Category: Good Writing

A Must Read on Obama and the 3rd Way

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Daniel De Groot at Open Left pulls a comment by sTivo and it may be the clearest explanation of both Barack and 3rd way politicians yet given:

When Barack Obama made his famous remarks about Ronald Reagan being transformational, it was misinterpreted as being political, an attempt to reach out to the other side. It actually was, as some feared, philosophical. It really did mean, sincerely, that except around the edges, he thought that Reaganism-Thatcherism was irreversible. Just as Bill Clinton does, just as Tony Blair does.

The Third-Wayers are serious about this. Seriously deluded, perhaps, but dead serious. There was never an attempt to triangulate the “independent center”, those who still believed in Reaganism but were distressed by the partisan cultural meanness. That was sincere. Those who were played were the Democratic base. They would have to be satisfied with corporate-style knockoffs of social-democratic ideas (health care being the most obvious example). Labor reformers would have to be mollified with “we don’t have 60 votes”. And symbolic gestures devoid of content like inviting Pete Seeger to the White House.

(emphasis mine)

Occam’s razor seems to mitigate toward this explanation.

Go read the rest.

H/t Atrios.

The Best Critique, and the Best Path Forward, I’ve Yet Seen on Obama

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Ian Welsh has a must read essay.

What he suggests that Obama could have done without having to consult Congress at all:

  • Start negotiations with a maximalist position, as opposed the current mode of giving the store away before anyone sits down.
  • Ending the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell discharges
  • Not made the HAMP a fraud perpetrated against desperate home owners.
  • Halting the Kangaroo courts at Gitmo.
  • Not starting the cat food commission after Congress voted it down.

Going forward, he suggests that Obama use the authority granted him under the Federal Reserve act, which allows him to remove governors for cause and recess appoint their replacements, and take the the distressed debt that the FED holds, and sell it.

This would force the banks to mark their own assets to the now established market value, which makes them insolvent, and which would mean that FDIC and related agencies could nationalize them.

I like this last one, but it ain’t never gonna happen.

Go read the article though, it’s very good.

Matt Taibbi has a Point

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I would have invoked Der Stürmer, and encouraged invocations of Godwin’s law, but Matt Taibbi is right, Fox News, and their fellow travellers are much closer to Radio Rwanda than they are to Julius Streicher’s oervre:

A lot of Tea Party anger is driven by real local issues — where I live in central Jersey, for instance, there are a lot of pissed-off white people crowing over a nutty state supreme court case in which a Central American drunk driver got off because cops didn’t explain the consequences of refusing a breathalyzer in his native Spanish. But without the constant reinforcement of national 24-hour media, which has taken these isolated cases and presented them as a coast-to-coast massive conspiracy, the rage over stories like this would never reach the levels we’re seeing.

In fact if you follow Fox News and the Limbaugh/Hannity afternoon radio crew, this summer’s blowout has almost seemed like an intentional echo of the notorious Radio Rwanda broadcasts “warning” Hutus that they were about to be attacked and killed by conspiring Tutsis, broadcasts that led to massacres of Tutsis by Hutus acting in “self-defense.” A sample of some of the stuff we’ve seen and heard on the air this year:

  • On July 12, Glenn Beck implied that the Obama government was going to aid the New Black Panther Party in starting a race war, with the ultimate aim of killing white babies. “They want a race war. We must be peaceful people. They are going to poke, and poke, and poke, and our government is going to stand by and let them do it.” He also said that “we must take the role of Martin Luther King, because I do not believe that Martin Luther King believed in, ‘Kill all white babies.'”
  • CNN contributor and Redstate.com writer Erick Erickson, on the Panther mess: “Republican candidates nationwide should seize on this issue. The Democrats are giving a pass to radicals who advocate killing white kids in the name of racial justice and who try to block voters from the polls.”
  • On July 6, the Washington Times columnist J. Christian Adams wrote an editorial insisting that “top [Obama] appointees have allowed and even encouraged race-based enforcement as either tacit or open policy,” marking one of what would become many assertions by commentators that the Obama administration was no longer interested in protecting the rights of white people. “The Bush Civil Rights Division was willing to protect all Americans from racial discrimination,” Adams wrote. “During the Obama years, the Holder years, only some Americans will be protected.”
  • July 12: Rush Limbaugh says Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder “protect and represent” the New Black Panther party.
  • July 28: Rush says Supreme Court decision on 1070 strips Arizonans of their rights to defend themselves against an “invasion”: “I guess the judge is saying it’s not in the public interest for Arizona to try to defend itself from an invasion. I don’t know how you look at this with any sort of common sense and come to the ruling this woman came to.” That same day, Rush says this: “Muslim terrorists are going to have a field day in Arizona. You cannot ask them where they’re from. You cannot even act like we know where they’re from. You cannot ask them for their papers. We can ask you for yours. Not them.”
  • July 29: The Washington Times asks “Should Arizona Secede?” and says the Supreme Court “is unilaterally disarming the people of Arizona in the face of a dangerous enemy” with the aim of creating a “socialist superstate.” The paper writes: “The choice is becoming starkly apparent: devolution or dissolution.”
  • July 29, Fox and Friends host Steve Doocy continues the Radio Rwanda theme, saying, “If the feds won’t protect the people and Governor Brewer can’t protect her citizens, what are the people of Arizona supposed to do?”
There’s nothing in the world more tired than a progressive blogger like me flipping out over the latest idiocies emanating from the Fox News crowd. But this summer’s media hate-fest is different than anything we’ve seen before. What we’re watching is a calculated campaign to demonize blacks, Mexicans, and gays and convince a plurality of economically-depressed white voters that they are under imminent legal and perhaps even physical attack by a conspiracy of leftist nonwhites. They’re telling these people that their government is illegitimate and criminal and unironically urging secession and revolution.

(emphasis mine)

There are some deeply evil people out there who are looking to leverage bigotry, racism, and fear for their own profit and power.

Taibbi calls for a boycott, saying that he’d, “Like to see at least one firm get blown out of business as a consequence of financially supporting the network that is telling America that its black president wants to kill white babies,” but he misses a part of the dynamic with his call to action: It isn’t that Fox News, and probably the rest of the media outlets, are driven by cynical economic or political goals, it’s that many of them, are bed wetting cowards like Roger Ailes, and they truly live their lives in terror.

As to the politicians stoking this matter, it’s pretty clear that they (Newt) are looking at this through the prism of political advantage though.

I won’t muse on the mental processes of Sarah Palin, that way lies me huddled on the floor, covered in mayonnaise, and gibbering, “Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!”

Krugman Channels Williams Jennings Bryan

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Is it just me, or does his most recent OP/ED have some significant thematic similarities to William Jennings Bryan’s Cross of Gold speech.

Here is the first ‘graph of Krugman:

As I look at what passes for responsible economic policy these days, there’s an analogy that keeps passing through my mind. I know it’s over the top, but here it is anyway: the policy elite — central bankers, finance ministers, politicians who pose as defenders of fiscal virtue — are acting like the priests of some ancient cult, demanding that we engage in human sacrifices to appease the anger of invisible gods.

Here is the last ‘graph of Bryan:

If they dare to come out in the open field and defend the gold standard as a good thing, we shall fight them to the uttermost, having behind us the producing masses of the nation and the world. Having behind us the commercial interests and the laboring interests and all the toiling masses, we shall answer their demands for a gold standard by saying to them, you shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns. You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.

Note, I am not making accusations of any sort of misappropriation of work. I am suggesting that two people, attempting to address similar problems, deflation and recession, have, 114 years apart, come to very similar conclusions, and expressed them in similar ways.

In any case, both Bryan’s speech, and Krugman’s OP/ED should be read. They are both very good.

Brilliant!

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I think that I injured myself laughing:

Outrage Over Plans To Build Library Next To Sarah Palin

PLANS to build a state-of-the-art library next to Republican catastrophe Sarah Palin are causing outrage across mainstream America.

…………

Meanwhile President Obama has caused unease within his own Democratic party by endorsing the library and claiming that not everyone who reads books is responsible for calling Mrs Palin a f%$wit nutjob nightmare of a human being.

But Bill McKay, a leading member of the right-wing Teapot movement, said: “Sarah Palin is a hallowed place for Americans who can’t read.

“How is she going to feel knowing that every day there are people going inside a building to find things out for themselves and have thoughts, right in the very shadow of her amazing nipples.”

