All posts tagged Obama

How Fox Is Hurting America

As if a thinking person needed any more reason to see the Fox “News” empire for what it is, try the following video clip of conspiracy tramp—and “official blogger for the Republican National Convention in 2008—Pamela Geller, from her appearance on Eric Bolling’s “show” on something called FOX “Business” Network.  I said “business” network.  Most of us know, though, that the real business of Fox is destroying President Obama.

I warn you, if you have one cell of decency in your body and you love your country, this will piss you off:

In case you don’t know much about Pamela Geller, besides her Sharia-law-is-coming crusade against Islam, here is an excerpt from Wikipedia about her blog, Atlas Shrugs:

Controversial postings on “Atlas Shrugs” have included a number of false claims,[47][48] including that Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan (who is Jewish) supports Nazi ideology (accompanied by a fake picture of her in a Nazi uniform),[49] a video suggesting that Muslims have sex with goats, a doctored photo showing President Obama urinating on an American flag[12] and false claims that Obama’s mother was involved in pornography and that Obama “was involved with a crack whore in his youth”.[50][51] Geller has also posted accusations against President Obama of anti-Semitism and doing the bidding of “Islamic overlords,” while her site posted a posting by another writer who, inter alia, suggested without any evidence that the President is the “love child” of Malcolm X (Geller herself says she does not believe that Obama is Malcolm X’s love child, and never did).

Geller is, come to think of it, a perfect fit for Fox.

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by R. Duane Graham on April 28, 2011  •  Permalink
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Posted by R. Duane Graham on April 28, 2011

http://duanegraham.wordpress.com/2011/04/28/how-fox-is-hurting-america/

Ozark Billy Says “No” To Victory

All of our local Missouri representatives voted for the Boehner-Obama-Reid agreement on a short-term resolution to keep the government running until a final vote on the 2011 budget later this week. 

All except one. 

Ozark Billy Long, as the Springfield News-Leader reported, was one of only 28 Republicans who simply couldn’t say yes to a substantial victory for the GOP.  Long joined his auctioneer brother and union-hater Jeff Duncan of South Carolina, along with other Republican stars like Michele Bachmann, Joe Barton, Louis Gohmert, and Steve King. When you cast a vote with those folks, you know you have arrived in Republican Looneyville.

But Ozark Billy ran into a little trouble explaining his vote:

“They rattled off more different numbers than an auctioneer [sic] Friday night in explaining what had been agreed to,” Long wrote in an e-mail to the News-Leader.

“I voted against the one-week stop gap continuing resolution Friday night because it didn’t fund the troops for the rest of the year and didn’t cut enough spending. We need to quit using our fighting men and women as political pawns.”

Let’s forget for a moment that Ozark Billy apparently couldn’t digest all the “more different numbers” thrown his way Friday night, so he just said to heck with it, pardner.  And let’s forget the fact that the bill Long criticized because it “didn’t cut enough spending” wasn’t suppose to cut spending. It was designed to only fund the government through the end of this week, until the House and Senate can vote on the real deal. 

I’m not sure what Billy thought he was voting on, but clearly he was confused about the nature of the budget deal.

Additionally, the resolution Long didn’t vote for early Saturday morning not only didn’t fund the troops for the rest of the year, it didn’t fund anything for the rest of the year. That wasn’t its purpose. 

And Long’s statement, “We need to quit using our fighting men and women as political pawns,” is quite interesting, since that’s exactly what he and his Republican colleagues tried to do on Thursday, when they passed a stopgap measure that would have funded the government through April 15 and the Defense Department through the end of the fiscal year. 

And Long voted for that bill, which most certainly was using the troops as pawns in the budget game.  Here’s what House Appropriations Committee Chairman Hal Rogers said during floor debate on the measure:

If you vote against this bill, you are voting against the troops, who are engaged in three wars.

One of Ozark Billy’s handlers tried to clean up the mess a little bit with a lame explanation that was reported this way:

Bret Funk, spokesperson for Long, said the proposed resolution that will be voted on before Thursday is supposed to fund troops for the full year; Long favored a bill the House voted on earlier in the week that guaranteed funding for troops so they wouldn’t be left as pawns in the budget negotiations.

The truth is that Long is lost in Washington.  With all those “more different numbers” and confusing resolutions and budget dealing, he’s just out of his league.  But if you ever need to sell off grandma’s old furniture or grandpa’s old farm equipment or other second-hand goods, Ozark Billy, southwest Missouri’s most famous auctioneer, may be able to help you.

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by R. Duane Graham on April 10, 2011  •  Permalink
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Posted by R. Duane Graham on April 10, 2011

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The Obama Anti-Doctrine

“Some nations may be able to turn a blind eye to atrocities in other countries.  The United States of America is different.”

—Barack Obama, Address to the Nation on Libya

Because I resent the often-superficial analyses that networks typically present after major presidential speeches, I here present a relatively lengthy review of President Obama’s outstanding speech on Libya, which couldn’t have been clearer on all of the outstanding issues, despite Republican criticisms to the contrary.  I hope interested and thoughtful readers will endure this analysis.

The first bit of clarity:

In just one month, the United States has worked with our international partners to mobilize a broad coalition, secure an international mandate to protect civilians, stop an advancing army, prevent a massacre, and establish a no-fly zone with our allies and partners. 

That process took a mere 31 days, said the President, compared to the more than a year it took to protect civilians in Bosnia during the 1990s. And, he said,

To brush aside America’s responsibility as a leader and—more profoundly—our responsibilities to our fellow human beings under such circumstances would have been a betrayal of who we are. 

The clarity, though, in Obama’s speech was not just in what the U.S. and its international partners have accomplished or in America’s embrace of people suffering under oppression, but in how future potential interventions will be managed in matters that involve limited U.S. interests intersecting with humanitarian concerns. 

It is in the expression of how Obama views these potential interventions which constitutes what I will call the Obama anti-Doctrine.

I call it anti-doctrine because typically one thinks of a doctrine as a dogmatic set of beliefs that apply in all reference frames. Obama’s willingness to project American power, however, is not so rigid that it applies in every conceivable situation, thus it can be fairly described as an anti-doctrine, which has the following three legs:

1. International cooperation

2. Limited engagement

3. Pragmatic use of American power

Obama expressed all three legs of this anti-doctrine in this one paragraph from tonight’s speech:

It’s true that America cannot use our military wherever repression occurs.  And given the costs and risks of intervention, we must always measure our interests against the need for action.  But that cannot be an argument for never acting on behalf of what’s right.  In this particular country —Libya — at this particular moment, we were faced with the prospect of violence on a horrific scale.  We had a unique ability to stop that violence:  an international mandate for action, a broad coalition prepared to join us, the support of Arab countries, and a plea for help from the Libyan people themselves.  We also had the ability to stop Qaddafi’s forces in their tracks without putting American troops on the ground.

1. International cooperation: “an international mandate for action, a broad coalition prepared to join us, the support of Arab countries, and a plea for help from the Libyan people themselves“

2. Limited engagement:  ”We also had the ability to stop Qaddafi’s forces in their tracks without putting American troops on the ground. “

3. Pragmatic use of American power: “America cannot use our military wherever repression occurs.  And given the costs and risks of intervention, we must always measure our interests against the need for action.”

There you have it.  As much as it may vex those who demand a one-size-fits-all foreign policy, Obama announced a set of principles that are flexible enough to both allow action in Libya and restraint in Yemen and other places. In short, a brilliant formulation of the practical rules that should govern the use of American power in gray situations that don’t directly involve our vital, black-and-white national interests, situations that materialize all too frequently these days.

Obama expressed in full his vision of the difference between our vital national interests and interests that don’t directly affect our national survival:

As Commander-in-Chief, I have no greater responsibility than keeping this country safe.  And no decision weighs on me more than when to deploy our men and women in uniform.  I’ve made it clear that I will never hesitate to use our military swiftly, decisively, and unilaterally when necessary to defend our people, our homeland, our allies and our core interests.  That’s why we’re going after al Qaeda wherever they seek a foothold.  That is why we continue to fight in Afghanistan, even as we have ended our combat mission in Iraq and removed more than 100,000 troops from that country. 

There will be times, though, when our safety is not directly threatened, but our interests and our values are.  Sometimes, the course of history poses challenges that threaten our common humanity and our common security — responding to natural disasters, for example; or preventing genocide and keeping the peace; ensuring regional security, and maintaining the flow of commerce.  These may not be America’s problems alone, but they are important to us.  They’re problems worth solving.  And in these circumstances, we know that the United States, as the world’s most powerful nation, will often be called upon to help.

In such cases, we should not be afraid to act — but the burden of action should not be America’s alone.  As we have in Libya, our task is instead to mobilize the international community for collective action.  Because contrary to the claims of some, American leadership is not simply a matter of going it alone and bearing all of the burden ourselves.  Real leadership creates the conditions and coalitions for others to step up as well; to work with allies and partners so that they bear their share of the burden and pay their share of the costs; and to see that the principles of justice and human dignity are upheld by all. 

