Sarah Palin: Staying Home for the 2012 Campaign

The Moderate Voice has an interesting little note on Sarah Palin's moment of indecision about whether to continue with her most recent pregnancy because of the baby's Down syndrome.

In relation to this, I want to mention that I don't think Sarah Palin is going to run for the presidency in 2012. It's always struck me that Palin never moved to Juneau to take up the governor's position. Her Indiana speech was also her first trip outside Alaska since the election. That doesn't make any sense to me and I've come to the conviction that Palin has a hard time leaving Wasilla for some reason and will give up on presidential campaigning because she wouldn't want to move to the White House.

Call it a gut feeling, but I'd still be surprised if she ran.

Megan McCain Moves Toward New Party

One of the most surprising developments of the early Obama era is that Meghan McCain has become a compelling political personality.

Who could have predicted that?

Most commentators probably see Meghan McCain's appearance at the meeting of the Log Cabin Republicans as part of the Republican Party civil war between "staunch conservatives" and those who want the Republican Party to appeal to moderates, independents, African-Americans, Hispanics, gays and other constituencies.

Certainly that's what Meghan McCain sees:

"feel too many Republicans want to cling to past successes. There are those who think we can win the White House and Congress back by being “more” conservative. Worse, there are those who think we can win by changing nothing at all about what our party has become. They just want to wait for the other side to be perceived as worse than us. I think we’re seeing a war brewing in the Republican party, but it is not between us and Democrats. It is not between us and liberals. It is between the future and the past. I believe most people are ready to move on to that future."

But I don't see it that way.

If there's a war between the "future and the past" in the Republican Party, the past has already won. Most of the Republican Party core wants to move backwards--backwards to the traditional male-dominated family, backwards to Calvin Coolidge economic policies, backwards to Ronald Reagan military triumphalism, and backwards to school prayer, religious tests for office-holding, whites-only immigration, and nice warm closets for gays. It's fair to say that conservatives don't want to roll back civil rights for African-Americans but they'd certainly demand that African-Americans be "grateful" for everything they've been "given." Witness the criticism of Michelle Obama for not being grateful during the presidential campaign.

So what does it mean for Meghan McCain to be a "new progressive Republican."

"What I am talking about tonight is what it means to be a new, progressive Republican. Now some will say I can’t do that. If you aren’t this and that, then you’re clearly a “Republican in Name Only,” also affectionately known as a RINO.

Suggesting the notion that one can be faithful to the original core values of the GOP while open to the realities of our changing world has really hit a chord with people. And it seems to be the next, natural stage of the journey I’ve been traveling."

In my opinion, what Meghan McCain is doing is groping her way toward a new political party that's more conservative than the Democrats but abandons the rejection of the post-60's world. Given that the Republican Party has renewed its pointless rejection of the New Deal, the only way forward for a moderate conservative like Meghan McCain is to get involved with a more moderate political party.

David Axelrod--Wrong on Tea Parties, OK Otherwise

Former Obama campaign manager and now "Senior White House adviser" David Axelrod really blew it when he referred to the right-wing tea party protests as "unhealthy."

Axelrod was asked on CBS's "Face the Nation" about the "spreading and very public disaffection" with the president's fiscal policies seen at the "Tea Party" rallies around the country last week.

"I think any time you have severe economic conditions there is always an element of disaffection that can mutate into something that's unhealthy," Axelrod said.

Axelrod appeared to backtrack when pressed on whether the movement is unhealthy. "Well, this is a country where we value our liberties and our ability to express ourselves, and so far these are expressions," he said.

Backtrack indeed! Unfortunately, David Axelrod doesn't really get a chance to backtrack from this kind of statement. President Obama's political opposition is eager to portray him as a closet authoritarian and Axelrod just gave them a couple days worth of headlines that can't be taken back.

David Axelrod is also wrong on the merits. People have a constitutional right to assemble to express their opinions and doing so is also very good for the political health of the country and the Obama administration as well.

One of the underappreciated facts of American political life is the way in which the weakness of the Republican Party is functioning to bring the farther edges of the American right into the political arena. Suddenly liberated from Karl Rove's suffocating embrace, a wide variety of survivalists, secessionists, Ayn Randians, one world conspiracy theorists, and small government purists have been pushing forward into the public light.

And why shouldn't these folks get their moment in the sun?

What the tea parties accomplished was to give a cohesive political focus to a lot of people who would otherwise be very marginalized from American politics.

That's healthy.

I also think the Republican Party leadership is working to see if it can come to an accommodation with these kinds of constituencies. The Republican Party and its Fox News, talk radio, and right blogosphere affiliates seem to be feeling their way toward a political identity that's even more right-wing and less welcoming to independents and moderates than it was during the Bush years. Promoting the tea parties and bringing in all the marginal constituencies was their first big thrust in that direction and it did make at least somewhat of a splash.

Ultimately, that's healthy too. One could argue that it's not a good thing for the Republican Party to move farther to the margins of the right-wing? But the Republican Party wants to become more of a purist party and if they and their affiliates want to mobilize constituencies from the farther right to accomplish that goal, that's their decision. Perhaps Republicans are seeing that moderates and independents just aren't going to accept right-wing points of view anymore and are moving farther right in an effort to regain some kind of momentum.

The political landscape has changed significantly over the last eight years and the Republican Party needs to make a serious adjustment. If their first instinct is to lurch further to the right, I have no problem with them finding out if that works or not.

Given that nothing lasts forever, it's a healthy thing for the Republicans and the various constituencies of the right to be able to experiment with new ideas (or at least new versions of old ideas) and political line-ups.

How Big a Hack is The Politico's Mike Allen?

In his blog post for today's Salon, Glenn Greenwald gives The Politico's Mike Allen about as bad a journalistic drubbing as you'll ever see.

The initial stimulus to the controversy was Greenwald's criticism of Allen for letting a Bush administration figure make anonymous criticisms of Obama.

But Allen's hackery wouldn't be worth noticing if he had just stopped there. But Allen wrote in a reply to Greenwald that the still anonymous Bush official had e-mailed him an incendiary criticism of Obama without even asking for anonymity. At that point, Allen asked the Bush official if he could quote the e-mail and the Bush official declined because it would make him look bad to be so critical of our very popular president.

According to him, all Bush officials other than Karl Rove and Dick Cheney are too cowardly to criticize Barack Obama on the record -- "They have new careers, and they know it’s a fight they’ll never win. He’s popular; they’re not; they get it" -- so what is a poor reporter like him to do other than agree to anonymity?

What are they scared of? Is criticizing Obama going to keep them from getting jobs with the Republican Party? Apparently agreeing that he didn't want to make the Bush official look "so" bad, Allen let the e-mail be quoted anonymously. In other words, Allen had a "story" of an incendiary e-mail from a former high official in the Bush administration and deluted the story because he felt sorry for the guy.

Give me a break!

But it gets worse. Allen had to write this little gem in his reply to Greenwald (Quoted from Greenwald's Salon post):

I figured that readers could decide whether the former Bush official’s comments sounded defensive or vindictive. . . . So at the bottom of the Axelrod story, I tacked on an ellipsized excerpt of the former Bush official’s quotes, removing several ad hominem attacks on Obama. I quoted less than half of the comment and took out the most incendiary parts -- a way to hint at the opposing view without giving an anonymous source free rein.

Let me translate this into a plainer version of the King's English. Seemingly still feeling sorry for the former Bushie, Mike Allen redacted more than "half of the comment and took out the most incendiary parts" as a way to make the Bush official look like less of an asshole. That way, the "readers could decide whether the former Bush official's comments sounded defensive or vindictive" because he himself had edited out all the material that made the vindictiveness of the Bush official obvious.

I guess my title was misstated. A real hack would have left in the juicy parts of the Bush official's comments as a way to titillate the reader. Mike Allen was so invested in protecting this Bush official that he couldn't bring himself up to the hack level.

What an embarrassment!

Inside Steve Bradbury's Crime Against Humanity

Tonight, I was reading in one of the recently released torture memos, the May 10, 2005 memo from Steven Bradbury to John Rizzo, Deputy General Counsel of the CIA entitled "Techniques That May Be Used in the Interrogation of High Value Detainees."

I'm not a lawyer but it seems obvious that Bradbury's memo is itself a crime against humanity in that it authorizes waterboarding, hosing people down, sleep deprivation, stress positions, enclosed spaces, and other forms of torture for suspected terrorists.

According to Bradbury, Congress defines torture in this manner:

In defining the federal crime of'torture, Congress required that a defendant "intend to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering," and Congress narrowly defined "severe mental pain or suffering" to mean "the prolonged mental harm caused by" enumerated predicate acts, including "the threat of imminent death" and "procedures calculated to disrupt profoundly the senses or personality."

Torture is also listed as a "crime against humanity" under Article 7(1) of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. In this sense, Bradbury's memo would be a crime against humanity because it authorizes and justifies the use of practices that fall under the legal definition of torture.

