POLJUNK

ReasonTV recently interviewed John Avlon who is promoting his new book entitled, "Wingnuts, How The Lunatic Fringe is Hijacking America." In the interview, Avlon does a nice job of identifying an underlying problem in modern American politics by pointing out that our political discourse, fueled in no small part by the mainstream media (this includes Faux News), has been reduced to black and white, or, if you prefer, red and blue, absolutist support of one team (conservative) or the other (liberal). He points out that independents are the fastest growing political affiliation in America, as opposed to Democrats or Republicans. I think he is fair in his assessment that most Americans are a combination of fiscally conservative coupled with social liberalism.

However, I have a couple of issues with his choices of examples of extremists in politics and the media. He cited Alan Grayson as a left-wingnut and Michelle Bachmann as a right-wingnut as examples of wingnuts in politics. He then identified Keith Olbermann as a left-wingnut and Glenn Beck as a right-wingnut in the mainstream media. Avlon is correct that these individuals are some of the loudest mouthpieces for their respective political affiliations, but there is a major difference between these examples of left-wingnuttia and right-wingnuttia. Grayson and Olbermann, for all of their faults, aren't bullshitters. We may or may not agree with their opinions, and that's fine, but they don't make shit up about their political opponents that simply isn't true. (I tried to find examples of Grayson and Olbermann making shit up, but my search was fruitless except for - wait for it... wait for it... a few right-wingnut websites that equate disagreement with themselves with falsehood.) Bachmann and Beck, on the other hand, don't have a goddamned foot in reality.

And, just for fun: At the outset of the interview, I wonder if Avlon inadvertently juxtaposed "unite us" with "divide us" (?).

Posted by Jude Lemrow at 3:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Let's face it, it's been a tough year or so for the President. He came in riding a wave of popularity and super majorities in both houses of Congress. On paper, he should have been unstoppable. But that's not how it panned out. Republicans focused on a cynical strategy of obstructionism, betting that their efforts would leave President Obama with nothing to show for a year of trudging on Health Care, which—right or wrong—is the President's primary domestic policy focus in these first two years of his administration. Of course, Blue Dogs and lefty Dems haven't helped him either, proving that numbers sometimes do add up to nothing.

The President himself has made some missteps and not getting out in front of the Days of Rage of last summer's nonsensical Tea Party protests and Town Hall donnybrooks is something he's still paying for. He lost the narrative and for most politicians that is the end of the story.

So where is the guy who campaigned like a warrior and beat everyone from the Clintons to the McCains and a host of others along the way? Where is that rough and tumble upstart from Chicago? He's back. This week marks the Final March of Reform and the President is doing what he does best: Campaigning. The entire White House apparatus is in campaign mode. Get your fact sheets, talking points (thoughtfully broken down into Twitter-friendly 140 characters or fewer), and marching orders. President Obama minced no words when he told congressional liberals that the chances for reform in our lifetime and his Presidency (and by extension, their own political fortunes) are on the line. If not now? If not us? When and who?

Posted by Derek Phillips at 6:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

In case you were wondering (and I know you were...), the great financial meltdown that began in America and rippled around the world in 2008 has its roots in the hippie movement of the 1960's and its birth can be traced directly to that horrific cauldron of wanton immorality that would forever be known simply as Woodstock. At least, such is the premise of an upcoming "documentary" film called Generation Zero from producer David Bossie. The Christian Science Monitor's Mark Guarino reported that according to Bossie, "generational narcissism, as represented by the 1969 Woodstock Festival, is responsible for the excessive spending, mortgage crisis, and recklessness on Wall Street."

Bossie's money quote:

"The people who were at Woodstock turned into the yuppies of the '80s and the junk bond traders of the '90s and the Wall Street executives of the 2000s," he says. "They went from Woodstock to driving a Jaguar."