As I listened to Republican criticisms of the speech (and some Democrats’), I was struck by the fact that many of them either didn’t pay attention to it or didn’t read it or only determined to hear what they wanted to hear. Many of them wonder what the end game is; they wonder about the fate of Qaddafi.  But Obama addressed that issue:

We will deny the regime arms, cut off its supplies of cash, assist the opposition, and work with other nations to hasten the day when Qaddafi leaves power.  It may not happen overnight, as a badly weakened Qaddafi tries desperately to hang on to power.  But it should be clear to those around Qaddafi, and to every Libyan, that history is not on Qaddafi’s side.  With the time and space that we have provided for the Libyan people, they will be able to determine their own destiny, and that is how it should be.

The burden is on the Libyan people, not the American people.  What could be clearer than that?

Finally, President Obama—try for just one second to imagine Michelle Bachmann or Sarah Palin or most of the other GOP putative candidates for president giving this speech—tried to set this Libyan conflict in a regional context:

Yes, this change will make the world more complicated for a time.  Progress will be uneven, and change will come differently to different countries.  There are places, like Egypt, where this change will inspire us and raise our hopes.  And then there will be places, like Iran, where change is fiercely suppressed.  The dark forces of civil conflict and sectarian war will have to be averted, and difficult political and economic concerns will have to be addressed. 

The United States will not be able to dictate the pace and scope of this change.  Only the people of the region can do that. But we can make a difference. 

A difference, indeed.

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by R. Duane Graham on March 28, 2011  •  Permalink
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Posted by R. Duane Graham on March 28, 2011

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Remarks And Asides

Dear God,

Please talk Donald Trump into running for president. I take back everything I’ve ever said about Your Party, about Michele Bachmann, about Sarah Palin, even about Anson Burlingame.  Just please let him run and let the GOP pick him as its nominee.  Pretty please?

Prayerfully,

Duane

________________________

Everybody’s making a big deal out of Newt Gingrich’s egregious flip-flop on what to do in Libya. First he can’t wait to go in, then when Obama goes in, he says he shouldn’t have gone in.  If a man can’t make up his mind about which woman with whom he wants to live happily ever after, why should anyone think he can make up his mind about which dictator we should bomb?

________________________

A new Pew poll shows that “nearly half (47%) of registered voters say they would like to see Barack Obama reelected, while 37% say they would prefer to see a Republican candidate win the 2012 election.”  The overview of the Pew survey, though, says,

In part, Obama is benefitting from the fact that the GOP has yet to coalesce behind a candidate.

All the more reason, God, to get Donald Trump to run.  Please?

________________________

Speaking of Republican candidates for president, Herman Cain, famous for broiling Whoppers for Burger King (actually, he’s somewhat famous for running Godfather’s Pizza), attended a rally of home-schoolers yesterday in Des Moines. 

Along with other candidates present, he, of course, trashed the public school system, obligatory behavior for anyone wanting to be the GOP nominee.  But Cain, an African-American Tea Party favorite from the South, said something I found interesting. He reportedly denounced all government involvement in education and then said this:

That’s all we want is for government to get out of the way so we can educate ourselves and our children the old-fashioned way.

The “old-fashioned way“?  Hmm.  Was he talking about the real old-fashioned way, back when there were no schools, no books, and no teachers?  That far back?

Or was the 65-year-old Herman Cain, who admits to a working-class pedigree, talking about the old-fashioned days in the 1950s when he would have spent his formative years in Georgia public schools?  

The old-fashioned way in those days in the South was to segregate-then-educate kids like Herman Cain, and despite the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954, some parts of Georgia did not even begin to integrate the schools until 1970.

According to Professor Michael Gagnon,

In defiance of Brown v. Board of Education, The Georgia School Board required public school teachers to sign a pledge that they would not teach in integrated schools in 1955 or they would lose their teaching license.

Is that the old-fashioned way the GOP candidate for president pines for?

________________________

Finally, James O’Keefe, the scoundrel whose creative video edits have killed ACORN and wounded NPR, while simultaneously giving Sean Hannity a Viagra-like boner, is in debt.  In fact, he claims he’s in debt up to $50,000.  Fifty G’s.  He has sent out a fund-raising email to supporters, saying he had to finance much of his wonderful work on the credit card:

We made a lot of sacrifices—personally and financially —because we fight for what we believe in.

It’s not clear to me how he can both claim he has sacrificed financially and yet beg others to pay his bills, but in any case, I am setting up the James O’Keefe Relief Fund here at The Erstwhile Conservative.  Just send in your donations and I will be sure he gets the money. No amount is too small.

Trust me at least as much as you trust him.

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by R. Duane Graham on March 24, 2011  •  Permalink
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Posted by R. Duane Graham on March 24, 2011

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Libya: It’s Harder Than You Think

It appears that Qaddafi is well on his way to repelling the rebel assault in Libya.

This morning on Morning Joe I heard lefty Nicholas Kristof say the following about the Obama Administration’s position:

Question: What is now holding back the United States from acting in a forceful way, in a way that shows leadership, maybe even out front, but with the support of others?

Kristof: Part of the problem is that we have stalled too long.  I mean a no-fly zone would have been, I think, quite effective three weeks ago, I think, probably would have been very effective. At this point, when… Qaddafi has been able to move all of his artillery right next to Benghazi, there’ much less that we an actually do.  And so now the administration is talking about going way beyond and actually attacking tanks and having a “no-move” zone in eastern Libya, which actually makes me kind of nervous.

Question: Was there an opportunity missed here? What happened?

Kristof: Absolutely. Absolutely.  They were so nervous about a no-fly zone that they missed that opportunity. There was a real window here, when we could have moved in with, I think, minimal costs and peeled off the Libyan military from Qaddafi, but that window at this point has pretty much closed.

A bona fide lefty who thinks Obama should have acted sooner and that the “costs” would have been “minimal.”  Hmm. I’m not sure why he thinks that.

Now, let’s turn to the Right.   National Review was initially opposed to direct intervention in Libya, and wrote of the so-called no-fly zone strategy:

If we are serious about limiting his ability to massacre his countrymen, the no-fly zone would have to become a no machine-gun zone, too — in other words an honest-to-goodness military intervention to affect events directly on the ground. Deploying our air power while Qaddafi continued to kill with impunity would make us look more ineffectual rather than less. For now (perhaps this will change if Qaddafi begins to consolidate his position on the strength of his air force), the no-fly zone seems a classic case of looking for lost keys under the streetlight; it’s the handiest way for us to intervene, not the most effective.

That was written on February 28.  Yesterday, the same editors wrote this:

Qaddafi is a murderer of Americans with whom we still have a score to settle. If he survives after we and our allies sought his ouster (even if ineffectually), he will be even more unpredictable; he would be foolish not to restart his WMD programs as insurance against foreign intervention against his regime in the future.

Uh-oh. The Right talking about WMDs again? I suppose you know what is coming next:

All this means that we should want the rebellion against Qaddafi to survive. We initially opposed a no-fly zone, but circumstances have changed. We should establish both a no-fly zone and a no-drive zone in the approach to the de facto rebel capital of Benghazi to prevent Qaddafi’s armored vehicles from entering the city.

Make no mistake about this: That “no-drive zone” means war. And just how long would it be before that strategy would mean American troops on the ground in Libya?  Well, National Review’s conservative editors think of everything, don’t they? Try this:

We are not talking of a military operation comparable to taking and occupying Baghdad in 2003. If we check Qaddafi’s offensive, then we can consider other options. Perhaps we will only want to do what’s necessary to maintain the rebels’ enclave so they can fight another day; perhaps we will want to undertake decapitation strikes against the regime in Tripoli; perhaps we’ll want to use the threat of such strikes to try to bargain Qaddafi out of the country.

Or perhaps we will get ourselves involved in a mess that we can’t get out of. 

Even if we stopped Qaddafi’s advance into eastern Libya, namely Benghazi, then what?  Help the rebels overthrow him? We know next to nothing about the motives of the rebels. We don’t know they would be better or worse than Qaddafi himself.  We don’t know that if they were to overthrow him that they would establish a Madisonian democracy or call up Glenn Beck for instructions on how to establish a caliphate.

Besides all that, there is evidence that tribal loyalties were much misunderstood in the West and that the rebel strength was vastly overrated.  This point is made very well in an article by Vivienne Walt at Time, who quoted Mustafa Fetouri, of the Academy of Graduate Studies in Tripoli, as saying,

The West’s interpretation was very, very stupid. They just gambled on the wrong thing, and made a huge, stupid mistake.

The Time article continued:

One crucial error by Western leaders, says Fetouri, has been to downplay Libya’s complex web of tribal loyalties, which has helped to keep Gaddafi in power for more than four decades — an impressive achievement, given several assassination attempts and years of Libya being an international pariah under stiff economic sanctions. Some tribal alliances date back decades to the bloody rebellions against the Italian colonial forces before World War II, and even some tribal leaders who hold grudges against Gaddafi, for having failed to deliver services or cutting them out of certain privileges, rushed to his defense once the antigovernment demonstrations in Benghazi became an armed rebellion. For those people, says Fetouri, “they will die for Gaddafi, because he belongs to their tribe.”

And because the rebels adopted the same flag used by the much-despised monarch that Qaddafi overthrew in his 1969 coup, it became much easier for him to enlist volunteers, as Time put it, “to fight to hold Libya together.”

