So, it appears campaign season is under way in earnest. Mr. Obama officially kicked off the festivities in Virginia and Ohio yesterday, and we saw our first Mitt-scorcher on Denver TV a couple days ago. I’ve been thinking about the Obama administration’s performance to date for a few months, and perhaps now is as good a time as any to summarize what I think has been the dominant theme of his presidency.
My home state, North Carolina, has a wonderful motto: esse quam videri – to be, rather than to seem. Full story »
 From Wednesday, March 21, 2012:
‘The Daily Show’s’ Advantage Over the MSM: An Eye for the Absurd
Political satirists sometimes enjoy wider latitude than journalists. It’s a distinct and vital genre for a reason. The press would nevertheless do well to step back, if only occasionally, and to look at the world as its [sic] seen from the Daily Show writers room, or the Onion headline writing desk. Satirists have a knack for hitting on angles that reporters miss due to excessively narrow framing. And deliberate temperamental irreverence is helpful if your job is to dispassionately observe.* In the aftermath of The Daily Show’s UNESCO piece, its angle and value added has been praised in numerous journalistic outlets. Going forward, the press should try to recognize absurdity ahead of the satirists, and bring to ensuing coverage the rigor that is the journalistic comparative advantage. Full story »
Cut Medicare payments and tweak Social Security. Cut defense spending by directly reducing spending and getting out of Iraq and Afghanistan. Raise income, corporate, and payroll taxes. These issues essentially define what it means to be serious about eliminating the federal deficit, because all of them need to happen before the deficit can truly be brought under control. Serious people can debate how much of each is necessary and where to make the largest changes, but anyone who rejects even one of the issues is either ignorant of the scale of the problem, blindly beholden to their preferred ideology, or lying.
Yesterday we discussed these issues. Today we look in greater detail at the public statements of various individuals and organizations to see if they are actually serious about cutting the deficit, or if they just claim to be serious.
The Republican Party
Since President Bush II presided over a massive expansion of government during his eight years in office, the GOP has, in most respects, become the party of “spend and don’t tax.” Full story »
 There appears to be two main narratives circulating about the cause of the widespread Democratic losses in the elections on November 2nd. The first is that the Democrats earned it because their actions over the last two years de-energized the Democrats who voted for hope and change in 2008. The second is that the Democrats who stayed home instead of voting in the mid-terms need to grow up and realize that they were never going to get everything they wanted, that Obama had done everything (or nearly everything) he could, and that they’d just shoot their beliefs in the metaphorical foot. While I’m solidly in the second camp, I remember a time when I would have related to those Democrats whose liberal idealism was deflowered over the last two years. And because I remember what it was like to be young and idealistic, I can appreciate that there is certainly some truth to the first narrative as well. Full story »
by Gareth Porter
In an interview on the PBS NewsHour last Wednesday, Joe Biden was unwilling to contradict the official narrative of the Iraq War that Gen. David Petraeus and the Bush surge had turned Iraq into a good war after all. That interview serves as a reminder of just how completely the Democratic Party foreign policy elite has adopted that narrative.
The Iraq War story line crafted by the Petraeus and the new counterinsurgency elite in Washington assures the public that U.S. military power in Iraq brought about the cooperation of the Sunnis in Anbar Province, ended sectarian violence in Baghdad and defeated Iranian-backed Shi’a insurgents.
In reality, of course, that’s not what happened at all. It’s time to review the relevant history and deconstruct the Petraeus narrative which the Obama administration now appears to have adopted. Full story »
 During the campaign then-candidate Barack Obama kept reminding us that “politics is the art of the possible.” We were encouraged to understand “possible” in the same context as “Hope®” and “Change We Can Believe In™.” That is, the Obama presidency was to usher in a new age where the old business as usual politics of the Beltway wouldn’t be tolerated. “Yes We Can©,” he insisted, summoning the disaffected masses into an arena of engagement where the entrenched forces of corporatism and corruption could be, would be, overthrown.
That was the promise. That was the dream.
The reality of the Obama administration has been a smidge less kumbayah than many might have hoped, though. The health care “debate” was as nasty and dishonest as anything the Republic has seen since … well, honestly I can’t quite think what the applicable touchpoint might be here. Civil rights? The Summer of 1968? The entirety of the Reagan years? Blowjobgate? Heck, I don’t know. Suffice it to say that from one end of the process to the other, if a government or corporate official’s lips were moving, somebody was being played. Full story »
 Part 1 of 2.
I tripped across a provocative headline in the Wall Street Journal the other day: “They Need to be Liberated from Their God.” Turns out the story was about Mosab Hassan Yousef and his spying on Hamas. Which was a little disappointing. There’s no doubt that Palestinian Muslims need to be liberated from their god, but given the recent explosion in documented attacks by US Christians on their fellow Americans (as well as on reason and basic common sense), I thought perhaps the WSJ was going to be the first mainstream “news” outlet to do a story on Jesus Gone Wild!
I keep a running tab of stories that strike my interest. Full story »
 The independently minded political animal always wrestles with times of transition, and the changeover from the Bush to Obama regimes has been worse than most. During the Dubya years it was easy to identify the enemy and to hate him with a blinding passion. Sweet Jesus, George II and his sidekick, The Dick Cheney, played their roles with less nuance than the bad guy in Rambo 12: Return of Ming the Merciless (directed by Roland Emmerich), making it easy to identify with the loyal opposition just on principle.
But it’s important to remember that the enemy of my enemy isn’t necessarily my friend. They might just be fighting over which one gets to eat my tender bits. Full story »
by Shelley Jack
 Mamasita! Mamasita! Psst! Psst! Psst!
