so much to be confronted by their idealism and courage and uprightness as by the realization that they were convinced, up to the very last, that they would succeed. Confident in the rightness of their cause, backed by the military might of the United States government, secure in the ringing declarations, now the supreme law of the land embodied in the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth amendments of the Constitution, that slavery was not only dead but that equality and the right to vote were the patrimony now of all Americans, they could not imagine that their nation could win such a terrible war and lose the ensuing peace.

[Read the entire article HERE]

So.  You may have noticed that one of the tags on this post is I Hate the South, and you may well be asking: 

Is this true? Kindly old Auntie Tild, do you really hate the South? 

Well…
  
Yeah.   Actually I do.

Of course it’s not literally true; I don’t literally hate “The South”.  I don’t hate the rocks and soil and flora and fauna of the South, nor the climate, nor the accent nor the speech patterns.   There must be at least, oh, dozens of admirable people I can think of, white and black, who are or were Southerners born and bred,  so it’s not that I literally hate all Southerners.  

 I like a lot of Southern people, places and things.  Just off the top of my head, I like:

Mark Twain

To Kill a Mockingbird

John Shelby Spong

pecan pie

Andy Griffith

everybody else in Mayberry

(except maybe Floyd the barber — he’s creepy)

the B-52s

But ask me: do I hate the legacy of the Confederacy?

Ask me:  do I hate the culture that produced the vicious, deluded, murdering racists of the past (AND present) described in The Bloody Shirt:  Terror After Appomattox?

Ask me:  do I agree with the author of the classic rant Fuck the South?

You’re damn right I do.

~

Democracy in America is a series of narrow escapes, and we may be running out of luck. The reigning presumption about the American experience, as the historian Lawrence Goodwyn has written, is grounded in the idea of progress, the [...]]]> The following is an excerpt from Bill Moyers’ new book, “Moyers on Democracy” (Doubleday, 2008).

Democracy in America is a series of narrow escapes, and we may be running out of luck. The reigning presumption about the American experience, as the historian Lawrence Goodwyn has written, is grounded in the idea of progress, the conviction that the present is “better” than the past and the future will bring even more improvement. For all of its shortcomings, we keep telling ourselves, “The system works.”

Now all bets are off. We have fallen under the spell of money, faction, and fear, and the great American experience in creating a different future together has been subjugated to individual cunning in the pursuit of wealth and power -and to the claims of empire, with its ravenous demands and stuporous distractions. A sense of political impotence pervades the country — a mass resignation defined by Goodwyn as “believing the dogma of ‘democracy’ on a superficial public level but not believing it privately.” We hold elections, knowing they are unlikely to bring the corporate state under popular control. There is considerable vigor at local levels, but it has not been translated into new vistas of social possibility or the political will to address our most intractable challenges. Hope no longer seems the operative dynamic of America, and without hope we lose the talent and drive to cooperate in the shaping of our destiny.

The earth we share as our common gift, to be passed on in good condition to our children’s children, is being despoiled. Private wealth is growing as public needs increase apace. Our Constitution is perilously close to being consigned to the valley of the shadow of death, betrayed by a powerful cabal of secrecy-obsessed authoritarians. Terms like “liberty” and “individual freedom” invoked by generations of Americans who battled to widen the 1787 promise to “promote the general welfare” have been perverted to create a government primarily dedicated to the welfare of the state and the political class that runs it. Yes, Virginia, there is a class war and ordinary people are losing it. It isn’t necessary to be a Jeremiah crying aloud to a sinful Jerusalem that the Lord is about to afflict them for their sins of idolatry, or Cassandra, making a nuisance of herself as she wanders around King Priam’s palace grounds wailing “The Greeks are coming.” Or Socrates, the gadfly, stinging the rump of power with jabs of truth. Or even Paul Revere, if horses were still in fashion. You need only be a reporter with your eyes open to see what’s happening to our democracy. I have been lucky enough to spend my adult life as a journalist, acquiring a priceless education in the ways of the world, actually getting paid to practice one of my craft’s essential imperatives: connect the dots.