It turns out, as G. K. Chesterton told us long ago, that it matters what flag one flies.  Time:

That flag, says Fetouri, “represents the misery my country lived through as puppets of the West.” He cites one of his relatives — no fan of Gaddafi — who traveled 400 miles (640 km) to join the government forces against the rebels; he had driven from the Bani Walid area, the heartland of the Warfalli tribe southeast of Tripoli, which has long been the bedrock of Gaddafi’s support. Fetouri, who says he himself had been tempted to join the antigovernment protests before they morphed into an armed rebellion, asked his relative why he was “fighting for Gaddafi.” He said the man told him “it was about Libya the country, not Gaddafi.”

Thus, we are likely watching Qaddafi retake the territory he has lost, unless the West does something. 

I confess, I’m torn here.  Like a majority of the American people, part of me thinks we should not get involved. Mind our own business.  We’ve invaded two countries over there, enough is enough.

But part of me also believes that if we could help the rebels without a long-term commitment, we should.  We should be on the side of so-called freedom fighters, particularly since the Arab world is asking us to. What that involves militarily, I don’t know.  But I do know it should not involve putting one American on the ground to possibly die in someone else’s civil war.  Not now, not this war.

Some good folks are urging President Obama to act now.  They seem to know better than he does what is involved both in terms of his personal legacy as president and in terms of America’s larger legacy.  The New Republic writes that Bill Clinton “waited tragically too long” to intervene in Bosnia in the mid-1990s:

When Slobodan Milosevic and his Bosnian Serb allies launched their war of “ethnic cleansing,” while “the West”—which is always to say, first and foremost, the United States—wrung its hands, many tens of thousands of innocent people were murdered and raped before President Bill Clinton finally found the resolve to mix air power and diplomacy to bring the genocidal violence to a halt.

Therefore:

Qaddafi is the kind of neighborhood bully that Slobodan  Milosevic was. And he must be met by the same kind of principled power. For America to do less than that now—less than the minimum that the Libyan rebels and the Arab neighbors are requesting—would be to shrink into global vacillation and ultimately irrelevance. If Barack Obama cannot face down a modest thug who is hated by most of his own people and by every neighboring government, who can he confront anywhere?

It’s a lot easier to write that kind of stuff than it is to have to actually make a real decision, no doubt.  As for me, I can live with whatever limited intervention the President decides to undertake, or I can live with his decision not to intervene. But I won’t measure his presidency by this decision one way or the other.  It’s just not that simple.

And I don’t think that America’s global reputation hangs in the balance over what to do about Libya.  It’s not that simple, either.

What is simple to understand, though, is that being president these days is an especially tough job.  And I remain confident that the right man for these times is holding that job.

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by R. Duane Graham on March 17, 2011  •  Permalink
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Posted by R. Duane Graham on March 17, 2011

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Trout Fishing Is For Socialists

“The reformer is always right about what is wrong. He is generally wrong about what is right.”

— G. K. Chesterton, 1922

As the budget battles continue between radical Republicans and increasingly limp Democrats, Gene Lyons’ column in Saturday’s Joplin Globe offered a reason for the good guys to stiffen up: socialized fishing. 

The Globe titled his piece,

Uncle Sam’s not broke, and we need him

Now, that header had to jar regular conservative readers of our paper, especially when Lyons used a local example of the small ways government makes life better, even for heavily Republican areas like southwest Missouri and northwest Arkansas:

In Arkansas, where I live, trout fishing is both a major pastime and a source of tourist income. Although rainbow trout are a cold-water species not native to the state, world-record fish are taken frequently. Just writing about it makes me want to load my gear and head for Calico Rock.

Anyway, whether you know it or not, these are government trout. Your tax dollars created and maintain this matchless resource.

Lyons went on to describe how that happened, which had to do with dams built in the White River basin by the Army Corps of Engineers for flood control and to generate electricity for both Arkansas and Missouri customers. 

The “string of picturesque lakes” that resulted also “became a magnet for real-estate developments and resort communities, transforming one of the nation’s historically poorest regions.”  He continued:

No government dams, no Branson, Mo., is one way of thinking about it.

Forget for a moment that the existence of Branson may be the one unassailable argument in favor of killing government meddling. Lyons’ point is that the federal Fish and Wildlife Service is responsible for the fish hatcheries “that keep it all going.” And Obama wants to cut that agency’s budget:

Trout can’t breed in dam tailwaters and must be constantly restocked. Should hatcheries close, the fish would soon vanish. So would the economic benefit to dozens of communities along the White and Little Red Rivers.

He points out that resort operators claim “they pay more in taxes than the cost of operating the hatcheries,” and Lyons wonders out loud about the motives of the Administration:

So did some Obama political appointee decide: “To hell with Arkansas. They didn’t vote for us anyway. Let them ask the tea party to pay”?

It could be.

Well, an interesting survey would be to ask those in southwest Missouri and northwest Arkansas who benefit from the fish hatcheries if they voted for Mr. Obama and how they feel about socialized fishing. Or perhaps Gaston’s White River Resort could rename its fish-catching course, “Marx’s Guide to Fly Fishing,” or “How to Fish Like a Socialist.”  Or they could sell bumper stickers that read:

If you caught a fish, thank a liberal

In any case, Lyons points out that,

Contrary to…Tea Party dogma, American prosperity has always depended upon countless such examples of public-private synergy. There are similar stories all across the country.

He ends with a point my hammering-hand never gets tired of driving home—and something Democrats have chosen to ignore for now.  Understanding the following is essential to understanding how to begin to fix our budget problems:

Meanwhile, measured as a percentage of GDP, federal tax revenue is at 14.4 percent—the lowest since 1950. (The 40-year average is 18 percent.) Marginal income tax rates on the McDuck class ["Donald Duck's tightwad zillionaire relative"] top out at 35 percent—compared to 50 percent under President Reagan.

Only Mexico and Chile, among industrial nations, pay less.

Happy fishing, comrades!

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by R. Duane Graham on March 13, 2011  •  Permalink
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Posted by R. Duane Graham on March 13, 2011

http://duanegraham.wordpress.com/2011/03/13/trout-fishing-is-for-socialists/

Huckabee, Hickabee

The field of potential Republican candidates for president is, to be kind, a pitiful lot, but some of them are just plain dumb.

Let’s look at Mike Huckabee, who led all comers in a new Winthrop University poll of Southern voters with almost 22%.

Huckabee, whose appeal is primarily among white evangelical voters, is set to undertake a book tour of the South next week, where his recent stupid statements on Barack Obama’s childhood will, no doubt, serve him well.

A few days ago, on a right-wing  whack job’s radio show,  Huckabee got caught up in the whack job’s invective about Obama’s birth certificate and managed to move the conversation down from there. For those who haven’t read the exchange between Huck and Steve Malzberg, here it is in all its colossal idiocy:

MALZBERG: Don’t you think it’s fair also to ask him, I know your stance on this. How come we don’t have a health record, we don’t have a college record, we don’t have a birth cer – why Mr. Obama did you spend millions of dollars in courts all over this country to defend against having to present a birth certificate. It’s one thing to say, I’ve — you’ve seen it, goodbye. But why go to court and send lawyers to defend against having to show it? Don’t you think we deserve to know more about this man?

HUCKABEE: I would love to know more. What I know is troubling enough. And one thing that I do know is his having grown up in Kenya, his view of the Brits, for example, very different than the average American. When he gave the bust back to the Brits –

MALZBERG: Of Winston Churchill.

HUCKABEE: The bust of Winston Churchill, a great insult to the British. But then if you think about it, his perspective as growing up in Kenya with a Kenyan father and grandfather, their view of the Mau Mau Revolution in Kenya is very different than ours because he probably grew up hearing that the British were a bunch of imperialists who persecuted his grandfather.

Now, obviously Huckabee’s basic facts are all wrong: Obama didn’t grow up in Kenya.  And he therefore didn’t grow up with his father and grandfather there. In fact, he didn’t grow up with them at all, anywhere. He only met his father one time, and he spent most of his childhood in Hawaii, as everyone outside the South and the Republican Party knows.

And Huckabee’s attempt to subsequently explain his idiocy is even worse than the original statements, because he had ample time to think about the explanation.  A spokesman first said Huckabee simply “misspoke,” claiming Huckabee meant to say Obama grew up in Indonesia.  Now, you can go back to that conversation and substitute Indonesia and you will find this:

But then if you think about it, his perspective as growing up in Indonesia with an Indonesian father and grandfather, their view of the Mau Mau Revolution in Indonesia is very different than ours because he probably grew up hearing that the British were a bunch of imperialists who persecuted his grandfather.

You can see how dumb it was to say he misspoke and meant Indonesia. That turns Obama’s father and grandfather into Indonesians and moves the Mau Mau Revolution out of Kenya, which is kind of strange since that’s where it happened and since the Mau Mau anti-colonialists were most definitely Kenyans, unless they all forged their birth certificates, which is just as likely as Obama forging his.

But then to make it worse, Huckabee published a statement on his blog, not only reaffirming that he meant to say Indonesia instead of Kenya, but claiming that he always knew there was no issue with Obama’s birth certificate and then blaming the New York Times for sensationalizing the story!  He then compared Obama’s “57 states” gaffe to his Kenyan gaffe, as if they were somehow qualitatively the same.