As Bradbury describes them within the memo, the CIA's "intensive" interrogations obviously fall within the definition of torture as "inflicting severe physical or mental pain or suffering" on suspected terrorists. Despite Bradbury's arguments to the contrary, causing "severe mental pain or suffering" is the manifest intent of all those interrogation techniques.

Two points.

What I found chilling about Bradbury's justifications of these techniques is that they took the reader "inside" the carrying out of American war crimes. There was a tremendous amount of detail about how Americans tortured prisoners and almost no balancing information about the background of 9-11, the need for information, or any information actually obtained from the prisoners. It was all war crimes all the time.

The second point is that the entire rhetorical force of Bradbury's document was geared toward creating sympathy for the torturers. In this sense, Bradbury's memo was equivalent of an insider's "how to" manual for mob hits, drug murders, lynchings, and other heinous crimes in that it sought to get the reader to identify with extremely horrible acts.

As a result, Bradbury's whole document conveyed a fetid, rotting sensation of trafficking in sweat, pain, and despair. I have to admit that I'm not a good enough writer to convey my whole sense of disgust with Bradbury's memo. I guess the bottom line was that it made me embarrassed to be a human being let alone an American.

That Catchy New Republican Slogan: *%#@ the Republican Party

Matt Cooper argues in Talking Points Memo that the Republicans should let Al Franken be seated out of their own self-interest. That's because the Republicans have failed to find a viable target for their attack-dog politics and Franken is an inviting target.

Franken is arechetypical Republican villain. His name has such an infuriating effect on the GOP that he could be just what they need in an age where the villains are lame. Franken, a friend of mine who I like a lot, is, O'Reilly aside, is I think a basically temperate and smart guy despite his role as a provocateur and comedian. He really didn't give the GOP much to work with in the 2008 campaign; they had to dig up his comedic past to really nail him. But he's the perfect foil for Republicans and conservatives. If Coleman wins, Republicans will have one more senate vote but they will have lost the kind of Democrat they instinctually love to hate.

Despite the left credential that comes from working with TPM, Cooper is basically an out-of-touch mainstream media guy. When was the last time that anyone remembers the Republican Party leadership acting in its own self-interest. As the various versions of conservatism have become less and less popular, Republican leadership on all levels has been ever more adamant about appealing to their shrinking activist base. While promoting the surge policy in Iraq, Dick Cheney was emphatic that "We didn't get elected to be popular. We didn't get elected to worry about the fate of the Republican Party." Now "Fuck the Republican Party" has practically become the mantra of everybody associated with the Republican Party.

In other words, the Republican leadership is not going to give in or compromise on Al Franken--or anything else.

The Tea Parties: A Bottom Line

Success vs SUCCESS. I have to admit that I wasn't as put out as a lot of left-wing people by all the anti-Obama tea parties. Street theater is not exactly the most effective politics in the world, but I've done some ineffective street politics myself and it's certainly a lot better than joining a militia, going on a killing spree in a liberal church, or pulling a Rich Poplawski and ambushing a bunch of cops.

So, I was glad to see the tea parties happen and I think everybody on the left should be glad to see people on the right have such a healthy and harmless outlet for their views.

There's a certain way in which the numbers tell the story of the tea parties. I've seen estimates of 2,000 anti-Obama tea parties and claims that 184,000 people attended. Estimates for the largest crowds were for 4,000 and came from Cincinnati and Lansing, Michigan. Only a few hundred attended in Boston. There weren't any tea parties announced for my home town of Morehead, KY.

And there's some significance to the lack of a tea party here.

I wouldn't discount the tea party turnout at all. All in all, getting 100,000 people to do anything in politics is very good. Certainly, the tea parties were a success.

However, it's useful to measure the success of the tea parties against the appeal of Barack Obama. My town of Morehead, KY has a population of about 11,000 when the college is in session. If Barack Obama showed up completely unannounced to speak in Morehead, he would draw more than 4,000 people to a speech just on word of mouth. Obama is far more popular than Bill Clinton but Clinton drew a crowd of about 4,000 to a 2008 campaign speech on one day's notice. Actually, six hundred people gathered when Clinton stopped at a Dairy Queen in Flemingsburg, KY (population, 3,000) on his way to Morehead.

And Obama only won this relatively liberal county in the very red, rural, state of Kentucky by 500 votes. Just think how many people Obama would draw in urban areas like Boston, New York, Philly, or Miami if he came to an event that was as much anticipated or highly publicized as these tea parties. The numbers would be in the tens if not the hundreds of thousands.

It's a sad fact of conservative life. Even when they have successful events, they're still dwarfed by the charisma and popularity of Barack Obama.

It Looks Like Newt's Gearing Up for 2012

The right-wing magazine Newsmax has an article today on a possible Newt Gingrich presidential candidacy in 2012.

Gingrich has managed to keep himself in the public eye since leaving the House, but the blitz of public appearances in recent months is reminiscent of the run-up to 2007, when he toyed with a presidential run only to abandon it before the primaries began. Now, some are speculating that the former congressman from Georgia is laying the groundwork for a White House bid in 2012.

Why not?

Newt's smart, he has a lot of big ideas (just ask him), and he's good at identifying issues that play well for Republicans. Gingrich was behind the "Drill Here, Drill Now" slogan that temporarily played well for Republicans during the 2008 campaign. Newt is also popular with activists and would be the most prominent candidate of the conservative wing of the Republican Party. Of course, conservative activists found out in 2008 that they're not a majority of the Republican Party when they couldn't defeat John McCain. But Gingrich doesn't need a majority. He might be expected to pull down as much as 30-35% of the primary vote and that would be enough to win the early states comfortably and nail down the nomination by February or March of 2012.

I'm sure Gingrich has already made this calculation. That's why he's "out there hustling" according to Grover Norquist and also why he's on "nearly every Republican short list" for the 2012 nomination.

Newt's main weakness is that non-conservatives dislike him. In 2007, his unfavorability ratings were over 40% and were up as high as 56% during the 1995 budget debacle. Of course, that means that the Obama camp isn't exactly shaking in their boots at the thought of running against Gingrich. But it need not matter in running for the Republican nomination. Like George Bush, Gingrich is popular among Republicans despite unpopular with everybody else. Moreover, it's not like Mitt Romney, Sarah Palin, Bobby Jindal, or Mark Sanford have all that much appeal themselves.

Gingrich wouldn't have much chance of beating Obama in a general campaign, but he would be a viable "bridge" candidate until the next generation of Republicans is ready for serious presidential bids.

Do I hear a "Run, Newt, Run" chant?

The Religious Right Wasn't Winning in the Eighties Either

James Dobson has gotten a lot of belated attention for saying that the religious right had lost the culture wars in his farewell address to the staff of Focus on the Family.

James Dobson, 72, who resigned recently as head of Focus on the Family - one of the largest Christian groups in the country - and once denounced the Harry Potter books as witchcraft, acknowledged the dramatic reverse for the religious Right in a farewell speech to staff.

“We tried to defend the unborn child, the dignity of the family, but it was a holding action,” he said.
“We are awash in evil and the battle is still to be waged. We are right now in the most discouraging period of that long conflict. Humanly speaking, we can say we have lost all those battles.”

The religious right definitely knows losing. Having been born in the lost battle of Southern white evangelicals against racial integration, the religious right has lost its battles over school prayer, abortion rights, popular culture, and gay civil rights. They're still fighting a rearguard actions against gay marriage rights and teaching evolutionary theory to high school students. However, people like Dobson sense that they're failing there as well.

And they are.

That's why Dobson claims we're "awash in evil." He thinks that the ability of women and gay people to live freely, the fact that kids can go to school without being forced into religious exercises, and the teaching of contemporary science are all manifest evils. It's hard to see much difference between Dobson's opinion of America and Osama bin Laden's. They both think we're a decadent, evil country.

But Dobson consoles himself that the religious right did make progress during the 1980's.

The battles that we fought in the Eighties now, we were victorious in many of those conflicts with the culture, trying to defend righteousness, trying to defend the unborn child, trying to preserve the dignity of the family and the definition of marriage. We fought all those battles and really it was a holding action.

But that's nonsense. The religious right wasn't winning in the 1980's either. Yes, Ronald Reagan got elected, but the religious right wasn't able to "preserve the dignity of the family" against pre-marital sex, divorce, drug use, rebellious children, or any of the other phenomena of sixties cultural turmoil. College students didn't have any problem getting high, getting laid, and then going out and campaigning for Reagan. Moreover, the right of American women to get abortions was just as broad at the end of the eighties as it was at the beginning.

Kids weren't praying very much in public schools either.

But the real defeat for the religious right was on the issue of gay rights. After the initial panic over AIDS and the founding of gay advocacy groups, American society began a long, steady march toward fully recognizing the civil rights of gay people.

As was the case with the civil rights movement, bigots like James Dobson made it an ugly, vindictive, and often brutal battle. But the progress has been steady. People can now live openly as gay people who would have once felt constrained to remain closeted. Gay people can work in a lot of professions from which they were previously excluded and gay people are able to live much more openly in places like Morehead, KY or my home town of Waverly, NY.

