Illegal Immigration--Why Do Much of Anything?

Peggy Noonan writes that the U. S. shouldn't pass any new immigration legislation until the "borders"--by which she means the Mexican border--are secure.

In the past four years, I have argued in this space that nothing can or should be done, no new federal law passed, until the border itself is secure. That is the predicate, the commonsense first step. Once existing laws are enforced and the border made peaceful, everyone in the country will be able to breathe easier and consider, without an air of clamor and crisis, what should be done next.

But the federal government already puts an enormous effort into border security and illegal immigrants have to go to great lengths to get into the country undetected. Instead, it seems that the main "problem" is the Mexican population that's already here in the U. S.

But if the Mexican population is a problem, it's a problem that I tend to welcome. My favorite restaurant in my part of Kentucky is the Mexican-owned Italian restaurant, I like seeing the Mexican guys at the stores, and I like the Mexican guy who lives next door better than I like my Anglo neighbor. I want my daughters to learn Spanish and wish I'd remember more of my own Spanish from high school.

In general, I appreciate Mexico and wish the Mexicans well. The drug cartel problem in Mexico is a great deal worse than the "illegal immigration" problem in the U. S. and we're the major cause of that problem because of our national hunger for "illegal" drugs. What I'd like to see is some sort of system that authorizes parts of the rural population in Mexico to circulate back and forth between Mexico and the U.S. In this way, Mexicans wouldn't have to risk death to enter the U. S., but they would also have the option of going back and taking up opportunities in Mexico after time in the U. S. I imagine that there will be less illegal immigration if there is more legal immigration.

I'd also like to see amnesty for the illegal immigrant population in the U.S. Once again, I want to go back to our problem--the drug problem. We have a couple of million people in jail for drug crimes, but millions more Americans ignore the drug laws in a way that's much more destructive to ourselves and Mexico than Mexican immigration. As a result, I don't think we in the U.S. have much credibility when we talk about the majesty of the law in relation to immigration. So, let's exercise a little modesty and forgive the transgressions of those who entered illegally from Mexico. Most of them seem to be making a positive contribution anyway.

Models In Need of an Airbrush

Above is a picture of a group of super-models who are modeling for Louis Vitton in Paris this year. Most of these women are in their early 20's, but they are so thin and worn that they look more like concentration camp survivors than anything else.

Camp survivors or drug addicts.

HuffPost cites readers at Reddit as saying:

"Seriously, though--how many of them have enormous foreheads and huge eyes? A lot of them are not attractive sans makeup. Their faces look smooshed; they're too damn skinny. Put down the coke straw and eat a cheeseburger, ladies!" and the more poetic "coke, coke, coke ,coke, heroine, coke, heroine, heeeey that one is smiling..., coke, heroine, heroine, coke, ..."

I would have put a couple of "meths" in with the coke and heroin cases.

Maybe all that airbrushing isn't so superfluous after all.

Crist Not Hitting Bottom Yet

Florida Gov. Charlie Crist announced today that he'll continue his campaign for Florida's U. S. Senate seat as an independent.

"My decision to run for the United State Senate as a candidate without party affiliation in many ways says more about our nation and our state than it does about me . . . As someone who served the people in Florida more than 15 years, from the state Senate to the governor's mansion, I can confirm what most Floridians already know. Unfortunately our political system is broken. I was never one who sought to hold elective office to demagogue, to point fingers. For me, for me, public service has always been about putting the needs of our state and our people first. And every single day, as your servant, I have tried to do exactly that."

Crist is counting on a groundswell of moderate opinion in his favor.

Good luck with that.

Joe Lieberman won as an independent in Connecticut because the GOP did not field a credible candidate, which meant that Lieberman was supported by Republicans as a way to undercut the Democratic candidate. However, Florida Democrats have a major candidate of their own in Rep. Kendrick Meek. Crist isn't going to get anywhere unless Meek closes up shop.

And that's highly unlikely.

The problem for Crist is the same as it is for almost any moderate. He wants to put "the needs of our state and our people first" but doesn't identify any specific ideas for doing so because that would put him in the crosshairs of the ideological battles between conservative Republicans and progressive Democrats.

Moderates generally like "compromise" and "bi-partisanship," but Crist is going to find out how poorly those principles play on the campaign trail. The right-wing views any politician who is willing to compromise with the Democrats as a "big-government liberal." Likewise, progressives view any willingness to compromise with Republicans as evidence of a politician's selling his soul to "corporate interests" and the Washington/media establishment.

And the worst thing for Charlie Crist is that both sides are right about him.

Sorry Charlie! But you still haven't hit bottom yet.

Fareed Zakaria Needs Smarter Super-Smart Friends

Fareed Zakaria's defense of Goldman Sachs in the current Newsweek has a Tom Friedman-esque air of "I was talking with a super-smart Wall Street guy on the flight back from London and he told me that this Goldman Sachs case is crap."

Like Friedman, Zacharia needs smarter super-smart friends feeding him his lines.

Maybe James Jones Shouldn't Have Known the Joke At All

Gen. James Jones, President Obama's national security adviser, is in some moderately warm water for telling a Jewish joke at a gathering at "The Washington Institute for Near East Policy – a pro-Israel think tank."

The joke scored a two-fer for Jones. First, he told a joke that relies on the kinds of long-time Jewish stereotypes associated with anti-Semitism from the expulsion of Jews from England to the Inquisition to the Holocaust. At the same time, he was telling the joke to a largely Jewish audience where a lot of people were guaranteed to be offended.

One person who attended the gathering noted the intense stupidity of Jones' story, "can you imagine him telling a black joke at an event of African Americans?" So what was the joke. Here's an account from Jake Tapper of ABC News.

Jones tells the joke “in order to set the stage for my remarks,” and then proceeds to tell the story of a “member of the Taliban separated from his fighting party.” The Taliban member stumbles upon a shack, which it turns out is a "little store owned by a Jewish merchant.'

“I need water,” the Taliban fighter says to the merchant. “Get me some water.”

“I'm sorry I don’t have any water but would you like to buy a tie?” the merchant says. “We have a nice sale of ties today.”

The Taliban warrior goes on a tirade against the merchant, against Jews, about Israel. “I need water you try to sell me ties, you people don’t get it.”

"Well I'm sorry I don’t have water for you,” the merchant says, “I forgive you for all of the insults you’ve levied against me, my family, my country...But I will help you out."

The merchant steers the Taliban towards a restaurant two miles away.

“They have all the water you'll need,” the merchant says.

The Taliban fighter walks towards the restaurant, then returns about an hour later.

"Your brother tells me I need a tie to get in the restaurant,” he says.

Ba-dum-bum.

Yeah, "Ba-dum-bum." That was hilarious. Personally, I've hated these kinds of jokes since I started college. Here, I'm an equal opportunity hater. I hate black jokes, Jewish jokes, Polish jokes, Italian jokes, and hillbilly jokes.

I hate it when I hear jokes about "hicks" as well.

It's all ugly. It's all crap. I'm rather proud that I've never remembered one of these jokes long enough to repeat it.

So what's Gen. James Jones have to say about it.

“I wish that I had not made this off the cuff joke at the top of my remarks, and I apologize to anyone who was offended by it. It also distracted from the larger message I carried that day: that the United States commitment to Israel’s security is sacrosanct.”

My wish is that Gen. Jones hadn't known the joke in the first place.

Sarah Palin as Stop Sign

The best thing about Gabriel Sherman's article on Sarah Palin in the New York magazine is the throw away line that Palin is the "president" or "CEO" of right-wing America.

But I see Palin more as a the right-wing's stop sign, the leading symbol of their refusal to accept the America in which they already live, the post-civil rights, post-feminism, post-gay marriage, macroeconomic America in which government acts on a large scale, a liberal black guy can be president, Mexican immigrants run the Italian restaurant down the street, and lesbian newlyweds are out gardening on weekends.

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It's really too bad.

Rick Perry a Progressive at Heart

Well, sort of. In spring 2009, Texas governor Rick Perry was ready to rejoin the Confederate Army. This spring it's the Glenn Beck Army. That sounds like progress to me.

Chris Matthews on Republicans Becoming Far Right

Chris Matthews thinks that the Republicans are trending too far to the right to appeal to suburban voters.

That's the basic perception over at HuffPost and TPM as well.

But I don't buy that.

Sure, it looks like the far right is taking over the Republican Party.

But if the far right is the only alternative to the Democrats, a sizable percentage of moderate voters will vote for them just because they're unhappy with the Democrats.

The best thing for Obama and the Democrats could do is engage the far right in debate. I think they'll find it easier to debate Sarah Palin than John McCain.

RSI Going to Philadelphia

Getting out of town is good! One of my grant application ships came in and now I'll be spending five weeks in Philadelphia this summer doing research.

Tea Party in Washington

And I used to like Victoria Jackson.

Happy Tax Day!

Good day for the RSI household. We haven't paid more than 8% of our income in federal taxes for years and our refund went up at least $2,000 this year. Now we're can think about visiting our ancestral homeland in Cancun.

Or is that Bora Bora?

Well, anyway. I'm sure I'm descended from people who were smart enough to be born on a tropical island.

