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Thursday, July 16, 2009
Obama's faith-based programsSarah Posner isn't doing her FundamentaList weekly column at The American Prospect Online any more. Which I think is too bad. It was a great weekly roundup of news on the Christian Right. But she's supposed to keep blogging there. And she has a new article out in The Nation, Obama's Faithful Flock 07/15/09 (08/03/09 issue), on the President's "faith-based" programs and some of the faithocrats involved. It's a mixed record, so far:Although the Obama administration eliminated federal funding for abstinence-only sex education, the HHS website directs potential grantees to abstinence-only funding available through state governments. ...Tags: obama administration
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
Not writing off Sarah Palin too soonBeliefnet's Steve Waldman makes a pretty decent case on why it would be premature to write Sarah Palin off for the 2012 Republican Presidential nomination in Why I'm Bullish on Sarah Palin's Prospects Huffington Post 07/15/09. He writes (emphasis in original):Religoius [sic] conservatives will be as important if not more so in the 2012 Republican primaries. Evangleicals acocunted for a bigger percentage of John McCain's general election vote than of George Bush's meaning that these voters have become amore central part of the party coalition. Two of the three early states (Iowa and South Carolina) have large evangelical populations, the third (New Hampshire) liking "mavericky" types.Rick Pearlstein writes ont he same topic in Beyond the Palin 07/10/09 (07/20/09 issue). He describes the current state of the tension between the country club and Christianist wings of the Republican Party. He perceives the tensions between the two wings to be increasing: The conservative intellectuals [the country club wing] once were able to work together more effectively with the conservative unwashed [the fundis]. Now, more and more, their recent irritation renders them akin to the Stalinist commissars mocked by poet Bertolt -Brecht, who asked if they might "dissolve the people/And elect another." The bargain the right has offered the downwardly mobile, culturally insecure traditionalist - give us your votes, and we will give you existential certitudes in a world that seems somehow to have gone crazy - is looking less like good politics all the time.He may be right. But various political analysts have been predicting that the alliance between the Wall Street and Main Street wings of the Party will soon break down for nearly three decades now. And it hasn't happened yet. Here is Thomas Edsall, whose record of political analysis has been highly dubious, writing in The Political Impasse New York Review of Books 03/26/1987 (behind subscription): The schisms facing the Republicans in the post-Reagan years appear likely to be at least as serious [as those of the Democrats]. The conservative wing of the GOP is full of discontent with Reagan but it has been unable to coalesce around a candidate, and it has wavered at various times between Representative Jack Kemp, Patrick J. Buchanan, and the television evangelist Pat Robertson. Vice President George Bush is running into increasing difficulty as he attempts to become an ecumenical nominee supported by both Reagan conservatives and by the GOP's moderate, East Coast faction. Senator Robert Dole, in turn, is trying to revive the Taft wing of the Republican party, for which the principal issue is the danger of the federal deficit, the same deficit that has made the Reagan economic and military program possible. Dole seeks, moreover, to expand his constituency with support for such liberal programs as food stamps and aid to the handicapped, as well as for such right-of-center causes as opposition to abortion and to gun control, and conservative appointments to the federal bench.Obama's team is on the right track in highlighting the extent to which the Republican Party is in reality led by Rush Limbaugh and other radio ranters. If there is a well-hidden faction of moderates within the Republicans Party, let them show themselves by lining up clearly against the Christianists on an issue of importance. The country club Republicans are likely to be riding the Christianist tiger for quite a while yet. Tags: christian right, christianism, republican party, republicans
