Two columnists and their recommended solutions

Two very refreshing pieces today say a lot about all this bipartisan-y wunnerful goodness of being "above the fray" and "objective" and all that nonsense. A WaPo columnist asks another WaPo columnist, David Broder, about Broder's column on the dysfunctionality of the Senate. Sargent agrees with Broder that the Senate is dysfunctional. Broder quotes a Republican Senator to that effect:

"climate change joined immigration, job creation, food safety, pilot training, veterans' care, campaign finance, transportation security, labor law, mine safety, wildfire management, and scores of executive and judicial appointments on the list of matters that the world's greatest deliberative body is incapable of addressing."

Okay, and Sargent notes that Broder blames:

Many forces -- from the money chase, to the party realignments, to the intrusiveness of 24-hour media -- have weakened the institutional bonds of that Senate. But it is the absence of the ethic embodied and enforced by its leaders that is most crippling.

But isn't there a more comprehensive, unified explanation? Could it be that Republicans have very consciously and deliberately adopted an explicit strategy:

...designed to deny Obama bipartisan cooperation solely to prevent Dems from winning major victories, and to grind the Senate to a halt to make Dems look like ineffective leaders.

It's certainly looked that way to me and many, many progressives from the very beginning of the 2008 Senate. Yet Broder refuses to leave his "above it all" bipartisan-y perch from which he looks down upon the unseemly fight in the Senate and tsk-tsks about the unseemingly-ness of it all. Broder never focuses blame on a specific party for the problem. He keeps it all very vague and very general. An interested citizen has absolutely no idea from Broder's piece if there are any fixes to the problems that he identifies.

Paul Krugman, on the other hand, examines the deficit reduction plan produced by Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin and tells readers why, exactly and in detail, Ryan's plan is wildly impractical and will never work. Krugman's point is quite clear: Never look to Republicans for wisdom on fiscal matters. Unlike Broder's column, Krugman's column gives interested citizens useful and practical guidance as to who they should listen to and/or vote for when it comes to fiscal policy.

Is Krugman wrong? Are Republicans making useful and serious contributions? Should citizens listen to the other side of the aisle? Republicans and other right-wingers and conservatives are certainly free to make these arguments, but Krugman does citizens a real service by starting off with a clear, factually argued foundation from which to examine the question. He doesn't just give us a vague, fuzzy picture from which all we do is throw up our hands and to declare that it's all hopeless.

These two columnists, Broder and Krugman, both examine political problems, but only one gives readers a clear idea of what to do about those problems.

Update: Digby fills us in on the other tricks that Ryan uses to appear to be a serious intellectual. Also, the lawyer/blogger Glenn Greenwald attacks the "muddled moderation" of the Obama Administration in their choice of the colorless, cautious careerist Elena Kagan as the new Supreme Court Justice (She was just recently approved for the position). Kagan doesn't move the Court very far to the right, but she unquestionably does move it a bit to the political right.

Proposed piece: "Where's the peace movement?"

Backstory: Couple of years ago, an executive from the Inky advised us to write articles for the paper. I composed one and sent it in, but it was rejected and they never even told me why, so I stopped. A few days ago, a right-winger in the online comments section of the paper stated that we weren't out in the streets protesting because Obama was a Democrat. When I said that wasn't true, he asked me "Where's the peace movement? I haven't seen a protest since Obama became president." I wrote out an answer, but the Inky didn't see fit to post it, so the following is my answer.

What's the peace movement doing these days? Are they quiet because the peace movement was always just a way to attack a Republican President and now that the President is a Democrat, they're demobilized?

Actually, there was a march back in October 2009 in Philadelphia and another one in Washington DC in March 2010. The NorthWest Greens of Germantown continue to do a weekly vigil at the Borders Bookstore there and the First United Methodist Church of Germantown and other peaceniks do a monthly vigil a few blocks North of City Hall. But yeah, okay, there aren't that major street actions these days. Why would that be?

Well, the withdrawal of US troops from Iraq proceeds on the schedule agreed upon by Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and former US President George W. Bush. The Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) is expected to end by August 2010, the troop level is scheduled to be 50,000 by September 1st and US forces are expected to withdraw completely by the end of 2011. There's really nothing for the peace movement to complain about here as the withdrawal schedule is a matter of an international treaty between two sovereign nations and neither nation appears to have any desire to renegotiate anything about it.

Withdrawal from Afghanistan appeared to also be on schedule until late July 2010 when Vice-President Joe Biden suggested that in July 2011, the scheduled date for the beginning of the withdrawal of US forces from there could see as few as “a couple of thousand” US troops depart. Richard Holbrooke, Obama's special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, testified as to the benchmarks that the US will be utilizing to track the progress towards a full US withdrawal and those benchmarks appear to be awfully vague and frankly, just plain unmeasurable. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton also recently suggested that US troops will be departing as late as the end of 2014.

So, until just a few weeks ago, there may have been suspicions, but there was no real proof that the Obama Administration was planning to overstay its welcome in Afghanistan. Anti-war groups in Philadelphia had already agreed to hold actions in early October 2010 and they're sure to call attention to the administration's plans for remaining in Afghanistan.

But no, I think we can safely say that the relative quiet of the peace movement for the past two years has nothing to do with the president being a Democrat and everything to do with conditions on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Obama Administration should hang its head in shame

Shirley Sherrod, the USDA Georgia Director of Rural Development, told a story from 24 years ago, the heavily-edited tape from that speech was shown and the Obama Administration acted like a bunch of hysterical children, firing Sherrod immediately. Did they get her side of the story first? They say they did, but that appears to an after-the-fact butt-covering excuse. The statement by Tom Vilsack, the US Secretary of Agriculture, said:

The controversy surrounding her comments would create situations where her decisions, rightly or wrongly, would be called into question making it difficult for her to bring jobs to Georgia.

But if her statements were completely fair and appropriate, and the statements were made at an NAACP Freedom Fund dinner, and somehow nobody there got the impression that there was anything controversial about them, then I dunno, but it seems to me that the Cabinet member, and most likely the President who backed up the decision, overreacted to a smear job.