Digby Doesn't Like Teabaggers

The liberal blogger Digby REALLY doesn't like Teabaggers. But then again, most conservatives I know don't like them early. I hear a lot of "Republicans won't vote for Sarah Palin."

Me? I'm pretty sure that my mother, one of my brothers, and one of my sisters have Teabag sympathies. Maybe my dad too.

So, I'm compelled to cut them a little slack.

A Note on Carl Paladino's Racist/Porn Convergence

This is a note on the racism/porn scandal that's developing around Carl Paladino, a multi-millionaire Buffalo NY businessman and Tea Party GOP candidate for governor of New York.

Yesterday, WNYmedia.net ran a lengthy story on the racist and pornographic e-mails Paladino has been forwarding to his friends, cronies, and political contacts in the Buffalo area.

There was plenty of racism and porn to go around.

Two of the racist e-mails focus on representations of Barack Obama. First, there's an African tribal dance pictured as an Obama inauguration rehearsal. In fact, there was a lot of "African" stereotyping of Obama right after his election. For example, some guy in my town walked into a convenience store on election night and announced that "we've elected a monkey for president." Of course, there's been even more "Obama" racist jokes after his inauguration. There is so much of it at my daughter's high school in Kentucky that dealing with racist joking is another reason to "hate" high school.

By the way, the tribal dance video was supposed to have been a big hit on racist web sites.

The second Obama picture involved Obama and his wife Michelle as a "pimp" and a "ho" in a play on blaxploitation movies from the 70's. This kind of stereotyping goes back to the images of "black dandies" in blackface minstrel songs from the 1830's. In relation to African-Americans, the racist idea in the dandy stereotype is to treat black people as absurd, inept, and incompetent for anything but singing and dancing. The stereotype is especially directed against African-Americans who are determined to shine in politics, business, literature, and the arts because it portrays black accomplishment as fundamentally farcical. In this sense, the picture of the Obama as a pimp and whore represents the election of Barack Obama as a racial absurdity.

The final racist item was a video of an airplane landing amongst a group of black people with the caption "run n-word run." There's a certain way in which this image is just as disturbing as the pornography I'll discuss below. Much like the tribal dance video and the pimp and ho picture, the video of the black men scattering is designed to demean and degrade African-Americans. But the airplane video is more demeaning because it portrays black people as being helplessly subject to white people and white people as getting off on their humiliation. It's a little bit like the scene in "Invisible Man" where a group of white men in a Southern town are entertained by watching young black men scramble for coins on an electronically-charged surface. The image was not only an abject humiliation of the black guys, it also involved the pleasures of white power. The same with the airplane scattering the black guys in the image circulated by Carl Paladino.





I find pornography to be traumatizing in the sense that contact with porn leads me to have post-traumatic stress symptoms. So I abstained from looking at it and limited myself to scrolling through. But there's very kinds of graphic sex clips and a bestiality video.

A couple of quick notes:

1. The Racism is not just Paladino's. It's the racism of the people who forwarded the e-mails to Paladino and the racism of those who laughed at the Obama racial send ups. To Paladino, the racist e-mails were "just humor . . . I'm not sensitive to ethnic humor. dago, spic, wap, polack, whatever we hear it every day. I think the oversensitivity to black/white humor is wrong and in itself demeaning." No surprise there. "It's just humor" is the typical response of racist blowhards when they're called out on their bigotry. In the case of Paladino, it's important to emphasize that he's a focal point for an extensive network of racist blowhards.

2. Pornography and Tradition. Hard-core porn has been at the heart of a number of scandals lately, including the sexting of Tiger Woods and the Jesse James/Sandra Bullock mess. Racism and porn have been linked in the United States since at least the 1830's. Paladino's e-mails bring the racism/porn nexus to the surface in the context of Tea Party politics. One of the things that interesting about the pornography angle here is the extent to which Tea Party conservativism is disconnected from Victorian ideas of tradition and propriety.

Last Week's Grading Orgy

Last week I really got it done on the grading front.

Capstone students turned in first drafts on Monday--back on Wednesday. Feminist theory students turned in research proposals on Tuesday--back on Thursday. Thursday night, I started reading all of my take-home essay exams. They were done by Saturday at noon.

And the papers were great. I got a lot of outstanding work--work that would have been outstanding anywhere.

Count me a happy professor at the end of last week's grading orgy.

Tiger Loses: The World Sighs in Relief

Phil Mickelson won the Masters Golf Tournament today. Good for him. Even better, porn king Tiger Woods lost, therefore enabling us to preserve the idea that there's some justice in the world.

Needs More Rehab

Disgraced former New York Governor Eliott Spitzer muses about getting back into politics. I'd probably vote for Tiger Woods first.

Duke Anti-Christs Win! Apocalypse Begins

Oh God! The Devil's favorite team, the Duke University Anti-Christs won the NCAA basketball championship. Fire and Brimstone start tomorrow. The survivalists are right. The world is coming to an end.

Jamie Dimon: Most Dangerous?

As part of their coverage of the politics of financial reform, Huffington Post published an article last week by Simon Johnson calling Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon the most dangerous banker in American history.

But it's not a strong case.

Johnson's main reasoning is that Dimon is dangerous because he has a lot of credibility stemming from the fact that he steered Morgan Chase away from all of the speculative strategies that led to the last crunch.

That means that Dimon could have a big role in influencing financial reform to the interest of big banks like Morgan Chase.

That may be the case.

But the most dangerous bankers in America are still trying to leverage CDO's and other bad debt into huge bonuses.

How to Be a Manichean Catholic?

NPR has an article by a writer named Elizabeth Scalia on why she remains a Catholic despite the pedophilia scandal.

Through 2,000 imperfect — sometimes glorious, sometimes heinous — years, the church has contemplated and manifested the truth that dark and light, innocence and guilt, justice and injustice all share a kinship, one that waves back and forth like wind-stirred wheat in a field, churning toward something — as yet — unknowable.

That sounds a lot like Manichaeism to me. One of the interesting things about early and medieval Christianity is the many ways in which pagan religions like Manichaeanism continued to subsist within the all encompassing embrace of the Catholic Church. Catholicism took up the gods of polytheism in the concepts of saints and angels. It looks like the Catholic Church took up the dualism of Mani as well.

If I were religious, I would personally prefer a religion which was not associated with the greed and brutality of the Roman Empire.

Sarah Palin for Fake President

It appears that Sarah Palin's interview special for Fox might be a fake in that Fox is broadcasting old interviews on the program rather than any kind of current sit-down with Sarah Palin.

According to a spokesperson for fake interview subject Toby Keith:

"We were never contacted by Fox. I have no idea what interview it's taken from. They're promoting this like it's a brand new interview. He never sat down with Sarah Palin."

Does this mean that Fox would be broadcasting old footage of Ronald Reagan if Palin ever gets elected president?

All This Science, I Don't Understand

That was the Elton John "Rocket Man" lyric that I was thinking about last night while I was helping Miss Teen RSI with DNA and RNA.

Shelby Steele Gets Obama Wrong Again

For Shelby Steele, all of the problems that President Obama now has or will ever have are caused by the self-importance Obama derives from being black.

Well, suppose you were the first black president of the United States and, therefore, also the first black head-of-state in the entire history of Western Civilization. You represent a human first, something entirely new under the sun. There aren't even any myths that speak directly to your circumstance, no allegorical tales of ancient black kings who ruled over white kingdoms.

Of course, Steele offers no credit to Obama or anyone else for the accomplishment--no acknowledgement of the generations of civil rights activists, everyday African-Americans, white liberals, or other minorities who made Obama's presidency possible.

And none was expected. Shelby Steele is a salaried conservative at the Hoover Institute who has exactly as much intellectual freedom as David Frum had at the American Enterprise Institute.

In other words--none.

Sour grapes might play a part here as well. Steele wrote a book predicting that Obama could not win the presidency because of his connections with the black community.

Anyway, Steele's argument is that the monumental character of Obama's accomplishment in getting elected has created an enormous self-importance that pushes Obama to push "big ideas" like health care reform.

Does this special burden explain Barack Obama's embrace of scale as vision (if I don't know what to do, I'll do big things)? I think it does to a degree. It means, for example, that a caretaker presidency is not an option for him. His historical significance almost demands a kind of political narcissism. For him the great appeal of massive health-care reform—when jobs are a far more pressing problem—may have been its history-making potential.

Here was a chance for Mr. Obama not just to be a part of history but to make history. Here he could have an achievement commensurate with his own historical significance. To have left off health care and taken up jobs would have left him a caretaker rather than a history-maker. So he hung in with health care and today it can be said: Barack Obama has signed the most significant piece of social legislation in 45 years—achieving something that has eluded every president since FDR.

That idea might have some credibility if Obama's had been the first Democrat to pursue health care reform or his health care proposals had been any kind of surprise. But Democratic presidents have been pursuing health care reform going back to FDR and all Democratic presidential candidates who even pretended to being serious contenders in 2008 had to have a detailed health reform plan. Obama, Hillary, and John Edwards all had big health reform proposals. I bet Joe Biden and Bill Richardson had them too. Even Joe Lieberman had a big health care proposal when he was running for president in 2004.

