Economist Dean Baker is appearing now until 2:30 pm ET over at MaxSpeak! to answer questions about his book The Conservative Nanny State (which is available as a free download). I myself will be at MaxSpeak! making strained, non-funny jokes such as “please speak more clearly and directly into the microphone.”

Glenn Greenwald writes:

How much of an impact the book can have is obviously a by-product of how much attention it receives, which, in turn, is determined by how well it sells. One way to begin is for those who have read the book to leave reviews on Amazon and other online retailers. Apparently, informative reviews — especially those written by people who seem to have actually read the book — can play a significant role in helping to promote the book.

Glenn’s new book is here, and is highly recommended. My own book only has a handful of reviews so far, so if you’re inclined to do that sort of thing, it sounds like it can be more helpful than I realized.

Oh, and by the way, if you didn’t click through the You Tube video below, you’re missing out on a truly sublime experience.

… and speaking of reviews, just got another Unsolicited Testimonial:

I just received your book from Amazon. I’d ordered it as a package deal with “How Would a Patriot Act”. The graphic reproduction is truly first class, and the comics themselves are (unfortunately) quite prescient. I figure if I put it on my coffee table it will attract my kids, their friends, or my friends and in a very natural way help me to spread the message that this administration is corrupt, incompetent and brutal. This is the reality we live in, and I find it hard to express it without stumbling over my own words. Fortunately for us, you’ve put eloquent words to most, if not all, of the progressive causes that make this country great. And the cartoon format makes the ideas approachable, endearing and memorable.

I’d recommend the book to anyone. It’s a simple way to support progressive discourse in America. When I think of the hundreds of bucks I dropped on the Kerry campaign, and the vapid safe posturing I got in return, the investment in this book seems a bargain. Buy the book. Share it with your loved ones — especially those who are still slumbering.

PS — The ‘toons look *way* cooler in the book than they do on a computer monitor.

Clumsy tribute to the late Lloyd Bentsen aside, in his previous post Bob engaged in one of my favorite blogosphere sports, bashing Pat Robertson. My favorite thing at Pat’s website is this interesting bit of Biblical scholarship for sale on his online store :

I guess I missed the part of the Sermon on the Mount in which Jesus said “Ladies, if you start feeling funny down there, drink a lot of cranberry juice.” Don’t worry fellas, there’s more books in the “Bible Cure” series, including cures for Heartburn, Chronic Fatigue, Irritable Bowel Syndrome, Hepatitis C, and Weight Loss (though that last one seems like something you’d want to cause, not “cure”).

That’s what he claims, anyway, while shilling “age-defying” health drinks which apparently give you superpowers.

“Age-defying?” What about “gravity-defying?” Not to mention “common-sense-defying.”

Someday it might even be “Federal Trade Commission injunction-defying.”

But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe Pat Robertson really can leg-press 2000 pounds.

I’d really, really like to see Pat Robertson strapped to a table somewhere, with 2000 pounds being slowly lowered down on top of him. This would be Pat’s big chance to show us just how fantastic his drink-powered leg-presses really are.

I’d really like this chance to see I was wrong for doubting him. In fact, I would like to see this on Pay-Per-View.

Then we could all see just what an honest man Pat Robertson really is.

Nice catch from my buddy Mike Irwin.

Greg came up with this one. I feel strangely compelled to share it with you all.

Book sales are chugging along respectably enough, but as regular readers probably know, I was hoping for a bit more with this one, hoping to take it to another level. After all the time and energy these things consume, you hope for some payoff. You get through the aggravating contract negotiations, the countless hours of production work and the hundred small battles you have to fight just to keep the cartoons from being printed upside down or inverted or some damn thing — and then when it finally comes out there’s even more time away from the work itself, travelling around to bookstores and giving interviews to any five watt radio station that’ll have you (and unfortunately, there aren’t that many) … and ultimately you learn once again that it’s not going to go any further than that; that you can pretty much jump up and down naked at Broadway and 42nd shouting buy my book buy my book — and not even get arrested.

