Month: December 2008

Freeper Coalition

by digby

Well, Obama may not have pleased his liberal base the last couple of days, but he has made great strides with the Freepers. Pam Spaulding ventured into the slime and came back with this:

I LOVE IT! Nothing so much pleases me as seeing the queerly beloved get angry at Rick Warren over his endorsement of Proposition 8! BRING IT ON!!! “Furious” and “fierce” are two more words that now belong exclusively to the “gay” emotional typology. great isn’t it to see these homo’s get done over, the idiots actually thought he was going to give them marriage right off the bat. maybe they never heard Biden or knew in the black community or the area of chicago homo’s are not well received. Not only that but did they take no notice of the church he went to for 20 years obama is actually pissing the left off more than the right and it is great to see
Is B Hussein telling the rumpriders to pound sand instead of each other? Did the gays finally realize what Muslims do to homos? Well, they elected a muzzie. These f@gs are fascists and way over the top. I have always said there is no difference between sex-preference and racism, and the language of sexual-orientation goes right ahead with advocacy of bestiality and other abominable degenerate orientations.

There’s more if you can stomach it. (The sad truth is that most of this is just a cruder version of what Rick Warren said.)

I think Ezra got exactly why this hits such a nerve:

The going explanation for Warren’s presence on the inauguration podium is that “this aims to be the most open and inclusive inauguration in history,” as Linda Douglas, a spokeswoman for the inauguration committee, told Politico. It’s a peculiar definition of “open and inclusive.” Warren, after all, is the only preacher giving the invocation. He will not share the stage with a rabbi, an imam, a monk, and an episcopalian. And Warren is not being chosen because he himself is open and inclusive. He thinks abortion a “holocaust” and urged his flock to vote for Prop 8. He compared gay marriage to incest and polygamy and pederasty, and when asked if he really thought those things “equivalent to having gays getting married,” he replied, “Oh, I do.” The tolerance Obama is asking for, in other words, is not from Warren. It’s from the LGBT community, and women. He is asking them to be tolerant of Warren’s intolerance. It’s a cruel play, framed to marginalize the legitimate anger of those who Warren harms and discriminates against.

And Jesse at Pandagon nails what else about this is so frustrating to those of us who’ve been out here battling with these people for years:

It’s the wholehearted embrace of the old right-wing complaint that calling out intolerance is the actual intolerant act …

The right has just had their phony victimization validated by the new Democratic president and as you can see from the Freepers, they are thoroughly reveling in it.

I also came across this little tid-bit about Obama’s relationship with Warren from Mark Ambinder, which I found quite astonishing:

The good pro-life theologian first met Obama in 2006 at a Saddleback AIDS forum in California. Obama used the occasion to press the evangelical pastors present to embrace “realism” when they considered the issue; preach abstience, yes, but preaching against contraception can kill. (Here’s some of what Obama said that day: “I know that there are those who, out of sincere religious conviction, oppose such measures. And with these folks, I must respectfully but unequivocally disagree. I do not accept the notion that those who make mistakes in their lives should be given an effective death sentence.”)

When I interviewed Obama last year, he told me that the moment was integral to his decision to run for president; when was the last time, he had asked himself, when a Democrat had had such dialog with pastors about AIDS?

I’m sure Obama doesn’t really think he invented this Democratic “outreach and dialog” stuff with the evangelicals. That would be bizarre (and more than a trifle egotistical .)

Here’s an excerpt from Jim Wallis’ Sojourner Magazine from 1996:

Nationally known religious leaders are being invited who don’t agree on everything, but who have important things to say about faith and political responsibility during this election year. Both Republican and Democratic leaders will be discussing politics and morality and the need for new solutions that lead us beyond our present impasse. Leaders from the evangelical world, the Catholic Church, the black churches, and the mainline denominations will discuss their efforts to offer an alternative to both the Right and the Left and to create a movement for a new and more spiritual politics in this country. We will profile some of the most effective groups who are already doing that and providing critical leadership in areas such as transforming poverty, protecting the environment, healing our racial divides, rebuilding families and communities, and restoring moral values. And we will be uplifted by some of the best gospel music in the country. Speakers will examine fresh ideas for forging new partnerships between religious communities and all levels of government, for the sake of our children and the poor. Members of Congress from both parties will reflect on the moral and spiritual challenges they face. We’ll hear from organizations that are already working to create a new politics—from the Christian Community Development Association and Bread for the World to the Children’s Defense Fund and the Ten Point Coalition. Prominent journalists have been invited to discuss the role of the press in covering politics and religion. We’ll all have the chance to talk with other activists, organizers, pastors, and community leaders from around the country.