Dumb, dumb, dumb.  But that’s what you get when you play in the sandbox with idiot birthers. 

Besides the obvious, my problem with all this, in terms of Huckabee’s qualifications to lead the country, is that even if he in fact believes there is no issue with Obama’s birthplace, why didn’t he tell Malzberg that?  Why did he allow himself to get caught up in the spirit of that wacky moment?  Why didn’t he have the guts to set him and his listeners straight? What kind of bleeping leader is that?

The truth is that Huckabee, like so many Republicans and so many Southerners, wants to keep alive the notion that Obama is “the other,” not one of “us,” not a real American.

It’s shameless, and it should disqualify Huckabee from doing anything outside his Fox “News” gig.  Unfortunately, though, for so many Republicans, it makes him more attractive.

[photo: Timothy Devine]
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by R. Duane Graham on March 2, 2011  •  Permalink
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Obama’s Socialist Chickens Are Coming Home To Roost

You may not have noticed it, given the propensity of media outlets to accentuate the economic negatives, but domestic manufacturing is improving. 

First, though, let’s review. During the Bush years almost 4½ million manufacturing jobs disappeared.  Oh? Don’t believe me?  Would you believe Patrick J. Buchanan?  Two years ago Buchanan, who isn’t exactly Eugene Debs, wrote:

Beginning and ending in recession, the Bush presidency added a net of 407,000 private sector jobs over eight years, less than 51,000 a year, the worst eight-year record since 1927-35, which includes the first six years of the Great Depression.

By January 2009, the average workweek had fallen to 33.3 hours, the lowest since record keeping began in 1964.

From Jan. 31, 2001, through Jan. 31, 2009, 4.4 million manufacturing jobs, 26 percent of all of the manufacturing jobs in the United States, disappeared.

Semiconductors and electronic component producers lost 42 percent of their jobs. Communications equipment producers lost 48 percent of their jobs. Textile and apparel producers lost, respectively, 63 percent and 61 percent of their jobs.

As a source of American jobs, manufacturing, for the first time in our history, fell below health care and education in 2001, below retail sales in 2002, below local government in 2006, below leisure and hospitality, i.e., restaurants and bars, in 2008.

Between this unprecedented loss in manufacturing capacity and jobs, and the $3.5 trillion in trade deficits in manufactured goods alone, run up by George W. Bush, the correlation is absolute.

Of course, Buchanan, ever pessimistic, saw our national doom in the numbers:

These statistics, these realities — factories closing in the United States, manufacturing jobs being outsourced in the millions to China and Asia, enormous, endless trade deficits in goods — testify to a painful truth: America is a receding and declining world power.

Not so fast, Pat.  Perhaps there is some hope for us yet. From the AP today:

U.S. manufacturers are finally adding jobs after years of shrinking their payrolls. They added 136,000 workers last year, the first net increase since 1997. And in January, the manufacturing sector added 49,000 jobs – the most in any month since August 1998.

From the Financial Times last week:

US manufacturing activity expanded last month at the fastest rate since 2004 on the strength of robust new orders and production, offering hope that the sector will add momentum to the economic recovery…

The US manufacturing sector has shown growth for the last year and a half, with activity accelerating steadily during the last six months. Fourteen of the 18 industries that ISM tracks grew in January.

“This only confirms that the US is at the leading edge of the global pick-up in manufacturing,” said Alan Ruskin, strategist at Deutsche Bank.

Wow! How can that be in the Age of Obama?

And from CNN yesterday:

Demand for capital equipment in the US is starting to pick up strongly, manufacturers say, boosting confidence in the health of the economic recovery and raising hopes of a revival in American industry.

St. Louis County-based conglomerate, Emerson, is cited as telling its investors,

that it expected non-residential investment in the US to grow by 8-9 per cent this year; as much as the average for emerging markets.

Honeywell executive David Cote is quoted as telling the Financial Times:

I do believe the US economy is more resilient now. Barring any unforeseen circumstances, we’re on the comeback trail.

Wow!  With a anti-colonialist Kenyan in the White House?

And Caterpillar, “the world’s largest manufacturer of earthmoving equipment,” will spend more than $1.5 billion “in the U.S. to build capacity.”

And this:

Eaton, the Ohio-based manufacturer of industrial equipment and components, has said it expected its US sales to grow faster than its international sales this year. Sandy Cutler, Eaton’s chief executive, told the FT that demand was “far stronger than people had thought it would be”.

Oh, I know that Republicans—who instead of jobs are currently focused on the old abortion debate—will take credit for this resurgence.  Just their calming, pro-business presence in Washington, as newly installed controller of 1/2 of 1/3 of the federal government, is enough to account for this release of pent-up investment, right? 

But we know the truth: Some of the socialist policies of the anti-capitalist, America-hating, African usurper in the White House are finally coming home to roost.

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by R. Duane Graham on February 8, 2011  •  Permalink
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Obama At The Chamber

From Real Clear Politics today:

“If we’re fighting to reform the tax code and increase exports, the benefits cannot just translate into greater profits and bonuses for those at the top. They have to be shared by American workers, who need to know that opening markets will lift their standard of living as well as your bottom line,” President Obama told the Chamber of Commerce on Monday morning.

He also told them this:

We cannot go back to the kind of economy — and culture — we saw in the years leading up to the recession, where growth and gains in productivity just didn’t translate into rising incomes and opportunity for the middle class.

And this:

And if we as a nation are going to invest in innovation, that innovation should lead to new jobs and manufacturing on our shores.  The end result of tax breaks and investments can’t simply be that new breakthroughs and technologies are discovered here in America, but then the manufacturing takes place overseas.  That, too, breaks the social compact.  It makes people feel as if the game is fixed and they’re not benefiting from the extraordinary discoveries that take place here.

And this:

Even as we eliminate burdensome regulations, America’s businesses have a responsibility as well to recognize that there are some basic safeguards, some basic standards that are necessary to protect the American people from harm or exploitation.  Not every regulation is bad.  Not every regulation is burdensome on business.  A lot of the regulations that are out there are things that all of us welcome in our lives.

A bewildered gathering of the Lords of Business chuckled, I’m sure.

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Egypt: The View From The Paranoid Right

Since nearly every sensible thing that can be said has been said this weekend regarding the upheaval in Egypt, I thought I would look in on what the right-wing is saying.

John Boehner and Mitch McConnell are so far playing it safe, essentially approving of the Obama administration’s cautious response to the crisis. But it’s only Monday.

Unfortunately, Egypt is not observable from Wasilla, so Sarah Palin hasn’t yet tweeted her foreign policy advice to the world.  But it’s only Monday. I’m sure after she catches up on her weekend reading, she will offer up some profound analysis.

Bill Kristol, a Fox “News” neocon who agitated for war against Iraq as early as 1998 and who has urged the U.S. to launch a military strike against Iran, has not yet called for invading Egypt and ousting Mubarak.  That’s always a good thing, but it’s only Monday.  

Kristol, who always knows what we should do in every tricky situation, did say the Administration was “a little slow in reacting to events and said a couple foolish things.”  Apparently, patience and deliberation is not a virtue in the Kristol family.

Speaking of a lack of patience and deliberation: The Glenn Beck News Service, The Blaze, featured this headline:

The story, written by Jonathon Seidl and complete with a Goldline ad, is one of those “connecting the dots” specials, which are the forte of the paranoid Right. It seems that the American Left, some of whom rallied this weekend in support of the Egyptian people, is encouraging the uprising because,

the power vacuum that would result from a government collapse would make the country a prime target for a socialist takeover.

Even though the protests in Egypt have been decidedly unrelated to Western politics, that’s not the way it is seen through the eyes of fearful right-wingers, at least when it comes to the motives of those Americans who support Egyptian freedom:

Is it really about democracy, then, as some of the signs suggest?

Not really. The reality seems to be closer to something like this: when a revolution opposes a leftist dictator, leftists and socialists ignore it. When a revolution opposes an American ally (particularly an ally as pivotal to U.S. security as the Egyptian alliance is) leftists and socialists support it. Succinctly put, the groups have a vested interest in the current American system being defeated (a goal shared by leftist dictators). That’s why they can support Chavez, Ahmadinejad, and even Hussein, but rally against someone such as Mubarak.

In the same vein, Red State, a popular right-wing site operated by Erick Erickson, now a CNN commentator, featured this headline:

The story takes the Beckian view one step further and involves the Obama administration in the plot to make Egypt and the Middle East a socialist paradise:

For all the lack of clarity on where the Obama administration stands, one thing is becoming more and more clear: Signs are beginning to point more toward the likelihood that President Obama’s State Department, unions, as well as Left-leaning media corporations are more directly involved in helping to ignite the Mid-East turmoil than they are publicly admitting.

Meanwhile, Dick Morris, another Foxinating right-winger who sees an Islamic terrorist hiding behind every crisis tree, is urging the U.S. to “send a signal to the military that it will be supportive of its efforts to keep Egypt out of the hands of the Islamic fundamentalists.” He wrote:

The Obama Administration, in failing to throw its weight against an Islamic takeover, is guilty of the same mistake that led President Carter to fail to support the Shah, opening the door for the Ayatollah Khomeini to take over Iran…

Now is the time for Republicans and conservatives to start asking the question: Who is losing Egypt? We need to debunk the starry eyed idealistic yearning for reform and the fantasy that a liberal democracy will come from these demonstrations. It won’t. Iranian domination will.