The might-have-beens will break your heart if you let them. The much-beloved bigtime liberal columnist who said he’d try to write an introduction to the book, and then simply stopped responding to emails as the deadline approached. The major newspaper writer who expressed serious interest in writing a high profile story, and then never followed up. The major magazine reviews that were promised but never quite materialized. And of course, the hip late night talk shows that you’d think, or at least hope, would be interested — but just aren’t. Any one of those things would have changed my life, would have given this book that small extra push that might have helped take it to the next level. Instead, it’s just a pebble tossed into the ocean, and I can already see the ripples beginning to recede, and I’m standing on the shore wondering — what was the point of all that? Why was it worth months and months of my life, exactly? It’s not like I make a ton of money off these things, and it’s not like I need any more distractions in my life. It’s hard enough, as an artist, to clear out the head space I need just to get to that … place … where the work itself comes together. There’s always some bill to pay, some errand to take care of, something around the house that needs fixing, some deadline coming up, some damn thing or another demanding my attention. Why am I adding to that, when the return on the investment is so inevitably discouraging? Do I really need to expend all this energy every two or three years only to once again have my nose rubbed in the fact that cartoonists are lower on the media food chain than street mimes? In this week’s cartoon, Charlie Brown serves as my stand-in, with his eternal and naive hope that this time the media are going to get it and expose the hypocrisy and corruption of Republicans once and for all — but the same metaphor equally applies to the books. I go through the whole process and think, this time it’s gonna happen! this book will get noticed! And then Lucy snatches the football away once again.

This post of Amanda’s lays out in handy table form something that a lot of people — including my friends at FAIR, and, well, me — have been trying to point out for far too long; i.e. that the definitions of right and left grow ever more skewed in this country. When mainstream discourse extends from the furthest fringe of the right all the way over to the middle of the road, progressive/left liberals are excluded from the debate entirely, and the “moderate center” is resituated somewhere well to the right of the actual center of public opinion in this country. And the goals of an extremist fringe minority (like the abolition of reproduction rights, per Amanda’s chart) are increasingly likely to be realized as a result …

Related cartoons (from ‘91 and ‘92) — here, here and here.

… one of the Pandagon commentors points out something that every Democratic politician should tattoo backwards on their forehead so they have to read it every time they look in the mirror:

… the Democrats keep losing because the Republicans are smart enough to stake out positions well to the right of what they really want, while the Democrats pre-negotiate with themselves and start with a position that concedes half the battle before the debate starts.

You want to know why Clinton’s health care reform failed so badly, and set back the cause at least a decade and a half? That’s it in a nutshell.

(Bumped)
For the next week and a half, if you sign up for Michael Moore’s email list, you’ll be eligible to win a signed copy of Hell in a Handbasket.

* * *

Or you can just go ahead and buy the book, and if you are a regular reader of the strip and/or visitor to this site and haven’t done so, now’s the time, before the damn thing vanishes entirely. It may be “just a compilation” of work you think you’ve already read, but unless you’ve committed everything I’ve ever done to photographic memory, you’re going to find plenty in there you either forgot about or missed the first time around. (Anyway, what’s so bad about compilations? When a columnist like Krugman puts out a compilation, it makes the best seller list. What do you people have against cartoonists, anyway?)

Seriously, if you want to support the site, support the cartoon — this is far and away the best way to do so right now, and it’ll only cost you about ten bucks. This is maybe some of the best work I’ve done, and if this one doesn’t do well, there’s a pretty good chance that’ll be it for my book publishing career. If you like the idea, in theory, of having these books in print, then you need to do something about it in practice.

(And of course, profuse thanks to everyone who has already bought the damn book.)

Now that I’ve seen these two new TV ads, I have decided to take a position on global warming which is every bit as clear-headed:

Multinational oil companies, despite the claims of Al Gore and his legion of activists and liberal media types, simply do not exist.

Oh, sure, you hear all the time about “thousands” of “leading scientists” from “all over the world” who have concluded that oil companies are not only “real,” but the result of human activity. But common sense (defined as what I personally want to believe) tells us this simply isn’t true.  And frankly, I’m tired of extremists using these emotional appeals to push a political agenda, particularly one that might make me wonder if I am responsible for my own impact on the world.