Sound familiar?

Clinton held the first white house conference on AIDS in 1995 and invited many religious types to talk about it. (In those days the religious right was appalled and disgusted by AIDS. It was only when it presented conversion opportunities in Africa that they got interested.)

And everyone was always whining about civility. Always. Here’s an article about the Wallis event with a quote from a prominent Democrat:

Senator Bill Bradley (D., N.J.), who is retiring at the end of the year, told Call to Renewal that he finds “a yearning out there in America that is deeper than the material [things] in our life” but also, at times, “an unwillingness to hear the message.” Americans, he said, are tired of the “mind-numbing shouting match between two opposing parties” and of a politics controlled by special interests, the ambition of politicians and the political slogans that emerge from focus groups.

Plus ca change and all that.

It’s not a crime for Americans to disagree on important issues and a political party can’t possibly be all things to all people no matter how big the tent. Some things are irreconcilable. A belief in the right to choose abortion vs those who believe it is murder is one of them. The right for gays to marry vs those who think it’s comparable to pedophilia is another. That’s ok. We have a political system and a wider culture that can accommodate that. But no single political party can and it’s a fools errand if Democrats think their majority can be enlarged by appealing to people who believe so differently.

Roosevelt’s New Deal coalition was made possible by the agreement that he would not pursue civil rights. And we all know that the New Deal coalition fell apart because of it. I would hope that we’ve come far enough as a country that Obama’s new majority is solid without having to make a similar soulless compromise. We may be looking at an economic crisis of 1932 proportions, but there’s no need to accommodate people who would take the culture back to 1932 as well.

Update: Here’s an interesting little piece I turned up from the New Yorker about Bill Clinton’s relationship with Billy Graham — and his son Franklin. It’s very telling.

Update II: Joan Walsh makes the case against Warren on a whole host of issues, including some of which I was unaware:

I tried to keep an open mind when Obama began courting Warren three years ago; Salon sent a reporter to cover the popular young Democrat’s first visit to Saddleback Community Church, to talk about its laudable AIDS work, in 2006. I believe in seeking common ground, and I was curious to see what Warren – and Obama – were up to. I watched carefully when Obama went to Saddleback for a presidential forum in August, along with John McCain. As I wrote at the time, I think Obama got punked; Warren spent an inordinate amount of time at the forum on issues like abortion and gay rights, and the promised focus on poverty reduction and social justice got short shrift. At Saddleback services the next day, Mike Madden didn’t find one worshiper planning to vote for Obama. One day after that, a self-satisfied Warren told Beliefnet he couldn’t say for sure whether Obama could compete for the evangelical vote, but he insisted that an antiabortion voter backing a pro-choice candidate would be like a Holocaust survivor voting for a Holocaust denier.

More at the link…

Update III: Greenwald is on the same wavelength.

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Congratulations

by digby

…. to Chuck Todd for his new post as Chief White House correspondent at NBC. This is is addition to his job as political director at NBC, so I’m relieved that we won’t be denied more expert analysis like this:

When Liberals Attack: Axelrod and Gibbs have to be smiling this morning with the news that gay-rights groups are angry that Obama has announced that conservative evangelical Rick Warren will give the invocation at Obama’s inauguration. Why are they smiling? Because it never hurts — at least when it comes to governing or running for re-election — when you sometimes disappoint/anger your party’s interest groups (in this case, People for the American Way and the Human Rights Campaign).