That doesn't mean that there isn't a lot of homophobia, discrimination, and violence for gay people out there. I recently heard a terrifying and heartbreaking story about a young woman whose mother attacked her with a knife when she came out.

But more than enough progress has been made that even James Dobson can see that the side of bigotry, discrimination, and unprovoked violence is going to lose.

It's just that religious right was losing in the 80's as well as the 50's, 60's, 70's, 90's, and 00's. They've just always been losing.

Conservatives and the Authentic Obama

One of the things I found as a Hillary supporter during the Democratic primaries was that it is very difficult to get a handle on Barack Obama. Obama initially had cache on the left because of his early opposition to the war, but he also had a magic with moderate Democrats that I had a hard time understanding. Obama never quite fit the usual dichotomies. To give one example, when Obama started running, he was a relatively young guy for a presidential level politician and he played around with generational themes of displacing baby-boomers like Hillary (and myself). But I also view Obama as having a stern, fatherly quality that especially came through in talking about issues of responsibility. That makes him seem old in a way that Bill Clinton or George Bush will never be old.

So what was Obama, the young up and comer or the fogie waiting to get old. I never came up with an answer and the question seemed somehow awkward and irrelevant.

Not that anybody else did any better. Tons of ink were spilled by smart writers like Debra Dickerson trying to figure out whether Obama was not black enough, too black, or whether and how blackness figured into Obama's personal and political equation.

They got nowhere for the same reason I got nowhere. For some not quite definable reason, the black/not black dichotomy dichotomy wasn't applicable when applied to Barack Obama and there wasn't a good substitute for that dichotomy in thinking about Obama in relation to race.

Conservatives are having an even harder time nailing down Obama's personality and it's not just a matter of failing to attach the usual pejoratives to him. Obama definitely hasn't had a moment where he reveals the "weakness" that right-wingers see in all non-conservatives. Apparently, Obama did not kowtow to the Saudi king. He didn't show weakness with the Somali pirates. He hasn't backed down on Timothy Geithner's weird hybrid approach to the bank bailout either.

And this has left some political conservatives wondering if there is any real core to Obama. According to Rex Murphy of the Toronto Globe and Mail:

Of the many speeches Mr. Obama has made, which one has said to you this is him? This is the irreducible, essential Barack Obama - this is why he's in politics. You will find it a frustrating challenge: His statements blur into one another, no one speech distinguished by the authentic charge of words spoken from the deepest part of himself . . .

What are the most important issues for Mr. Obama? What are the cornerstone beliefs of this new President? What does he have "within which passes show"? He glides from one part of his mammoth agenda to the other, smooth, cool and charming all the way. But his effortless equanimity poses the question: If it were another agenda, a contrary agenda even, would he glide equally smooth, cool and charming over it? I don't think we know. He doesn't offer any real affective clues.

Having written about Obama's "cool androgyny" myself, I've experienced Murphy's uncertainty in dealing with Obama's "smooth, cool and charming" personality. Conservatives have a special problem with this though. The right has a taste for a politics of big, showy gestures that both reveal the core beliefs of a political actor and define the nature of a political moment. For conservatives, the biggest moment of Ronald Reagan's presidency was the gesture of calling on Mikhail Gorbachev to "tear down this wall." By doing so, Reagan defined both himself as an authentic conservative and champion of freedom and the real nature of the U.S./Soviet conflict at the end of the Cold War.

George Bush was forever in search of this kind of "perfect gesture" and tried to demonstrate his own authentic personality a number of times. His post-9-11 appearance with a bullhorn in New York, the "either you're with us or against us" speech, and all of the "dead or alive" and "mission accomplished" prattle were attempts for Bush to provide illumination concerning the inner Bush and the true nature of the war on terror.

None of it worked, but conservatives have a hunger for this kind of showy authenticity. This is one of the factors behind the Fred Thompson boomlet in 2007 and a big reason why conservatives were ultimately able to unite behind John McCain even though they thought he was a phony.

If there's anything McCain is good at, it's revealing his "authentic self" in dramatic ways.

With Obama, conservatives are always going to be very frustrated because he avoids using the bully pulpit of the presidency as a way to reveal his true nature.

As somebody who likes to have a grasp on people in leadership, I share that frustration.

But ultimately, the difficulty of pinpointing Obama's personality is a good thing. It means that all of us can focus on the extent to which his policies and actions measure up to the current demands of his position. It's somewhat of a mixed bag with me. I'm highly favorable toward Obama's foreign policy and domestic agenda in relation to health care, energy, and education, disagree with the Obama administration's policies on secrecy and the legal culpability of the Bush administration and am up in the air on the bank bailout. At the same time, I think Obama's doing a great job of measuring up to the full demands of the presidency in the post-Bush era. Given the tremendous damage the Bush administration did to American prestige and the governing capacity of the federal bureaucracy, the Obama administration has had to act on a large number of fronts at once and they've done an admirable job of stopping up many of the holes in the dykes.

And I suspect that one of the reasons Obama is doing so well is that he doesn't feel much of a need to show off his "authentic self."

Should Dick Cheney be at the Bush Reunion? Should Anybody?

It looks like Dick Cheney isn't going to attend this weekend's long-awaited Bush administration reunion. It's been almost three months since the Bush administration left office. I'm surprised they haven't had two or three reunions by now.

Some people think Cheney's being peevish over Bush's failure to give Scooter Libby a full pardon, nuke Iran, or just turn the whole government over to the Likud.

But let's give Dick Cheney some credit.

What he's being is consistent.

Cheney and his lawyers always denied that the "Office of the Vice-President" was part of the executive branch.

Why should Cheney go to a Bush administration reunion if he wasn't really IN the Bush administration.

Bad Genes Will Out

Today, Miss Teen RSI wanted to know what time midnight mass at the Catholic Church was tonight. I don't know whether I wanted to die of laughter or embarrassment.

But I guess bad genes will out.

Is Sean Hannity an America Hating/Socialist Parent

In my Hotmail account today, I had a "personal message" from Sean Hannity. As a blogger who keeps track of the right, I get a lot of deeply personal letters from people like Hannity, Newt Gingrich, and the guy at Newsmax.

Not that my inbox isn't fair and balanced.

I also hear from President Obama, Michelle, Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton, and Joe Biden about issues they know I'm concerned about.

For some reason, Glenn Beck doesn't seem to care. At least not yet.

Today, I had a hard time deciding whether Sean Hannity was promoting a socialist parenting agenda or just hated America.

Perhaps knowing that I'm the parent of 11 and 14 year old daughters, Sean wanted me to learn about a new book by Rebecca Hagelin entitled 30 Ways in 30 Days to Save Your Family. Here's what he has to say:

Most parents pray that their children will grow up to be strong, productive, and patriotic, with a robust moral sense.

But as soon as you bring your children into the world, others try to pry them from you. Crass marketers try to lure them into commercialism. "Experts," from doctors to teachers, try to replace your good values with theirs.

Now, thankfully Rebecca Hagelin has brought the ammunition that all of us, as parents, have long needed. In her terrific new book, 30 Ways in 30 Days to Save Your Family, she's given us the perfect guide, the perfect handbook, to keep a toxic culture at bay while forging a closer, deeper, more meaningful relationship with our children.

"Crass marketers?" "Lure them into commercialism?" I assume Sean means all those nice companies that sell pink and blue baby clothes and all the baby stuff with primary colors that keeps parents mesmerized for hours at a time. I imagine he's thinking of all the companies that sell baby books as well. We liked stories like Goodnight Moon, the House That Jack Built, The Three Billy Goats Gruff, and those fairy tale collections. My kids always liked all the various versions of the Cinderella story. We must have watched the Whitney Houston/Brandy Cinderella movie hundreds of times.

Come to think of it, I guess Sean must have especially meant the Disney corporation which has their hands in just about everything connected with kids.

Now, if someone's a normal person, they'll know that all of these companies really care about children and want to do everything they can to help parents raise their children in today's demanding world.

Someone would have to be a socialist to think of all these companies as "crass marketers."

I guess that makes Sean a socialist.

Not that there's anything wrong with socialism. Sometimes I think I'm a socialist myself.

Now that I'm thinking, it looks like Sean probably hates America as well.

Certainly, anybody hates America who would recommend a book by Rebecca Hagelin. This is from the product description for Hagelin's Home Invasion: Protecting Your Family in a Culture that's Gone Stark Raving Mad:

In Home Invasion, Rebecca Hagelin proves that in today's all-consuming culture of corruption there is nowhere left to hide-American homes have already been invaded by this insidious enemy that seeks to twist our minds and poison our hearts through the unmonitored Internet, television, magazines, and music that our families ingest on a daily basis. Speaking as a nationally known social commentator and as a mother of three, Hagelin shows through specific examples and alarming statistics how the enemy has infected the family van, our neighborhood schools and textbooks, the stores in which we shop, and even the churches in which we worship. With warm words of encouragement and practical suggestions, she coaches parents on how to arm themselves with information, strategically plan the movements of their family members, secure allies in the battle, and most of all, muster the guts and the resolve to lead their families to victory against the great beast.