Taunting, yet playful faces of men passed me by on uneven sidewalks, working diligently to make eye contact. I was lost, again, on a street in downtown San Jose, Costa Rica, walking quickly, head down. Only a few months in to my year-long stay as a business English teacher in the country, the unpredictability of the road and transportation systems continued to challenge even my most adventurous side. When I finally arrived at my destination, three hours into what should have been a 30-minute walk, I sat down and cried one of those long, cleansing cries. I felt dirty from a steady stream of what we North Americans might refer to as aggressive cat-calling or ogling. I was drenched in sweat and tears, and I was painfully conscious of my light skin, blue eyes. Worst of all, I was immersed in a kind of fear that most of my countrywomen never have to face here on the streets of America. Full story »
“What they really want to see is, they want you to chop your fucking arm off, hold up your arm, wave it around spewing blood, and believe me, if you did that, the crowd would go fucking ballistic. You only get four good shows like that, though. Four good shows, and then you’re just a torso and a head, trying to get one of your band mates to give you one last hurrah and chop your head off. Which they probably wouldn’t do, which would really be hell.” Who said it? Full story »
by Bob Wheeler
It’s been a few days, but I still wanted to take some time to put my spin on the State of Union Address. Not point by point, but in a broader view. The one thing I think Washington needs to change most is their tone with each other. As such, I think President Obama took many steps to affect the organizational culture of today’s politics. Some steps were positive, some were negative and some were more like marching in place.
Chronologically speaking he started out good. He addressed the issue head on to Congress. He chastised them for not being able to work together, but in this regard he never went far enough. I have no problem with the President giving Congress a lecture. I have no problem with the President calling out the Supreme Court. I think we need to have three distinct branches of government that keep tabs on each other. Full story »
In case you’re wondering, that’s a whole lot of cash. My latest for Raw Story:
While some sunlight has been shed on the hefty sums shoveled into congressional campaign coffers in an effort to influence the Democrats’ massive healthcare bill, little attention has been focused on the far larger sums received by President Barack Obama while he was a candidate in 2008.
A new figure, based on an exclusive analysis created for Raw Story by the Center for Responsive Politics, shows that President Obama received a staggering $20,175,303 from the healthcare industry during the 2008 election cycle, nearly three times the amount of his presidential rival John McCain. McCain took in $7,758,289, the Center found. [...]
Gary Jacobson, a campaign finance expert and political science professor at the University of California, San Diego, says the healthcare industry saw the writing on the wall and sought to “protect their interests.”
READ THE FULL STORY
“The man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors.” Who said it? Full story »
Mr. President, Mr. Vice President, Speaker Pelosi, Majority Leader Reid, Senator Bennet, Senator Udall, Representative DeGette:
As we all know, the nation has been alive with discourse of all flavors over the current state of the health care system and the insurance industry. Recently, Senator Baucus has brought forth his proposal, dubbed by some critics (rightly so, in my opinion) the “Insurance Industry Profit Protection and Enhancement Act.”
Please listen: The very reason we need the government to intervene is because millions of us have a Sword of Damocles hanging over our heads. Private industry has already proven that it cannot be trusted to look out for its bottom line and simultaneously safeguard and maintain the health of the American people, even if some of us are misguidedly rallying in the streets against our interests at the urgings of their preferred Chicken Littles of media and industry.
It is my belief that what needs to be accomplished is the affirmation of every American citizen’s right to a basic level of health, security and well-being above a private company’s right to make a profit, which it currently does in part by conveniently discounting and disregarding its customers’ human rights at its whims. Private insurers need to know, as my mother would say, that “your rights stop where another one’s starts.” Full story »
 THE DEPROLIFERATOR — Two days of nuclear reckoning are bearing down fast on the Obama administration. First, it’s scrambling to complete what’s called a nuclear posture review (posture n. Position assumed by President Obama on a specified issue, e.g., supine or prone) in time for renewal of the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty I in December. START I, as it’s known, has carved sizable swathes out of nuclear arsenals, a process which Obama and Russian President Medvedev indicated a willingness to further accelerate in a preliminary meeting.
Meanwhile, a special U.N. Security Council meeting (also presumably to pave the way for the new, improved START) that President Obama is convening on September 24 inspired a Newsweek piece two weeks ago entitled Why Obama Should Learn to Love the Bomb. The title was likely slapped on by an editor, but the piece itself is no less glib. Full story »
Oh hell, MTV plays what certainly looks like a bad public relations stunt replete with silly hair and some acting that makes the WWF look Shakespearean and the next thing you know the internets are all blowing up because Barack Obama called Kanye West a jackass.
Full story »
THE DEPROLIFERATOR — At New Paradigms Forum, Christopher Ford writes that an attack on our military and commercial satellites “would be no less an act of war than attacking one of our naval vessels on the high seas.” This past spring, he explains, the Obama administration “agreed to Chinese and Russian demands that the U.N. begin discussions on preventing an ‘arms race in outer space’ [by enacting] ‘a worldwide ban on weapons that interfere with military and commercial satellites.’”
Great — sounds like it’s of a piece with the president’s disarmament overtures, right? To Ford, it’s not that sample. In fact, “A ‘space weapons ban’ may be an incoherent and perhaps dangerous idea [because] trying to define and prohibit space ‘weaponry,’ [is a] fool’s errand.” Full story »
 I’m not a Republican, but I know many people who are. I have GOP friends, co-workers and family members, and for that matter I used to be a Republican myself. A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, to be sure. But it’s true.
It’s no secret that I don’t agree with the GOP on much of anything these days, but there’s kind of an odd element to my conversations with Republican acquaintances lately: a lot of them profess significant disagreement with the platform and policies of their party, too.
Taken in a vacuum, this is hardly surprising. Full story »
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