It appears that some on the Right, who night and day lie and stoke fear about Obama’s imaginary disregard for the freedoms of Americans, don’t mind if he helps squash the yearnings of Egyptians who want liberty—and jobs—in their own land.

“We really run the risk of some Iranian style regime emerging in the end here,” foreign policy expert Sean Hannity said on Friday.

And even though the real experts discount that possibility (the Muslim Brotherhood reportedly represents around 20% of the population), it doesn’t matter. What matters is that however the situation in Egypt ends, Obama will have either done too much or too little.  He will either have sided with the Egyptian dictator or sided with the Muslim Brotherhood or engineered a socialist revolution.  

And to think it’s only Monday.

 

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by R. Duane Graham on January 31, 2011  •  Permalink
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The Real Job Killers

“Ye shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles?”

—Matthew 7:16

President Obama’s op-ed in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal has once again caused some on the Professional Left to question his committment to old-fashioned liberalism.

Lynn Parramore wrote:

Today in the WSJ we catch a glimpse of the administration’s stance on regulation, and it’s not a pretty picture…

The op ed, with its neo-liberal celebration of America’s great ‘free’ market (never mind that what we’ve got is a market captured by oligopolies) perpetuates the specious proposition that if we could just rein in the evil regulators, everything would be much better.

In the op-ed Obama tried to assure American businesses—which have criticized him mercilessly—that he and his administration have received their message about regulation:

…we are…making it our mission to root out regulations that conflict, that are not worth the cost, or that are just plain dumb.

Who could be against that? Obama argues for regulatory equilibrium:

…throughout our history, one of the reasons the free market has worked is that we have sought the proper balance. We have preserved freedom of commerce while applying those rules and regulations necessary to protect the public against threats to our health and safety and to safeguard people and businesses from abuse.

Yet many on the right have criticized Obama for stifling growth through excessive regulations.  Obama addressed that criticism at the end:

Despite a lot of heated rhetoric, our efforts over the past two years to modernize our regulations have led to smarter—and in some cases tougher—rules to protect our health, safety and environment. Yet according to current estimates of their economic impact, the benefits of these regulations exceed their costs by billions of dollars.

Yes, we have all heard the rhetoric: Too much job-killing regulation.

But it’s hard to argue with this: The business-hating socialist—President Obama—is presiding over an almost unprecedented Age of Prosperity, at least if you happen to own stock in a company listed on the S&P 500:

And the Commerce Department, in case you forgot, reported two months ago that annualized third-quarter profits for American businesses amounted to about $1.7 trillion, the highest ever recorded.  Ever. Really.

But don’t forget about those darn job-killing regulations.

Again, Lynn Parramore from the left:

Free market fundamentalists have been pushing the idea that regulation is the enemy through a variety of dishonest arguments, from the notion that regulators ‘just don’t understand’ fancy financial instruments and should stay out of it to the particularly offensive canard that regulators kill jobs. Never mind that it was the unregulated financial sector that threw millions out of work in the Great Recession. In the Alice-in-Wonderland world of free market mythology, people lost their jobs because the darned government just wouldn’t stop abusing big business.

And from the right: The president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce suggested last week that due to the Republican takeover of the House, the Obama administration is “likely to turn to the regulatory agencies.” He followed that with this:

The resulting regulatory tsunami poses, in our view, the single biggest challenge to jobs, our global competitiveness, and the future of American enterprise.

Wow!  The “single biggest challenge“?

And as Reuters reported last month, Ivan Seidenberg of the Business Roundtable,

has been critical of the Obama administration in the past, charging that its zeal for regulation was creating uncertainty that was making it harder for businesses to raise capital and create jobs.

Oh, yeah?  Then why did I read in The New York Times that multinational companies operating—and creating jobs—in China tolerate a regulatory system much more onerous than ours?

The article revealed that companies like General Electric are reluctant to criticize the Chinese for manifestly unfair trade practices for fear that Chinese regulators will punish them for their insubordination. As the Times put it—and you should read this carefully:

Chinese laws are often just a few pages in length, even on complex industrial or financial subjects. That leaves broad discretion to regulators on enforcing regulations that may help some companies and penalize others.

Regulators also have the authority in every industry to approve foreign investments, and even demand a say in details like what equipment will be purchased by foreign investors for their factories. Regulators have long used their involvement in the minutiae of corporate management, and their ability to delay even minor decisions, as a way to discipline companies for taking stances at odds with Chinese policy.

Now, some anti-regulatory apologist needs to explain to me just how campanies—that  supposedly have trouble raising capital to do business in America—can raise capital to compete in an environment like that?  We are, after all and for God’s sake, talking about China, an authoritarian—some say totalitarian—state.

In another Times article, China Drawing High-Tech Research From U.S., we find that despite the potentially punitive regulatory structure in China, American high-tech businesses are now rushing there to do business. 

Much of the rush is based on the gargantuan market available.  “China has become the world’s largest auto market,” the paper said.  “The country is also the biggest market for desktop computers and has the most Internet users,” it continued. And then it pointed out:

Not just drawn by China’s markets, Western companies are also attracted to China’s huge reservoirs of cheap, highly skilled engineers — and the subsidies offered by many Chinese cities and regions, particularly for green energy companies.

Ahh.  There it is: cheap labor. You see, a multitude of regulatory sins can be overcome by cheap labor. And in China, even the engineers work for beer money.

But it’s not just cheap labor that attracts American businesses. Gifts from the Chinese government help a lot.

In yet another Times article we have the story of Evergreen Solar, a Massachusetts company that is (was) the third-largest maker of solar panels in America. The company achieved that distinction partly through assistance from the government of Massachusetts in the form of $43 million.  But that wasn’t enough:

…now the company is closing its main American factory, laying off the 800 workers by the end of March and shifting production to a joint venture with a Chinese company in central China. Evergreen cited the much higher government support available in China.

“Much higher government support“?  The Times interviewed the chief executive of Evergreen Solar, Michael El-Hillow, and reported:

Mr. El-Hillow said that he was desperate to avoid layoffs at the Devens [Massachusetts] factory. But he said Chinese state-owned banks and municipal governments were offering unbeatable assistance to Chinese solar panel companies.

Factory labor is cheap in China, where monthly wages average less than $300. That compares to a statewide average of more than $5,400 a month for Massachusetts factory workers. But labor is a tiny share of the cost of running a high-tech solar panel factory, Mr. El-Hillow said. China’s real advantage lies in the ability of solar panel companies to form partnerships with local governments and then obtain loans at very low interest rates from state-owned banks.

We can expect Mr. El-Hillow and Evergreen Solar to soon sell their Chinese-manufactured solar panels back to us.  Hopefully, there will still be someone here with money to buy them.

Is this what it has come to? Is this what American businesses want from us?  We have to stop regulating them and slash the wages of our workers and subsidize profit-making ventures through low-interest loans or else?  Or else these capitalist patriots will pick up and move to a Communist country where they can “partnership” with an autocratic government that has unlimited power to destroy them through regulation?

Let me quote again the original Times story about the threat to American businesses China represents:

[Chinese] regulators have long used their involvement in the minutiae of corporate management, and their ability to delay even minor decisions, as a way to discipline companies for taking stances at odds with Chinese policy.

As I listen to the complaints about “excessive” regulation on American business here at home—I have actually heard conservatives say that too much American regulation forces companies to move to China!—and as I think about why President Obama felt it necessary to reassure businesses that he means them no harm, I wonder why American companies are killing jobs here at home and fleeing to an authoritarian land.

No, I don’t really wonder. For too many capitalists, profits trump patriotism every time.

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by R. Duane Graham on January 19, 2011  •  Permalink
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The Day After The Deal With The Devil

“He has darted now to the far right, economically.”

—Joe Scarborough, conservative Republican

This morning on Morning Joe, the discussion, naturally, focused on President Obama’s deal with the right-wing in Congress.

Joe Scarborough, speaking from the right, summed up his view of Mr. Obama:

After this, you cannot say he’s a socialist.  The right has been calling him a socialist forever. This is income redistribution, but it’s taking it back to the rich.

I mean, millionaires are getting tax cuts.  Billionaires are getting tax cuts…They’re lowering the estate tax. They’re giving payroll tax breaks for the next couple of years.  My God, I would be afraid to campaign on this, as a conservative with a 95% lifetime rating—actually, I did campaign on stuff like this…it is stunning…He has become a Jack Kemp Democrat.  He needs to embrace it.

Now, there’s no doubt that Scarborough has overstated the case.  President Obama did not become a supply-sider overnight.  He made this deal with the devil because, as he said, “these are not abstract fights for the families that are impacted“:

As for now, I believe this bipartisan plan is the right thing to do.  It’s the right thing to do for jobs.  It’s the right thing to do for the middle class.  It is the right thing to do for business.  And it’s the right thing to do for our economy. It offers us an opportunity that we need to seize.

Obviously, Mr. Obama was in a difficult place.  He acknowledged that, “political wisdom may dictate fighting over solving problems,” but, he said,

I’m not willing to let working families across this country become collateral damage for political warfare here in Washington.  And I’m not willing to let our economy slip backwards just as we’re pulling ourselves out of this devastating recession.