Old news revisitedI realize that it's not exactly a breaking story that Maureen Dowd is a lunatic. That's been painfully obvious for a while. Her latest mental breakdown is called White Man’s Last Stand New York Times Online 07/14/09. The strangeness of this column is only fully apparent if you keep in mind that in the Bizarro World of our national press corps, MoDo is considered a liberal and a feminist.You might think that a leading political columnist would have a number of constructive ways to approach the historic Sonia Sotomayor hearings. She could write about the nominee's judicial philosophy, for instance. Or key cases likely to come before the Supreme Court. Or contemporary legal philosophies. Or the odd political spectacle of a bunch of old (and not-so-old) Republican white guys working hard to insure that their Party will receive as few as possible of those Latino votes that might otherwise threaten to come to their candidates. But for MoDo, the hearings bring to mind:
If MoDo weren't so representative of the frivolous attitude of our national press corps, it would be easy to write her off as the crazy aunt in the attic, babbling about sex and tossing out random literary references. Though her columns would be more appropriate in the Style section. But what MoDo really stresses about Sotomayor in this column is MoDo's own gender-nut obsessions. Despite her own position as a professional woman and an alleged feminist, women or men in the public eye who step outside the conservative gender-role assumptions she grew up with in her conservative Irish-Catholic family just send MoDo's troubled mind into orbit. So she paints Sotomayor as a cold-hearted bitch. Thus the "Sonia Legree" reference, which casts the first Latina nominee for the Supreme Court as the cruel white overseer in Uncle Tom's Cabin. MoDo pounds on the point. In the Babe Ruth reference, she writes that "the Bronx Bomber kept a robotic mask in place" during the hearings. I don't get any connection with Babe Ruth. But since some of the goofier precincts of the Republican world are comparing Sotomayor to one of the Reps' current favorite bogeymen, former Weather Underground member Bill Ayers, it's not a very funny reference. And, remember, MoDo passes as a "liberal"! MoDo writes of the nominee's cold-heartedness, "the only bleeding-heart thing about her was the color of her jacket." Fashion is a comforting subject for MoDo's strange mind, it seems. MoDo thought that Sototmayor made a "full retreat from the notion that a different life experience is valuable." Democrats in alleged liberal MoDo's view of the world are always big liars and hypocrites. Sotomayor used "a flat tone" in talking about 9/11, Lady MoDo complains. "Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer gamely tried to make the judge seem even more coldhearted," she reports. The nominee responded to one question with "an iciness that must have sent a chill up the conservative leg of Alabama’s Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, even as it left Obama hanging out on an empathy limb." You see, in DowdWorld, Obama is a big sissy girly-man because he once said something positive about empathy (or something like that) while Sotomayor is a cold-hearted, mannish shrew because she tried to sound like the professional judge she is. Near the end, MoDo goes into her own version of liberal boilerplate: Besides, it’s delicious watching Republicans go after Democrats for being too emotional and irrational given the G.O.P. shame spiral.It's all very amusing to Lady MoDo. To steal a Bob Somerby phrase, this is what life looks like from within the walls of Versailles. W. and Dick Cheney made all their bad decisions about Iraq, W.M.D.’s, domestic surveillance, torture, rendition and secret hit squads from the gut, based on false intuitions, fear, paranoia and revenge.And during those years, MoDo was obsessing about Monica Lewinsky, Hillary Clinton (also a mannish shrew in DowdWorld) and ridiculing those big sissy Democrats John Kerry and Barack Obama. MoDo devoted far more thought (if you can call it that) and emotion to the unspeakable vileness of Hillary Clinton than she did to any of those "bad decisions" she sniffs about in retrospect. Not content with humdrum facts, MoDo can read the minds of Cheney and Bush to know what motivated those decisions. In the reality-based world, it's still quite a mystery what actually motivated their Iraq War drive, in particular. Sarah Palin is the definition of irrational, a volatile and scattered country-music queen without the music. Her Republican fans defend her lack of application and intellect, happy to settle for her emotional electricity.MoDo's obsessions occasionally glob on to Republican targets, like Sarah Palin. Palin remains an object of general derision to the Beltway Village press. But you don't have to go further than Time magazine to see how easily ridicule can morph into admiration of Palin's supposed touch for the common folk. It should be obvious from this column devoted to attacking Sotomayor's robotic cold-heartedness, it's not a criticism for MoDo to talk about Palin's "emotional electricity". And what was Lady MoDo saying about the Republicans' White Princess during the 2008 campaign? This, for example: Sarah is a