Girl Scouts of America revives old dispute about objectivity

Media Matters For America (MMFA) was cited by a Girl Scouts of America (GSA) guide to the media as a good fact-checking website to counter lies and misinformation in the media. Well, the right wing wasn't going to have any of that! As they're frequent targets of MMFA, they of course resented it's inclusion in the Girl Scout piece and especially the suggestion that it was a reliable source for girls and their parents. Quoted by MMFA from the Glenn Beck website:

Her daughter, Sydney, a 15-year-old who served as a Girl Scout for eight years, left the organization in 2010 after she found that it embraces some controversial stances. Now, Sydney co-edits "Speak Now: Girl Scouts Website," which provides plenty of other examples of what some may see as liberal bias.

Perhaps the Girl Scouts staffers were too busy to respond to us, but considering the fact that the Media Matters reference is, in itself, a form of misinformation, bias -- potentially even indoctrination -- we assumed that the book would no longer be on the market. But we were wrong. [TheBlaze.com, 12/27/11]

Steve Doocy of Fox News has a basic, fundamental objection to the Girl Scouts using MMFA, and that is that MMFA is "a site that is clearly with an agenda." So for an informational site to have a real point of view, to have an agenda even, is somehow inconsistent with being able to provide girls and parents with accurate information.


Problem: PolitiFact is considered to be a site that doesn't have an ideological point of view or any sort of agenda. Yet PolitiFact published their "Lie of the Year" and they named the Democratic Party assertion that Republicans, and specifically Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), want to "End Medicare." Turns out after a considerable amount of back and forth that PolitiFact now agrees that Democrats are charging Republicans with wanting to make such drastic changes to Medicare that it would be a program that would be essentially different from what it is now. PolitiFact appears to be really grasping at straws here and is trying to tell the public that there's a fundamental difference between "Ending Medicare" and "Ending Medicare as we know it."


So my question would be "What's so great about objectivity?" Isn't it better to have a site that makes no claims about being objective and above it all and to have no pre-concieved ideas about anything? Obviously, just because Politifact claims it's an objective source, that doesn't mean that they provide good, solid, reliable information.


Chris Wallace of Fox News purports to be an objective journalist, but the biggest problem with MMFA that he could come up with was:

But industry blog Mediaite says Media Matters has a, quote, "far left bent that is both transparent and indisputable." [Fox News, Special Report, 12/29/11]

Which again, is a "criticism" that causes many folks to dismiss MMFA out of hand, but I'm not really sure why having a "far left bent" is automatically disqualifying. My feeling is that if MMFA provides substantiated accusations, charges that are backed up with evidence, i.e., video, audio and photographs, and if they go the extra mile and provide contest for the accusations (Quoting whole paragraphs as opposed to just giving us the sentence or sentence fragments that are damning), well, what's the problem?


The Girl Scouts reportedly agreed that MMFA is not a source they should be using.

"Girl Scouts constantly reviews our materials based on feedback and suggestions we receive from our members and we update our materials on a regular basis," said the statement. "As a result of this process, upcoming reprints of journeys materials will not include links to Media Matters."

I see this far more as a matter of the GSA backing down to political pressure placed upon them by right-wing media figures than it is any sort of epiphany that MMFA really is biased.


Score another victory for right-wing pressure to conform to their idea of what constitutes "bias" and "objectivity."

Becky Sharp and evolution

In the piece "Gay gene, deconstructed," the observations were made that:

Most scientists who study human sexuality agree that gay people are born that way. But that consensus raises an evolutionary puzzle: How do genes associated with homosexuality avoid being weeded out by Darwinian evolution?

Some gays and lesbians do reproduce, said Pennsylvania State University anthropologist and geneticist Mark Shriver, but not as much as straight people do. Even if a gene decreases people's fertility by 1 percent, it's going to be eliminated.

To which I answer "Becky Sharp." Was she the heroine of Vanity Fair? Hmm, "heroine" would be much too complimentary a term.  "Protagonist" will do. Miss Sharp was a woman who very much enjoyed sex (It's made clear that her primary reason to marry the fellow she does is so she can have plenty of sex without the scandal of being a single woman doing so) and who bore a number of healthy children. Problem: She didn't particularly like children. She didn't enjoy spending time with children and greatly preferred the company of grown-ups.


Let's presume that that was the natural consequence of regular old human diversity and ask "How could such a gene survive?" Clearly, in an agricultural or an industrial society, it wouldn't. But in a hunting and gathering society, I can very easily see how people who were attracted to same-sex partners could ally themselves with the Becky Sharps of the world.


For humans, with their lengthy times for child-raising, producing the child is only a first step. To get a fully competent human being that can raise itself and take care of its own needs requires, what for any other mammal, would be a very extended period of care and devotion from at least one parent, but preferably from two of them.


In an agricultural or industrial society, a nuclear family is the preferred social unit because that's the ideal social group for assuring that material wealth is passed down from one generation to the next. Why don't we see nuclear families in hunting and gathering societies? That's easy, in that type of society, there's no material wealth to pass down.Everything that's used is taken directly from the environment and is easily replaceable.


Without being constrained by a nuclear family, where husbands and wives stay with each other and with their children, the Becky Sharps who don't like spending time with children can pass them off to a same-sex couple that is less likely to produce children themselves. The same-sex couple is then able to take over the job of raising the children that the Becky Sharps produce.


So, my theory is that the two types of people, women who produce children but don't like spending time with them and gay couples who are likely to produce fewer children than regular opposite-sex couples would, would ally with each other in a symbiotic relationship. Their own tendencies would complement each other.

Round-up of events - Nov 30th to Dec 9th

Wow! Awesome speech by the President! After so many "populist" appeals by the Tea Party (Genuine populism takes the side of regular folks against billionaires, the Tea Party was largely founded by billionaires), the President makes a genuinely populist appeal to the American people! Naturally, a fellow on Fox News has a problem with it. Very interestingly, he tips his hand as to how weak his case against the President's speech is. The President is "quoted" as saying "Rugged individualism doesn't work." Did Obama actually say any such thing? Here's the part where Obama says "rugged individualism":

OBAMA: Now, just as there was in Teddy Roosevelt's time, there is a certain crowd in Washington who, for the last few decades, have said, let's respond to this economic challenge with the same old tune. "The market will take care of everything," they tell us. If we just cut more regulations and cut more taxes -- especially for the wealthy -- our economy will grow stronger. Sure, they say, there will be winners and losers. But if the winners do really well, then jobs and prosperity will eventually trickle down to everybody else. And, they argue, even if prosperity doesn't trickle down, well, that's the price of liberty.

Now, it's a simple theory. And we have to admit, it's one that speaks to our rugged individualism and our healthy skepticism of too much government. That's in America's DNA. And that theory fits well on a bumper sticker. (Laughter.) But here's the problem: It doesn't work. It has never worked. (Applause.) It didn't work when it was tried in the decade before the Great Depression. It's not what led to the incredible postwar booms of the '50s and '60s. And it didn't work when we tried it during the last decade. (Applause.) I mean, understand, it's not as if we haven't tried this theory. [emphasis added]

Obama isn't saying that "rugged individualism" doesn't work, he's saying that trickle-down economics doesn't work. That's something entirely different from what the Fox News guy "quoted" the President as saying. This goes back to G.W. Bush and his constant "straw man" arguments. If an opponent has to make up straw men in order to make an argument, that indicates that they don't have any good arguments to begin with.

Right-wingers are now using urban legends to deny economic help to struggling constituents. People need help after being unemployed for months? Nah, right-wing Congresspeople are just contending that there are just too many lazy people collecting unemployment! How is that approach affecting the middle class? Very badly, as a matter of fact. Another urban legend appears to be the talking point that, by proposing to raise taxes on millionaires and billionaires, Democrats want to raise taxes on "job creators" and that small businesses in particular, would be devastated by those new taxes. Slight problem with that talking point:

We wanted to talk to business owners who would be affected. So, NPR requested help from numerous Republican congressional offices, including House and Senate leadership. They were unable to produce a single millionaire job creator for us to interview.

