James O'Keefe and "punking"

I don't agree that James O'Keefe's ACORN videos proved that ACORN was corrupt, but otherwise, this post from the right-wing blog RedState sums up the latest O'Keefe cluster**** very nicely:

If an enterprising citizen can expose media bias with a video camera and good idea, that’s a good thing. But I fail to see how luring a lone female reporter to a remote location and isolating her on a boat, surrounding her with sex toys and pornography, and trying to convince her that the virtual stranger sitting next to her is coming on to her, possibly in front of a “sex tape machine,” does that. That’s not a recipe for a gotcha video, it’s more like a step-by-step instruction on how to cause discomfort and fear. What an ugly and potentially traumatic situation to create on purpose. It’s not clever or funny, it’s sick.
There will no doubt be more details and, one assumes from the reporting, emails, that will fully establish who wrote what and whether O’Keefe was going to go through with the plan or not. Those details will probably be reported by Boudreau, an actual journalist.
So no, I don’t think “stunt” or “prank” are the right words. I think the one I would use is “despicable.”

Media Matters looks at the praise O'Keefe previously received.

I get comments

Got my letter published in the Inky on Sep 16th

Can't blame all Muslims for 9/11

Re: "Imam: Mosque not on hallowed ground," Tuesday:

I fully appreciate the feelings of former New York Deputy Fire Chief Jim Riches, who in discussing the Islamic community center planned for a location close to the 9/11 site, which already has an exotic-dance club nearby, said: "The strip club didn't murder my son." Well, yes, but neither did all Muslims collaborate in murdering Riches' son.

It's entirely reasonable to say that Japan, meaning the entire Japanese nation, was responsible for the 1941 attack at Pearl Harbor. The Japanese emperor approved the attack, and the Japanese navy carried it out. It's entirely reasonable to say that Germany carried out the Holocaust. Germany's dictator ordered it in his position as head of state, and German officials committed to obeying the dictator carried it out.

There is no way to assign blame for 9/11 to any part of the Muslim world except al-Qaeda. How many people does al-Qaeda represent? It was being sheltered in Afghanistan at the time of the attacks, but it didn't control Afghanistan.

Continued

Blue Dog Democrats bite Democratic Party

This is a very serious reason why progressives never liked Rahm Emanuel, the President's Chief Of Staff. Emanuel likes to recruit DINO's (Democrats In Name Only) to run against Republicans. This strategy results in not giving voters much of a choice. They can take the real Republican supplied by the Republican Party or they can take one of Rahm's pseudo-Republicans. In the video on this blog post, Fox News (I don't blame Fox News in the slightest for re-running this Democratic ad as they're simply pointing out Emanuel's stupidity) runs the ad of a Democrat who positions himself as an independent by trashing both Republicans and Speaker Pelosi.

Not only is this a complete failure of Democratic Party messaging ("Our guy is smarter/more moral/better than the Democratic Speaker of the House") and not only does it severely weaken the Democratic brand as a whole, but it doesn't even result in Senators or Representatives who toe the party line when they're called upon to do so.

We can see in this table that some Democratic Congresspeople who voted against the Affordable Care Act in early November 2009 had good reason to do so. Democratic Representative Chet Edwards (TX-District 17) won his last election by only eight points, but McCain won that district by 35 points. Walt Minnick (ID-District 1) squeezed into office by one point, but McCain won his district by 26 percent. Others are less explicable. Larry Kissell (NC-District 8) won by a comfortable eight points and Obama won his district by five points. John Barrow (GA-District 12) won by 32 points and Obama by 11. Why aren't these people loyal to the Democratic Party platform? Why can't they put their votes with the party that put them into office? In all, there are 30 Democrats who won their races by over 10 points, but who nevertheless sided against the Democratic Party on a major issue.

Seven Democratic Senators and one Independent tossed up a temporary roadblock to the ACA, all of whom fall into the Blue Dog category. Eventually, all eight Senators voted for the bill, but:

The idea of a full-blown government-run insurance option, heatedly debated for months, would be jettisoned under the tentative agreement reached by Senate Democratic liberals and moderates and announced Tuesday night. In its place would be the expansion of Medicare, as well as new nationwide private plans to be run by the same agency that oversees the system that lawmakers use for themselves and their families.