Homes, schools, television, music, stores, churches, even the family van--the "great beast" is everywhere in our country. Actually, Hagelin believes that the great beast is America and she's at war with the rest of American culture and society when she "coaches parents on how to arm themselves with information, strategically plan the movements of their family members, secure allies in the battle . . . and "lead their families to victory." Just reading the product description made me want to reach for my AK-47. Hagelin might just as well have followed Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini and referred to the United States as "the Great Satan" or gotten her book published by a bin Laden front company.

In promoting Hagelin's new book, Hannity obviously wants everybody to hate America as much as Rebecca Hagelin. Given Hannity's support for Hagelin, it wouldn't surprise me if he soon announces that he's leaving for Pakistan to join bin Laden. Not having served in the American military, Hannity will finally get to show his guts by joining in the crusade against "the great beast."

Rick Warren Calls My Atheist Number

Jon Meacham's Newsweek article on the "End of Christian America" isn't that compelling. I mean was there really a "Christian America" that could come to an end. It would be reasonable to say that the culture wars were an attempt by the religious right to assert a predominance for Protestant fundamentalism after the cultural ferment of the 1960's and 1970's. But the fundamentalism of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson might never have been dominant outside the South--certainly not after the repeal of Prohibition. The Moral Majority was never a majority in the first place.

But I thought Rick Warren might have some interesting things to say about the issue. So I read the transcript of Warren's interview with Hugh Hewitt today.

Boy, I was wrong there:

All Warren comes up with is this:

One of them is will America return to the historic roots, Christian roots, that are foundational for every one of our institutions. Or will we go the way of Europe, and go secular. The bottom line is that secularism doesn’t last, because no faith will always be filled by something else, and so that’s why Islam is making strong inroads into Europe, because faith of any kind will always beat no faith.

To which "historic roots" would America return--Puritanism, high church Anglicanism, the Catholicism of Irish and Italian immigrants, or the African-American church? Puritanism and high church Anglicanism no longer exist in any way that would be meaningful to Warren and there's no need to "return" to immigrant Catholicism because Hispanic immigrants are already there. Actually, I have a feeling that Warren isn't thinking about Hispanic immigrants in these comments. He doesn't seem to be thinking about African-American Christianity either. Or Mormons. Or Pentecostals.

Like Meacham, Warren mostly has Europe in mind and wonders if the U. S. is drifting toward a situation where 20% of the adult population attends church. That seems highly unlikely given the power of Protestant evangelism as well as the growth in Pentacostalism, Mormonism, and the largely Catholic Hispanic population. To the contrary, it looks like the United States is going to remain relatively religious compared to Western Europe and also have a great deal of religious diversity compared to either Europe or the U. S. of the 1950's.

Is that so bad? I don't know why it would look too horrible from a Hispanic, Pentacostal, or Mormon perspective. Their religions would have a shot at national cultural influence for the first time. Religious multi-culturalism has obvious advantages from an atheist/agnostic or liberal Protestant perspective as well. Within a diverse environment, a secular public sphere would be seen in its best light as defending the rights of all religious perspectives rather than just denying religion. I also think it's a good thing for atheists and agnostics to have contact with religious people and develop an interest in religious views. It's certainly been good for me.

The only question is whether evangelical conservatives will ever develop a respect for non-evangelical points of view. If so, religious multi-culturalism is a good thing for evangelicals. If not, then the best thing for everybody in the U. S. is for evangelicals to lose any hope of ever attaining precedence again.

But Rick Warren does get my number as an atheist in one way. Here's Warren stressing that the extent to which atheists reject their fathers.

Paul Vitz, who is an author with New York University, wrote a very fascinating book called Faith Of The Fathers, in which he went and studied the 72 most well-known atheists in history, the Bertrand Russells, the Voltaires, the Freuds, and the only thing he could find in common with every one of them is they all hated their dads. Every one of them. They had distant dad, demeaning dad, a dead dad, they had no relationships with their fathers.

I'm not going to make any list of "most well-known atheists," but I certainly hated my abusive father for a long time. Actually, I became an atheist after reading Freud's The Future of an Illusion, but did not explode into rage in relation to my father for about three years after that. Likewise, I began to "testify" to my atheism in public at about the same time that my father and I established something like a civil relationship 20 years later. But Warren's point still holds for me. I'm an atheist who's hated my father for most of my adult life. There isn't any way around it.
I guess I'll have to live with my lack of uniqueness in that regard.

Steele Should Worry About Keeping the 36

RNC Chairman Michael Steele was in Florida yesterday trying to increase GOP registration by getting Florida Republicans to seek out the black and hispanic vote.

He urged party members to create a grassroots movement by doing things like door-to-door voter registration and community service, as well as reaching out to blacks and Hispanics and seeking new minority leaders.

''Please send some folks to the convention that look like Florida,'' Steele said. ``Could you help a brother out? No more national conventions with [only] 36 people of color in the room.''

Steele should worry first about making sure those 36 black Republicans stay in the GOP tent. As Republican Party like Michele Bachman and conservative media outlets move farther to the far right, they're targeting their appeals to neo-Nazis like Pittsburgh shooter Richard Poplawski instead of African-Americans, Hispanics, and other minorities.

Maybe Steele's new slogan should be: Keep the 36!

All Things Must Pass

Miss Tween RSI is too cool for High School Musical 3. What's next? Is she going to lose interest in Scooby Doo?

UNC-Michigan State Near the Half

I'm watching North Carolina vs Michigan State on the CBS web site.

Carolina is ahead by 18 with 2:30 to go in the first half. They're making Michigan State look like Morehead State.

Actually, Morehead State looked better against Louisville.

Did I mention that I have two degrees from Carolina.

Some Resistance to the Left's Pittsburgh Narrative

According to Dave Neiwert of Crooks and Liars, today's shooting of three police officers in Pittsburgh to fear-mongering about guns from freak-show conservatives like Glenn Beck and the NRA:

Some of the early reports out of Pittsburgh indicate the man who shot three cops today was fearful that the Obama administration was going to "take away his guns."[...]

He feared an Obama gun grab? Gee, I wonder where he could have heard that.
Indeed, a story replete with NRA-style fearmongering about the looming "grab" -- which has been fueling a run on guns at local shops -- ran just three days ago in the Pittsburgh Tribune..

Prominent liberal blogger Digby followed up Neiwert with further reflections the dangers of fanning gun zealotry.

This is one of the weird fault lines in American politics --- the police who have to face the armed citizenry and the macho right wing zealots whose only answer for anything is for everyone to carry more guns. It's incidents like today's that bring home the fallacy of that argument in living color -- the cops are all armed and three of them got mowed down today by a gun nut.

The black helocopter crowd went underground during the Bush years, blithely unconcerned with the Cheney police state, (which proves just what a bunch of gullible tools they really are.) They only get aroused when someone tells them a liberal is in
office and so it's time to stock up on weaponry to repel the jack-booted thugs.

I don't want to say that the focus on the NRA and wing nuts is mistaken, but I still think there should be some resistance to this kind of strictly political narrative in favor of some reference to the rural-urban and class fault lines in this country.

Starting with guns, I'm bothered by the question of whether or not Pittsburgh shooter Richard Poplawski would have thought that Obama was "coming to take his guns away" even if the NRA never existed.

Looking at it from an Eastern Kentucky perspective, I'd have to say the answer is yes. Guys like Richard Poplawski would worry about liberals "taking their guns" even without the NRA and other fear-mongerers. Out in rural areas like this one, guns are many things for the guys who own lots of them. Guns are hunting instruments where hunting is often an orgy of drunken recklessness. Guns are also fetish objects for heterosexual guys who are more comfortable with their "buddies" than women. Likewise, guns are an important way in which guys mark out their symbolic distinctiveness from a lot of the cultural authorities who've judged them, including public school teachers, preachers, the educated people they think look down on them, and the city-dwellers who view rural people negatively.

I want to expand on this last point a little. I've lived most of my life in rural areas of upstate New York and Eastern Kentucky but have also spent a lot of time in urban or intellectual areas like Philadelphia, Portland, Oakland, Chapel Hill, NC, and Ann Arbor, MI. The liberal intellectual types I hang out with in places like Philadelphia have often been condescending toward the rural areas around them. But the condescension doesn't have a lot of energy to it because people in cities give so little thought to the rural areas around them. I remember one television station in Philadelphia once ran a special series on "the rest of Pennsylvania" so people in Philly would have an idea of the state outside Philadelphia, its suburbs, and Pittsburgh.

This is one reason why the "they're coming to take out guns" fantasy would be virulent here even without the NRA. People in areas like Eastern Kentucky and rural Pennsylvania know that middle-class and educated people in the cities have little use for guns. They also assume that city-dwellers have the same animus for them that rural people have for urban areas. The rural people I've known can't believe that people in the cities just don't think about them that much. When I'm talking with a "they're coming to take our guns" guy, that's precisely the point I make--they don't care about your guns, they don't care about you, and they don't care about Eastern Kentucky.