zealot, but she’s a fun zealot. She has a beehive and sexy shoes, and the day she’s named she goes shopping with McCain in Ohio for a cheerleader outfit for her daughter.In the column after that, MoDo was evidently ecstatic about the fact that she had a new sex angle to run with: Only four days into her reign as John McCain’s “soul mate,” or “Trophy Vice,” as some bloggers are calling her, on the ticket known as “Maverick Squared,” Palin, the governor of Alaska, has already accrued two gates (Troopergate and Broken-watergate), a lawyer (for Troopergate), a future son-in-law named Levi (a high school ice hockey player, described by New York magazine as “sex on skates”), and a National Enquirer headline about the “Teen Prego Crisis” with 17-year-old daughter Bristol. [my emphasis]The National Enquirer is a little high-brow for MoDo's taste, I would have thought. MoDo paired Palin with Hillary Clinton in her gender-nut obsession: If Barack Obama had chosen Hillary Clinton as his running mate, we would now be looking forward to the greatest night in the history of American politics: the Oct. 2 vice presidential debate between Ma Barker and Sarah Barracuda.MoDo was hearing voices in that one. MoDo didn't sound nearly so negative on Palin then as she was on Hillary Clinton: Sarah, who is now so renowned that she is known merely by one name and has a name ID of 90 percent, has to be a Kmart mom who appeals to Kmart moms and dads. She’s already shown that she can shoot the pig, put lipstick on it, bring home the bacon and fry it up in a pan. Now all she has to do is also prove that she can be the leader of the free world on a moment’s notice, and field dress Putin as adeptly as she can a moose.MoDo certainly seemed to have a more favorable view of Palin than of girly-man Obama: Sarah has single-handedly ushered out the “Sex and the City” era, and made the sexy new model for America a retro one — the glamorous Pioneer Woman, packing a gun, a baby and a Bible.Back to her current column: And then there’s the Supreme Court, of course, which gave up its claim to rational neutrality when the justices appointed by Republican presidents — including Bush Sr. — ignored what was fair to make a sentimental choice and throw the 2000 election to W.MoDo, like the rest of the Beltway press, spent 1999 and 2000 attacking Al Gore for being contemptible in about every imaginable way. Dowd devoted three columns during that period to Gore's bald spot. But now she's sorry about the way it turned out. It's against the iron law of the Village press, though, for MoDo to breathe a word about how her own irresponsibility and that of her fellow celebrity reporters and columnists played such a huge role in putting Dick Cheney and George Bush in control of the country. MoDo herself played a key role in spreading the themes about what a liar and phony and sissy that Gore supposedly was. Gore went on to win the Nobel Prize and do useful things in the world. MoDo continues to have her regularly scheduled twice-weekly breakdowns on the high-value journalistic real estate of the New York Times op-ed page. Tags: maureen dowd
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
Encounters with conservativesI've had some interesting little encounters with conservatives the last few days, some in person and some in cyberspace. I thought I would share a couple of stories.You're one, what am I? That phrase is used to describe a common style of conservative conversation. Or argumentation, though it's hard to distinguish the two sometimes. And it's a technique that I recognize, but find it hard to describe succinctly. The basic concept is, "I'm going to call you names but I'm not going to admit to holding the opinion I'm defending." The occasion of this instance was a Facebook posting linking this blog post: Obama as Chancellor of Weimar America by Joerg Wolf Atlantic Review 07/12/09. Joerg's blog is a really good one. The subject of that post was the story on which I had also blogged, Sen. Jim DeMint's Know-Nothing comment about how Germany had been a "social democracy" just before the Second World War. The comment in question was from a talk DeMint was giving hawking his new book Saving Freedom, which I'm sure will become a standard political science work overnight [NOT!]