Just asking, but is anyone but People for the American Way and the Human Rights Campaign surprised that Rick Warren is going to give a prayer at the inauguration? Where was this outrage when Obama appeared at Warren’s Saddleback forum back in August? The difference may be that the forum came before Proposition 8 passed in California. As for the pure politics of this, when you look at the exit polls and see the large numbers of white evangelicals in swing states like North Carolina, Florida and Missouri, as well as emerging battlegrounds like Georgia and Texas, you’ll understand what Obama’s up to.

Yep. But I must have missed all the times when Todd applauded Bush for reaching out to liberals and annoying his most ardent supporters. Oh that’s right, that’s because Bush never did it. In fact, I’m pretty sure he was given plaudits by the political establishment for years for his strong convictions and principled loyalty to his supporters — those very same white evangelicals. Everyone knows they are the only slice of the American electorate worth having.

Update: Someone asked me who made the invocation at Bush’s inauguration. It was supposed to be Billy Graham, but he was sick so his son Franklin stood in. And it was controversial, because the invocation had always been ecumenical before but Graham made it explicitly Christian for the first time.

Franklin Graham’s a wonderful fellow:

• I believe that God created one man and one woman. He gave sex to us, God did, and sex is to be enjoyed and is to be used within the bounds that God created…. In sexual behavior outside the parameters that God created, we’re at high risk, and we’re seeing the evidence of this with HIV/AIDS. We’re outside of these parameters, and we have a huge global problem now.”[5]
• “And I think we’re going to have to use every — and I hate to say it, hellish weapon in our inventory, if need be, to defeat these [terrorists]. But let’s use the weapons we have, the weapons of mass destruction if need be and destroy the enemy.”(CNN, September 14, 2001)

That’s not much different from Warren, who believes in assassinating foreign leaders and compares gay relationships to pedophilia. But it’s hard to find a Christian minister who some people believe is responsible for genocide like Franklin Graham. That’s why Warren is a middle of the road right wing pastor: he didn’t commit genocide. It’s an unusual standard but when it comes to the religious right, it’s probably pretty fair.

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Meltdown In Sacramento

by digby

Dday has been blogging the nuclear meltdown that’s going on in California’s capital right now, with the government a hairsbreadth away from bankruptcy. It’s very, very ugly and if you don’t think the bankruptcy of the most populous state in the union will impact your life, think again. The cascading of this problem is a serious danger to everyone. To those of us who live here, it’s a nightmare.

At this moment, it looks like they may pass enough of a small placeholder budget to get through a couple of weeks. But there’s no way of knowing if the Governor will sign it if it hits his desk. The government is both dysfunctional and broke, not a pretty scenario.

For those of you who are econ geeks, this is a story worth following. The best place to do that is at Calitics. They are, as far as I know, the only California progressives following this in detail.

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Not A Disorderly Collapse, A Nice Orderly One

by dday

George Bush was asked about the auto industry rescue today during a speech at the American Enterprise Institute. He said that he hasn’t made up his mind yet. But the signs are clear that he’s looking at an “orderly” bankruptcy for the automakers.

The Bush administration is seriously considering “orderly” bankruptcy as a way of dealing with the desperately ailing U.S. auto industry.

White House press secretary Dana Perino said Thursday, “There’s an orderly way to do bankruptcies that provides for more of a soft landing. I think that’s what we would be talking about.” […]

“Under normal circumstances, no question bankruptcy court is the best way to work through credit and debt and restructuring,” he said during a speech and question-and-answer session at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative Washington think tank. “These aren’t normal circumstances. That’s the problem.”

So we’ll force them to go bankrupt anyway, but it’ll be done very nicely. That’s not going to freak out consumers and keep them from purchasing an American car, worried about their warranties and service contracts.

This was floated the day before in a Bloomberg piece, but there it was assumed that bankruptcy would be forced by a “car czar” if the cash infusion didn’t work out after March 31. This makes it much more sudden. By the way, that “car czar” looks to be Henry Paulson at this point. I don’t think he’ll show the same sympathy for blue-collar industry that he did for his financial buddies.

This is insane. Both GM and Ford are retooling themselves for the 21st century, and were on the road to profitability before the economic meltdown. Nobody can buy a car, that’s the bottom line, it has nothing to do with what cars are being offered. The ripple effects have begun. Chrysler is shutting down all of its plants and GM is halting its Chevy Volt plant. You’re talking about 3 million jobs at risk, and even an orderly bankruptcy is going to shake consumer confidence. It’s exactly the wrong thing to do.