Fair enough.  Except that the main reason the President found himself in this position at the end is because he was so weak at the beginning.  After the November 2 election, he essentially waved the white flag and invited Republicans to come in to finish the rout.

And, being Republicans, who know how to play hardball politics, that is exactly what they did.  Yesterday, here’s how John Boehner played it:

It’s encouraging that the White House is now willing to stop all of the job-killing tax hikes scheduled for January 1.

Get it? That’s the way it will play out, as this thing goes forward.  Obama will get exactly zero credit for any benefits from this deal.  Republicans will take all the praise and leave him with the ill effects. Despite what Scarborough says, Obama will still be a big-spending, liberal, socialist, anti-American scoundrel.

In his statement yesterday, liberals would have at least liked to hear our President call out the Republicans for what they have done.  But this is the closest he could get:

Now, Republicans have a different view.  They believe that we should also make permanent the tax cuts for the wealthiest 2 percent of Americans.  I completely disagree with this.  A permanent extension of these tax cuts would cost us $700 billion at a time when we need to start focusing on bringing down our deficit.  And economists from all across the political spectrum agree that giving tax cuts to millionaires and billionaires does very little to actually grow our economy. 

This is where the debate has stood for the last couple of weeks.  And what is abundantly clear to everyone in this town is that Republicans will block a permanent tax cut for the middle class unless they also get a permanent tax cut for the wealthiest Americans, regardless of the cost or impact on the deficit.

All of that is, of course, true.  But it lacks the fighting force of Boehner’s “job-killing tax hikes” rhetoric. 

So, since Mr. Obama simply refuses to tell it like it is, I will revise his statement to read more Boehner-esque:

Now, Republicans have a different view.  And I not only completely disagree with their view, I believe it is chicken crap. They want to give the richest Americans, who already are cashing in big time in this otherwise dreary economy, a $700 billion dollar bonus.  Wait. That’s worse than chicken crap. That is a Joe Dirt, wagon-sized turd ball is what that is.  There isn’t an economist this side of the Heritage Foundation who thinks that it will help the economy.

And, yes, I screwed up at the beginning of this thing and allowed the Republicans to play me.  I know that.  And I’m sorry.  But now it has become abundantly clear to everyone in this town that Republicans are willing to screw 99% of the American people just to put more jingle in the pockets of their country club friends, no matter the impact on the deficit that they claim to be so damned worried about.  And I just can’t let that happen.

I promise to do better next time.  For now, I’ve got to do what I think is right for the American people.  But I will not let the Republicans do this to me again. 

And I will not let them do this to you again.

 

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Read Democrats’ Lips: Tax Cuts For The Rich

Huffpo reported today:

President Barack Obama’s top adviser suggested to The Huffington Post late Wednesday that the administration is ready to accept an across-the-board, temporary continuation of steep Bush-era tax cuts, including those for the wealthiest taxpayers.

In a sadly Rumsfeldian moment, David Axelrod, probably President Obama’s closest adviser, defended the move this way:

We have to deal with the world as we find it,” Axelrod said during an unusually candid and reflective 90-minute interview in his office, steps away from the Oval Office. “The world of what it takes to get this done.”

Such a breathtaking reversal—Obama was only a few weeks ago campaigning on the issue of allowing extensions only of the middle class Bush tax cuts—is not surprising, I suppose. Many in the Democratic Party have misinterpreted the defeat of House Democrats last week: “Voters just want us to work together to get things done,” they seem to think was the message.  So, it’s not all that shocking that some on our side are willing to retreat on this and other issues.

But what is surprising is the willingness to concede defeat even before the beginning of the upcoming debate—especially since Democrats still control both bleeping houses of Congress until next January.  Many of us out here in the non-D.C. parts of the country wonder just what good is it to have a substantial majority in the House and Senate—many of them lame ducks with nothing to lose—if you can’t do something that a large majority of Americans support?

Oh, I understand the filibuster cow paddies left all over the floor of the United States Senate by Republicans, which make it hard for Democrats to take a step without getting poop on their penny loafers, but why not at least force Republicans to actually conduct the filibusters on the Senate floor? 

Why not force them to stand up, hour after hour, day after day, and hinder passage of middle-class tax cuts, just so Republicans can ensure that rich folks have another $100,000 to deposit in their swelling bank accounts?

As for President Obama, here’s what he said less than two months ago at the CNBC town-hall meeting:

…the GOP wants, essentially, to write checks of $100,000 and more, at taxpayer expense, to all the millionaires and billionaires. This is irresponsible,” the president said, “and I won’t do it.”

Obama said, “You can’t give tax cuts to the top two percent and lower the deficit at the same time – not when that tax cut costs $700 billion.”

Read my lips: “I won’t do it,” he said.  Hmmm.

Axelrod did try to assure us that the White House is not going to back down on protecting the health insurance reform legislation:

“I’m not going to prejudge what they are going to do,” Axelrod said of Republican opposition to the legislation. “But I will tell you this — we are firm in our commitment, we are willing to work with people to improve this plan. We are not going to stand for those who want to undermine it and destroy it.”

Read my lips: “We are firm in our commitment,” he said.

Uh-oh.  Here we go again.

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by R. Duane Graham on November 11, 2010  •  Permalink
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Energy Independence: Obama’s Apollo Mission?

Some of the discussion on Morning Joe this morning involved President Obama’s upcoming speech to the country on the BP oil disaster.

Joe Scarborough, former right-wing Republican but now a little more thoughtful conservative, suggested that Obama turn the Gulf crisis into a vehicle to push America—like John Kennedy pushing the country to the moon in the 1960s—to world-wide energy dominance by the end of this decade:

I would make the John Kennedy speech that by the end of the decade, we will go to the moon. This president can say, thank god it’s the beginning of the decade, by the end of a decade, America will break its dependence on foreign oil. By the end of the decade, we will control our own destiny. By the end of the decade, we will be positioned to dominate the world in energy for the next century. We will do it because we must do it…We know what the president needs to say tomorrow night, but he will not say it because that is not the type of president he is.

Well, although I agree with Scarborough that Obama should aggressively push the country toward energy independence (he’s already begun a modest push), if he doesn’t use the present crisis as a springboard for that race-to-the-moon effort, it’s not because of Obama’s reluctance to fight for controversial legislation.  After all, despite his native pragmatism, he just pushed Congress to pass a highly controversial health care reform bill that may cost many of his fellow Democrats their jobs, and may cost him his own job in 2012.

We have to remember that the space race that began under Kennedy and Johnson was an extension of the Cold War and thus enjoyed great popularity.  It just wasn’t that controversial when the President of the United States decided to create the Apollo program in order to kick a little Soviet ass in space—not to mention the increase in relative military strength that accompanied it.  Having such a common enemy made it easier to do big things like Kennedy proposed and Johnson made happen.

These days, Obama would have a monumental fight on his hands from recalcitrant Republicans who want nothing to do with working with Obama on much of anything—he is the enemy, remember?—let alone something highly controversial like a total revamping of our energy policy.  Such a remake would lend itself to much demagoguery from the other side—”Obama’s plan to raise energy taxes” would just be the nice way the right-wing would characterize it.  The not-so-nice way would be, “Obama’s communist plan to take over the oil business.”

Having said all that, and understanding that Obama is at bottom a pragmatic man, I hope the president does go to the people in the country and ask them to override the political decisions of their legislators and demand that those legislators—mostly, but not all, Republicans—back a national energy policy that will, as Scarborough said, leave us in a position to “dominate the world in energy for the next century.”

Obama went to Washington to do big things.  This is one of those big things.

If it costs him his job in two years, then so be it.

[photos: NASA and U.S. Coast Guard]

 

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by R. Duane Graham on June 14, 2010  •  Permalink
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Posted by R. Duane Graham on June 14, 2010

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It’s As Obvious As A Hitler Mustache At A Tea Bagger’s Placard Painting Party

Naturally, some folks don’t want to hear that much of the Tea Party “movement” is not what it purports to be.  I understand that. Committed to the issues that allegedly animate the organizers, they don’t want to believe that the core of the movement is really about fear, fear of a strange black man from Kenya Hawaii, who now leads our country.  

Someone by the name of Captain Obvious, whom I have now officially busted to Lieutenant Oblivious, complained about my analysis of the Winston Group findings on the composition and motivation of the Teapartiers. He wrote,

I have never seen such a worthless string of simplistic speculation and voluminous bloviation based upon nothing more than a personal assumption of mala-fides.

At first I thought he was commenting on the Rush Limbaugh Show, but then he clarified:

Even if in bizarro world Democrats were noble saviours out to repel the Republican scourge, it isn’t sufficient for you that tea partiers could just be “wrong.” No, using your psychic “intention detector” you KNOW it’s all racism.

No, Lieutenant, it’s not all racism.  And, of course, no one has said such a thing.  We all understand that many people, in both parties, are concerned about the deficit and the national debt.  It’s just that most people don’t dust off their 18th-century Sunday best and hustle down to the town square and make fools of themselves degrading our democratically-elected leader, calling him silly names while holding grammatically-challenged signs.

