US politics: Can someone continue summarising what's going on with the GOP?

Continued from the endless thread.

gop ca. 1960s: medicare = current generation will be the last to know freedom
gop ca. 2009: medicare = sacrosanct entitlement for the older generation that libruls want to kill

Can someone continue summarising what's going on with the GOP?

They are losing "their" country, and they do not like it.

losers be losin

a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of losers

http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2003/images/zeolite/hindenberg.jpg

that jgp was the best thing about the first thread

How are they multiplying? Do you not see that they're multiplying? Are you that blind? Have you noticed that there's more than there were last year and the year before, and the year before that? How are they multiplying? They're reproducing right? No, here's a biology lesson: they're not reproducers, they're recruiters! And you know who they're after? Your children. Remember you dropped off your kids last week? That's who they're after. You drop them off at some daycare, you drop them off at some school somewhere, you don't know where they're at. I'll tell you where they're at: they're being recruited by the sodomites. They're being molested by the sodomites. I can tell you so many stories about people that I know being molested and recruited by the sodomites.

http://crooksandliars.com/david-neiwert/gospel-hate-arizona-pastor-steve-and

Okay that photo SO does not help his case.

http://static.crooksandliars.com/files/uploads/2009/08/steve_39657.jpg

"DON'T HIT!"

ned i dunno if direct linx are a good idea

http://crooksandliars.com/david-neiwert/gun-toting-arizona-protester-belongs

hot xx-post

That's who just sold our corporations to the government.

homophobia totally run of the mill, but this very concept is completely mindboggling in its logical inversion of reality

Looks like George McFly

ned i dunno if direct linx are a good idea

Was going back and forth on that. (The first photo is hosted on the Crooks and Liars site, FWIW.)

That dude seriously does not know how to hold a baby.

how is babby held?

Pretty poorly.

omg lol -- WSJ: Obama must move to the right to 'save his Presidency'

save it from what? lol blackmail.

SAVE IT FROM ABJECT FAILURE, obv.

interesting angle there, how Clinton benefited from the GOP. Something must be wrong with my browser though because I can't find the word 'impeachment' anywhere in that article.

lol. I assume the op-ed author would not say the same about Republican Presidents (i.e., that they campaign on a centerist platform, but if they try to govern from the far right, they're doomed to failure), since the underlying assumption is that the country is center/right.

I usually give more cred to the wsj for at least being a grounded conservative view. but that is some totally blinded by bias crapola.

We liberals still dream of the zipless debate -- of the claim so clear and pure that it can’t be routed in some bizarre fashion. As we dream these dreamers’ dreams, we show that we still don’t understand the shape of our current predicament.

Can we talk? In years when no GOP congressman has been discovered sleeping with boys, it’s easy to defeat our proposals! (There is no easier job on earth than that of the pseudo-con pundit.) Typically, we show few signs of understanding why that is. ...

The other side just has to say a few words: “Government takeover!” No, wait: “Death panels!” By way of contrast, our guy goes out there for an hour -- and nobody knows what he wants!

One side gets to yell crazy things -- and the other side is required to make intensely detailed presentations! And yet, the side which yells the crazy things is the side which constantly wins! It’s almost like a dream from Kafka -- a dream our side can’t quite explain. Then too, we thought of a passage from Wittgenstein: “We feel as if we had to repair a torn spider’s web with our fingers.”

tracer that is an argument for...what? more bamboozlement and bullshit from "us"? completely running over republicans rather than any show of deliberation or respect? i'm half in favor...

i don't still dream of a zipless debate, fwiw

i think it's less of an argument than a painful yawp of frustration and disappointment

'zipless' meaning what, exactly? velcro, maybe.

i know this has been said, but i think handwringing about how "we always lose!" is playing into the republican narrative way more than anything that's actually going on in washington. "we" (however you define that) do not always lose. it's just not true.

a health care bill is going to pass. it's not going to be everything anybody wants it to be, but it's going to pass and it's going to be a "win," and people who think it's going to be "defeated" by crazy people waving hitler pictures just need to calm down and enjoy the spectacle.

and really, who doesn't enjoy clowns waving crudely drawn Hitler posters?

(can someone compare contrast the Bush=Hitler posters w/some Obama=Hitler posters? Cuz I definitely saw the former at various anti-war protests)

tipsy mothra otm

social security was kind of a shitty deal when it was put together too

You know what blows my mind? We have 3 1/2 years more of these people losing their shit. Like, it took Bush fatigue a few years to get going. But Obama? Instant anti-karma. What will the nuts be saying/doing next year?

Shouting loudly at primaries and caucuses?

The Democrats should simply refuse to engage with townhall people. It will piss them off, yes, but the party can then respond that they won't respond to irrational people demeaning the process by spreading lies, misinformation and rumors.

eh, i kind of agree w/ that, but the optimist/idealist in me thinks that the dems engaging w/ the psychos in as kind and open a way as possible is likely to both reap long- and short-term political rewards but also maybe inject some level of openness and kindness to political discourse

I don't buy that, really, though I would like, if not kindnness, a certain flinty insitence on civility and at least a modicum of respect for American democracy's functioning requiring at least some reference to facts more than emotions.

engaging w/ the psychos in as kind and open a way as possible is likely to both reap long- and short-term political rewards but also maybe inject some level of openness and kindness to political discourse

this is highly unlikely. you cannot co-opt an irrational opponent with rationality, it doesn't work.

yeah i mean doing so not as a strategy to make crazy people uncrazy but as a strategy to make every who isnt crazy less likely to act crazy in the future, and also to remind everyone out there which party is the crazy party

Just because the base of the Republicans looks crazier, now, doesn't mean that the Democratic base doesn't have its share and doesn't have some internal contradictions. In the end, this will come as much from appealing to various constituencies, inductries and interest groups. It almost always does, no matter what the chatter is about.

That chick that Frank smacked down was a LaRouchebag after all.

(Why am I hearing that epithet in Scooby's voice all of a sudden?)

The only thing you can do about crazy people is to make them look even crazier, either by refusing to engage or by setting the terms of the argument.

Borat to the rescue?

suzy, while that is globally true, TV stations have no particular self-interest in objective policy debates. They LOVE self-righteous, loud crazies. It stirs shit up.

UH. There is really nothing anyone here needs to remind me about re. the workings of the media. I was more or less talking about how the Dems should handle it; these yahoos at Town Halls were the same people who'd screech and boo a person who had the temerity to turn up to a Bush event in an anti-war t-shirt, and their favourite politicians would often have such people arrested or harassed.

Anyway, Randall Terry of Operation Rescue turned up to a TH where Howard Dean spoke and was disruptive, so Dean chucked him out.

So this morning I hear Michael Steele on the radio w the new Republican meme, "Democrats want to destroy health care/kill old people". The interview went something like this:

MS: Democrats want to deny our Seniors health care.
NPR: So you're saying your for Medicare. But isn't that a government program?
MS: Exactly! That's why it's so horrible. The way it's being run it is currently bankrupt, and we need to make cuts to it. But the Republicans love old people so we want to save health care.
NPR: So your supporting it because it's very popular.
MS: The fact is, government-run health care is evil and that is what the Democrats are all about, but now we are saying we support the current government-run health plan cos we wrote a list of things to say a month ago and we are near the bottom of it.

Hope this interview gets transcribed soon cos it is hilarious.

it's replaying it now, i think

it

pwned by steve inskeep

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=112281170

Man this is hilarious!

MS: What makes it a valuable program is that it is the last line of opportunity to receive health care for a lot of our seniors and it has been now since the 1960s. The problem is, as we all note, that the system has been raided over the years from time to time. It's become bloated and in some cases it's efficiencies have not been maxed out. Therefore it's running into problems where every few years we have storied about Medicare falling apart and we've already projected -

SI: It's gonna run out of money.

