Where No Man Has Gone Before...

...at least in the last thirty years:

Reports say when the White House releases their budget proposal, there will be no money for the program that was supposed to return astronauts to the moon by 2020.

Reports say NASA will instead look at developing a new "heavy-lift" rocket that one day will take humans and robots to explore beyond low Earth orbit.

One year ago President Obama had backed a Moon return mission in the NASA budget.

There's an abounding irony in the fact that a Republican president, desperat to reverse his sagging polls numbers amidst the long-standing accusation of intellectual uninterest in the world around him, propsed not only a return to the moon, but an eventual manned landing on Mars, while the Democratic president whose intellectual curiousity teems across his life has proposed stifling that ambition.

 

The budget, you see, affects more than just our paychecks. It affects our humanity.

 

I grew up in the Space Age. The world had a future. Space had a future. Mankind had a future.

 

Forget colonizing other planets in our solar system! Yea, we'd establish outposts and such and do experiments. Maybe hippie communes might spring up, but space had a wealth of resources that we could use to improve the human condition.

 

Offshoring manufacturing would take on a whole new meaning as we'd head out to the asteroid belt, pick an appropriate rock and as we dragged it back to high earth orbit, begin to refine out metals and chemicals, processes that pollute our environment horribly. The dollar cost of the mission would be more than offset by the real savings to the environment, to the air, earth, and water, to Gaia.

 

We would beam back energy from solar panels floating at Lagrange points around the earth in stable orbits. No more war for oil. Sure, there'd be money to be made, but if someone tried to corner the market, someone else would fire up a rocket and deploy his or her own satellite.

 

And that's just the beginning. The technologies that grew out of the space program, everything from Tang to hazmat equipment to the modern computer, have served us well and one can only imagine what new technoloies could come from the needs of the astronauts.

 

A country is suffering a drought? It might be cheaper to drag a comet to low earth orbit and make it rain into that country's reservoirs than to bring it by the bottle or boatload across a sea. A nation needs a tourist attraction, a way to bring people to it? Well, if it has a nice climate and a lot of flat open space, it could offer to build a spaceport.

 

The cultural impact of space exploration cannot be ignored. Neither can it be put off. Eventually, someone is going to realize that we don't have a lot of time or space left on this planet, and if we start now, it will be cheaper in the long run. While I can appreciate the budgetary needs of the Federal government in this time of belt-tightening and counting pennies, this is something that needs to be kept on the table year after year, as a reminder of what it means to be human.

President Mike?

Repetition is the sincerest form of mockery:

NEW YORK -- New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg insists that hiring Hillary Rodham Clinton's former media strategist is not a step toward a possible presidential run.

Howard Wolfson helped Bloomberg win a third term last year and is coming to work at City Hall as an adviser.

You may recall he said the same thing in 2008 before finally deciding to endorse Barack Obama for President against Hillary Clinton.

 

That's how early he gave up the ghost. Likely, Bloomberg calculated the economy's toll on a Presidency and decided that he'd rather someone else pick up the slack. If he runs in 2012, he'll have the benefit of four years of Obama's attempts (success or failure) to revitalize the economy.

 

Too, there are rumours running around that Obama is pondering just a one-term run. This is all probably just hedging his bets, freeing him to be Presidential, but you know...you can do that and still win re-election. In fact, I've long maintained that the best Presidents are those who aren't guaranteed a second term by dint of a first term blowout election (like Bill Clinton, who won only a plurality in 1992).

 

Still, that Bloomberg has locked up Howard Wolfson, who did a pretty good job selling Hillary Clinton, altho he could have done better, and stowing away his billions to gear up for a run has got to be disconcerting to someone like Sarah Palin, who would find it very hard to argue with Bloomberg's skills as an administrator or a candidate.

Populism! If You Can Afford It...

It is to laugh...

A Tea Party convention billed as the coming together of the grass-roots groups that began sprouting up around the country a year ago is unraveling as sponsors and participants pull out to protest its expense and express concerns about "profiteering."

The convention's difficulties highlight the fractiousness of the Tea Party groups, and the considerable suspicions among their members of anything that suggests the establishment.

The convention, to be held in Nashville in early February, made a splash by attracting big-name politicians. (Former Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska is scheduled to deliver the keynote speech.) But some groups have criticized the cost — $549 per ticket and a $9.95 fee, plus hotel and airfare — as out of reach for the average tea partier. And they have balked at Ms. Palin's speaking fee, which news reports have put at $100,000, a figure that organizers will not confirm or deny.

There's a certain irony that a supposed "grass roots movement" would price itself out of hearing the voices of the people it supposedly represents, like working and middle class voters, afraid and angry at the targets of the rhetoric that the real voices represented, the coal and oil industries, the rich and powerful, have been waging.

 

Interestingly, they have taken a page out of American history: the original Sons of Liberty (you might recall them as the Boston Tea Partiers) were an elitist group of wealthy Northeastern landowners and middle class merchants who were tired of taxation by the British crown.

 

You know, the liberal coastal elite!

 

Indeed, the American Revolution, the spawning "Of the people, by the people and for the people", was in reality a movement of the artistocracy in this country, and the laws passed by the Continental Congresses reflected this, particularly when it came to human rights (votes were limited to white males who owned property, as an example).

 

The SoL did eventually expand their ranks because, let's face facts, a revolution goes nowhere unless it has popular support. Even at its height, the American Revolution had plenty of people, rich and poor, who really preferred to remain status quo. Chapters of the Sons opened in every colony, and recruited a fair number of men (and a few women) to their ranks.

 

But, I doubt they would have charged the equivalent of $450 to attend a Tea Party!

Republican Rape Of America

Well, here we go again! Eight years of Republican preznidentin' and...

 

Item I - Decade of Decline in U.S. Teen Pregnancies Ends.

 

Item II - Welfare rolls up in '09; more enroll in assistance programs

 

 But hey, the Republicans are the party of personal responsibility, while the Democrats are the socialists who want to see everyone on welfare!

Tenth Avenue Freezeout

Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm...

 WASHINGTON — President Obama will call for a three-year freeze in spending on many domestic programs, and for increases no greater than inflation after that, an initiative intended to signal his seriousness about cutting the budget deficit, administration officials said Monday.

 

The officials said the proposal would be a major component both of Mr. Obama's State of the Union address on Wednesday and of the budget he will send to Congress on Monday for the fiscal year that begins in October.

The freeze would cover the agencies and programs for which Congress allocates specific budgets each year, including air traffic control, farm subsidies, education, nutrition and national parks.

On the face of it, this budget freeze makes a lot of sense, even if it has the liberal wing of the nation in a flutter.

 

Look, not to put too fine a point on this, and at the risk of my liberal cred, I think Obama might have a point here: there's only so much we can spend, and unfortunately, much of that stimulus spending, as Joe Klein points out, nearly $600 billion of the $787 billion package went directly to taxpayers and the services they count on day to day.

 

Much of the rest went to public works projects that will create jobs...once the money starts getting spent. The trouble is, it was left up to Congress to deal with which shovel-ready projects would be picked, a bad idea in the best of times, a worse idea in an era of absolute partian rancor.

 

We're facing trillion dollar budget deficits, of which some ten to twenty percent can be attributed to the legacy of the Bush administration...unless of course you want to lay blame for the current recession at his feet as well, in which case, well, 100% of the trillions in annual debt is his. I don't think he's as much to blame for causing this economic collapse as much as he facilitated it.

 

Economies collapse under all regimes and administrations...except, curiously, Democratic ones, but I digress. It doesn't matter if it's a democracy, monarchy, tyranny, what have you: economies are cyclic.

 

The budgets he's proposed to freeze amount to about a sixth of annual government spending, so will lower deficits a little. It would be nice, hell, it would be revolutionary, if Obama actually proposed cutting the military budget a little as an acknowledgement that we are no longer fighting two wars, but a war and a half. That would actually make a difference in the deficit.

 

I don't know how this plays out: what taxes Obama will be forced to raise after the November elections, what actual budget cuts will be made. But I do know that all he really has to play with right now are things on the fringe of the budget and with the budget as frayed as it is, the fringe is a lot closer to whole cloth than we'd like.

 

We have to have patience here.