But nobody ever believes me. People in rural areas believe that Obama's coming to get their guns because they assume that they're important to Obama and can't believe they aren't.

It's also important to think about class in relation to these kinds of shootings. Three of the recent shooters had failed to establish any kind of solid footing in the working class. Binghamton shooter Jiverly Wong was ridiculed for his poor English and recently lost his job. Pittsburgh shooter Richard Pawlawski got involved in fist fights with his neighbors, washed out of the Marines for attacking a drill sergeant and also lost his job. Alabama shooter Michael McLendon didn't do any better with the Marines or the local police force, was involved in some sort of family dispute and had lost his job before he shot up his family and neighborhood.

All of these guys had failed with their class aspirations and weren't doing any better at their fall-back positions either.

All of them also seemed determined to commit suicide as they planned their shooting sprees. Richard Pawlawski called a friend to tell him he was going to die as he got ready to shoot the first wave of cops to come to his door. In a way, the impulse isn't surprising. What kind of self-respect does our culture offer to men or women who are struggling in the ways these guys were struggling? Not much that I can think of. Most people I know would think of these kinds of guys as "losers," "dumb-asses," "assholes" or some other pejorative term. I wouldn't be surprised if they all thought of themselves that way as well. There isn't much respect for working-class life in American culture. There's even less respect for not succeeding at working class life.

I imagine that Neiwert and Digby are right about fear-mongering on the right having a significant role in relation to the Pittsburgh shootings. But I also think it's important to resist viewing this kind of event strictly in terms of political manipulation. The fear-mongering of the right has an impact in the context of the larger patterns of people's lives and it's important to keep these larger patterns in mind as we think about these kinds of events.

Mass Murder in Binghamton

Fourteen people are dead in Binghamton, NY as a result of another mass murder. With the recession, the mass murders are building up as the Binghamton killing follow hard on the murders in Alabama and Oakland.

I'm originally from a little town less than 40 miles west of Binghamton on Rt 17 (now I-86 I think) and know the area well.

As Fingerlakeswanderer says in the Open Salon blog, Binghamton is an industrial town that's lost most of its industry. According to the elementary school social studies books I read as a kid, Binghamton was supposed to be an up and coming city during the sixties.

But it never took off.

Binghamton was a crossroads city on the interstate highway system but never developed much in the way of restaurants, malls, or even gas stations around the highways.

IBM was big in the Binghamton area but it never seemed to get any bigger and none of the other computer/techn0logy companies located to the area. Then IBM got a lot smaller.

Binghamton University is a great university but the city hasn't been able to build on that in the same ways as other college towns.

I remember going to downtown Binghamton while I was in high school and wondering where the downtown was. It was just kind of a faceless place. My friends and I didn't even think enough of Binghamton to stigmatize it as the "armpit of the universe" like we stigmatized Utica and Rome (places none of us had ever been).

It also seems like the whole Southern Tier of upstate NY has become more "country" and impoverished over the last 20 years. I hear stuff on and off about Klan organizations, survivalists, and guys abandoning civilization for the woods. There's also a lot more NASCAR symbolism around my home town and I've even seen a confederate flag on the NY/PA border. Today's my mother's birthday and she talked a lot about how more attention needed to be paid to poor people who needed help but weren't eligible for government assistance.

The area didn't use to be that poor.

What's this have to do with the shootings?

Probably nothing.

All over the U. S., there's just an extremely volatile mix of rage, guns, and role models of mass murderers. Columbine killers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold have become cult figures among the copycat killers at Virginia Tech, Northern Illinois, and other places. Watching the Dark Knight, I wondered if the Joker's blowing up the hospital wasn't modeled after Harris and Klebold's plans for Columbine High. Guns are ubiquitous and accumulating one's own little personal arsenal is a cultural style in places like Eastern KY.

Likewise, the mostly male rage has so many sources in popular culture (video games, porn, music, movies, cop shows, sports, the broad condemnation of any kind of failure, etc., etc.,) that it's almost useless to point to any one source of the problem.

That whole mix of rage, guns, and mass murder models has come under a great deal of pressure as a result of the recession and I think that what's happening is that there have been a lot of little murder explosions like the one in Binghamton. To give folks an idea of the volatility, my 14 year old daughter told me today about three boys talking about ways to torture people during her geometry class and that's WITH the counseling the school is providing for them. I disagree with Fingerlakeswanderer about gun control being the answer. I think limits on gun possession are a good idea, but the murder problem is so broadly cultural at this point and that eliminating the mass murders would have to involve major adjustments in American values and popular culture as well as gun policy.

Given that I don't see that happening, I just hope the recession eases so there's fewer triggers on the rage.

The Republicans May Be The Third Party Newt's Waiting For

Yesterday, Newt Gingrich came out with a warning that the Republican Party may be facing a challenge from a third party in 2012.

“If the Republicans can’t break out of being the right wing party of big government, then I think you would see a third party movement in 2012,” Gingrich said Wednesday during a speech at the College of the Ozarks in Missouri, the local television station KY3 reported.

I imagine Gingrich might be right. Perhaps there will be some alliance of the religious right, small government idealists, and neo-conservatives that no longer views the Republican Party as a suitable vehicle for their ambitions.

Maybe there's a younger, more credible version of Gingrich himself ready to take charge of a new kind of conservative coalition.

But I don't think so.

The bottom line is that the Republican Party is moving farther to the right grows as the right grows less popular. If anything, there's less chance of a new conservative party emerging now than there was in 2008 when conservatives thought John McCain was a dangerous liberal.

But that doesn't mean there won't be a third party in America's future. Actually, that third party might be the Republicans.

Despite the hesitations and hedging of the Obama administration, the Democrats have charted a much more liberal course on a multi-lateral foreign policy, universal health care, a green economy, and dramatically expanded education.

And I'm happy to see it.

But the fact that the Dems have shifted to the left and the Republicans have moved right means that there's a lot of ideological space in the mushy middle for another political party.

One of these days, people like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Michael Bloomberg, Charlie Crist, Evan Bayh, Susan Collins, Olympia Snowe, and Arlen Specter might realize they have more in common with each other than they have with either of the current major parties.

They might also find a charismatic presidential candidate who occupies the middle ground in a compelling manner, sparks some new party organization, and wins lots of converts among current office holders.

I don't particularly like moderate politicians or moderate voters. But "moderation" could be the next big thing in American politics. It's easy to see a moderate political party replacing the Republicans as the leading opposition party and becoming competitive with the Democrats in New England, New York, the middle Atlantic states, large sections of the Midwest, and the West Coast.

The situation of Arlen Specter in Pennsylvania is a good example of the potential of a moderate party. Specter might not be viable in either a Republican or Democratic primary, but he would be the initial favorite in any three-candidate race.

It's not beyond the realm of imagination to see a moderate party replacing the Dems as the leading opposition party in states like South Carolina or Utah either.

That kind of development could mean that a moderate party would be a threat to the status of the Republicans as the "second party" in American politics.

The opportunity for a "moderate moment" has been there in the past.

Colin Powell could have seized it in 1996 when he was polling almost 30% versus Bill Clinton and Bob Dole. John McCain was the most popular politician in America in 2000 and might have won as an independent over Gore and Bush.

Barack Obama has proven to be extremely adept at occupying both the middle and the left. So, there might not be a realistic opportunity for a moderate political party in 2012.

But that doesn't mean that the opportunity won't open up again after Obama leaves the scene. Gingrich might get his wish for a third party. It's just that the third party might end up being the Republicans.

Is Newt Still a Christian?

So, Newt Gingrich has converted to Catholicism and joins Bobby Jindal, Jeb Bush, Sam Brownback, and a bunch of other prominent Republican converts to the Catholic faith.

There have even been reports about a possible George W. conversion.

That's fine with me. I'm an atheist who's married to a Catholic woman. My Irish Catholic in-laws are the nicest people in the world and my two daughters count themselves as Catholic.

And I have to admit, they're really nice kids.

So, I'm about as down with Catholicism as someone can be who's horrified by the whole Judeo-Christian thing of a god who ordered Abraham to sacrifice his son, angrily destroyed the whole world in a flood, and then sent forth his own son to be killed for mankind's sins.

Living out here in Eastern Kentucky though, it's impossible not to notice that many Protestants who deny that Catholics are Christians and would therefore deny that Newt Gingrich is still a Christian just as much as they would deny that Mitt Romney is a Christian.

And it's kind of a pain to the little Catholic congregation in Morehead, KY.

I've known for years that many of my college students don't view Catholics as Christians. Also, the local "Bible Baptists" have picketed the Catholic Church after Mass seeking their own converts to "Christianity" from "popery."

But it struck home when a social studies teacher announced to my daughter's class that Catholics weren't Christians.

That bothered us enough as parents that we complained and got the teacher to stop.