Barack Obama didn't have to be black to have big ideas on domestic policy, he had to be a Democrat. Of course, one can argue that the Democrats have been heavily influenced by the African-American wing of the party since the heyday of the civil rights movement and that all Democrats have something of an African-American optimism concerning hope for social reform.

But that would have made Bill Clinton the first African-American president and forced hacks like Shelby Steele to blame all of Bill Clinton's shortcomings on the fact that he was black.

Feds Send Message to Michigan Militias

Yesterday, federal authorities launched raids on Michigan's "Hutaree" militia in response to threats allegedly made by militia members against Muslims.

Sources have said the FBI was in the second day of raids around the southeastern
Michigan city of Adrian that are connected to a militia group, known as the Hutaree, an Adrian-based group whose members describe themselves as Christian soldiers preparing for the arrival and battle with the anti-Christ.

WXYZ-TV reports that helicopters were spotted in the sky for much of Saturday night, and agents set up checkpoints throughout the area. Witnesses told the station that it was like a small army had descended on the area. The Department of Homeland Security and the Joint Terrorism Task Force are also involved in the raids.

If those helicopters were black, the whole task force must have been supervised by the federal Department of Irony.

It's going to be interesting to find out if members of the Hutaree were making threats or just engaging in the usual survivalist blustering.

For better or worse, there is a difference.

Given that there is a significant Muslim population in Ann Arbor, Dearborn, and other areas of Southeastern Michigan, threats have to be taken seriously.

At the same time, there is reason to suspect the Feds of sending a message to Michigan militias that they "mean business" this time. Southeastern Michigan was a militia hotbed during the 1980's while I lived in Ann Arbor. The Michigan Militia was best known but was one of many militia/survivalist groups in the heavily white, rural towns in the area. Most prominently, Oklahoma City bombers Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols both had roots in the Michigan militia environment.

In raiding the Hutaree militia, federal authorities might be sending a message to the Michigan militias that they consider all of them to be terrorism threats and that they don't want to see any more Timothy McVeighs coming out of their groups.

Update: Nine members of the Hutaree group were indicted for plotting to kill a policeman and then bomb his funeral. They are also suspected of planning a "covert reconnaisance" of their target in the near future and being resolved to kill “anyone who happened upon the exercise who did not acquiesce to Hutaree demands.” Like the various al-Qaeda wannabes ploting jihad in the United States, the Hutaree's version of Christian survivalism sounds pretty clowinish. It will be interesting to see if the Feds have any convincing evidence of this scenario.

Even Bigger Than Health Care

Miley Cyrus decides to leave Hannah Montana. The world will never be the same.

Duke Still Back of the Pack

George Dohrmann writes for SI that "Duke is Back" after their win over Purdue. But Duke isn't anywhere. The Dukies had no inside presence, didn't have enough athleticism to get separation from midget Purdue defenders, and couldn't make shots.

Oh, I forgot to mention that Duke's a turnover machine as well.

Of course, it could be claimed that I'm biased because I have a couple of North Carolina degrees and root for Kentucky.

I also have to confess that my ex-wife teaches at Duke.

But my bias doesn't make Duke a better basketball team.

Be surprised--be very surprised--if Duke gets much further.

Mrs. RSI Near the Finish Line

Mrs. RSI is almost done with her masters in nursing program. Last night, she turned in her major research paper. Now her editor would like to see her turn in her "Punctuation Randomizer." She could do without her "Grammar Randomizer" as well.

Kathleen Sebelius: Nietzsche Nazi, Socialist Revolutionary

Ack! Fume! Splutter! Scream!

I've decided that the Jonah Goldberg's "liberal fascism" vocabulary doesn't go far enough for what Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius says in the quote below.

Sebelius is not just a Nazi and a socialist. In fact, Sebelius is so far gone into fascism that she needs an adjective to amplify her Nazism. It would be all right to call her an uber Nazi but Nietzsche Nazi sounds way cooler because it's an alliteration.

Didn't Nietzsche used the term uber in one of his books? I'll have to ask my good friend Jeff Goldstein, the smartest most highly educated guy on the internet.

Just ask him

Anyway, I'll call Sebelius a Nietzsche Nazi until I get the authoritative word from Jeff.

So what did Sebelius say anyway?

She promises a hands-on approach, “a sense of urgency” and as much say-so for the states as possible. “We need to be the face of competent government — the face of a help desk that can really respond to personal issues and questions — and make sure we do that well and competently . . .”

"Competent government"--that makes her a socialist revolutionary as well.

I couldn't even type it without shaking a little.

American Exceptionalism in the Obama Years

Indiana Governor Mitch McDaniel baits Obama by saying that Americans are now "good Europeans" after passing health care.

That's ridiculous.

In relation to health care, we're uniquely American in a bad way. Europe has socialized medicine. They're better on almost every measure than us and they're going to stay that way after we adapt ObamaCare.

But the Obama years do hold the promise of a good kind of American exceptionalism. We can remake ourselves into a strongly multicultural society that embraces the full value in all the groups in our mosaic.

We're far from being there and the Tea Parties are a good measure of the white nationalist reaction against Obama.

But if we become a fully multicultural society, we would certainly be distinct from Europe.

Biden Gets Second Chance

The House and Senate have passed health care revisions. Now we'll see if Biden can hold in the potty mouth. Of course, I thought the first health care bill was a fucking big deal as well.

Engaging Our Opponents

Now that the progressive side has won the heatlh care battle, I'm feeling very generous. So, I'll take the congratulations of Jonah Goldberg in a better spirit than they were intended.

First: Congratulations to President Obama and the Democratic leadership. You won dirty against bipartisan opposition from both Congress and the majority of Americans. You've definitely polarized the country even more, and quite possibly bankrupted us, too. But hey, you won. Bubbly for everyone.

Thanks Jonah. You're a prince.
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Of course, progressives want to achieve a lot more than monumental health reform. We also want to reform the financial sector, enact cap and trade energy legislation, and move on immigration reform. In the progressive vision, the United States is a multi-cultural society in which the federal government regulates capitalism to serve the common good and pushes economic growth by stimulating the transition to a green economy. Given that the Democrats won the presidency and majorities in both houses of Congress, it should be no surprise that progressives are pushing for legislation that promotes our idea of progress.
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Where to go from here?
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Well, we can thank our friend Jonah Goldberg for identifying some of the problems. Of course, he's wrong to think that a majority of the American public opposes health reform. According to a CNN poll, 59% disapproved of health care legislation, but 13% disapproved because the final bill did not go far enough. The real numbers were more like 48% for large-scale health reform and 46% against.
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Still, Goldberg is correct to point out that passing health care reform did result in further polarization of our divided society. Best represented by the Tea Party movement, the popular right has been inflamed like it hasn't been inflamed really since the McCarthy era. Tea Party events last April and last September are not nearly as big as protest gatherings on the left (200,000 recently marched in a parade for immigration reform). But they represent the biggest "conservative" protests ever and have a threatening aura because of the minor gun displays of Tea Party Activists. With grassroots Tea Party support, Republican Scott Brown scored a monumental upset over the Democratic candidate ("she who must not be named") in the election to replace Ted Kennedy. Treating health care legislation as socialism, comparing the passage of ObamaCare to 9-11, and manifesting a fair amount of racism, homophobia, and nullification talk, the Tea Party right represents a new spasm of polarization in American society and has largely been inspired by the push for health reform.
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But what is the precise problem that the Tea Party Movement poses for the Obama administration, the Democrats, and Progressives more broadly?
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That's a more difficult question.

One way to address this question is to view the Tea Party movement as a barometer of anti-progressive sentiment in the U. S. According to a CNN poll, about 20% of the electorate strongly supports the Tea Party with another 15% moderately supporting them. If Tea Party support is motivated by a reaction against liberal policies, it is safe to say that 20% of the electorate is beyond the reach of progressive appeals and that another 15% is very difficult to reach for various reasons. My impression of the Tea Party movement is that it has many overlapping motivations, including abhorrence of big government, anger over corruption, homophobia, racism, anti-immigrant convictions, neo-confederate sentiment, and an all-purpose anxiety over "change." What all of these points of view share is a blanket hostility to the liberal world views of white progressives. That's why Tea Party support is a decent barometer of anti-progressive sentiment.

Given that I believe that progressives should pretty much write off Tea Party supporters as a lost cause. For Red State progressives like myself, this can be fairly painful. A lot of my relatives, quite a few of my students, and any number of the people I see at the local Walmart and Krogers would have Tea Party sympathies. It's painful to just say "let's not bother. We can't reach these people."

But we should.

Still, progressives should give extra effort to engaging and debating with the Tea Baggers instead of devoting all our rhetorical energy to portraying the Tea Baggers as outside the bounds of political debate--as racists, bigots, confederates, crazies, "freaks" or a "freak show" (here's a couple of places where I've made this mistake myself). Right now, the progressive media is focusing on Tea Bagger violence in response to the passage of health reform and the inadequacy of the Republican response.