A right-wing blogger, the Anchoress, suspected right off the bat that there was a lot more to the speech by Sherrod than the heavily-edited tape that was released by Andrew Breitbart was letting on:

Doesn't it seem like, after all of that sort of winking, "you and I know how they really are" racist crap wherein Sherrod-intentionally or not-indicts her own narrow focus, she was heading to a more edifying message? What did it open her eyes about? Was she about to say "I took him to one of his own, but it shouldn't have mattered about that; my job was to serve all the farmers who needed help."

Was she about to say, "I learned about myself and about how far we still have to go?" [all emphases in original]

At the same link, MMFA reviews Breitbart's frequent problems with the truth, which of course makes the Obama Administration look even worse. They apparently took the word of a known con man over that of one of their own employees. Speaking from my own experience, I was in the Navy for almost a decade. If I had been caught in an embarrassing posture like Sherrod was, the procedures for my supervisors to have followed would have been crystal clear. My immediate supervisor would have been called. My supervisor would have huddled with me. He/she and I would have gone up the chain of command and would have spoken to the Department Head or the Executive Officer. After that, various huddles would have been held, with people bringing their viewpoints to the Commanding Officer and would probably have resulted in a meeting of myself, my supervisor, my Department Head, the XO and the CO. The final decision would have been something that more or less everybody would have been satisfied was the right thing to do. If I had been right, the chain of command would have stood by me. Had I been wrong, they would have dumped me overboard. But this kind of hasty, panicked decision? This kind of unhinged hysteria?

Sherrod told CNN on Tuesday that she was told repeatedly to resign Monday afternoon after the clip surfaced. "They harassed me," she said. "I got three calls from the White House. At one point they asked me to pull over to the side of the road and do it because you are going to be on Glenn Beck tonight."

Seriously, the White House needs to hang its collective head in shame.

Update by Susan (DailyKos): And some rollback and apologies begin, according to Bloomberg:

The Obama administration apologized to a black USDA employee who was forced to resign after an edited video clip of her remarks suggested she acted with racial bias in dealing with a white farmer 24 years ago.
White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack acted without having all the information about the speech by Shirley Sherrod at an NAACP banquet in Georgia in March. Vilsack is trying to contact Sherrod to discuss whether she will return to the agency, he said.
“A disservice was done,” Gibbs said at a White House briefing. “The secretary will apologize for the actions that have taken place over the past 24 to 36 hours.”

"Disservice" is putting it mildly.
Update: Shirley Sherrod has accepted the apology.

The New Black Panther Party non-story

Stick a fork in it, it's done. Abigail Thernstrom is hardly a liberal on voting issues, but even she agrees that the New Black Panther Party and their antics during the 2008 election aren't worth all of the durm and strang that Fox News has applied to the complete non-story (Fox has featured the non-story 95 times as of July 16th). Fox News person Megyn Kelly defends paying so much attention to the non-story on the grounds of "fidelity to the law," but this concern of hers was something that suddenly appeared on January 20th, 2009. It was nowhere in evidence concerning Bush's warrantless surveillance or on the Bush/Cheney torture policies. So naturally, the WaPo Ombudsman is now convinced that his paper needs to start covering the story!

The timidity of our press corps

Back during the 2008 campaign for the Presidency, Obama, Biden and McCain all found their religious viewpoints examined in great detail. In March 2008, ABC News felt comfortable covering the religious viewpoints, and specifically the religious advisers of, Democratic primary opponents Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton as well as those of John McCain. In September 2007, the Pew Research Center said frankly that Mitt Romney's Mormon faith was held against him to a degree, but in general, the public was inclined to see a mildly-religious candidate as a better one.

Knowledge Resources provides a guide to all of the 2008 candidates' views. Here are some of Sarah Palin's:

Palin’s Pentecostalism and strong social conservatism were among the factors that made her a controversial figure as the election progressed. She spoke about the role her faith played in helping her deal with criticism and her confidence that God would guide the election. She was criticized for stating that U.S. soldiers were on “a task from God” in Iraq, which she later qualified by explaining that she meant that she believes “there is a plan for this world and that plan for this world is for good.” In her interview with Couric, Palin also affirmed her commitment to teaching evolution in school as an accepted scientific principle while allowing for discussion of creationism in classroom debates. However, Palin largely shied away from speaking about religion, discussing her beliefs and their influence on her politics almost exclusively when she was asked about them.

Pentecostalism was developed from 1913 to 1918 and modified in 1946. One of its primary tenets is:

...the Godhead does not consist of three distinct Persons with one substance. Instead, the single Person performs various roles to which He assigns the titles of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

As a direct result of this belief, Pentecostalism believe in "Jesus only" baptism and not baptism in the Holy Trinity and they also believe that the speaking of tongues during baptism indicates a "true" baptism. Did the media in general cover these rather unusual beliefs? In September 2008, PBS did a quickie, once-over-lightly survey of Palin's viewpoints, stating only that

Well, we've been reporting that evangelicals and conservative Catholics who were very lukewarm about John McCain have been thrilled with the selection of Sarah Palin, and so they're working harder, and they are energized.

Granted, most of the short piece focused upon how abortion and religion intersected and not upon religion per se. A Columbia Journalism Review piece from the same month goes over the various controversies over religion and Palin that occurred during the campaign and is notable for the fact that it mostly cites blogs and fairly low-profile reporters. The Washington Times and Rachel Maddow are the highest-profile sources that get cited. So no, the media in general did not cover Palin's beliefs the way they did Obama's, McCain's, Clinton's and Biden's.

The same type of shying away from uncomfortable topics is apparent in the media's coverage of race, specifically, in the way that the right wing treats it and our President. That there's racism being expressed by right-wing Republicans and especially by the Tea Party, is getting harder and harder to deny. The blogger Digby says, concerning Sarah Palin's use of the very racially loaded term "half-black":

That Palin would use this particular description in this particular discussion is revealing. Nobody other than right wingers with racist baggage describe him that way. I give her a break simply because I don't think she's sophisticated enough with language to necessarily know what she's saying.

