Obama Day on the Sunday News Shows

Barack Obama was all over the Sunday news shows today. The account at TPM makes Obama sound like he was so moderate that he lost all of the fire from his speech to a joint session of Congress. It would be better if he was fighting.

Down with a Cold

My inner blogger is stuff up with a cold. Hope it isn't one of those two month things.

How Creepy is John Edwards?

I didn't like John Edwards but I didn't think he was creepy enough to do this.

According to the newspaper . . . Edwards once told Hunter they would wed after Ddwards' wife, who has cancer, died. Edwards told Hunter that the ceremony would be held on a rooftop in New York and the Dave Matthews Bands would make an appearance, the newspaper said, citing its examination of the book proposal.

Of course, I also have a hard time believing anyone would fall for a line like that.

Talking Points Memo Makes Me Want

to tear out what's left of my hair. They front paged a speech by former Bush administration official Ellen Sauerbrey at a Maryland Republican dinner saying that Obama was like Hitler and Juan Peron.

Sauerbrey said that President Obama was surrounded by a cult-like following, edging towards that of Juan Peron or Adolf Hitler. She told the paper that she was not making a comparison between Obama and Hitler, but instead saying that the conditions in this country were such that a dictator could usurp the rights of citizens.

Why? Why? Why? Ellen Sauerbrey was a nobody Assistant Secretary of State for a Neglected Function in the Bush administration. And there's no good reason why she shouldn't continue to be a nobody. However, Talking Points Memo (TPM), a progressive media outlet, is giving Sauerbrey her shot at becoming a somebody because they're giving Sauerbrey's little speech national play. Given that TPM has become a source of stories for the mainstream media, Sauerbrey's views could be all over television by the end of the week and she could start getting invited to the Sunday talk shows.

Talking Points Memo and HuffPost should seriously think about their role in communicating and amplifying the right-wing message.

Hey, That's Me

There's my picture for a story on my brilliant career as a blogger from the Morehead State University newspaper, The Trail Blazer. I've never really liked having my picture taken and I like it even less the older I get.

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But I guess we all have to make sacrifices. There it is.

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Here's the article in my college newspaper, The Trail Blazer below. It does take some of my flamboyant statements out of the context in which I wrote them and therefore makes them appear more unreasonable than they really are. One thing that I like, though, is that is that my writing and thinking about politics looks like its "quotable." That distinctiveness is part of what I'm aiming for.

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While focusing on Red State Impressions, I should mention that I put up my 2,000th post for this blog a couple of days ago. Not bad for three years work.

"Blue Blogger in Red State"

The words used to write about Democratic Senator Max Baucus's health care bill were frank: "Now, I know why Baucus shouldn't get any credit. It's because he's stupid."

These words do not stem from a right-wing blog or Sarah Palin's Facebook profile; they are written by Ric Caric, an outspoken MSU government professor, on his blog Red State Impressions (http://red-state.blogspot.com/), which offers a left perspective on American politics.

Although Caric writes from the left and has been critical of Republicans, especially the Bush administrations, he has recently also criticized some Democrats including Baucus in yesterday's blog spot.

"I've been more critical of progressives for focusing so much on the media," Caric said. "They are also not very inclusive, of the labor unions, of minorities. I'd like progressives to be more open."

But conservatives are still his favorite target. On Tuesday he commented on Linda McMahon, the CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment, gearing up to run for the Republicans in a Connecticut Senate race.

He writes "Linda McMahon is the perfect Republican politician for these times. Actually, I'm rather surprised that the WWE has not run its executives, wrestlers, managers, and divas all over the country as Republican candidates. It's been known for a long time that politics is show business and the WWE puts on the kind of show that Republicans like to see. It's a natural fit."

Caric said he first started writing online on a daily basis shortly after the 9/11 terror attacks, concentrating on the possibility of a war against Iraq, which later would come true.

"I was convinced within days of the attack that the Bush administration was gearing up to invade Iraq," he said.

Caric first wrote in chat rooms of the online magazine Slate using various user names such as "riccaric", "keepacleareye" or "pinkroom."

"I'm the kind of person who gets bored with myself very easily," he said.

In 2004, he moved from the chat rooms to his own blog, and since 2006 he writes under the blog title "Red State Impressions." Caric averages about 10 posts a week updating the site sometimes multiple times per day.

"I have excess opinion that I want to write about beyond teaching or academic writing," he said.

Caric said the blog allows students to know about his political thoughts without injecting them into his regular teaching. In the classroom he takes various points of views to orchestrate discussion; on his blog his personal view of politics becomes clear.

Jordan Maynard, one of his students and a self-identified conservative, said he appreciates professors writing about their political opinions, even if he disagrees. "I think anytime a university professor expresses their views outside of the classroom, it is helpful to the learning process," he said. "It's actually problematic that more conservative thinkers do not blog on the college front."

Caric said writing a blog post every day has helped him with his academic writing by formulating new opinions and ideas.

"I've always struggled with my academic writing – writer's block and writer's anxiety--but writing every day has made it easier," he said.

The Painful Stupidity of Max Baucus

Max Baucus finally unveiled the "Baucus Bill" on health care today and I was prepared to give Baucus credit for all of the work he and his staff did on the legislation. I'm for the public option, but I thought Baucus get credit for a sincere effort to craft a bi-partisan bill. Certainly, the effort to put together bi-partisan legislation took hundreds of hours or negotiation and writing. Why, I thought, shouldn't Baucus be congratulated for his hard work even though he had little chance of success?

Now, I know why Baucus shouldn't get any credit.

It's because he's stupid.

One of the Baucus' major strategies for paying for universal health care is to put an additional tax on high end health insurance plans. That doesn't sound like a bad idea in itself, but it turns out that Maine has the fourth highest number of high end insurance plans in the country.

Obama and Baucus have suggested paying for a big chunk of reform by levying new taxes on high-cost insurance plans. Specifically, Baucus has suggested a 35 percent excise tax on insurance plans that cost single individuals more than $8,000 a year and cost families more than $21,000.

Snowe’s problem with that plan is that it could impose a heavy tax burden on Maine, which has one of the highest average health insurance premiums in the country. A July study by Harvard economist David Cutler found that Maine, on average, has the fourth-most costly insurance premiums in the country, trailing only Connecticut, Delaware and New Hampshire.

That's the state of Maine that is represented in the Senate by Olympia Snowe, the Senator who was the Republican most likely to support health reform. Maine is also represented in the Senate by Republican moderate Susan Collins. The Democrats would like to get support from Collins whenever they can get it as well.

In other words, proposing a tax that would negatively impact Maine is an incredibly stupid idea. Max Baucus and his staff have to be incredibly stupid people to even propose that kind of idea.

If Obama supported this idea, he's stupid too.

Talk about painful stupidity, Baucus might have as well have proposed a tax surcharge on lobsters.

Dan Riehl: Racist Weenie Boy

I haven't done a weenie boy post on right-wing masculinity for awhile. But I couldn't resist posting this statement from Dan Riehl, a conservative blogger and teabagger who attended the Washington protest on Sept. 12.

Michelle has a disturbing video posted. It's of several black students beating a white student on a school bus in St. Louis. Here's the deal. I haven't mentioned it before.

Riding out of DC on the Metro, 9/12, there were some folks from South Dakota and also another Mid-West state I can't recall in the same Metro car. We were talking, nothing special, really - politics, of course.

In the back were maybe ten or so black kids taking up that section of the car. There was no confrontation, just one or two of them talking loudly enough to make sure they'd be heard.

Without resorting to the poor diction it was along the lines of, these are the people who think Obama is the anti-Christ. That McCain he wasn't chit. Obama's going to be president as long as he wants, so these people better get used to it, etc. It went on but not really to a level that was so loud, or so confrontational that it needed to be addressed.

We just ignored them without much trouble at all.

Yeah, they were technically thugs. But the reality was they were still wannabes really, pretty young, not that big, or many. And if the several adults there for 9/12 actually needed to do something about it, the kids wouldn't have lasted very long. Maybe if they were bigger, or more numerous, it might have been worse. Or it may not have happened at all. Who knows?

But what's unfortunately becoming increasingly clear is that, for the people who thought Obama's election would make America post-racial? I'm afraid you're wrong. Some of the potential racial narratives that may still play out during his presidency
might not be that pretty at all.

I can't say as I'm not concerned that America might not end up more racially divided than we've been in 30 years. And that burden is as much, if not more Obama's to carry as it is anyone else's. Whether he's up to that along with everything else, we'll have to wait and see.

I can't think of any better way to exemplify weeniness than stereotyping some little African-American guys as "thugs" and then fantasizing about beating the snot out of them. A "small man" in every sense of the word, Riehl dreams the racist dream making himself into a big man by beating up some black kids.

We should probably thank Riehl for being so honest in his blog. Too bad it's likely that that kind of weenie racist dreaming is so prevalent among the tea-baggers.

From Jack and Jill Politics

Looking for an alternative to the Kanye West/Taylor Swift mess at Jack and Jill Politics, I saw a link to the "Power to the Peaceful" festival organized by Michael Franti.

Looked interesting.

Saw videos of both Kanye West and Taylor Swift--didn't find either of them all that appealing.