So,while acknowledging that there is much public angst about our long-term fiscal health, some of us wonder just what the Tea Party movement is really about, since most of the worried public does not identify itself with it.  The reason we wonder is because of the dissonance between the alleged concerns of the movement and its rather selective timing of the expression, as well as the target,  of those concerns.

As fellow blogger Juan Don pointed out in a comment:

Squawking about President Obama’s reckless spending is much more fun when you’re not attached to the previous administration’s strange homage to “fiscal conservatism”. Of course, it’s purely coincidental that deficit hawks flex their feathery outrage only after their party is out of power.

And as Jim Stone, another blogger pointed out in his comment:

Leading up to the present, Democrats (every President) have IMPROVED our situation regarding this issue. Eisenhower’s administration is the ONLY Republican administration which reduced the debt.

Here are a couple of simple charts to illustrate Juan’s and Jim’s point (click on for a better view):

 

So, given the fact there is objective, historical evidence that under Republican governance the things that allegedly bother Teapartiers so much—worries about the size of government, deficit spending, mounting debt—have grown much worse under Republican control, we have a right to ask about the Teapartiers, Why? Why now? and, Why are they so angry at President Obama?

Why, beginning shortly after Obama was inaugurated (but with roots going back to before the election), did a group of almost exclusively white folks decide to get together with misspelled placards, misplaced rhetoric, disingenuous and anachronistic use of the Founder’s words—not to mention the caricatures of Obama that had racist overtones—and decide to start a “movement” whose alleged concerns were the size of government, its spending increases, and its debt, when Republicans have been the demonstrable cause of those concerns for years?

The truth is that at the core of the Tea Party movement is a group of disgruntled and fearful white conservatives and Republican sympathizers, whose fears are not as much about the deficit, debt, or the size of government as much as they are about Barack Hussein Obama, the “exotic” black man, who some on the right think is the anti-Christ, who many on the right think is a Muslim, and who most on the right think is a socialist—if not a Communist bent on destroying America.

That fact is as obvious as a Hitler mustache at a teabagger’s placard painting party.

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by R. Duane Graham on April 4, 2010  •  Permalink
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Posted by R. Duane Graham on April 4, 2010

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The War On Obama

Given that conservatives have continued to prosecute their all-out war on Obama’s handling of our fight against Al Qaeda, it was nice to hear a strong defense of the administration coming from somewhere near the top. Here is one excerpt from Joe Biden’s appearance on Meet The Press today:

DAVID GREGORY: What about the general proposition that the President according to former Vice President Cheney doesn’t consider America to be at war and is essentially soft on terrorism? What do you say about that?

VICE PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: I don’t think the Vice– the Former Vice President Dick Cheney listens. The President of the United States said in the State of the Union, “We’re at war with Al Qaeda.” He stated this– and by the way, we’re pursuing that war with a vigor like it’s never been seen before. We’ve eliminated 12 of their top 20 people. We have taken out 100 of their associates. We are making, we’ve sent them underground. They are in fact not able to do anything remotely like they were in the past. They are on the run. I don’t know where Dick Cheney has been. Look, it’s one thing, again, to– to criticize. It’s another thing to sort of rewrite history. What is he talking about?

This follows Deputy National Security Advisor John Brennan’s piece last week in USA Today in which he said:

This administration’s efforts have disrupted dozens of terrorist plots against the homeland and been responsible for killing and capturing hundreds of hard-core terrorists, including senior leaders in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and beyond — far more than in 2008. We need no lectures about the fact that this nation is at war.

Now, no doubt these defenses will not placate Obama’s political enemies. They are at war with Obama himself.  The right-wing will not be satisfied by good news that the 9/11 perpetrators are being diminished on a daily basis. They don’t like Obama’s approach because it lacks the language of authoritarianism that conservatives covet.

Not content with merely being at war with Al Qaeda, they want Obama to buy into their larger “war on terror” because such a posture allows for a wide array of possibilities—both domestic and foreign—that will help satisfy their authoritarian cravings.  From wanting more warrantless surveillance of Americans to suggesting starting a war with Iran,  their authoritarian jones simply can’t be satisfied by a thoughtful, “professorial” approach they claim Obama’s policies represent.

Especially now that the Obama administration has tripled down on the efforts in Afghanistan and Pakistan—with unarguable success—conservatives these days have to focus on some other aspect of the administration’s policy they want to make the public believe is leaving us vulnerable to terrorism.  Thus, a return to an emphasis on the language that Obama uses, as he prosecutes the war on actual terrorists, as opposed to an amorphous war on a tactic, “terror.”

What some have called a right-wing meme still makes its way about the culture.  You’ve heard it: “Obama won’t even use the word ‘terror.‘“  In a stunning example of not only right-wing hysteria, but of mainstream media compliance with such hysteria, here is a transcript from CNN from early January:

SEN. JIM DEMINT (Rep-S.C.): There’s no question that the president has down-played the risk of terror since he took office. He is investigating the CIA, rather than build them up.

GLORIA BORGER: How has he — Senator DeMint, how — how has he down-played the risk of terror?

DEMINT: Well, it begins with not even being willing to use the word.

BORGER: Well, aside from the semantics, aside from that.

As Greg Sargent pointed out,

Politico ran with DeMint’s claim today, also without fact-checking it. So did The Hill and MSNBC. CBS also ran similar DeMint comments without rebutting them.

The rebuttal is that not only has Obama repeatedly used the word, he had used it as recently as one day before DeMint’s accusation!  You gotta love that liberal media, letting hard-core conservatives lie about Obama that way.

But thankfully, there are other outlets.  Here is one example that utterly destroys the Obama-won’t-use-the-word-terror meme:

  

If you think such a devastating rebuttal of outrageous right-wing hysteria would stop the insane references to language and Obama’s war efforts, you would be wrong.  Here is something Sarah Palin said, to much applause, at the Tea Party Convention last weekend:

Let me say, too, it’s not politicizing our security to discuss our concerns because Americans deserve to know the truth about the threats that we face and what the administration is or isn’t doing about them. So let’s talk about them. New terms used like “overseas contingency operation” instead of the word “war.” That reflects a world view that is out of touch with the enemy that we face. We can’t spin our way out of this threat. It is one thing to call a pay raise a job created or saved. It is quite another to call the devastation that a homicide bomber can inflict a “manmade disaster.” I just say, come on, Washington, if no where else, national security, that is one place where you’ve got to call it like it is.

She went on to say:

We need a foreign policy that distinguishes America’s friends from her enemies and recognizes the true nature of the threats that we face.

The “true nature of the threats that we face” is what Obama and his administration have finally got right.  And for that the right-wing offers nothing but ridicule and fear.  The latest book by a former Bush official, Marc Thiessen, has as part of its title the following:

How Barack Obama Is Inviting the Next Attack

Thiessen began his attacks on Obama rather early.  Last year he wrote:

It’s not even the end of inauguration week, and Obama is already proving to be the most dangerous man ever to occupy the Oval Office.

All of this illustrates that conservatives are more interested in a “War on Obama” than anything else.

[Biden photo: AP; Palin photo: Tennessean.com]
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by R. Duane Graham on February 14, 2010  •  Permalink
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Posted by R. Duane Graham on February 14, 2010

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The Prince And The Prince Of Peace

Now that the Democrats have squandered an illusory 60-vote majority in the Senate, one that wasn’t really manageable considering Joe Lieberman had a man crush on John McCain and other hawkish Republicans, and considering he is as phony as an Allen Shirley guest column, it’s time to try a new strategy of governance.

While I will leave it up to legislative gurus to figure out a way to advance through Congress an agenda that Democrats can be proud of, I want to address something that has bothered me at least since the false-patriot Rush Limbaugh uttered the F-word—failure—regarding Obama’s presidency.

Make no mistake about it, I am a great admirer of the president.  I worked to get him votes; I defended him before angry voters; I supported his initial conciliatory approach to governance, in which he tried to transcend normal partisan politics and forge coalitions to get things done.  I have written many times in his defense over the past several months.  His thoughtfulness, his deliberation,  and his willingness to wait until he has all the facts before he acts are part of a style I love and appreciate.

But, I am now waiting for Obama to channel his inner Machiavelli. At least a little bit. I realize that Jesus is likely Obama’s model of behavior, and I realize that it probably isn’t in his nature to actually apply Machiavellian principles of princely behavior to his presidency.

However, I suggest that perpetually “turning the other cheek” in today’s political environment will lead to failure.  And it didn’t work out too well for Jesus, either.  His earthly career ended in ignominy, hanging from a crossbeam outside the city walls, naked and defeated.

While I am not asking Obama to fundamentally change his personality, I am asking him to at least consider two pieces of Machiavelli’s advice:

He who wishes to be obeyed must know how to command.

It is better to be feared than loved, if you cannot be both.

Obama’s administration began with Rush Limbaugh’s famous, “I want Obama to fail” remarks and his flirtation with moving to New Zealand—which not one Republican politician had the balls God gave man to protest—continuing through Jim DeMint’s ”Waterloo” comment, in which the creepy religious fanatic masquerading as a U.S Senator pledged that killing health care would be the end of Obama. 

Last summer, we endured the spectacle of so-called “angry” voters, who voiced such anger in terms fit for a World Wrestling Federation event.  We endured swastika-covered placards; voodoo-priest images; messages that Obama was a fascist, socialist, communist, and racist; charges that Obama was not a U.S. citizen, that his presidency was not legitimate and that he wanted to destroy America.  