And even if multinational oil companies really do exist, does that mean they’re the direct result of human activity?  Of course not.

It’s a well-documented fact that oil companies have spontaneously increased and decreased in number throughout our planet’s history, dating back to the dinosaurs (as the Sinclair logo so aptly demonstrates).  This is an entirely natural occurence.  For alarmists to claim that the historically-recent surge in the existence of mulitnational oil companies is somehow related to human activity defies logic, reason, and of course my common sense.

Besides, because humans exist in nature, industrial civilization is itself completely natural.  Therefore, even if multinational oil companies were produced by human activity, they would be entirely natural, and therefore good for the environment.

But let’s not forget (in precisely the manner in which climate change discussions are usually held) that the historical record is entirely hypothetical, and secondary (even if contradictory) to the main premise, which is:

Multinational companies simply do not exist.  Therefore, Al Gore hates America.

That is all.  Now please inhale carbon dioxide in massive quantities.  This is entirely natural.

By an almost 2-to-1 margin.

This idea is not only impractical, discriminatory, and thuddingly empty, but also completely ignorant of — not to mention disrespectful to — this nation’s history.

At the time of the revolution, for example, viele Amerikaner kamen aus Deutschland, also war Deutsch fast unsere nationale Sprache. But it would have been stupid and short-sighted to make German the official language, as anyone can see in retrospect.

The idea that a language unifies or defines a culture is based on a bizarrely narrow, uninformed, and misplaced sense of what makes a culture worth having. And America’s culture is profoundly defined and shaped for the better by people who came here speaking — and continued to speak for generations — languages from all over the world.

Hell, you don’t even need to speak someone’s language to communicate or understand. Interpersonal communication is perhaps 90% non-verbal. You can even hear tone of voice just in reading, sometimes even through languages whose words you can barely parse.

Les mots que Thomas Jefferson ont choisi, for example, d’encadrer la démocratie américaine — la vie, la liberté, et la poursuite du bonheur (sound familiar?) — ont été inspirés en partie par les idées des philosophes français pendant l’Enlightenment. Without somebody speaking French, we ain’t got no damn America, or at least it isn’t quite the same. But some of these people who voted today think the French are our natural enemies. Jeebus. In vari periodi, l’America ha assorbito gli immigranti numerosi dall’Italia, and somehow la Repubblica survived. From Ireland came entire ships full of oibrithe iomarcacha na hÉireannaigh. From all over the world, we’ve had speakers of every language you can think of, and even a population of millions of kidnapped slaves-turned-citizens from Africa, although their languages were yanked away by force, and terendiroo mang beteyaa, or so I read.

Do you know what all of those words mean? Neither do I. But you know exactly the gist of what I just said.

In over two centuries of constant immigration, never once has an official language been important enough to bother with. And in these days of the Internet, massive multilingual communication, and translation tools at our fingertips, never has an official language been less necessary. Not even close.

But it’s an election year. And for about 30% of this country, fear is an emotion that overrides everything else.

But esta idea no tiene nada hacer con solucionar ninguna problemas, y nada hacer con la inmigración o la integración. Es unicamente sobre el miedo y la intolerancia y una necesidad que la gente débil tiene para la ilusión del control. Es vergonzosa. Es pathetic as hell.

Es unamerican.

En una palabra, es bullshit.

In any language.

Uggghh….the “jobs Americans won’t do” meme will never die, but who am I to argue with anecdotal evidence?

Some economists say such accounts don’t mean that Americans won’t do some jobs, but that employers such as Gurney simply aren’t paying enough.

“Every time someone says illegal immigrants take jobs from Americans or do jobs Americans don’t want, I want to scream,” UCLA economist Christopher Thornberg says.

This argument makes Smallwood want to scream herself. On a recent job that went into overtime, a Diversified Landscape foreman, Vincente Sanchez, was making $52.34 an hour.

“How high can you go?” she says.
. . .