(%$# mine)

No go read the whole thing. It’s pretty short.

Deep Thought

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Dick Armey created an Army of Dicks.*

Jon Stewart does a good job teasing out the hypocrisy of the Congressman, former House Majority Leader, and über lobbyist Dick Armey casting himself as an anti-establishment foe of Washington .


Jon Stewart, Part 1 of 3


Jon Stewart, Part 2 of 3


Jon Stewart, Part 1 of 3

*The Teabaggers.

The Daily Show is the Best Journalism on TV Today*

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Seriously, the fact that Jon Stewart has so much material to work with makes me despair for the future of the Republic.

This sh%$ is not rocket science, and the idea that the press is not to call bullsh%$ over transparent bullsh%$ is not a mark of professionalism, it is a mark of cowardice, hypocrisy, and laziness.

In any case, on to the vid.

*Yes, my Geek Goddess, Rachel Maddow, is a close second.

Don’t Pray for Christopher Hitchens, Buy His Book

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Christopher Hitchens has metastasized esophageal cancer, and his friend and co-worker at The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, has fielded the responses to this news.

It’s very well written, and bears repeating:

A Message to Those Praying for Christopher Hitchens

Aug 9 2010, 10:05 AM ET

On behalf of Christopher Hitchens, who thinks all of this skydaddy talk is ridiculous, thanks to all of you who wrote in to Goldblog to report that they would be praying for him as he undergoes treatment for esophageal cancer (you can hear him talk about his current predicament here). I would like to reiterate, of course, that Hitchens is still solidly atheist (strike that ‘still,’ actually, because it implies his mind will change, which I don’t think will happen, at least, as he says, in reference to the mind we know today as Hitchens’s mind—what medicine does to his mind is a different story), but nevertheless I can report that he does not mock those who say they are praying on his behalf. What you could really, do, of course, if you’re interested in making Hitch happy, is buy this book.

As for the few of you who wrote to Goldblog to say they were praying for Hitch’s death, I can say that he does not care one way or another what you do or think or pray, but on behalf of myself and the entire team here at The Atlantic, let me just say, Go f%$# yourselves.

I believe God will forgive me for that one.

(%$# mine)

Your Gibbs Update

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So, little Bobbie Gibbs has doubled down on his tantrum, refusing to offer anything beyond that he was “frustrated”, and then he went on to basically say that the liberal party base are nothing but a bunch of helpless co%$ suckers who have no where else to go, so they will show up to vote like the pathetic losers that you think that they are:

A day after the controversy over Gibbs’ remarks was seemingly been put to rest by a quick walk-back from the press secretary, Wednesday’s briefing seems likely to reignite the debate over the White House’s relationship with liberals. But if there was nervousness over base voters not heading to the polls, Gibbs didn’t show it:

“I don’t think [liberal voters won’t show up],” he said, “because I think what’s at stake in November is too important to do that.”

The translation here is, “Neener-neener you dweebs! What are you going to do, vote for Ralph Nader.“

That‘s really going to invigorate the base.

First, what The Rude Pundit said:

Finally, f%$# you, Mr. Press Secretariat, because you should be wooing the f%$# out of us. You should be trying to get in our underwear and hand job us with a smile on your face instead of treating us like a convenient punching bag because you don’t want to offend the precious “real America” or whatever bullsh%$ phrase politicians want to use to isolate and alienate us. Why? Because we’re the ones that made sure you are the Press Secretary.

(%$# mine)

And then we have Alan Grayson saying that he should be fired, and notes that he is frequently referred to as “Bozo the spokesman.”

If there is a lesson of the past 40 years in Politics, it is that dissing your base is a way to lose elections.

If this is how the Obama administration thinks it should win elections, I have no clue how the beat McCain in 2008.

*In a 110% purely heterosexual kind of way, of course, as the General would say.

I Love General J. C. Christian*

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He has come up with Burn the Confederate Flag Day, to be held on September 12:

Burn The Confederate Flag Day


Burn the Confederate Flag Day is a protest against the right’s exploitation of racial prejudice for political gain. We urge you to burn the Confederate flag, a long-time symbol of racial hatred, on Sept 12, the date when the racially-divisive Tea Party holds its annual hate fest.

Brilliant.

*In a 110% purely heterosexual kind of way, of course, as the General would say.