 NPR lists several other groups they contacted to try and locate these elusive "millionaire job creators" but, amazingly enough, couldn't locate any [/snark]

Heh! Elizabeth Warren is doing extremely well in her campaign to replace Senator Scott Brown (R-MA), so well in fact that Karl Rove is tossing everything and the kitchen sink at her! His latest ad accuses Warren of approving of the TARP bailouts of late 2008 (After an ad accusing her of being too close to the Occupy Wall Street crowd failed miserably). Warren responds by noting that Rove gets the situation completely backwards and that, boy, he sure is getting desperate.

Republicans block nominee for Consumer Financial Protection Agency (The vote "lost" with 53 in favor against 45 opposed as 53 wasn't sufficient to break the Republican filibuster). Republican Senator openly admits that the nominee was qualified, but that he opposes the whole idea of the agency to begin with.

Politico shows itself to be an organization utterly without integrity. Representative Paul Ryan (R-WI) presented a ludicrously half-baked mess of a plan to end Medicare and to replace it with a voucher system. Not only that, the system would diminish in value to senior citizens every year, leaving them increasingly unable to afford health care. Naturally, just about every Republican member of Congress voted for the idea, a vote that Democrats would do well to hang about their necks in 2012 as the idea quickly proved to be wildly unpopular. To the absolute delight of partisan Democrats, Mitt Romney has now wholeheartedly adopted the Ryan plan as his own.

And in cheerful news, a Fox News host has to back down after calling the Muppets a group of communists.

Round-up on the news 19Nov2011

Very pleased to note that Democrats hung tough on the latest vote on the Balanced Budget Amendment.

In 1995, 72 of the 202 Democrats who voted crossed over and voted for the BBA. That’s quite a few, and it means that it wasn’t just conservative and Blue Dog Democrats; quite a few mainstream or even liberal Dems thought it was worth supporting for substantive or political reasons. Today, however, only 25 Democrats crossed lines to support the amendment, while four Republicans voted against it.

Yes, Democrats have previously gotten all wobbly-kneed, caved in and voted for packages that they considered insane, but lately, they're definitely learning and toughening up.

Bwah-hah-hah!!!! Michele Bachmann insists "I haven't had a gaffe." Uh, gee, some random, unknown person in a receiving line tells Bachmann that a vaccine causes mental retardation, so Bachmann insisted that this random person knew what she was talking about. Erm, slight problem, the claim is complete and utter poppycock. Rush Limbaugh even came to the defense of the vaccine, and when Limbaugh tells you you've "jumped the shark," you've really gone overboard! Oh, and her plan to run the government without taxing anybody was a good one! Bachmann's gaffes have been quite frequent.

Speaking of Limbaugh, the fellow got very confused and claimed that the former Penn State assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky was gay. No, gays, straights and lesbians all fall into the category of adults who make love to adults on a consensual basis. Rapists and pedophiles fall into a different category, that of people who abuse victims and who really couldn't care less what the gender of their victims are.

Thankfully, the Super-Committee/Cat Food Commission II seems to be headed for complete failure. The likely result is sequestration in 2013. Given that Senators John McCain (R-AZ) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC) have declared, in response to Defense Secretary Leon Panetta's claim that sequestration would result in a "substantial risk of not being able to meet our defense needs" that

"We are staunchly opposed to this draconian action. This is not an outcome that we can live with, and it is certainly not one that we should impose on ourselves. The sequester is a threat to the national security interests of the United States, and it should not be allowed to occur.”

In other words, sequestration is not a serious threat as these Republican Senators will clearly not allow it to gut their preferred programs. Unfortunately this is, by the count of the FireDogLake blogger, President Obama's fourth attempt at a "Grand Bargain." Sure would be nice if it were to be the last.

It's difficult to keep from sympathizing with Occupy protesters when law enforcement authorities get so completely out of control that they use pepper spray directly onto the faces of Occupiers who are just sitting there peacefully. Of course, pepper spray is torture and should never be used unless police officers are in extreme peril, a condition that very obviously did not apply in this case. Great picture from the same blog, by the way. What's the ultimate goal of the neoliberals who are the opposition to #OWS? Australia, Brunei Darussalam, Chile, Malaysia, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, Vietnam and the US have been negotiating, behind closed doors naturally, for a Trans-Pacific Partnership that would lock in many of the worst aspects of NAFTA, but in the Pacific instead of Central America.

And lastly, former Senator from Pennsylvania Rick Santorum, gets all philosophical and declares that, when contemplating the vast number of Americans who are getting food stamps as opposed to being able to work at jobs, that hey, well “suffering is part of life and it’s not a bad thing, it is an essential thing in life.” Um, yeah, considering that Santorum’s estimated net worth is between $880,000 and $1.9 million, this is a real generous, Christian attitude.

Occupy Philadelphia & Occupy Wall Street march in solidarity

On the evening of Sunday the 13th of November, marchers from Occupy Wall Street (OWS) joined up with members of Occupy Philadelphia (OP) to collaborate in a night-time march. The OWS people were on their way to Washington DC to make it clear that "We are the 99%!"
As I've pointed out, that concept is a bit more complicated than just a matter of dollars one makes in a year. We of the 99% don't consider, say, the filmmaker Michael Moore to be a member of the 1%, even though he obviously makes enough money to qualify. The question is one of collaboration in neoliberalism (Don't think "liberal," think in terms of "capital wants to be liberated from all constraints!") and in trying to act in ways that are contrary to the interests of the rest of us, the regular people.
Of very great concern I think, and something that I find utterly baffling when I try to examine it through the lens of Democratic Party self-interest, is that the Democrats are prepared to help the Super Committee/Cat Food Commission II remain in existence past the statutory November 23rd date for the Commission to issue its report.
What's the point of the Commission? To try and tackle the deficit problem.
How many Americans give a rat's ass about the deficit? 6%.
Well then, what do Americans care about? Jobs. To get jobs, a strong majority supports raising taxes on the rich.
Does the Commission want to raise taxes on the rich? Ha, ha, ha! They'll do no such thing, of course.
Is the Commission in the pockets of the 1%? Yup. The Commission needs to be disbanded immediately. Neither regular citizens nor any members of the Democratic Party stand to gain anything whatsoever from its continued existence.


Update:
Two comments I thought were worth reproducing:
Occu-Posse….March to DC
Submitted by Baja K (not verified) on Mon, 11/14/2011 – 8:21pm
How to find out where and when the NYC to DC Occupy March will be?
Those who’d like to join for all or part of the march can’t do so if the info doesn’t get out there and spread around a bit ahead of time. Various “Occupy” sites may have this info but it’s hard to find.
Check out some old Hopalong Cassidy movies where his posse, galloping along to the rescue of something, was joined by another group of members, and then later by more, and then more and more and more till the whole screen was filled with the cowboy version of what the march on DC might be.
Think “Occu-posse”. Don’t confuse with the James Bond film of similar-sounding name.
————-
I though that was a pretty good question, so:

From a publication called The Root:

CBS is reporting that members of the Occupy Wall Street movement are heading to the nation’s capital. A group from the encampment in New York City’s Zuccotti Park are embarking on a two-week walk to Washington, D.C. They left at noon today and will arrive by Nov. 23, the day of the deadline for the congressional “super committee” to come up with its deficit-reduction plan.

RT.com says:

Organizers on the OccupyWallStreet.org website have revealed plans for Occupy the Highway: The 99 Percent March to Washington. Protesters will be playing in safe, however, and will ditch the major roadways in exchange for more pedestrian-friendly thoroughfares. They intend on leaving New York City Wednesday at noon and plan to march roughly 20 miles a day, stopping along the way in Trenton, Philadelphia, Baltimore and elsewhere before arriving in Washington two weeks later.