Gingrich has been traveling in elite circles for a long time. So, he might have forgotten the extent to which the Protestant evangelical tradition denies the Christianity of Catholicism and condemns Catholics to damnation.

But it's something that's out there.

John Calipari--From Specter To Coach

Needless to say, I'm feeling pretty smart in focusing on John Calipari as a UK coaching candidate even before the hapless Billy Gillispie got fired.

It looks like the University of Kentucky is in for a new era of recruiting crime.

The Fate of Billy G. and the Specter of John Calipari

From the hills around Pikeville to the river towns on the Mississippi, all of Kentucky is thinking about one thing--is University of Kentucky basketball coach Billy Gillispie going to be fired today?

The universal assumption is that Gillispie is going to get the ax and the air is thick with the thrill of an upcoming public execution. It's all the teachers talked about at my daughter's high school. It's all the kids talk about. It's all my daughter talks about even though she's never even watched a UK basketball game.

Who knows! Maybe Gillispie will get a reprieve. But he probably should be fired even though he's only been here two years.

Billie Gillispie just refuses to grow.

The University of Kentucky basketball team has won seven national championships, more games than any other college, and is the pride and joy of most of the rural part of the state where I live.

When Gillispie left Texas A&M for UK two years ago, expectations were high that he would return UK to the Final Four. Gillispie had a reputation as a workaholic and rabid recruiter who brought the best out in his players. Unmarried, Gillispie was supposed to be all basketball all the time just like UK's fan base. Texas A&M All-American Acie Law was held up as a shining example of what Gillispie could do with players and Gillispie made a couple of big splashy signings right away in Patrick Patterson of West Virginia and Alex Legion of Michigan.

However, Gillispie turned out to be a bundle of eccentricities.

During his first year, Gillispie developed a reputation as an odd kind of guy. Gillispie seems to be more devoted to practice than any other aspect of the game. It's especially odd that he has hard practices on the days of games. Gillispie also seemed to enjoy playing mind games with players and made a lot of strangely oracular statements about how players were doing. More disturbing, Gillispie quickly developed a reputation as an alcoholic who had no social skills. My students swear that he's been banned from six bars in Lexington for being weird while drunk or that he isn't allowed to drive his own car because of his drinking. I don't know how much stock to put into these stories, but the reputation is definitely there.

However, Gillispie's first team at UK did well despite starting poorly and expectations were pretty high for this year. Holdovers Ramel Bradley and Joe Crawford got the hang of playing for Gillispie, Patrick Patterson was everything he was supposed to be and more, and UK made it to the NCAA. True, Bradley and Crawford graduated, Alex Legion transfered as quickly as a Marilyn Munster date got out the door, and Patterson suffered a late-season stress fracture in his ankle. But it did look like Gillispie did get his teams to play really hard and effectively.

So, people in Kentucky were optimistic.

The optimism was wholly unwarranted. In Gillispie's second year, UK basketball fans got a look at the bottom of the barrel and began to think that Gillispie was going to keep them there for a long time. Once again, UK started slowly and seemed to rebound. They even got into the Top25 rankings after 5 quick victories in the SEC and the emergence of Jodie Meeks as a big-time scorer with 54 at Tennessee. But then they went off the rails. Patternson wasn't nearly as dynamic as he'd been before the stress fracture, Meeks started breaking down, and other teams matched UK's intensity. The Wildcats lost 8 out of their last 11 games in a weak SEC and even lost a final home game to cellar-dweller Georgia.

What made the whole thing even more wretched was that it became obvious that Gillispie wasn't going to change his approach and adjust to the situation--EVER. It emerged that Gillispie is a soulless workaholic who knows only one way to do things and will stick with that no matter how badly it fails. Nobody really likes these kinds of people, but the approach is acceptable when someone is winning. Former 49ers great Jerry Rice was a lot like Gillispie and everybody loved him because he was setting records and scoring touchdowns for Super Bowl teams. But when tireless workaholics start losing, the revulsion begins to show.

And that's been happening to Gillispie.

Making things worse was that it became obvious that Billy Gillispie doesn't give a damn for anybody's opinion but his own. Gillispie had a couple of dust-ups with a harmless ESPN sideline reporter, got into a public disagreement with AD Mitch Barnhart about whether he should embrace the "good-will ambassador" dimension of any coach's role, and insisted that all he had to do was "work hard" at recruiting and coaching. The stupidity of this is monumental. Any coach at a big-time college sports program is a celebrity and ambassador for the school. If nothing else, it's a major recruiting advantage. That's just as true for Roy Williams at North Carolina and Billy Donovan at Florida as it has to be for Billy Gillispie at the University of Kentucky. Given that Gillispie genuinely doesn't seem to grasp that, it started looking like he's too clueless to hold the job.

If Gillispie had been at North Carolina or Kansas, the university might have been able to diddle around about firing him for a couple of years.

But UK can't waffle. If Gillispie isn't going to succeed, they need to fire him before he drags down the program.

That's because basketball success at the University of Kentucky is a fragile thing.

The University of Kentucky actually doesn't have that much going for it as a basketball school. The bottom line is that Kentucky high schools don't produce a lot of great basketball players and needs to recruit most of its stars from out of state. But why would players lead New York, Chicago, or California to come to Lexington and the University of Kentucky? Kentucky is a poor state, the University of Kentucky is not that great of a university, and Lexington is not that great of a city.

Not bad--just not that great.

As Faye Dunaway would say, what's the motivation?

Until it's last bout of NCAA probation in the late 1980's, the University of Kentucky basketball program was able to cover it's structural problems by cheating. Like the University of Alabama and University of Oklahoma football teams, UK basketball was known as a big-time cheating program and had been on probation several times from the forties onward.

But UK made a decision to go in another direction when they hired Rick Pitino to run the basketball program in 1990. With Pitino, UK was able to succeed without cheating because they had an extremely attractive coach who said all the right things, did a tremendous job of recruiting, and melded all of the great recruits into outstanding teams that contended for NCAA titles. Great coaching would make up for great cheating in producing great basketball.

What UK is facing with Billie Gillispie is the specter of slipping to its "natural" level as a middling college team that makes some noise in the NCAA's every once in a while but isn't really a perennial contender like North Carolina.

And that's why Gillispie has to go.

But firing Gillispie doesn't solve the problem. How does UK regain top-level success in college basketball? Is there another Rick Pitino out there willing to carry UK back to the top, the very top.

Maybe.

But John Calipari is down in Memphis and he gets big-time recruits and goes to Final Fours even though he has low graduation rates. So what if Calipari relies on "one and done" guys and isn't that careful about standards or college or all that rot.

Calipari might have an aura of Tarkanian-like sleaze about him, but he definitely gets the job done.

And sleaze might be what UK needs to remain competitive in college basketball.

Michael Steele: Where's Your Friends?

I didn't realize that Michael Steele was in such a bad way in a Richard Nixon petty paranoia style. But it looks like the first thing he wanted to do as RNC chair was to flush out his enemies in the Republican Party.

"I'm very introspective about things. I'm a cause-and-effect kind of guy. So if I do something, there's a reason for it... It may look like a mistake, a gaffe. There is a rationale, there is a logic behind it," he said. "I want to see what the landscape looks like. I want to see who yells the loudest. I want to know who says they're with me but really isn't."

"It helps me understand my position on the chess board. It helps me understand, where, you know, the enemy camp is and where those who are inside the tent are," Steele added. "It's all strategic."

Memo to Michael Steele: What the Republican Party really needs to do is figure out the location of the "friend camp" and how to find the friend camp is it still exists. Almost any Republican has lots of enemies and conservatives whine constantly about how nobody likes them. So the enemy tents are never hard to find.

It's the "friend tents" that Republicans need to look for.

The Guilt Free Life of a Blogger

The thing I like best about being a political blogger is that politics and the media are full of people who are worse than me. I always feel a lot better about myself after going through the political blogs and web sites for a few minutes.

Today's a good example. I couldn't watch Barack Obama's press conference last night because I was in the Morehead State University library. Missing Obama's press conference means that I've failed again as a blogger. How am I going to build my reader base if I keep abstaining from all the events political bloggers need to write about. What a loser I am.

But then I read in HuffPo that House Republican Whip Eric Cantor--the GOP's new conservative genius--skipped out on the press conference to take in a Britney Spears show. Britney Spears??? There's a triple threat if there ever was one. She can't sing, can't dance, and can't act either.

As my daughter would say, "ew, that's gross."

But I feel better about myself.

Yes, the guilt free life of a blogger.

Morning Thought

Maybe Rush Limbaugh could serve the conservative movement best by just going off the air.

Obama's Very Long Leash

Josh Marshall gets at a key point concerning the Obama presidency in his comments on last night's press conference.

One thing that was clear from tonight's press conference was why the White House keeps wanting to get Obama out in front of the cameras and on TV. Obama has a ready and mainly unflappable command of the issues confronting the country, which I think people find reassuring in itself. In a climate of crisis such as this, I don't think most people's focus is ideological. They're looking for competence and command, a sense that someone is sailing the ship, at helm with a clear sense of where they're going.