Certainly, there's a significant place for demonizing attacks on the offices of Democratic members of the House, threats to people's lives, or cutting gas lines. Intimidation is one of the main motifs of the Tea Baggers and much of the reason that the Tea Baggers try intimidation tactics is that they view liberals and democrats as being weak, quick to cower, and effeminate in the stereotypical sense. In the same way, the explanations of Tea Party racism as just something that happens when people "really get angry" are the same kinds of rationalizations that Southern segregationalists made to justify lynching, racial discrimination, and the exclusion of blacks from juries, voting, and office holding.

And we should be condemning this kind of sick stuff for what it really is.

Still, we can't just demonize the Tea Party types. Whether we like it or not, the Tea Party activists have become the main opposition to progressive ideas and Democratic policy agendas in this country. The Republican leadership is being driven by the Tea Party rather than the other way around. Whether we like it or not, moderates and independents are going to listen to Tea Party rhetoric on health care, cap and trade, and financial reform. Because the Tea Party Movement is the main source of diversity in American politics, moderates and independents are going to look to them for an alternative to progressive ideas no matter how much, or how justifiably, we portray Tea Party activists as beyond the pale.

That means that we have to engage Tea Party activists on the role of government regulation in our economy, the morality of the legislative process, and what it means to be an American in the 21st century. Jonah Goldberg claims that health insurance companies are now "heavily regulated government contractors" rather than independent companies. We need our arguments about health insurance companies. Personally, I think we should be arguing that health insurance companies wouldn't be in this situation if they were following the examples of Google and UPS and making money by providing terrific versions of much needed services at low cost. But it's clear that the health insurance companies have decided to raise their profits by developing innovative ways to deny their customers coverage instead. That's what withdrawing coverage from extremely sick people and denying people coverage for pre-existing conditions is about--raising profits through exploiting sick people. And yes! Taking people's money and then denying them the service of re-imbursing medical costs is a form of exploitation.

That's why it was necessary to increase the goverment regulation of health insurance companies and the Obama administration is going to press for heavier regulation of the financial services industry for analogous reasons.

This is what progressives need to do on all issues. We need to keep coming up with fresh perspectives on progressive positions as a way to stay engaged with moderates and independents while we also respond to the various "freak show" outrages of the Tea Party movement.

Bi-Partisanship with Moderates

Mark Halperin of Time, a guy who projects an inhuman creepiness while on camera, believes Obama should strain at the bit to get Republican support on finance reform, immigration reform, and overhauling No Child Left Behind.

But that doesn't work.

The Republican leadership has made it clear that they are not going to cooperate. Because Obama wanted bi-partisanship, Boehner and McConnell concluded that bi-partisanship means "Obama wins." They'll reject everything Obama proposes because they view compromise as to Obama's advantage.

What Obama and the Congressional leadership need to do is get better at negotiating with moderate and conservative Democrats while taking heavy flak from the right. Pelosi got her act together after Scott Brown was elected in Massachusetts. But the Dems have to keep improving in their efforts to deal with their own moderates if they want continued success.

That might be a good way to pick off some Republican votes as well.

Health Reform Passed

The 216th vote came at 10:44 or 10:45. It's a great day. Hopefully, the Dems will be able to build on this momentum a little. The final vote is 219-212. All the Republicans voted against it. So did 34 Democrats.

John Boehner's Bigger Lies

Whoa! John Boehner is telling even bigger lies than Eric Cantor. Really impressive!

The Eric Cantor Lie-a-Thon

I'm listening to (R-VA) Eric Cantor's speech on health care reform. It's pretty much four straight minutes of lies--kind of impressive in its monstrously dishonest way.

A Visit From Big Brother

We got our census forms the other day. Because we had two kids, it took about ten minutes to fill out. Now we're mailing it back in. Big Brother now knows EVERYTHING about us. Ooh scary!

It's "Deem and Pass" Baby

That's the current status of health care reform anyway. The House is going to vote for the Senate bill and for amending the Senate bill at the same time. "Deem and Pass" Baby.

After that, there's the problem of dealing with moderates.

Tough to Be John Bolton

Former Bush apparatchik John Bolton is having a hard time finding a hero these days. Because the Obama administration refuses to play the tough guy, the U. S. is obviously too "soft" and "weak" for Bolton's taste.

That [Israeli] strategy would have been entirely sensible if Mr. Obama were simply another president in the long line since Franklin Roosevelt who vigorously asserted U.S. national interests, championed our friends (especially beleaguered ones), and kept alliances strong. But Mr. Obama is different. He is our first post-American president. He looks beyond American exceptionalism and believes that our role on the world stage should be merely one nation among many.

Normally, that would mean that Bolton would slide the Israelis into the hero's role. If Bolton had a meaningful choice, I'm sure he would choose Israel and the settler movement over the pansy Americans. But Obama not only refuses to allow the U. S. to play the enforcer, he's also making the Israelis do unmanly things as well. Where Bolton wants the Israelis to nuke Iran, Obama is making them "negotiate" with the Palestinians.

Israel has sought to accommodate Mr. Obama on two critical issues: negotiations with Palestinians and Iranian nuclear weapons. These efforts have largely kept
bilateral disagreements out of sight. But now the suppressed conflicts are fully
visible and will either be resolved or cause a serious collision between Israel
and the U.S.

Unfortunately for John Bolton, that means he'll have to get his kicks watching Inglorious Basterds.

A White Captain America?

Apparently, the powers that be at Marvel Inc. are having trouble casting the lead role in the upcoming Captain America.

Deadline.com reports that Marvel has approached Channing Tatum for the role. They say he very likely skipped the audition process since his recent turns in G.I.Joe' and 'Dear John' have positioned him as a bankable name. They're saying that, if Marvel advances the conversation with him, it'll be in the form of an offer for the role, not an audition. . . . Meanwhile, the Motion Captured blog at Hitfix is saying that Ryan Philippe is also a contender. . . "[I] actually am going in to meet on 'Captain America,' which is kind of cool," Phillippe told MTV. "After Superman, he was kind of my favorite."

Part of the problem might be that Marvel is only considering white actors like the "old for his age" Ryan Philippe and ex-stripper Channing Tatum. White guys often have to cut through too many layers of irony and/or bitterness to have the kind of purity needed to convincingly play the Steve Rogers role in Captain America. Tom Welling is convincing in Smallville, but Ben Affleck had too much super-ironic Dogma and Gigli baggage for Daredevil to work. White actors tend to be more convincing when they're burdened by guilt and bitterness as well. Clint Eastwood and Bruce Willis evoke enough bitterness to fill a Tolstoy novel while Matt Damon hit all the guilt marks as Jason Bourne in the Bourne movies.

The problem with Steve Rogers and Captain America is that Rogers came through WWII as pure as he went in. It's hard to imagine any white actor portraying that convincingly. Maybe Tom Welling, but he's already taken.

It would be better if Marvel started looking for a black lead.

RSI Endorses Jack Conway

I haven't exactly been brimming with enthusiasm about the Democratic primaries for the U. S. Senate seat currently held by right-wing bully Jim Bunning.

In a typical pattern for cowardly Democratic politicians in Kentucky, attractive candidates like Ben Chandler and Crit Luallen decided that running was too risky and chose to stay in their current positions. That left a not-particularly-compelling primary between Lt. Gov. Daniel Mongiardo and Attorney General Jack Conway. Mongiardo is a relatively weak campaigner who should have beaten Bunning in 2004. So I've never been excited about him. But Conway comes off as a blow-dried politician who doesn't have much going for him other than being good-looking--sort of the Democratic version of Republican candidate Trey Grayson.

But I've decided to go with Conway.

Today's Lexington Herald-Leader has an article on how all the Senate candidates are fawning over the coal industry. In a way that makes sense. Coal is a major industry in Kentucky. But the coal companies are also some of the most predatory corporations out there--sort of a smaller scale version of Goldman Sachs and the financial sector. So, the support for coal among Kentucky politicians is pretty nauseating even though it's the "Kentucky patriotic" thing to do.

But Mongiardo takes the cake. The most egregious environmental crime of the coal companies is mountain top removal--a mining practice that removes entire hills to get at the underground coal seams. Mongiardo's tag line: "it's not mountaintop removal; it's mountaintop development."

Screw that. I'm endorsing Conway.

The Vanilla Frappe Movement?

According to CNN, the "Coffee Party" alternative to the Tea Party Movement is gaining momentum.

Billed by many as an answer to the conservative Tea Party movement, the Coffee Party was born on Facebook just six weeks ago. While the group has become an instant hit online -- it boasts more than 141,000 Facebook fans as of Saturday-- gauging the success of this weekend's coffee meetups was predicted to be an indicator of the group's strength.

But Miss Teen RSI insists that the new movement should be called the "Vanilla Frappe Movement" instead.

The Kaus Pretence

For years, Slate's Mickey Kaus has blogged as a Republican pretending to be a Democrat. That's also Kaus' approach now that he's challenging Barbara Boxer for the Democratic nomination to the Senate.

I have no special beef with the incumbent, Senator Boxer. She is a state-of-the-art Democrat. But . . . "State of the art" means the incumbent has learned to please the party's interest groups, often at the expense of the needs of average individuals and the party's own ideals. It means the incumbent supports a "card check" bill that would effectively take away the secret ballot from workers in order to give more power to the big unions-- including public employee unions--whose influence over our great industries and our government has led to disaster . . . This isn't the Democratic party I signed up for. It's not the party many common sense Democratic voters signed up for.