The Inky tries to explain Occupy Wall Street

Raghuram Rajan, in the Inky of 11 Nov 2011 is absolutely correct, the Occupy Wall Street movement is using a rhetorical shorthand to describe what it's complaint with America's current status is and why they're out protesting. Unlike the Civil Rights Movement that began in the late 1950s, the opponents of Occupy Wall Street are in need of careful definition as the problem is nowhere near as obvious as it was for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his followers. The traditional media, of course, very clearly won't do that for us and those wanting clarity will obviously have to look elsewhere than into any daily newspaper or TV news show.*
The blogger and Professor of History at the University of Michigan, Juan Cole, has put out a piece describing the worldwide movement that Occupy Wall Street is a part of. Neoliberalism is the economic movement that wants capital and business to be liberated from government regulations and it both got Ronald Reagan elected President and greatly benefited from his administration. As Cole points out, the worldwide movement in reaction to neoliberalism encompasses not just the "Arab Spring" countries of Tunisia, Egypt and Libya, but Chile, Spain and Israel as well as the United States.
It's irresponsible capital that seeks freedom from government supervision that's the problem, not merely those who earn lots of money. As Rajan makes clear, there are many people who earn lots of money that the Occupy Wall Street movement doesn't have a problem with. Rajan points to a long-term problem that indeed will require a coordinated effort from the whole of American society, but that particular problem doesn't explain why the Occupy Wall Street movement exists.

Update:

Further pieces defining who the 1% are and are not:

The people who tossed out Glass-Steagall are most definitely part of the 1% that we’re criticizing:
http://downwithtyranny.blogspot.com/2011/11/clinton-and-gingrich-now-say-it-was.html
The wealthy people who are standing up with the 99% are very clearly not part of the group that we’re condemning:
http://firedoglake.com/2011/11/11/1-is-a-state-of-mind/

*As an example, the Inky ran a piece written by Senators Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX) that was allegedly pro-litle guy and pro-small businesses, but the actual position they took was completely opposed to Net Neutrality. The piece was very shortly followed by a vote where all the Republican Senators voted against Net Neutrality, meaning the article was written in a deceptive manner, to suggest that the two Republican Senators were opposed to the interests of big corporations and in favor of small businesses.
In contrast to the assertions made by the Republican Senators, Internet program and content providers do not compete on an even playing field because of capitalism and competition, but because of government regulations. This is why the traditional media cannot be relied upon to accurately tell the public what the Occupy Wall Street movement is all about.

Fair Game

Finally got to see the DVD of Fair Game, the story of the Bush Administration's rush to war against Iraq in late 2002, early 2003. Very good and no, it doesn't leave the slightest doubt that Bush's people knew full well that in the two cases the film looks at, the aluminum tubes (centrifuges or missile launch tubes?) and whether of not Niger sold raw uranium to Iraq, that the Bush Administration very consciously, deliberately and with malice aforethought, lied to get Americans enthusiastic about going to war with Iraq.
I had never before heard the exact reasons the CIA gave for not believing that the aluminum cylinders were for missile launch tubes as opposed to being nuclear fuel enrichment centrifuges, but in the film, the agents laughingly answer a Bush Administration official that the tubes that Iraq possessed were three to four times thicker and twice as long as centrifuges would have been. Makes sense, as centrifuges wouldn't need to be very thick, but a launch tube would need to be able to withstand a rocket going off inside it.
I could tell when Joe's article came out in late 2003 that there were lots of problems with the idea that Iraq got uranium from Niger (Joe Wilson pronounced it Ni-zheer, precisely to distinguish it from Nigeria). There are no railroads in that part of the world and the film specifies that it would have taken 50 heavy trucks to have carried a sufficient quantity of raw yellowcake uranium to have made a few bombs. I looked at a map and saw that it was 400 miles from the Southeastern tip of Niger to the nearest ports in Benin or Nigeria. The author Tony Hillerman wrote about people living in isolated areas such as one finds in Niger and Northern Benin and Nigeria. Hillerman wrote about two Apache detectives who lived in the American West. When vehicles in those isolated areas move, they get noticed and commented on. People in the Hillerman novels get asked if they've seen, say, a blue car going West. They usually remember just such a car and approximately when it passed. Even if Niger could have gotten all 50 trucks the 400 miles in one day (That of course, presumes really well-maintained roads), it would still take quite a while to get all the yellowcake offloaded from the trucks and loaded onto a ship. There's simply no way that even the most minimal due diligence wouldn't uncover all kinds of testimony and other evidence about such a large shipment. Even if satellites didn't pick up such a large movement for that region, spies in the ports would definitely have gotten lots of pictures of the loading. Obviously, the ship would have been carefully tracked and intercepted long before it got to Iraq.
I was surprised to hear that Valerie Plame Wilson (Played by Naomi Watts) didn't tell her husband (Played by Sean Penn) that she had informed her supervisors in the CIA that Joe had previous experience being a General Services Officer in the late 1970s to Niger. And no, I never believed for a single moment that she "sent" him to there. Her explanation that she merely suggested that "Oh, if we need someone to go to Niger, my husband has relevant experience being in that area." Joe didn't work for the CIA, he went voluntarily and Valerie wouldn't have had the authority to send him anywhere as she simply didn't play any such role in the CIA.
What was always the most ludicrous charge thrown against the Wilsons was that Valerie had sent Joe on a "junket." When I served in the Navy (1991-2001), I spent two years in the Mediterranean (1996-1998) onboard the USS LaSalle (AGF-3), the command ship for the Sixth Fleet. I certainly got to the big party/tourist ports, Venice, Italy; Cannes, France; Mallorca, Spain, etc. But I also got to some not-so-wealthy, not-so-touristy places, Constanta, Romania;  Tunis, Tunisia and Poti, Georgia, among others. Now, if I were told by a US government official "Mr. Gardner, your country would appreciate it if you were to go to [one of these places to do whatever]", I'd salute, say "Aye-aye," get over there and make the best of it. But would I go to any of these places as though they were tourist destinations? Uh, hardly. There's a scene in the film where Joe turns on a tap and, instead of getting water, gets some sort of thick, black liquid. Clearly, Niger was not any sort of touristy kind of place that wealthy Americans or Europeans were visiting for the fun of it. So I never found it the slightest bit believable that Joe Wilson had set out to Niger for any reason other than what he said he was there to do, to see whether Niger had sent uranium to Iraq.
And yes, I agree with the films conclusion, that it's right for citizens to stand up when things are wrong and to publicly say so.I greatly appreciate both of the Wilsons for having done so.

British vs French or incrementalism vs overnight change

Had an extensive debate with a fellow member of UFPJ-DVN on Facebook about his use of the term “Working Class,” he was using the term in its classical Marxian Das Kapital 1867 meaning, to denote those who work for, and get a wage from, those who own the means of production. I was using it to mean people who are wealthy enough to own homes as opposed to those who rent apartments.

The immediate, practical difficulty here is “What is going to work to advance our goals?” Is it going to help the movement to insist on Millennial goals, on trying to overthrow capitalism and to try and replace it with communism? I pointed out here that communism failed. Communism simply couldn't keep up with capitalism. Did it fall into the dustbin of history or, as Ronald Reagan and other right-wingers insisted, was it pushed by US military expenditures? My own interpretation is that it fell due to

the fact that it simply doesn't work for certain sectors of the economy. Government control works fine for health care and education as those two sectors don't act like markets, with competent customers making informed, unhurried decisions in a reasonably fair marketplace. When, on the other hand, one is purchasing shirts or houses or lawn mowers, markets work fine. Now, we saw with the Triangle Waist factory blaze that corporate capitalist enterprises simply cannot be trusted (Remember, the blaze occurred in 1911, many decades after corporate industrial capitalism began, so it's not like it wasn't given a chance to regulate itself) that the Federal Government must assume oversight of corporate enterprises to see that workers are protected.