Media Matters surveys the recent racist behavior and speech of prominent right wing figures like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck and wonders why their views aren't really being covered by the media. The Washington Post/CNN media critic Howard Kurtz recently spoke about Rush Limbaugh's commentary, but MMFA noted some interesting sides to the story that Kurtz politely overlooks:

But please note the recent race-baiting comments that Kurtz could have highlighted on the same Reliable Sources show -- the ones in which Limbaugh claimed Obama was destroying America on purpose in order to make it pay for its historical sin of slavery and discrimination. Kurtz had nothing to say about the jaw-dropping attack that Limbaugh had made, claiming Obama was some sort of black Manchurian Candidate who ran for office because he hates America and specifically, because he resents white America. I wonder if Kurtz failed to highlight those dark, hateful comments because it would be virtually impossible for anyone to suggest that a case could be made that Limbaugh's race-baiting Obama comments were correct.

The problem appears to be that, as with Palin's apparently-heretical religion, it's simply not possible to really discuss racial issues and how Republicans are talking about them without getting, well, judgmental. Kurtz simply can't quote Limbaugh's more jaw-droppingly outrageous comments without appearing to be taking sides against him.

There are two kinds of objectivity. There is the kind where one holds one's fire and carefully considers both or more sides and then delivers a carefully-considered judgment, a judgment that one can comfortably back up with the facts. Then there's the other kind, where one simply doesn't take any position at all and holds ones' fire indefinitely. When one is asked for an opinion, one mumbles or engages in the equivalent of mumbling by delivering a fuzzy or an incoherent opinion.

Unfortunately, our traditional media press corps appears to have gotten very comfortable with the latter kind of pseudo-objectivity that only appears to be objectivity. I call it cowardice.

Funny polling

"Funny" of course means suspicious here. The WaPo begins by asserting that President Obama's approval rating is seriously down "Public confidence in President Obama has hit a new low." The very first question asks for approval/disapproval and the "net" number is 50. Which is about where it's been since December of last year. Sure, confidence (Question 7) was 49 in August of last year and has declined to 43 now. In neither case are we looking at abrupt or massive changes.

I was accused of using a blog post that provided me with an "incorrect reading" and that led me to "publish falsehoods." Not so sure it does either. I quoted Question 26. The WaPo combines that with the previous question to arrive at a combined answer. I strongly disagree with them combining the two questions because they're very different questions. Question 25 asks whether the US should rely on the private sector or the government to pull the economy out of the ditch it's in. Question 26 asks if the US should spend lots of money regardless of whether or not it increases the deficit. Natcherly I agree with the 80% of the public who in Question 26 say "Yeah, go ahead and spend whatever" as the deficit is a vague, abstract concept that hasn't mean much of anything under Republican Presidents since Reagan, but which was regarded as tremendously significant under Carter, and then again under Clinton and then Obama. In any event, it really shouldn't mean a whole lot when we're trying to pull ourselves out of the kind of economic situation we're in.

Nah, this doesn't strike me as a poll designed to get objective measurements on public attitudes.

Silliness from the opposition party

My, my, so what ideas for the nation are being proposed by today's Republican Party? Well, we've got this neat new website being touted as a way for citizens to tell the party what they want. Slight problem with how the idea is being executed, though:

Last week, the top five entries in the "Liberty and Freedom" category were: ban handguns, "drop the idea that we're a 'Christian' country," declare abortion "none of the government's business," allow gays to serve openly in the military and legalize marijuana.

Republican leaders mentioned none of these when they began highlighting proposals from the project.

Nothing wrong with saying certain citizen proposals are unacceptable, regardless of how popular they are with the public. Does kinda raise the question of why the party is even bothering to pretend that citizen input is even being solicited if party leaders are just going to cherry-pick the proposals they like anyway.


Sarah Palin starts off well:

"Something has to be done urgently to stop the out-of-control Obama-Reid-Pelosi spending machine, and no government agency should be immune from budget scrutiny."

Hmm, okay. I'll go with that. Sure, we can always find fraud, waste and abuse to cut out. How's things on the defense procurement front?

"Secretary Gates recently spoke about the future of the U.S. Navy. He said we have to ask whether the nation can really afford a Navy that relies on $3 [billion] to $6 billion destroyers, $7 billion submarines and $11 billion carriers. He went on to ask, 'Do we really need . . . more strike groups for another 30 years when no other country has more than one?' " Palin said. "Well, my answer is pretty simple: Yes, we can and yes, we do, because we must."

Um. So let me get this straight. The "Obama-Reid-Pelosi spending machine" is "out-of-control" and allow me to emphasize this phrase here "...no government agency should be immune from budget scrutiny." But cutting unnecessary weapons systems is completely off the table.


Got it.


How's tax policy going? How is this whole "pay as you go" idea working out when it comes to the Bush tax cuts that did nothing to boost the economy?

WALLACE: We’re running out of time, so how are you going to pay $678 billion just on the tax cuts for people making more than $250,000 a year?

KYL: You should never raise taxes in order to cut taxes. Surely congress has the authority and it would be right, if we decide we want to cut taxes to spur the economy, not to have to raise taxes in order to offset those costs. You do need to offset the cost of increased spending. And that’s what republicans object to. But you should never have to offset cost of a deliberate decision to reduce tax rates on Americans.

In other words, let's not cancel the useless Bush tax cuts, but the Minority Whip Senator John Kyl had zero problems voting against extending unemployment benefits for Americans who still don't have jobs. *Sigh*, so nice to see that some folks are so concerned about their fellow, less fortunate Americans.