MS: Exactly.

SI: But you're coming here against reducing the spending on it.

MS: No, no no no no no, that's not coming out against reducing the spending, that is not, that's a wonderful interpretation by the left but, what I was saying was, don't go raiding the program without some sense of what we're taking from the program, the impact it's going to have on the senior citizens out there. You know, raiding a program that's already bankrupt to pay for another program that we can't afford is not good public policy.

SI: So you would be in favor of certain Medicare cuts.

MS: Absolutely! You want to maximize the efficiencies of the program. Anyone who's in the program would want you to do that and certainly those manage the program would want you to do that.

SI: Here's another thing that I'm trying to figure out; within a couple of paragraphs of writing "We need to protect Medicare", you write that you oppose President Obama's "plan for a government run health care system". Now, you're a veteran public policy official, you're aware that Medicare is a government-run health care program.

MS: Yeah, look how it's run! And that's my point!

After that he sort of laughs cos he realizes how ridiculous his entire argument is. The end of the interview is awesome, where he advocates having the government regulate the insurance industry and then realizes what he just said. The whole think is doublespeak but without Steele actually believing anything he himself is saying. It's kind of surreal.

Also he points to the Post Office, which has obviously failed us because it is no longer around today.

August 27, 2009
Categories: Republicans
RNC: Dems will use voter records to ration health care

The RNC reportedly sent a Washington State couple a mailing that suggests the Obama administration will create "Dem Panels" [my term] -- to parse out health care based on voter registration.

Raymond and Louise Denny of La Center, Wash. were surprised to receive a one-page mailing from RNC Chairman Michael Steele entitled "2009 Future of American Health Care Survey" that contained a series of loaded push-poll-ish question.

The Dennys, retirees from New York, are lifelong independents who registered as Democrats last year to vote in the state's caucuses approached the survey with an open mind, according to Louise, but were taken aback by the following question:

"It has been suggested that the government could use voter registration to determine a person's political affiliation, prompting fears that GOP voters might be discriminated against for medical treatment in a Democrat-imposed health care rationing system. Does this possibility concern you?"

Needless to say, Democrats haven't suggested using party registration as litmus for care -- so it's hard to figure out where the rumor is coming from, apart from the mass registration required under a health insurance mandate.

The survey -- first reported in the Columbian of Clark Co., Wash. -- also asserts "Rationing of health care in countries with socialized medicine has led to patients dying because they were forced to wait too long for treatment," and asks, "Are you concerned that this would be inevitable in the U.S. under the Democrats' plan?"

[I haven't seen the mailing yet, but the Dennys are scanning it.]

A call to the RNC press office wasn't immediately returned.

H/t Washington Independent.

Stay classy GOP

Well it's always nice to know, through the magic of projection, what would be happening if the GOP were running things!

ARE YOU CONCERNED THAT A DEMOCRATIC PLAN TO KILL ALL PEOPLE WOULD KILL YOU? Y/N?

"It has been suggested that the government could use voter registration to determine a person's political affiliation, prompting fears that GOP voters might be discriminated against for medical treatment in a Democrat-imposed health care rationing system. Does this possibility concern you?"

this is really a beautiful sentence

suggested... could... might be...possibility...prompting fears... ARE YOU SCARED YET

They recruit through rape. They recruit through molestation. They recruit through violation. They are infecting our society. They are spreading their disease. It's not a physical disease, it's a sin disease, it's a wicked, filthy sin disease and it's spreading on a rampage. Can't you see that it's spreading on a rampage? I mean, can you not see that? Can you not see that it's just exploding in growth?

Does this possibility concern you?

do you want to know more?

Congresswoman Lynn Jenkins (R-KS) calls for a "great white hope" from within the Republican Party.

looooooooooool nice

what i love about the attempted backpedaling on that one is the implied attempt to find some non-racist meaning of "great white hope."

she meant "shining"! "bright"!

she looks really tan, not so white

to be unnecessarily fair to her, I would guess that the majority of people familiar with the phrase "great white hope" have no firm idea what it means, have never much thought about it, and possibly associate the "white" with the color of the stallion said hope will ride up on or something

she did apologize too, btw. which is rare enough, christ.

awesome album

Haha nabisco, when I stole that link for Facebook I felt compelled to post a Jack Johnson wikipedia link because of unnecessary fairness.

it makes the backpedal kind of a funny half step:

There's no doubt the Republican Party has gone through some dark and challenging times in recent years, but thankfully bright young leaders have stepped up to lead the party into the future and she hopes to be a part of it. That was the intent of her comments.

i.e., "she didn't mean it about race specifically, she was just referring to our general cultural commonplace about light/whiteness being good and dark/blackness being bad, which ... wait, that still sounds vaguely racist when you explain it too much"

she's talking about the beginning of the Bible

"lemme come at it this way: you know how kids are afraid of the dark?"

to be unnecessarily fair to her, I would guess that the majority of people familiar with the phrase "great white hope" have no firm idea what it means, have never much thought about it, and possibly associate the "white" with the color of the stallion said hope will ride up on or something

Yeah, this.

omg it was just used on the quiddities thread!

Also:

http://images.amazon.com/images/P/B00066FABM.01.LZZZZZZZ.jpg

every whitey knows that great white hope is racist. don't make excuses for us.

I have a vague idea that the phrase is boxing-match related? But a quick google tells me that even the ORIGINAL meaning of the phrase was racist, so saying, "But it's historical! I didn't make it up!" doesn't rly help, does it.

Is there an analogy between this and "niggardly"?

Was sort of thinking that too, except the latter really IS a word with no connections to the racial slur.

In a way; you could say that a racial furor over the phrase "great white hope", which was coined explicitly for a boxing match that was supposed to prove that white men are intrinsically superior to black men, is like the exact opposite of a racial furor over the word "niggardly", which has its roots in the Old Norse verb nigla and has absolutely nothing to do with the Spanish word negro.

xp I spent too much time flexing to delete this post

they sort of reverse each other -- one's a non-racist term that lots of people think is racist, the other's a racist-in-origin phrase that lots of people presumably think isn't

In a way; you could say that a racial furor over the phrase "great white hope", which was coined explicitly for a boxing match that was supposed to prove that white men are intrinsically superior to black men, is like the exact opposite of a racial furor over the word "niggardly", which has its roots in the Old Norse verb nigla and has absolutely nothing to do with the Spanish word negro.

xp I spent too much time flexing to delete this post

You're challenging me to a boxing match?

whoops, Dan got there first

btw I totally whiffed with my joke about the horse -- a better guess would be that many people never think about the "white" in the phrase because they think of it in the same terms as "white knight." which is funny because what it has retained is the sense that the great hope is the champion of some specific group in need of comeback/redemption (in this case Republicans) -- the phrase tells you flat-out what group that originally was, but I'm not sure people notice that.

haha the google results for "put em up" are distracting

Hmm, I think it's more correct to say most white people today would not believe 'great white hope' was racist. This should not be the 'default' setting.

"Some suggest the phrase 'great white hope' has racist origins despite our protestations that we couldn't have imagined it in that context. Does this possibility concern you?"

the phrase "that's mighty white of you" when someone does you a good turn -- racial? y/n

I always assumed it was when I was a kid, but have heard differently

I've always thought the same.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Play_the_white_man

wau Wikipedia

lol, Wikipedia pwned by Everything2: http://everything2.com/title/Mighty+White+of+You

i should say i've heard differently w/r/t its origins; i would imagine in its current common use it typifies some good ol boy racist bs

xxposts

"Mighty white of you" I only hear ironically, as in "thanks for overcoming your inner dickishness and doing the right thing".

that's very Michael White of you

N'est-ce pas?