I believe there is an inherent, inborn tendency towards wealth and property to concentrate, for a wealthy person with a lot of land to obtain more wealth and land. As the Bruce Springsteen song goes:

Poor man wanna be rich,
rich man wanna be king,
And a king ain't satisfied,
till he rules everything, ...

For those people with more modest means, they must occasionally struggle to keep what they have. These struggles started with the development of agriculture and I simply don't see them ever ending. In the Soviet Union, we saw the development of the nomenklatura, in China, they saw the Red-Hat Businessmen. In both cases, the group that had the most (In Marxian terms, they're referred to as the Ruling Class) morphed and changed shape and adopted new terms, but never essentially changed from what they always were. My own preference is for the term aristocracy as I consider that to be a more accurate and descriptive term.

So what's with the title of this post? As either a tween or as a young teen, I read a piece comparing what the author termed the “British” and the “French” method of social change. The French method was what my fellow member obviously prefers, a sudden, vast, overnight change from the old to the new. The British method, by contrast, was referred to as “muddling through.” It consists of moving incrementally, moving in a general direction as opposed to being focused on specific goals, trying one thing at a time, seeing how it works, modifying it if necessary and then moving again.

We all saw how the French Revolution worked, it very quickly resulted in bloodshed and empire and their defeat at the hands of foreigners and a return to the bad old days. The Netroots, on the other hand,

have been quite successful. Their electoral strength was shown first in 2006 by the defeat of Joe Lieberman in the Democratic primary for Senator of Connecticut. It was very much a partial victory, one step forward, another step back, but Lieberman was no longer speaking with any credibility for the Democratic Party as Democratic voter had booted him out of the party. He was still able to do some damage to progressive goals, but not as much as he was doing before. The Netroots had handed over the day-to-day control of policy to our President, who went in a Blue Dog Democrat direction and promptly suffered losses in the 2010 midterm, but we're pushing back again with the assistance of the Occupy Wall Street people.

The anti-war movement has very definitely gone in the direction of incrementalism. We don't describe ourselves as being pacifists as that implies we have a fixed and rigid and unchangeable goal, but as people who oppose this particular war or that particular action. The ultimate shape of our proposed policies may resemble those of doctrinaire pacifists, but by showing how particular policies are bad or ineffective on a case-by-case basis, we build a far more credible case for the general public that we're taking a thoughtful, flexible approach to the issues of the day.

Our approach to economic issues is similar. We don't oppose the wealthy simply because they're wealthy. We oppose particular wealthy people because they're cheating and not following the “rules of the game.” England had to conduct several land reforms between the Norman invasion of 1066 and the switch-over to industrial society during the 1800s. Land had gotten too concentrated and was held by too few people, just as wealth today is far more concentrated than it should be, so land got broken up and moved into many more sets of hands. The redistribution of wealth that occurred after the crash of 1929 (Second chart on this page) was done in a far less conscious and deliberate manner, but resulted in many good things for people of regular income. What progressives today would really like to see is another version of land redistribution or a more conscious process of returning some wealth back to regular people, as was done via the Great Depression. Obviously, we'd like to do that without going through another Great Depression.

Entertainment - Vampire Diaries

When I'm seeking entertainment, I have no desire to review issues that actually affect me. I don't have any desire to see shows or movies about people who are broke, I don't need to be reminded of that particular problem.
Now, in the latest Vampire Diaries, we have a blond vampire who's sleeping with a Latino werewolf, the brother of the series' heroine is caught up in a love triangle between his former girlfriend, who's now a ghost and his current girlfriend, who's a former witch. The fellow who's going out with the heroine is yer classic "bad boy," only much more so as he has the bad habit of biting and draining the blood of people he doesn't like (There are a lot of people he doesn't like as he's got a generally bad attitude). So you know, these are the sorts of problems I like seeing on TV, precisely because I'm most likely never going to run into them in real life. Falling Skies was also pretty cool for just that reason. Not much chance we'll have an alien invasion where our young people are drafted into picking up scrap metal and having the aliens carry off the metal back to their own planet. In the recently-canceled comics series Secret Six, a super-heroine was carrying on a kind of Romeo-and-Juliet sort of thing with a super-villain. It struck me that her hero buddies would probably be a lot more judgmental about her going out with him than his villain buddies would be about him going out with her.
Fun stuff to worry about and consider, precisely because I'm highly unlikely to ever run into such problems myself.

Privatizing education - a zombie idea that just won't die

(I wrote this in response to a piece in the Inky, gave it to a buddy of mine to check and he never got around to reading it. With the news that Rupert Murdoch' of the News Corporation (NY Daily News, Fox News, Wall St. Journal, etc.) giving the keynote speech at an education summit, I've decided the piece is just too relevant to continue to hold back.)

Re: "School choice programs are making inroads" Aug 28

Y'know, it would sure be nice if the Inky would expand their explorations of certain issues beyond simply reprinting right-wing think-tank handouts. A perfect case in point is a piece from the Heritage Foundation "School choice programs are making inroads" that they published on August 28th. A better explanation of the article's thesis comes from a piece from a Heritage Foundation blog ("FamilyFacts.org: Education Spending Skyrockets While Achievement Remains Flat" March 29th of this year) makes the more detailed case that while spending on education has gone up, achievement by students has remained flat. The New York Times, however, took a detailed look ("Growth in Education Spending Slowed in 2009" May 25th) at why education spending has gone up.

As economists have pointed out, the main driver of the growth of federal budget deficits is America's health care system. Not surprisingly, health care for teachers and other school personnel is a major factor in the rise of schooling costs. We also might keep in mind the rise of mandates in education, things that parents would like to see schools do and teach. The Heritage Foundation blog is correct, there are many, many more persons working in positions in schools today that weren't there 100 or even 50 years ago. 

As far as costs go, however, it's important to keep in mind that once a school has paid for things like their grounds, their building and their furniture, there are standard yearly expenses like books and uniforms and sports equipment and daily expenses like cafeteria food. But the vast majority of money was, and I believe still is, spent on salaries for the teachers, the administrative staff, the janitorial staff and others.

I worked as a secretary for a private school from 1985 to 1990. Computers were just beginning to become standard equipment (Popular use of the Internet was still a long way off) and I used a typewriter for most of the documents that I produced for some of the teachers. These included tests and student evaluations.

When, near the end of my time there, I brought in a laptop computer, I produced student evaluations for teachers faster and better, but as I had a lot of free time anyway (I got lots and lots of reading done on that job, sometimes finishing big hardback books in a week), it didn't make much difference to the workloads of the teachers. They still gave me drafts written in pen and I still typed them out on paper with carbons. Technology was a nice thing to have, VCRs were helpful and although photocopiers were in use, lots of paper reproductions were still done via the mimeograph (slide projectors weren't replaced with computer slideshows until long afterwards), but as teaching was mainly done through teachers talking to students from the head of the classroom and with students writing their thoughts and answers and essays on paper, technology didn't make a whole lot of difference to the teacher's workload.

Education simply is, was and always will be a very labor-intensive field. Obviously, money can make some difference, students can achieve more in a clean, well-lit and physically comfortable classroom then in a place where the roof leaks and books are in short supply. But once a certain level of spending is reached that enables classrooms to reach that level, a point is quickly reached where the school's spending hits the point of diminishing returns. At that point, money continues to be helpful, but ceases to be critical to whether a school can teach children effectively.

So the idea that the educational system is simply throwing money at the problem of bettering education is not very credible.

There's no question that the school choice movement is a growing one. The real question is why that is. From a generally rah-rah piece on privatizing schools ("Julia Steiny: The Excellent School-Choice Movement Accidentally Leaves Vulnerable Children Behind" June 9th):

Mind you, research shows that apart from a few truly great schools, the choice movement hasn’t boosted academic performance overall.  Charter schools, for example, have roughly the same range of good, bad and indifferent as regular district schools.