The conclusion that we are in trouble is unavoidable. I report the assault on nature evidenced in coal mining that tears the tops off mountains and dumps them into rivers, sacrificing the health and lives of those in the river valleys to short-term profit, and I see a link between that process and the stock-market frenzy which scorns long-term investments — genuine savings — in favor of quick turnovers and speculative bubbles whose inevitable bursting leaves insiders with stuffed pockets and millions of small stockholders, pensioners, and employees out of work, out of luck, and out of hope.

And then I see a connection between those disasters and the repeal of sixty-year-old banking and securities regulations designed during the Great Depression to prevent exactly that kind of human and economic damage. Who pushed for the removal of that firewall? An administration and Congress who are the political marionettes of the speculators, and who are well rewarded for their efforts with indispensable campaign contributions. Even honorable opponents of the practice get trapped in the web of an electoral system that effectively limits competition to those who can afford to spend millions in their run for office. Like it or not, candidates know that the largesse on which their political futures depend will last only as long as their votes are satisfactory to the sleek “bundlers” who turn the spigots of cash on and off.

The property qualifications for federal office that the framers of the Constitution expressly chose to exclude for demonstrating an unseemly “veneration for wealth” are now de facto in force and higher than the Founding Fathers could have imagined. “Money rules Our laws are the output of a system which clothes rascals in robes and honesty in rags. The parties lie to us and the political speakers mislead us.” Those words were spoken by Populist orator Mary Elizabeth Lease during the prairie revolt that swept the Great Plains slightly more than 120 years after the Constitution was signed. They are true today, and that too, spells trouble.

Then I draw a line to the statistics that show real wages lagging behind prices, the compensation of corporate barons soaring to heights unequaled anywhere among industrialized democracies, the relentless cheeseparing of federal funds devoted to public schools, to retraining for workers whose jobs have been exported, and to programs of food assistance and health care for poor children, all of which snatch away the ladder by which Americans with scant means but willing hands and hearts could work and save their way upward to middle-class independence. And I connect those numbers to our triumphant reactionaries’ campaigns against labor unions and higher minimum wages, and to their success in reframing the tax codes so as to strip them of their progressive character, laying the burdens of Atlas on a shrinking middle class awash in credit card debt as wage earners struggle to keep up with rising costs for health care, for college tuitions, for affordable housing — while huge inheritances go untouched, tax shelters abroad are legalized, rates on capital gains are slashed, and the rich get richer and with each increase in their wealth are able to buy themselves more influence over those who make and those who carry out the laws.

Edward R. Murrow told his generation of journalists: “No one can eliminate prejudices — just recognize them.” Here is my bias: extremes of wealth and poverty cannot be reconciled with a genuinely democratic politics. When the state becomes the guardian of power and privilege to the neglect of justice for the people as a whole, it mocks the very concept of government as proclaimed in the preamble to our Constitution; mocks Lincoln’s sacred belief in “government of the people, by the people, and for the people”; mocks the democratic notion of government as “a voluntary union for the common good” embodied in the great wave of reform that produced the Progressive Era and the two Roosevelts. In contrast, the philosophy popularized in the last quarter century that “freedom” simply means freedom to choose among competing brands of consumer goods, that taxes are an unfair theft from the pockets of the successful to reward the incompetent, and that the market will meet all human needs while government itself becomes the enabler of privilege — the philosophy of an earlier social Darwinism and laissez-faire capitalism dressed in new togs — is as subversive as Benedict Arnold’s betrayal of the Revolution he had once served. Again, Mary Lease: “The great evils which are cursing American society and undermining the foundations of the republic flow not from the legitimate operation of the great human government which our fathers gave us, but they come from tramping its plain provisions underfoot.”

[Read the rest HERE]

~

I was unsurprised to learn that we regularly get complaints from customers who [...]]]> When I started my part time bookstore job last month, I began to hear anecdotes from my fellow booksellers about customer habits, quirks and trends.One such discussion concerned customer complaints about which books we stock and which books we don’t.

I was unsurprised to learn that we regularly get complaints from customers who think that we don’t carry enough “conservative” titles. Thinking there must also be corresponding complaints from the other side of the aisle, I asked “But what about on the flip side?” To which my colleague answered “Oh yeah, we also get those same customers complaining that we carry too many ‘liberal” titles.”