Really? The people? All of them? Nobody who attended Woodstock chose a different path in life? I guess I wouldn't be surprised if a few of them did wind up on Wall Street later in life. I'm sure that some of the 10,000 people who were at the Billy Squier concert that I attended in 1984 went on to do great things. No word yet on what a monumental event that turned out to be...

Every generation celebrates itself in some fashion. For years we have been listening to our elders describe themselves as The Greatest Generation (see Tom Brokaw's book entitled The Greatest Generation). People like to tell themselves that they are important. But, as the film's trailer informs us, there are four "turnings" in history. Yes, four (4): The Crisis, The High, The Awakening, and The Unravelling. The trailer reminds us that, "history repeats itself," before devolving into what looks like a promo for Shark Week. Never mind that if one believes that history repeats itself, then it makes no sense to declare the cause of one specific event to be one other specific event because, presumably, events repeat themselves and, thus, there really is no beginning and no end to the cycle. But I digress...

I wonder if Bossie's accusation of "generational narcissism" is really a veiled attack on the larger civil rights movement of the 1960's. I mean, before the moral meltdown of the 1960's, women, blacks, furriners, and homosexuals sure knew their places and all was white, um, I mean right with the world.

And if the name David Bossie strikes a bell, perhaps it is because Bossie is the president of Citizens United, an ultra right-wing organization that, according to its website, "seeks to reassert the traditional American values of limited government, freedom of enterprise, strong families, and national sovereignty and security." (Reassert sovereignty? - I thought we settled that like 230 some odd years ago when we kicked England in the balls.) Bossie and Citizens United released Hillary, The Movie in 2008 and Bossie was the lead investigator in the Clinton / Whitewater investigation in the 1990's.

The idea that the social movements of the 1960's are the beginning of the end of a previously more perfect America has become central to modern conservative mythology. Everything is always somebody else's fault. We can't possibly hold the captains of American free market loving capitalism responsible for themselves.

Coming soon to a Tea Party event near you...

Posted by Jude Lemrow at 5:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

(via Media Matters) - Arizona Congressman Trent Franks recently floated the idea that African Americans were better off under the jobs program known as Slavery than they are under "the policies of today." Franks suggested, without citing a source, that half of all black children today are aborted. Therefore, he seems to believe, those supposedly aborted children (they are children to him, not fetuses... - but I'll leave the weight of those details to our humble readers...) would have been better off enslaved than aborted.

This video is close to ten minutes long, but it is worth watching to get a glimpse into some of the thought process that drive the modern conservative movement.

And all of this during Black History Month! (Have you ever noticed that Black History Month is February, the shortest month of the year?)

BTW: Franks seems to await the moment when Rachel Maddow, "wakes up and smells the coffee." Wonder what he meant by that...

Posted by Jude Lemrow at 12:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This has been bouncing around my head for months now—at least since the run-up to our Afghanistan escalation: how have Republicans gone from being the guys hollering for military deference uber alles (despite a US Constitution saying something to to the contrary) to the guys who can't seem to support anything our military leaders recommend?

Steve Benen seems to agree:

Obama has spent a year following the guidance of military leaders, and Republicans have spent a year breaking with the judgment of the military establishment.

It's a fascinating dynamic. On everything from civilian trials to Gitmo to torture, we have two distinct groups -- GOP leaders, the Cheneys, Limbaugh, and conservative activists on one side; President Obama, Gen. Petraeus, Secretary Gates, Colin Powell, Adm. Mullen, Adm. Blair, and Gen. Jones on the other...McConnell and his Republicans cohorts are reluctant to admit it, and political insiders have been slow to acknowledge it, but what we're witnessing is exceedingly rare -- the Republican establishment openly rejecting the judgment of the military establishment.

Via: The Daily Dish

We even had Jake Tapper today tweeting a quote from John McCain in 2006 that is sure to haunt him now that the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs has called for repealing Don't As, Don't Tell:
@jaketapper: McCain 06: "the day the leadership of the military comes to me and says, Senator, we ought to change the policy..."

Well...?