. The distinguished Senator from South Carolina said: Part of what we’re trying to do in “Saving Freedom” is just show that where we are, we’re about where Germany was before World War II where they became a social democracy. You still had votes but the votes were just power grabs like you see in Iran, and other places in South America, like Chavez is running down in Venezuela. People become more dependent on the government so that they’re easy to manipulate. And they keep voting for more government because that’s where their security is. When our immigrants get here, they’re worried, because they see it happening here.Quickie history: during the Weimar Republic of 1919-33, the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the Catholic Center Party were the two most important "Weimar parties". Meaning that they actually supported the democratic system of government. The Nazis, other rightwing nationalist parties, conservatives and (for different reasons) the Communist Party (KPD) didn't really support the Weimar regime. In the last couple of years of its existence, Weimar was really only a semi-parliamentary government, run in practice by conservative Chancellors operating under the authority of Presidential decrees. When Hitler first became Chancellor at the end of January 1933, there was one last parliamentary election held in March. The Communists were banned and the election took place in an atmosphere of repression, but the Nazis still failed to win an outright majority. When Hitler proposed the Enabling Law that gave him dictatorial powers, the SPD was the only party in Parliament to vote against it. (There were some individual exceptions in the vote.) In 1939, when the Second World War began, the SPD had been outlawed in Germany for over six years. It's active members operated underground or in exile. Not least of the problems of DeMint's idiotic identification of the Nazi regime with "social democracy" is that the Germans who actively took risks in favor of democracy during the Third Reich, like the active Social Democrats, deserve at least enough respect for people not to falsely identify them with the Nazis. Here is the interchange I had with a Facebook poster calling himself Richard Avery: Bruce Miller at 11:05pm July 12Avery made a classic "You're one, what am I?" pitch there. That's standard OxyContin style. If a Republican get caught saying something stupid or worse, Rush and his imitators quickly come up with a "But, but, Democrats do it too" example. But by his last comment, he was clearly agreeing with DeMint, but still ambiguously distanced himself from the actual comment: "I would not have used DeMint's rhetoric because it is counterproductive." It's similar in a way to playing tennis with someone for the first time and telling them what your own level is according to amateur tennis standards and they say, "Oh, I'm not that good." And then why you play them, you quickly see they are very good. I always wondered in those situations, what's the point of pretending? If you were playing for money and it was a hustle of some kind, I could at least see a point to it. But if it's just a casual game and you're going to quickly see the level at which they are playing, what's the point of the false modesty? It's like they're trying to be devious for the sake of being devious but not doing a good job of it. A phony fainting spell This is from a recent television appearance by Marcy Wheeler where she was talking about legal accountability for the torture perpetrators, where our delicate press corps - and pro-torture bloggers - were shocked, shocked and offended and mortified because she reference the Republicans' political jihad against Bill Clinton and used the phrase "blow job". Our press is still obsessing over those blow jobs. Chris Matthews and Maureen Dowd will apparently never stop fantasizing about them. But they were horrified at hearing the phrase "blow job" uttered on the air. Outrage over torture, tsk-tsking at the Cheney family or anyone else for defended sick sadistic torture on the air, explanations of the legal obligation to prosecute torture perpetrators? Not so much. Not much at all, really. Jamison Foser comments on this phenomenon in MSNBC's bizarre social norms: Sex bad, murder funny County Fair blog 07/14/09. Marcy herself, chagrined over the press corps' moronic reaction, "I don't know whether my efforts today helped or hurt those [accountability] efforts. Next time I'll just repeat, endlessly, torture torture torture. It'll probably cause the same kind of outrage." Eavesdropping on Republicans I was browsing in a used bookstore on Sunday and overheard the couple who were apparently the owners chatting with another like-minded couple. They were evidently Republicans who were embarrassed by Sarah Palin being one of the main public faces of their Party. An understandable feeling, no doubt. One of them bragged about having sent an e-mail to her "most intelligent" friends to complain about Palin. And one expressed enthusiasm for Peggy Noonan's recent criticism of Palin. Anyone who considers Bush-worshipper Peggy Noonan a sober analyst for the "most intelligent" - or even the least intelligent - is really in a bad way, I'd have to say. Now, I'd love to believe in pretty fantasies, like the tooth fairy and moderate Republicans. But I found myself thinking of how phony they were, talking their Country