That’s as fair and balanced as it gets, folks. Complaints, complaints, who’s got complaints? Let’s start with these guys…

From the New York Times:

Conservative Authors Sue Publisher

By MOTOKO RICH
Published: November 7, 2007

Five authors have sued the parent company of Regnery Publishing, a Washington imprint of conservative books, charging that the company deprives its writers of royalties by

selling their books at a steep discount to book clubs and other organizations owned by the same parent company.

In a suit filed in United States District Court in Washington yesterday, the authors Jerome R. Corsi, Bill Gertz, Lt. Col. Robert (Buzz) Patterson, Joel Mowbray and Richard Miniter state that Eagle Publishing, which owns Regnery, “orchestrates and participates in a fraudulent, deceptively concealed and self-dealing scheme to divert book sales away from retail outlets and to wholly owned subsidiary organizations within the Eagle conglomerate.

Some of the authors’ books have appeared on the New York Times best-seller list, including Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry, by Mr. Corsi and John E. O’Neill (who is not a plaintiff in the suit), Mr. Patterson’s Dereliction of Duty: The Eyewitness Account of How Bill Clinton Compromised America’s National Security and Mr. Miniter’s Shadow War: The Untold Story of How Bush Is Winning the War on Terror. In the lawsuit the authors say that Eagle sells or gives away copies of their books to book clubs, newsletters and other organizations owned by Eagle “to avoid or substantially reduce royalty payments to authors.”

Among other reasons. Duh. There’s certainly no way Eagle/Regnery could ever get rid of their toxic little screeds by actually selling them in a bookstore or an onlineretailer. I mean. Who buys this crap? And when they do, who pays retail? In fact, I’d be willing to bet that many of the “book clubs” and “other organizations” mentioned here are nothing more than truckloads of Eagle/Regnery books discreetly dumped in out of the way landfills.

The authors argue that in reducing royalty payments, the publisher is maximizing its profits and the profits of its parent company at their expense.

“They’ve structured their business essentially as a scam and are defrauding their writers, Mr. Miniter said in an interview, “causing a tremendous rift inside the conservative community.”

And that “tremendous rift inside the conservative community” is — where? Unless he means that huge schism between the authoritarian-follower wingnuts and the knuckledragging freepers. Well, wherever this schism is, it couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch.

Traditionally, authors receive a 15 percent royalty based on the cover price of a hardcover title after they have sold enough copies to cover the cost of the advance they receive upon signing a contract with a publisher. (Authors whose books are sold at steep discounts or to companies that handle remaindered copies receive lower royalties.)

In Regnery’s case, according to the lawsuit, the publisher sells books to sister companies, including the Conservative Book Club, which then sells the books to members at discounted prices, “at, below or only marginally above its own cost of publication.” In the lawsuit the authors say they receive “little or no royalty” on these sales because their contracts specify that the publisher pays only 10 percent of the amount received by the publisher, minus costs as opposed to 15 percent of the cover price for the book.

Mr. Miniter said that meant that although he received about $4.25 a copy when his books sold in a bookstore or through an online retailer, he only earned about 10 cents a copy when his books sold through the Conservative Book Club or other Eagle-owned channels. “The difference between 10 cents and $4.25 is pretty large when you multiply it by 20,000 to 30,000 books, Mr. Miniter said. “It suddenly occurred to us that Regnery is making collectively jillions of dollars off of us and paying us a pittance. He added: “Why isRegnery acting like a Marxist cartoon of a capitalist company?”

Oh, who cares what kind of a cartoon it is, as long as it’s this funny?

In an e-mail statement, Bruce W. Sanford, a lawyer with Baker Hostetler, a Washington firm representing Eagle and Regnery, said: “No publisher in America has a more acute marketing sense or successful track record at building promotional platforms for books than Regnery Publishing. These disgruntled authors object to marketing strategies used by all major book publishers that have proved successful time and again as witnessed by dozens of Regnery bestsellers.”

The authors also say in the lawsuit that Regnery donates books to nonprofit groups affiliated with Eagle Publishing and gives the books as incentives to subscribers to newsletters published by Eagle. The authors say they do not receive royalties for these books.

“You get 10 per cent of nothing because they basically give them away, Mr. Patterson said in an interview.