I used to hang out at everything2 :(

To return to an earlier discussion, this is an (especially frightening) example of why it's such a dangerous time for Pres. Obama:

Chris Broughton, the man who brought an assault rifle and a handgun to the Obama event in Arizona last week, attended a fiery anti-Obama sermon the day before the event, in which Pastor Steven Anderson said he was going to "pray for Barack Obama to die and go to hell", Anderson confirmed to TPMmuckraker today.

* * * *

"I don't obey Barack Obama. And I'd like Barack Obama to melt like a snail tonight," Anderson said in the sermon.

The article links to an audio clip of Anderson's sermon.

http://kristainlondon.typepad.com/dining/images/2008/06/01/biarritz_escargot.jpg

That original article says

The phrase "great white hope" is frequently tied to racist attitudes permeating the United States when heavyweight boxing champion Jack Johnson fought in the early 1900s. Reaction to the first black man to reign as champion was intense enough to build support for a campaign to find a white fighter capable of reclaiming the title from Johnson.

"Mighty white of you" I only hear ironically, as in "thanks for overcoming your inner dickishness and doing the right thing".

oh yeah, when I've heard it it's def dripping with sarcasm, but I assumed (perhaps wrongly) the subtext was racial

The GOP is actually acting like idiots with the strategy of self-preservation. The recent surfacing of BushCo abuses are constantly buried in the media underneath 'What wacky lies will they say today?'

yes this is a phrase created for racist reasons and only used by intelligent people for racist reasons. Sorry, GOP whackadoodle.

haha the problem there is that your use of "intelligent" probably does not include whackadoodles

I keep reading about this lovely Pastor and wondering what part of his credo is remotely connected to Christianity.

go to 27:30 on the stream linked above, you'll hear how it's linked

it is pretty remarkable

wtf Broughton is black?!?

That sermon is scary.

The Dennys, retirees from New York, are lifelong independents who registered as Democrats last year to vote in the state's caucuses approached the survey with an open mind, according to Louise, but were taken aback by the following question:

"It has been suggested that the government could use voter registration to determine a person's political affiliation, prompting fears that GOP voters might be discriminated against for medical treatment in a Democrat-imposed health care rationing system. Does this possibility concern you?"

This part of the article is innacurate and the survey question nonsensical as it applies to this couple, because you do not register as a member of a party in Washington.

Good.

anyone who talks about killing the president is flagged by the secret service. I'm sure these guys are being watched.

Uh

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0OUXkZO8vE&feature=related

That was yesterday's show. I don't have cable, can anyone watch tonight and let me know what Glenn Beck's secret plan is?

Beck is so fragile.

Also, I hate the sound of chalk on a blackboard. STOP IT, PROF. BECK.

that's Perfessr Beck to you, librul

"THE ONE THAT'S MISSING IS 'Y'" That's right: Why, why -- why -- Glenn Beck?!?

I'm tired of being a sheep, too. I'm tired of being a victim, too.

I want to subscribe to your newsletter, Col. Beck.

F---g A.

If only it was possible to arrange the names of various right wing leaders organizations so that they (almost) spelled out something evil sounding...but no, right wingers were 3 steps ahead and chose all their names so that it would be impossible to rearrange them to spell out disagreeable words and phrases. DAMN

Status Quo
Teabaggers
Ronald Reagan
Free Market
Anti-abortion

hold the phone...

Free Market
Anti-abortion
Ronald Reagan
Teabaggers
Status Quo

lol

Don't forget the Republican party produced all-time dirty anagram champion Spiro Agnew.

a rope swing
groan wipes
rape sowing
groan swipes
gape is worn
pager is own

dang

influential thinker Alex Jones

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZGFw3hY20lM&feature=fvw

where have all the ladies gone?

I saw that Jesus Camp doc tonight. WTF.

xpost weird, as soon as i put that link up the page went down. anyway, details are here.

Eva Lorraine Molina, a junior at Amherst College, is a summer intern for the Clare Boothe Luce Policy Institute.

just imagine that column if she went to Arizona State...

also on that townhall page...

http://media.salemwebnetwork.com/creative/TH/TownhallJun09225x200.jpg

you know, for ladies!

i can't decided if aryan chicks wearing pro-torture t-shirts are post-something-or-other or just actual aspirational fascism.

can't decide i mean

Hah Ronald Reagan puts the 'R' in FARTS

http://www.boingboing.net/2009/08/31/dick-cheney-proud-to.html

"I'm very proud of what we did in terms of defending the nation for the last eight years successfully," Cheney said of the Bush administration's post-9/11 terror strategy on "Fox News Sunday." Cheney says he stands behind the interrogation tactics and is convinced the use of those practices were "directly responsible for keeping America safe for eight years."

I'd forgotten that 9/11 happened in August of 2001....

George Will: We're fucked in Afghanistan, so let's leave.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v134/tracerhand/GlennBeckbookcover.jpg

That's the real cover, by the way.

:)

He is photoshopped to look way thinner than normal.

Whenever I see Glenn Beck's Common Sense on the shelves at the library, I just want to laugh and laugh.

the return of hogan's heroes' sgt. schultz : "I know noth-ing. NOTH-ING."

why are you condescending to middle America?

I saw an older guy at the airport carrying Glenn Beck's "Inconvenient Book" all conspicuous, like a 16 year old trying to let everyone know he's reading something deep. I was super fried after traveling all day and actually did spontaneously laugh at him and he did not look amused.

why are you condescending to middle America?

Am waiting for the worm to turn on this meme in a 'lady, if you have to ask...' sort of way.

wait, is he supposed to be dressed as a soviet general?

Republicans are assholes

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=republicans+are+assholes&search_type=&aq=f

err actually this is the exact clip

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yt66eWnjoTo

sadly, true, but even more sadly, not the real answer to the question, and comforting in being not-true.

the republicans have a senate leadership system built for discipline, the democrats have one built for protection of individual senators' priviledges. max baucus can do what he wants and there's no internal mechanism to lean on him. not so of grassley et al.

gooel I don't know what the fuck he's supposed to be dressed as. The entire thrust of the cover passes me by completely.

As a socialist, naturally. A national-socialist. Don't you guys follow the news?

OK. I still don't get it.

It's his tribute to the Village People.

Tracer, the douchebag is wearing a defanged Nazi uniform a la Hogan's Heroes, and he does look like diet Schultz. Perhaps lightning will strike twice and Beck will meet a Bob Crane ending.

I'm just kidding, Tracer. I won't say I've given up trying to understand Beck. I've never given a fuck about him nor his cretin audience and I will tell them to their faces that their 'issues' are by and large diversions dreamed up by religious obscurantists, racists and corporate interests to keep them angry but subservient.

how's that been working out

that cover is blowing my mind

i wonder if the hyper-touchy ADL types will object

how's that been working out

Meh. I'm just sick of engaging with them as if I concede that their interests and pet peeves are as important to us as they think.

I hope the ultra-touchy ADL people yell about this really loudly. Beck getting all precious about having to account for himself to The Jews should cause uh interesting things to happen to his rhetoric, never mind that of his butthurt, racist audience.

http://glennbeckrapedandmurderedayounggirlin1990.com/

wau

(would rather not have that be a direct link from here)

Beck getting all precious about having to account for himself to The Jews should cause uh interesting things to happen to his rhetoric, never mind that of his butthurt, racist audience.

Waht? I'm sort of curious about what this is about (I'm Jewish).

Glenn Beck should account for himself, but not just to us.

It's about him releasing a book where he's on the cover dressed vaguely like a Nazi.

And photoshopped to be thinner. I think it must be the pic he uses for his manhunt profile.

loooooooooooooooooooooooool

not to get all finkelstein/said itt but considering the relationships between the american and israeli right wings, "official" opprobrium w/r/t playing around with overt nazi imagery tends to fall leftward more often than not...

or more to the point i can't imagine, i dunno, a michael moore putting on some wehrmacht gear to "make a point" without your commentary magazine types going ballistic

xps

OMG LOOLOLL

xpost

i really have no clue how to resolve the title of the book with the cover of the book. impressively weird.