Posted by Derek Phillips at 7:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

My favorite part of the 2008 presidential campaign was when Barack Obama addressed John McCain's (and moreso, Sarah Palin) bad habit of associating Obama with various unsavories. The favorite line at the time was that Obama was "palin' around with terrorists," to which the Democratic nominee responded that if McCain really believed it he should "say it to my face" in the upcoming debate. It was the point when I knew he had it in the bag. He out-muscled the darling of the "pro-defense" Republican straight talker with a bar room request to take this outside. McCain of course shrunk away.

It's been that kind of tough talk I'd been missing as the President strove for bi-partisanship in passing healthcare reform. It didn't come and the Republicans took control of the debate and poisoned the discussion with nonsense like death panels and federal takeovers of health care. I wanted Barack Obama to get tough and call bullshit. He didn't and reform is all but sunk when we've come so close.

The State of the Union address piqued my hopes again though when he called out Republicans for simply opposing and not governing. Now today, in a televised appearance before the House GOP retreat in Baltimore President Obama more forcefully took Republicans to task.

If the way these issues are being presented by the Republicans is that this is some wild-eyed plot to impose huge government in every aspect of our lives, what happens is you guys then don't have a lot of room to negotiate with me. I mean, the fact of the matter is that many of you — if you voted with the administration on something — are politically vulnerable in your own base, in your own Party. You've given yourselves very little room to work in a bipartisan fashion. Because, what you've been telling your constituents is: this guy's doing all kinds of crazy stuff that is going to destroy America.

That is Barack Obama calling bullshit.

Continue reading "The President Gets Tough" »

Posted by Derek Phillips at 4:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The blogosphere was abuzz today with the news from the Obama Administration that it was floating a proposal of a three-year freeze discretionary of federal spending not related to national security. Reactions ranged from a suggestion that the move was a cheap and infantile gimmick; to a discussion of how both the political left and right will hate the freeze; and to a somewhat cooler and sober sentiment that, "sometimes a freeze isn't that much of a freeze."

CNN.com provides a brief summation of what this could mean:

When the White House talks about non-security discretionary spending, it's referring to spending on an array of domestic programs -- everything from agriculture to energy -- that add up to $447 billion of roughly $3.5 trillion in the federal budget. It does not include Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Obama's plan to freeze spending would not apply to those or other entitlement programs.

According to CNN, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said, "Instead of wielding an across-the-board axe, the president will cut programs that are duplicative or that he believes serve no important purpose."

Let's bear in mind that there's a big difference between freezing funding and eliminating funding, and some programs that might be affected recently received between seven and ten percent funding increases. Of course, I need not point out the apparent irony of an Administration that has staked no small amount of political capital on stimulus spending suddenly announcing a spending freeze. But I guess that raises a question. If Gibbs is right (not just spinning) and the freeze targets non-essential and/or duplicative government services, whereas much of the stimulus money targeted much-needed infrastructure projects, then is the freeze not such a big deal, at least with regard to the Administration's overall agenda? – The point being that it is possible to have a stimulus program while paring back outmoded or redundant spending. The stimulus was not intended to be a waste of money, it was intended to be an investment.

Posted by Jude Lemrow at 11:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It's been a tough week, that's for sure, but not the disaster to Democrats and liberals some (including many Democrats and liberals) would have you believe. So now it's a test of your mettle. Are you up to the fight? Andrew Sullivan lays out the stakes:

This is about more than health reform and we have to see it in that context. This is about a cynical nihilist attempt to break this presidency before it has had a chance to do what we elected it to do by a landslide vote. It is an attempt to destroy a majority's morale, to break a president's foreign policy autonomy, to prevent engagement in the Middle East peace process, to stop action on climate change, to restore torture, to increase tensions with the Muslim world, to launch a war on Iran. We cannot delude ourselves that if Obama fails, this is not the alternative. It is.

Barack Obama is talking a good game and we'll see if he's up to the task, but what are you going to do?