Catfood Commission meets this Saturday

Here's the URL to the official invitation page for the "Catfood Commission" (They want to reduce our senior citizens to eating nothing better than catfood during their golden years):

Here's a list of talking points that concerned citizens can use while talking to folks about how terrible the commission is:

Alan Simpson goofs up and admits the real purpose for the commission's existence:

NY Times columnist Paul Krugman wonders what the major malfunction of the deficit scolds can be:

Lengthy piece (20 kilobytes), with FDR quote and a heart-breaking sentence: "The bill failed 57-41." Note that 57 Senators voted FOR the bill and only 41 voted against it. Yes, under the much-abused cloture rule, that was enough to kill the bill that would have saved American jobs.

Comparing crises

WaPo columnist David Broder had a truly stupid column the other day, suggesting that the American public would soon begin comparing President Obama and the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico to Jimmy Carter and the Iranian hostage crisis that occurred on Carter's "watch."

They haven't built a popular new television program around it -- yet. No one has created a new media franchise for himself out of it [yet]. There isn't a name for it that has become part of popular culture [yet]. [emphases and "[yet]" added]

Broder seems to be awfully eager for the BP oil spill to be blamed on Obama, even though it really can't reasonably be blamed on him. But ya know what's interesting? People are blaming the spill on, well, exactly the people who are responsible for it, BP! HuffPo presents "pictures from two of the protests in NYC and DC, calling for the seizure of BP's assets."

Obama and campaign contributions

In today's Inky editorial on the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, a commenter again brings up the fact that Obama received more campaign cash from BP than anybody else did. Over the past 20 years, BP has given a total of $2.89 million via their PAC and about $638,000 via individuals. Obama got a total of $77,051 from them. Does that represent a conflict of interest on Obama's part? Erm, not really. Obama pulled in $388,283,755 for the 2008 campaign. That means BP gave Obama about 0.0002% of his total campaign contributions. Obama's top 20 campaign contributors begin at $1,591,395 (University of CA) and go down to $493,835 (Latham & Watkins). So, no. If one is trying to explain Obama's actions concerning BP via their campaign contributions, one would achieve a major FAIL!

BTW, rather concern-raising message in the same comments thread:

Posted 08:41 AM, 05/30/2010

Kaiser Sosa

nancee - Obama and his cronies have NEVER been against "big government". What are you smoking? The progressives are the enemy within and should be crushed at every turn, in every institution. They are a cancer in our society.

Whooo-weeee! Are we a Glenn Beck listener, perhaps?!?!

And then there are some truly silly people!

A Ms. S.E. Cupp writes an astonishingly stupid piece -

Fallen Rep. Mark Souder, a Republican from Indiana, is just the latest excuse to throw poor abstinence under a bus full of condoms. Salon.com's Alex Pareene wrote about Souder's unseemly tryst with a female staffer - who was not his wife - under the headline, "Abstinence Proselytizer Mark Souder Regrets Nothing." For Pareene, the fact that Souder supported abstinence education is apparently an important thread of the story line.

But why? Granted, the promotional video of Souder and his mistress advocating abstinence is a delightfully vivid and embarrassing twist of irony. But Souder's infidelity, and his inability to abstain from having extramarital sex, has nothing at all to do with abstinence education.

I say this is stupid because abstinence is a great deal more difficult than faithfulness. There are many, many millions of people who observe, at the minimum, "serial monogamy," restricting their sexuality for just one person, or at least just one person at a time. Going without sex entirely is a great deal harder. Souder's inability to restrain himself and to limit his sexuality to just one person shows us that abstinence is an unrealizable ambition, even among those who announce, with great zeal and conviction, that they can do it. Souder's infidelity has absolutely everything to do with abstinence.


The problem that right-wingers have constantly had with their lecturing us progressives on sexuality is that they're committed to an impossible ideal. An ideal that I'm not even sure is actually healthy.

Status on Arizona's anti-immigrant "Show me your papers" law

Seattle has now become the 11th city to boycott Arizona in reaction to their draconian "Show me your papers" law. Several other cities are considering following suit. The law is scheduled to go into effect on July 23rd, but may be overturned before then as there are presently five legal challenges against it. What would those challenges be based on? Well, a phrase that jumped out at me from Section 2, paragraph B is:

FOR ANY LAWFUL CONTACT MADE BY A LAW ENFORCEMENT OFFICIAL OR AGENCY OF THIS STATE OR A COUNTY, CITY, TOWN OR OTHER POLITICAL SUBDIVISION OF THIS STATE WHERE REASONABLE SUSPICION EXISTS THAT THE PERSON IS AN ALIEN WHO IS
UNLAWFULLY PRESENT IN THE UNITED STATES, A REASONABLE ATTEMPT SHALL BE MADE, WHEN PRACTICABLE, TO DETERMINE THE IMMIGRATION STATUS OF THE PERSON. THE PERSON'S IMMIGRATION STATUS SHALL BE VERIFIED WITH THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT
PURSUANT TO 8 UNITED STATES CODE SECTION 1373(c).

What exactly does "lawful contact" mean? That's hard to say. The cited blogger claims that he's searched the Arizona Revised Statutes and has no idea what the phrase actually means. The Arizona Republican House majority's Homeland Security research analyst, Rene Guillen, says:

[L]awful contact is definitely different than reasonable suspicion in terms of the initiation of the contact. So lawful contact is essentially any interaction a police officer may have with an individual through the normal legal, lawful course of the performance of their duties. So it wouldn't just be those suspected of crimes. It could be victims, witnesses or just people who are lawfully interacting with the police officer where through the course of that contact they are able to build reasonable suspicion and therefore inquire.

With 27% of their players being Latinos, the Major League Baseball Player’s Association has taken the lead against Arizona's law.

Players don’t want to go back to an era where they were welcome to play but not welcome to stay. After they play, players want to be able to drive, eat, shop and sleep without being forced to “show their papers.” They don’t want their wives, children and family members hassled and deprived of their due process either.

Attorney General Eric Holder embarrassed himself and his office when he "under repeated questioning by Senator Hunt of Texas, he finally admitted he had not read the Arizona law." The Attorney General shouldn't have read the law simply because he might be questioned on it, but because it's a law that's being intently discussed and the nation's chief law enforcement officer should be knowledgeable about it.