That book should be subtitled "how to stop big government with small minds." It's apparently working.

It just looks so perverted, I can't get over it.

The expression is hilarious.

He's making some weird pouty face that it looks like he learned from watching Tyra on ANTM.

He looks like a slapstick parody of a Prussian.

http://fourfour.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451b8c369e20115707db50c970b-800wi

See what I mean?

Haha I think the only adequate approach to take here is that of Cocorosie's psychologist, who would say that while it's not prohibited for white singers to say "nigger," it is (shall we say) "very very interesting" that one would choose to put it in the song, then have to sing it to groups of people every third night for the next few years, then trade your drum loops for beatboxing from your black backing band (haha then get quoted in infamous "Kill Whitey" article), all leading up to a general chin-scratching steeple-fingered "very interesting, Cocorosie, you are very interested in black people."

― nabisco, Wednesday, March 28, 2007 3:54 PM (2 years ago) Bookmark

sub "glenn beck" for "cocorosie" and "revolutionary fascism" for "nigger/black people", nabisco otm.

keep "song" tho

That's the real cover, by the way.

Okay, that is f----d up.

And seriously, shame on Glenn Beck.

somewhat unfortunate for Glenn that he looks like Jon Cryer trying to be sultry

how to understand beck.. imho he's something of a cult leader. tells alienated & disgruntled people he's the one who understands them & has the answers to what's wrong with this country, encourages mistrust of government/most news media, gives them something to do: endless wild goose chase of conspiracy theories about acorn/community organizers/czars, tea parties.

there are all these attacks on him & his audience that only say he's crazy, these people are crazy, but that's not very useful. i think he just zeroed in on a constituency and gave them something to do, is all.

lol googling Jon Cryer doesn't yield many pics of him trying to look sultry but is practically a bonanza for "lol Jon Cryer is bald" pics

the cover makes me think of those obama-as-joker posters: wrong and weird on so many levels, it's impossible to even be precise about what's wrong with it

The thought of a sultry Jon Cryer is a disquieting one.

just realized beck reminds me of no one so much as

http://ephemerist.files.wordpress.com/2007/12/glick.jpg

huge lols @ OLIGARHY. can't believe I missed that.

Daniel,many xposts, but it's just that I think a lot of these people are boors who live in a land where all of the 'isms' bro down together, and think America's media and financial institutions are run by some form or other of chosen people who are not them; a lot of criticism of liberals is coded the same as anti-Semitism, eg. 'Hollywood' as dog-whistle. If the ADF were to complain, I'm fairly sure that would tip the hands of some of the guanolocos toward saying something very stupid and offensive to a large number of Americans. It would also prompt decisive advertiser action and probably force/enable HI DERE's college pal to cancel that shit.

fascist beck looks like eminem

(fwiw "college pal" is way way way way WAY too strong to describe the relationship between me and J4m3s Murd0ch; more like "dude I met a couple of times in college who was a good acquaintance of one of my actual friends")

Oh, I have no doubt there's a lot of anti-Sematism on the right. And I'm not fooled by the religious right's ostensible support for Israel: It's just a means to an end.

has any mainstream politician ever got caught explicitly equating support for Israel with fulfilling end-time prophecy?

surely

fucked if i can come up with an example, tho :-/

LOL Dan, there was an I'M TEASING element in there somewhere. Although he's catching flack in the UK this week for cynical, posturing anti-BBC lecture; wants more level playing field/freer market, Beeb is in the way, blah blah.

EXAMPLE: The weird Rapture-ready Seven Mountains or whatever-it's-called crap that Sarah Palin is involved with *might* just explain the Israeli flag she kept in the AK governor's office. People tried to get that to go mainstream during the election along with the Kenyan witch doctor, but obviously there was so much hot mess to wade through w/Palin that it got left behind. ARGH concierge Christians ('God is my Errand Boy') bug the shit out of me. See also, the dungeon in C Street.

And I'm not fooled by the religious right's ostensible support for Israel: It's just a means to an end.

Hahahahha funnily enough it's a means to THE end -- they believe Christ can't come again until the temple of Solomon has been rebuilt in Jerusalem. So get cracking on that, Jews. That Dome of the Roc ain't pulling ITSELF down, you know. Not that you're going anywhere but the hot place for killing the Son of God, but never mind that.

So get cracking on that, Jews.

These things take time.

Oh the apocaplytic afetrnoons when we blew up al-Quds
They meant more to me than any living thing on earth...

I think a lot of these people are boors who live in a land where all of the 'isms' bro down together, and think America's media and financial institutions are run by some form or other of chosen people who are not them

Lovin' how Beck/Fox News is constantly railing against 'the media'. Like, are you guys local pirates who hacked into my comcast or something?

Thats what bothered me about the Murd0ch speech they're going apeshit on over here, he's essentially going argh THE MEDIA to the BBC. Obviously all media companies spin against one another as part of competing, but it's a bit ridiculous for a Murd0ch to complain about market share of anything.

well, this should provide a few days' amusement.

arah told me she had a great idea: we would keep it a secret—nobody would know that Bristol was pregnant. She told me that once Bristol had the baby she and Todd would adopt him. That way, she said, Bristol and I didn’t have to worry about anything. Sarah kept mentioning this plan. She was nagging—she wouldn’t give up. She would say, “So, are you gonna let me adopt him?” We both kept telling her we were definitely not going to let her adopt the baby. I think Sarah wanted to make Bristol look good, and she didn’t want people to know that her 17-year-old daughter was going to have a kid.

He looks kinda hot in that video too.

That's some grade-A world-class attention-whoring right there. At least he's fucking over someone I don't have any sympathy for.

is there a betting pool yet for when levi goes to rehab and finds god?

he and sarah can write a book together about forgiveness, and go on a motivational speaking tour.

A Levi rehab pool actually sounds like a fun idea if the stakes are cheap, like a buck or two.

I thought he had already found god and that's why they let him visit?

o_0 to this Pat Buchanan column. The column itself is on Yahoo.

Words fail. Does Buchanan speak for a large percentage of the GOP?

I guess this was all in a book of his last year? I knew he had tendencies in this direction, but I didn't know he went this far.

doesn't speak for the gop. buchanan is the crazy uncle of msnbc who.. i suppose by virtue of him being so pleasant and agreeable personally, can say whatever he wants & most people are like oh, that's just crazy uncle pat, there he goes again. he seems perfectly aware that he's a dinosaur.

far as the column, my take on it is: this is buchanan being a dinosaur historian as much as he is a dinosaur political thinker, basically. it's buchanan talking to an audience of conservative retired guys in small town USA who enjoy geeking out over military history & the history of WWII in particular, and all read the same books and plot out the major battles and know the names of all the generals and political leaders. it's just what they do.

what a dork

this is dorm room what-if nonsense, sure, but it's not an apologia for Hitler. it's a known hardline isolationist trying to suggest that a strong isolationist policy would have prevented WWII, which he also believes was a huge disaster, geopolitically. i'll grant that it's bizarre that he believes that somehow the Holocaust itself might have been averted had the war not happened. though, actually, I still can't tell if that IS what he's suggesting, or if it's creepier: that we shouldn't have intervened even then (or in Kosovo or in Rwanda or wherever).

either way, wacko blowhard though he may be, i really doubt that this article (or his book, which i haven't read) is some kind of love letter to awesome hitler. it's just a sensational way of getting out the isolationist message. don't go on foreign adventures, EVER, even if it's hitler! because hitler didn't even WANT world war II, stupid Britain made a dumb agreement with idiot Poland over some bullshit town! now look at the mess we're in!

xp daria otm

"Hitler wanted to end the war in 1940, almost two years before the trains began to roll to the camps.