Last week Smallwood wrote a flier that says she would pay $34 with experience and $14 without. The notice cautions that no application would be accepted “without verification of proper identification that allows you, by law, to work in the USA.”

The flier is up in more than a dozen landscaping supply stores. So far, Smallwood says, there have been no calls.

It’s times like these when I feel like the world has turned upside down in the last few years. After all, how else can you explain a situation in which conservatives are begging for government intervention in the economy and liberals (or at least some of us) are insisting that the laws of supply and demand should be allowed to resolve a situation?

The thing I find so damn frustrating about this never-ending argument is the fact that the “jobs Americans won’t do” are jobs Americans did do, at least until employers figured out they could pay illegal immigrants less and not have to worry about getting in trouble for it. From what I’ve read, the massive influx of Mexican immigrants didn’t pick up steam until the late 60’s or early-70’s, but it’s not like we had self-picking fruit and lawns that didn’t require mowing before then. The implication that Americans aren’t willing to get their hands dirty and put in a honest day’s work is not only factually incorrect, it’s insulting as well.

And none of this is to denigrate the work ethic of immigrant laborers. I’ve been saying for years now that anyone who comes to this country to do manual labor for next to nothing has worked a lot harder to achieve the American dream than I’ll ever have to, so if anyone’s earned the right to pursue citizenship, it’s them. If they’re already here and working hard, why shouldn’t they be allowed to become citizens and participate in all of the rights and responsibilities that come along with that?

Please spare me the hand-wringing about people who “skip to the front of the line”. The reason there’s a line in the first place is because the number of people we allow into the country is based on an arbitrary quota preference system that doesn’t accurately reflect the number of people entering our country. If you’re lucky enough to be one of the fraction of immigrants who are allowed to begin the path towards citizenship, the process for becoming a citizen is often prohibitively expensive and a bureaucratic nightmare. The naturalization process isn’t indicative of the needs of our country or the immigrants themselves.

Which, in the toxic terms that define the current immigration debate, means that my position would be described in a sneering, Lou Dobbs-ian tone as “supporting amnesty“. As conservatives work towards making the word “immigrant” synonymous with “criminal”, this strawman argument is a way of modernizing the Willie Horton slur and broadening it to include almost every Spanish-speaking immigrant. If you support giving “illegal aliens” citizenship, you support criminals (unlike the God-fearing, flag-waving patriots in the Republican party). The racist subtext of this debate is starting to make itself clearer, but it’s not like this is the first time the GOP has exploited racial tension in an election year.

Besides, there’s a big difference between giving people who are already here a clear path to citizenship and granting citizenship to a large subset of our population automatically (a position I haven’t heard anyone endorse). As far as I’m concerned, if they’re already working here, we should be doing everything we can to further integrate them into our society, not cement their status as second-class citizens residents through a “guest worker” program that does nothing but cover the asses of employers who have been disregarding our nation’s labor laws. If the President truly believes that immigrants are an essential part of our economy and are doing jobs that we “won’t do”, then there’s no reason to exclude them from our American family.

Of course, the greatest irony is that the only halfway decent excuse for keeping immigrant laborers segregated from the rest of the working class is the faux-righteous outrage that the immigrants in question are “breaking the law”. One wonders where these defenders of civic virtue have been over the past few years as the Bush Justice Department has made a deliberate effort to cut down on the enforcement of laws that make it a crime to hire undocumented workers. Apparently the only crimes worth shedding crocodile tears over are the ones committed by poor Mexicans. Perhaps we should take a cue from the Republican response to the President’s own lawbreaking by working to bring immigrants’ residency status back “within the scope of the law”.

As I said above, my position is that we should expand our citizenship to more accurately reflect our population and ensure that the American dream is within the reach of anyone willing to work hard to achieve it. If you want to call that “amnesty”, so be it, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have a reasonable naturalization process, strong border security (at both borders), and increased enforcement of the laws that are already on the books. Of course, such an approach might put the needs of the working class and the nation’s security ahead of those of lawbreaking businesses, and we can’t have that.