Why Not More Professional Wrestling in Republican Politics

It looks like WWE CEO Linda McMahon is gearing up to run as a Republican for Christopher Dodd's Senate seat in Connecticut. That makes a lot of sense. The Republicans have been sounding more and more like professional wrestlers over the last ten years. All the Bush administration chest-beating about the "New Roman Empire," the "Axis of Evil" accusations, Dick Cheney telling Pat Leahy to "go fuck yourself" in the Senate--it was all about pumping themselves up, showing that they were the baddest act in town, and going out to "kick some ass."

Wait a minute! Didn't George Bush say that as U. S. troops began the invasion of Iraq?

GOP speechwriters would have had to pump the volume to match the WWE's techniques for promoting Hulk Hogan, the Rock, and John Cena. But the core motifs are the same--big bragging, huge putdowns, and lots of exciting pseudo-action whether it was the Iraq War, "diplomacy" with North Korea, threats against Iran, and immigrant bashing, gay baiting, and race baiting.

The only difference is that the Bush administration was called upon to "govern" as well as put on a show and al-Qaeda, Katrina, and last fall's financial meltdown did not respond nearly as well to professional wrestling rhetoric as expected.

Something about opponents being able to write their own lines that screwed things up.

Not that things have changed much since Obama took office. Joe Wilson's "you lie" was more WWE than Teabagger. Or more precisely, the Teabagger/Townhall movement has a lot of WWE in its paranoia, racism, and know-nothingness.

In this way, Linda McMahon is the perfect Republican politician for these times. Actually, I'm rather surprised that the WWE has not run its executives, wrestlers, managers, and divas all over the country as Republican candidates. It's been known for a long time that politics is show business and the WWE puts on the kind of show that Republicans like to see. It's a natural fit.

I wouldn't be surprised if the WWE doesn't need the Republican Party as well. With the rise of Ultimate Fighting and mixed martial arts as a new form of mass entertainment, the WWE probably needs new ways to market itself and keep growing.

Why not Republican politics?

As for Chris Dodd. His blood's in the water. It looks like there are going to be four major candidates vying for the Republican senate nomination in Connecticut. He's been coasting to re-election for years. Now, he'll have to fight.

Maybe he should call Hulk Hogan for campaign advice.

A Reflection on the Thinness of Secularism

What's someone to do who's been emotionally terrorized by evangelical Christianity? That's one of the questions posed by Max Blumenthal in a Nation article on Matthew Murray, a young man who was raised according to the strictest tenets of "movement Christianity," profoundly rejected the faith of his parents, and ended up killing four people at a Youth with a Mission Center in Colorado.

Certainly, the child-raising techniques of Matthew Murray's pentecostal parents were grotesque enough. Here's a lengthy quote from Murray:

...my mother was into all the charismatic "fanatical evangelical" insanity. Her and her church believed that Satan and demons were everywhere in everything. The rules were VERY strict all the time. We couldn't have ANY christian or non-christian music at all except for a few charismatic worship CDs. There was physical abuse in my home. My mother although used psychotropic drugs because she somehow thought it would make it easier to control me (I've never been diagnosed with any mental illness either). Pastors would always come and interrogate me over video games or TV watching or other things. There were NO FRIENDS outside the church and family and even then only family members who were in the church. You could not trust anyone at all because anyone might be a spy.

Murray was home-schooled from the third grade forward with his parents "educating" him according to the principles of Christian-right, self-help guru Bill Gothard. From Blumenthal's article, the main emphasis of Gothard's approach was the complete isolation of children from the larger society, intense paranoia concerning "outsiders," and a primary emphasis on submission to authority. First graders in Gothard's program sang this song about obedience.

Obedience is listening attentively,
Obedience will take instructions joyfully,
Obedience heeds wishes of authorities,
Obedience will follow orders instantly.
For when I am busy at my work or play,
And someone calls my name,
I'll answer right away!
I'll be ready with a smile to go the extra mile
As soon as I can say "Yes, sir!" "Yes ma am!"
Hup, two, three!

Scary stuff! I would say it was cult-like, but I wonder if most "cults" are this systematic in their indoctrination. Perhaps it would be better to say that a lot of cults are "Gothard-like." I'm not sure. It would be interesting to see what the Gothard approach to Christian home-schooling said about Jesus and the doctrines of the New Testament. One of the things that characterized the ministry of Jesus was reaching beyond the limits of Judaism as the religion of proper and respectable Jewish people and connecting to Roman centurions, Phoenician women, prostitutes, tax-collectors, beggars, and other outsiders and disreputable people. But this seems like the last thing Murray's parents had in mind. From Blumenthal's account, Matthew Murray's parents and their role models were much more focused on Satan than Jesus.

The situation for Murray got worse after he went to a "discipleship training school" of Youth With A Mission (YWAM):

But as soon as Murray enrolled at YWAM's training center in nearby Arvada in 2002, he found himself trapped in an authoritarian culture even more restrictive than home. He realized that, as another student of YWAM bluntly put it, the school's training methods resembled "cult mind-controlling techniques." Murray became paranoid, speaking aloud to voices only he could hear, according to a former roommate. He complained that six of his male peers had made a gay sex video and that others routinely abused drugs. Hypocrisy seemed to be all around him, or at least dark mirages of it.

After being booted out of the YWAM center, Murray began his path toward mass murder by first becoming a follower of Satanist Aleister Crowley and then engaging in:

"every sort of sexual pervrsion [sic]...that's legal," from anonymous gay sex to bestiality. He boasted of his proclivity for binge drinking, his love for death metal bands, and his penchant for spewing "blasphemy." He envisioned his new experiences as positively transcendent. "In a way it's like I'm just about completely rebelling against christianity [sic] in any way that I can," the enragé mused, "but this is a little different of a rebellion."

Blumenthal expresses surprise that Murray did not move from "hardcore Christian culture" to "secular humanism, a natural position for jaded skeptics like him." But this is where I can't follow Blumenthal. Murray was far from being a "jaded skeptic." He was an enthusiast who was highly committed to doing the opposite of what his parents wanted. Matthew Murray was just as enthusiastic a follower of Aleister Crowley as his parents had wanted him to be of the pre-fallen Ted Haggard (his mother's favorite minister). Likewise, he seems to have thrown himself just as energetically into "anonymous gay sex," "bestiality," "binge drinking," "death metal," and "blashphemy" as his parents wanted him to throw himself into mission work.

I also wonder about Blumenthal's reference to "secular humanism." I'm an atheist and a long-standing participant in the world of progressive internet writing. But Blumenthal's association of "secular humanism" and "jaded scepticism" reinforced some of my current dissatisfaction with the progressive media. Why is it the case that Blumenthal views secular humanism in terms of being jaded? My best guess is that political progressivism and secular humanism have been mostly about opposition--opposition to the Bush administration, neo-con warmongering, the religious right, and the current conservative freak show. Opposing these things is important and necessary and I've been an energetic participant. But it's also like we've gotten so "jaded" in our political opposition that we haven't developed a sense for the kind of things we're seeking for American society. Not really knowing what we want, we also don't have much of a language for articulating our ideas politically. Likewise, progressive media institutions are much more effective at "opposing" than they are at "advocating." It's not just the power of the right and the cowardice of the blue dogs that keeps us from moving forward, it's the "thin" character of our opposition mentality.

It's not like progressives are "jaded" personally. I'm a college professor who spends a lot of my time and am committed to helping students and colleagues. Lots of progressives are in helping professions like medicine, teaching, social work, and psychotherapy. But political progressivism has not done enough to articulate themes like friendship, love, mutuality, shared responsibility, and community. We don't have much of a political language for reaching out to people like who have grown up in the Christian right, participate in "death metal," are heavily into guns, and the like. Not paying attention to these dimensions of American culture, we have no way to reach out to people who are living in these ways and might be dissatisfied like Matthew Murray. We have too much of a tendency to be limited to our own liberal communities. Taking Max Blumenthal as an example, we're coming off as oppositional and "jaded" even to ourselves.

We also fail to recognize the power of cultural motifs we don't share--like the gun culture. In the case of Matthew Murray, he started elaborating on a suicide fantasy in which he kills as many Christians as he can before he dies. Then he stockpiled an arsenal for getting the job done.

As winter approached, Murray acquired a fearsome arsenal of assault rifles, including a Bushmaster XM-15 ("Beltway Sniper" John Lee Malvo's weapon of choice) and an AK-47. At a local UPS store where Murray maintained a mailbox, employees observed that he was ordering "boxes and boxes" of ammunition. Murray's bogus tales of preparing to deploy with the Marines quelled whatever suspicions burned-out UPS employees might have had. Meanwhile, Murray's parents, who were adept at ferreting secular media material from his desk drawers, had no idea his stockpile even existed.

One way to express the power of the gun culture in America society is that it was a logical place for Matthew Murray to move after leaving the religious right. Given that most progressives like myself refuse to participate in the gun culture and therefore have little "feel" for it ourselves, we have a difficult time understanding its attraction to millions of other Americans. If we are going to be an attractive option to disaffected Christians like Matthew Murray, we need to be more interested and effective in addressing people like him.

Let me be clear. I don't think that progressives should stop opposing the religious right. It's important that we do so. Likewise, I don't think a "better progressivism" would have saved Matthew Murray from becoming a mass murderer. But Max Blumenthal's article on Matthew Murray does contain themes that should give progressives pause and lead us to think about our own limitations and weaknesses as well as those of the religious right.