It's a little know fact that the 6 labor camps that had been built before then were for dance parties.

also, i think that when buchanan puts something like this out there, it's motivated in at least some small way by a desire to tweak liberal noses.

"hitler! whaaaaa!!!"

for old time's sake
http://files.myopera.com/velmu/blog/hammerzeit.jpg

L0_oL:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/andy-ostroy/president-scarborough-mor_b_273620.html

Perry: Concern over Obama speech understandable

AUSTIN, Texas — Gov. Rick Perry says he understands the concerns of parents who don't want their children listening to President Barack Obama's school-time speech on education next week.

But Perry says he's "certainly not going to advise anybody not to send their kids to school that day."

Obama plans to give a Tuesday speech aimed directly at the nation's school children, addressing the importance of education.

But parents across the nation are balking at the prospect, with some even calling on other parents to keep their children home from school that day.

In an exclusive interview with The Associated Press, Perry said he doesn't think school officials and parents know enough about what issues Obama will address. He said the White House should have kept local school officials informed.

http://jamie-online.com/random-jamz/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/facepalm.jpg

my fuckin man

protect your little ones from the obama new world order mind-control broadcast plz

hoos no offense here but fuck texas

what the hell is wrong with the people in this country

I would have been in favor of GWB addressing kids about the importance of education, not because I agree with his policies or think that he's particularly smart, but because I think having people who run the country telling kids that education is important is a good idea. (Of course, it would never occur to GWB to make a speech like that so it's a moot point.)

The lengths people will go to in order to generate partisan friction about EVERYTHING is one of the most disheartening things about living in this country.

The lengths people will go to in order to generate partisan friction about EVERYTHING is one of the most disheartening things about living in this country.

cosign x a million

ITA. And it seems like it just continues to get worse. I wish people would endeavor to listen and understand each other a little bit better instead of shouting down any view that's different to the ones they hold.

btw, remember "AUGUST 29, SOVEREIGNTY OR SECESSION"?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubzG1CFi8cs

lol at these people forever, I am happy to be a fucking elitist and point out these people are incredibly stupid

Yeah, but see, Obama is asking kids to write TO HIM to see how they can "advance" his "agenda." That's what's going on – we're breeding Obama Youth, see.

On August 29, 2009, citizens gathered to call for Texas' secession from the Union. The turnout for the rally wasn't huge—200 would be a generous estimate—but it was enough to show how much Gov. Rick Perry has helped galvanize and embolden the right wing "hate America" fringe.

i'm ok with those people, but i don't want them around BEAMED DIRECTLY INTO THE BRAIN OF my kids

This is a perfect opportunity for Obama to bring up the all-important "Kill You Parents" issue to the attention of the nation's youth.

I saw that footage. It was amazing. I think my facial expressions were probably hilarious to everyone else on the train with me (I watch Maddow on my ipod).

The thing I find most frustrating about the GOP viewing their minority status as enforcing a duty to troll is that they also view critiques of GOP policies as just trolling. So opposition to e.g. torture or environmental rape is just trolling too.

GET A JOB

I know it's kind of a pointless game to compare left-leaning Bush-haters with right-leaning Obama-haters, but even with the level of vitriol against Bush, even with the number of people who rejected the legitimacy of his being president in the first place, I don't know how many people felt the need to actively shield their children from hearing his statements; I especially don't know many wouldn't have trusted that any message he had for children about education would be basically innocuous and encouraging. Obama-haters seem to have reached a whole new level of complete denial about the guy's presidency; some also seem to carry a double consciousness where if they trust the president then the state is America, and when they don't trust the president the state is an invasive foreign power.

i don't think it's pointless; i think you're 100% correct.

word.

there was never any hand-wringing about Bush poisoning our youth with his LIES or whatever. then again, he never appealed to youth in any major way, so why would have anyone worried? obama on the other hand is the cool, "urban" president that really knows how to rap with the kids, so, gasp, they might actually LISTEN to him (which, since he's just gonna say "stay in school," you'd think was a good thing)

you would think that Obama haters would almost want their kids to listen--then, afterwards, they could have a teachable moment or whatever and tell their kids how wrong Obama was, but noooo that would be too much to ask and would involve sitting down with your kids and talking with them. better just not send them to school that day

Re. "double consciousness", I think that's right, but I don't think it's just the president that they see as the invasive foreign power, but also the masses of Obama supporters. Those huge rallies during the campaign were pretty frightening to these people, because it made vivid, maybe more than election returns because they were visual, how many people held views they found frightening.

Could it be that there's that cultural element in conservatism that's all about 'protecting' the children/women/etc? Maybe I'm a little unfair but I also get the impression that there's a greater drive to carefully cultivate messages/morals/values that are 'good and proper' by excluding offending/immoral/evil sources, whereas lefty families like to celebrate themselves so much for being critical thinkers who love to expose their children to opposing viewpoints etc.
That's a *lot* of projecting, mostly cuz I think my dad always had a bit of that "hey, we're all smart people, let's debate it!" thing going on, but I got the impression among righty folks at school that you DIDN'T debate it because you were simply right.

sorry that's really a WHOLE LOT of projecting, but I always thought that the people who make a big deal about 'teachable moments' in the first place were also all about how progressive they were, while the conservative fringe just sticks their kids in homeschooling.

seriously, sorry for all the strawmen...

no, that kinda sounds right to me.

yeah i think you are right--i guess it's wishful thinking on my part

Eh, lefties are pretty protective of children too.

let me post/quote this great yglesias post one more time!

http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/archives/2009/04/the_militia_right.php

What’s interesting in particular about the militia mindset, however, is that its narrative sources are very different from those of left-wing radicalism. People who believe in violent revolution and the murder of American soldiers and policemen generally, if on the left, appeal to basically anti-patriotic attitudes. Which is about what you would expect from advocates of the violent overthrow of the established political order. But the militia crowd exhibits much more the attitudes one would expect from a coup leader—a Franco or a Pinochet who’s actually appealing to the concepts of patriotism and nationalism as justification for violent revolution.

I suppose there are some different ways of characterizing the asymmetry, but the underlying issue seems to be that rule by conservatives is integral to the right’s conception of the United States of America. This is part of the rhetoric of the “heartland” and “real America”—a period of political victory by a coalition grounded in the coasts and Greater Chicago is a period in which America has ceased to be herself.

http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2009/09/quote_of_the_day_70.cfm

the underlying issue seems to be that rule by conservatives is integral to the right’s conception of the United States of America

^^ right, yes, this is exactly what I meant -- it's not just the president who becomes a foreign/invasive power, it's that the whole state becomes one, America ceases to be America, and the people who believe this feel themselves to be an America in exile

I suppose there's pretty obvious stuff about conservative viewpoints and beliefs (versus progressive ones) that makes it a lot easier to feel that way.

seriously fuck these people

seriously fuck these people
seriously fuck these people
seriously fuck these people
seriously fuck these people
seriously fuck these people
seriously fuck these people
seriously fuck these people
seriously fuck these people
seriously fuck these people
seriously fuck these people
seriously fuck these people
seriously fuck these people
seriously fuck these people
seriously fuck these people
seriously fuck these people
seriously fuck these people
seriously fuck these people
seriously fuck these people

I am quite happy to kick them out of the country if that would make them feel better.

it makes me so angry i feel like i can't even articulate just what it is i disagree with them about. just: fuck these people.

better the kids stay home than do some ugly anti-obama stunt at their parents' behest that will embarrass them forever, like those kids burning beatles records in old photos.