This Is Why I Publish Books Under A Pseudonym

John Edwards Has a Sex Tape

 

Um. Ewww? Now, he's a handsome man, alright, and I'm fairly sure there will be a market for this, but...it's not Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee. Nothing worse than a soft middle aged white guy doing the nasty on camera.

 

Like I said, this is why I won't publish under a known name.

 

Hell, it isn't even Rob Lowe and some faceless nameless hooker.

Joe Klein and Good Sense

Never thought I'd ever type that in the same line, but....

Absolutely amazing poll results from CNN today about the $787 stimulus package: nearly three out of four Americans think the money has been wasted. On second thought, they may be right: it's been wasted on them. Indeed, the largest single item in the package--$288 billion--is tax relief for 95% of the American public. This money is that magical $60 to $80 per month you've been finding in your paycheck since last spring. Not a life changing amount, but helpful in paying the bills.

The next highest amount was $275 billion in grants and loans to states. This is why your child's teacher wasn't laid off...and why the fire station has remained open, and why you're not paying even higher state and local taxes to close the local budget hole.

People are idiots, and American people doubly so. They swallow the garbage whole and then wonder why they keep crapping trash.

File Under "Things You Didn't Know"

Bubblewrap is fifty years old today.

 

Now, this might not surprise anyone under, say, 30, but bubblewrap as a popular shipping material was not widely used until the late 1990s when shipments of computer equipment and other sensitive technology items to which styrofoam might stick and damage became more and more regular.

The Tablet Comes Down From The Mountain

Anyone who's known me a long time knows I'm a buttboy for Apple products.

 

I've long admired Apple computers, but until fifteen years ago, my income was insufficient to justify purchasing one. Yes, I know the ramble: Apple comes preloaded, no viruses, lower costs to maintain, yadayadayada, so the cost to own is comparable to a cheap PC. I know this because I bought into it eventually. It didn't matter in 1988. I bought a PS-1 for $800. I ended up plowing another couple of hundred on RAM and a hard drive, so yes, eventually it cost as much as a good Mac.

 

Maybe if Apple had introduced a lay-away plan back then, its market share would be healthier, but I digress.

 

When I bought my first Mac, a Performa 6360CD, despite that particular model's deep design flaws and the absolutely inscrutable nature of the Apple product line at the time, I fell in love. Here was a computer that actually thought one step ahead of me. Instead of responding to demand, it anticipated my needs. You could tell it had been created by a design team, not a bunch of marketers (altho the Performa, later models would prove, had a lot of input from the Marketeers).

 

It's gotten so bad that I recently traded in my iPhone 3G for an iPhone 3GS, and now I have cause to re-evaluate even that upgrade. The iTablet (or iSlate, as it's rumored to be called).

 

Now, the iSlate sounds like it will be an impressive product: a reader to compete with the Kindle, a gaming console that will take on at least the Wii in terms of sophistication, graphics and oh yes, motion control, and a netbook (my real reason for coveting it), if all this can come in at a price point closer to $500 than $1,000, Apple will have yet again redefined an entire market.

 

Or four. the reader, the gaming console (especially on the tail end of a disappointing holiday season which saw no real upgrades to the big three systems) and the netbook. And the desktop PC.

 

The desktop PC is starting to get long in the tooth as a way for the average person to be connected. The smart phone revolution, particularly after the iPhone, saw to that. Apps that basically take advantage of the concept of cloud computing that you can download to your phone allow you to be mobile and in touch.

 

The only area that Apple will struggle with here, I think, is the netbook. You see, netbooks are cheap pieces of PC crap that are cobbled together with little thought to anything except being able to get data and information from here to there.

 

Apple doesn't do cheap. They've said so in the past that the netbook is a market they'll concede. At least that was true.

 

Too, AT&T, the iPhone's only authorized US service, has refused to unlock tethering, or using your iPhone (or data account) to access the Internet from a laptop or 3G modem (a development which simultaneously pissed me off and intiated my sole attempt to hack the AT&T network).

 

My suspicion is, the iSlate is the reason why. I imagine that AT&T will allow tethering only if you have an existing iPhone account, or buy a data plan when you purchase the iSlate.

 

If AT&T is clumsy enough to insist that you have a separate account for the iSlate if you already have a contract for the iPhone, it will likely kill the iSlate. If Verizon is the carrier of choice for the iSlate, that will piss off the installed base of iPhone users (something like 8 million in the US, with a predicted jump to 23 million by year's end) who are contractually obligated to stay with AT&T. The logical choice is to offer the iSlate on both networks and force AT&T's hand.

 

Steve Jobs is probably pissed as hell that he's had to genuflect to AT&T's core incompetence. We've seen a woefully slow rollout of the 3G network, serious outages and blind spots where it actually does exist, and a trickle of improvements (waiting two years for picture messaging? Are you kidding?) over the years. Verizon refused the offer of the original iPhone, likely because it had just rolled out its V-Cast services, including music, video and TV shows, and would have been in direct competition with the iTunes store.

 

You don't see many Verizon commercials for the V-Cast service anymore.

 

Anyway, I'll probably grab one when it hits the shelves in June, even if I have to limit it to WiFi use only. It will be a game changer.

Putting His Long Pants On

One of the reasons I endorsed Hillary Clinton over Barack Obama in the primaries two years ago was my concern that Obama might not have the ability to put up a tough enough fight, whereas Clinton was battle-tested.

 

Apparently, Obama himself has come to that realization:

WASHINGTON—Coming off one of the most difficult weeks of his presidency, Barack Obama has beefed up his political staff and is expected to deliver an uncompromising State of the Union address. Aides said Sunday that the White House wasn't making any abrupt policy shifts, even as the message was retooled to focus more sharply on job creation.

If anything, an unfinished agenda from 2009 will grow larger as, in addition to tackling health care and unemployment, the president presses for a bipartisan commission to tackle the budget deficit against resistance from Republicans.

White House officials said Obama campaign manager David Plouffe would be brought on as a political consultant as the White House gears up for the midterm elections.

The president's party is facing a stiff headwind from an electorate angry about high unemployment and what they see as ineffectual government, White House officials said. Republican Scott Brown's capture of the Massachusetts Senate seat Tuesday was a first shot in what Democrats worried would be hard-fought contests in November.

Now, I can't really argue much with Obama's decision to try to be bipartisan and conciliatory. After all, we just spent sixteen years dealing with an uberhostile Republican party that was soundly and thoroughly drubbed for two straight election cycles. You'd think they learned their lesson.

 

Too, he was...different...to use a euphemism, so his entire administration was going to be viewed thru a lens different than any other president's would be. He had to grab hold of the same courage that Jackie Robinson did, and be above reproach.

 

But circumstances changed as the economy dropped into the toilet, and the political dialogue of this nation was shaped by a relatively small band of extremists known as Teabaggers. An astute politician would have sniffed the change and changed his strategy. Obama did not, but it might not be too late.

 

And that whole "above reproach" theme, while noble, was shattered as the Teabaggers became more noxious, uglier and more strident in their approach, particularly after lifting Glenn Beck up on their shoulders and carrying him around.

 

Barack Obama came out of the Chicago school of politics, which might actually be nastier and more brutal than its school of economics. I have little doubt that when he decides to roll up his sleeves and stop playing nice in the sandbox, mudpies will be flung. Bringing in David Plouffe, who managed Bob Toricelli's Senate campaign. Toricelli, who came up thru the New Jersey political machine, was a tough-as-nails politician who had no problem in playing dirty.

 

The sense I get from the Plouffe return is President Obama, who has been willing to let things hatch out, looking longer term, needs someone in place to get him to the next step in his vision. Plouffe is a plain-spoken, bare-knuckles, no nonsense type of guy who can do that.

Hoist A Glass: Why I Owe Lizz Winstead A Debt

This, while a sad development, was neither unexpected nor unwelcome.

 

The death of Air America Radio is a little like watching an older more sophisticated sibling die. It served its purpose, tho.

For me, I met a whole slew of new friends and made a few enemies on the blogs there. No problem. I'm a rare jewel, and was happy to make the acquaintances I did.

 

More to the point, however, AAR forced me to blog.

