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.

George Will Puffs and Puffs

George Will has a bad puff piece on Michelle Bachmann in the Washington Post. I imagine Will's trying to get back in the good graces of the right after "going soft" on Afghanistan. But Will can't do feature writing to save his life and the whole thing falls flat.

I especially like it when Will refers to Bachmann as a "burr in the side" of the left. Who's Will kidding. Bachmann's great for the left and everybody on the left knows it. A quick comparison with Ann Coulter wmakes the point. Like Ann Coulter, Bachmann says a lot of sensational and offensive things that make the Republicans look bad. But Bachmann's not smart enough or knowledgeable enough to make liberals uncomfortable in the way Coulter used to. That makes Bachmann the perfect foil for the progressive media and TPM and HuffPost cover Bachmann with the same manic obsessiveness as the tabs cover Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. The left can't imagine a world without Michelle Bachmann any more than the right can get along without Bill Ayers. After all, who can really be sure that Michelle Bachmann didn't write Palin's Going Rogue? I'm not.

George Will's pretty useless as a writer, but he would be less useless if he understood that the left has a big stake in Michelle Bachmann as well as the right.

Health Reform Has Crossed the Crossroads

There's so many stories coming out about health reform that the relentless spinning is making everybody's head spin. My own sense continues to be that the Obama administration and the Congressional Democrats are going to pass health reform legislation with a public option this year. I don't know whether Arlen Specter is right in claiming that there are 60 votes to bring a public option plan to a vote if the GOP throws up a filibuster. But I wouldn't be surprised if he was. I also don't know if it's going to be a straight public option, a public option with a mechanism allowing red states to opt out, or a public option with a trigger to go in effect if the health insurance companies continue to conduct their business in a predatory manner. Today's flavor is a public option with an opt out for the benefit of moderate and conservative Democrats who want to hide behind the idea of "choice." However, momentum can shift quickly and I think there's a slightly better chance that the final legislation will contain a straight public option.

My own preference is that the public option be adopted as national legislation. The weakness of the "opt out" is that the states likely to take it are states like Texas and South Carolina that have large minority populations and even larger white populations determined to screw minorities as much as possible. Allowing these states to opt out of the pulbic option is monumentally unfair to large group of working poor among the Hispanic and African-American population. It's unfair to the working white people who can't afford health insurance as well. The politics of a nullification state like South Carolina might militate against accepting a public option, but that doesn't mean that the higher numbers of working poor people in these states should not get the same benefits as people in a wealthy state like Connecticut or Illinois.

But if the public option with opt out is adopted, I believe that it would be politically beneficial to the Democrats. The reason for this is that the acceptance or rejection of the public option would be a powerful wedge dividing the Republicans. This could be seen with the fate of the stimulus package in South Carolina and Alaska. Teaparty governors like Mark Sanford and Sarah Palin wanted to reject stimulus money but this led to howls of outrage among orthodox Republicans in state legislators who wanted the money and were willing to fight their governors over the issue. Health reform is even more unpopular with the teaparty folks and the conflicts among Republicans over opting out would be even nastier. As the fight over Dede Scozzafava in New York's 23rd District shows, the teaparty faction is determined to eliminate moderates from the Republican Party. If a public option "opt out" passes, the teaparty folks are going to start going after "sissy conservatives" as well.

Teaparty activism is part of the dynamic among the Democrats as well. That sound everyone hears in Washington these days is Democratic backbones snapping into place. No one would know this from reading the "progressive media" which over-dramatizes every twist and turn from potential "turncoats" like Ben Nelson, Blanche Lincoln, and Mary Landrieu. But the Democratic and membership in the Senate and House have responded to the Teaparty Movement by tuning out the right-wing. Ben Nelson desperately wants to vote for something Olympia Snowe can support, but Snowe and Susan Collins have become practically the only Republicans on the Democratic radar. When Republican senators like Charles Grassley started going along with the "death panel" lie, the Democrats began to ignore them. People like Nelson and Kent Conrad still have loyalties to the insurance companies, but the Republicans haven't given them anything credible to consider and Democrats in general have closed ranks with the intent of negotiating something among themselves.

The teaparty movement has bee successful in generating grass-roots conservative opposition to health reform, but disgust over tea-party rhetoric among the Democrats has solidified support for large-scale health reform and guaranteed that the public option is going to be passed in some form. America owes the teabaggers a big thank you. As a result of revulsion over the teaparty movement, health reform has "crossed the crossroads" and is on its way to approval.

Ann Coulter on Obama/Fox

Something is wrong with Ann Coulter. Today, she has an op-ed on the Obama/Fox controversy entitled "The Grating Communicator." But there's hardly anything about Obama in the piece and the overall effect is so flat she might as well serve it as a pancake. As a writer, Coulter's been so far off her game that she hasn't had any impact on the health care debate at all.

I guess this is the point where a leftist like myself should be gloating over Coulter's prospective decline and fall. But I think I'll pass on that particular temptation and try to look on her more as a human being.

"We are the Sultans"

Maybe the godawful Washington Redskins would have better karma if they finally changed their racist nickname. I like the "Washington Sultans." Not only does "Sultans" have a nice Ottoman ring to it, but the team song is so-o-o obvious.