Yeah, Mickey. You're right and everybody who thinks the Democrats have been supporting labor unions since the 1930's is wrong. Pretty soon, you'll be able to convince everyone that the Democrats never supported civil rights, women's rights, or gay rights. When you and Joe Lieberman signed up as Democrats, "everyone in their own closet" was the party motto. How exactly did the party get so darned "liberal."

Back in the real world . . .

Tiger Woods Commits to the Dark Side

and hires Ari Fleisher as a consultant. According to Robert Lusetich of Fox Sports:

The road to his (Woods') comeback was reportedly completed with the hiring of former Bush White House press secretary, Ari Fleischer.Fleischer, a spin doctor with a checkered past, helped Mark McGwire craft the steroid admissions the disgraced slugger made after wanting to return to baseball. There is little doubt about what the tone of Fleischer‘s advice will be, given the statement on his website that "the way the press treats athletes and sports executives has become increasingly adversarial and conflict-driven."Woods has lost major sponsors including Gatorade, AT&T and Accenture as well as the goodwill of a public which largely adored him. If he’s looking for forgiveness, Woods would be better served by getting rid of a consigliere whose stock-in-trade is “acceptable truths” and “plausible deniabilities” for a policy of openness and honesty.

Give Lusetich props for strong moral fiber. But Lusetich is being naive about the real Tiger Woods.

In fact, hiring a slimeball like Fleischer is practically an announcement that Woods has renewed his commitment to the forces of evil after putting up with a couple months of rehab.

School's out. Now it's back to the simple life of aggressive deception for the Tiger.

Porn actresses and escort services everywhere must be happy.

The Meryl Streep Era

MSN has an article claiming that Meryl Streep should have won 13 Academy Awards besides the two she's actually taken home.

As I've said before, I just count myself lucky to be alive during the Meryl Streep Era.

Should Be Shunned

Glenn Greenwald points out correctly that Marty Peretz of the New Republic should be shunned by all respectable people.

On the Nuclear Front: The Threat of a Rogue America

In today's statement commemorating the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, President Obama discounted the threat of nuclear war:

Today, the threat of global nuclear war has passed, but the danger of nuclear proliferation endures, making the basic bargain of the NPT more important than ever: nations with nuclear weapons will move toward disarmament, nations without
nuclear weapons will forsake them, and all nations have an "inalienable right" to peaceful nuclear energy.

Sure, there isn't much danger of the U. S., Russia, and China will exchange nuclear attacks. So, Obama's right. The main threat on the nuclear front has changed.

But the danger doesn't lie in nuclear proliferation either.

What's really dangerous is the possibility of a rogue government gaining control in a country that already has nuclear arms and then using its nuclear weapons to threaten or attack its enemies.

And what government is most at risk of such a takeover--Pakistan, India, France?

No! It has to be the United States.

Pakistan may be unstable because "elements" of the Pakistani military and intelligence services are sympathetic to al-Qaeda.

However, the situation is worse in the United States because neo-conservatives have enormous disdain for the United Nations, international law, and anything else that might inhibit its ability to wage total war. Neo-conservatives also speculate openly about nuclear attacks on Iran and the speculation should be taken seriously because neo-cons seem to be aching to break the taboo on nuclear weapons just as they were aching to break the taboo on torture.

Conservative America--the world's most dangerous and unstable political force.

The Sarah Party Split

One of the things I've picked up from talking with conservatives is that many conservatives activists have just as much contempt for Sarah Palin and the tea party types as any liberal. If Palin gets the nomination, there's going to be a simultaneous inflation and deflation of the Republican Party.

Killing Patriotism the Right-Wing Way

It looks like the right-wing is killing patiotism one shooting at a time.

Why not? The right's been destroying Christianity for years now.

According to reports on Pentagon shooter John Patrick Bedell, "Patriot” groups, steeped in antigovernment conspiracy theories, grew from 149 in 2008 to 512 in 2009." If that keeps up, the word "patriot" is going to be more associated with "nut," "weirdo," and "freak" than anything positive--"murderer" as well.

GOP Rebotoxes Obama Speech

I'm still not in blogging form yet, but have to pass along that Miss Teen RSI says that Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell was "botoxed out" for his reply to Obama's speech.

Another Gutless Dem Plays It Safe

Beau Biden decides not to run for his father's old Senate seat, leaving the field open for Republican Mike Castle.

Republicans already have a strong candidate in the race, Rep. Mike Castle, who has held the state's only House seat since 1992, and was governor for eight years before that. With a strong Republican in the race and currently no Democrat, this race has to be seen as a likely GOP takeover for now.

That's the same kind of gutlessness that kept Ben Chandler out of the Senate race in Kentucky. We need our blow-dried politicians to have the same courage as Republican blow-dries like Scott Brown.

The Coakley Debacle: Aftermath

Lots of blame to go around for the Coakley debacle. But there's also lots of ways to get going again. Let's start with the top.

The Obama administration. One message from the Coakley debacle is that President Obama and his people need to realize that they can't stop campaigning and "just govern." In order to govern, they need to embrace "the permanent campaign." If the Obama administration isn't willing to campaign relentlessly for everything they promised, they'll lose it all.

More as the day goes along.

The Triumph of Evil?

With Alabama leading Texas 24-6 in the 3rd quarter, it looks like a smashing victory for evil in this year's BCS college football championship. Too bad.

Revelations from the Conservative Bible

Wow! Is it snowing in Morehead, Kentucky today? I think we're supposed to get six inches. Needless to say, that makes me think of the Bible and the right-wing Bible project. Tired of reading "liberal" translations of the Bible, conservatives have started a Conservative Bible Project so they can have their own "conservatively correct" sacred text.

Let them have at it!

From the conservative point of view, Christianity means that everybody should be able to make a ton of money, kick the crap out of anyone they like, and drop nukes on their enemies.

Why can't they have a Jesus who pronounces these things as the divine "word"?

Conservatives should also revise the Bible so they can finally get the birthplace of Jesus right. It should be obvious by now that there was a white Christmas for the birth of Jesus. When Irving Berlin (certainly a Christian conservative) wrote that he was "dreaming of a White Christmas," he meant that he was dreaming of the glistening white snow that was actually there when Jesus was born. The liberal accounts of Jesus being born in a manger in an ugly desert country can't be true. Mary gave birth to Jesus in a picturesque manger scene with lots of snow as the three wise men drove up in their sleds. It was so beautiful.

That means that Jesus had to be born well north of the town of Bethlehem in the Romanized Mediterranean. Maybe Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.

George Will Bloviates; RSI Responds

George Will has a pointless little op-ed out on the cosmic significance of the event that wiped out the dinosaurs and most other species 65 million years ago. It turns out that there is an underwater mountain in the Indian Ocean that could have been the result of the massive meteors that created the Mexico's 110-mile-wide Chicxulub and brought about the "worldwide collapse of the climate and ecosystems" leading to the mass extinctions of the dinosaurs and two-thirds of marine animals, and the destruction of much of the planet's flora."

Awesome.

But have no fear, the American Constitution "still constitutes, and the fact that flora and fauna have survived Earth's episodes of extreme violence testifies to the extraordinary imperative of life."

What's amazing about Will is that he still gets it wrong. It's unconstitutional to think that the Constitution "constitutes." It's the people who "constitute" the government and the Constitution says so. According to the Preamble:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

It's the people of the United States who are constituting the Constitution as the governmental arrangement through which they will seek to attain the ends of forming "a more perfect Union," establishing "Justice" and the like. Framers of the Constitution like James Madison were very suspicious that the vast majority of the people would act to dispossess the wealthy of their property and therefore created a system in which it was difficult for majorities to either form or engage in major legislative enterprises. But it's always the people, their elected office-holders, and the judges and subordinate office-holders appointed by the elected officers who act to achieve the ends of government--not the Constitution itself.

Ironies abound with the American Constitution. The Constitution was designed to ensure that Presidents and Senators were subject to elite choice rather than popular choice. And failed spectacularly in doing so. Presidential elections were popular affairs from the beginning and U. S. Senators were chosen by the ultimate political hacks--state legislators.

The American Constitution was also designed to ensure the continuance of the slave system and failed even more spectacularly in accomplishing that. In fact, the Constitutional system was so inadequate to the task of dealing with slavery that it took four years of bloody civil war to create a "more perfect Union" without the slave system.

The Constitution is being tested again. What the right-wing essentially wants is a Constitutional system under which people like Sarah Palin can pretty much do whatever they want and never get challenged. I don't think they'll succeed, but it won't be the Constitution that determines the outcome, it will be the processes which determine the will of the American people as a whole.

Resolution One: Re-establish Blogging Hobby

My resolution last year to "drink more" was such a success that I have a lot of New Years Resolutions this year.

1. More Blogging. The first resolution is that I need to do more blogging. By the end of the year, my unhappiness with my work situation had led me to reduce my blogging to one post a week. Given that "happiness=blogging," I need to do more blogging.