Patrick Swayze RIP

Too bad about Patrick Swayze's death. Too bad about his cancer being such tabloid fodder as well. Miss Teen and Miss Tween were both disappointed to hear the news although only one of them claims to have seen any of Swayze's movies.

Star Parker Sees Stars

In the "hard to believe" column, Star Parker sees a black conservative renaissance in the fact that African-American approval rates for Barack Obama dropped from 95% in April to 92% in more recent polling.

I see a new generation of freedom loving, church going black Americans coming on the scene. Many voted for Obama out of racial pride. But their values and aspirations for freedom are causing a change of heart.

Polls go up, polls go down. But African-American voters have actually become more positive toward Barack Obama since his inauguration--not less. When Obama was inaugurated, his favorable ratings among African-Americans stood at 86%. They eventually got as high as 96%, but are now back down to 92%.

I remember back in the 80's when the virulently racist Frank Rizzo still got 5% of the African-American vote--probably from "black conservatives" like Star Parker. Perhaps George Wallace would have gotten 5% of the black vote during his segregationist heyday as well.

That is, if Alabama had allowed blacks to vote.

But the percentage of black conservatives hasn't really increased in any measurable way since then. The Democrats have gotten between 87 and 96% of the black vote since 1984. Perhaps Obama got 96% of the black vote and John McCain only got 4% was a matter of "racial pride." But I don't think so. Certainly, the racial pride was there, but's unlikely that the Republicans would have gotten more than 5 or 6% against Hillary Clinton either?

The best the Republicans have done with African-American voters in presidential elections over the last 25 years is 13%.

I imagine Star Parker would see getting back to 13% as a miracle.

And it would be.

RSI: A Retrosexual Dream Reject

Time has an article on people who hook back up with high school and college flames through Facebook. They call it "retrosexuality." I don't think that's going to happen to me though. Last night, I had a dream about my main college girlfriend calling security to prevent me from talking to her at a grocery store. Getting shot down in my own dreams--that's tough.

Glenn Greenwald Wrong on Dynamics of Freak Show

Glenn Greenwald's position is that the right-wing hasn't changed much over the last twenty years and is doing pretty much the same stuff to Obama that it did to Clinton:

But when was it different? Rush Limbaugh didn't just magically appear in the last twelve months. He -- along with people like James Dobson, Pat Robertson, Bill Kristol and Jesse Helms -- have been leaders of that party for decades. Republicans spent the 1990s wallowing in Ken Starr's sex report, "Angry White Male" militias, black U.N. helicopters, Vince Foster's murder, Clinton's Mena drug runway, Monica's
semen-stained dress, Hillary's lesbianism, "wag the dog" theories, and all sorts of efforts to personally humiliate Clinton and destroy the legitimacy of his presidency using the most paranoid, reality-detached, and scurrilous attacks.

I see things differently. Things are worse with the right. It wasn't until the George W. Bush years that the Republican elite coalesced arbitrary imprisonment, torture, and endless war, that establishment figures like Frank Gaffney were calling for the imprisonment of members of Congress, and prominent conservative intellectuals and Harvey Mansfield were calling for military coups or one-man rule. Where Rush Limbaugh used to represent the "right" of the Republican Party without advocating a lot of survivalist, conspiratorial, neo-Nazi junk, the "right" is now best represented by people like Glenn Beck who are eager to see the country descend into chaos. During the Clinton years, mainstream conservatives were looking to George W. Bush's "compassionate conservatism" as a way for the Republicans to appeal to people who were fed up with Newt Gingrich, Tom DeLay, and the confrontationalism of the Republican Revolutionaries of 1994. Now, mainstream conservatives view the "Revolutionaries" of 1994 as wimps and sell-outs. In 2000, the "radical right" was mostly a collection of single-issue movements like the "Right to Life" movement and the NRA. In 2009, all of those single issue movements seem to have coalesced around the cause of opposing Obama.

Forces of Evil Lose to Wolverines

I was glad to see the Notre Dame Forces of Evil lose 38-34 to Michigan. Having rooted against Notre Dame ever since they hired Jesse Helms supporter Lou Holtz as coach in the 80's, I hope this year's team falls on its face again.

Richard Wolffe: A Pimple in the Acne of American Politics

It was disappointing to see Richard Wolffe getting a bye-line from the Daily Beast for a pointless article on Obama administration's health care strategy for the fall. As bad a representative of mainstream media whoring as this country has to offer, Richard Wolffe has been able to keep his journalistic gigs with the Daily Beast and MSNBC while also raking in big bucks as a partner in the lobbying firm Public Strategies. The bottom line for Wolffe is that he can maintain some liberal credibility while undermining the public interest on behalf of his corporate clients. It's a win-win strategy for Wolffe and a lose-lose proposition for the public interest.

Speaking of interest, Wolffe's article has no interest outside a "senior administration official" giving him a spicy quote about instant "you lie" celebrity Joe Wilson (R-SC) being a "pimple on the ass of progress."

In fact, the White House is more than ready to brush aside the now-infamous protest of Rep. Joe Wilson of South Carolina, who yelled at the President during his televised address. “I think this is a pimple on the ass of progress,” said the senior adviser.

Predictably, the rest of the piece is filler that anybody could have gotten from CNN and which Wolffe probably did get from CNN. Wolffe might try to do some real research or real thinking. That way, he could earn his six or seven figure income.

But that would probably interfere with making money.

Come to think of it, the "senior administration official's" characterization of Joe Wilson applies to Richard Wolffe as well. Wolffe is just another "pimple on the ass" in the acne of American political life.

Comedian World Domination

The comedian plot to take over the world continues to gain steam. First the evil comics made Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert into America's two most trusted newsmen. After their success in taking over the news business, the comedians gained more momentum when the producers of Saturday Night Live ran Al Franken for the United States Senate. Saturday Night Live didn't just corrupt the Democratic Party either. They also convinced the Republican Party to nominate a Tina Fey impersonator for Vice-President. When Franken finally won, the plotters at Comedian Central (not to be confused with "Comedy Central") were almost as happy as Obama bin Laden was on 9-11.

But the news keeps getting worse. Not satisfied with taking over the news media and politics, the comedians have set their sights on a really important target. That's right, folks. The comedians are taking over one of the spiritual centers of American society--"American Idol." Operatives from Comedian Central have succeeded in placing Ellen Degeneres as a fourth judge on the most revered program on television. What does Ellen Degeneres know about music . . . or anything else for that matter. Is nothing sacred? Have the comedians no shame? How long do the other judges have to live before the comedians kill them?

Outside the National Football League, "American Idol" is the most important center of religious experience in the United States. Now that comedians have extended their influence from comedy shows to news, politics, and the world of religion, there's probably no stopping them. America has survived two invasions by the British, the slave conspiracy, two world wars, the Cold War and the War on Terror, but it looks we'll at long last lose our country to the laugh merchants at Comedian Central.

This may be my last post. I think I hear the goose-stepping myrmidons of Comedian Central coming up my driveway now, tasers in hand.

The Progressive Media Fails on Obama's Speech

This is another in what looks like a series of posts complaining about the problems of the progressive media in covering the Obama administration.

I'm going to start with a quote from HuffPost's Dan Froomkin worrying about upcoming coverage of the health reform debate from the mainstream media.

The biggest challenge for Obama at this point, however, is the press. Will his speech be a game-changer as far as the coverage is concerned? Last night's triumphant visuals, including wildly cheering Democrats, and the resulting instapolls certainly proved a change of pace from the angry town-halls and barrage of lunacy that so transfixed our elite reporters during August. But the question is actually less whether the tenor of the coverage will change than whether the media will take this occasion to engage -- even just a little bit -- in a serious examination of the issues. Chances are, of course, that the vast majority of the coverage will continue to focus obsessively on politics and process -- and on the next conflict, the next gun-toting whacko, and the next spectacular bit of disinformation. That wouldn't be good for Obama -- or for the nation.

But where is the mainstream media going to go for their stories about Rep. Joseph Wilson yelling at Obama, the "next gun-toting whacko," or the next set of bizarre comments from Michael Steele--Instapundit? Rush Limbaugh? Fox News? Why bother. Such conservative sources will have at least some discussion of whether yelling "liar" at President Obama is a reasonable thing to do or carrying guns to Obama rallies is a good way for conservatives to dissent. Translating all of that into the desired "food fight" between the Obama administration and the right wing would be too much work for the mainstream media. Why should intellectually lazy mainstream media types bother.

That's especially the case because the mainstream media can draw its stories on right-wing antics from HuffPost. It's 10:58pm Eastern Standard time. Let's see what HuffPost has up right now. For their headline, they have a picture of Rep. Joseph Wilson of "you lie" fame along with four articles on the Joe Wilson story. Anybody reading HuffPost tonight--including the sheep-like mainstream media--would reasonably conclude that the most important thing about President Obama's speech as a political event was Joe Wilson's outburst. Not Obama's arguments concerning why health reform is necessary, his criticism of skyrocketing medical costs, Obama's attempt to pose himself as a moderate manuevering between "progressives" and "conservatives," or even his stories about seriously ill patients having their health insurance pulled. Instead of following up on the poor people who have died because of the inhumanity of the insurance companies, HuffPost decided to make Rep. Joe Wilson just as famous as Joe the Plumber.