UPDATE:
Sullivan is still at it, encouraging everyone (including the President) to get mad and fight back.

He must not just rally the House Dems, he must rally the country. He must bring us back in. And we must back him up. This is not just about a centrist comprehensive health reform bill. It is about defeating an entire brand of cowardly, cynical, spin cycle bullshit that has brought this country down and promoting an adult and reasonable discourse that grapples with our problems.

Remember, this is coming from a conservative who is disgusted with where the American conservative movement has gone.

Posted by Derek Phillips at 1:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I'll admit some sympathies with the Tea Partiers. I understand their frustration and anger. I get it. But I also think it's childish and naïve. I have the same sympathies for Libertarians, which is an ideology I explored years ago. The problem with it for me was like any ideology, it only works in ideal and theoretical situations. Sure, I am all for limited federal government in theory, but I also want to ensure we have safe roads, steady interstate commerce, protection of civil rights across state lines, etc. etc.

But there's a bigger, practical problem with ideology in that it doesn't account for the realities of governing. In my ideal world we would have single-payer universal healthcare for all American citizens. It makes the most financial sense and also fits with my moral beliefs. But it's not politically viable today, so my options are to cling to a pipe dream or accept incremental steps that are imperfect but get us closer to the ideal. As a pragmatic idealist, I chose the latter.

Continue reading "Maybe We Should Call It IDEALogy" »

Posted by Derek Phillips at 12:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

So, I was just finishing my lunch while watching CNN and they played a clip of Former New York Mayor and Republican Presidential hopeful Rudy Giuliani. Apparently, while being interviewed on Good Morning America, he criticized President Obama's approach to terrorism, using the example of the near-tragedy on Christmas Day as a sign of the Obama Presidency's shortcomings. To highlight his perceived contrast between the Bush Administration's and the Obama Administration's approaches to terrorism, he said that there were no attacks on American soil during the Bush years. That's right, the guy who became "America's Mayor" when his city was attacked on September 11, 2001 and subsequently forged a campaign to seek the Republican nomination for President that banked almost entirely on his role in the response to 9/11, seemed to have forgotten 9/11. Never mind that Republicans scream all day long that Americans, and Democrats and anybody else who isn't ultra right-wing, has forgotten the lessons of 9/11.

A few minutes after I saw Rick Sanchez run the Giuliani clip, Sanchez shared with his viewers a statement from a Giuliani that clarified and corrected the former mayor's misstatement. At first, that might seem to be the appropriate response from Team Giuliani. After all, Giuliani certainly wouldn't be the first public figure to misspeak on camera. I think then-Candidate Obama, after a hectic day on the campaign trail, once said that the USA had 58 states.

However, I wonder if there isn't something else going on here. The only people who are going to see or hear Giuliani's correction are those of us who pay close attention to politics. I wonder if Giuliani deliberately made the misstatement, knowing that the bulk of Good Morining America's viewers might not going to think about his statement enough to think something was wrong with it, much less look for a retraction or correction. If enough right-wing mouthpieces issue enough history-rewriting statements often enough, eventually people will begin to believe it. This sort of thing is standard fare for FOX News and other conservative misinformation outlets.

Posted by Jude Lemrow at 2:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A few things bother me about this exchange between CNN's Rick Sanchez and Senator John Ensign (R-NV) that has some people worked up that this was some sort of ambush on the senator.

1. Ambush? That's nonsense. The deference already afforded to government officials by the media in order to secure access to said officials is bordering on pandering. The role of the media is to be a check on power so I don't have a problem with tough questions for any politician, especially those relating to abuse of power as Ensign of which Ensign has been accused.

2. Speaking of deference...what is up with the set-up? How many ways can Sanchez tickle Ensign's ass before he finally asks the tough question? Ensign has always tried to be a "stand-up guy?" Explain that to his wife and the dude who is married to his girlfriend. Oh that's right, you can't because Ensign and his parents paid them off.