Club Republicans jive, pretending they didn't share the unsophisticated viewpoint of a Christian Right yayhoo like the one Sarah Palin portrays in her public image. I couldn't help but think that they would be great enthusiasts for Brother Jeb, who talks vaguely about upgrading the Party's image while defending that same positions that Palin herself takes. But check out the straight-line oil lobby position Palin takes in this op-ed in the Washington Post, The 'Cap And Tax' Dead End 07/14/09, which the OxyContin crowd somehow imagine is part of the Liberal Press Conspiracy So Vast: . Do the more "sophisticated" Republicans like Jeb Bush and Mitt Romney stand for anything different than this? Tags: republican party, republicans
Monday, July 13, 2009
Accountability for torture moves closerThe Obama administration seems to be sending up a new "trial balloon" about prosecuting the perpetrators of the Cheney-Bush torture program. Other new revelations about CIA lawlessness, including Cheney's pet assassination program, is also reminding us of how risky it is to allow the President and Vice President to operate unencumbered by the law.I've linked several commentaries below on what this latest round of the slow progress toward holding the torture perpetrator legally accountable. The bottom line really is that the law, including the Torture Convention of 1984 which as a ratified treaty has the same force of law as the Constitution itself, require the Obama administration to seek prosecutions of anyone for whom there is good evidence they broke the laws against torture. As the commentaries linked below describe, the Sunday morning gasbags were pooh-pooing this whole silly idea that those who committed criminal action in the torture program should be held legally accountable. One more sign of the deep-seated corruption of our broken national press in the United States. The torture issue isn't going away. The sooner the adminstration submits the whole thing to the normal process of investigating and prosecuting the perpetrators, the better. But it's not going away. No matter how much "Give 'Em Whine Harry" Reid in the Senate and the media priests of High Broderism want it to just go away. If it's such a depressing prospect for them, maybe some of them will just decide to retire and do the whole country a favor. Links: Daniel Klaidman, Independent's Day Online Newsweek 07/11/09 (07/20/09 issue). This is the "trial balloon" article. McJoan, Cheney, the CIA, and Congress: Now What? Daily Kos Diary 07/13/09. McJoan reminds us against what a joke the bold Maverick McCain's alleged opposition to the torture program really is. (My characterization, not hers.) Not that the Democrats as a group were a profile in courage on the issue. But McCain being celebrated by his silly press fans as a bold opponent of torture was one of the more ghastly farces of the Cheney-Bush era. Digby, Who Will Tell The President? Hulaballoo 07/13/09 Marcy Wheeler (emptywheel) Obama on the Afghan Massacre Emptywheel blog 07/13/09 John Amato, Destroying the Furniture: This Week's roundtable gagglers gag on the possiblity of torture hearings 07/13/09 Scott Horton, three posts on his No Comment blog 07/13/09: Will Holder Launch a Torture Investigation?; Is the Lid About to Blow on the Cheney Snuff Program?; Rep. King Calls for Scorched Earth Glenn Greenwald, The Holder trial balloon: Abu Ghraib redux 07/12/09 Scott Horton, Torture Prosecution Turnaround? The Daily Beast 07/12/09 Digby, Holder Of The Cards Hulaballoo 07/11/09 Joan Walsh, Will Eric Holder do the right thing? Salon 07/11/09 Glenn Greenwald, The new Report on illegal spying is not a real investigation Salon 07/11/09 Susie Madrak, Sy Hersh: Cheney Ran Assassin Ring Crooks and Liars blog 03/12/09 Tags: accountability for torture, torture
Friday, July 10, 2009
Stimulate Me AgainAs the unemployment rate climbs into double digits, and the Vice President says that the Obama Administration may have "misread" the economic situation, there are a few economists calling for a second stimulous package. The first one, $800 billion, did not quite do the trick.How worried should I be? If a second stimulous is needed, the Republicans are going to have a huge party, they will slam the Administration as hard as they possibly can, they will close their greedy fists tightly around the tax payer dollars, while Americans, those citizens who pay the taxes, struggle to survive. The Republicans will talk and talk, while Americans wonder where they are going to get the money for groceries, for mortgage payments, for shoes for the kids. I am a woman in my late forties, and I am all for more stimulous. In fact, if the books I have read lately have any truth to them, I can be stimulated many more times. I say, pile on the stimulous, guys, we can spend it as fast as you can print it.