It gets worse. Almost immediately below the headline is a story about Glenn Beck--I'm sorry two stories about Glenn Beck right below a picture of Glenn Beck. So far, we have pictures of Joe Wilson and Glenn Beck on what might have been considered a big day for Barack Obama and the health care debate. I had to push my "PgDn" button three times before I got to a picture of Obama and the picture of Obama makes him look thin and small compared to the full exposure given Joe Wilson. Progressives at HuffPost and TPM have been complaining all day that Republicans like Joe Wilson did not show proper respect for Obama and intimated that they were at least partly motivated by racism. And I think they're right. But treating Joe Wilson as though he's more important than Obama isn't much of a way to show respect for Obama either.

Scrolling down on Huffpost, there's at least three more stories about Joe Wilson, another story about the California politician who resigned after some pornographic bragging about his (alleged) affairs, and Jane Hamsher criticizing Obama. Compared to the wall coverage of Joe Wilson, the progressive HuffPost only has three articles by Froomkin, Maxine Waters, and Paul Begala praising Obama and commenting a little on the substance of his views. In other words, HuffPost is practically a warehouse for stories on the state of the right-wing antics and relatively little coverage to the speech itself. And even then, a considerable amount of HuffPost's coverage of the speech is about polling and the politics of the moderate, progressive split among congressional Democrats. Dan Froomkin complains about the lack of policy substance in the mainstream media, but it's not like HuffPost is any better. And given that HuffPost "rules the world" of the mainstream media more than Drudge, HuffPost has become a significant source of the problem for the mainstream media as well.

And it's not just HuffPost. Talking Points Media features a big picture of Joe Wilson with smaller pictures of Dick Armey and John Boehner. Altogether I count eight stories on Joe Wilson and only three stories on Obama's speech (concerning Tom Harkin, Ron Wyden, and Joe Biden). And even those stories are more than balanced by other stories about Michael Steele, Mark Sanford, and California sex-bragger Mark Duvall. If a Democratic politician really wanted to be featured on TPM or HuffPost, the best thing they could do would be to start seeing prostitutes or go one better than Mark Sanford and have an affair with an exotic Brazilian beauty. Maybe President Obama could get more coverage in the progressive media if he filed for divorce.

To be fair, Salon featured a positive column about Obama's speech from Joan Walsh even though it still ran more articles about the Republican reaction.

All in all, the big-time progressive media has its head firmly up its butt about Obama's speech, the health care debate, and health care policy. As bad as the mainstream media is, the progressive media doesn't have a lot of room to criticize.

Steeling the Jelly-Spines of Moderate Democrats

Marc Ambinder writes for his Atlantic blog that President Obama survived the teabagging offensive by offering the "public option" as a bargaining chip to conservative Democrats.

Initially, given the GOP success . . . in framing the option as essential to health care, its putative failure and demagoguery seemed to be a significant blow to the White House. But -- and here is the key point -- it became something for the Blue Dogs to "oppose" and thus satisfy their constituents' concerns about reform in general. Sen. Max Baucus's health care plan has been derided by many liberal activists because it seems to be a compromise upon a compromise.

This is about right. Republican senators Charles Grassley of Iowa and Mike Enzi of Wyoming might be the only two people in the country who changed their minds as a result of the townhall eruptions. Obama stuck to his guns and progressives stuck to their guns. So did moderate Democrats from conservative districts in the South. If anything, teabagger rudeness and intimidation might have put some steel into the jelly-spines of moderates.

Ambinder didn't see a single Democrat in Congress changing their mind as a result of aggressive conservative tactics. I didn't see any either.

Actually, the political process has now been simplified. There are only four real players right now: Obama administration, the Democratic leadership, Democratic moderates like Max Baucus, and Maine Republican Olympia Snowe. The Democratic players will try to work out a compromise and they'll try to keep Snowe on board. But Snowe representing herself, her policy interests, and her Maine constituents. The Republican Party has rejected health reform so completely that they're not going to be a party to any negotiations.

And the legislation is going to pass one way or another. If the Democratic leadership can't get 60 votes, they'll pass a bill on budget reconciliation with 50 votes.

It's really that simple at this point.

Concerning the public option. Ambinder thinks it's dead, but I'm not so sure. Today it looks like the wind is blowing toward some sort of "trigger." But what happens when conservatives demagogue the "trigger" for the public option. Obama and the Democratic leadership might decide that they won't lose any more votes by keeping the public option than they would by compromising it away.

What's going to be the political fall-out of the health reform debate. In my thinking, health reform is one more item that's killing the Republican Party. Obama's popularity might be down but the Republicans have sunk much further. Republican strategists think they have an opportunity for big gains in 2010, but my impression is that the Republicans still don't have the candidates, message, or money needed to win hard-fought campaigns.

So, I wouldn't be surprised if the Republicans didn't lose a couple more Senate seats while only scoring minor gains by defeating a few Blue Dogs in the House.

In other words, Republicans are still on the path to being displaced as a major political party.

An Urban Legend Grows: My Daughter "Stood" for Obama

While I was conducting an event at the Honors House tonight, I heard from a colleague that Miss Teen RSI had stood up during a high school class and said that it was time to listen to President Obama's speech. I was also told that the teacher had told her to sit down and that the class wasn't going to hear the speech.

Yes, I had a brave daughter who was willing to stand up to authority in the name of all that was good and true.

But it turned out to be an urban legend.

When I got home, the daughter in question said that she had sort of stood to make her hand visible but that she forgot what the teacher said and that it hadn't been any kind of put down or anything like that anyway.

All very mundane.

It turned out that about half of the high school teachers didn't show Obama's speech in their classes.

Not much of a surprise.

High school teachers are pretty conservative--especially in a Bible-belt area like this.

I'm just glad that they're not teaching the "Answers in Genesis" line in the science classes.

A New Perspective on Glenn Beck

Doesn't the new species of giant rat in this picture remind you of Glenn Beck?

Obama's "I Walked Through Five Feet of Snow" Moment

In a way, conservatives are right about President Obama's speech to the nation's schoolchildren being indoctrination. It's indoctrination into the dominant ideology of individualism. But it's hard to see why conservatives object. They believe in individualism just as much as Obama.

What I found charming about Obama's speech was this "standard parent moment of telling kids how tough he had it when he was a kid. Every parent gives this speech hundreds of times while their kids are growing up and every kid ignores this speech every time their parents give it. In our house, it's called the "I Walked Through Five Feet of Snow" Speech.

I know that feeling. When I was young, my family lived in Indonesia for a few years, and my mother didn't have the money to send me where all the American kids went to school. So she decided to teach me extra lessons herself, Monday through Friday - at 4:30 in the morning. Now I wasn't too happy about getting up that early. A lot of times, I'd fall asleep right there at the kitchen table. But whenever I'd complain, my mother would just give me one of those looks and say, "This is no picnic for me either, buster."

For that matter, I did walk through five feet of snow to go to dances in a neighboring town while I was in high school. Or was it "I walked five miles through the snow?" I forget now. And maybe Obama didn't really take classes at 4:30 in the morning. Maybe it was 3:30 in the morning before he went out for his pre-school job in the oil fields.

Whatever it was, I pulled myself up by my own bootstraps just like President Obama. See, I still have the bootstrap scars to show for it.

Sympathy for Legarrette Blount

After yesterday's Boise State win over Oregon, Oregon senior tailback Legarrette Blount sucker-punched a Boise State player and then went beserk before being pushed into the Oregon locker room. Here's the video. There was some provocation. The Boise State player taunted Blount and slapped Blount's shoulder pads. But the provocation was nothing compared to what Blount did. Upon seeing the incident on video, University of Oregon officials quickly decided to suspend Blount for the rest of the 2009 season and effectively end his college football career.

It appears that they are going to keep him on scholarship though.

I agree with the punishment.

For his own good, Legarrette Blount needs to get out of big-time football for awhile.

But I also have some sympathy for Blount. High level athletes are expected to play with enormous intensity, reckless abandon, and testosterone-fueled aggression. But athletes are also expected to keep their emotions under rigid control at all times when they're not playing football and serve as role models for good citizenship.

It's an impossible demand and I'm surprised more athletes don't just go berserk like Blount did yesterday.

Anyway, I hope Legarrette Blount gets things worked out.

He certainly has my good wishes.

Where Have You Gone, Marion Motley?

I was shocked by this report on Shawne Merriman of the San Diego Chargers being arrested for choking his girlfriend. I always kind of hope these things aren't true, but they almost always are.

Who Was More Obsessed with Tea-Baggers?

E. J. Dionne argues that the mainstream media was obsessed with loud-mouthed teabaggers at the health care townhalls during August.

But what if our media-created impression of the meetings is wrong? What if the highly publicized screamers represented only a fraction of public opinion? What if most of the town halls were populated by citizens who respectfully but firmly expressed a mixture of support, concern and doubt?

There is an overwhelming case that the electronic media went out of their way to cover the noise and ignored the calmer (and from television's point of view "boring") encounters between elected representatives and their constituents.

But it's hard to believe that CBS, NBC, and ABC were any more focused on townhall disruptions than HuffPost or TalkingPointsMemo. The progressive media might have had a different agenda in covering the townhall protesters, but progressive outlets were just as obsessed as the mainstream media.