 

When I heard, over and over, from people at AirAmerica that they thought they were alone in the wilderness, that AAR gave them a place where they realized they weren't weird or odd or unique, or worse, outcast, that meant a lot to me, and after much arm twisting by a certain co-blogger of mine, I started this humble little place.

 

I owe it to Al Franken, Rachel Maddow, Lizz Winstead, Randi Rhoades, Marc Maron, Sam Seder, Janeane Garafolo, Mark Riley, Laura Flanders, and Steve Earle. AM talk radio helped people find their voice, and I was one of them.

 

We liberals don't take our marching orders from on high, which is why AAR was doomed from the get-go. We argue and quibble, and come to a consensus. We are not the sheep of the right, listening to Beck or Rush or O'Reilly and bleating "MEGADITTOES!"

 

What Air America did for us was inform us.

 

In the midst of a Bush administration bent on disinformation and warped lying, this was vital. And we started to do our own research and learn our own truths. AAR was never going to make money so it was never going to survive. All it had to do was light a fire.

 

So to my friends, like not_over_it and Mr. Doggity and Lestat de Lioncourt, and CathCatz and Elderta and Ham Jenkins III and Stewardess...my fellow denizens of those days...like Crunchy Knee and Britisher, and the hundreds of others whose names escape me at the moment but who I met and loved and argued with and informed and kidded around with...thank you and I share your pain in this.

 

But think of all the good that's come out of it, folks! AAR may be gone, but forgotten?

 

Never!

Nobody Asked Me, But...

1) Talk about a slap on the wrist. I realize that going back fifteen or twenty years to when banks had true regulations placed on them like Glass-Steagal and Regulation Q is like regaining your virginity, but come on, Mr. President! You can do better than this. These asshats just destroyed the greatest economy in the history of the planet and have relegated America to a second-tier economic power in perpetuity!

 

2) Learn to speak Chinese is what I'm saying, folks, because you'll need it when all the tourists start descending on America from Beijing.

 

3) And they'll probably be looking to buy a senator or two.

 

4) When I learned that the Bush administration was going to allow lobbyists to write legislation...by the way, does anybody know if Obama actually stopped this?...I thought the country couldn't sink any deeper into the pits of fascism: corporations and government walking hand in hand in a class war against its citizenry. I was wrong. Fucking goddamned Republicans. If I'm ever made king of this country, I will issue an edict declaring Republicans enemies of the state.

 

5) Roe v. Wade is 37 years old today, just about at the end of its fertile cycle.

 

6) Most of them are probably Republicans.

 

7) What a fucking week. You know, you go on vacation, you expect to ramp up working a little bit on either side of it to make up/catch up. I've had to put in so much effort this week that I haven't unpacked yet from my trip and I arrived a week ago, and the attitude I've gotten is almost hostile to the fact I was away, rather than be happy I got a chance to relax a little and recharge my batteries.

 

Add to that the fact that there was a wage freeze the past two years and our bonuses were cut by a cumulative 35%, and I'm starting to feel genuinely unloved here. Pride in a good day's work is all that keeps me plugging away. For now.

 

8) Consider this your obligatory reminder about the Haiti telethon tonight

 

9) Wow! And I thought I've pissed off past girlfriends!

 

10) Next thing you know, the entire Eastern seaboard will be littered with giant Pampers filled with verdigris!!

Rage WITH The Machine?

If you want to begin to come to grips with the Tea Bagger...I mean, Tea Party movement, here's a good place to start:

ONE CAN DEDUCE merely from the titles of' Ann Coulter s books (If Democrats HadAny Brains..., etc.) that diplomacy and shaded opinion are not her strong suits. Why is she so mad?

Maybe because she's a tail, leggy blonde. It's not the trod-upon who are easily-angered, according to recent research from UC Santa Barbara; it's the entitled, Aaron Sell and collaborators make a case for anger as an evolved bargaining tactic. Huffiness promises either the infliction of harm or the withholding of goods. When you don't get a "fair" shake, you flare your nostrils and your adversary recalculates. And the more bargaining power you have—the size of your stick or your carrot—the better treatment you feel you deserve.

In Sell's new studies, men's strength (big stick) and women's self-rated beauty (tasty carrot) both correlate with sense of entitlement, proneness to anger, belief in the effectiveness of personal aggression, and a history of getting one's way. The theory stands up.

If Coulter feels entitled, it could also animate her jingoism; jocks and beauty queens in the studies also supported political aggression. Sell suspects these alphas' pro-war stances are an evolutionary echo of strong men expecting to go to battle themselves (and win), and fair maidens expecting to claim an unfair lot of the spoils. "Political attitudes," he points out, "don't stem from reason,"

A compelling argument, to be sure, made by Matthew Huston, of Psychology Today in the current issue.

Anecdotally, it seems to bear weight, as well. The right wingers I've encountered, the really angry, nasty ones, tend to be people who have already got some (the usual way of phrasing this is "I got mine, Jack!"). Or as the poet put it, when you ain't got nothing, you ain't got nothing to lose.

 

There's a fear underlying this, as well. When you feel you deserve a fair shake and get angry when things don't seem to be going your way, that's about loss. If not a material loss, then one of self-esteem and prestige. Those who have get more easily, mostly because they have already and other people feed into that.

 

Anyway, something to think about when going up against someone like this.

 

Thin Skins

Good grief.

President Obama and his team spent most of last year blaming President G.W. Bush for just about everything that went wrong. So what can we expect from the Bush-bashing White House in 2010? 

There's a lot of "stoopid" in that paragraph. About the only bits they got right were "President Obama" and "2010".

 

I only recall hearing Obama even reference the Bush administration handling of anything once all year, and that was early in the spring when defending the additional bail-out funds paid to the bankstahs. Justifying this outlay, he explained that he was following precedent and that his advisory team said it was a good option to pursue.

 

In other words, he actually praised Bush's decision (even if it was an idiotic one from the get-go and oh yea, so was Obama's follow-through).

 

Maybe I'm wrong, and maybe Obama did blame Bush for Brazil winning the summer Olympics bid...yes, that's IN the article!

 

But I doubt I'm wrong.

 

Who in the hell believes this shit?

 

 

BREAKING NEWS: AMERICA DEAD!

Ball game's over, Charlie.

 

Say goodbye to any voice you and I had in American politics.

Pass It...To Kill It?

Lawrence O'Donnell is one of my favorite DC people. Not because he's particularly bright and only partially because he was deeply involved with the production of The West Wing television series.

He pays attention. That's his strength. You see it when he's interviewing someone, you see it when he's on a panel of bloviators, and you see it in his blogging.

You see, by paying attention, you pick up on nuances and details that others miss. Like the fact that, well, Mitch McConnell has all but passed healthcare reform for Harry Reid already:

In Washington, where everyone is desperate to know what's happening behind closed doors, all you have to do to keep something secret is do it out in the open, preferably on C-Span. Mitch McConnell did exactly that when he entered a unanimous consent agreement with Harry Reid about how to proceed on the health care bill. McConnell knew that agreement was going to make it impossible for Republicans to amend the bill and would put it on a fast track toward passage.

McConnell accepted an agreement brilliantly designed by Reid that required 60 votes to pass an amendment. McConnell did that without anyone noticing anything odd after a year of saturation coverage of the importance of 60 votes in the Senate. Everyone outside the Senate now thinks it takes 60 votes to do anything. Not amendments. Amendments pass by a simple majority, 51 votes. Amendments are usually debated for a couple of minutes or hours or days, then voted on. Once in a while, a 60-vote cloture motion is needed to end debate on an amendment. What McConnell agreed to was an implicit cloture motion in every vote on every amendment, thereby completely surrendering the minority's real power. In all my years in the Senate, I never saw a leader make such a mistake. If it was a mistake.

[...]President Obama threatening to violate a campaign pledge by taxing workers' health care plans is one thing, but actually doing it is a dream come true for Republicans. They know the health care reform bill has a handful of taxes like that, none of which were mentioned by any Democrat in the last campaign. They can't wait to campaign to repeal those taxes. The internal Republican strategy debate now is should we repeal the whole bill or maybe leave some of the more popular sounding bits alone? But how can they run on any kind of repeal if Scott Brown wins in Massachusetts and steps into the Senate just in time to kill Obamacare?