Jeb's Esquire interview The text of the interview that He's about as explicit as it gets in saying that the Republicans' electoral troubles are not in substance or policy but are rather a matter of packaging, messaging, marketing: Conservatives can win, can draw people toward our cause with the proper language and the proper ideas. I don't think that conservatism has been rejected in the United States. I don't believe it. ...That's the "compassionate conservative" posture that they famously compassionate George W. Bush used in his Presidential candidacy in 1999-2000. Say things like, "The world is radically different than it was in the 1980s, dramatically different," that your press admirers can pick up on to say, now here's a man with fresh ideas and a new vision. But for policy, stick to the same old boilerplate slogans like in this interview: "What's the alternative? The alternative is to take time-tested practices and convert them to the world we live in. Which means you're going to cut taxes and cut spending." Got that? Barack Obama would not have gotten elected if he'd let us in on his secret plan prior to the election. He would not have gotten elected if he'd said, "... My idea is to create a massive cap-and-trade system [based on the idea] that CO2 is [a] pollutant and we need to tax it in a massive way to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions." ...Media Matters has been addressing this particular talking point of the climate change deniers highlighted in bold, e.g., Media promote claims of global cooling despite overwhelming consensus to the contrary 03/30/09. The global-warming-denial scam uses a similar approach to the industry-friendly Tobacco Institute, which presents research findings on the health effects of tobacco whose only purpose is to create an impression that the scientific/medical consensus on the matter is somehow "in dispute". Creationists use a similar method in opposing the entire concept of evolution, the existence of which is not in scientific dispute. But by raising pseudoscientific objections to it, the creationists try to leave the impression that a scientific controversy is there which doesn't exist. And this creation of phony controversies is accompanied by a denigration of science, framed as opposition to "dogmatic" science that defends elitist notions like evolution in some kind of more-or-less conspiratorial attempt to bamboozle the regular folks. This kind of pitch has a lot of appeal for the Republican base. And it's the kind of thing that our sad excuse for a national press can be persuaded represents plain-spokenness and a downhome touch. Time recently ran an article about Sarah Palin that shows how easily our press can turn their currently-prevailing Palin-is-a-dummy narrative into Palin-speaks-the-language-of-the-ordinary-people narrative. In fact, this Time piece adopts the latter approach and is downright adoring in tone. Their praise of Palin's Know-Nothingism could also apply to the type that The Outsider: Where Is Sarah Palin Going Next? by David Von Drehle and Jay Newton-Small Time Online 07/09/09: ... Palin's unconventional step [announcing she will step down from the Alaska governorship] speaks to an ingrained frontier skepticism of authority — even one's own. Given the plunging credibility of institutions and élites, that's a mood that fits the Palin brand. Résumés ain't what they used to be; they count only with people who trust credentials — a dwindling breed. The mathematics Ph.D.s who dreamed up economy-killing derivatives have pretty impressive résumés. The leaders of congressional committees and executive agencies have decades of experience — at wallowing in red ink, mismanaging economic bubbles and botching covert intelligence.I don't know exactly how Beck's book has been sold. But it's not unusual for the wingnut-welfare system of Republican foundations and think tanks to boost the early sales of favored conservative books by placing large initial orders and using the books as gifts, or returning some of them later to be remaindered. Also, can even Time reporters imagine that Beck's highly partisan, rightwing Republican schtick is a "pox-on-all-their-houses" posture? But he also does his "compassionate conservative" feint to praise the value of expertise in the context of foreign policy: I think it's okay to have a deeper understanding of things. I think it's okay to talk in three-syllable words. The world we're living in is incredibly complex. And simplifying things to the point where you're misunderstanding where we are as a nation isn't going to help people overcome their fears or give them hope that they can achieve great things. I don't get inspired by shameless populism.Palin hits similar themes to those of Outside her family's Dillingham smokehouse, Palin lays out a robust indictment of the Obama agenda. "President Obama is growing government outrageously, and it's immoral and it's uneconomic," she says. "The debt that our nation is incurring, trillions of dollars that we're passing on to our kids, expecting them to pay off for us, is immoral and doesn't even make economic sense. So his