I listened to 'Time Sweep' again recently, a piece which takes 5 seconds of every #1 song on the US charts from 1955 onward, a recent version that's been updated to 2009. It really is remarkable how radical the shift in pop culture is over the last ten years -- there'd always been black pop acts hitting #1, but in the late 90's it goes from alt rock & soft ballads to hip hop and R&B pretty much like a switch being thrown and held. I didn't listen to pop radio much at that time, but I remember a basic sense of the transition and thinking it was a welcome change, pop music was sounding interesting again. But taking in all 55 years of mainstream pop in one sitting in some ways forced me to become a person in my 50's/60's, and from this new perspective once it got to 2005, I was shocked to find myself getting disoriented and feeling displaced by the Time Sweep. It felt gradual to me living through it, as a person living in the Bay Area, but listening to it all at once, it felt less like a shift than something instantaneous, like 'something had happened'. and by the end of the piece, I was specifically wondering if this is what it felt like to be Glenn Beck's audience.

w/o thinking this through too much, there is, at first glance, a manichean problem with the right's basic insistence on strength, power and order-through-violence: a strange belief in the weakness of their own cause in the face of the infectous power of deliberation, difference, ordered evidence, compassion (or just basic politeness). i'm not sketching this out very well with that sentence, but what i'm thinkin of are: the belief that young people are especially prone to fall prey to homosexuality if exposed to it; that open self-critical government systems are powerless against autocratic enemies and need to be scrapped and made more autocratic at home, etc. the party of the rich, tough and productive sure seem convinced of being defeated by life at every moment...

i'm all for these people shutting themselves off and acting like idiots if it doesn't involve out-and-out reactionary violence, but when it comes to fucking around with impressionable minds through selective exposure and censure, that's when i want to reach for my revolver. fuck these people so hard

x-post exactly! but the problem is they believe that reality is willed into existence, so of course you can't expose anyone to anything that doesn't fit that reality, because their reality is real and so everything else isn't, and because it isn't, it's not even there... these people have no relationship to reality! they don't have a belief in the weakness of their argument because there isn't even an argument in the first place!

the argument is: we hate stuff

or we're scared shitless of everyone and everything

in the late 90's it goes from alt rock & soft ballads to hip hop and R&B pretty much like a switch being thrown and held.

Are you sure that didn't happen earlier? Maybe I'd already lost interest in radio before then.

or we're scared shitless of everyone and everything

This is the crux, right? Will people throw rotten tomatoes if someone references that Orcinus series about authoritarianism again?

ok well this is getting very airy and abstract and vague, but goole, it's sort of like a Puritan aesthetic, isn't it? like believing in purity or virtue -- the mindset is that you believe in something strong but it is always susceptible to contamination, subversion, infiltration; your job is to be strong and defend it, to blot out whatever threatens it, not to sit around and reason about it. virtue is "strong" but must always be defended, etc.

the mental image of these people wearing chastity belts as hats is cheering me up somewhat

Ahhhhh and w/r/t the issue of purity and contamination, this is why there isn't room for multiple viewpoints in that worldview -- because even if your system is in charge and is working, any disagreement ruins the whole.

The right's current (and historical) refusal to compromise could, by following that line, be based in something way more interesting than simple meanness.

pilgrim's progress x-post

The right's current (and historical) refusal to compromise could, by following that line, be based in something way more interesting than simple meanness.

They want to see the other side lose, and they want to win.

"I was specifically wondering if this is what it felt like to be Glenn Beck's audience."

I had a different take on this -- somewhere around 70s/80s the chart toppers began to embrace an abrasive, hyperbolic, almost deliberately ugly sound, and this ugliness started passing as the norm, and Glenn Beck & co. reflect this normative, shouty ugliness. Maybe they are cultural enemies of current chart-toppers, but they are aesthetic bedmates, like in that Patton Oswalt joke about how conservatives love cirque.

xp Yeah but one of the roots of their belief system is that they can't AFFORD to compromise. Jesus plus nothing, remember? The "greater good" is not an option here.

"everything is wet and gay and french and on fire aaaaaaaiiiiieee (i mean awesome!!!)"

it's like that tv movie 'the wave' and glenn beck is mr. ross

THERE IS YOUR LEADER! (points to Obama poster with Hitler musstache)

Milton, can you post a link to the "time sweep" you're talking about? google is giving up a bunch of crap...

Are you sure that didn't happen earlier?

Ha, I was going to suggest it wasn't really until 2001 or so. You still have Santana and Matchbox 20 and Creed and Enrique Iglesias at #1 in 2000.

every thread around here turns into an ILM thread eventually doesn't it

basically

Jesus, Creed! Are they at least non-judgmental, gay-loving Christians? I'd hate to see them throw a kink in my "cultural enemies/aesthetic bedfellows" theory.

goole, it's on leonardo

That's true. I think I lost interest in the early 90s. As I remember it, it was hair metal & metal ballads finally giving way to...sexy ballads? Does that count as R&B?

i dunno i kind of hate Vampire Weekend

no balls

they were removed surgically by Obama the Islamofascist Testicle Death Squad

oh sweet gbx thx

(although, dan, can you get my name offa here?)

whoops, sorry :(

ta-da

TESTICLES

like that?

<3

(haha enough meta mod humor)

Hair metal is so weird! Conservatives dressing like transvestites and engaging in all sorts of liberal debauchery! Al Gore is their nemesis! Problematic, hair metal is. (picture yoda ruminating on the paradox that is hair metal while coruscant burns)

There was some Neil Young documentary on PBS recently and there was this right winger Neil Young fan in a sweaty rage over his anti-Bush concert. He was totally going to beat Neil up.

It's true. What I really wanted was punk, but I didn't know it existed, and neither did any of my friends. So I had metal. It was the most transgressive music I could find at the time, although in retrospect it wasn't the best match for me. Plus it really upset my parents.

Hair metal is so weird!

100% true. OTOH: Ratt!

There was some Neil Young documentary on PBS recently and there was this right winger Neil Young fan in a sweaty rage over his anti-Bush concert. He was totally going to beat Neil up.

& don't forget Black Sabbath being forced to pull their Bush=Hitler video montage during 'War Pigs' from Ozzfest 2004 due to massive fistfights in the parking lots after the shows

Are you sure that didn't happen earlier? Maybe I'd already lost interest in radio before then.

― The Lion's Mane Jellyfish, pictured here with its only natural predator (Laurel), Thursday, September 3, 2009 8:49 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark

it's already mostly light soul & pop by the late 80's, but the Meat Loaf / Bryan Adams / Ace of Base / Elton John / Aerosmith ballads all begin to drop away. and even those songs seem to flow with things like Paula Abdul / PM Dawn / Jacksons etc. but by the late 00's, things like James Blunt coming after 50 / Nelly / Outkast just sound crazy

I just listened through again, and there's more consistency across decades than I thought, I was just surprised by my own reaction to this 2009 update. I have a lot of family in Virginia and North Carolina, and had a pretty remarkable trip through those states last month, so I guess I'm just sort of working overtime to hear things from any other perspective than the Bay Area party line, which has been pretty maddening recently

I've always associated hair metal -- and 70s arena rock -- with conservatism. It's (a) outsized, fist-pumping, self-congradulatory music, (b)with heavy-handed "rock" sensibilities, (c) lots of faux-machismo, and (d) an insular, in-group vibe that feels so uniquely conservative to me.

I'm sure a case can be made for other genres being just as conservative. And it's all in the eye of the beholder, I suppose. Still, when I used to see guys at concerts yelling "FREEEBIRRRRDDDD," I think GOP. Oh, also: Ted Nugant.

Damn! So many typos. Apologies.

Guys, let's go back to talking about how crazy GOPers and right-wingers are and how they're all mentally ill etc. If I wanted to read about hair metal...