If that happens, and the Democrats then scale back their dreams on cap and trade and other liberal ideas, then maybe moderate independents -- including some of Scott Brown's voters -- might think Mitch McConnell has all the Republicans he needs to keep the Democrats on the moderate course those voters prefer. So who is Mitch McConnell really rooting for in Massachusetts?

Absent the future tense and uncertainty of a Brown win, as I'm late to the party on this column.

It is an interesting note that O'Donnell makes. Mistakes are rarely made in the Senate and hardly ever made by the party leadership. Clearly, McConnell intended to leave himself the out that O'Donnell mentions, the ability to have a tax to rail against in November.

Just as the abortion issue could have been settled in favor of the Republican/conservative caucus at any point over the past 16 years or so by aggressively pursuing legislation to overturn Roe v. Wade or at least drastically limit it (not just the nibbling around the edges that has been passed), Republicans could simply have repeated the strategy they pursued in defeating healthcare reform in 1994: submit endless amendments that would eventually exhaust the chamber.

Four real amendments were submitted as well as five requests to return the bill to committee. All were voted "down" in the regard that they did not pass a 60 vote test.

Sure, the Republicans put on a show of opposition: calling for a reading of the bill on the Senate floor, forcing Senator Byrd to roll in on a wheelchair to vote in the middle of the night. To call this a full-court press to defeat the most socialist piece of legislation in the history of this country (even Social Security doesn't force everyone to carry it, only people earning wages) is ludicrous.

Now, it's possible that McConnell made a mistake. It's possible that, when Reid and McConnell made this agreement, McConnell had polling that showed Americans were so deeply in support of reform that they'd tear apart anyone who behaved badly, and McConnell decided it wasn't going to be his side.

And it's also possible that monkeys might fly out of my butt tomorrow, because this fear was diametrically opposite to the strategy that was pursued, which was to so water down the legislation...what? You thought Ben Nelson and Joe Lieberman acted independently out of good conscience?...that no one would like it much.

The election of Brown certainly defeats that possibility...unless of course a rookie Senator can be persuaded to tow the line.

Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm...

Martha Choakley

It's not the end of the world. Hell, it's not even the end of Obama's presidency. Politics is, after all, the art of the possible and good politicians like Obama can make lemonade out of pisswater.

So what are the real lessons to be learned from Martha Coakley's defeat at the hands of a naked teabagger?

1) Never ever diss Fenway Park, sports fans, or the Boston Red Sox if you want to win a statewide office in Massachusetts. Martha, my dear, when people are hurting, sports comes to the rescue. For most men I know, a sport if not multiple sports is a religion. Treat it that way. That means, yes, standing outside Fenway Park on New Year's Day, shaking the hands of every single Bruins fan you can grab hold of, and talking to them, answering and more important, asking them questions. You will never win in Massachusetts as a Democrat if you can't carry all of Boston, not just the quiet neighborhoods where you can throw cocktail parties and make fun of blue collar workers. Remember the flak Obama took in Pennsylvania for comments recorded in California? It nearly cost him the nomination.

2) Apart from Kennedys, Massachusetts has a shitty Democratic machine. When the chips have been down and we've turned to a Massachusian to lead the way, look at what they've served up: Dukakis, Kerry, now Coakley. And even Mitt Romney, to extend this to a bipartisan level. The MassDems ought to take a good long stone cold sober look at themselves and wonder if maybe they're barking up the wrong tree for campaign funds.

3) Democrats cannot win elections by preaching from on high. See point (1). The party faithful are not a homogenous bunch of sheeple, nearly all white and nearly all Christian, like the Republicans. We aren't as patriarchal and we are not going to be lectured. The only way Democrats win is to engage with the voters, face to face, hand to hand, heart to heart. That last is the most important. Listen, then speak. It's how Obama won, it's how Deval Patrick won, it's how both Clintons won elections. We speak of hope and prosperity, we talk about how Americans are struggling and how they will ldo better under a Democrat because that's what history teaches us. We talk about the values that make America great and how all people need is a fair, level playing field in order to succeed. We don't need to tear down, because we always build up. Hope was a theme of the last two Democratic presidents for a reason, folks!

4) You can't win an election in absentia. I'm not talking about taking a vacation in a truncated election season, altho that couldn't have helped. I'm talking about running a campaign as a surrogate for a beloved politician like Ted Kennedy. There's only one person who could possibly have done that, and Victoria Reggie Kennedy was not in the race. You want to flavor your stump speech with reminders of his tireless work on healthcare and how you want to protect that, that's fine, but don't make it the singleminded focus and the raisn d'etre of your campaign. See point three for what to run on.

What should the Democrats in DC do now?

I'd like to see them take off the gloves. This is the time to recognize that, while Democrats are not sheeple, elected Democrats have to be. Time to bully the Blue Dogs, and kick Lieberman to the curb, use the reconciliation feature of Senate votes and get Obama to release that donor list of his for robocalling on healthcare, on jobs, on deficit reduction. We have less than a year where we can guarantee even an eighteen seat majority in the Senate, so we have a deadline looming on us. We're likely to lose seats as it is, but whether we pass HCR or not, whether we get a jobs program in place or not, we're not going to lose the majority party status. So if we sacrifice one or two Democrats in the cause of advancing the nation, so be it.

Are you listening, Senator Reid?

One Island, Two Nations

Two households, both alike in dignity,
In fair Verona, where we lay our scene,
From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,
Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.
-- Romeo and Juliet: Prologue

Occasionally, CNN.com does its job right and makes me think. Today was one of those moments:

We are all sick at heart to witness the unfathomable suffering in Haiti. Why do bad things happen to innocent people? Why Haiti, again? Even Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said recently, "It is biblical, the tragedy that continues to stalk Haiti and the Haitian people."

How we make meaning of this suffering will be crucial to how we respond, in the long term, as a global community.

Why, indeed?

McAlister goes on to explore Haitian faith and the Christian belief that Haiti is playing our the last chapter in the Bible, of famine and floods and earthquakes and war.

Perhaps. And yet, there's a side to this story that doesn't often get mentioned: the eastern half of the island of Hispaniola contains another country: not as poor, quite as Christian, and poised to absorb the nation of Haiti.

Quite the turnaround for a country that had to fight for independence from Haiti.

It's true, for much of its existence, Haiti has been out of favor of the United States and Europe, while the Dominican Republic has enjoyed the benefits of alliances with both. This despite the fact that the DR had engaged in what we would now call "ethnic cleansing," slaughtering Haitians within its borders by the tens of thousands, in an era marked by the spread of totalitarian fascism around the world and the rise of Nazi Germany.

Admittedly, Haiti has a long history of shackling from the West, first as a slave colony, and then with crushing debt incurred in the treaty for independence from France. Indeed, the national bank of Haiti has been looted, literally, no less than four times, including at least once by American troops.

Too, the political unrest in that nation since, well, independence can't have helped any, but riddle me this, Batman: why is American bankrolling uprisings or defending dictators, when we espouse policies of "sovereignty" and "freedom" and "popular choice" on our own people and are trying to cram these down the throats of Iraqis and Afghanis?

Is it any wonder people really don't trust us? They read history, the history we should read but do not. I mean, come on, we were supporting the Duvaliers with economic aid and development!

I don't know that I have the answer to this conundrum, and I expect people with far better knowledge of sociology and political science struggle with a question that seems infathomable to me.

But this simple truth cannot be denied: one island, two nations moving in diametrically opposite directions:
The which if you with patient ears attend,
What here shall miss, our toil shall strive to mend.

Hating Haitians

One of the joys of scuba diving is it offers the chance to take vacations in exotic locales off the beaten path (Bon-where, now?).

 

One of the embarrassments of scuba diving is having to explain Rush Limbaugh and Pat Robertson to people from more civilized and sophisticated societies like France, England, the Netherlands, and "Bon-where, now?"

 

Often, I'm tempted to shrug my shoulders and simply say they're snake oil salesmen who have entire swaths of morons bamboozled by both bilking them for tens of millions of dollars, all while off-putting the blame to someone else. Of course, there's much evidence that even the more mainstream Republican factions are con artists, which makes this not only a tempting trope to leave with, but a facile explanation to boot.

