Month: December 2011

Getting married today

by David Atkins

I’ll be getting married today at 1pm Pacific time to my lovely fiancee and life partner of 7 years KK Holland. The only thing that dims the brightness of this day is the knowledge that the freedom to share the same expression of devotion is still denied by force of discriminatory law to same-sex couples across America. Hopefully those barriers will come down soon as the long arc of justice continues on its course.

In the meantime, here’s hoping for a beautiful day for you and your loved ones as we approach a new year.

.

QOTW

by digby

On Ron Paul’s rise:

And much hand-wringing will ensue on the left, as they try to decide whether or not they like a racist anti-war isolationist who favors a society of bare-foot, pregnant women smoking dope in the kitchen.

What to do?

BTW: You can hear Jay tonight with Stuart Zechman on Virtually speaking A-Z.

New boss same as the old boss?

by David Atkins

plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose:

Egyptian security forces stormed the offices of 17 nonprofit groups around the country on Thursday, including at least three democracy-promotion groups financed by the United States, as part of an investigation that the military rulers say will reveal foreign hands in the recent outbreak of protests.

In Cairo, heavily armed men wearing the black uniforms of the central security police tore through boxes, hauled away files and computers and prevented employees from leaving the offices of the two American groups, the National Democratic Institute and the International Republican Institute, which are affiliated with American political parties and financed by the United States government. The security forces also raided the offices of Washington-based Freedom House.

The raids were a stark escalation in what has appeared to be a campaign by the country’s military rulers to rally support by playing to nationalist and anti-American sentiment here.

The military has the money and guns in Egypt. When the people gathered en masse in Tahrir Square, the military eventually found it more convenient to dump Mubarak than to keep him.

I honestly don’t see how this resolves well. Certainly, history tells us that military juntas do sometimes end without the need for external war, civil war or bloody revolution. But they tend to stay in power for a long time once they’re created, and there’s not a whole lot the people can do about it.

.

Hand-holding over the canapes

by digby

Oh please, no. Not this again

I’ll just let Charlie Pierce do the honors:

Nobody of whom I’m aware ever thought of President Obama as Mr. Happy Fun Guy. The last guy, you may recall, was bouncy and gregarious and handed out alpha-male frat-boy nicknames, and then he got in there and screwed up the country. Moreover, if there are five people of value who still care what James Carville — let alone Gerald Rafshoon — thinks about anything, I don’t know them. But perhaps the singular failure of this particular “White House Memo” is its argument that things would be better all around if the president had “reached out” to the Congress. Good god, there are even some Democrats in there saying it, which is a very good indication of the problems the president has, none of which will be solved by some discreet hand-holding over the canapes at Ben and Sally’s.

There is a lot to criticize president Obama for, but failing to properly kiss the Village Tabbies’ rings is not one of them. Indeed, if he’s aloof toward these people, all the better.

.

The low point

by digby

TNR is running a “most overlooked stories” of the year feature that covers everything from the odd demise of the Do Not Call registry to state level budget slashing.

But this one stands out because I had completely forgotten about it and yet it frames the entire economic argument of the past year:

Walter Shapiro: Obama’s Failed Fireside Chat

Last July 25, on his 916th day in the White House, Barack Obama finally delivered a formal Oval Office address on the issue that will define his presidency—the economy. Obama’s words that night were devoid of Clinton-esque empathy over the plight of the unemployed and Roosevelt-ian attacks on Wall Street power brokers. Instead, playing to the sensible center in the debt-ceiling fight, Obama called for “a balanced approach to reducing the deficit” and urged viewers to send the message to Congress that “we can solve this problem through compromise.” For a president elected because of his eloquence, Obama summoned up all the poetry of the collected workout routines of George W. Bush.
[…]
The point is not to re-argue the wisdom of Obama’s ever-shifting strategy in the debt-ceiling fight or to retroactively reward the Republicans for their dangerous intransigence. Rather, the goal is to highlight one of the central mysteries of Obama’s presidency: Why has his rhetoric about the troubled economy been so consistently turgid? Much of the Oval Office address sounded like it was written by a focus group. At times of trouble, there is nothing so stirring as a president calling for a “balanced approach” and raising the dread specter of “kicking the can further down the road.”

A single off-key speech does not jeopardize a presidency. But Obama resisted an Oval Office address on the economy during all the dark days of double-digit unemployment, preferring speeches to Congress punctuated by partisan cheering sections and prime-time press conferences punctuated by preening reporters. The problem was that neither forum allowed Obama to make a sustained economic argument rather than simply offering applause lines or jousting with journalists. As a result, Obama has never been able to convince voters that increasing the deficit during hard times hastens the speed of an economy recovery. Small wonder Obama is heading into his reelection campaign with Republicans believing that he is a European-style socialist and too many Democrats worrying that he is a trimmer with no more inner convictions than Mitt Romney.

To revive an old joke: On July 25, 2011, Barack Obama gave a fireside address—and the fire went out.