The authors argue that because at least a quarter and as much as half of their book sales are diverted to nonretail channels, sales figures of their books on Nielsen BookScan, which tracks about 70 percent of retail sales but does not reflect sales through book clubs and other outlets used by Eagle, are artificially low. Publishers use these figures when determining future book deals, and the authors argue that actions by Eagle and Regnery have long-term effects on their careers.

Mr. Miniter said that when he was negotiating a book deal with Threshold Editions, a conservative imprint of Simon & Schuster, he could have gotten a higher advance if BookScan reflected the true quantity of sales of his books.

Nullifidian explains just how ridiculous this is.

According to BookScan, Mr. Miniter’s “Shadow War” sold 46,000 copies in hardcover, and “Losing Bin Laden” sold 36,000 copies in hardback.

Careful what you wish for… “Miniter’s temper tantrum gets redirected at Regnery. He wants them to stop bulk-ordering through retail, bringing the BookScan figures into line with the actual sales figures. However, this will only succeed in ensuring that nothing he writes ever again will get onto the NYT Bestseller list, and without that preliminary buzz, he won’t even get 36,000 next time — more like 10,000 if he’ s lucky.”

Mr. Miniter, who spearheaded the legal action, said he became aware of the discrepancies in royalty payments while defending a separate arbitration initiated by Regnery over a

canceled contract. Mr. Miniter said that during the arbitration, which is pending, he saw royalty statements in which it appeared that about half his books’ sales had not gone through stores, and that his payments for those sales were much lower than the payments for bookstore sales. He contacted other Regnery authors and learned that they saw similar patterns on their royalty statements.

Joel Mowbray, author of “Dangerous Diplomacy: How the State Department Threatens America’s Security” said he was particularly disappointed in Regnery and Eagle because they had so championed conservative authors. “These guys created the conservative book market, Mr. Mowbray said. “Before them, conservatives were having to fight, generally unsuccessfully, to get books published.”

The authors, who say in the lawsuit that Eagle has been “unjustly enriched well in excess of one million dollars” are seeking unspecified damages. But Mr. Miniter said “We’re not looking for a payoff; we’re looking for justice.”

And what are we looking for? To paraphrase a little more from Nullifidian: a bumper crop of shadenfreude at the expense of these poor little dears.