As we now know, the Medicare buy-in plan was also jettisoned. It's really far from clear what the Democratic Party gains by getting Blue Dog Democrats into office. I mean, yeah great, they get to say that they're in the majority (Which does indeed have some worthwhile perks) and some bills get passed, but those bills get through the process all chopped and sliced and cut up.

Emanuel's strategy just looks to me like an extremely flawed strategy that includes some serious drawbacks. When Blue Dog Democrats win races, it's far from clear that the Democratic Party can really say that it's come out ahead. There's simply no assurance that the Democratic party has gained a reliably Democratic vote. And as we can see in the ad that was re-run by Fox News, neither is there any assurance that a Blue Dog Democrat won't disrespect the Democratic Party leadership in the process of ensuring their own political survival.

People I have very little use for

Sometimes, there are so many awful people in the world, ya just can' write just one piece on them.

David Broder commends Senator John McCain (R-AZ) for winning a fifth term as Senator. This sentence of Broder's was especially disturbing:

Nor was I bothered by the doctrinal compromises the senator made in order to convince Arizona voters that he was, in fact, a conservative.

This brings to mind the declaration of Thomas Paine in 1776:

The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.

Broder had said earlier in the piece:

Now that John McCain has taken care of his political business in Arizona, it is time for him to return to Washington and the responsibilities he bears...

No, it isn't. You see, to my mind, a "leader" who only leads when the grubby business of getting re-elected has been safely taken care of isn't a leader at all, but a mercenary and an opportunist. A true leader doesn't wait until "political business" is all taken care of, a true leader acts anyway and shrugs his shoulders at the possible consequences.

Broder indicts the traditional press corps far more than he realizes here:

McCain is one of the few names that does not draw instant contempt from the voters.

Gee, that wouldn't have anything to do with the mad man-love that the traditional media press corps showed for McCain during the 2008 election, would it? Could it be that McCain doesn't really deserve adulation, but because the media insisted on painting him in such a flattering colors, that he gets it anyway?

Broder finishes up with:

In Arizona, he successfully steered the GOP away from an experiment in extremism.

Erm, no he didn't. McCain unreservedly backed the "Show me your papers" law that promised to secure Arizona's Southern border by authorizing their police to stop all brown people on sight. Fortunately, and no thanks whatsoever to McCain, the law has not been implemented yet. My experience is that with people who actually have principles, true principle is an all-the-time thing. True principle is not something that someone occasionally or every now and then upholds, it's something that someone upholds all the time and under all circumstances. I'm not saying that the "summer soldier and the sunshine patriot" don't have their uses or that they're always worthless, just that they don't deserve to be lionized as heroes. McCain is a survivor, nothing more. He deserves nothing in the way of respect and Broder deserves far less for handing out unwarranted praise.

------------

David Paterson, Governor of New York, has attempted to find a possible compromise on the Burlington Coat factory that some New York City Muslms want to turn into a community center and that will include a prayer room. 60% of the American public opposes building it, at least where it will be located. Folks are calling it the "Ground Zero Mosque" even though it's two blocks and a corner away from Ground Zero, the site of the World Trade Center that was attacked on 11 September 2001 and where nearly 2,700 lives were lost. Problem: Paterson has suggested moving the site of the community center. Not only would this constitute surrendering to bigotry, but the people there chose that site for a reason, i.e., there's a community in the vicinity that will use it. If we look at the comments from Sister Toldjah, various right-wing commenters on Free Republic and a piece from Front Page Magazine, it's pretty clear there's not much appetite on the right wing for compromise. So why is Paterson willing to surrender the principle at stake? Why is he willing to give in to opponents, especially when it's far from clear how far is far enough and how close is too close? I've seen plenty of vague, general statements on the community center being "too close," but nothing saying "At least three blocks" or anything specific of that nature. Also, as a 9/11 Widow puts it, "politicians are using the issue for political gain." She states several good reasons to fight the bigotry and build the center. Why does Paterson want to start haggling over distance when the issue is very clearly a lot larger than that?