Anyone who reads this blog knows that I think the President and his men believed in his Grand Bargain from the very beginning and embraced the cracked idea that the people would reward them for being “balanced” and the “only grown-up in the room.” They thought that Americans wanted turgid scolds about “skin in the game” and “kicking the can down the road” — that placid technocratic “no drama Obama” was the selling point.

I agree that it was bizarre considering the circumstances. And the president seems to have realized somewhere down the line that he needed to show the public that he has a pulse. But Shapiro is probably correct in highlighting that moment as the one where a whole lot of supporters stared at the screen and sighed. Everything about this speech was just … wrong.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

.

There is one war Ron Paul wants to fight

by digby

The War on Christmas:

As we celebrate another Yuletide season, it’s hard not to notice that Christmas in America simply doesn’t feel the same anymore. Although an overwhelming majority of Americans celebrate Christmas, and those who don’t celebrate it overwhelmingly accept and respect our nation’s Christmas traditions, a certain shared public sentiment slowly has disappeared. The Christmas spirit, marked by a wonderful feeling of goodwill among men, is in danger of being lost in the ongoing war against religion.

Through perverse court decisions and years of cultural indoctrination, the elitist, secular Left has managed to convince many in our nation that religion must be driven from public view. The justification is always that someone, somewhere, might possibly be offended or feel uncomfortable living in the midst of a largely Christian society, so all must yield to the fragile sensibilities of the few. The ultimate goal of the anti-religious elites is to transform America into a completely secular nation, a nation that is legally and culturally biased against Christianity.

This growing bias explains why many of our wonderful Christmas traditions have been lost. Christmas pageants and plays, including Handel’s Messiah, have been banned from schools and community halls. Nativity scenes have been ordered removed from town squares, and even criticized as offensive when placed on private church lawns. Office Christmas parties have become taboo, replaced by colorless seasonal parties to ensure no employees feel threatened by a “hostile environment.” Even wholly non-religious decorations featuring Santa Claus, snowmen, and the like have been called into question as Christmas symbols that might cause discomfort. Earlier this month, firemen near Chicago reluctantly removed Christmas decorations from their firehouse after a complaint by some embittered busybody. Most noticeably, however, the once commonplace refrain of “Merry Christmas” has been replaced by the vague, ubiquitous “Happy Holidays.” But what holiday? Is Christmas some kind of secret, a word that cannot be uttered in public? Why have we allowed the secularists to intimidate us into downplaying our most cherished and meaningful Christian celebration?

The notion of a rigid separation between church and state has no basis in either the text of the Constitution or the writings of our Founding Fathers. On the contrary, our Founders’ political views were strongly informed by their religious beliefs. Certainly the drafters of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, both replete with references to God, would be aghast at the federal government’s hostility to religion. The establishment clause of the First Amendment was simply intended to forbid the creation of an official state church like the Church of England, not to drive religion out of public life.

The Founding Fathers envisioned a robustly Christian yet religiously tolerant America, with churches serving as vital institutions that would eclipse the state in importance. Throughout our nation’s history, churches have done what no government can ever do, namely teach morality and civility. Moral and civil individuals are largely governed by their own sense of right and wrong, and hence have little need for external government. This is the real reason the collectivist Left hates religion: Churches as institutions compete with the state for the people’s allegiance, and many devout people put their faith in God before their faith in the state. Knowing this, the secularists wage an ongoing war against religion, chipping away bit by bit at our nation’s Christian heritage. Christmas itself may soon be a casualty of that war.

December 30, 2003

You can certainly understand why all those fundamentalist preachers are so intrigued by Paul’s very special form of libertarianism, can’t you?

.

The definition of “foreign”

by David Atkins

Rick Perry:

“Every barrel of oil that comes out of those sands in Canada is a barrel of oil that we don’t have to buy from a foreign source,” Mr. Perry said in Clarinda, earning a loud round of enthusiastic applause.

Later, the audience reacted again to Mr. Perry’s assertion that buying so much energy from foreign countries is “not good policy, it’s not good politics and frankly it’s un-American.”

In Republican land, “foreign” doesn’t mean what it does to you and me. It means “vaguely brown, Mooslim countries with names likes Ooz-beki-beki-beki-stan.”

By Republican definitions, Canada isn’t a foreign country. That’s white Christian American oil right there.

Unless the subject is healthcare. Then Canada’s as foreign as can be.

.

Good Gummint Regulation

Gosh I wonder what a modern Republican President with a Tea Party congress would do to that?

.

Droning on

by digby

I’m sure most of you are aware of all this. (And if you aren’t you should be reading Greenwald and Emptywheel more often.) But this time it’s in the Washington Post, mentioned as blithely as one might talk about the naming of airports and post offices:

The article doesn’t seem to find any of this particularly shocking. They ran it on the Monday after Christmas, so they certainly weren’t looking for any publicity. But it is just a little bit disconcerting that a President who ran as an anti-war candidate and received the Nobel Peace Prize is doing it, don’t you think?

Sources indicate that much of the growth of this program came about because of the growth of the technology. I guess that, like children with toys, those who have access to them simply have to use them.