A right-winger I was corresponding with made the charge that the Secretary of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano, said something similar, so I headed over to Fox News (To ensure that I was getting the most damaging statement possible) and the statement was: "I've not reviewed it in detail. I certainly know of it, Senator." I found this to be less than incriminating. Not great, but not a statement that she simply hadn't read it.

Senator John McCain (R-AZ), who's in a tough re-election fight, showed a less-than-complete familiarity with the law:

“I haven’t had a chance to look at all the aspects, but I do understand why the Legislature would act,” he said. Even though it wasn’t clear to him “whether all of it is legal or not,” he said state lawmakers “acted out of frustration because the federal government didn’t do its job.” [emphasis in blog post]

Not much worse than Napolitano's statement.

The Arizona Association of Police Chiefs is opposed to the law, though they assure us they'll enforce it anyway. Sarah Palin says: "We're all Arizonans now!" Uh, as Tonto says when he and the Lone Ranger find themselves surrounded by potentially-hostile Native Americans: "What do you mean 'we' white man?"

And now this gets really good. The sponsor of SB1070 is now trying to overturn the 14th Amendment and to outlaw "Anchor Babies."

[T]he 1898 case United States v. Wong Kim Ark demonstrated without reservation that an American-born child of foreign parents was automatically a United States citizen, even if those parents were in the country illegally.

Republican State Senator from Arizona Russell Pearce wants to overturn that and to make the children of undocumented persons not-US citizens.

Broder's "reporting"

David Broder starts by lavishly complimenting his subject, Senator Bob Bennett (R-UT).

Bennett, 76, who followed his father to Washington and Capitol Hill, is the kind of legislator reporters value, because he can speak thoughtfully and dispassionately about his colleagues' collective mood without subjecting you to gobs of self-serving rhetoric.

Bennett then complains that the Federal Government is "big and intimidating, and it's out of control." Ehh, I agree that it's big because, well, it's dealing with big problems. It's a nice theory that we can get along with no authority higher than that of a county sheriff, but what is a county sheriff supposed to do about, say, a massive oil leak about a mile under the ocean's surface? If BP could have dealt with the problem by itself, I presume it would have done so.

This uncertainty is compounded by political and economic trends, and by individual companies quietly disregardful imposed regulations.

As the Deepwater incident reveals, shareholders are responding to uncertainty and complexity by demanding additional disclosure on environmental practices, safety protocols, overall risk exposure and a company’s response to forthcoming regulations. [emphases added]

Yes, the Federal Government fell down on the job of regulating BP so that the spill might never have happened, BP was clearly cutting corners, they didn't even have an up-to-date disaster recovery plan in effect, but that's hardly an argument for shrinking the government and making it even less effective. President Obama may not have fixed the problem by now, but he's at least got people working hard to try and solve it.

The Federal Government is "out of control"? Really? How, exactly, has the government demonstrated that it's "out of control"? Bennett's primary example is that

...Democratic Speaker Nancy Pelosi forced an unusual Sunday session of the House of Representatives to push through an amended version of the Obama administration's health-care bill. "It was a Sunday, which is a very special day for me and my fellow Mormons," Bennett said. "And it was really a display of partisan political muscle."

Awwwww. Weep. Sob. Wail. It of course never occurs to the columnist playing stenographer to the Senator to point out to readers that Republicans were digging in their heels and fighting the passage of the Affordable Care Act every single inch of the way and were using every single, solitary parliamentary trick and procedure at their disposal to delay the vote in any way possible, thereby making a Sunday session a necessity if the wishes of the majority of the American people who voted for a President who clearly and explicitly promised to pass a health care reform bill were to be respected. But nooooo, Broder can't possibly introduce any objectivity, why, that's something only a reporter might do!

Bennett attributed his difficulties to a mainstream reaction against the centralization of power in the capital...

You mean the tea party folks? Not only were the tea party people never the majority of the country, their main figurehead, Glenn Beck, has clearly seen his days of fame and glory come and go.

Think about all the magazine covers, the massive amount of media coverage and free publicity that Beck generated over the past 12 months. Think about the fact that Beck is supposed to be at the forefront -- the media point person -- for a burgeoning political, right-wing revolution that's unfolding across the country. Beck is the anointed leader of the almighty Tea Party movement. And what does he have to show for it one year later in a nation of 300 million people? About 100,000 more television viewers.

Nah, the tea party's big moment in the sun was last year's 9/12 rally in Washington D.C., a gathering of around 70,000 people. Not a bad number to assemble on the National Mall by any means, but there have been no similarly large gatherings since and their lobbying has definitely hit the point of diminishing returns. No, sorry to inform Senator Bennett, but "reaction against the centralization of power" doesn't explain much of anything.

The same sentiment carried to Arkansas, where incumbent Democratic Sen. Blanche Lincoln was forced into a runoff by her labor-backed challenger, Lt. Gov. Bill Halter.

Uh, Blanche Lincoln failed because she was shown to be a corporate shill who couldn't care less about anybody who makes under a quarter of a million dollars a year. The "same sentiment" had nothing to do with anything. Broder also attempts to draw the once-Republican Arlen Specter into the same corral, but again, his grand, sweeping generalizations have nothing to do with the reality of Tuesday's races.

Sorry, but Broder and his subject, Senator Bennett, have both achieved a major FAIL!