Displays of Degradation I

I haven't mentioned yet that I got a fairly good response from the University of Pennsylvania Press about my book proposal. They didn't give me a contract, but they did tell me that they would send a full manuscript out to readers when I submit one.

So, now I'm working on completing a full manuscript and one of my jobs is to write a chapter on blackface minstrelsy in Philadelphia during the 1840's.

Toward that end, I'm reading William J. Maher's, Behind the Burnt Cork Mask. In the intro and first chapter, Maher's core argument is that blackface minstrelsy was more about establishing a particularly American form of popular culture than it was about African-American cultural forms or racism more generally.

Although it's a very good book, I'm not convinced.

In the first chapter, Maher convincingly argues that performers like the Christy minstrels focused more on burlesquing European imports like Italian opera than satirizing plantation life or northern black Dandies. I'm not very familiar with the operation of Italian opera in 19th century America, but I'm not very surprised that blackface minstrel performers were working with a variety of "white sources." The African-American references in the minstrel songs of the 1840's often look rather token. White performers are talking primarily about themes from white life.

But that doesn't change the fact that minstrel performers were dressing up as black men and women and that they were using European sources to portray blacks as buffoonish, lazy, dependent, and sentimentally attached to slavery. If anything, working with the European sources gives the racial imagery of blackface minstrelsy a new flexibility as white performers learned how to articulate their images of blackness through different kinds of materials.

That still leaves the question of why white performers found blackface such a compelling medium for the presentation of their own concerns about romance, family, politics, race, and masculinity. So far, Maher hasn't addressed that question.

Limbaugh in Hawaiian Hospital

Talking Points Memo is carrying an item about Rush Limbaugh being taken to a Honolulu hospital in "serious condition" with "chest pains."

I hope he's okay.

And I mean it. When Limbaugh was in rehab for his drug addiction, I posted on Slate's Fray that people on the left should respect Limbaugh as a formidable adversary and have the same kind of sympathy for him in adversity that we have for our own friends and allies. That doesn't mean that we should be "soft" on Limbaugh. We should be hitting Limbaugh hard for his conservative positions, showing disgust for his racism, homophobia, and warmongering, and ridiculing him for his pseudo-macho buffoonery.

But people on the left should also extend Limbaugh the same basic human compassion we extend to other people.

Maybe Limbaugh wouldn't have that kind of compassion for someone like me.

But that doesn't make it any less appropriate to have compassion for him.

It's Over Joseph-Beth

When I moved to Morehead in 1990, Joseph-Beth bookstore in Lexington, KY was the place to go for the intellectual glitterati at Morehead State University. The chair of the search committee even took me there during my job interview even though the store was 60 miles away in Lexington.

And then, the owners made Joseph-Beth even better with a dramatic expansion.

But Joseph-Beth gradually got less interesting.

They started focusing more on bestsellers, name-brand authors, and trinkets for the post-hippy set, less on materials that were intellectually interesting. Once upon a time, I could go into the philosophy and history sections at Joseph-Beth and come upon great books and authors I'd never heard of.

Not any more.

The philosophy section at Joseph-Beth has shrunk from a wall to two shelves and the history section looks like its declined as well--too much Civil War and Kentucky history stuff, not enough effort to connect with the history of the rest of the world. It wasn't like there was nothing there. I found a decent looking book about the Romans and Barbarians and bought a couple of other books as well. Joseph-Beth's is not BAD. It's just not all that good.

If I did a survey of my professor friends, I think most of them would still say that they think Joseph-Beth is the best book store in Lexington. But I now like the Barnes and Noble in Hamburg Place better.

Next year, everybody should send me gift cards from Barnes and Nobles.

Pope Robbie I--Robert George Takes Charge of American Catholicism

The New York Times has an interesting article on the influence of Princeton scholar Robert George on American Catholicism. The core of Robert --or "Robbie" as he's affectionately known among conservative circles--George's position is that Catholics should abolish any kind of social justice agenda and focus entirely on sexual issues like abortion, gay marriage, and embryo research.

Last spring, George was invited to address an audience that included many bishops at a conference in Washington. He told them with typical bluntness that they should stop talking so much about the many policy issues they have taken up in the name of social justice. They should concentrate their authority on “the moral social” issues like abortion, embryonic stem-cell research and same-sex marriage, where, he argued, the natural law and Gospel principles were clear.

Actually, "Robbie" is right about the clarity of the "Gospel" on the issues of abortion, embryonic stem-cell research, and same-sex marriage. In fact, the Gospels say absolutely nothing about any of these issues. There can be no clearer statement about the lack of significance of these issues for Jesus than that. Actually, Jesus might have had suspicions of same-sex marriage, but such suspicions would have been derived from his scepticism about marriage and family in general rather than his views on homosexuality. Jesus most clearly formulates his scepticism about marriage in Luke 14:26 where he states that "If any man come to me and hate not his father and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple." Obviously, this passage is not the "politically correct" Jesus of the Good Samaritan story, but it clearly expresses the persistent suspicion Jesus had about the likelihood of family bonds competing with the attachment of potential disciples to Him. In the Gospel accounts of Jesus' life, Jesus himself did not marry or form heterosexual attachments with any of his female followers. Jesus also chose other males as his chief confidantes and apostles for his message. And according to Catholic orthodoxy, it is very important that he did so.

Jesus doesn't address homosexuality anywhere in the Gospels. Perhaps Jesus didn't view himself as competing against homosexuality in the same way that he viewed himself as competing against heterosexual marriage. But Jesus does enunciate principles that apply to many if not most gay people. In the opening passage of the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5, Jesus gives a set of blessings that have become known as "The Beatitudes." By defining the first of those blessings as "blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven," Jesus gives the first (and foremost) of his blessings to people like suicidal gay teens, the thousands of gay people who suffered and died at the height of the aids epidemic and the millions of gay people who feel themselves excluded the mainstream of American society because they are not allowed to get married like "normal" people. Much as Jesus valued tax collectors, lepers, "fallen women," and the outcasts of ancient Israel, he would value contemporary outcasts from social respectability like gay people, drug addicts, alcoholics, and the homeless. According to the Beatitudes, "theirs is the kingdom of heaven."

The NY Times article gives the impression that Robert George has gained influence among the Catholic bishops because of his emphasis on the justification for his social conservatism in the "natural law" ideas of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas rather than divine revelation. For better or worse (worse in my view), that's made opposition to gay marriage and abortion rights into the guiding principles of American Catholicism and Robert George into the real Pope for American Catholics.

All hail Pope Robbie I.

Joey Lieberman Doesn't Like Anything

It looks like Joe Lieberman might be able to unravel health reform. He won't support a robust public option, won't support a public option opt out, won't support a public option trigger, and won't the medicare opt in that he supported last week.

Lieberman and Ben Nelson of Nebraska are the last of the 1980's DLC dinosaurs. The DLC (Democratic Leadership Council) rose as a corporate-funded trojan horse in the Democratic Party to ensure that the Democrats became less of a reform party. It's primary object was to defeat liberals within the Democratic Party and make the Democrats more friendly to a corporate agenda.

But the DLC idea of treating progressive Democrats as their worst enemies lost steam in the face of the surge of progressive surge in response to George Bush. There are still lots of moderate and conservative Democrats, but Lieberman and Nelson are the last of the Democratic senators who make it a personal point to oppose progressive agendas at every turn. In Lieberman's case, there's a huge element of spite toward progressives as well. Anti-war sentiment ensured that Lieberman's 2004 presidential campaign went nowhere. Even worse, Connecticut progressives beat Lieberman in a 2006 primary and forced him to win re-election as an independent.

Now, its payback time for Lieberman and he's using his leverage as the 60th vote to do his best to either force progressives to give up everything they value about health reform or ensure that the whole effort fails.

Let's see how Harry Reid and the White House respond.

Harry Potter the VI on the Small Screen

I started watching Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince at home tonight and fell asleep twice. Hopefully, it was more compelling on the big screens.

Taxing Financial Transactions--Not exactly the Heart of the Matter

Paul Krugman proposes a tax on financial transactions as a way to discourage the day to day churning of accounts on Wall Street.

Tobin’s idea went nowhere at the time. Later, much to his dismay, it became a favorite hobbyhorse of the anti-globalization left. But the Turner-Brown proposal, which would apply a “Tobin tax” to all financial transactions — not just those involving foreign currency — is very much in Tobin’s spirit. It would be a trivial expense for long-term investors, but it would deter much of the churning that now takes place in our hyperactive financial markets.

This would be a bad thing if financial hyperactivity were productive. But after the debacle of the past two years, there’s broad agreement — I’m tempted to say, agreement on the part of almost everyone not on the financial industry’s payroll — with Mr. Turner’s assertion that a lot of what Wall Street and the City do is “socially useless.” And a transactions tax could generate substantial revenue, helping alleviate fears about government deficits. What’s not to like?