growth-of-government agenda needs to be ratcheted back, and it's going to take good people who have the guts to stand up to him." It was, to the extent that my brother was unable to get the Congress to go along with meaningful entitlement reform, although he tried, which by the way the Republicans were not supportive of. It was because we fought a war, and we had to build a homeland-defense structure that didn't exist. But I think my brother gets a bad rap about the general idea that there were massive amounts of spending beyond those two things.National security, in his view, is endangered by Medicare: The interest on the debt, and Medicare alone, will weaken our country to the point where we're not going to have the same influence that we need to have, or should have, or want to have in the world.And in case anyone thinks that the Catholic former Governor of Florida is going to be less Chrisitianist than his brother as President, he spells out how the Republican Party has to deal with its sins. No, not the torture program, not unjust war, not the Katrina disaster, not reckless disregard of the needs of our citizens, but the sin of losing the 2008 election to the Democrats: In this interim period, we have to pay for our sins and show some humility.A glimpse at the future envisioned for us by Tags: jeb bush, republican party, republicans, sarah palin
Thursday, July 09, 2009
Texas is the future?The conservative London Economist is suggesting that Texas is the wave of the future: America's future: California v Texas 07/09/09.It does provide a handy definition of the problem that has forced California's staet government for years to chronically operate on the verge of bankruptcy: No state has quite so many overlapping systems of accountability or such a gerrymandered legislature. Ballot initiatives, the crack cocaine of democracy, have left only around a quarter of its budget within the power of its representative politicians. (One reason budget cuts are inevitable is that voters rejected tax increases in a package of ballot measures in May.)But in thinking that Texas style government is the wave of the future, I guess The Economist's editors just snoozed through the Cheney-Bush administration, when we got to see Texas-style government implemented on a national and international scale. That would be the experiment that wrecked the world's financial system, slammed the world economy into the Great Recession, put the United States into the torture business, and produced corruption on a scale that makes Teapot Dome sound like an immaterial accounting error. Oh, and produced the worst strategic disaster in the history of American foreign policy with the Iraq War. No, thanks, eight years of that kind of "Texas" government was more than enough for a century or two! Tags: bush administration, california politics, predator+state, texas
Secular conservative culture warriorsBack in the days of Spiro Agnew, when the "culture war" as we know it was in its youth, being secular and a conservative culture warrior didn't seem like such a contradiction. With the dominance of the Christianist Right in today's Republican Party, though, it seems to be an odd eccentricity.Taki's Magazine is an Old Right isolationist online publication that tries to cling to a lonely brand of secular culture war. This article by Steve Sailer of the rightwing-extremist nativist hate group VDARE, How Multiculturalism Killed the Counter Culture 06/24/09, makes some weird argument about how rock-and-roll music is white ethnic heritage, or some such garbage. Sailer's ideological equivalents in the 1950s were calling the then-new popular music of rock "race music". And they didn't mean the white race, either. Aside from the bigotry, he makes this strikingly unreflective historical observation: The late 1960s remain the fastest-changing period in my lifetime. For example, I was recently telling my son about the worldwide demonstrations in 1968, when he asked, “Did feminism play a big role in 1968?”Uh, dude, if you're old enough to actually remember 1968, it most likely was the fastest-changing period in your life. You know, puberty, adolescence, acne, first kiss, etc. Maybe a teenager distracted by raging hormones and other things would only be able to grasp such things as fads. And while a young teenager might not realize that feminism long predated 1969 and environmentalism 1970, one would hope that he might have picked up on that sometimes during the subsequent decades. This column calls to mind what Arlo Guthrie has often said: "Anyone who says they remember the sixties probably wasn't there." And it's another anecdotal reminder that hardline conservatives are more defined by their image of "the sixties" than anyone else in American society. Tags: sixties, steve sailer
Wednesday, July 08, 2009
Jeb BushJeb.Bush. Jeb Bush Slams Obama, Neglects To Mention Palin As Future Leader Of The GOP Huffington Post 07/07/09Think about the implication of those words: Jeb.Bush. Bush Doctrine II. Compassionate enhanced interrogation. A kinder, gentler Predator State. Jeb.Bush. Tags: jeb bush
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