More Like "Heck" than Hell

An Alternet headline screams that "Obama Is Leading the U.S. Into a Hellish Quagmire." I'd say Afghanistan is more like "heck" than hell right now.

Olympia Snowe: Most Important Woman in the World

According to Ezra Klein, the White House has decided to make a deal with Republican senator from Maine Senator Olympia Snowe. In effect, that makes Snowe has become the new health reform czar. Back in the 1920's, there was a saying that "as goes Maine, so goes the nation." Now, it's really true.

Pat Buchanan and the Facts of Conservative Life

Yesterday was the 70th anniversary of Hitler's invasion of Poland and Hitler apologist Pat Buchanan is in full "Sympathy to Our Pal Adolf" mode. According to TPM:

According to Buchanan, Hitler's invasion of Poland -- which led to Britain's declaration of war on Germany, and the start of World War II -- was motivated merely by Germany's desire to regain the city of Danzig, which had been given to Poland in the Versailles Treaty. Had Poland simply negotiated with Hitler, war could have been averted. In fact, Hitler wasn't bent on world, or even European, domination. He would have been happy with just Danzig, Austria, and the Sudetenland, you see. Hitler "wanted to end the war in 1940, almost two years before the trains began to roll to the camps." It was only thanks to the aggression of Britain, Russia, and the U.S. that the conflict was expanded. So, goes the implication, any deaths that occurred after 1940 -- including the 6 million that comprised the Holocaust -- are on the Allies' heads.

But Buchanan is just being an honest conservative here. Every conservative defense of tyranny, domination, cruelty, or oppression begins with the premise that the stronger party is provoked into aggression by their targets. That's true of wife-beating husbands and rapists. It was also the case with conservative justifications of slaveholders and segregationist lynch mobs. The Bush administration used the fact of Iraqi resistance as a justification for the destruction of Iraqi cities like Fallujah. The only thing that Pat Buchanan is doing here is extending a core conservative view to a previously taboo subject in the form of Adolf Hitler.

Otherwise, defending the cruelty of the stronger party is just a fact of conservative life.

Good News on the Book Proposal Front

Moving one step forward--I got a very favorable reaction from a series editor at a very good academic press. Now, I just have to avoid the two steps back thing.

Jenna Bush as Royalty

Glenn Greenwald criticizes NBC's selection of George W. Bush's daughter Jenna Bush Hager as a Today Show correspondent as an example of the media stockpiling "American royalty."

Greenwald points to plenty of other examples as well.

They should convene a panel for the next Meet the Press with Jenna Bush Hager, Luke Russert, Liz Cheney, Megan McCain and Jonah Goldberg, and they should have Chris Wallace moderate it. They can all bash affirmative action and talk about how vitally important it is that the U.S. remain a Great Meritocracy because it's really unfair for anything other than merit to determine position and employment.

He could have mentioned Maria Shriver and just about any Kennedy as examples of royalty on the Democratic side as well, although there's still the conundrum of why the Kennedy's are the only Democratic side accepted as American royalty.

Which brings us to Jenna Bush.

It's curious to me that NBC is bringing Jenna Bush on board as a royalty hire. Given that George W. Bush has just about as much clout after leaving office as Richard II, the hiring of his daughter has to be seen more as an act of "royalty defiance" than anything else.

For her sake, I hope Jenna Bush is better at being a reporter than dad was at being president.

Ted's Replacement?

Victoria Kennedy sounds almost as good for the Senate in Massachusetts as Caroline Kennedy sounded for the Senate in New York.

Conservatives Should Give Up on Christianity

I've always been surprised that more conservatives don't convert to some sort of "Looking Out for Number One"--"God Wants You To Make Tons of Money"--"Screw People Over As Much as You Can"--"Torture Anybody You Please"--kind of religion.

Wait a minute. That's what conservatives have made of Christianity.

But Jesus objects.

Even an atheist like myself can see from the New Testament that Jesus and the authors of the New Testament gospels had enormous contempt for the wealthy and powerful and he hated the Pharisees mostly because he saw them as self-righteous pricks.

People like James Dobson.

Jesus thought of the poor as blessed and headed for heaven. In the Luke version of the Sermon on the Mount from Luke 6:20-24, Jesus proclaims "Blessed be ye poor for yours is the kingdom of God." That sounds nice and well-intentioned. But it's also part of the core of Jesus' theology. The poor are "blessed" and are saved whether they believe in Jesus or not because the human condition of being poor, abused, deprived, and suffering prefigures the sacrifice of Jesus himself. In other words, the poor are like Jesus while the wealthy and powerful are cursed and condemned to eternal suffering because they're a lot like the people who end up crucifying Jesus. Also in Luke 6:2024: "But woe unto you that are rich! For ye have received your consolation. (quotes from King James Version)

But where Jesus really nails the analogy between the poor and suffering and himself was in Matthew 25:31-46. I'll quote this at length.

"Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye did it unto one of these my brethren, even these least, ye did it unto me. Then shall he say also unto them on the left hand, Depart from me, ye cursed, into the eternal fire which is prepared for the devil and his angels: for I was hungry, and ye did not give me to eat; I was thirsty, and ye gave me no drink; I was a stranger, and ye took me not in; naked, and ye clothed me not; sick, and in prison, and ye visited me not. Then shall they also answer, saying, Lord, when saw we thee hungry, or a thirst, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not minister unto thee? Then shall he answer them, saying, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye did it not unto one of these least, ye did it not unto me. And these shall go away into eternal punishment: but the righteous into eternal life."

Jesus is already in those who are hungry, thirsty, naked, sick, imprisoned, and living in strange lands. That's why those who minister to the "truly disadvantaged" are blessed and welcome in heavy and those who refuse aid are damned and "shall go away into eternal punishment."

What the religious right is doing in the health care debate is "refusing aid" to the working poor, uninsured people, and illegal immigrants in the United States who need help assistance the most. People on the right could say that they just don't want "government" to provide that aid. Given the ferociousness with which Jesus damns those who refuse such aid, it's hard to imagine that he would accept such a lame excuse.

That's why it's hard for me to see why conservatives remain Christians. Who would want to be part of a religion that condemns people like themselves to eternal punishment?

An End to State Funerals

I have to admit that I just hate the kind of "state funeral" that's been mounted for Ted Kennedy today. The monumentality of the wrongfulness and absurdity of this kind of event is beyond my literary ability to conceive and describe. But let's call it depressing, ugly, morally sick, bad democratic theory, bad politics, and bad history for starters.

A state funeral is also a horrifying way to honor Ted Kennedy's real accomplishments.

---

For the purposes of this post, I'm just going to stick with emphasizing the depressing character of it all though.

Starting with the church in the above picture--the "Basilica of Our Lady of Perpetual Help." In the picture taken from the high angle, the basilica itself looks like a tomb just as much as Ted Kennedy's casket. I'm not a religious person and have not been in a church for a religous purpose for 34 years. But I know enough church language to know that the room where the service was being held is called a "sanctuary." At Kennedy's funeral, the sanctuary looks like a mass grave and the participants look like they're already dead but still under the illusion that they're alive. What happens when Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and the Clintons leave the basilica. Are they going to spring back to life? I doubt it. There are enough images in our culture of the dead having a kind of life as vampires, werewolves, the undead, or whatever Bruce Willis was in the "Sixth Sense" that we can't really tell who's living and dead anymore. The people at Ted Kennedy's funeral look like they're already navigating the line of being dead but not really knowing it.

--

The effect of living death is enhanced by the fact that the men at Ted Kennedy's funeral are dressed almost uniformly in shades of blue and charcoal-gray. The surface thought is that the "somber" colors are appropriate for a funeral and don't have any significance beyond that. But the thought is mistaken. These are the suits that elite men wear every day of their working lives. What the suits represent in the basilica is what they represent at the White House, in Congress, in business, and in the media. And what they look like to me is little blue and gray caskets for the ashen-faced men within them. Like Diogenes carrying around his coffin with him, all of the important men at the funeral look like they're encased in coffins. But where Diogenes was joking (at least I think he was), the men at Ted Kennedy's funeral look like they live their "undeath" every day. Or maybe they view their everyday lives as an on-going funeral.

--

What makes this depressing is to think that these men (and women) are the cream of "our" elite, the Democratic, liberal, progressive, socially conscious, rational, caring, thoughtful elite, and that they are just as much the undead as the Dick Cheney's and Rupert Murdoch's of the world. Even if Barack Obama isn't as fully committed to being a war criminal as Dick Cheney, he's still cut from the same blue and grey cloth, still pulled to the undead existence that characterizes the elite, and still pulling the rest of us into the sphere of the undead ourselves.

Broncos: The Path Down Loser Road

The Denver Broncos appear to have given up on playing Pro Bowlers. Quarterback Jay Cutler got out of town as soon as his little legs would carry him after new head coach Josh Marshall tried to trade him. Evidently, Cutler didn't like the idea of being dangled as trade bait after his first Pro Bowl. Now, they've suspended Brandon Marshall and his 206 catches over the last two years for being vocal about his desire to be traded as well.

Actually, I'm not sure that's right. Now that new head coach Josh McDaniel has introduced the "New England Way" of not giving a damn about players, it might be that the Broncos have decided to eliminate all of their professional football players--not just the Pro Bowlers.

Hmm, maybe I should call them and see if I can get a tryout.