To top it all off, we endured the embarrassment of a rude, unruly, disrespectful Congressman Joe Wilson shouting, “You lie!” during an Obama speech to a joint session of Congress.

Obama, of course, largely ignored the anger, at least publicly.  He, of course, accepted the congressman’s apology without highlighting the uncivility.  And, of course, last night Obama phoned Scott Brown, who defeated Martha Coakley, to “congratulate” him.

Why?  Why ignore the Tea Party anger?  Why accept Wilson’s apology without using it to embarrass those who hate Obama? Why congratulate Brown so soon? There would have been plenty of time to shake his hand and offer his congratulations. Why last night?

He congratulated a man who opposes nearly every social value that Obama holds dear; he congratulated a man who publicly suggested Obama was a bastard child; he congratulated a man who has pledged to join a small but fanatic group of Republicans who are hell-bent on seeing to it that Obama’s administration will be the failure that Rush Limbaugh famously wished for and predicted.

Why give such an unworthy opponent immediate recognition and instant credibility?

Anyway, we now have the spectacle of a teabagger capturing the seat of Ted Kennedy, who surely must be scratching and clawing on his coffin lid to get out and demand a do-over.  But ironically, despite a poor campaign and some gaffes by the Democratic candidate, Ted Kenney’s life-long issue—health care reform—proved to be the defining issue of the Brown-Coakley campaign.

That didn’t have to happen.

Because of a noble, cautious, protracted approach—apparently approved by Obama—that dragged on much too long in an attempt to attract conservatives in the Democratic Party, not to mention fringe Republicans like Olympia Snowe, we have what we have today.

Because the White House chose a behind-the-scenes strategy of influencing the outcome of the health reform legislation rather than an open and direct and emphatic defense of an acceptable bill, we have what we have today.

Because of a calculated recognition of the difficulty of overcoming conservative opposition in both parties and a desire to get something passed, no matter how feeble, we have what we have today.

Because from the start the White House took off the table a single payer option and signaled that a strong public option wasn’t even an essential part of reform legislation, we have what we have today.

So, I ask:  What did all the soft-sell strategy accomplish?  We all understood the reality of the situation: There were just too many damn conservatives in the Senate to get the best bill.  But my problem is that the White House didn’t even put up a goddamn fight for one.  Thus, the other side recognized a palpable weakness, and as the calendar advanced, wily conservative Democrats sensed the opportunity to game the process.

All of this confounded liberals, those who put Obama in the White House by actually going out and convincing the much-vaunted “independents” to vote for him.  And some liberals, pissed off that their candidate was not fighting hard enough, unwisely threw up their hands and said “let the bill die.”  Or at least began to stop aggressively defending it against the lies being told constantly by Republicans at Town Halls and Tea Parties, broadcast faithfully by the Obama-hating Fox “News” channel, whose perpetuation of falsehoods about the bill and the “Obama is dangerous” meme came to be less and less challenged, too.

Even the feeble attempt by the White House to challenge Fox “News,” which initially had such promise, withered under the criticism of “mainstream” journalists, who incomprehensibly defended the network, despite the fact that Fox is undoubtedly destroying the line between journalism and propaganda and thus undermining the very journalists willing to defend the network.

Finally, although no one knows how this mess will play out, I will offer President Obama one final piece of advice from Machiavelli:

Whosoever desires constant success must change his conduct with the times.

Hopefully, in the times to come, Obama will move forward with less “turn the cheek,” “Jesus meek and mild” reactions and be more like the Jesus who threw the moneychangers out of the temple.

Because Obama’s political enemies seek not only his office, but seek to destroy him and the promise and legitimacy of liberalism.

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by R. Duane Graham on January 20, 2010  •  Permalink
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Posted by R. Duane Graham on January 20, 2010

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The Truth Behind The Phony Outrage

From Michael Steele to Liz Cheney to Senators Jon Kyl and John Cornyn to nearly every conservative pundit, the right wing is making much of Harry Reid’s racially-tinged comments about Obama found in Game Change, by Mark Halperin and John Heilemann:

He (Reid) was wowed by Obama’s oratorical gifts and believed that the country was ready to embrace a black presidential candidate, especially one such as Obama – a ‘light-skinned’ African American ‘with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one,’ as he later put it privately.

Steele laughingly said Reid should resign; Kyl, too, invoking the Trent Lott controversy over sympathetic remarks Lott made about a real racist, Strom Thurmond, said Reid should step down.  Cheney predictably said liberals were protecting one of their own and ignoring his “racist” remarks.  In a fight with none other than George Will yesterday, she said,

The comments were outrageous … I don’t think it’s okay if you say it in private or public. The excuse by liberals is inexcusable.

First, notwithstanding phony outrage from conservative Obama-haters, Reid’s comments were not “racist” in the same way that Bill Clinton’s alleged remarks about Obama—found in the same book—were.   As quoted,  Clinton supposedly said to Ted Kennedy in 2008, while the former president was seeking Kennedy’s endorsement of his wife,

A few years ago this guy would have been getting us coffee.

Now, those are racist remarks, pure and simple, and if Clinton made them (which, of course, will probably never be confirmed) then he deserves condemnation from all sides, including liberals.

But Reid’s comments were in a different class, albeit they do demonstrate a certain “polite” or “genteel” kind of racism we might call racism-lite.  

However, no matter what one thinks about Reid’s remarks, what he said says more about us as a culture than it says about Harry Reid, who is prone to making dumb statements. The truth about America is that it has travelled a long way in overcoming its racial past, from abolishing slavery, to overturning Jim Crow, to electing its first African-American president. But a deeper and darker truth is that our country is a long way from treating all blacks as equals and Harry Reid’s comments reflect a reality very few want to acknowledge.

During the Obama campaign in 2008, I attended a meeting locally with some union activists who supported Obama and were preparing to work to get him elected.  During a talk, one of the activists who was working on behalf of the AFL-CIO, was talking about the difficulties of campaigning for a black candidate around these parts (a realistic concern) and said something like this:

When you run into someone who is sympathetic to Obama’s views, but has problems with him because he is black, remind them that he is only half black and encourage them to vote for the “‘white half.”

Now, I knew this person and I knew he was not a racist in any way I could discern, but as we all acknowledged at the time, there is something sad about the truth he was expressing.  Light-skinned blacks do fare better in our culture than dark-skinned blacks.  And, à la Harry Reid, blacks who talk like educated whites do fare better than blacks who don’t.

Naturally, Democrats, including Obama, are giving Reid the benefit of the doubt.  Reid is an Obama supporter and the top Democrat in the Senate, who is steering health care reform through some rough seas in Congress.  And quite as naturally, Republicans are crying hypocrisy on every news channel.

But the larger truth shouldn’t get lost in the charges of hypocrisy, whether applicable or not.  As Americans—Republicans and Democrats, blacks and whites—we have a long way to go before we are truly color blind.

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by R. Duane Graham on January 11, 2010  •  Permalink
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Posted by R. Duane Graham on January 11, 2010

http://duanegraham.wordpress.com/2010/01/11/the-truth-behind-the-phony-outrage/

E-Bama

It is time we framed the issue of how to reform our health care system in moral terms: 

Do we want our health insurance supplied by profit-minded CEO’s, who command huge salaries and bonuses based on their ability to squeeze the life out of the sick, or do we want our health insurance supplied by the same people who supply life-giving health insurance to our senior citizens?

Now that is framing the issue.

Anyway, here is the latest on the Democrats’ sometimes-quixotic effort to bring some morality to our health care system.  Some folks have figured out that Medicare is comfortably popular, and maybe therein lies a way to convince people that the so-called public option is not the death-panel monstrosity that the half-governor Palin said it was.  We can now call it Medicare Part Everybody.  Voila!

The idea that health care reform ought to include a public option, that is, a government-administered insurance program similar to Medicare, has run into stormy seas, and it’s not just Republicans who are weary and seasick, but some Democrats have been queasy over the idea, too.

Now, maybe with the Medicare Part E idea, Democrats can overcome the Palin-Limbaugh-Hannity-Beck-[insert favorite demagogue here]-wing of the Republican Guard and start making some progress in wrestling with the devil of death-bed profiteering.

Look, it’s no secret that the American people generally have a healthy skepticism toward government involvement in the affairs of mankind, preferring the private sector to take care of most of their needs, like supplying Budweiser and bullets.  But what Republicans try to deny, and Democrats often fail to point out, is that when it comes to health insurance, people do want the government involved.  That’s why Medicare is so popular.

It turns out that when it comes to matters of life and death, people who aren’t independently wealthy prefer the discernible hand of government to Adam Smith’s invisible, frequently grifting private hand, which all too often belongs to a health-insurance Artful Dodger, whose focus is on the company’s financial health, not on the health of its clients.

geico-geckoNow, all we need is for President Obama to jump with both feet on the idea of Medicare Part E. 

Who knows, maybe one day Blue Cross will just be a jazzy Christian band gigging at a patriotic Tea Party, protesting government-sponsored auto insurance.

Look out GEICO.

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by R. Duane Graham on October 22, 2009  •  Permalink
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Posted by R. Duane Graham on October 22, 2009

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