And from a question and answer session with the Director of Education Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute ("Frederick Hess: Questions and answers" January 23rd):

So far, charters have had mixed results. They haven’t been shown to be consistently better than traditional district schools...

A piece in Z Communications ("The History of the School Privatization Movement" March 15th) states:

However instead of improving funding to these struggling schools, the one intervention supported by statistical research, they continue to aggressively shift education funding from public schools to private charter schools – despite the Stanford study showing that charter programs don’t improve achievement levels...

So if proponents of charter schools/school choice aren't delivering better quality schooling for our youngsters, then what's the point? Z Communications makes the case that the movement is a neoliberal attack on liberal activist government generally.

It's a very generously-funded movement (Counterpunch "The Future of Charter Schools" August 26th, 2009) that forces teachers to be mere

...technicians, dispensaries of information for memorization purposes in accordance with the testing regime of NCLB

As I suggested in my opening, there is very considerably more to the school choice issue than any right-wing think-tank hand-out will ever tell you.

Of straw men and arguments

George Will makes an interesting assertion in opposition to Elizabeth Warren's famous YouTube talk to a group of supporters:

Warren is (as William F. Buckley described Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith) a pyromaniac in a field of straw men: She refutes propositions no one asserts.

Let's look first at exactly what a straw man argument is. G.W. Bush was famous for using them. Bush would address and “refute” arguments that no one was making in the first place. Bush tackled the question that perhaps the Iraq War was making terrorism wordwide worse. There was strong evidence for this, as terrorist incidents worldwide shot up enormously after the Iraq War was launched. But Bush spent his answer insisting that US interests were attacked before the Iraq War was launched. That's all very fine and well and entirely true, but that didn't address the essential criticism, that the Iraq War increased terrorism.

Have right-wingers asserted the opposite of what Warren asserts, that when they build factories and turn out products, that they owe their success entirely to themselves? As a matter of fact, some commenters quoted by the right wing Instapundit do exactly that:

you hired workers the rest of us paid to educate; No, you did not educate them. You babysat them for 12 years. Then I hired them, taught them how to be responsible and show up for work, taught them how to communicate in clear sentences, taught them that there are rights and wrongs and (unlike with your schools) wrongs have consequences in the workplace. Then paid for extended education for my employees so they could continue to improve themselves and better add value to what we do around here.

No, sorry, but when Warren's argument is met head-on and addressed directly by critics, it's not a straw man argument! George Will adds an interesting paragraph:

The collectivist agenda is antithetical to America’s premise, which is: Government — including such public goods as roads, schools and police — is instituted to facilitate individual striving, a.k.a. the pursuit of happiness. The fact that collective choices facilitate this striving does not compel the conclusion that the collectivity (Warren’s “the rest of us”) is entitled to take as much as it pleases of the results of the striving. [emphasis in original]

Of course, Will completely fails to tell us how on Earth government is supposed to “facilitate individual striving” without taking “ as much as it pleases of the results of the striving.” Government is supposed to build useful things for us for free? Sure, I'll go along with Wills' statement near the end of his piece:

Society — hundreds of millions of people making billions of decisions daily — is a marvel of spontaneous order among individuals in voluntary cooperation.

But where is society supposed to get the money to produce “such public goods as roads, schools and police” if society cannot “take as much as it pleases of the results of the striving”? The airy-fairy philosophy of Will falls apart on the practical question of “Where are we supposed to get the money to pay for all of this?”

A Review of Deena Stryker's Lunch with Fellini, Dinner with Fidel

Ebook available from Girlebooks .

Full disclosure: I've known Deena for awhile, having worked on her website and I saw much of the material that she used in this, her autobiography, before she wrote it.

The theme of an independent woman, striking out on her own and blazing her own path is by now a familiar one, but this ebook is a very well-done tale of a woman doing just that in the early 1960s. Deena Stryker sets the tone of the book early on as she describes being 15 years old in 1949 and being on a train in Germany and being confronted by a train conductor over her lack of a “Tripartite Pass.” She never heard of such a thing before or since, but the way in which she handled her confrontation with the conductor was striking and showed someone who was ready to fearlessly confront the world.

Deena was aware of the “women's lib movement” in the early 60s, but didn't have a lot of contact with it. She spent most of her early decades shuttling around between her native Philadelphia, Europe (Paris, Rome and several countries behind the Iron Curtain) and Fidel Castro's Cuba. She gained great sympathy for the viewpoints of Communists. The Cuban government was so pleased with her piece on them in the French magazine Paris Match, that she was invited back to Cuba to conduct more interviews, but she was always more ideologically in tune with West European Social Democrats.

Before Deena went to Cuba, she wrote a book about the Italian film director Federico Fellini and followed him around while he made the movie 8 ½. She saw the making of the film in up-close detail, but was still quite impressed by Fellini's talent when she saw the film again 13 years later.

Deena has two sons, but she remained single. She made it into the US Government as a speech writer to the Assistant Secretary of State for Cultural Affairs under President Jimmy Carter. She lives today in Philadelphia and still keeps up with world and political affairs enough to maintain the blog http://otherjones.com/.

Decisions reached on Occupy Philadelphia

The occupation will begin at City Hall at 9:00am on Thursday, October 6th. Come one, come all! Bring the kids, bring the grandparents, heck, bring the family dog!

Occupy Together has put together some down-loadable posters here.
Here are the Occupy Pennsylvania websites.

Now, I've always had a problem with the Cat Food Commission and don't have much use for Cat Food Commission II, or the Super Committee. But now it's become clear that the second iteration of the Cat Fod Commission is simply unable to produce a useful consensus. The Republican Party is holding firm on a no-cuts-to-the-military and no-tax-increases platform which means all of the automatic cuts will fall on Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and any other socially vital program.
No, let's call for the complete elimination of the Commission.

The assault on the needs of regular people

In their "Abbreviated Pundit Round-up" Daily Kos today details a few of the many ways Republicans are trying to cripple the government so that it's unable to assist regular citizens. One of the items that makes no logical sense from the perspective of regular taxpayers/citizens is Amtrak. The Staggers Rail Act of 1980 freed railroad companies to focus on freight lines and to pretty much ignore passenger rail via the founding of Amtrak. Passenger rail wasn't all that profitable as people appeared to prefer either driving for shorter distances or flying for longer trips. 9-11 led to increasingly tight and inconvenient rules for air travel (I had to dispose of several bottles of liquids before getting on a plane a few years ago, and no, the expense wasn't huge, but it was quite annoying to have to do that) and it made for lengthy delays at airports. Not surprisingly, that's led to increased popularity for Amtrak.

With other countries having high-speed rail, that's made airplanes even less appealing as long and medium-distance transportation. Could the US simply turn rail back over to private industry? Probably, but as the linked piece indicates, freight lines aren't really compatible with the new high-speed passenger lines.

[Freight railway] owners worry that the plans will demand expensive train-control technology that freight traffic could do without. They fear a reduction in the capacity available to freight. Most of all they fret that the spending of federal money on upgrading their tracks will lead the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA), the industry watchdog, to impose tough conditions on them and, in effect, to reintroduce regulation of their operations.

Just seems to me that conservative/right-wing plans to destroy Amtrak would give America the worst of both worlds, we'd keep our annoying and inconvenient restrictions on air travel, but we wouldn't be able to just use Amtrak as an alternative. Would private service be cheaper? Probably, but that's not because private service is inherently better than government service. The main difference is that private lines could concentrate on medium-distance services of 50 to 500 miles and not have to worry about longer-distance lines of over 500 miles (The Boston to Washington Northeast Corridor is 440 miles long) whereas Amtrak has to run much longer-distance lines that run from California to Illinois or from Chicago to New Orleans. So yes, privatised rail service would see a big drop in costs for rail passengers, but those relatively few people who use long-distance passenger rail would get clobbered with either very expensive service or no service at all, being forced to go by air or having to drive.