Unfortunate About Billy Gillispie

I was disappointed to see that former UK coach Billy Gillispie was arrested on suspicion of drunken driving a couple of days ago.

Lawrenceburg Police said Gillispie was driving a white 2009 Mercedes with Texas
tags around 2:45 a.m. on US 127 when a call went in to 9-1-1 reported seeing the the car driving erratically. Gillispie was arrested and charged with DUI. In Gillispie's arrest report, the arresting officer stated that Gillispie "had a strong fruity smell coming from his person (possibly wine) and had red glassy eyes and slow slurred speech."

What's unfortunate here is the possibility that Gillispie is slipping into alcoholism after being fired from the UK job. From the minute Billy Gillispie arrived in Lexington, KY, there have been rumors about him being such a bad alcoholic that he was booted out of bars and had to be driven everywhere. I'm not in position to either confirm or disconfirm those rumors and I've certainly ridiculed Gillispie for his cluelessness as a basketball coach.

But still, I don't like the thought that he might be deteriorating at this point. Now that Gillispie has no job, it's likely that he has lots of money and lots of time on his hands. If he indeed does have alcohol problems, that's not a good combination.

A Weak Nostalgia Moment

I have to admit it. I finally gave in to Woodstock nostalgia and caught Joni Mitchell singing "Woodstock" on YouTube. I'm "weak, weak, weak."

Great tune though. Surprised that Joni Mitchell was ever that young though.

Even Bigger Banks and the Coming of Finance Socialism

According to David Cho of the Washington Post, big banks like Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo have become considerably bigger as a result of last year's financial meltdown.

J.P. Morgan Chase, an amalgam of some of Wass Street's most storied institutions, now holds more than $1 of every $10 on deposit in this country. So does Bank of America, scarred by its acquisition of Merrill Lynch and partly government-owned as a result of the crisis, as does Wells Fargo, the biggest West Coast bank. Those three banks, plus government-rescued and -owned Citigroup, now issue of of every two mortgages and about two of every three credit cards, federal data show.

A year after the near-collapse of the financial system last September, the federal response has redefined how Americans get mortgages, student loans and other kinds of credit and has made a national spectacle of executive pay. But no consequence of the crisis alarms top regulators more than having banks that were already too big to fail grow even larger and more interconnected.

It almost goes without saying that a higher level of concentration in the banking industry means that the next financial meltdown is going to be even worse--much worse. The Obama administration and the Federal Reserve Board were able to get through the last crisis because there was some margin for error. When BearStearns went belly-up, it could be absorbed by Morgan Stanley. The same with Merrill Lynch being absorbed by the Bank of America.

But there not going to be any Plan B for failed big banks next time. Last year, the "big banks" were "too big to fail." Next time, the even bigger big banks will be "too big to save" within the framework of private corporations. Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo are plenty big, but they're not big enough to absorb teetering monstrosities the size of Citigroup or Bank of America. The only answer to the failure of "bigger big banks" will be to nationalize them.

Whether we like it or not, "finance socialism" has almost arrived.

A Note on Ted Kennedy

I've always been very ambivalent about Ted Kennedy and remain so after his death. The negative is hard to shake off. The booze, the womanizing, the hard partying late into his 50's, the death of Mary Jo Kopechne, and the William Kennedy Smith rape case all created an impression of profligacy and waste that can't be forgotten. Kennedy had a lot of embarrassing moments as a politician as well. When Kennedy ran for president in 1979, he couldn't come up with a coherent question to Roger Mudd (then of CBS News) when Mudd asked Kennedy why he was running for president. Kennedy's last two speeches to the Democratic Convention have been painful to watch as well. If George W. Bush wasted his inheritance, the story of Ted Kennedy's life can be seen as wasting a much bigger inheritance.

But I also view Ted Kennedy as a story of personal redemption. After the William Kennedy Smith case in 1991, Kennedy seemed to realize that he was blowing all his opportunities and really became the outstanding senator everybody's now saying he was. That says something very positive about Kennedy's character as a human being and his devotion to the causes of poverty, health reform, education, and immigration reform. Swimming against the conservative tide of the 1990's and early 2000's was tough but Kennedy proved to be more than up to the task. My own opinion is that Ted Kennedy could only come into his own as a political figure after the politics of the 1960's had played out and the era of the Kennedy family's Camelot was completely dead.

The early 1960's was a high tide of political liberalism in the United States and first John and then Bobby Kennedy rode that wave for all it was worth. But Ted Kennedy couldn't show his virtues to their fullest extent until the conservatives took over and started to roll back the Great Society, the Warren Court, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the safety net, abortion rights, and the rights of criminal suspects. Ted Kennedy was at his best in fighting a rearguard action on behalf of the liberal accomplishments of the post-WWII era and pushing a liberal agenda forward despite the prevailing winds of conservativism.

But events move quickly and Ted Kennedy had already become a man of the past even before he was diagnosed with brain cancer. The time for rearguard actions on behalf of liberalism is over and progressive America is looking at an opportunity to advance "the general welfare" rather than just protecting the country against the right. As full of faults as they are, Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Dick Durbin, Joe Biden, and Hillary Clinton are the men and women of this moment. We need to ensure that they get it right.

Does the GOP Have Much Choice But To Oppose Health Reform

Digby claims that Congress actually might pass a decent health reform bill because the GOP refused to give them cover for legislation loaded with corporate goodies. The moderates and Blue Dogs wanted compromise but the Republicans wouldn't budge.

The sell-outs are almost begging the Republicans to help them pass the terrible,
insurance company giveaway bill they want so badly --- and the Republicans just
won't cooperate.

I believe the Democrats are going to get health reform enacted with a "public option" that will serve as competition for the insurance companies. But I don't think the Republicans ultimately had any practical option but refusal to cooperate. The conservative activist core has gone teabagger and they're carrying Republican politicians with them. Any Republican senator or House member who defies the conservative consensus is going to be in trouble. It's easier for senators like Charles Grassley of Iowa to toe the line and pass out Glenn Beck books to the yahoos than compromise with Obama. That's why Grassley indicated that he wouldn't vote for health reform even if the Dems gave him everything he wanted.

If the Democrats want to govern, they'll have to govern without the cooperation of the Republicans on health care or any other issue of substance.

And, like Digby, I don't think that's such a bad thing.

Rudy Giuliani and His Skeletons for Governor

Former NYC mayor Rudy Giuliani is thinking about running for governor of New York and is planning on running a classic whistle-stop railroad campaign on Amtrak. Of course, Giuliani will need the full train to carry all the closets with all the skeletons that accompany him wherever he goes. He'll also need somebody to guard his wife while she walks the dog.

I'm all for a Rudy Giuliani gubernatorial campaign. Rudy needs to be in a higher office before my dream of an American Idol type show entitled "Rudy's Next Mistress" can become a reality.

The First Four Theses Against Progressives

Talk about being fed up--the big names of the journalistic left have been firing at the Obama administration with everything they have. Paul Krugman, Glenn Greenwald, Frank Rich, and Digby all speak with one mouth even as they condemn President Obama's approach to health reform. Obama's "weak" and getting "rolled" by the blue dogs and their corporate allies. Obama's betraying progressives on health reform the same way he betrayed progresives on the financial bailout and secrecy. Obama's going to abandon the "public option" and turn health reform into a bonanza for the health insurance companies. Obama's betraying the "progressive base" that drove him to victory over Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primaries and John McCain in the general election. Finally, progressives condemn Obama for losing the initiative because he's not as ideological and partisan as they are.

Actually, I should say as partisan as "we are." I count myself as a progressive blogger, read the better-known progressive bloggers, and admire their smarts, passion, and talent. I also agree with them on most issues. Like Greenwald, I'm disappointed that Obama has maintained most of the secrecy policies of the Bush administration. Not unlike Krugman, I think the bank bailout is a set-up for the next financial crisis, and want to see Obama aggressively employ the tax system to reduce wealth differentials. Yesterday, I blogged yet again about the criminal culpability of Dick Cheney and the other major figures of the Bush administration. I also want to see socialized medicine in the United States just as much as Dennis Kucinich or anybody else on the left.

But I'm also starting to think that progressive commentators are way off base about the Obama administration. Worse, there are certain ways in which the progressive commentariat is making it more rather than less difficult to enact fundamental health reform.

In other words, I'm starting to get fed up with some of the rigid ways in which progressives are fed up with Obama.

Here's my four theses on progressives.

1. Progressives Are Not "the Base." The Democratic Party has a diverse voting base among largely white progressives, African-Americans, Hispanics, gays, and union members. Those progressives who view themselves as "the" Democratic base are deluding themselves. Obama won the nomination primarily by appealing to moderate and conservative Democrats in caucus states. Obama won the election because he was able to keep moderate and conservative Dems in the fold while appealing to independents. Progressive Democrats may have been necessary to Obama's victory, but other Democratic constituencies were even more necessary. Just like the Republicans, Democratic progressives have a hard time internalizing the extent to which minority support was crucial to Obama's victory.