Latest updates on BP oil blow-out

Unfortunately, when it comes to the British Petroleum (BP) oil blow-out in the Gulf of Mexico, the one phrase that keeps coming to my mind is the title of the UCMJ charge (Article 92) "Dereliction of Duty." (Frankly, if America were to settle on a single phrase with which to sum up the years of the younger George Bush, that's my nomination) The latest news makes it clear that, sure enough, there was massive failure due to dereliction on the part of regulators. As Stephen Lendman in PhillyIMC puts it:

-- since 2001, 69 deaths and 1,349 injuries have occurred from Gulf drilling operations as a result of 858 fires and explosions on 90 big rigs and 3,500 production platforms;

-- the US Minerals Management Service (MMS) issued 150 reports "documenting non-compliant offshore drilling operations;"

-- 172 Gulf spills exceeding 2,100 gallons have occurred in the past decade;

*snip*

On May 5, Public Citizen's Tyson Slocum reported that BP has "the worst safety and environmental record of any oil company operating in America." In recent years alone, it pled guilty to two crimes (among many), paying over $730 million in fines and settlements to the federal and state governments and civil lawsuits for "environmental crimes, willful neglect of worker safety rules, and penalties for manipulating energy markets."

Lendman cites a lengthy history of violations and the coziness between Barack Obama and BP going back many, many years. Personally, I see the Bush and Obama coziness with oil companies in general as being far more similar than they are different. Sure, Obama may have inherited a bad situation, but he wasn't inclined to do very much to change that situation. By the same token, Bush may have inherited a bad national security situation from Clinton, but there isn't the slightest shred of evidence that he did anything to affirmatively change that situation before 9/11.

So, can we blame Clinton for 9/11 or Bush for BPs appalling record of sloppy and derelict work? Negative. Both Bush and Obama are responsible for the problems on their watch as neither of them did anything to change the situations they inherited. There's no evidence that had either crisis occurred a year later, that the situation would have been any different as neither president was making any effort to change their respective situations.


Heh! President Obama is now planning to "get mad" about offshore drilling. Yeah, a bit late on that.


Does the BP oil spill equal "Obama's Katrina"? Uh, no. That's a truly stupid comparison as Obama's team was on top of the blow-out situation as soon as it occurred and both BP and Obama's team have been making apparently sincere and strenuous efforts to fix the problem. Sure, BP is also strenuously trying to underplay the problem:

"It's been 21 years and the litigation between the federal government and Exxon is still not over."

What he details next, however is telling “The executives at BP must be reading the Exxon spill response playbook because they’re doing exactly what Exxon did,” he said. For those of you without access to the oily inner sancta, the playbook’s rules are these:
1 — Understate the amount of oil spilled.
2 — Understate the environmental damage caused by the oil.
3 — Overstate the effectiveness of your company’s response.
4 — Try to buy off the locals with tiny amounts of money (BP is offering $5,000 each to coastal residents in Mississippi) in exchange for waivers promising not to sue for damages.
5 — Slap gag orders on anyone doing business with the corporation. (Fishermen who want work from BP in the cleanup efforts have to agree in writing not to speak to the media. The gag orders are legally meaningless; it’s the intimidation factor that counts.)

The dispersants that BP has slopped all over the spill are somewhat helpful. Climate Progress says: "Chemically dispersing oil spills 'solves the political problem of visible oil but not the environmental problem,' ” but there's no indication that BP and Obama's team aren't doing their best to fix the leak and to prevent any more oil from gushing into the sea than necessary. The really serious problem is that the bulk of the oil may lie about 200 to 300 feet below the surface, where it's pretty much impossible to track. We may never know where the oil is going to end up until it suddenly starts washing up on beaches hundreds, perhaps even thousands of miles from the spill.


FireDogLake has a whole webpage devoted to tracking the spill and what's being done to stop it.

More on oil well blowout

Investigations are now showing that there were serious problems with one department communicating with another and that engineers wasted many precious hours working with inaccurate diagrams.

Who ordered the alterations in the blowout preventer, the 500,000-pound mass of gears and hydraulic valves that sits atop and underwater well and is intended to snap the pipe if disaster threatens, was the subject of dispute at Wednesday's hearing.
Transocean, the owner of the blowout preventer and of the sunken Deepwater Horizon rig, said any alterations would have come at BP's instigation; BP, which owns the well and hired Transocean to drill it, said it had never sought the changes.
Rep. Bart Stupak, D-Mich., chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, said the changes prevented BP's engineers from activating a "variable bore ram" intended to close tight around the pipe and seal it.
"When they investigated why their attempts failed to activate the bore ram," Stupak said of BP engineers, "they learned that the device had been modified. A useless test ram _ not the variable bore ram _ had been connected to the socket that was supposed to activate the variable bore ram."
"An entire day’s worth of precious time had been spent engaging rams that closed the wrong way.” [emphasis added]

FDL has a webpage summarizing and keeping track of the unfolding disaster.
This reminds me of the time when my father and I were reviewing the Battle of the Monitor and the Merrimack. I came across the item that pointed out that actually, had the Monitor's guns been tested to their full extent, their cannonballs would have torn right through the Merrimack's armor and ended the battle very quickly. Dad pointed out "The people who denied victory to the Union were not the people on the ship. The person who messed up was the guy in charge of the testing program. Had he done his job, the Monitor would have promptly knocked out the Merrimack!" His statement rung true then and rings true today. The battle doesn't always depend on those who are on the front lines. Sometimes, it's the people long ago and far away who are decisive.

Deepwater Horizon BP oil well

Michael "Heckuva job, Brownie" Brown of FEMA during the Hurricane Katrina clusterf*** in New Orleans, had an interview with MSNBC in which he made the wild, hysterical, unhinged claim that the Obama Administration delayed its response to the blow-out of the Deepwater Horizon oil well owned by British Petroleum (BP). To its credit, MSNBC responded with a good deal of skepticism and questioned his claims.

Fox News also hosted Brown and failed to question any of his claims and so got spanked by the President's Press Secretary Robert Gibbs.

The whole idea that the Obama Administration's response to the BP oil spill compares in any possible way, shape or form to Bush's Katrina response completely falls apart once the facts are known.

The problem with, as Brown puts it, the media showing pictures of Bush playing guitar during Katrina was that it made the whole government response look incompetent. And hey, President Obama didn't go to the Gulf of Mexico until very recently. Problem with this theory though, was that the picture of Bush playing guitar as people in New Orleans drowned was that it very precisely describd exactly what the situation in August 2005 was. Bush's whole government was asleep at the wheel and failed to effectively respond until FAR too many days after the disaster. Obama's government, as one person put it "Scored 100 out of 100 in its' response," which is why the press, try as it might, can't seem to find anyone of any seriousness or credibility to say that Obamas' response was slow or in any way faulty.