I know it's kind of a pointless game to compare left-leaning Bush-haters with right-leaning Obama-haters, but even with the level of vitriol against Bush, even with the number of people who rejected the legitimacy of his being president in the first place, I don't know how many people felt the need to actively shield their children from hearing his statements

― nabisco, Thursday, September 3, 2009 4:05 PM (55 minutes ago) Bookmark

OTM. And Bush actually, literally stole the fucking presidency, so if the Left was really so dangerous that would've been the time it would rise up against America. I think liberals didn't need to shield their children from Bush was cos they figured their kids were smart enough to figure it out for themselves. Liberals have a more open-minded and skeptical view of the world - which is why the democrats are all fumbling over each other right now. Conservatives are into demagogues which is why you get people like Glenn Beck and these portrayals of Obama. Liberals see a politicians/leaders as just people and Conservatives see them as saviors or prophets. Since they keep promoting their favorite cult in the public sector drives the point home even more.

It makes me think of the philosophy behind Christianity, which basically 'These are the laws, follow them or you are going to hell, and don't even think about questioning it'. This is why the political movement tied closest to this religion has a theological foundation of close-mindedness. You're either god or the devil, savior or false prophet, free market or public option. No compromise.

yes let's get back to incisive insight like ^^^^

It's lol, but it's why I bookmark'd this thread.

Okay, okay. One more, tho. The ultimate 70s rock guy. Deeply conservative-sounding:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1vqWhqSnMHo

It makes me think of the philosophy behind Christianity, which basically 'These are the laws, follow them or you are going to hell, and don't even think about questioning it'.

bruneauTM

thats a pretty reductive take on "the philosophy behind christianity"

christianity's a pretty reductive cult

T|S ILX's Opinions About Right-Wingers V. ILX's Opinions About The Philosophies of Christianity

vs ILM's opinions on Indie Rock

^^including my own lame "insights" as well

http://www.danjarrard.com/Bumper%20Sticker.jpg

hahahaha wait

sorry this is just a pet peeve of mine--christianity hardly has a theological foundation in closed-mindedness, and has been an incredibly powerful force for progressive social and economic change, in this century and others

yeah wai to generalize thousands of years worth of religious thought and practice

the english revolution was largely founded on radical christianity

for instance

They want to see the other side lose, and they want to win.

ding ding ding ding

Plus about 40 years worth of very consistent, disciplined messaging and a Left which has basically abandoned populism for about as long

Srsly. Can you imagine the Civil Rights movement without Christianity?

But I'm not even contesting the description so much as lol'ing at the lack of nuance. I'd hate it if this thread became the left-wing version of a FreeRepublic thread.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerrard_Winstanley

im happy to point out connections--and there are many--between the kind of dogmatic literalism so beloved by some of our countrys favorite religious leaders and the lockstep obedience demanded by the cheney wing of the GOP--lets just leave dumb generalizations about christianitys theological precepts out of it

yeah so my description of it as "puritan" wasn't necessarily meant to point toward Christianity; just that a lot of right-trending (and especially nationalist) ideologies are really concerned with rooting out "contaminating" influences and subversives and so forth. to be fair, the same can be said of totalitarians on the left, if in a slightly different way.

of course, right-wing hyperbole aside our country is pretty low on the kind of totalitarian leftists who want to send you to a reeducation camp for being counter-revolutionary -- the most anyone suggests is that maybe you're not fit for certain jobs if you're out of sociopolitical step with the rest of us, and maybe also that you suck -- while this country is not as low I'd like on the kind of conservatives who fear contaminating elements like an evil homosexual agenda, grandma-killing socialism, secret terrorist sympathies, etc.

the same could be said of the structure of western drama - there is a stable system; something destabilizes it; the plot is the story of confronting the threat; denouement and emotional release hinge on the moment that the threat is flushed out of the system. which is a very conservative way to think about life - that what's good is what's stable

but maybe i am somewhat off-piste

Yeah jeez you guys go tell all your stories about Christianity helping human progress to the Native Americans.

It's an archaic death cult of people that worship a zombie by eating his body and drinking his blood every Sunday.

You know who else was a Christian, don't you?

I think zombies eat human bodies and drink human blood, not the other way round.

yeah you're not going to get very far with that line, sorry

2xp

I really wish the left didn't also have idiots

I guess Jesus was only a zombie for a few days before he ascended to heaven. But still:

ZOMBIE

I've started to realize lately the extent to which I'm in this left-leaning bubble, where my friends watch Maddow and snark and don't actually bother engaging with anyone's arguments about anything. It's dulling my critical thinking.

Srsly. Can you imagine the Civil Rights movement without Christianity?
the english revolution was largely founded on radical christianity

these are kinda silly cause of the whole "pretty much everyone in america/england being christians" thing. it's like saying "can you imagine the gettysburg address without the english language?"

protestantism underlies the whole liberal order: if all people are radically equal before god, none has the inherent right to rule over another. if there is no divinely ordained order for rulership on this earth, but only an equal-and-total need for subservience to god (getting dicey here admittedly), then there is no way to know what is correct and we have to hash out decisions among ourselves as they arise.

http://static.hometheaterforum.com/imgrepo/a/af/htf_imgcache_38073.jpeg

iatee it's not like mlk and winstanley just happened to be christians - they grounded their actions specifically in their interpretation of their faiths

sorry, i mean they liked zombies

I've started to realize lately the extent to which I'm in this left-leaning bubble, where my friends watch Maddow and snark and don't actually bother engaging with anyone's arguments about anything. It's dulling my critical thinking.

yeah, this is why i mostly avoid political threads here tbh

http://hvchronic.com/volume_2/no_1/CryingIndian.jpg

RE conservatives scared of Obama death-cult indoctrinating their children in school:

My first grade coincided with Reagan's first election, and after Xmas break our homeroom teacher handed out our copies of The Weekly Reader (remember it?). On the cover was a smiling Ronald Reagan. It said, "Ronald Reagan is our 40th president. He will be the new leader of the United States." Inside was the White House address, and we were urged to write ideas about how to make our country better.

I remembered it because I have a head for such things, but never did I think it was particularly sinister.

I've started to realize lately the extent to which I'm in this left-leaning bubble, where my friends watch Maddow and snark and don't actually bother engaging with anyone's arguments about anything. It's dulling my critical thinking

Well, this is why I read The Corner and WSJ and my parents pick arguments with me.

iatee it's not like mlk and winstanley just happened to be christians - they grounded their actions specifically in their interpretation of their faiths

right, but that doesn't mean that their faith was the only one that could have served that purpose - it's pretty easy to find an argument against discrimination using any religion, if you are so inclined. (and easy not to, if you're not.)

xp

tpm has the freakout roundup here

http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2009/09/more-and-more-right-wingers-object-to-obamas-socialist-message-of-staying-in-school.php

xp i dunno i try to find right wing zones where the ideas are really some kind of challenge, the corner and the ws funny papers are kind of facepalm.jpg more than anything

You might try Richard Posner, Ramesh Ponnoru, and Ross Douthat.

When I was in third or fourth grade, I got in trouble goofing off during some exercise where we had to write letters to officials. They put me in the hall where I then penned some letter to Reagan complaining about our garbage pick-up. A few weeks later I got a big Reagan care package in the mail in return, with "official" letters and some picture of him riding a horse. Needless to say, I got a check-plus on the assignment.

yeah i like ("like") all those guys, reihan salam too

posner pere doesn't like the senate as an institution so i'm down with that

xp

Alfred, that's a good catch. Maybe the 'but Reagan even did that!' meme could go somewhere. People who rail against book smarts in front of kids are foul.

"Srsly. Can you imagine the Civil Rights movement without Christianity?"
I'll grant you that Civil Rights pursued under the banner of Marxism/Socialism in the US would get as much traction as White Power Ska, but that doesn't mean that the framework wasn't there. And MLK could just as easily have absorbed Gandhian non-violence tactics without a grounding in Christliness. Also, a Civil Rights movement conducted John Brown style doesn't seem to be a recipe for success either.