By "people," Marshall means all the constituencies who are not committed conservative. He's referring here primarily to white moderates and independents but also to progressives, African-Americans, hispanics, and gay people. Depending on how one counts, these constituencies add up to anywhere between 2/3rds and 4/5ths of the whole voting population and Marshall is right that these groups are going to evaluate Obama primarily on whether he appears to be serious, competent, and moving forward--the extent to which he avoids appearing to be a Bush-like caricature of himself representing the worst of American society.

Given that appearing to have "competence and command" is something that Barack Obama is very good at doing (and that's much of the reason he was elected), he's on a very long leash as president. In my opinion, Obama's general approval ratings and level of public support are going to stay high for at least the next five or six years. Even if the most recent bank bailout doesn't work, Obama's going to get the benefit of the doubt for taking a serious approach based on the best advice he could get from "the experts." Marshall is right in noticing that public opinion is not ideological on the bailout. That's partly because public opinion isn't sure about it's own idea of the "right approach." Consequently, the public could be willing to continue supporting Obama even if the "public/private partnership" idea doesn't pan out. As long as Obama is not making a fool of himself in the process, he's okay.

The Republicans and the conservative movement don't understand this yet, but they are a very big part of the public opinion dynamic that gives Obama such a long leash. George Bush's approval ratings were in the 20's and low 30's because his administration and the Republican Party largely perceived as a bunch of buffoons whose incompetence and corruption led the country to disaster. The most common term used for Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Alberto Gonzales, and the other prominent Republican figures from the Bush years is "idiot." What's happened since Obama's inauguration is that the higher profiles of figures like Rush Limbaugh, Michael Steele, Michele Bachmann, and Jim Bunning have reinforced the whole buffoonish aura of the Republican Party that was created by the Bush administration. That's made Obama even more appealing by way of contrast and done a great deal to lock in the idea that Obama as a figure of "seriousness and competence."

Rush Limbaugh, Michele Bachmann, and Jim Bunning were all in the news yesterday making themselves and the Republican Party look more absurd than any comedian could make them look. Limbaugh was cartoonishly racist, Bachmann was cartoonishly "radical," and Bunning was doing a great impersonation of a stereotypically bitter, bullying right-winger who nobody in their right mind would vote for. Every time these people are in the news, they make Barack Obama look very good by way of comparison and keep giving the Obama administration a longer lease on popularity and credibility.

Given the public mood and the ridiculousness of the Republican opposition, I'd say that the Obama administration is on a very long leash indeed.

Interest in Oakland Shootings

I have a little bit of a personal interest in the Oakland shootings because I used to live fairly close to the location of the shootings on 74th and MacArthur Boulevard.

Of course that was back in 1978 and 1979 when I was on my coming-of-age adventure with my then girl friend Susan from North Carolina. We lived at the corner of 10th and 23rd in an apartment building where everybody was African-American except for one other tenant. To put this into the context of my life, I had never even seen a group of African-Americans until my first year in graduate school in 1976. That's how white my upbringing was in upstate NY.

Straight too--1976 was the year I met an out gay person for the first time.

Anyway, now we were living in a 99% black neighborhood in what we thought was a major urban ghetto. We thought we should be scared but the neighborhood looked friendly. So we weren't.

Besides! The rent was cheap, we were broke, and we had already survived a rough warehouse district in Portland with nothing but a couple of interesting stories to tell.

Almost everything on the corner of 10th and 23rd was pretty mundane.

The adjoining streets were crowded with cars and guys were out just about every Saturday washing their cars during the summer. We were sort of hippy like and didn't care that much about appearances but we soon started washing our Honda too after getting some "wash me" hints drawn out on the dust.

We did have a prostitute/heroin addict living next door to us and she had a guy with a rainbow colored Afro wig staying with her. He'd play Barry White music all day while I was in our room (and it was a pretty nice room) reading Freud, Hunter Thompson, and Fustel de Coulange. It wasn't that bad, but I eventually decided to do my reading at the UC-Berkeley library about 10-15 miles away.

Gas was cheap in 1978/79.

What about the cops? I imagine we were like a lot of other people in the neighborhood in thinking of the Oakland cops as more of a menace than anything else. A police helicopter flew over our building at the same time every day. It was intimidating. It was annoying. And I'm pretty sure that's what they wanted to accomplish in our neighborhood--intimidate and annoy.

Being prone to fantasy, I used to daydream about getting a machine gun and shooting the helicopter out of the sky one day.

But I fantasized about a lot of other things in those days.

As for last weekend's shooting, killing four people is a horrible thing to do. I don't know how the family of shooter Lovelle Mixon is going to come to grips with the fact that he did this horrific thing. That seems even more difficult than coping with the sudden death of the officers for their families. Of course, it's all a nightmare.

I can say that I'm surprised that more of the police aren't shot in the United States. Given the volatile brew of aggressive police, an armed public, and the constant throbbing of self-righteous rage, one would think that there would be a lot more police shootings than there are. But people tend to hold back from shooting the cops.

And that's a good thing.

Lance Armstrong Catches a Break

I've never been a big Lance Armstrong fan, but I'm not particularly anxious to see Armstrong get humiliated on his comeback. I still remember Sugar Ray Leonard being beaten to a pulp by Terry Norris and I'm not anxious to see Armstrong go through the cycling version of that trauma.

So, I was glad to see Armstrong fracture his collarbone during a race in Spain. He might recover in time for the Tour de France, but I'm betting that the injury knocks him out of the race. Much of Armstrong's edge came from his super-conditioning and I don't think he'd want to give that up. I'd wouldn't be surprised if Armstrong dropped out of the Tour once he realizes he won't be able to prepare like usual.

Better to go out this way than be humiliated before the whole world on L'Alpe du Huez.

Sickening News on the Chris Brown/Rihanna Front

It appears that there's a lot of sympathy for Chris Brown in his beating of his pop-star girlfriend Rihanna. That's especially the case for teen age girls.

And what may be surprising is the level of support for Mr. Brown. While thousands of teenagers have certainly turned on Mr. Brown, many others — regardless of race or gender — defend him, often at Rihanna’s expense.

In a recent survey of 200 teenagers by the Boston Public Health Commission, 46 percent said Rihanna was responsible for what happened; 52 percent said both bore responsibility, despite knowing that Rihanna’s injuries required hospital treatment. On a Facebook discussion, one girl wrote, “she probably ran into a door and was too embarrassed so blamed it on chris.”

This reaction has alarmed parents and professionals who work with teenagers, and Oprah Winfrey was prompted to address violence in teenage relationships on her show. Boys who condone Mr. Brown’s behavior disappoint, but don’t shock Marcyliena Morgan, executive director of Harvard’s hip-hop archive. “But it’s
the girls!” she said. “Where have we gone wrong here?”

The sad thing is that so many teen-age girls learn this "she deserved it" crap then have to spend the rest of their lives unlearning it when they become targets of physical violence and rape themselves.

The Wind Blowing from the Left

Who could have guessed that Bob Dylan's "you don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows" would create a new cliche genre.

And who could have guessed that the wind would suddenly stop blowing from the right?

I follow the right fairly closely and I don't know that anybody on the right has had anything significant to say about AIG bonuses, the new version of the Geithner bailout plan, or anything else having to do with the financial sector crisis.

Has Rush Limbaugh been talking about bending over because AIG has a white CEO? What's Ann Coulter's latest joke about Michelle Obama's victory garden? Sean Hannity have anything interesting to say? Controversy from Bill O'Reilly's end?

What about the Republican political leadership?

Can we really say the Republicans have contributed to the debate if nobody listens?

The wind has shifted enough that the conservative/left pole being the Obama administration, TNR, and Slate and the liberal/left pole being occupied by liberal media outlets like HuffPost, TPM, Salon, and the Daily Show, and policy progressives like Paul Krugman, Joseph Stiglitz, Matt Taibbi, and Robert Reich.

The elimination of freak show conservatives from the economic debate does simplify things somewhat, but I'm still pretty much torn between Obama and the left-critique myself.

My bad ideological self like to agree with the liberal/left critique, take over the AIG and the big banks (Citigroup, BoA, Goldman Sachs, etc.), and let AIG's counter-parties and big bank shareholders hang out to dry.

But I would bet that my Kentucky state retirement fund is heavily invested in AIG's counter-parties (hedge funds, private equity funds, Goldman Sachs, and the like) and that retirement funds all over the country will be bankrupted if AIG's counter-parties are forced to eat their very real losses. A lot of my friends who lost tons from 401k plans are waiting for the retirement shoe to drop as well (I didn't have a 401k).

That strikes me as a very big problem with the liberal/left critique.

Not that I'm satisfied with the Geithner plan. As Brad DeLong explains, the government is going to set up the world's largest hedge fund to dispose of the "toxic assets" (i.e., mortgage-backed securities) currently held by financial institutions. Likewise, the government is going to be bringing in hedge fund managers to manage the operation and guaranteeing a certain floor price to the securities.