2. Progressives are One-Trick Ponies. Progressives are primarily playing the defensive role of maintaining the “public option” as part of Obama's proposals. That means attacking the Obama administration, Max Baucus, Ben Nelson, the Blue Dogs, Tom Daschle, the mainstream media and anybody on the Democratic side who's wavering on the public option. By they're so focused on that one point that progressives are doing very little if anything to actually promote the public option concept to the broader American public. Maybe I'm missing something, but I find almost nothing in TPM, HuffPost, or other progressive outlets about how the public option would work, what kind of federal agency would be set up, why (beyond "it won't need to make a profit") the public option would drive down costs, and why the public option doesn't necessarily lead to "socialized medicine." The Obama people have tried to discuss the public option, but their ideas are falling on deaf ears in the progressive as well as the mainstream media.

3. Progressives keep the health care debate "white." Outside the Obama people and the Congressional leadership of both parties, the three main poles of debate are the right, the Blue Dogs, and progressives. Outside that one guy with the AR 15 in Phoenix, the right is monolithically white; the Blue Dogs even more so. Needless to say, progressives aren't that white. Bob Herbert, Eugene Robinson, and Clarence Page come to mind as well-known op-ed writers who are progressives. Pam Spaulding of "Pam's House Blend" also gets considerable play on the big progressive blogs. But the fact is that African-American, Hispanic, and gay perspectives only have token representation (if that) in the progressive media and there are times when I think the progressive media is about as interested in minority views and interests as George Bush was interested in astro-physics. The health care debate has become a debate among the white population and the progressive media bears significant responsibility for keeping the health care debate "white."

4. The Progressive Media Has No Self-Awareness. It almost goes without saying that progressive outlets like Media Matters, ThinkProgress, HuffPost, and TPM are saturated with media criticism. This is so much the case that well-traveled media figures like Chuck Todd and Jake Tapper are probably better known in some progressive households than in their own. But the progressive media shows almost no awareness of its own growing impact. There's no little or no analysis in the progressive media of its general significance as a media voice, it's impact on specific issues like health care or torture, which progressive outlets have preponderant influence, or what influence the progressive media has on the mainstream media, the Obama administration, and the Congressional Democrats. In other words, the progressive media shows almost no self-awareness. By comparison, conservative media shows like Limbaugh's and Hannity's are bastions of self-understanding.

My Last Cookies at Root-A-Baker's

Driving by Root-A-Baker's bakery on Rt 32 (the "Connector" in Morehead-ese), I saw that they had a sign in their yard saying "THIS PIECE OF THE NATION/IS STILL UNDER GOD."

Root-A-Baker's is an excellent bakery and Mrs. RSI and I have patronized them for years.

They're nice people too.

However, as far as I'm concerned, the yard sign was an announcement that "WE'RE A RELIGIOUS RIGHT BUSINESS AND WE'RE MAKING OUR CONSERVATIVE AFFILIATION PART OF OUR ADVERTISING."

They're also saying that people who don't share their politics can't be "Under God."

Of course, the Root-A-Baker's ownership has every right to announce their political affiliations and promote their political views.

But I have rights to political expression as well, and I'm going to exercise my rights by refusing to buy cookies, cinnamon rolls, and birthday cakes from Root-A-Baker's as long as they're a right-wing business.

And I'll urge my friends and colleagues to do the same.

All that sweet stuff probably isn't good for us anyway.

Mrs. RSI Says Good-Bye

After six hours of Smallville, Mrs. RSI has decided to leave me for Lex Luthor. I thought I made a convincing argument that I was just as evil as Lex. But she apparently prefers evil to be hairless.

My Lai's William Calley Emerges

William Calley of My Lai massacre fame emerged to apologize for the Vietnam War massacre in a speech in Columbus. “There is not a day that goes by that I do not feel remorse for what happened that day in My Lai . . . I am very sorry.”

Actually, I was surprised that Calley was still alive. It turns out that he had been living a quiet life in Ohio and Georgia.

It's probably useful to remember what happened. Here's a version from the "apology" story.

Calley explained [at his court martial that] he had been ordered to take out My Lai, adding that he had intelligence that the village was fortified and would be “hot” when he went in. He also said the area was submitted to an artillery barrage and helicopter fire before his troops went in. It turned out that it was not hot and there was no armed resistance. But he had been told, he said, that if he left anyone behind, his troops could be trapped and caught in a crossfire.

Not leaving "anyone behind" was a euphemism for killing hundreds of unarmed people. Event though Calley didn't serve nearly the time he should have for the horrific crime, the commanders and politicians who put Calley in that position are the ones who should have been punished more severely.

The same way that Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, and the people behind the Iraq War should be punished.

Death Struggle Near the Bottom of the Height Pool

As regular readers of Red State Impressions probably know, the beautiful Miss Teen RSI has been severely height-challenged all her life. When she was two and three years old, I would take her in for annual check-ups and I could see that her height wasn't even making the low end of the growth charts. I was always touched that kind-hearted nurses would fudge the numbers to make me feel better. But my daughter was short, short, short.

And it wasn't all the cigarettes we had her smoke as a baby either. Miss Teen just has short genes. Mrs. RSI is only 5' 2 1/2" inches and Grandma Marlene is barely 5'2." Once when Miss Teen was about seven, I explained to Miss Teen why she was doomed to a Randy Newman life by having Mrs. RSI and Grandma Marlene stand together.

But denial was strong. Miss Teen still felt like she was going to have the big growth spurt that would get her up to 5'5."

Fortunately for Miss Teen, her best friend E-Teen is even shorter than she is. Because Miss Teen hit puberty relatively early, she had a little growth spurt that got her up to 5'0." This was the height of her dad's ambitions for Miss Teen and I'll always been grateful to the gods of genetics for letting Miss Teen get to five feet. But now that E-Teen has hit puberty herself, she's been catching up and looked like she was getting ahead when she wore the right shoes and had the right hair-style.

But yesterday, Miss Teen and E-Teen had the short girls version of the shoot-out at the OK corral when they stepped on the scales with their other friends watching. The competition was tough and the results had to be verified several times. Personally, I'm just glad that blood wasn't spilled.

However, it turns out that Miss Teen is still one "silly centimeter" taller than her rival. Congratulations to Miss Teen. She always had it in her.

The Big Health Reform/Civil War Analogy

There's a good chance that I'm engaged in wishful thinking here, but my gut feeling is that health reform is going to pass with a public option. What makes this extraordinary is that Obama has been fighting the health care battle the same way Shelby Foote said the Union fought the Civil War--with one hand tied behind his back.

Obama could be doing rallies with 70,000 plus people. He could also be taking the fight to the Republicans and the teabaggers in a highly partisan manner. But Obama hasn't taken those weapons out of his holster yet.

And it doesn't look like he's going to either.

To me, it looks like Obama and the Democratic leadership in the House and Senate are grimly determined to win the health care fight on Obama's terms of reasonable discussion and reaching out to the other side.

And I think they're going to win it on their terms.

I Read Robert Novak

Right-wing journalist Robert Novak died from cancer today. Novak was a super-asshole of the highest order, but his column was a good read and Novak was one of the few conservatives who had some skill in dealing with facts. I was thinking about him yesterday and wondering if his cancer had gone into remission. It's sad to see him go.

No Surprise! Gun Guys Have Militia Ties

No surprise here. The guy who organized the gun display at the Obama townhall in Phoenix is a talk-radio host with ties to members of the Arizona Viper Militia who were convicted of plotting to blow up government buildings during the 90's.

What's been happening is that the activism of the Glenn Beck/teabagging/super-small government "near fringe" has inspired the really dangerous people on the right to come out of their caves.

I hate to be pessimistic, but it doesn't take a genius to see that one of these militia idiots is going to use spraying an Obama rally with his AK 15 as his suicidal "exit strategy."

Oh No! Tiger Lost!

Maybe the Tiger slump will go on forever now. I can't believe Tiger Woods lost the PGA tournament to a nobody like C. E. Yang from somewhere on the Korean peninsula. Talk about choking. It must have crushed Tiger's confidence to go from one shot ahead of Yang to three--yes, three--shots behind at the end.

I'm not saying that Tiger's career is over yet. But we have to face facts. Tiger Woods has entered thirteen tournaments this year and has only won five. That's not even 50%. If he was coaching the LA Lakers and had that kind of record, Woods would have been fired by now.

Tiger also entered four major tournaments and didn't win a single one of those.

None! Nada! Zilch!

And the way Tiger choked away the PGA tournament was particularly sad:

This time, Woods made one mistake after another over the last four holes, mostly with his putter.

"I did everything I needed to do, except for getting the ball in the hole," Woods said. "Just didn't make the putts when I needed to make them."

"Just didn't make the putts"--what an obvious euphemism for "I choked big time."

Obviously, Tiger's career as a major league golfer is over. I just hope he retires before he starts embarrassing himself like that Michael Jordan guy.

Republican Apologies Not Forthcoming

Steve Benen of the Washington Monthly would like the Republicans to apologize to the rest of the country for the disastrous eight years of the Bush administration.

Bush/Cheney policies failed so spectacularly, Republican candidates and officeholders are generally reluctant to associate themselves with the tarnished name of the previous administration. But Bush/Cheney policies are still those of the contemporary Republican Party. Nothing has changed. Failure and defeat haven't chastened the GOP at all, and if given a chance to govern again, Republican leaders are quite anxious to return to the exact same agenda they embraced when they were in the majority.