Sweet.

~~~

A post-it note on the book said “Found with Gramma’s things” but I knew immediately that the book had to [...]]]> A while back I found a book tucked in with some old atlases and maps on one of the many bookshelves that adorn the walls of the remote fortified family compound known as Tildebunkport…

A post-it note on the book said “Found with Gramma’s things” but I knew immediately that the book had to have come to us by way of one of the hub’s flea market expeditions. None of us ever called our grandmas “Gramma”, for one thing.

Grandma Dallelie was a registered nurse and Grandma Tild, while never formally trained in nursing, worked with the Red Cross for decades, and was a temperance activist to boot. Both women also had highly developed bullshit detectors, so I’m certain neither one of them would ever have allowed a book filled with such seductively pernicious claptrap in the house, much less kept it with her personal effects.

“What Your Neighbors Say” Dream Book (no copyright date, but probably published circa 1900)

About the book

About Dr. R.V. Pierce (from the Museum of Menstruation and Women’s Health)

excerpt from Substance and Shadow: Women and Addiction in the United States

More about Dr. Pierce, elected to the House of Representatives

More about Dr. Pierce, plus more about misdiagnosis and malpractice

A sampling of pages from “What Your Neighbors Say” Dream Book:

Diseases of Women, page 1

Diseases of Women, page 2

Oh! My! Such Pain!

How To Tell Unhealthy Urine By Its Appearance

A Healthy Woman Is Always Beautiful

Watch Your Daughter!

Healthy Mothers Have Healthy Children

UPDATE: Wondering what was in “Dr. Pierce’s Favorite Prescription”?

Although The Ladies’ Home Journal was not involved in the investigation of adulterated food, its muckraking into another issue helped bring about the same legislation–the Pure Food and Drug Act. The Journal’s campaign against the “patent medicine curse” was the best known of the muckraking in any of the woman’s magazines.[45] However, the Journal was not alone in its niche in uncovering the “evils” of the patent
medicine nostrums. Good Housekeeping also carried stories about the content of patent medicines.[46]   However, this campaign took a secondary position to food adulteration.  Both magazines extensively covered the problem from 1904 to 1906, when the Pure Food and Drug Act was passed.[47]

Both had the freedom to do so because neither accepted patent medicine advertising. The Journal carried the greater number of stories and devoted the more editorial space of the two to uncovering the abuses of the patent medicine industry.  Editor Edward Bok wrote most of the stories; and while clearly he was reporting facts, the largest number of these articles appeared on the Journal’s editorial page.   One of the first stories on the issue appeared in the May 1904 in an editorial, “The ‘Patent Medicine’ Curse,” and accompanying sidebar on the alcohol content of various brands of patent medicine. The results were startling. Richardson’s Concentrated Sherry Wine Bitters had 47.5 percent alcohol; Hostetter’s Stomach Bitters, 44.3 percent; Boker’s Stomach Bitters, 42.6 percent; Parker’s Tonic, “purely vegetable,” 41.6 percent.  Lydia Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound had relatively little–20.6 percent.[48]

Bok saw a real problem.  Women were doctoring themselves and their families with dangerous alcoholic nostrums.  Temperance women were turning to “bitters” to cure their sluggishness.  Pregnant women used “Doctor Pierce’s Favorite Prescription”, which contained digitalis, opium, oil of anise and alcohol (17 percent). [49].

Why Women Should Confide in Dr. Pierce

Oh, and men: lest you laugh too hard, thinking that Dr. Pierce spared your gender from scrutiny, consider…

“Spermatorrhea”
or the emission of semen without intercourse, including 1: wrecked manhood, wanton waste

..a selection from Dr. Pierce’s bestseller “The People’s Common Sense Medical Adviser; or, Medicine Explained” (63rd edition, 1895)

Well, enough hilarity. Funny; I think what I could really use right now is a drink.

~

by Mary Charlotte Aubry Costello

When an elementary school art teacher in Davenport, Iowa instructed her fifth grade students to study and sketch the local Mississippi River bridges one semester, probably neither the teacher nor her students nor anyone else had any inkling [...]]]> Climbing the Mississippi River Bridge by Bridge: Volume 2: Minnesota

by Mary Charlotte Aubry Costello

When an elementary school art teacher in Davenport, Iowa instructed her fifth grade students to study and sketch the local Mississippi River bridges one semester, probably neither the teacher nor her students nor anyone else had any inkling that a decades-long labor of love was about to begin.

Mary Charlotte Aubry Costello’s fascination with the Mississippi River and especially its hundreds of bridges continued after her fifth graders’ study unit ended. A few years later when she took early retirement, Costello gathered up her sketchbooks and art supplies and a camera and embarked on a quest:  to sketch every bridge across the Mississippi River, from the Louisiana delta all the way north to the headwaters in Lake Itasca.

During the course of her many trips south and north from her Iowa home, Costello not only sketched the bridges but also collected as much information about them as she could. She spoke to engineers, DOT personnel, bridge designers, construction workers, railroad administrators, bridge-tenders, historians, and citizens who lived along the river. She wrote down bridge histories from newspaper articles, railroad companies, the Coast Guard, and the Army Corps of Engineers.

In 1995, nearly twenty years after Costello set out on her expedition of discovery, the first of two volumes of her artwork was published:

Climbing the Mississippi River Bridge By Bridge, Volume 1(from Louisiana to Minnesota)

Seven years later, in 2002 Volume 2 was published, containing sketches of all 135 of Minnesota’s Mississippi River bridges. 

By coincidence, Mister Tild checked out Volume 2 from the Eden Prairie Library about a week before the I-35W bridge collapsed.  In the weeks after the collapse,  when it came time to either return the book to the library or renew it, we finally realized what we had in Costello’s comprehensive compendium of bridge information. We turned to the entry for ”Bridge 39″  ie: Minnesota’s 39th bridge across the Mississippi as you travel north from the Iowa border:

For each of the 135 bridges in Volume 2, Costello has included a paragraph or two of background information.  It’s impossible to miss the irony in the last lines about Bridge 39:

  

Oddly, in the aftermath of the bridge collapse there’s been no sudden spike of interest in these books.  When I looked in the Hennepin County Library catalog last week, most of the 14 copies of Volume 2 that are in the system were checked in.  

The fruits of Mary Charlotte Aubry Costello’s labor of love have been widely praised by historians, bridge designers and engineers.  Both volumes of Climbing the Mississippi River Bridge By Bridge are cited often in Wikipedia entries and other reference works.  Complete with a glossary of bridge terms, descriptions  and diagrams of different types of bridges, these volumes are essential reading for anyone who wants to know more about our bridges’ past, present, and possible futures.

~

 ÂÂ

Why Can’t the U.S. Have the Debate about Naomi Klein’s Book That Europe Has?

By Jan Frel, AlterNet. Posted September 21, 2007.

America Since 1980: A [...]]]> Tild sez:   The responsibility for economic policies enacted in the past 27 years that have targeted working class America for destruction needs to be laid exactly where it belongs: on the right’s beloved Saint Ronald fucking Reagan.  A new book by Dean Baker takes some big strides towards that end… 

America Since 1980: A Right Turn Leading to a Dead End

By Dean Baker, AlterNet. Posted April 27, 2007.

Economist Dean Baker’s new book lays waste to the Reagan Revolution’s unprecedented assault on working Americans’ economic security.

Editor’s note: this is adapted from Dean Baker’s new book, The United States since 1980 (The World Since 1980).

U.S. politics took a sharp turn to the right in 1980 with the election of Ronald Reagan as president. Domestically, Reagan touted an agenda that would lead to a sharp upward redistribution of income. Internationally, Reagan explicitly rejected the “détente” framework for engaging the Soviet Union that had been accepted by the leadership of both major parties since the beginning of the Cold War. In its place, Reagan put forward a doctrine of U.S. unilateralism in which the United States basically claimed the right to do whatever it wanted, unconstrained by allies or international institutions.

The welfare state in the United States was always weaker than in West Europe, but in 1980 it was reasonable to believe that West Europe presented a model that the United States would follow. Medicare and Medicaid were still relatively new programs, having been established just 14 years earlier. Having recently seen a massive expansion of publicly provided healthcare coverage, many people believed that it would not be long before healthcare coverage was extended to the entire population. Other features of European welfare states, such as long vacations, short work weeks, and paid parental leave (generally maternity leave at the time), also seemed feasible political goals.

Reagan’s election changed the political reality. His agenda was rolling back the welfare state, and his budgets included a wide range of cuts for social programs. He was also very strategic about the process. One of his first targets was Legal Aid. This program, which provides legal services for low-income people, was staffed largely by progressive lawyers, many of whom used it as a base to win precedent-setting legal disputes against the government. Reagan drastically cut back the program’s funding. He also explicitly prohibited the agency from taking on class-action suits against the government — law suits that had been used with considerable success to expand the rights of low- and moderate-income families.

The Reagan administration also made weakening the power of unions a top priority. The people he appointed to the National Labor Relations Board were qualitatively more pro-management than appointees by prior Democratic or Republican presidents. This allowed companies to ignore workers’ rights with impunity. Reagan also made the firing of strikers an acceptable business practice when he fired striking air traffic controllers in 1981. Many large corporations quickly embraced the practice. Also, his high dollar policy in the mid-’80s was a severe blow to manufacturing unions, who suddenly had to compete against low-cost imports that were essentially subsidized by an overvalued dollar.

The net effect of these policies was that union membership plummeted, going from nearly 20 percent of the private sector workforce in 1980 to just over 7 percent in 2006. Inequality soared, as the vast majority of the gains from economic growth over the next quarter century went to high-end wage earners (e.g., doctors, lawyers, CEOs) and profits. The wages of typical workers increased little from 1980 to 2006.

On the international side, Reagan followed through on his campaign promise to reject the arms control agreements that previous administrations had negotiated with the Soviets. He insisted on going back to the drawing board and negotiating proposals for arms reduction, not just freezes. While Reagan eventually found a more accommodating enemy than he had anticipated when Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in the Soviet Union, his belligerence towards the Soviet Union was a deliberate break with prior administrations.

[Read the whole article here]

 

I know I’m just one of a multitude saying it, but I have to say that this news leaves me very sad.  

Actually I’m only familiar with a few of his books: 

Mother Night

Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons 

Slaughterhouse Five

and, my first encounter with him:

The [...]]]> Kurt Vonnegut died yesterday at the age of 84.

I know I’m just one of a multitude saying it, but I have to say that this news leaves me very sad.  

Actually I’m only familiar with a few of his books: 

Mother Night

Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons 

Slaughterhouse Five

and, my first encounter with him:

The Sirens of Titan

..which I read when I was 13, and which led me to conclude that Vonnegut must be the most psychotic SF author of all time.  It took me ten years to get over that first impression, but when I did, I embraced the madman and never looked back. 

Until today, that is, when we might all benefit from reading an essay Kurt Vonnegut wrote in 1971:

~~~

June 30, 1971

TORTURE AND BLUBBER

By KURT VONNEGUT Jr.

West Barnstable, Mass.,–When I was a young reader of Robin Hood tales and “The White Company” by Arthur Conan Doyle and so on, I came across the verb “blubber” so often that I looked it up. Bad people in the stories did it when good people punished them hard. It means, of course, to weep noisily and without constraint. No good person in a story ever did that.

But it is not easy in real life to make a healthy man blubber, no matter how wicked he may be. So good men have invented appliances which make unconstrained weeping easier–the rack, the boot, the iron maiden, the pediwinkis, the electric chair, the cross, the thumbscrew. And the thumbscrew is alluded to in the published parts of the secret Pentagon history of the Vietnam war.

The late Assistant Secretary of Defense, John McNaughton, speaks of each bombing of the North as “. . .one more turn of the screw.”

Simply: we are torturers, and we once hoped to win in Indochina and anywhere because we had the most expensive torture instruments yet devised. I am reminded of the Spanish Armada, whose ships had torture chambers in their holds. Protestant Englishmen were going to be forced to blubber.

The Englishmen refused.

Now the North Vietnamese and the Vietcong have refused. Plenty of them have blubbered like crazy as individuals, God knows–when splattered with jellied gasoline, when peppered with white phosphorus, when crammed into tiger cages and sprinkled with lime. But their societies fight on.

Agony never made a society quit fighting, as far as I know. A society has to be captured or killed–or offered things it values. While Germany was being tortured during the Second World War, with justice, may I add, its industrial output and the determination of its people increased. Hitler, according to Albert Speer, couldn’t even be bothered with marveling at the ruins or comforting the survivors. The Biafrans were tortured simultaneously by Nigerians, Russians and British. Their children starved to death. The adults were skeletons. But they fought on.

One wonders now where our leaders got the idea that mass torture would work to our advantage in Indochina. It never worked anywhere else. They got the idea from childish fiction, I think, and from a childish awe of torture.

Children talk about tortures a lot. They often make up what they hope are new ones. I can remember a friend’s saying to me when I was a child: “You want to hear a really neat torture?” The other day I heard a child say to another: “You want to hear a really cool torture?” And then an impossibly complicated engine of pain was described. A cross would be cheaper, and work better, too.

But children believe that pain is an effective way of controlling people, which it isn’t–except in a localized, short-term sense. They believe that pain can change minds, which it can’t. Now the secret Pentagon history reveals that plenty of high-powered American adults think so, too, some of them college professors. Shame on them for their ignorance.

Torture from the air was the only military scheme open to us, I suppose, since the extermination or capture of the North Vietnamese people would have started World War III. In which case, we would have been tortured from the air.

I am sorry we tried torture, I am sorry we tried anything. I hope we will never try torture again. It doesn’t work. Human beings are stubborn and brave animals everywhere. They can endure amazing amounts of pain, if they have to. The North Vietnamese and the Vietcong have had to.

Good show.

The American armada to Indochina has been as narrow-minded and futile as the Spanish Armada to England was, though effectively more cruel. Only 27,000 men were involved in the Spanish fiasco. We are said to have more dope addicts than that in Vietnam.  Hail, Victory.

Never mind who the American equivalent of Spain’s Philip II was. Never mind who lied. Everybody should shut up for a while. Let there be deathly silence as our armada sails home.

 

Kurt Vonnegut Jr. is the author of “Slaughterhouse-Five,” “Cat’s Cradle” and other novels.

[New York Times, June 1971]  

~~~