----------------

Alan Simpson, the Co-Chairman of the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform (Known by progressives as the "Cat Food Commission" because it's been pretty obvious to progressives that all of the membes would like to see Social Security recipiets living on nothing better than cat food) made a real howler of a statement:

Yes, I've made some plenty smart cracks about people on Social Security who milk it to the last degree. You know 'em too. It's the same with any system in America. We've reached a point now where it's like a milk cow with 310 million tits!

A very serious problem was that the statement was reported on August 25th. By the 26th "The White House accepted Alan Simpson’s apology regarding the sexist, demeaning comments..." which, along with Simpson's status on the Cat Food Commission, indicates that portraying Social Security recipients as baby calves greedily sucking away at a government program to the point where they endanger the "milk cows" health is perfectly acceptable. As Jane Hamsher of FDL points out, Simpson is hardly some "rogue operator" who just makes crazy statements which then indicate that he, personally, is crazy. No, Simpson's crazy statements are extremely important because in one instance "he had just come from the closed door meeting and was clearly saying what everyone in the room was thinking but wouldn’t say publicly."

The extremely good question here is that the Cat Food Commission is trying to solve the not-very-urgent problem of the deficit, but it's far from clear that attacking Social Security has anything to do with the deficit, so why are they making so much noise about Social Security? James Galbraith's piece (PDF) on Social Security shows that Social Security and Medicare “solvency” is not part of the Commission’s mandate to begin with and that as a transfer program, Social Security is irrelevant to deficit economics in any event.

Yeah, Simpson needs to be fired, but far more importantly, the entire Cat Food Commission needs to be dissolved, immediately!

Gays in the Navy

[I wrote a comment on a FireDogLake piece about my experience with gays in the Navy and got the following reply:

This is another comment, rich in personal history, which would make a wonderful standalone diary at The Seminal. Please consider sharing your experience there — I think people have a hard time understanding the historical inanity of this debate: there have always been gays in the military and people have never cared more than right now, it seems.]

Back when I was in "A" School (School you take between Boot Camp and the fleet), I was joking around with a few buddies. "Yes sir, I knew that I shouldn't have pushed that button and blown up that city, but I just didn't care. I just couldn't summon up the emotional energy to really give a damn, so yeah, sorry, I pushed that button."

That, to me, summed up my attitude towards gays while I was in the Navy. I served as a Personnelman and got up to the rank of 3rd Class (PN3, equivalent to an Army Corporal) from May 1991 until January 2001. When I was overseas from November 1996 to November 1998, my ship had 400 people on it. So we all knew each other, some of course better than others, depending on how closely we worked together.

There was a fellow that I sorta, kinda had my suspicions about. He seemed to be a little awkward socially and we talked about fitting in with the group. He once complained that "I wish people would invite me to go out on liberty with them." We had to use a buddy system where when we hit liberty ports, we had to have at least one other person from the ship with us, which meant that sometimes a shipmate had to wait on the Quarterdeck until one or more other people wanted to go out on liberty and then the whole group could take off together. I cheerfully explained to him that no one was ever going to think of inviting him to be their liberty buddy, he had to wait on the Quarterdeck and invite himself to join a person or a group that was going off into town. I had to explain that being socially popular involved some measure of just jumping in and joining the group.

His chain of command decided to send him back to the States to learn some more stuff about how to do his job. We talked about how the Navy would pay for his TAD (Temporary Additional Duty) and we went through a pantomime about how he would take money from one purse, then from another purse, he'd add everything up and then he'd get paid for the whole thing upon completion of the whole evolution. Well, a few days after he'd taken off for the States, I heard that he'd gotten busted for being gay. I thought back about how we had related to each other and what I'd heard about him and thought "O-o-o-oh yeah-h-h! Yeah, that would explain why..." and various small things I hadn't noticed at the time occurred to me and now they made sense.