 

I mean, come on! When a dunderhead like Erick Erickson finally begins to see the light about the movement he's helped spawn and launch, it's like Capt. Renault finding gambling at Rick's Cafe Americain!

 

But that's nothing compared to the massive scam being pulled by Rush Limbaugh and Pat Robertson over Haiti. If Sarah Palin and Michael Steele are pulling in long money over a few books and a convention, you can rest assured that every time Rush Limbaugh or Pat Robertson open their mouths and say something blitheringly, blindingly idiotic, their accountants are grinning from ear to ear.

 

For example, when Robertson says that the earthquake was a "blessing in disguise," was he really referring to religious reform in Haiti? Well, sort of, but the blessings were not for Haitians and not for the afterlife, but for the hundreds of evangelicals and other Christian missionaries who would be getting beaucoup bucks to keep piling on the indigent population to attempt to convert them to a brand of Christianity that is both judgemental and better suited for people with little intelligence.

 

In other words, it benefits Robertson and other Christian Coalitionites.

 

And when Rush actually campaigns against giving to relief efforts (particularly those emanating on the White House website, like, you know, the American Red Cross?), cui bono? Who benefits?

 

As for his ridiculous comments that American taxes go to pay Haitian relief efforts, yes, to the extent that they pay the salaries of officials and soldiers on the ground there, it's true. Those salaries would be paid anyway, however so its not like no earthquake would have magically removed a line item from the budget.

 

Indeed, one could make the argument that Rush himself benefits from those same taxes, ergo he should not be allowed to charge for advertising on his radio program since the airwaves are free.

 

But now try explaining to some fellow diver who's Swiss or Italian the whole phenomenon of a man who rails against taxes or one who calls innocent people "devils" in a free society, not only with little repercussion (the tragedy having far outweighed the outrage, a tactic both Rush and Robertson rely upon) but with the full faith and credit of a significant percentage of Americans supporting them, and not conjure up images of Il Duce or worse.

 

I'm sure I got defensive when discussing them. For that, I apologize, just as I was forced to offer up simple puling of "well, there's a place for all beliefs in America" as explanation.

 

Which I shouldn't have had to. Your not allowed to shout fire in a crowded theater. It's about time we found some way to hold people responsible not only for their actions, but for their words.

Haiti

Please be careful about how you give, if you give, to disaster relief. Personally, I like the Doctors Without Borders (Jim Dean's Democracy For America and others have teamed up for them, also).
For those of you who would like the larger perspective on Haiti, I've compiled a few resources and articles you might like:

1. Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti
has ALOT of info on human rights issues and other campaigns--not only in Haiti, but other countries in the region.
2. Max Blumenthal has back story galore, including a link to his 2004 article entitled "The Other Regime Change" where he outlined the federally funded International Republican Institute's (IRI) inciting a coup in Haiti. This is the same bunch that tried unsuccessfully to overthrow Chavez in Venezuela in 2002. There is also a link to Blumenthal's discussion on Democracy Now today, and other well done back story.
3. Our Role in Haiti's Plight by Peter Hallward in Wednesday's Guardian is concise and the kind of insight you just can't get from, say, Pat Robertson.
4. For anyone who has even just read parts of The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein, her article, "Haiti Disaster Capitalism Alert: Stop Them Before They Shock Again" is a must read.
Especially, since she busted the Heritage Foundation not even 24 hours into the disaster wanting to "reshape" Haiti. They have since replaced the verbage to a more diplomatic tone.
I hope these contributions are helpful to anyone wanting a bigger picture.
Not to mention, this wasn't easy with multiple cats trying to "contribute", people!

TapTapTap...Is This Thing On?

Hey, kids, hate to eat and run, but my sched is ka-rayzee today!
So, brush your teeth and eat your vegetables, and do your political action for a whistleblower today! (It's a sham of a travesty of a facade of a hollow mockery--not that I have any feelings about the whole thing, though.)

Te Aworo

I thought I'd have more time today to post something, and maybe even have the chance to write some things for next week.

I'll be on vacation. I'll see about posting stuff, but I ain't promising. I leave you in the capable hands of Kat, and if ThumbPer can work out the password on the computer, he might post some stuff too.

See you on the 18th!

Things That Make You Go "Hmmmmm"

Senator Harold Ford, Jr...of New York???

His stature undoubtedly derives from his five consecutive terms as a United States representative and a bitterly contested campaign for the Senate, but Mr. Ford, 39, has introduced himself to New Yorkers as a self-assured, nattily dressed political insider on Fox, NBC and MSNBC.

Over the past two years, he become a regular on shows like "Morning Joe" and "Meet the Press," pontificating on everything from death panels to Barack Obama's popularity.

The appearances have given Mr. Ford's name a familiar ring but have revealed little about his politics, which will become the subject of intense scrutiny over the next few weeks as he decides whether to run against Senator Kirsten E. Gillibrand this fall. He has given himself 45 days to sound out potential donors and party leaders about a campaign.

Attentive readers of Simply Left Behind now have an explanation to this bizarre encounter your editor had two years ago. Not in a million years would I have imagined that it was leading up to this possibility, but the fact that he met with Joe Trippi in a quiet little restaurant (albeit not in the corner) certainly intimates Ford's intention to re-enter political life.

 

I'm not sure how I feel about this. Ford, you may recall, had his hopes for Senate in Tennessee dashed in part by a race-baiting TV ad.So to a degree, his candidacy in a state less predisposed to listen to hate-mongering and more disposed to listening to issues is sort of "get even." Too, he's an intelligent man with good ideas who is not as liberal as many would pick him out to be, so he could be a sale in areas of New York State that Hillary Clinton carried with surprising regularity.

 

On the other hand, Kirsten Gillibrand has not exactly been a horrible Senator. She is, however, somewhat tainted by her unfortunate and necessary association with Governor David Patterson, whose approval ratings are abysmal, even if they have softened somewhat these past few weeks, Gillibrand has also carried a lot of the water for the Democrats in the Senate, voting strictly along party lines despite being more conservative than the party in general.

 

Which is saying a lot, considering how far to the right the party has had to move to pass legislation this year.

 

This has the earmarks of a White House wishlist, between this trial balloon and the pressure President Obama has placed on Patterson to forgo re-election. Patterson has led an oddly charmed life since that pressure was made public: no one serious, it seems, wants to run against him, except perhaps Andrew Cuomo. Republicans have shunned the race like Puritans in a sex club marathon.

 

My guess is, the budget outlook is so bleak, no one wants to be the one left standing when the music stops. In this regard, Patterson will likely thrive into a second term, simply because he hasn't backed down from the challenge.

 

But I digress.

 

The potential for a Gillibrand-Ford lock-up in the primary is interesting. Ford would likely capture most of the lower counties, like the city, Westchester, and Long Island, while Gillibrand would run strongly in the central parts of the state, like the Leatherstocking district and the Hudson Valley.

 

So the toss-ups would be the university towns way up north, like Ithaca, Syracuse, Rochester and Buffalo. Those are a strange admixture of blue collar whites who have suffered mightily in this Bush depression, and scholarly-types. Ford appeals to both, to be sure, but Gillibrand's support amongst the working class folks would be hard to crack.

 

Look for pressure brought to bear on Gillibrand to quit the race, and perhaps lock horns with Patterson for the governor's chair, or an offer of a post that would be hard to turn down (ambassador or sub-Cabinet appointment). I don't think the state party wants to have this on their hands after the 2009 state Senate debacle.

Great Moments In Twitter History

Sadly, No!, in response to complaints about a thread deconstructing a Tweet sent by some random cultural celebrity and basically demolishing it as the single most ridiculous form of communication ever devised, has created a thread of how Twitter would have been used in history. I post some examples here:

Naturally, the denizens couldn't help but chime in...

Elephant Butte said,

January 6, 2010 at 4:34

@Caesar OMFG et2 Bts?

It gets worse:

Felonious Monk said,

January 6, 2010 at 8:03

@Genghis
Plan 4 2nite: F#%* sum bitchzz, overrun West Asia, F(@# moar bitchzz. Holy Shit I luv my life.

So, yes...I took a swing or two:

actor212 said,

January 6, 2010 at 16:17

@MaryMagadalene U no who else got naled? Ur mom LOL!!!!!!!!!!

actor212 said,

January 6, 2010 at 16:19

@MaryToodLincoln Othr thn tht, how wuz plai?