Last night, I was at the public meeting that was considering an occupation of Philadelphia, modelled on the successful Occupy Wall Street action. As a traditional-news reporter was asking questions, it occurred to me that one of the major reasons I was so excited about it was that it pushes the Republican assault on government off of the front pages and that it drives the Republican/Tea Party-inspired drive for austerity and cutting the budget onto the back pages and out of peoples' view. If we can keep the attention of American citizens focussed on what we citizens need as opposed to what the plutocrats and oligarchs want, we're far more likely to succeed.

Living in the past

Rick Santorum comes out strongly against gay and lesbian servicepeople being "out" and open about their sexual identities. His fundamental point is that military service has nothing to do with sexuality and that Soldiers, Sailors, Marines and Airmen should focus on their jobs and not bother with the distractions of wanting to get married or raise a family while in the service.
In the times that Santorum appears to be nostalgic for (No, Santorum never served in any branch of the military, so "nostalgia" is not really an accurate term), in the 2004 movie King Arthur, our heroes get drafted into the Roman Army for a term of 30 years. If they had sex lives at all during that time, it was expected to be with "ladies of easy virtue." If they sought to maintain a family on the side, well, they could probably have done so. Families in the old days didn't expect to receive any financial benefits from the Army. Families were expected to simply live off of what they grew or hunted and to simply do without a father and a husband (Female soldiers are, historically, an extremely recent innovation) for extended periods and well, if the soldier was lost in combat, the family would eventually learn about it from his buddies when the group got home.
Back during the late 90s, I believe it was a Marine officer who expressed the opinion that Marines simply shouldn't get married while on active duty. I can sort of, kind of see that for a four-year enlistee, but to expect a 20-year careerist to live that way is simply not taking into account the fact that families nowadays need to be supported by the family breadwinner. Families don't simply live off the land any more. American employees who worked on farms in 2010 were just a little over a million. Number of total nonfarm employees for the same period was up to nearly 138 million in 2008 and down to 129 million in 2010. Children need to be educated, they need to move on to college or graduate school if their families really want them to get ahead. Older parents get care these days, they don't simply die off when health problems come up.
Unfortunately for people like Santorum, these days, the American armed services need to involve themselves in family issues anyway. Dealing with gay and lesbian personnel is just one more issue that gets tossed onto a pile of many other issues. A look at the Armed Forces Crossroads website shows us that supporting families is hardly just a throw-away or side issue. It involves many, many people working full time on many different aspects of the non-military parts of servicemember's lives.
Update:  Gotta love this piece from Washington Monthly. The blogger points out: "...because nothing says 'support the troops' like booing a U.S. Army serviceman currently in Iraq."

Blue Dogs and the budget

A Blue Dog Democrat said:

"...we've got to get our fiscal house in order," Shuler said. "We're at 15 percent of GDP in revenue and 24 and a half percent of expenditures. You want to take that 15 percent to 13 percent and increase spending to 27 percent.... I've ran a business, that doesn't go good on my balance sheet. I'm in the red when that happens."

The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities agrees with these percentages and also points out that the US is spending nearly half a trillion dollars on safety net programs. Where does our Blue Dog intend to make a cut so that our budget goes down from 15% to 13%? The safety net programs are a pretty tempting target because safety net money normally goes to constituents that don't write big checks to politicians, that the politicians then spend on re-election campaigns.

Well, aren't there expensive programs that everybody agrees aren't all that useful? Back in 1981, President Reagan's first year in office, there were a few small cuts that everybody could agree on. The US was publishing an estimate every year of how much coal remained in the ground. The estimate ran into the hundreds of years worth. That publication was canceled. Problem was, despite the Golden Fleece Award given out by former Senator William Proxmire (D-WI) from 1975 to 1988, there just wasn't much of what politicians refer to as "low-hanging fruit," so after mid-1981, there simply haven't been any serious budget cuts.  There was a slogan that David Stockman, Reagan's first Budget Director, liked to cite "We're against weak claims, not weak clients." Great slogan, but one that was very difficult to stick with in practice, because those who write big checks for re-election campaigns have a pretty powerful and persuasive voice when it comes to budget priorities.

It's far from clear where Blue Dogs want to make cuts in the budget, but it does appear pretty clear that their preferred route is not to get more Americans employed, but to slash expenditures. As the Daily Kos piece says, what the Blue Dogs want is "not just bad politics, it's bad policy." The essential problem that Blue Dogs don't appear to understand is that the government is not a business.

Governor Rick Scott of Florida (R), tried to run Florida's government as though it was just another private, for-profit corporation and quickly learned that

The inclination is to give a new governor the benefit of the doubt and let him settle into office a bit. Scott squandered that with his arbitrary decisions and disregard for other institutions, including the Cabinet, Congress, the voters and the media.

Scott is used to running an enterprise as a one-man show, where he's not answerable to anyone. State governments don't work that way and there's no reason they ever should. It's extremely important to remember:

Democratic Government is not structured to make a profit. It's job is to spend the pooled contributions of the citizens (taxes) to provide services to those citizens - health, education, defense, infrastructure. There is no profit, as we, the People, are supposed to run this country, and are not selling these services to ourselves.

It's simply a contradiction for the Democratic Party to include Blue Dogs, who just don't appear to understand this. There's a very strong argument that the Democratic Party has been too much of a big tent party and that it needs to shrink down by kicking all of their Blue Dog Democrats out. Let those guys form their own party. Will that make Democrats a minority? Probably, yes. The advantage, however, is that Democrats would speak with one, consistent and unified voice. In contrast, what we have is a party where someone says something like this:

I am a former prosecutor. I put people in the electric chair. I have a gun. I believe in capital punishment. I believe in this war on terror. And I'm a Democrat.

As Digby says:

According to this fellow, I'm not a member of the Democratic Party and nobody gives a damn what I think. I get that, and I believe it. But considering his list of identifiers there, the real question is, why is he?

As to the policy front, the contractionary austerity policies that Blue Dogs appear to favor is opposed by no less an institution than the International Monetary Fund (IMF). As an anti-globalizer, (A popular policy position in the 1990s-early 2000s, it's very highly skeptical of the financial sector and strongly suspects that the MOTUs don't really know what they're doing, but capitalism is far from dead or useless) is a political position that I strongly identify with and the IMF has long been a e-e-evilll boogeyman to the anti-globalization movement, so I thought it was very interesting to see the IMF put out a very useful and informative study of contractionary policies. The IMF looked at 173 instances in 17 countries to gauge the effectiveness of contractionary or "consolidation" policies.

The challenge facing the United Kingdom and many advanced economies is how to bring debt down to safer levels in the face of a weak recovery. Will deficit reduction lead to stronger growth and job creation in the short run?

Recent IMF research provides an answer to this question. Evidence from data over the past 30 years shows that consolidation lowers incomes in the short term, with wage-earners taking more of a hit than others; it also raises unemployment, particularly long-term unemployment.

In other words, no, contractionary policies are pretty worthless. The IMF was unable to identify any positive results from those 173 instances. The recent orgy of budget-cutting in the US has been followed by an economic downturn, with employment gains going flat. There's nothing mysterious or coincidental about that. One led very directly to the other.


Seriously, there's absolutely no reason for liberal Democrats to do anything to keep Blue Dogs in the party.

Just thought I'd point out...

Charles Krauthammer today credits the Iraq War with having damaged al Qaeda:

Iraq, too, was decisive, though not in the way we intended. We no more chose it to be the central campaign in the crushing of al-Qaeda than Gen. Dwight Eisenhower chose the Battle of the Bulge as the locus for the final destruction of the German war machine.