I didn't have any strong opinions either way about gays. To a sailor, a shipmate is more than just a mere co-worker. A shipmate is someone you live with as well as work with. You clean up your workspaces and berthings together, you perform fire drills together where get all suited up and you pretend to fight fires, you eat meals together where you just see an empty spot, sit down and start chattering with whoever's sitting there. But the off-duty habits of my shipmates just didn't concern me much. As I said in the first paragraph here, I just didn't care. It didn't make any big difference to me that one of my shipmates turned out to be gay. It made a big difference to the ship that we now had one less qualified sailor who had previously done a satisfactory job. Y'know, he may not have done a super-brilliant job, but he certainly wasn't known for doing a poor job and so much in the Navy just requires being steady, being reliable, getting jobs completed and reports filed on schedule and within parameters.

One time, on an earlier ship, we were about to leave on a voyage and a low-ranking sailor cleaned off a pipe down in the engine room. He came back a short while later and the pipe was covered with oil again. He recognized that this was not a good sign and reported that to his supervisor. Turned out the voyage had to be postponed for a day so that the pipe could be replaced. It had worn away so badly that it was now so thin that oil was just plain leaking through the pipe itself. If our sailor had not been observant and had not reported the problem..brr...I hate to think of what could have happened out there on the open sea. The point is, the ship was saved from a potential catastrophe by a shipmate who just plain did his job. He paid attention to detail. He did his job in a manner where he was aware and alert and that made all the difference in the world.

One time, I had a shipmate fill out an ID Card application with incorrect information. He thought he was being clever and was finding a way around a problem. We had to have a series of discussions, my supervisor was brought into it, the problem was fixed, the shipmate was scolded and we got on with our day, but that wasted an hour that wouldn't have been wasted if he had just done his job correctly the first time. Several years earlier, I applied for another job within the Navy. The fellow who was advising me on how to apply neglected to fill me in on all of the necessary details. I think maybe he considered it a learning experience for me, but the result was that my application was a mess and the Bureau of Naval Personnel had to get back to me several times and tell me that yet another piece of the application was missing.

In the military, attention to detail is very, very important. People need to know what they're doing, they need to keep their minds on their jobs. And y'know? We all need to get along with each other. The male sailors need to be aware of how they're dealing with the female sailors so that our language never crosses over from the "yellow" into the "red." White sailors have to be aware of how they're talking with black sailors so as to make sure that language never gets offensive. It's perfectly okay to suggest that an African-American sailor is doing a lousy job, but it's not okay to suggest he's doing a lousy job because he's African-American. We can joke around and have a good time, but we have to pay attention to our language.

Do we ask questions of our shipmates about their off-duty sexual habits? No, of course not. That kind of question could very easily be construed as a "red zone" sexual harassment-type of question. When we were in our home port and left the ship and went off into town, where we went and who we saw was our concern. I guess the really bottom-line concern of mine as a sailor was, "Is my shipmate doing a satisfactory job?" If he or she was doing their job and paying attention to detail and the instruction manuals were being followed, why is it going to concern me that he might be sleeping with another he or she with a she?

If I had been asked to make a list of my top ten concerns, the sexuality of my shipmates would either have not made the list at all, or I would have listed at least eight or nine concerns prior to that. As I said, I just didn't care.

The Cordoba House/Park51/Ground Zero mosque proposal

In response Sachio Ko-yin's call for dialogue.

I was extremely pleased to see the editorial in the Inky today. Unfortunately, it was followed (As of 12:30pm) by 81 comments, most of them blindingly stupid and bigoted. According to a few of the comments, the mosque, to be located inside a recreational center located two blocks away from the border of the 9-11 Ground Zero, is opposed by 60% of the population. That explains why the Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) has taken the incorrect position on the subject and probably why the President has taken such a wishy-washy stance himself.

In the case of the proposed Cordoba House, or as the blog Daily Kos refers to it "The Burlington Coat Factory Mosque" (The site is currently occupied by a coat factory), we would be well-advised to remember the views of James Madison:

“In all very numerous assemblies, of whatever characters composed, passion never fails to wrest the scepter from reason. Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob.” Federalist no. 55, February 13, 1788

The CATO piece on Madison and his musings on mob rule continued:

But Madison did not share the naïve faith so common today that the people can do no wrong. He knew that majority rule, like all unconstrained political power, posed its own dangers for individual freedom.
-------------
In pure democracies, such as ancient Athens, individuals quickly discovered common interests, formed factions, and oppressed their fellow citizens.