Take your best shots, readers, either here or at Sadly, No!

Thunder And Lightning

Barack Obama showed some stones yesterday.

 

This shouldn't be news. I suspect the reason it is is the last administration was in woefully short supply of stones, particularly when it made mistakes. "Heckuva job, Brownie!"

After an earlier meeting with his security advisers, President Obama said US intelligence services had enough information to place the Nigerian suspect, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, on a no-fly list, but had failed to connect the dots, adding: "That's not acceptable, and I will not tolerate it".

I should point out that the only person who suffered any consequences of the 9-11 terrorist attacks was Sibel Edmonds. Indeed, the only admission by anyone in authority in the Bush administration with respect to the 9-11 tragedy was from Condi Rice, which she called a  "failure of imagination".

 

As if terrorists bringing four planes down a month after the infamous August 6 PDB was like the release of "Avatar".

 

But I digress.

 

President Obama's point yesterday, that we had all the pieces but no one to put the puzzle together, was supposed to be solved by the Department of Homeland Security, set up by "President" Bush and alowed to squander seven years of financing to put on a dog and pony show of protecting Americans' security. We were given rainbows, told tweezers and nail scissors were deadly weapons (perhaps they anticipated an attack by an army of Jackie Chan clones), and asked to buy duct tape and plastic sheeting.

 

Instead of putting together an infrastructure that would in real time share information between agencies and prevent a lone terrorist from boarding a plane loaded down with explosives. Yes, Bush and his team stopped Richard Reid (for want of a lighter, admittedly on the "no-fly" list. Too bad Reid wasn't.), and then rested on their laurels.

 

Bush and Rove et al spent those last seven years wetting their pants trying to get us to wet ours, with continual incidents of false flag terror alerts (timed in election cycles, no less).

 

President Obama's inference, that intelligent people are now running the intelligence services so let's cut the crap, is an even better reaction than expected. Had Abdulmutallab (and I thought Ahmadinejad was hard to spell!) succeeded, I would hope the implication that heads would roll would be carrid out, starting with his own Cabinet pick, Janet Napolitano, who now has to work hard to persuade Americans she can handle what on the surface seems to be a job cut out for her. I'm sure the details are far more complex, however.

 

2009 was a difficult year for Obama, even tho the end showed glimmers of an administration that can reverse the deep troubles this nation is in. If this kick-off to campaign year 2010 is any indication, this should be a good year for Obama and the Democrats.

Tiger, Tiger, Burning Bright

In the forest, in the...nude? Well, sort of...:

(CBS)  While Tiger Woods remains holed up in seclusion more than a month after his Thanksgiving Day crash, never-before-seen images of the world's No. 1 golfer have surfaced in this month's Vanity Fair, reports CBS News correspondent Jeff Glor.

 

A bare-chested Woods graces the cover of the magazine -- Woods holding a dumbbell in each hand.

 

The shots, taken by celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz back in January of 2006, give a rare glimpse into the life of the world's most guarded athlete.

The words I've heard bandied about here are "intense, dedicated, raw".

 

In other words, practically (save for "dedicated") the opposite of his persona.

 

There's a lesson here for all of us who admire celebrities: don't.

 

Don't admire anyone who hires a publicist or a manager or an agent or charge d'affaires. The image you are admiring is likely not what that person really is, and if you have to aspire to a fictional character, then aspire to fiction with your eyes open. Admire Captain Kirk, or Luke Skywalker, or Tess of the D'Urbervilles.

 

Or admire what Woods could have been, because it's clear he is not whom he was presented to be.

 

I have often wondered why we swallow these images whole. Part of me thinks it goes back to the Bible, and those tales of superhuman endurance and semi-divine men and women who walked our planet and left footprints that by rights we are unworthy to follow, but who probably were human to begin with.

 

Even Jesus had a temper, in other words, but we are offered him as a God who was perfect, which we should aspire to even tho we are guaranteed to fail. Similarly, we conflate heroism on humans, taking a talent or small act and assuming the entire soul follows in those footsteps. And vice versa. We assume evil is evil through and through, even if simple observation of the people around us shows that people are neither good nor bad, but a mix, so even saints and devils must have a little of both.

 

It's clear that Woods was not the ultranice citizen of the world he claimed to be. In these photos, he shows a complete narcissistic side of himself, a man in love with being Tiger Woods, a man who gives flinchingly to others of whom he is.

 

Ask Elin if you don't believe that last bit. In exchange for selling his soul, his essence, he signed a bondage agreement with a wife, his sponsors and a sport that values dignity and comportment above improved play or score. The scary bit is, what's going on in that sport that is going on in other sports, that golf is not talking about openly? How different will golf's image be once the steroid and amphetamine scandals erupt from the clubhouses?

 

How will golf survive? It won't attract the kind of sponsors it does now, upscale investment banks and luxury cars, and it won't be able to assume an image that's more down to earth (maybe if the LPGA was forced to play in bikinis and have implants, and the PGA was forced to play in Speedos and have full contact).

 

And maybe it shouldn't. Golf has always tried to walk a fine line between sport and diversion. Golf is a sport the way walking is a sport: it's a fine way to pass time if you've got gobs of it to waste, but to sit and watch someone engaging in it is an even bigger waste of time. In this regard, setting up a webcam on a busy street ought to be classified as sport.

 

And it dumbs down the definition of sport while it debases its true nature. Fractally, this reflects in Woods' own persona. He's dumbed himself down in order to fit into a sport that denies his true nature. The most interesting comment I've heard on the entire mess was on the Today Show this morning, when some yahoo told him to show up at the Masters riding a Harley, tattoos all over his arms, unshaven, win the tournament, throw away the green jacket and hook up with the first woman he comes across in the press tent after demolishing the competition.

 

I concur, actually. Be who you are, Tiger. Stop pleasing everyone else around you. You are the most talented golfer on the planet, and you shouldn't have to lower yourself to some image that others have of you.

 

Does it really matter if you earn $100 million a year or $50 million a year? Endorsements will come simply because of the talent. It may take a while, but you're very young and eventually people will not only forgive you, they'll come to see your point of view.

 

Fuck redemption. Teach the world a lesson about getting the fucking sticks out of its collective ass.

Truth Will Out

It may take twenty years, but eventually, truth will out:

The year 1989 changed the world. It moved us from a world of division and nuclear blackmail to one of new opportunity and unprecedented prosperity. It set the stage for our contemporary era: globalization, the triumph of free markets, the spread of democracy. It ushered in the great global economic boom that lifted billions out of poverty around the world and established America as the one and only superpower.

 

Yet it was a dangerous triumph, chiefly because we claimed it for our own and scarcely bothered to fully understand how this great change came to pass. We told ourselves stick-figure parables of defiance and good-versus-evil triumph, summed up in Ronald Reagan's clarion call: "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!"

 

From the vantage point of 20 years, we should be wiser. The reality is that "our" victory in the Cold War was not what we thought it was, nor did it happen the way we think it did. Most painfully, the myths we spun about it have hurt the world and ourselves.

It was, in truth, a Pyrrhic victory that took more than 40 years to come about, and was more about the edificial nature of the Soviet Union and its weak economy than about America's "strong defense"...altho to be fair that had a large part to play in the drama, certainly in terms of speeding it up.

 

Meyer raises some interesting points beyond this obvious trope, that the United States and in particular the Reagan administration have been too quick and too self-centered in picking up all the credit.

 

Indeed, many myths, like populist revolt overthrowing the Warsaw Pact, come into question.

 

The central point is, the Soviet Union was doomed from the beginning. It was really a matter of time and economics.

 

Just as the fall of America was ordained in the early days of its creation: one nation was not under God, but several disparate islands of view. White, black, male, female, rich, poor, these groups, history shows, cannot all live under the same roof forever. It really is just a matter of time, as history demonstrates.

 

But note Meyer's third fallacy that came out of 1989:

A third myth is the most dangerous: the idea of the United States as emancipator, a liberator of repressed peoples. This crusading brand of American triumphalism has become gospel over the past two decades in certain foreign policy circles, especially among neoconservatives.