3. Sanchez, upon hearing multiple times that his subject would NOT answer the questions, should have said, "So, you're refusing to address these issues, Senator? Is that how you'd like this reported?" Never, ever accept the dodge, "I have already answered these questions..."

4. And what mouse is in Ensign's pocket since he's clear that "we" will be cleared of all charges. He is the only one facing ethics charges.

Posted by Derek Phillips at 5:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Despite the fact that the suspects in all known plots in the US and attached to US interests hail from a wide variety of backgrounds and nationalities, some on the right still cry for racial profililing.

As ThinkProgress reports today, radio host Mike Gallagher said,"There should be a separate line to scrutinize anybody with the name Abdul or Ahmed or Mohammed." (Note: Those are some of the most common names in the world.)

But radio hosts are paid to incite people and get them worked up. What about those who are responsible for enacting laws and defending our Constitution? Just ask Rep. Peter King (R-NY), who said, "100 percent of the Islamic terrorists are Muslim, and that is our main enemy today. So why we should not be profiling people because of their religion?"

Now, never mind the dopey redundancy of "100 percent of the Islamic terrorists are Muslim," that's like saying 100% of Christian terrorists believe Jesus is our savior--no shit. The question is what percentage of the total Muslim population is represented by the number of known plotters? If you're trying to catch people doing bad things shouldn't you instead focus on patterns of behavior? Would racial profiling have snagged Timothy McVeigh, Terry Nichols (both white, American born), Jose Padilla (Hispanic, American born), or Richard Reid (English and Jamaican, English born)?

The goal is to stop terrorists, regardless of religious affiliation. Those bombs set by pro-life Christianists are just as deadly as those set by Islamofascists.

Posted by Derek Phillips at 12:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Democratic Rep. Parker Griffith announced Tuesday that he's switching parties from D to R and cited his belief that Democratic policies were sending us down the road to debt-laden ruin. He's a freshman congressman so it's not the earth-shattering shift you might expect, but the timing and circumstances are interesting. This is the week Democrats (and make no mistake, it's Democrats alone) will pass healthcare reform in the Senate, bringing us just two short steps from the biggest fundamental reform to our health insurance system in at least two generations. Details of the House and Senate bills aside, this is an opportunity for Democrats to stake a claim for passing historical legislation. It's a far cry from the do-nothing slog we've become accustomed to.

But beyond that, this may be the worst time in modern political history to jump ship to the Republican party unless you're coming from the far-right fringe of nutter politics. With Tea Partiers, Birthers and Tenthers purging the existing ranks of actual, loyal Republicans because they don't hew to a strict conservative orthodoxy, do you really think this is the right time to come in as a Yellow Dog? That D after your name doesn't fade fast.

Posted by Derek Phillips at 3:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Poor Frummy. Necon apologist and former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum is already out there trying to resuscitate the horribly damaged image of an utterly failed ideaology; not by defending its tenets but by pretending it was something else entirely. His Newsweek essay "How the Neocons Can Save America" is just sad, beyond the nonsense of the title.

Now, Frum admits early on that the brand is beat up and that the recent reaction on the right has been damaging to conservatism at best, and political suicide at worst. And he's right that simply being the opposition party isn't enough to get back to being the governing party:

The American right that has emerged since 2008, of Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh, is a movement of cultural protest. But protest is not enough. Americans won't reject even a badly damaged incumbent unless they see a credible alternative.

That's true, just ask John Kerry. The problem is that Frum doesn't lay blame squarely where it belongs: at the feet of neoconservatism itself and its best/worst practitioner, George W. Bush. He tries to pretend that the results of the 2006 and 2008 stompings the GOP took weren't so much a shift in political winds as a minor adjustment and a message to Republicans, who the populace would really rather have in office (despite subsequent drubbings by voters).

...that rejection did not mean they wanted to hand the keys to the car to an unchecked Democratic Party. Americans want balance in their politics.