I don't have anything against raising money by taxing Wall Street, but a transactions tax doesn't get to the heart of the matter with the American financial system. The financial system was driven by the high profits from the derivatives markets, but that the derivatives markets were so speculative and unstable that they almost brought down the whole world economy. I haven't seen any proposal that either liberates the financial system from dependence on the derivatives markets or regulates the derivative markets in ways that makes them more stable. The problem is that whatever stability the current financial system affords might be completely contingent on the high profit margins of derivative transactions. The derivative markets might themselves by highly unstable, but any regulation effort that reduced derivative profits might also be de-stabilizing.

It's a nasty conundrum that isn't addressed by a financial transactions tax.

To his credit, Krugman admits this.

What about the claim that a financial transactions tax doesn’t address the real problem? It’s true that a transactions tax wouldn’t have stopped lenders from making bad loans, or gullible investors from buying toxic waste backed by those loans.

But bad investments aren’t the whole story of the crisis . . . As Gary Gorton and Andrew Metrick of Yale have shown, by 2007 the United States banking system had become crucially dependent on “repo” transactions, in which financial institutions sell assets to investors while promising to buy them back after a short period — often a single day. Losses in subprime and other assets triggered a banking crisis because they undermined this system — there was a “run on repo.”

In other words, bad derivative investments ("toxic waste") still triggered the financial crisis. They just did so "indirectly" by undermining the system of short-term transactions (churning) on which the banking system was dependent.

So, sure--put a tax on financial transactions as a way to discourage churning and reduce the crush of pointless trading.

But other measures are going to be needed to prevent the next big meltdown.

Health Reform--Out of Harry Reid's Office

A Health Reform bill finally got out of Harry Reid's office today. I still think it will be passed with a public option--probably a public option with an opt out clause.

But it looks like conservative Dems are going to take out every last pound of flesh they can.

Conservatives think that health reform is a kind of Rubicon and that America will be a different kind of society if Congress passes a public option.

Maybe that's the case.

But, really, the Rubicon was crossed when Barack Obama was elected president. The question is whether Obama is going to maintain his position on the new side of the river.

The Sexist Depth of the Sarah Palin Cover

This week's edition of Newsweek arrived a day after the controversy over the magazine's Sarah Palin cover emerged.

Is the cover sexist? You betcha!

And it's worse than Palin or other media critics think.

The main criticism of the Newsweek cover is that it shows Palin in short runner's shorts and reveals a lot of leg. Her top is also zipped down in a mildly suggestive manner. What's sexist about this is that the political magazine is focusing on Palin's sexual attractiveness as a woman rather than her significance as a cultural and political figure. Media Matters for America is also right to call attention to the demeaning girlishness of the Sound of Music reference in the title "How Do You Solve a Problem Like Sarah."

But it's worse.

The Palin picture was originally taken for a running magazine, but Newsweek editors must have known that whole thing has a luridly pornographic effect when put into the context of political news. Take Palin's legs for example. There's a sense in which her legs aren't really "showing" because she's pictured as being so tanned that it looks like she's wearing panty hose. The extremely minimal "concealment" effect of the tan actually enhances the erotic effect of showing her legs in a stripper/porn manner.

The same thing is true of the flag and the Blackberries. On the cover of Newsweek, they look more like stripper props than anything else. Palin is involved in a lot of business and likes to portray herself as a flag-waving patriot. But the Newsweek cover makes her look like someone who uses the American flag and business items to enhance her "sexy" mystique.

Ditto her trademark glasses and hair and the whole pornographic effect is enhanced by the bright and crowded redness of the Palin's top, the flag, and the Newsweek banner.

I imagine that Newsweek could defend itself by arguing that the cover was trying to say something about the luridness of Sarah Palin's appeal. But achingly conventional articles by Evan Thomas and the execrable Christopher Hitchens don't justify any defense of the sort.

Newsweek would have done better if they hadn't covered Palin at all.

The Carrie Prejean Chronicles

I have to admit. I gave into temptation when I saw an item on "more Carrie Prejean sex tapes" and clicked onto a Joy Behar segment on Prejean.

What a mistake!

All the reasons for not watching television were on full view. Joining Joy Behar in the discussion were the kind of vapidly handsome figures typical of the "entertainment news" media--Spencer Pratt, Heidi Montague, and gossip-monger Perez Hilton. I have some suspicion that the whole setup was designed to make Joy Behar look weighty. Where her guests looked like they'd just been stamped out by a plastic factory, Behar looked like a real person. Likewise, Behar's may not be a news heavyweight, but she looked like a combination of Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow in comparison to her guests.

Not that the discussion was very interesting. The panel talked in vaguely "racy" ways about the possibility of seven Carrie Prejean sex tapes emerging into the public domain, Prejean making a sex tape all by herself, and whether or not Prejean is a "hypocrite" for identifying with the Christian right at the same time she was engaged in topless modeling, making sex tapes, and the like.

But I think that's the wrong way to think of Prejean.

What's interesting about Prejean is her audacious effort to leverage her Miss USA notoriety for rejecting gay marriage into an enduring status as a celebrity of the Christian right.

With the emergence of her sex tapes, it's clear that Prejean's gambit isn't going to work. But that doesn't mean that it's not interesting. Did Prejean view her post-pageant conservative proslytizing as simply pursuing a business opportunity? Or was it something she found appealing for other reasons? When I think about Prejean's manuevers, I wonder about just how desperate women in the netherworld of fairly low-level modeling, acting, and beauty pageants might be to make something out of their life-long commitment. As Prejean's breast implants, topless modeling, and sex-tape(s) indicate, it can all be extremely degrading. Maybe Prejean's eager grasp at Christian conservative celebrity was an attempt to remain in the celebrity world of vapid beauty while being somehow more substantial. As Prejean's case indicates, the celebrity media views opposition to gay marriage as "politically incorrect" or bigoted, but beauty pageants and modeling are still highly conservative cultural institutions that promote traditional images of female beauty and sexuality. And as the Southern fascination for beauty pageants indicates, cultural conservatives are especially drawn to the ideas of "innocent sexiness" that are embodied in beauty pageants.

One additional point. Critical commentary on flawed Christian conservatives like Carrie Prejean is usually totally lacking in any kind of human sympathy. But I'm beginning to think that it's an important point for progressive politics to wish people well, even our most determined opponents. Certainly, I'd like to see Carrie Prejean out something viable.

The O'Reilly Boycott Begins Now!

In the biggest media surprise of the week, Bill O'Reilly appears to have given up on the right-wing dream of killing every last one of the world's Muslims.

Barack Obama wants to win hearts and minds in the Middle East, in the Muslim world, which is a good thing and you know that. As a soldier, we can't kill all the Muslims. So we wanna win as many hearts and minds of good moderate Muslims
as we can.

I don't know why O'Reilly's going soft like this. Hasn't he heard of the "MuslimDetection" programs being developed by Blackwater or whatever they're called now. What's O'Reilly going to give up on next--missile defense, torture, the "Crucifix in the Classroom" program?

Pretty soon O' Reilly's going to start sending fruit baskets to bin Laden.

That's enough.

The O'Reilly boycott begins now.

Presidential Obama--Channeling the Nation's Grief and Outrage

It appears that President Obama is also very successful at leading the nation in grief and outrage over the shootings at Fort Hood. This is from Marc Ambinder of the Atlantic Online:

Today, at Ft. Hood. I guarantee: they'll be teaching this one in rhetoric classes. It was that good. My gloss won't do it justice. Yes, I'm having a Chris Matthews-chill-running-up-my-leg moment, but sometimes, the man, the moment and the words come together and meet the challenge. Obama had to lead a nation's grieving; he had to try and address the thorny issues of Islam and terrorism; to be firm; to express the spirit of America, using familiar, comforting tropes in a way that didn't sound trite.

An excerpt from the elegiac address, below, and the full text, after the jump.

It may be hard to comprehend the twisted logic that led to this tragedy. But this much we do know - no faith justifies these murderous and craven acts; no just and loving God looks upon them with favor. And for what he has done, we know that the killer will be met with justice - in this world, and the next.

These are trying times for our country. In Afghanistan and Pakistan, the same extremists who killed nearly 3,000 Americans continue to endanger America, our allies, and innocent Afghans and Pakistanis. In Iraq, we are working to bring a war to a successful end, as there are still those who would deny the Iraqi people the future that Americans and Iraqis have sacrificed so much for.

As we face these challenges, the stories of those at Fort Hood reaffirm the core values that we are fighting for, and the strength that we must draw upon. Theirs are tales of American men and women answering an extraordinary call - the call to serve their comrades, their communities, and their country. In an age of selfishness, they embody responsibility. In an era of division, they call upon us to come together. In a
time of cynicism, they remind us of who we are as Americans.

We are a nation that endures because of the courage of those who defend it. We saw that valor in those who braved bullets here at Fort Hood, just as surely as we see it in those who signed up knowing that they would serve in harm's way.

We are a nation of laws whose commitment to justice is so enduring that we would treat a gunman and give him due process, just as surely as we will see that he pays for his crimes. We are a nation that guarantees the freedom to worship as one chooses. And instead of claiming God for our side, we remember Lincoln's words, and always pray to be on the side of God.

That must be a big disappointment to a lot of people.

Why Does Anyone Need the Washington Times?