Good pieces with extensive details on the crisis. One. Two.

Interesting conspiracy theory on the initial blow-out

Evidence, the nature of

I had a dispute with a right-winger today in the comments section to the Inky's letters page. I had commented earlier on the astroturfed nature of the teabaggers (Nah, we can't call them that in these comments as the Inky won't allow those comments to be posted).

Posted 09:05 AM, 05/01/2010

turkytom

rich! Tea party folks are accused of racial taunts against reps, and nothing caught on tape anywhere... Lewis turned down an offer to get $10,000 donated to a black scholarship if he submitted to a lie detector test. The same offer was made for anyone who could produce any recordings of those slurs. Nothing. Yet that lie is still told. But video evidence of not taunts, but outright violence, and you brush it off with "No blood, no injuries, no sort of limp"!!!

To which I responded:

Posted 09:15 AM, 05/01/2010

rich2506

turkeytom, there were several reporters present who testified to the insults. How one Earth did anyone prove anything before the invention of cheap, handheld video cameras?

Later:

Posted 11:14 AM, 05/01/2010

turkytom

Rich, the homophobic comment was reported by several, and the TP'rs turned on the person immediately, Nobody has documented the racial slurs.

Teabaggers turning on the homophobe is news to me (No one ever denied that Representative Barney Frank (D-MA) was called a "faggot"). I certainly never heard of any teabaggers "turning on" the person. But the racial slurs were not documented?!?!? From the Huffington Post:

Three Democratic congressmen – all black – say they heard racial slurs as they walked through thousands of angry protesters outside the U.S. Capitol. A white lawmaker says he heard the epithets too. Conservative activists say the lawmakers are lying.
-----------
The dispute pits the lawmakers – one of them, Lewis, is a leader and survivor of 1960s civil rights battles – against conservatives determined to counter claims of racism within the predominantly white and middle-aged tea party movement.
----------
A fourth Democrat, Rep. Heath Shuler of North Carolina, who is white, backed up his colleagues, telling the Hendersonville (N.C.) Times-News that he heard the slurs.

And I'm sorry, I really hate quoting Bill O'Reilly as the sensible voice of reason here, but:

O'Reilly said, "Just because it's not on tape doesn't mean it's fabricated."

And I agree, since when does the lack of video evidence prove anything? If there was no video of the name-calling, well, there very simply was no video of it. I don't blame Lewis for not wanting to drag the issue out by submitting to a lie-detector test. I frankly think he was probably pretty insulted by the notion that he might have lied and would have to prove otherwise.

Widely accessible video cameras are a pretty recent invention. Did people have no way of proving anything before video cameras? Nothing was considered "documented" until it could be electronically recorded? Needless to say, such a concept would be news to a lawyer, who deals in eyewitness evidence all the time.

BTW, the dispute that "turkytom" refers to is over Kenneth Gladney, who another commenter described as "savagely beaten." That description would lead one to believe that Gladney spent some time in intensive care, followed by recovery time in a hospital bed. In reality, Gladney never even took any medical complaints to a paramedic, let alone a doctor. The video that was shot of that incident shows Gladney tussling with a union person, then getting right up minus any visible evidence of any sort of injury. Not saying that the union person was right to be tussling with Gladney in the first place, but "savagely beaten" is obviously an absolutely HUGE overstatement.

Perceptions of strength/weakness

Daily Kos, in their daily Pundit Round-up, reprinted a bit of Thomas Friedman's column today:

Thomas Friedman:

Have no illusions, the rest of the world was watching our health care debate very closely, waiting to see who would be the strong horse — Obama or his Democratic and Republican health care opponents? At every turn in the debate, America’s enemies and rivals were gauging what the outcome might mean for their own ability to push around an untested U.S. president.
It remains to be seen whether, in the long run, America will be made physically healthier by the bill’s passage. But, in the short run, Obama definitely was made geopolitically healthier.

The site responded:

That's very funny, because it's exactly how pundits react. It's why Bush got a pass for so many years from the Heathers in the press. Friedman was no exception.

My own response to Friedman's column was:

Re: "Everybody Loves a Winner" Apr 21

Many years ago, I attempted to test the prevailing assumption I found among the right wing that certain nations were either strong or weak in their pursuit of military objectives (The theory had already taken a big hit when the Jewish people, historically considered weak because they had no state of their own, suddenly became perceived as strong when they prevailed over their Arab neighbors) and looked at France's withdrawal from the Second Italian War of Independence in 1859 and again at France's performance in World War I, specifically during the battle of Verdun in 1916. In 1859, after the French-assisted victory at Solferino, Napoleon III surveyed the battlefield, became sickened by the carnage and withdrew his forces short of final victory over the Austrian occupiers of Italy. In 1916, Frenchmen stood firm against the German assault and ultimately prevailed and joined the final Allied push against the Germans in 1918.
What was the difference? Very simply, the goals. In the first instance, Napoleon III was simply interested in glory and empire-building. In the second, France was fighting for survival itself.
To think that one can learn something meaningful about how President Obama will handle foreign crises by observing how he deals with Republicans strikes me as a typically right-wing perspective. That's like saying that the US was perceived as weak in 1975 because it got booted out of Vietnam. Nonsense! Perceptions of US power were unaltered by the Vietnam debacle because political leaders around the world are not, by and large, idiots. Political leaders are, as a group, generally smart enough to realize that how hard a nation fights for a goal has absolutely everything to do with how important that goal is.

Update: Poor Friedman simply has no clue. The guy babbles on about a "Green Tea Party" as though the teabaggers could possibly care less about the environment.

Digby:

One more time, with feeling. They are not populists and they are not libertarians. They are what is known as the far right. And their organizing principle is hatred of liberalism (and those it serves) and government when it is in the hands of the Democratic Party. That's all there is to it.