No, they don't. They want competence in their government. Most Americans are only casually associated with a political party and most of them could barely tell you what their affiliated party's platform is. They don't are about balancing the parties and triangulation and political realignment. That's for dorks like us.

The silliest part of the essay though is when he tries to revise with a list of five bullets what constitutes American conservatism. Problem is that three of the five describe the antithesis of neoconservatism and George W. Bush.

Continue reading "Finding Neo" »

Posted by Derek Phillips at 6:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Andrew Sullivan is having a field day with the various fact checking issues in Sarah Palin's book. My recent favorite is this gem found by the Huffington Post:

Perhaps the most embarrassing gaffe so far is her mis-attributed quote to UCLA basketball legend John Wooden. As the epigram to Chapter Three, "Drill, Baby, Drill," Palin assigns the following remarks to the Hall of Fame hoops coach:

Our land is everything to us... I will tell you one of the things we remember on our land. We remember our grandfathers paid for it--with their lives.

Only the quote wasn't by John Wooden. It was written by a Native American activist named John Wooden Legs in an essay entitled "Back on the War Ponies," which appeared in a left-wing anthology, We Are the People: Voices from the Other Side of American History, edited by Nathaniel May, Clint Willis, and James W. Loewen.

That is rich...

Posted by Derek Phillips at 4:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

In case you missed it, here's a clip of a bunch of teabaggers at a townhall meeting here in Illinois the other day. They stopped screaming, "USA, USA, USA," long enough to allow a woman to begin to tell a nightmarish tale of her daughter's passing away in part due to a lack of health insurance. Then they began heckling her and laughing at her. Stay classy, conservatives!

Happy Thanksgiving!

Posted by Jude Lemrow at 10:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I can't help but quote him these days because he's the only sane person on the Conservative side I can find.

Andrew Sullivan takes on the RNC's dopey Ten Commandments for being a Reagan Republican...or whatever. He takes on each of the ten bullets and then summarizes:

If a potential Republican candidate disagrees with more than two of the above, the RNC wants to deny funding. I'm not sure how anyone could agree or disagree with this crapulous mishmash of rhetorical degeneracy. But as a sign of intellectual health, it is depressing. It's a sign that denial is deep and a serious attempt to govern, as opposed to posture, is still far from the Republican psyche.

Can't be easy for the guy...

Posted by Derek Phillips at 4:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

"It's hard to be more conservative than I am on issues -- though there are different ways stylistically to communicate that -- I'm pro-life, I'm pro-gun, I'm pro-family, and I''m anti tax." ... "I don't know what else you're supposed to be, except maybe angry too."

Via TPM

Posted by Derek Phillips at 3:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Nate Silver nails it:

To channel my Inner Krugman: it's a political imperative for the Democrats of the highest order to get some sort of jobs bill to Obama's desk -- the sooner and the bigger the better. Suppose you could create jobs at a price of about $40,000 per, which is higher than the figure suggested by empirical research on highly targeted jobs programs. A $200 billion bill would then create 5 million new jobs, which would reduce unemployment by about 3.3 percent (e.g. from 10.2 percent to 6.9 percent).

Everything the president wants to do is being pulled down by anxiety around unemployment. His argument would be that reforming healthcare is essential to bringing those jobs back and easing the burden on small businesses in particular, which is true, but the American people ain't feeling that right now. They just want a job, man.

Posted by Derek Phillips at 5:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Two things of particular interest in this interactive presidential approval tracker: 1) The two Bush's have eerily similar approval trends that both peak at tragic times (in the days following the launch of Desert Storm for 41 and the days following September 11 for 43); 2) Though Republicans are basking in the falling returns for President Obama, his trend most closely aligns with that of Ronald Reagan's. Love him or hate him now it's undeniable that Reagan is widely viewed as a "Great" president and one who is viewed positively by a lot of Americans. Oh yeah, and Republicans want to have 10 million of his babies.

Posted by Derek Phillips at 4:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)