Al-Qaeda, uninvited, came out to fight us in Iraq, and it was not just defeated but humiliated. The local population - Arab, Muslim, Sunni, under the supposed heel of the invader - joined the infidel and rose up against the jihadi in its midst. It was a singular defeat from which al-Qaeda never recovered.

Slight problem here, though. The Council on Foreign Relations gives us the history of al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) and well, er, um, it's really not quite so clear that AQI was a part of al Qaeda that existed prior to the invasion of Iraq.

Ahead of the 2003 invasion, U.S. officials made a case before the UN Security Council linking AQI with Osama bin Laden. But a number of experts say it wasn't until 2004, when Zarqawi vowed obedience to the al-Qaeda leader, that the groups became linked. "For al-Qaeda, attaching its name to Zarqawi's activities enabled it to maintain relevance even as its core forces were destroyed [in Afghanistan] or on the run," observed (PDF) al-Qaeda expert Brian Fishman in 2006. Fishman, formerly with the Combating Terrorism Center at the United States Military Academy, says the relationship eventually broke down when Zarqawi ignored al-Qaeda instructions to stop attacking Shiite cultural sites.

Sorry Charlie, but your theory's a bust. Had there not been an Iraq War, there never would have been an AQI. The defeat of AQI was hardly a defeat for al Qaeda.

Turkey vs Israel over Gaza

I was curious to read in a Trudy Rubin column that Turkey and the Palestinians of Gaza had been given a good offer by the UN and that they should have taken it up. The offer concerned the "US Ship to Gaza" or the "Freedom Flotilla" that had as its flagship the Mavi Marmara. I was especially struck by these passages: Israel had a "right to impose and enforce a naval blockade on Gaza" and "As the panel makes clear, Israel had a legal right to search the ship, but made a bloody mess of it."

In May 2010, the Mavi Marmara was about 80 miles from shore and Israel had a 12-mile limit, but there's no question that it was headed for Gaza. Israel's right to intercept and detain any ship attempting to break the siege or blockade of Gaza is hardly clear at all. Guests of the radio show Democracy Now, Huwaida Arrat and Norman Finklestein, strongly dispute that Israel had any such right.

Essentially, the proposed compromise is that Israel could check incoming shipments for weapons, but could not otherwise stop imports. That has the problem of defining a weapon. According to Israel, cement (Freedom Flotilla II had lots of cement onboard), which is widely used as a construction material for housing in the region, is also useful for constructing fortifications. The distinction between imports via land and via sea differ only in that imports via land can be checked more easily.

The UN Special Rapporteur for Human Rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territories writes for Uruknet that, in the case of the report of the Palmer panel, that "the report failed to address the central international law issues in a credible and satisfactory manner."

But to be satisfactory, the report had to interpret the legal issues in a reasonable and responsible manner. This meant, above all else, that the underlying blockade imposed more than four years ago on the 1.5 million Palestinians living in Gaza was unlawful, and should be immediately lifted. On this basis, the enforcement by way of the 31 May attacks were unlawful, an offense aggravated by being the gross interference with freedom of navigation on the high seas, and further aggravated by producing nine deaths among the humanitarian workers and peace activists on the Mavi Marmara and by Israeli harassing and abusive behavior toward the rest of the passengers. Such conclusions should have been 'no brainers' for the panel, so obvious were these determinations from the perspective of international law as to leave little room for reasonable doubt.

China's news service says that "Ankara announced a series of measures against Israel, which included downgrading Turkish-Israeli diplomatic ties to the second-secretary level, suspending bilateral military agreements, and demanding a review of the Israeli blockade of Gaza by the International Court of Justice."

Jonathan Chait's case for Obama

I guess what really annoys me about the last paragraph in Jonathan Chait's “What the Left Doesn’t Understand About Obama” (Sep 2), is that the piece as a whole reminds me of how my brother-in-law described Colin Powell's 2003 speech at the UN, warning us all of Iraq's mythical Weapons of Mass Destruction. He told me that “Yeah, it was real convincing, provided of course, that you had no prior knowledge of the debate and had no knowledge of the issues. Other than that, yeah, it was really persuasive.”

Chait's final paragraph was:

Liberal critics of Obama, just like conservative critics of Republican presidents, generally want both maximal partisan conflict and maximal legislative achievement. In the real world, those two things are often at odds. Hence the allure of magical thinking.

This might be convincing if President Obama had truly “left everything on the road,” had he truly made a genuinely maximal effort to achieve the goals he said he was committed to. “Liberal critics” were very much aware that the legislative option of “reconciliation” was available for passing the Affordable Care Act in the Senate, meaning that it was completely unnecessary to have a supermajority of 60 Senators to bypass the Senate's filibuster rule (The House operated by plain old majority rule, so there was no need for any bypassing there). The filibuster is, by the way, nowhere mentioned in the Constitution. Chait's statement:

Yes, Bush passed his tax cuts — by using a method called reconciliation, which can avoid a filibuster but can be used only on budget issues.

But that's a rather bizarre observation, considering that reconciliation was used after the Senate passed the Affordable Care Act, but before it went to the House for final passage of various fixes. It simply wasn't necessary for Obama and his people to permit the Blue Dog Democrats to act as though they had veto power over what went into, and what got thrown out of, the bill. Sure, Senator Joe Lieberman (I-CT) was a terrible fellow for getting the public option deleted from the ACA, but Speaker Pelosi made it clear that, although she was in favor of re-introducing it “...the Obama administration [had] shown no interest in the public option over the past year.“


Yes, President George W. Bush conducted a PR campaign to gut Social Security and feed it to the sharks of Wall Street, but I paid pretty close attention to the 2004 campaign for Bush's re-election, but after that campaign and vote, the introduction of his plans concerning Social Security came as a complete surprise to me. Bush had successfully convinced America that Senator John Kerry (D-MA) couldn't be trusted to be our President, but that's pretty much all that the 2004 campaign was about. It was also clear that Bush wanted to continue the Iraq War and that Kerry was a bit less enthusiastic about that, but Social Security was simply never an issue in the campaign. So yes,

Bush did have one episode where he tried to force through a major domestic reform against a Senate filibuster: his crusade to privatize Social Security. Just as liberals urge Obama to do today, Bush barnstormed the country, pounding his message and pressuring Democrats, whom he cast as obstructionists. The result? Nada, beyond the collapse of Bush’s popularity.

But this episode says absolutely nothing about the filibuster and nothing about the ability of Presidents to force Congress to do as they urge it to do through PR campaigns. If Bush had a mandate, if he was describing reality by saying "I earned capital in the campaign, political capital, and now I intend to spend it. It is my style." then yes, one could draw conclusions about how effective it is to barnstorm the country on a PR campaign. But a far better example would be Harry Truman's Whistle-Stop Tour, where he reminded the public what the Democratic Party stood for:

I'm asking you just to read history, to use your own judgment, and to decide whether you want to go forward with the Democratic Party or whether you want to turn the clock back to the horse and buggy days with such people that made up that "do-nothing" 80th Congress.

That Congress tried its level best to take all the rights away from labor. That Congress tried its level best to put the farmer back to 1932. That Congress tried its level best to put small business out of business. For what purpose? To help the big interests which they represented.

Note that Truman was successful precisely because he wasn't trying to ram through a deeply unpopular proposal. He was, instead, reminding people of what they already liked about the Democratic Party. Sorry Chait, but if Obama tours the country, advocating a jobs program, then I think Obama's job would be far more similar to Truman's tour than to Bush's.

Perhaps the oddest feature of the liberal indictment of Obama is its conclusion that Obama should have focused all his political capital on economic recovery. “He could likely have passed many small follow-up stimulative laws in 2009,” Jon Walker of the popular blog Firedoglake wrote last month. “Instead, he pivoted away from the economic crisis because he wrongly ignored those who warned the crisis was going to get worse.”

Nothing the slightest bit “odd” about it. Historically, a high unemployment rate has doomed presidential re-election chances. Getting Americans back to work was and remains a top-of-the-line political priority.