I know a lot of people thought that when Bush was left holding the bag after Senate negotiations produced no auto rescue, that the auto companies would end up with a better deal. Doesn’t seem like it. Obama’s transition could do a lot right now to save the industry and make his job a lot easier, but outside of the odd press release he’s been strangely silent.

It’s time for him to step in.

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Keeping Us Safe

by digby

I think it’s pretty clear that the Republicans are playing for 2010 and want to run against the “Obama Economy.” That means they are going to put a monkey wrench in everything they can get away with. And I think we know that the consequences for all of us are likely to be painful.

But if they get away with it, things may go awry in ways that they may not expect. (It’s even possible that newtie and Cheney and some of the other radicals who are saying some odd things may realize.) Here’s an article on the subject that will curl your hair:

What’s the worst that could happen?

That’s a question that James Rickards spends a lot of time pondering these days, as he sifts through the national security implications of the financial crisis facing the United States.

Rickards will lay out his worst case scenarios in a lecture sponsored by the Navy and the Office of the Secretary of Defense for Policy tonight. And his forecasts aren’t for the faint of heart.

Rickards calls it the “A to Z” problem: What are the threats that could make the U.S. economy look less like America and more like Zimbabwe? He sees them everywhere – in the Chinese ownership of vast amounts of American debt, in Russia’s increased centralization of its economy, in Al Qaeda’s long-established fascination with damaging the U.S. economy.

In many ways, Rickards is the ultimate bear. He’s not just thinking about whether the stock market will decline, but whether or not the stock market will survive.

All that puts Rickards decidedly outside mainstream economic and political thinking in America. But he does have an influential audience: the United States intelligence and defense communities.Rickards is a regular adviser on financial issues to the director of national intelligence’s office, and he lends his financial advice to the national security community.

His lecture comes as part of an annual “Rethinking Seminar” produced by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. Rickards argues that government is not doing nearly enough to prepare for the worst. “Here’s the policy problem for the United States,” he said in an interview. “We have experts in defense and intelligence, and huge depth in capital markets experience at the Fed and at Treasury. But they’re separated by the Potomac River. And they’re not talking to each other.”

Rickards came by his economic experience the hard way. He was the general counsel at Long Term Capital Management, the hedge fund that collapsed in spectacular fashion in the late 1990s and nearly took the global economy along with it. That near-economic death experience gave him a healthy appreciation for risk. Today, he’s the senior managing director for research at Omnis, an applied research firm.

read on for the details.
Now I don’t know if this is reasonable. But I do think that it’s something that the Republicans should keep in mind as they plan their little obstruction fest to the necessary stimulus Obama is said to be planning to propose. While Peggy Noonan and the rest of the clones have been robotically mouthing Karl Rove’s talking points about Bush “keeping us safe” he has actually been weakening this country in more ways that we can measure. From the secret energy task force, tohis intimate relationship with Kenny Boy Lay’s electrical ponzi scheme, to putting partisan hacks like Chris Cox in charge of the SEC to, well … everything else, this financial and economic crisis has most definitely made us all less safe.

If these Republicans want to continue with conservative dogma on free market fundamentalism by obstructing Obama’s efforts, I suppose they can. But if they think it’s a good political calculation, I’d suggest they have really lost their touch. Everybody is going to suffer and they are going to blame the wealthy grownups who ran the self-described “low tax and national security party” that ran the country into the ground. Why do you think that Dick Cheney is running around telling people that it’s “Herbert Hooverville” if the Republicans don’t get their act together. He’s evil, but he isn’t stupid.

Update: Oy.

Update II: Stupid people on CNN have taken it upon themselves to decide what constitutes “legitimate” infrastructure spending. Apparently, Obama is only going to be allowed to spend money on roads and bridges. Even things like bike paths are “pork” and are not going to be acceptable to the “fiscal responsibility” scolds and cable news spokesmodels. Word to the wise. Nobody gets it.

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