He has a point: every war we've engaged in, with the exception of one, since 1989 has been a patrician war of "freedom". The sole exception? Preventing ethnic cleansing in the former Warsaw Pact state of Yugoslavia.

 

Indeed, many of our wars for freedom have ended up oppressing sectors of population worse than before we arrived to fight (the Kurds after Gulf War I spring to mind), and most, if not all, have left the nation we've battled in far worse for the wear and war. This lesson is being demonstrated now in Iraq (and eventually Afghanistan) to our utter embarassment.

 

Imagine if we had invested that postwar "peace dividend" in our infrastructure, or education, or job retraining, or healthcare, and freed Americans instead of people who meant us no harm, caused us no harm, and whom we could have safely ignored (obviously, the Taliban and Al Qaeda do not fit this profile).

 

Imagine the trillions we would have shored up our economy with. Imagine actually going in and winning a quick war against Al Qaeda because we weren't tamping down Somalia in the 90s (or worrying ourselves over which orifice of what woman our President was filling, but I digress...).

 

It's a shame that it takes history to give us wisdom, that we do not learn from the mistakes of our ancestors or even from our elders, who fought and beat a hegemonic empire, likely the most powerful on the planet, to win our freedom. Practically by ourselves (the French helped).

 

Wouldn't we be ashamed if some other nation, say, Italy, came here and fought for our freedom for us?

 

Nobody Asked Me But....

1) Happy New Year, for what it's worth. According to Arthur C. Clarke, this was the year we were to make contact with an alien civilization. Me, I was just hoping for dolphins in my living room. That would have been cool.

2) It's also going to be the year of the Tiger, which will fall on Valentine's Day. We welcome our Chinese overlords.

3) So what will be the biggest stories of 2010? Here are my picks: Afghanistan, which I think will flare up and join Pakistan and India in a regional conflict that doesn't pit nation against nation (altho there will be plenty of bickering) but establishment versus insurgencies. A loose confederation of groups including but not limited to Al Qaeda and the Taliban will form a coalition in an attempt to deconstruct borders artificially imposed by Westerners.

4) Big Story #2: the destruction of Sarah Palin's political aspirations. The floodgates have crept open. I forsee revelations with respect to her personal dealings that will make past scandals look like Kiwanis Club level corruption.

5) Big Story #3: The economy will lag until the late spring when there will be a sudden surge in activity and hiring. Altho the unemployment numbers will not fall below ten percent, the turnaround will be real and will make people give Obama credit. Also, the Democrats will lose seats in the House and Senate, meaning the second half of Obama's first term will be devoid of anything much, forcing him to focus on international issues like Afghanistan and terrorism.

6) Big Story #4: Water. The impact of global climate change and warming has found its mark in the lesser developed nations, but the drought in the Western United States will become so severe that California will ration water south of Santa Barbara, and Las Vegas will all but be evacuated.

I learned my lesson from last year about making too many predictions...I mean, really, Cuba?...so I'm going to leave those out there as the four biggest stories of the year.

But I did call eight of the ten! ;-)

7) Blue blue blue blue moon...dididididadada

8) As a Finn, I have to say I'm very impressed by this.

9) When in doubt, suck!

10) The tree did it in the arboretum with a club.

Rush Limbaugh Deathwatch

Damn.

 

Early reports had him actually dead, which means he likely suffered a very serious attack before they were able to clamp him down with bungee cords to use the AED. I wonder what whaling vessel they called in?

 

But I digress.

 

Perhaps the time has come to pronounce Limbaugh "all but dead" and to determine what he will leave in his wake, besides a steaming trail of slug slime?

 

There's a small part of me, a very Christian, liberal part of me, that likes to think that deep down inside Rush is a scared little boy. You see, twenty, twenty-five years ago, this slug of a man, this Jabba The Nut, emerged with a shtick that saw him alter the reality of political talk in America, changed the direction of a major political party, and became a gravimetric force for evil.

 

Half-jokingly, so he could maintain the veneer of "comedian," Limbaugh launched anger as a weapon in the national political dialogue. Not that this hadn't happened before, Father Coughlin springs to mind, but the hatred that Coughlin spewed was not so much anti-American ideals as just random hatred.

 

Limbaugh, on the other hand, just hated that he was behind the times, and since he couldn't muster the effort to keep up, he set out to deliberately drag the nation back to him. It wasn't about advancing a political agenda. It was about self-promotion.

 

In that respect, Limbaugh had no qualms about stepping over boundaries that anyone who actually loved a nation would never set foot near, accusing anyone and everyone of being a Nazi or a commie, or an Islamofascist, or worse...a liberal!

 

"Liberals got women the right to vote. Liberals got African-Americans the right to vote. Liberals created Social Security and lifted millions of elderly people out of poverty. Liberals ended segregation. Liberals passed the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act. Liberals created Medicare. Liberals passed the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act. What did Conservatives do? They opposed them on every one of those things...every one! So when you try to hurl that label at my feet, 'Liberal,' as if it were something to be ashamed of, something dirty, something to run away from, it won't work, Senator, because I will pick up that label and I will wear it as a badge of honor." -- Matt Santos, The West Wing

Rush conveniently forgets that, if not for liberals, Rush himself would be begging loose change in exchange for butt-fucks in the Kansas City railway station. Rush, you see, the bastion of conservative, up-by-the-boot-straps, rock-ribbed self-sufficiency, was on both welfare and unemployment insurance.

 

But now this hatred Limbaugh has spewed all over the land, this sludge of toxic waste, has morphed into something that, if it had been submitted to DC Comics, would have been laughed out of the office, and if it had been submitted to Mad Magazine, would have been met with stone-cold silence in its unbelievability.

 

Consider the birther movement. Consider the teabaggers. Consider the hatred spewing from the extreme right wing like an oil gusher that has not yet been capped.

 

I think Rush is terrified. I suspect it is this deep deep fear in him that forces him to marry every five years, to bloat up like a corpse in a cesspool, stopping only to blurt out what now sounds like almost moderate venom. He sees that the monster he has unleashed threatens to tear apart the very party he claims allegiance to, the party he claims he would like to see leading this nation. He sees that party slide into a cartoonish obscurity of obsolescence and obscenity. And with each passing election, he watches the internal strife of moderates versus radicals become more and more obvious, more and more spiteful, more and more divisive. And he watches his party become a footnote to history because of what he instigated.

 

He's lost the spotlight.

 

I don't give him much time.

The Right To Primacy

I have long believed, ever since Amy Carter, that the minor children of politicians should remain off-limits until they become of age. I didn't care much for the jokes about Jenna and Not-Jenna in the first Bush term, certainly I was disgusted when Rush Limbaugh called Chelsea Clinton "The White House Dog," and I'm pleased to see the right wing has kept hands off Sasha and Malia Obama.

 

Mostly. I'm not aware of any outright major blogging with respect to them and a quick Google search uncovers only the Beanie Babies controversy from February.

 

So it's with trepidation that I approach the news yesterday that Bristol Palin lost her fight to keep the records of her custody fight with Levi Johnston private.

 

See, Bristol Palin presents a problem: on the one hand, she was a minor when she was dragged out of the Arctic obscurity of Wassilla into the hot lights of the Minneapolis mayhem, and her private pain fully disclosed.

 

On the other, she presents prima facie evidence of at least Sarah Palin's inability to keep her own house in order, much less take over the White House.

 

My suspicion here is there's a reverse-discrimination issue at play, at least as far as the Chris Crocker wing of the GOP is concerned: after all, none of them had any problem when Al Gore's son was arrested for possession, calling that an example of the poor family values of the liberal Democratic party.

 

My instincts tell me that Bristol's name ought to be kept off the lawsuit. It's too late now, of course. Even if the ruling was reversed, it wouldn't take much to figure out which court docket was hers and to publish the details from it.

 

Which leads me to the dilemma. Legally, there is no question that the public's right to know is far smaller than the right to privacy that Tripp Palin is entitled to, and this is a nation of laws.

 

Right?

 

On the other hand, there's the whole nasty issue of Sarah Palin's exploitation of Tripp Palin. That cannot be ignored or denied, and that complicates the legal issue.