Take it away Mark Knopfler. "We are the Sultans/We are the Sultans of Swing."

A Few Words on the Obama Feud with Fox

I'm glad to see the White House punching at Fox. Most importantly, they're right. Fox News is a joke as a news organization. Why can't the White House say it just as much as HuffPost? Doesn't the Obama administration have freedom of speech?

The second thing is that it's important for the White House to not be a day in, day out punching bag for the conservative movement. Obama has always shown that he's capable of effective counter-punching and that's what he's doing now, some nasty counter-punching against Fox News. Good for Obama.

The New York Times wants the Obama administration to be above tangling with the "cable shouters:"

Tactics aside, something more fundamental is at risk. Even the president’s most avid critics admit he exudes a certain cool confidence. The public impression of him is that if anyone were to, say, talk trash on the basketball court with Mr. Obama, he would not find much space for rent in Mr. Obama’s head. ...

People who work in political communications have pointed out that it is a principle of
power dynamics to “punch up “ — that is, to take on bigger foes, not smaller ones. A blog on the White House Web site that uses a “truth-o-meter” against a particular cable news network would not seem to qualify. As it is, Reality Check sounds a bit like the blog of some unemployed guy living in his parents’ basement, not an official communiqué from Pennsylvania Avenue.

The American presidency was conceived as a corrective to the royals, but trading punches with cable shouters seems a bit too common. Perhaps it’s time to restore a little imperiousness to the relationship.

As usual, the NY Times has their heads up their butts. The Times itself is losing ground to the guys and women blogging from "their parents basements." Why shouldn't the Obama administration get in on the action before they start losing ground?

By attacking Fox News, the Obama administration has signaled that it's willing to mix it up in its efforts to get health reform and cap and trade passed.

That's as good as news can get right now.

On another note. Personally, I like what Fox is doing in the sense that Fox has blazing a trail as a television network of political opposition. Unlike the other networks, Fox is an independent entity that is not beholden to the government for stories. When networks with more liberal political agendas start following Fox's example, the world will be a better place.

Worries About Glenn Beck

Thinking about Glenn Beck, I'm worried that he's going to start running out of Obama/Nazi analogies. What's he going to do then? How is Glenn Beck going to bring the truth of the Obama administration to the American public if he can't compare Obama to Hitler and Goebbels? Beck can't allow the well to run dry.

But there's hope America.

First, Glenn Beck should start using images of himself being tortured.

Here's a couple of examples.

There's waterboarding: "these attacks on Fox News make me f -e-e-l like I'm being thrown into the water . . . and it's getting into my lungs . . . and I'm coughing uncontrollably."

Having his testicles sliced open like a former terrorism suspect: "these thugs from Chicago want to make it impossible for someone like me to be a man anymore. There, they're slicing open my testicles and the pain is excruciating. But I'm willing to go through this in order to show the world what Barack Obama . . . is . . . doing . . . to . . . America."

More torture and animal rights comparisons tomorrow.

Al From: Right-Wing Infiltrator

Al From was the founder of the Democratic Leadership Council, the organization that ostensibly tried to lead the Democratic Party in a more conservative, business-friendly direction. But From always served primarily as an agent of the right-wing, a thought confirmed by From's op-ed in the Wall Street Journal arguing for Obama to give up on the public option. It would be better if From, Mickey Kaus, Peter Beinart, and people like them just moved out of the Democratic Party and joined the Republicans.

Glenn Beck Cries for a Return to the 70's?

I only watched this once, but Glenn Beck seems to be crying for a return to the 1970's. Beck refers to the seventies as a simpler time and I guess he was right.


Just like George W., Richard Nixon committed a number of crimes as he sought to concentrate power. But the seventies was a simpler time and Nixon was removed from office.


Just as people opposed the Iraq War, they opposed the Vietnam War. But the seventies was a simpler time and the United States just withdrew from Vietnam.


But Glenn Beck doesn't want to go back to the real 1970's.


That's when the forces of socialism were really gaining strength in the U. S.


I should know. I was trying to help them.


What Beck wants instead is the iconic commercials of the 1970's like that Joe Green Coke commercial or the Paul Anka Kodak commercial.


Of course, the 70's was much like the 60's in that teenagers like me were telling their parents that the wisdom of the Depression and WWII no longer applied to the prosperous consumer society of the post WWII era.


Beck refers to that as America as disobeying its parents and going to the "wrong kind of party." Maybe he should have thrown in a couple of lyrics from "American Pie" on "the devil's only friend" about the Stones and "the Sergeants refuse to yield" about the Beatles.


"Do you recall what was revealed/the day the music died?"


Well, I joined millions of other Americans in disobeying my parents and going to plenty of the wrong kinds of parties with the wrong kinds of people and listening to the wrong kinds of music.


God, it was great.


But who really wants to go back? The fact is that the 70's was followed by almost 30 years of greed, corruption, and stupidity of the right. Democrats and liberals participated, but the period from the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 to the election of Barack Obama in 2008 was dominated by the party at the house of Ronaldus Magnus.


And now we've got to figure a way to get out of it.

Hopefully, we won't be as dumb as they were.