The big problem here is that the federal government still hasn't done anything to break the business culture of big-bucks entitlement that fueled the speculative investments that burned up everybody's 401k plans and pension funds.

God, this sounds like I'm reciting "This is the House that Jack Built."

Anyway, the point is that the federal government's approach will be restarting the cycle of reckless speculation that would result in another crash pretty quickly. There will be the same players because hardly anybody was fired, the same expectations for profit that originally got everybody into trouble, and hundreds of billions in government cash to leverage.

Where the hedge funds first leveraged my retirement money into a financial black hole, now it looks like Timothy Geithner wants them to leverage my tax money into a black hole as well.

Nevertheless, I view the Geithner approach as workable if the federal government decides to once again start using government regulation as a tool for discouraging speculative financial behavior.

That's the only way I see to thread the current needle.

We All Deserve His Silence

Yesterday George W. Bush said yesterday that current President Obama "deserves my silence." In general, this is not a point of view I support. I don't think that a former president should go from leader of the nation and leader of the Republican Party to complete silence in the two minutes it takes the next president to say his or her oath.

But I'll make an exception in Bush's case. Given that he was one of the worst presidents in American history, it's save to say that we all deserve silence from George W. Bush.

The Apple of My Eye

Today's the 17th anniversary of my marriage to Mrs. RSI. It's hard to believe that we've been married that long. It's even harder to believe I'd ever get it together enough to be married for that long.

But it's a very nice feeling.

She's definitely the Apple of My Eye.

What's Next for Republican Campaign Trackers--Sexual Assault?

Republicans in Congress just don't get it. More than 2/3rds of the American public just doesn't want "more of the same" from them. The public doesn't want the Republicans to stay mired in right-wing ideological rigidity, doesn't want the Republicans to be maintain an attitude of relentless aggression, and doesn't want the Republicans pulling one cheap stunt after another against the Obama administration and the Democrats.

Today's manifestation of GOP obtuseness is the practice of using Congressional staff members as "campaign trackers" to track Democratic members of Congress and try to provoke them into saying something that can be used against them in negative ads.

The National Republican Congressional Committee is sending out video "trackers" to ask provocative questions of Democratic members of Congress. The trackers, who are congressional committee staffers, were earlier reported by Congress Daily, a specialty publication distributed largely on Capitol Hill.

NRCC spokesman Paul Lindsay told McClatchy that Democratic complaints were "whining," adding that "The modern-day world of campaign politics demands that we track our opponents' steps and missteps. We have nothing to hide when it comes to asking tough questions, but it appears that Democrats do when it comes to answering them."

One target of this form of stalking is conservative Pennsylvania Democrat Chris Carney:

Rep. Chris Carney was walking down a Capitol Hill street when suddenly — bam —
an anonymous Republican with a video camera who'd been following him asked him a question that was intended to embarrass the Pennsylvania Democrat.

The interviewer asked first about a single provision in the massive economic stimulus bill, then asked if Carney was going to be "ready to vote tomorrow."

An irritated Carney answered: "Like I told you before, if I see the damn package, I'll have an answer."

The whole idea is to get Democrats to embarrass themselves under stress and hopefully cost them re-election the same way George Allen ruined his career by referring to a Democratic videographer as a "macaca."

Given that they're now stalking people, one wonders how far Congressional Republicans are willing to go. Are they going to start shouting provocative insults to see how Democrats respond? Perhaps they'll go ahead and just start assaulting Democrats to see if they're "tough enough" to defend themselves or whether they're "committed enough to gun rights" to carry a pistol on them?

Maybe the Congressional Republicans will really "push the envelope" and start sexual assaulting Democrats on the streets in order to tape the response.

They could call it "Porn Politics."

Learning from Those Big AIG Bonuses

Ok! I get it. I get it. The Obama administration is trying to preserve the American financial system by NOT fully nationalizing AIG, Citigroup, and other zombie institutions.

The problem from the Obama point of view is that most financial institutions were invested in the mortgage-backed securities and credit default swaps of companies like AIG. Why not? They were all under pressure to produce big profits and all this stuff looked like easy money. So, they all got in. Now, Goldman Sachs and I would think all kinds of hedge funds, pension funds, and mutual funds would go down the bankruptcy toilet if the government nationalized AIG and Citigroup and then sold their financial assets.

And that would wreak even more havoc on the whole global economic system.

Like I said I get it.

But there's been a big price to pay.

The $165 million, $450 million, or $1.2 billion that AIG is paying out mostly to people in the Financial Products Division that lost perhaps hundreds of billions of dollars illustrates one of the fundamental weaknesses of the Obama approach.

It leaves the toxic business culture of American financial institutions in place.

The 10, 50, and 100 million dollar bonuses available to financial services executives are a significant factor in the current crisis. With huge bonuses out there for the taking, executives at companies like Bear Stearns had a juicy incentive to make the kinds of speculative, high yield investments that could lock in the big profits for the company and get a nice bonus slice for the account executive. As the housing bubble inflated, the men and women who got in and got in big got all the bonuses and all the promotions while the guys who were cautious got fired.

The Darwinism of Speculation--I imagine that's how people like Alan Schwartz of Bear Stearns and John Thain of Merrill Lynch and million dollar redecorations got to the top.

What the big AIG bonuses show is that these kinds of people are still dominating office culture at AIG and are probably still dominant at other companies as well.

If the Obama administration had fully nationalized, most of the people and most of the business culture of the financial industry would have been flushed down the toilet in the wave of bankruptcies.

The collateral damage to the economy might have been too much, but caution and prudence would have ruled the day.

Now that it looks like many of the financial industry people and a lot of the speculative business culture are going to survive, it seems likely that the pressure toward big-time speculation is going to start re-building as executives look for ways to start earning big piles of bonus cash again.

The best thing the Obama administration can do now is double down on financial industry regulation as the most effective way to impose caution and prudence.

Obama can start by writing legislation to outlaw the kinds of mandated bonuses that are written into AIG contracts. If AIG contracts require millions of dollars in bonuses for certain levels of sales, they are encouraging toxic levels of speculation and putting the whole economy at risk for crashing.

Those kinds of contracts should be banned.

The pervasive abuses of the federal government bailout by the financial industry are certainly outrageous and the AIG bonuses should be cancelled.

But the abuses should also be seen as a learning opportunity for the Obama administration as it figures out the best way to regulate the financial industry in the future.

One place to start would be executive bonuses.

Glenn Beck Plays Footsie with the Mass Murder Line

I wouldn't pretend to have opened any windows into the soul of Glenn Beck. Still, it appears that he's experimenting with justifications for violent, terrorist-type acts against American society during the Age of Obama.

A few weeks ago, I put up a couple of brief posts on Becks enthusiastic references to militias, depression, and revolution as example of "freak show" Republicans in action.

But now Beck's gone farther in the direction of domestic terrorism in response to the shootings in Alabama. Nobody knows why Michael McLendon shot up his mother, grandmother, and a bunch of people sitting on their porches in Samson, Alabama. McLendon tried to join the Marines but failed. He tried to become a policeman but failed. Likewise, McLendon had a list of people who had "wronged" him and appeared to be involved in some sort of family dispute. But right now, there's no public information on what kind of guy he was, how exactly he felt wronged, or what triggered his murderous rampage.

And there might not ever be any good information. McLendon killed a number of the people who knew him best.

But that didn't stop Glenn Beck from speculating.

According to Beck, McClendon's problem might have been that he was one of the people who's been "disenfranchised" by the recent liberal turn in American politics and social attitudes.

But as I’m listening to him. I’m thinking about the American people that feel disenfranchised right now. That feel like nobody’s hearing their voice. The government isn’t hearing their voice. Even if you call, they don’t listen to you on both sides. If you’re a conservative, you’re called a racist. You want to starve children . . . Yada yada yada. And every time they do speak out, they’re shut down by political correctness. How do you not have those people turn into that guy?

Beck's theory here is that people on the right are being "silenced" and that mass murders like the one perpetrated by McLendon could be a "natural" reaction to the sense of exclusion. One example of what Beck's talking about is the attack on a Unitarian Universalist Church outside Knoxville, TN where Jim D. Adkisson tried to kill as "many liberals as possible" and did manage to murder a couple of people before he was stopped. Beck's logic here would be that Adkisson was so fed up with the shaming he felt from the media about racism, homophobia, and the other ways that liberals shame, silence, and disenfranchise conservatives that he lashed out.

The question is whether Glenn Beck is justifying mass murder as a legitimate expression of right-wing grievance against a liberal society. My impression is that Beck is experimenting with that possibility but has not quite made up his mind and is taking care about risking his cushy gig on Fox. Even Fox might have a hard time defending Beck if he began to openly justify domestic terrorism.

Still, Barack Obama has only been in office for two months and Glenn Beck is already toying around with the idea of justifying domestic terrorism.

It makes you wonder how far the fringes of the right are willing to go.