Benen is an outstanding blogger, but he's off track here. For the Republicans, it's a matter of being themselves. And a lot of times that means being assholes. From the GOP point of view, the Bush administration and McCain campaign were not aggressive enough about promoting conservativism, insufficiently willing to push wedge issues, and altogether too prissy about things like truth, fairness, and effective government. What mainstream Limbaugh conservatives value most highly is constant aggression in the their never-ending war against liberals, gays, and minorities. Name-calling, fear-mongering, and race and gay baiting aren't just political tactics (although they are that), they're also expressions of conservative identity.

Paraphrasing Bill Parcells (who knows a lot about being an asshole), the Republicans are what they are. If the Obama administration, Democrats, and progressives want to govern effectively, they're just going to have to acknowledge the reality of Republican intransigence and resolve to fight just as hard as the Republicans fight.

Otherwise, we're going to lose . . . again.

I'm So Happy for Tiger Woods

I can't begin to express my happiness over the fact that Tiger Woods is leading the PGA championship by four whole strokes.

Like billions of people the world over, I was worried that Tiger's life would have no meaning whatsoever if he did not win a major championship this year.

Of course, Tiger did lose all three of the other majors. But winning the PGA would make it possible for him to get through the off season without thinking of himself as a total loser.

Concerned golf fans can also put their "Don't Jump Tiger" buttons into storage.

Rick Pitino--Pro-Choice

Who knew that basketball coach Rick Pitino of the University of Louisville was pro-choice in his self-centered prick kind of way?

Now I Just Have To Leave My Shirt Untucked

Today, my 92 year old mother-in-law told Mrs. RSI that I looked "sexy" with my shirt untucked. What can I say? The woman has taste.

Grassley Chooses the Dark Side

Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa has been a member of the Gang of Six on the Senate Finance Committee who have been negotiating on health reform legislation.

But it should be obvious now that he's decided on the dark side rather than working with Obama and the Democrats.

Here's Grassley on the thoroughly debunked idea that "end of life" care is equivalent to euthanasia.

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) continued the thoroughly debunked right wing euthanasia/death panel meme today, telling a town hall crowd, "You have every right to fear....a government run plan to decide when to pull the plug on Grandma."

He also said, "There are some people who think it is a terrible problem that Grandma is laying in a bed with tubes in her... and that the government should intervene. I think that's a family or religious thing that needs to be dealt with."

This is choosing "the dark side" because Grassley knows perfectly well that he's lying, but has decided to commit himself to the lie. One of the things that's interesting about the health care reform issue is whether the Republicans are going to be able to work with a new health care system if they lose. There have been at least a couple of comments on this blog indicating that conservatives will go along with a new system. I'm not so sure.

Meetings Today

It looks like one of those semesters. I skipped convocation. Needless to say, the provost noticed. Oh well. At least I got through the initial set of meetings without needing another shot of blood pressure medication.

On the bright side, I've started working on a proposal for a grad class on race for education students. Hopefully, I'll be teaching it in the spring.

Give Arlen Specter Credit

I usually don't give Arlen Specter a lot of credit. Mostly because he's never deserved much credit. But I have to give him props for sticking it out through that hostile townhall meeting in Lebanon, PA this afternoon.



Dick Cheney certainly never had guts like that.

Digby on Taser Torture

Digby is one of the few white bloggers who closely follows the police abuse of tasers. Here's an extended quote from her article on Glenn Greenwald's blog today.

Tasers were sold to the public as a tool for law enforcement to be used in lieu of deadly force. Presumably, this means situations in which officers would have previously had to use their firearms. It's hard to argue with that, and I can't think of a single civil libertarian who would say that this would be a truly civilized advance in policing. Nobody wants to see more death and if police have a weapon they can employ instead of a gun, in self defense or to stop someone from hurting others, I think we all can agree that's a good thing.

But that's not what's happening. Tasers are routinely used by police to torture innocent people who have not broken any law and whose only crime is being disrespectful toward their authority or failing to understand their "orders." There is ample evidence that police often take no more than 30 seconds to talk to citizens before employing the taser, they use them while people are already handcuffed and thus present no danger, and are used often against the mentally ill and handicapped. It is becoming a barbaric tool of authoritarian, social control . . .

America's torture problem is much bigger than Gitmo or the CIA or the waterboarding of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. The government is torturing people every day and killing some of them. Then videos of the torture wind up on Youtube where sadists laugh and jeer at the victims. It's the sign of profound cultural illness.

Actually, there are a number of "profound cultural illnesses" at work in the tasing phenomenon. Above everything else, there is racism and the contemporary workings of racism. African-American bloggers like African-American Political Pundit follow police abuse of tasers very closely and find a great deal of racism in the abuse. In my own blogging, I've explored the idea that tasing represents a generalization of the police treatment of African-Americans to the whole population. Another sickness is the close association of freedom with the exercise of authority in the U. S. Even after the election of Barack Obama, the most important images of American freedom are not authority figures like the police and the military as opposed to dissenters like Martin Luther King. In this context, tasing is a manifestation of the kind of police freedom that is widely admired in American society. Finally, tasing is yet another manifestation of the paramilitarization of American policing. Cops like the Boston racist Justin Barrett are just like the contras or Columbian paramilitaries in viewing themselves as judge, jury, and executioner for any behavior they don't like. In this way, tasing is just another way for the police to mete out summary justice.

Forty Years of Charles Manson is Enough

For the last couple of weeks, there's been a lot of media publicity about the fortieth anniversary of the Manson killings.

But America doesn't live in a "post-sixties" world any more. Whether we like it or not, things have changed. Not that we've forgotten the sixties, but the major events of that decade--the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, the anti-war movement, the counter-culture, and second-wave feminism--have lost the sense of tangible immediacy they had for so long.

It's the eventfulness of our own era that's pushing the events of the sixties to the back reaches of the public mind. Much as the sixties pushed WWII out of immediate awareness, the sixties are now being pushed back by 9-11, the Iraq War, the failures of George W. Bush, and the Obama presidency. Given that our time is so urgent, the sixties is now looking more like WWII, the Depression, and the Jazz Age. Yes, the sixties were highly significant, but the major events, personalities, and trends of the sixties no longer have much immediacy.

And that includes Charles Manson and his killings.

Manson's crimes continue to evoke a strong reaction long after public obsession over other high-profile cases has faded. He was the bogeyman under the bed, the personification of evil, the freaky one-man horror show. For years, when prison officials still allowed it, he gave television interviews, never failing to shock. The interviews kept memories of him fresh long after he was locked up.

The memories may have been fresh, but Charles Manson is no longer the model American mass murderer. That belongs to Columbine killers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. Columbine was the model for the Virginia Tech killings, Northern Illinois University killings, the rash of school shootings in Kentucky, and threatened school killings everywhere. The Columbine model of guys who viewed themselves as outside the magic circle of success and were determined to "go out in style" was still active in last week's Pittsburgh shooter George Sodini.

Of course, Charles Manson is titillating because the Tate/LoBianca murders were so monstrous. But sensation and titillation are not the same as cultural importance. Like the rest of the sixties, Charles Manson is not nearly as important as he used to be.

And why should he be? Isn't forty years of Charles Manson enough?

The Tiger Slump: When Will It Ever End?

Tiger Woods won the Bridgestone Invitational today by four strokes.

It was his fifth victory in the twelve events that Woods has played this year while continuing his recovery from knee surgery. But the really important thing is that Tiger Woods has LOST seven whole tournaments. THAT'S SHOCKING!!! Who's ever heard of a major golf icon like Tiger Woods losing seven tournaments in only a year. And Tiger has lost all three MAJORS this year. That's right, Tiger Woods hasn't won a MAJOR all year. He's been stuck on 14 MAJOR tournament victories for almost eighteen months.

And Woods STILL hasn't won as many majors as Jack Nicklaus.

What's happening? What's Tiger doing wrong? I'm not a golf expert, but I'm worried. It's been so long since his last victory in a MAJOR that people who really know golf are beginning to wonder if Tiger has the cajones needed to break out of this horrible slump.

But I'll never lose faith.

Hang in there through this trying time Tiger.

We feel your pain.

What About Testing Humans On Dog Skills!

I'm not an animal rights person and I eat meat, but I'm still annoyed by research that ranks animals according to their performance on scales in relation to human skills. Why isn't there any research that ranks us in relation to the specific skill sets of birds, dogs, pigs, and fish?

Here's a summary of some research into the math skills of dogs.

The canine IQ test results are in: Even the average dog has the mental abilities of a 2-year-old child.

The finding is based on a language development test, revealing average dogs can learn 165 words (similar to a 2-year-old child), including signals and gestures, and dogs in the top 20 percent in intelligence can learn 250 words.

In my opinion, what's amazing here is that dogs can pick up that much of a skill like using human words. I wonder if human beings would be flexible enough to pick up very many of the dog skills connected with smell and hearing. I'm not so sure.

I'm Old and I Look It!

Today, the counter person at Shoney's asked me if I wanted a senior citizen discount. That was the first time I had gotten THAT question. But after recovering my composure, I owned up to being 55 and received a $1 discount.

Now that didn't exactly make my day. Five years ago, I was 50 and could still pass for 35-40, at least with those friends who were interested in flattering me. Now, I'm 55 and can pass for . . . well, 55.

My mother used to say that 70 was the new middle age and, who knows, maybe I'll eventually start looking at things that way as well.

But right now, I'm thinking that I'm old and I look it.

I did feel good that I could add another buck to the tip though.