Rather than deploy every ounce of his leverage to force moderate Republicans, whose votes he needed, to swallow a larger stimulus than they wanted, Obama clearly husbanded some of his political capital.

Sorry, but I saw that in early 2009 and continue to see it today as an extremely poor strategic choice. That political capital did Obama no good whatsoever in passing the ACA and winning over “moderate” Republicans (Whose voting records tend to be indistinguishable from their more hard-line colleagues in any event) has been a complete bust. Obama saved his political capital for nothing.


But by far the most serious problem, as the economist Brad DeLong points out, was that Obama pivoted to deficit reduction far, far too early. Appointing the Bowles-Simpson Deficit Commission (Progressives popularly refer to it as the “Catfood Commission” and it's second iteration, the “super committee” created by the debt-limit deal, as “Catfood Commission II”) was a true stinker of an idea that, among many other problems, made it politically impossible to ask Congress for another stimulus without the Obama Administration appearing to be a bunch of incompetents. This was an entirely unforced error that has severely hamstrung the Obama Administration, turned them away from their own best interests and aided and abetted their political opposition by making it appear that their favorite issue since the presidency of Ronald Reagan, deficit reduction, was more important than putting people back to work, addressing Global Warming or addressing Peak Oil. All three of these issues are many, many times more important than deficit reduction is, was or ever will be.


No, I disagree with Chait's title, I think the left understands Obama just fine. Obama's a moderate Republican. He's in the wrong party and his errors have probably made a second term impossible. He needs to disband Catfood Commission II and he needs to adopt a full-blown campaign to get Americans back to work. He needs to put deficit reduction on the far, far back burner until other priorities are addressed and are well on the way to being solved.

Cowboys & Aliens

Good stuff. Takes a while to really figure out what's going on, so patience is definitely called for. Definitely a surprise to see Harrison Ford playing the role he does. Reminds me of the comics series Secret Six (Group shot of them) in that heroes and villains are all mixed up.

Sympathy?

Should we feel any sympathy for former President George W. Bush?

By that time, W. had belatedly realized that Cheney was a crank whose bad advice and disdainful rants against “the diplomatic path” and “multilateral action” had pretty much ruined his presidency.

There were few times before the bitter end that W. was willing to stand up to Vice.

I'm remembering that "W." had pretty much the same reaction to appointing John Bolton to be our UN Ambassador, standing with him and against his many critics and finally realizing and lamenting that "I spent political capital for him."  No, 'fraid to say my sympathy for G.W. Bush could barely fill a thimble.

Cheney was the one who struggled for months with the Department of Justice over the warrantless surveillance program. Bush was finally informed that officials from the DOJ were prepared to resign as a group over the program's blatant illegality, but he had to do a lot of frantic catch-up because Cheney had kept him completely in the dark about it. Even the President's National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice, and the President's Counter-Terrorism Adviser, Frances Townsend, had very little information about the program.

Former General and Secretary of State Colin Powell is unimpressed with Cheney's "Heads will explode" statement, comparing it to a statement one might find in a supermarket tabloid. Lawrence Wilkerson denies that the Bush Administration continued torturing suspects after the Abu Ghraib photos came out. Gee, if Cheney's favored methods of getting information was so amazingly successful, then why did the Bush Administration feel so free to so completely discard such methods?

--------------
Unsurprising update: Condoleezza Rice strongly disagrees that she "tearfully" said anything to Cheney at any time. That description from Cheney struck me as wishful-thinking, after-the-fact revisionism the moment I heard it.

Colombiana

Very cool flick! Question though, is Colombiana a superheroine? It's not like she explicitly has any superpowers, but her exploits are so fantastically amazing early on, I was completely prepared to exercise suspension of disbelief in later scenes. One of the last scenes, though, is good in that restores a real sense of humanity and realness to the character. She emerges all disheveled and ragged looking, so I accepted that "No, no the character really went through all that and survived solely because she's just an amazing ninja babe-type character."

Just as I said

In former Vice-President Dick Cheney's book, we learn:

The book opens with an account of Mr. Cheney’s experiences during the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, when he essentially commanded the government’s response from a bunker beneath the White House while Mr. Bush — who was away from Washington and hampered by communications breakdowns — played a peripheral role. (emphasis added)

Of course Bush was reduced to playing a peripheral role! As I said back in 2005 (I said it as early as 2002, but this is the earliest point in my blogging that I can locate this statement):

My conclusion that during 9-11, the President should have gotten himself to a command post, either at a base, to Air Force One or onto a ship is based on my Damage-Control experience.

And:

There are two reasons for the President to get to a command post:

1. Safety. A ship or a plane can get underway or take off and can promptly be surrounded by escorts, i.e. other ships and planes. Military bases are normally placed in safe, defensible areas and the base command post is usually well inside the base, able to be surrounded by troops. Of course, there's a reason to want the President to be safe. Being safe is not an end in itself. The President is only one person and there are 250 million other people in the United States for us to worry about. Accordingly, we're concerned about:
   
2. Communications. The other primary reason is so that the President can communicate with the Armed Services. Not just one-way communications. Both directions are needed. The President must be informed in real time as to what's going on and he should respond in real time so that the proper orders can be issued. An example would be during the September 11^th attacks in 2001.

As I said, for Bush to fail to get himself to a command post on the morning of 9-11 constitutes what the UCMJ refers to as Dereliction of Duty. When the President fails to do his job, that's when unauthorized people get the chance to muck things up.

Heated comments

Rick Santorum made some rather angry-sounding, heated comments about Representative Maxine Waters (D-CA). Waters had pressed for job-creation policies and used some rather heated language herself:

"This is a tough game," she explained. "You can't be intimidated. You can't be frightened. And as far as I'm concerned -- the 'tea party' can go straight to hell."

Why is Waters so angry? A lot of her frustration actually has to do with the President.

...Illinois Democrat Jesse Jackson, Jr. says he understands her frustration. “President Obama got 96 percent of [the black] vote but he isn’t dealing with our biggest problem—unemployment—which is more than twice that of whites,” Jackson told Colorlines.com...

And

The Los Angeles representative was unhappy that the president chose to take his recent bus tour through Midwestern rural areas instead of urban centers where blacks live...

Co-founders of the Tea Party Patriots are very unhappy with her remark, of course, and they condemned her remark and asked "Is civility required only of their opponents?" Santorum added:

"She's a caricature of what's wrong with Congress," Santorum told conservative radio host Steve Malzberg. "She's vile. She's always been that way, and she's just one of these real, real nasty, you know, anti-basic traditional, fundamental values of this country."

"This is the left in America. They absolutely despise, you know, the founding principles of this country, that believes in free people, that believes in limited government. She is someone who believes she should control what's going on in America, that she knows best, and that people that stand by constitutional principles of limited government are folks who are to be condemned."

Whoof! Did we get up on the wrong side of the bed this morning?!?!? "Vile"? But what I found especially interesting here is his apparent defense of Herbert Hoover-type policies as opposed to Franklin Roosevelt-type policies. Problem is, if Hoover-type policies were so effective, why aren't Republicans claiming that they're working just fine? It probably doesn't help that economic indicators are getting softer as Republicans pass their 200th day in control of the House of Representatives. Housing sales are off. The economy is dipping. A blogger looks at a growing company (Apple) versus a shrinking company (Eastman Kodak), compares US economic policy to Kodak's and concludes that both the US economy and Kodak are showing poor morale and an aversion to risk that augur poorly for the future. Will the "super committee" created by the debt-ceiling deal accomplish anything? Probably not.

So, I have a feeling that if "basic traditional, fundamental values" were doing well, Santorum wouldn't be nearly as upset. If doing essentially nothing were causing the economy to pick itself up, then Santorum would be much easier and breezy about Waters' criticism. As it is, Santorum sounds pretty bent out of shape about it.