No, I don't regard the polls as being the appropriate final word on guiding Americans on how to consider the proposed mosque. I respect the people who oppose the mosque, but I strongly support New York's Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who took a very strong and uncompromising stance in favor of allowing the mosque to be built.

"The proposed mosque is to be built only two blocks away from Ground Zero!!!1! That's insenstive to the families of the 9-11 victims!11#!1!!" [paraphrased from numerous comments]

The History Eraser Button blog has a series of photos showing what the neighborhood around Ground Zero looks like. I'm sorry, but a 13-story building (It's going to be shaped like a regular rectangular box, it won't have towers from which muezzin can call out the adhan) two blocks away is not going to even stand out, much less will it be a hulking, looming presence. The same blog includes a map of where the photographed places are along with a number of positive and negative comments.

I wrote a letter in response to a column by Charles Krauthammer:

I have a problem with Charles Krauthammer's comparison of 9-11 and Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor ("...the idea of putting [up a Japanese cultural center] at Pearl Harbor would be offensive"), as the nation of Japan took ownership of the attack on Pearl Harbor right away, just as the nation of Germany took ownership of the horrors of Treblinka as soon as they was revealed to the world at large. Islam as a whole has not taken ownership of 9-11 for very good reason. 9-11 was launched by a group of Muslims, but these Muslims constituted a very, very tiny fraction of a single percentage point of the world's nearly one & a half billion Muslims. To say that the US can't permit any mosques within an undefined distance away from Ground Zero (The proposed cultural center, which will include a mosque, will be two blocks away, this is obviously not considered good enough by Krauthammer and his fellow critics) is to claim veto power over, well, who knows how far they want their veto power to extend?

I understand Krauthammer's descriptions of Disney's proposed Civil War tourist attractions as being sacrilegious because they were designed to directly overlook and to directly comment upon the sites they were next to. The Cordoba House has no such intention. Two blocks may seem very close to people who have never been to Manhattan, but having been to Manhattan many times, I can testify that two blocks in that section of New York City is pretty much "out of sight, out of mind." Besides which, the building will be designed as a standard rectangular box, more or less indistinguishable from all of the surrounding buildings.

As Representative Jerry Nadler (D-NY) put it, the Cordoba House will be built by "moderate Muslims," not by jihadists, despite Krauthammer's attempt to lump in Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf with every other Muslim group of "bad guys." Krauthammer gives us a very slanted and partial picture of Rauf by quoting only one statement of his, one that is less than fanatically opposed to the very existence of Hamas. It's very easy for a Westerner, halfway around the world from the Middle East, to take a strictly black and white, ideological view of Hamas. It's asking a bit much of a man connected to the Middle East as Rauf is, to do the same.

I found it very distressing that many of the commenters to the Inky's editorial today seem oblivious to the initial point I made in my letter here and insist on conflating all Muslims with the 9-11 hijackers. It's precisely this refusal to draw distinctions between the 9-11 hijackers and the nearly one and a half billion Muslim people that convinces me that the 60% of the public is wrong and that the 40% is correct.

Update: Karl Rove proves that progressives are absolutely correct to accuse conservatives of bigotry by comparing Muslims peacefully practicing their religion to Nazis harassing Jews.

How do politicians best combat this wave of feeling? The solution is thousands of years old. Stand up! Take a forthright and uncompromising stand as Mayor Bloomberg has and be firm! There's even a term for that. It's called leadership.

Further update:

Howard Dean "From the Democratic Wing of the Democratic Party"

Sez: "move the mosque." *Sigh!* Well, Dean was once a standardbearer we could count on.

Today, former Reagan Solicitor General Ted Olson -- whose wife, Barbara Olson, was killed on 9/11 -- said he saw no reason for Park51 to move. And Peter Beinart, expediting his ongoing transformation from TNR Seriousness Guardian into shrill liberal blogger, today called on Democrats to -- as he put it -- "Grow a Pair" by standing up to this increasingly toxic campaign.