Balloon juice:

And those crowds of angry white old people screaming “keep government out of my medicare” and waving signs of “Drill, baby, drill?” They sure as hell don’t care about the environment and are not going to become some sort of “Green Tea Party.”

Friedman then babbles on about the "radical center" and how Senators Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Joe Lieberman (I-CT) and John Kerry (D-MA) are cooperating on energy legislation, but Graham has (Quite sensibly, if you look at it from a purely tactical perspective) declared that he's willing to toss out months of work if he doesn't get his way on the bill. Look for lots of liberal cave-ins and concessions and hand-wringing about how if we don't give Graham everything he wants, he'll walk.

The Tea Partiers

Well, the numbers are in. The polls have been done and the people who support the Tea Parties are essentially the ol' "Bush dead-enders," the people who continued to stand by G.W. Bush after the Terri Schiavo mess (Terri was brain-dead, but the anti-abortionists refused to take her husband's solemn word on that and insisted that Terri be kept on a feeding tube) and the flooding of New Orleans that resulted from Hurricane Katrina and Bush's apparent indifference to the city's agony. Keep in mind that Bush rushed back to Washington DC in order to sign a bill demanding that Schiavo be kept on her feeding tube, but that he didn't meaningfully react to the declaration of a state of emergency in New Orleans by Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco (August 26th) until September 2nd, when he took an aerial tour of the city and serious federal help didn't arrive until two days after that.

The Tea Party folks are the same quarter of the country that continued to support Bush even after these two incidents. The hardest of the hard-core Tea Partiers, people who watch Glenn Beck's show on the Fox News channel, have hit their numerical peak and his audience has begun to decline. A few albums after Michael Jackson released Thriller, someone commented "His big earning years are behind him." Jackson remained culturally relevant for many more years, but he had already seen what Bruce Springsteen would have referred to as his "Glory Days." So too, will Beck continue to be culturally relevant, but it's apparently safe to say he's seen his "big earning years" come and go.

Are the Tea Party folks historically unprecedented? Are they a unique thing to have burst upon the national scene? No. The US saw just such an angry, bitter movement in reaction to the election of a Democratic President in 1961, 1977 and 1993. There's nothing new or unusual about the Tea Party movement save for the fact that the Tea Partiers are supported by corporate PR firms practicing what's referred to as "astroturf" (As opposed to "grassroots") politics. See especially action item 2 on this press release ("Final showdown against Obamacare 2.0 this weekend!")

2) Protest outside the local, district office of your Congressman at 12pm on Saturday. You can find his or her office location by clicking here. Bring your friends and some signs, and alert the local media.

It's not that astroturf efforts are illegitimate, but such efforts have less credibility than true grassroots efforts that take place because citizens are spontaneously reacting to an issue and forming up without a whole lot of leadership from "above." A look at how the Tea Parties are actually run:

I noted a few months back TPM Media's report that the PAC that organized the Tea Party Express, a series of right-wing nationwide bus tours and rallies, had sent nearly two thirds of its spending during a recent reporting period right back to the GOP consulting firm that spawned it. Today, Politico's Ken Vogel provides more details of the Tea Party Express' operations, including the original memo from a consultant with the firm, Russo Marsh + Rogers, proposing its creation.

The same piece goes on to note how Fox News' management reacted when one of its TV hosts tried to cash in for himself as opposed to pitching in to help out his corporate supervisors.

What's next for the Bush dead-enders? Well, it looks like they're planning a Second Amendment March in Washington DC. Unfortunately, these folks now seem to be actively promoting sedition, a term last heard before and during the Civil War. When protesters begin actively brandishing weapons, the movement has gone beyond mere peaceful, civil protest and starts to become truly dangerous.

The Affordable Care Act a few weeks later

So, the Affordable Care Act (ACA) passed the House on March 21st and now it's all a matter of implementation. How is that going? Well, in an entirely predictable and in fact, widely predicted move, the private, for-profit health insurance industry is working very energetically to find all the possible loopholes and fuzzy definitions and anything else they can use to defeat the whole purpose for passing the ACA to begin with. That this was going to be a problem became clear on the 25th, less than a week after the ACA was passed in the House

President Obama endured some mockery from the press corps when his answer to a single constituent question stretched all the way to 17 minutes, but the blogger writing about it was cheered by the fact that Obama defended the whole idea of activist government that picks up where private enterprise leaves off, where private enterprise simply can't do the necessary job.

On the other side of the aisle, right-wingers are absolutely miserable about it. They feel America is becoming "indistinguishable from the Canadians and the Europeans" and, wonder of wonders, they consider that to be a bad thing. Looking at the comments on the Inky's letters page one would get the impression that the tea partiers were not screaming, tantrum-throwing, out-of-control wingnuts, but were instead just cheerful, earnest, honest citizens who were outraged about out of control government spending, which of course, didn't bother them the slightest under the last president. Fortunately, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) doesn't appear to think that there's much chance that the ACA will be repealed, even as Rep. Tom Price (R-GA) appears to be pining for the "good ol' days," which doesn't sound like he means just the pre-Obama era, but appears to share with many other right-wingers a desire to return to the "Gilded Age" of the 1880s. A major problem with that, of course, is that the Republican Party is caught between a rock and a hard place where spending on specific projects is actually quite popular, even if spending in general is theoretically frowned upon.

Oh, and encouraging words on interrogation practices from the head of the CIA’s National Clandestine Service

And both I and a fellow progressive wrote about the problems the Roman Catholic Church is having with the Pope and pedophilia.


And no, I'm very unimpressed with the Vatican's pushback published in the Inky.


Update: Digby is the blogger who came up with the term "The Village" with which so many describe the traditional media press corps today. It's funny how "The Villagers" do these cute little anthropological-type expeditions out into "The Real America" and always seem to find right-wingers. They never appear to run across any liberal or non-white groups and they have a tendency to focus on small, yes, villages, to focus on. Hmm. Very interesting how that happens.