 

Part of Johnston's fight has been to protect his public image, which is his right to privacy such as he can maintain and the right to go about doing his business, whether it's being a public figure (which appears to be his destiny, however pathetic that career will be), from the smears and slanders of another public figure, Sarah Palin.

 

To privatize the records of these hearings is to shackle Johnston's hands from protecting himself. Indeed, his filings in this matter speak to that:

In an affidavit, he [Johnston] says he wants the case to be open to "public scrutiny as a check against anyone's need to be overly vindictive, aggressive or malicious." He adds that he's referring not to Bristol but to her mom.

Clearly, there are no winners here, only losers, especially Tripp. My suspicion is the testimony and evidence presented at the trial will speak to both sides of the family being rather...ugly...with perhaps Bristol the only one coming out of it with any chance of an improved public image.

 

Sarah Palin will be forced to spin, spin, spin mightily the testimony. That Johnston has already landed a few pre-emptive blows in his interviews with regards to how Palin behaved behind the scenes tells me that's about all he was allowed to say by his lawyers, and that there's more, much more, to come.

 

Which would be consistent with her harping image from the campaig trail, the "pitbull with lipstick" writ small.

 

For my part, I'll likely ignore the trial, except to note when there will be real damage to Palin's Presidential aspirations.

 

But she really only has herself to blame for that. She could have been a better parent.

The Devil In The Details

When you bargain with the devil, sometimes you win. Most times, he wins.

 

You may recall back in '06 when Howard Dean decided to revitalize the party by energizing the machinery in all 50 states, regardless of traditional voting patterns. Everyone thought it was brilliant, because hey, it was Howard Dean. I thought it was idiotic.

 

But the results of the 2006 and 2008 Congressional and Presidential elections proved me wrong. Sort of.

 

Unfortunately, it has brought front and center the very wing of the Democratic party that we need to continue to run the country and there's the rub:

Before 2009, most Americans never heard of Sens. Ben Nelson, Max Baucus or Kent Conrad. More have heard of the Independent Sen. Joe Lieberman as a result of his Democratic vice presidential bid in 2000.

Yet now they are the movers and shakers in the Senate. Anyone who follows politics knows exactly who they are. It could not be further from 2005 when Nicholas Confessore in The New York Times wrote that "centrist Democrats today struggle with an unfriendly environment."

Throughout the Senate debate over health care, the centrists repeatedly forced the president's hand by insisting on changes to the legislation that made Obama's liberal base furious and which will constrain the impact of this legislation. Health care was the second major victory for centrists this year. They also were able to cut down the size of the economic stimulus bill back in February 2008.

Despite the poutrage from the liberal community, this is a simple fact: we can't run a 50 state strategy if we're going to lose the Baucuses, Nelsons and Conrads of the nation. How easy would it be to say to a voter in, say, Colorado "See what them libs did to Lieberman" and scare off a potential vote?

 

Let's turn back to CNN for a moment:

Why is this small group of senators so influential and will this change? The first reason has to do with the nature of the Democratic Party. Democrats have never been as ideologically disciplined as the Republicans, and they have been less successful containing party differences.[...]

The second factor behind the new kings of the hill has to do with the sharpening of the partisan divide on Capitol Hill. The impact of growing party polarization since the 1970s has meant that winning votes from the other party is extraordinarily difficult. Except for rare moments, neither party can count on winning significant blocks of votes from the other side of the aisle.[...]

Finally, institutions matter. The U.S. now has a Senate that operates as a supermajority. The Senate now requires 60 votes on any piece of legislation given that senators are willing to use the filibuster on almost any bill. If the majority party needs 60 votes to pass a bill, and it can't win votes from the other side, a handful of moderates wield tremendous power.

Expanding a voter base is a lot like breaking ground in a garden. You have to work the soil, amend it, fertilize it, then you can seed. Once you can begin growing things, you can thin and weed out the garden, thus insuring a healthier crop.

 

The basic flaw in the strategy of Karl Rove's attempt at a permanent Republican majority was in underestimating the ground that was shifting underneath him. He believed it was more solid than it was, but in point of fact, the number of solidly blue or red districts (much less states) in the nation is very small. And as CNN points out, generally you can count on 45% of any district to go Democratic, 45% to go Republican, meaning you are scrambling for less than ten percent of the vote.

 

Unless you can alter your party's image sufficiently that you can peel off voters from the other party who are frustrated with the lack of response from their own party. This is how Obama won in 2008. It wasn't the liberals that got him elected, altho the youth vote was a large factor.

 

Instead, it was the perception that he was not a radical Muslim liberal hippie pinko commie Volvo driver. Why do you think the radical ight chose the ridiculous tropes they did, day in and day out, to stain the man? 

 

And it's funny how our side missed that message completely, while the other voters got it almost from day one (and certainly the day after McCain chose Sarah Palin as his running mate).

 

So for now, we're stuck with these guys. If you read on in the linked article at CNN, you'll find the three options Obama and the party leadership have for dealing with them. If we as liberals are truly interested in helping this administration, we'll opt for Number Two:

The second option would be to use the power of the bully pulpit, as well as the famous but now forgotten campaign network from 2008, to go into the states of these senators and build grassroots pressure to vote with the party. Thus far, the president has been hesitant to take this path.

What if, rather than waiting for his instruction, we lifted the burden off his shoulders for him? You know, the man's a little busy and right now needs these guys but if we can get underneath their pins and start to push outward, they might decide they need to shift left a little in order to shore up their chances of winning re-election.

 

After all, ain't that what it all comes down to? It's all fine and dandy to have campaign money flowing in from corporations, but if you have no office, that tap gets shut off faster than beer in a Prohibition raid.

 

Ay, but then, the devil's in the details. How many of us really care that much?

A Modest Proposal

Little noticed in the hoopla over the failed terrorism attempt of Christmas Day, with the concurrent fingerpointing (these rules were instituted under the Bush administration, something jackasses like Rep. Peter King (R-Frontrunning Poser) seem to forget) was an item that made me think a little:

WUHAN, Dec. 26 (Xinhua) -- The Wuhan-Guangzhou high-speed railway with the world's fastest train journey at a 350-km-per-hour designed speed, started operation Saturday.

    Two passenger trains rolled out the Wuhan Railway Station and Guangzhou North Railway Station at about 9 a.m. and reached the terminals within three hours, compared with the previous 10 and a half hours.

    The service between Wuhan, a metropolis in central China, and Guangzhou City, a business hub in the southern Guangdong Province, was put into trial operation on Dec. 9, reaching a maximum speed of 394.2 km (ed. note: roughly 250 miles) per hour.

Not quite as fast as a jet airplane, but no one drove a train into the 90th floor of the World Trade Center, either. And given the delays in airline terminals sure to arise from this incident, bullet trains might begin to make more sense.

 

Several reasons drive train travel in Europe and Asia that seem not to affect Americans: higher fuel prices due to government taxes, shorter distances between hub cities, less developed road systems (really, the Autobahn and perhaps Englands motorways are about the closest any nation comes to the US interstate highway system) creating slower speeds and longer travel times, among other reasons.

 

Indeed, China may be the only nation who suffers from both the need to have citizens in two places at once as well as the staggering large distances between those places.

 

Now, Barack Obama did propose investing in high speed rail systems, particularly across the heartland of the United States. So far, the only firm proposal is for a rail link between Disneyland and Las Vegas (courtesy of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid). I'm not entirely sure what the advantage is for having this. Do you drop your kids off with Goofy in the morning and pick them up at night after you've blown the mortgage payment?

 

But I digress. We have an opportunity now to invest in something that a) makes sense to do, given the economic catastrophe that higher fuel prices will create shortly, b) can be shovel ready within months, c) would help wean us off foreign energy sources, d) could employ zero-emission power plants strung along the rail lines, e) would reinforce homeland security, both from a macroeconomic point of view as well as a micro-security viewpoint, and f) would give us a goal that most Americans can appreciate and wrap their minds around.

 

After all, rail travel has been around 150 years and there's a whole litany of romantic notions with regards to it. Imagine going from Chicago to Denver. It's a 17 hour drive. It's a three hour plane flight, plus two hours at security. At 660-odd miles and 250 mph on a train, it's 2 and one-half hours. And you're in downtown at both ends.

 

Makes sense, right?