It's very important to understand the Park51 issue as a national security issue. This is a guerrilla war/"hearts & minds" issue that the US can win, but only if we respect our Muslim brothers and sisters. If we treat them like suspect outsiders, the consequences will not be good ones.

Video of person walking from Ground Zero to Park51.

Howard Dean responds.

Round-up on various stories

My piece on what the next Congress might look like.

A piece by a Muslim man about the recent Time Magazine cover (Featuring an Afghan woman with her nose cut off and suggesting that American occupation will solve that problem) and how Muslim women have generally fared under Western occupations (Hint: Not well).

Right-wingers are very upset at how reality has such a strong liberal bias that right-wing pieces are not popular on the social networking site Digg. This lengthy piece goes into how right-wingers have tried to "game" the system as to how Digg rates articles.

Christine Romer is leaving the Obama Administration due to her not having any influence on the President's economic policies. She'll be missed as she called for good things to happen.

President Obama is in deep political trouble because Snooki disapproves of him! Augh! Screech! No, no, no!!! Erm, wait a minute! Wha?!?! Who is Snooki? Oh, she's a person from the reality show "Jersey Shore." Um, er, okay.

What will the next Congress look like?

If, as many fear, the Republicans manage to take over one or both house of Congress? Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) indicates that he's been entirely happy with his strategy to block or at least delay, pretty much everything the Obama Administration has tried to do since January 2009. WaPo columnist David Broder reports that the following remark of McConnell's leaves him skeptical:

McConnell ascribed much of the distress both Packer and I had recorded to the natural impatience of new members. The Senate, he said, "takes a bit of getting used to." But if they stick it out, these newcomers will learn to love the old rules, he said, and abandon their foolish impulse to change them.

No, it's wildly unprecedented to force the Senate to get just about every bill through on the basis of a supermajority of 60 to 40 in order to get around the filibuster. Broder holds out hope:

Much as I differed with McConnell's defense of the status-quo Senate, I have to agree with several of the other points he made at the breakfast. He is right when he says that the Senate tends to be at its best when the party ratios are relatively close -- say 55 to 45 -- rather than as lopsided as they have been during Obama's first two years.

Sorry, but this strikes me as utterly starry-eyed in its' sweet, childish naiveté. What are McConnell's legislative plans?

"What I hope we are going to have after November is more balance, more balance, which would give us the opportunity to do things together that simply were missing when you have this kind of disparity," McConnell said. "But, I'm not going to be very interested in doing things left of center. It is going to have to be center right. I think the president is a flexible man. I'm hoping he will become a born-again moderate."

In other words, yeah sure, we'll work with Democrats, as long as that means doing everything our way.

The Republican Party as a whole has a number of serious issues with the Constitution. They want to "review" the 14th Amendment, calling it the "Anchor Baby" Amendment, they want to throw out the Affordable Care Act based on the theory that Congress cannot exercise any control over the economy, individual Republican Senators want to repeal Social Security and the Federal highway system and naturally, many Tea Party Republicans want to repeal the 16th Amendment, which authorizes the income tax. Sharron Angle, who's running to replace Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), is a Christian Reconstructionist, a pretty far-out philosophy for someone who's neck and neck with Reid in the polls. Rand Paul, running for Senator in Kentucky, wants to relieve those poor, poor abused business owners from having to comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act because, y'know, it just costs so much money to comply with it.

In contrast to what Republicans think Americans want, Americans don't really care about how big government is, they want a government that effectively solves problems and that sees to the needs of its citizens. Conservatives generally know what percentage of the GDP is being spent by the government. Progressives tend not to know because they don't regard the number as particularly relevant to anything. For a progressive, the concern is "Does the government have enough money to get the job done?" Whether it's using 20% of the GDP or 21% or 21.75% of the GDP is a completely meaningless consideration.

Sorry, but the one and only way for the next Congress to be a productive one, i.e., to do what American citizens want it to do, is for the Democrats to retain their majorities in both chambers and to reform the Senates' filibuster rule (Which is not in the Constitution) so that the Senate can get stuff done.

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.