There seems to be a great deal of conflict among Sun Myung Moon's sons over the fate of the money losing Washington Times. I'm not sure why. Now that the Washington Post has become an outlet for neo-conservatism, it's hard to see what function the Washington Times serves at all.

TPM has Dems at 218

One monumental hurdle has been cleared. Health Care legislation has passed the House of Representatives. The Democrats now have 218 votes. The legislation still has a long way to go and many hurdles to be cleared before it's enacted.

But I think I'll have a beer to celebrate anyway.

It appears that the final vote is 220-215.

RSI's Epic Defeat at Root-A-Baker's

Yeah, today I broke down and bought a cake at Root-A-Baker's for an office celebration on Monday. Curse their cakes anyway! But there wasn't much choice. Right-wing wackos or not, Root-A-Baker's is the only first-rate bakery in town and the alternative was to ask Mrs. RSI to spend time baking when she needed to work on her classes.

I'll do better with my next boycott.

Health Care: The Debate is on in the House

The House is debating the health care bill. The Dems are confident of passage.

Sex with Neanderthals?

MSN has an article on the possibility of mating between modern human and Neanderthal populations.

"Would they have recognized each other as possible mates?" Harvati asked. "We know when closely related primate species meet, they sometimes interbreed in nature, not just in zoos, and this is something we see not just in primates, but with other closely related species among mammals."

That the least of it. Human beings have been known to have sex with just about anything animal, vegetable, and mineral. Some human beings like corpses while others prefer cows, goats, or dogs. The producers of one popular movie were so proud of the sex Jason Biggs had with an round-shaped apple dessert that they named the movie American Pie.

If homo sapiens lived at the same time as Neanderthals, there can't be much doubt that there was a fair amount of sex between members of the two groups. The only real question is whether the sex could have resulted in pregnancy.

At an October conference in Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York, Pääbo — a
geneticist of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany — said the two species had sex, but it remained an open question as to
whether children resulted and left a legacy in our genomes.

A very open question.

Maybe That William Ayers Wrote Obama's Book!

The White House released a partial list of the people visiting the White House in the ten months of the Obama presidency. Some famous names made the list.

Given that up to 100,000 people visit the White House each month, the names published Friday included people with some very familiar names -- including William Ayers, Michael Jordan, Michael Moore, Jeremiah Wright and R. Kelly

But the guy named Michael Jordan was not THE Michael Jordan. None of these famous names were connected to famous people.

"The well-known individuals with those names never actually came to the White House . . ."

But maybe THAT William Ayers was the one who wrote Obama's book rather than the 60's radical.

The Joe Lieberman Conundrum

There are times when I think the progressive media is just as committed as the mainstream media to avoiding any kind of policy debate concerning health reform.

Talking Points Memo and HuffPost have little discussion of either Democratic proposals or health policy more generally. Progressive media sources actually do very little in the way of promoting any Democratic ideas on health reform. Likewise, they have little information on how the current financing of the health system works, why it costs so much, and why our results on life-span, infant mortality, and other measures of health are so poor compared to other countries. A number of stories about the inhumanity of health insurance companies to their policy-holders have been published by HuffPost. But I'm aware of no reporting on how the corporate strategies of the health insurance companies reinforce their drive to reject legitimate claims from sick individuals.

Instead of discussing health policy, the progressive media focuses on three themes--dissecting the political process, publicizing to right-wing "outrages," and vilifying Democratic "traitors." For most of this week, the focus has been on the Joe Lieberman's "treason." Just as McCain stole the thunder from Obama's convention speech by announcing his nomination of Sarah Palin, Lieberman undercut the progressive euphoria over Harry Reid's support for a public option by declaring the next day that he would filibuster any bill including a public option. Since then, the progressive media has been obsessing about Lieberman's desertion of the Democrats. Why, the progressive media asks, would Lieberman oppose a public option now when he embraced the public option during his 2004 presidential campaign? Why is Lieberman so eager to filibuster now when he's always been suspicious of filibustering in the past? In a way, this is all a self-fulfilling prophecy. Lieberman's "treason" toward the Democratic Party has been a major theme in the progressive media ever since the first emergence of the left blogosphere. But this is Lieberman's most important treason to date. Lieberman's sabotaging the legislative agenda of a Democratic president who's gone out of his way to to be nice to him. Why would he do that?

Glenn Greenwald, Rachel Maddow, and Joe Conason argue that Lieberman opposes health reform for corrupt reasons, either because his wife works for health lobbyists or because the health insurance companies have contributed huge money to his re-election campaigns. Here's Joe Conason:

The Lieberman family's financial ties to the health industry are no secret, yet their full extent remains unknown. During her husband's 2006 reelection campaign, Hadassah Lieberman's employment as a "senior counselor" to Hill & Knowlton, one of the world’s biggest lobbying firms, briefly erupted as an issue, especially because the clients she served were in the controversial pharmaceutical and insurance sectors. Exactly what she did for those clients has never been disclosed.

Also, here's Glenn Greenwald on the Rachel Maddow show discussing Lieberman's ties to the health industry.

But I don't think that Joe Lieberman's ties to the health industry are the issue. The main problem with Lieberman is his bitterness over the re-emergence of an energized Democratic left during the Bush years. I imagine that Lieberman initially thought he had a good shot at the Democratic presidential nomination in 2004. Lieberman had been the vice-presidential nominee in 2000, he was well-known as a result of his gazillion television appearances, and he had paid his dues. Maybe, Lieberman thought, his time had arrived and he would be able to mount a moderate to conservative challenge to George W.

But it wasn't close. The Iraq War which Lieberman supported was already a failure in early 2004 and the left blogosphere had become the focal point of opposition to the war within the Democratic Party and liberal/left constituencies. Lieberman may have been a long-time Senator from the nearby state of Connecticut, but he didn't even get 9% of the vote in the New Hampshire primary and he had become the butt of constant ridicule from people on the left (including me). Lieberman began turning away from the Democratic Party in his heart when Ned Lamont launched a successful primary challenge in 2006. Barack Obama and the rest of the establishment Democrats might have campaigned for Lieberman but that didn't make any difference. For Lieberman, the Democrats were now the party of Daily Kos, Ned Lamont, and Amy Goodman rather than the party of Al Frum, the DLC, and neo-liberalism. As he showed during the 2008 presidential campaign, Lieberman was quite willing to turn against the Democratic Party establishment that had sought to save him. But it was only because the establishment was heading up a popular political party that he now hated.

The progressive media needs to understand how satisfying the idea of filibustering the public option probably is to Joe Lieberman. Progressives humiliated Joe Lieberman in 2004 and humiliated him again in 2008. Joining with the Republicans to filibuster the progressive highlight of the health reform package is probably the most bitterly satisfying thing that Joe Lieberman has done in the last ten years. Because of the rise of the progressive movement, Joe Lieberman went from respected insider to punching bag overnight.

And now the punching bag is punching back--where it really hurts by the way.

But that's the way it goes. If Lieberman sinks the current legislation, we'll just have to find another way. Bitter guys like Lieberman almost always lose in the end.

White House Declares Victory Over Fox--Sends Troops Home

The Politico has a report of a "truce meeting" between Obama press secretary Robert Gibbs and a Fox executive.

White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs and Michael Clemente, Fox News' senior
vice president for news, met at the White House for about 20 minutes on Wednesday morning, sources said.

The contents of the meeting remain private. A Fox source said that the marching orders are to “continue doing what we’re doing – reporting the news, asking tough questions and providing analysis/opinion on shows like O’Reilly, Beck and Hannity.”

I image that the Obama administration refers to Clemente as the "senior vice-president for propoganda outreach" at Fox. The Obama/Fox war has been a complete victory for the Obama administration. Jake Tapper of ABC might have been sympathetic with Fox, but the fact is that the Obama people were able to take Fox out of the health care debate at the key moment when legislation was bubbling up toward the floor. Instead of spending September and October making up new lies about "death panels" and comparing health reform to the rape of the Sabine women, Fox executives and news personalities had to devote themselves to defending their claims to journalistic integrity and whining about "censorship."

Now that Fox, the Republicans, and conservatives in general are on the outside of the health care debate, it looks like Robert Gibbs has decided to declare victory and offer a temporary truce to his defeated opponents in the right-wing media.

That's certainly magnanimous of him.

But Fox has already promised to "continue doing what we're doing" and the Obama administration certainly won't hesitate to attack them again.

Peace between Obama and Fox? More like a pause.

Another Post Bites the Dust

I was going to write a hard-hitting post about Antonin Scalia's statement that he would have dissented against Brown v Board of Education. But it turns out that he didn't make that statement after all. So, Scalia's reputation lives another day.

If only Scalia could find better hunting partners.

The Clippers Curse

Ouch! The Clippers curse strikes again. Blake Griffin is out six weeks with a stress fracture in his kneecap. General Manager Mike Dunleavy made several good moves during the off-season, winning the draft lottery, picking Griffin, and bringing in a stronger set of reserves in Sebastian Telfair, Rasual Butler, and Craig Smith. Eric Gordon is excellent and hope remains for Baron Davis and Al Thornton. But a major injury to Griffin takes a lot of the air out of the Clippers balloon. And then there's the problem of Coach Dunleavy.