There's a certain mindfullness and equivocation at work in socially progressive Christianity that lends credence to the idea that there is a constant struggle to bend Christianity towards righteousness rather than the other way around. I mean, Israel has socialized medicine and openly gay military! It turns out you don't need the New Testament to arrive at that.

heh the commies WERE at the forefront of civil rights in the early days

not everyone in the israeli military is gay, btw

This whole intractable division in America, btw, seems to be leading to some inevitable separate but equal reimplementation, if not overtly than certainly de facto. And also not equal, because these right wing states and districts and their denizens are quickly descending back to the stone age in terms of beliefs. In the not so distant future, they will be likely be cowed into submission when Obama consults an almanac and wows them with the ol' "make the sun go away" magic trick before making them all slaves forced to provide abortions and free medicine. Which doesn't sound so implausible a future conspiracy theory, given the rate things are going.

re: republican scaredy-catness i don't know why it's surprising that the politics of fear are based on like, fear

When I was in third or fourth grade, I got in trouble goofing off during some exercise where we had to write letters to officials. They put me in the hall where I then penned some letter to Reagan complaining about our garbage pick-up. A few weeks later I got a big Reagan care package in the mail in return, with "official" letters and some picture of him riding a horse. Needless to say, I got a check-plus on the assignment.

Hey, all the biographies confirm that Reagan wrote personal checks to citizens who themselves wrote to Reagan asking for help. Government handouts!

it's how they do it out west

it's not paying for votes, technically, you're just a generous dude

A big reason why Christian churches played such a huge role in the Civil Rights movement was they provided a base of operations that also encouraged a sense of community. I always thought of that as slightly more important to the cause than spreading Christian doctrine. I mean, most of the organizations used the churches as a means to covertly set up protests and demonstrations and spread information relating to equal rights more than Christian theology.

Reagan's personal charity is perfectly in line with personal jesus, megamart convenience churches, self-empowerment bible belt Christianity. I bet Catholics are the way to go if you want to get a religious power base behind gov't sponsored socialized medicine. Catholics, does this sound right?

No -- we want you to suffer as much as possible so that you meet your heavenly reward. Thanks to Vatican II, though, the priests smile a lot.

wow that is a one-two punch of cluelessness, sorry

xp

adam in what way did they encourage a sense of community? how did the people at these churches accomplish this? what did they have bringing them together that was any different from any other place people met - baseball games, barber shops, parades, dances? aha

if you want to make the criticism that unions and organized labor should have done more to fight against racial discrimination i could go there

I'm saying we had a society where everyone was against newly freed slaves, we had Jim Crowe laws, etc. Churches are where African Americans had a safe haven. Churches can also be linked and have access to public utilities, buses, things that most people on their own don't have access to.

There's an element of privacy in a church that you don't get in a store or parade, that is useful when trying to organize a march or a protest. Plus you can have ministers that travel around to the different churches, bringing news that can't get out through normal channels, networking more and more people into an entire region.

On that note, is the GOP promoting town hall disruptions or Tea Parties through churches these days? I would guess on the whole this isn't happening so much.

if civil rights leaders meeting at churches = theological christianity played a positive role in the civil rights movement

then

kkk members meeting at churches, bibles in hand = theological christianity played a negative role in the civil rights movement

(religion can be used however people want to use it shockah.)

http://abanes.com/CIM_Saves.jpg

I don't really get the point of this argument that some other religion or ideology could have assisted in movements we consider positive -- sure, they could have, but they didn't. (To borrow an analogy from upthread, it seems like saying "eh, Grant could have given the Gettysburg Address" -- maybe, but he didn't, so...) If you want to talk about the effects of Christian perspectives and ideologies on the world, it strikes me as pretty natural to acknowledge that there have been times when they've been a real force for social good. Not just incidentally, but because those values and ideas have led people to do positive things.

(Equally confused by the Civil Rights thing -- yeah, black churches in the south served a whole other social/community/organizing purpose beyond just religion; religious ideals were also a big part of how lots of people of various races wound up toward the right side of that moment; it's not exactly an either/or situation.)

I don't really get the point of this argument that some other religion or ideology could have assisted in movements we consider positive -- sure, they could have, but they didn't.

that's the thing, they couldn't have, because everyone's christian

and my analogy wasn't about the author of the gettysburg address - it was about the language. lincoln wrote the gettysburg address in english because he spoke english and basically everyone spoke english. not because english is a language particularly well suited to freeing slaves.

yeah dude I followed the argument, I just don't see the point of it

guyyyys we r turning this thread into ick

US politics: Can someone continue summarising what's going on with the GOP?

1. Fear
2. Loathing

"wow that is a one-two punch of cluelessness, sorry"
I'm pretty shaky about the Catholics being a socialized medicine ally, but what stripe of even the most conserva-Christian would balk at Reagan's personal charity?

"some other religion or ideology could have assisted in movements we consider positive -- sure, they could have, but they didn't"
I'm unfamiliar how Gandhi came to endorse non-violent resistance but apparently MLK got it from Gandhi, and while the South are still sore about it, I'll bet if they used biblical tactics, things would've been much much worse.

yeah dude I followed the argument, I just don't see the point of it

my point is that in a situation w/ a cultural monopoly, it's impossible to judge how big a factor the nuances of that religion/language/etc. was, because you have nothing to compare it against.

Sarah to the rescue!

The Palin house was much different from what many people expect of a normal family, even before she was nominated for vice president. There wasn’t much parenting in that house. Sarah doesn’t cook, Todd doesn’t cook—the kids would do it all themselves: cook, clean, do the laundry, and get ready for school. Most of the time Bristol would help her youngest sister with her homework, and I’d barbecue chicken or steak on the grill.

Sarah was sad for a while. She walked around the house pouting. I had assumed she was going to go back to her job as governor, but a week or two after she got back she started talking about how nice it would be to quit and write a book or do a show and make “triple the money.” It was, to her, “not as hard.” She would blatantly say, “I want to just take this money and quit being governor.” She started to say it frequently, but she didn’t know how to do it. When she came home from work, it seemed like she was more and more stressed out.

http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2009/09/levi-johnston.html

Or have yall gone thru that already? I opened this thread and the farthest back was a photo of Picard

Gone there on many threads.

churches don't necessarily have to be about god they could just as easily be about twizzlers

therefore we don't know that god isn't a twizzler

I'm gonna rep for churches a little and say they probably have yummier food (including twizzlers) for the homeless than a city shelter, but I'm just as happy to be proven wrong.

Yeah I'm sorta equally lost on the logic, which I don't see as a comparative thing. People have, at times, signed on to positive social movements or taken positive moral stands based on values, ideas, and beliefs that came to them via Christianity. Saying that "everyone" is Christian, so this isn't meaningful, seems somehow like denying that our culture is shaped by or built on certain sets of ideas, that we have a culture at all in the first place?

"the english language can only lead to terrible things like eat pray love"
"no, the english language can be beautiful, think of the gettysburg address"
"but the gettysburg address was only in english because everyone spoke english"
"yes"

nabs u basically jsut said u want prayer in schools right

I don't really get the point of this argument that some other religion or ideology could have assisted in movements we consider positive -- sure, they could have, but they didn't.

Nabisco, are you seriously claiming that there was no secular abolition movement?

those are both jokes, right?

no he is sayin that America was
built on xtian values and that's what made (emphasis on the PAST tense) us great

;)

at the expense of millions of indigenous peoples

America in theory was built on Deist values but try telling a right-wing Christian that.

hey dudes as a Cherokee I would just like to thank christianity for the civil rights movement and the gettysburg address

also america

That whole bit trying in Christianity to GOP for me starting w/ watching Glenn Beck and deciding he's basically an old-school televangelist. Look at how sweaty and emotional he gets, how he polarizes every issue into fire and brimstones!

look, we know the role of religion was huge - but in america, religion has no social institutions that can *really* compete with it (not even politics) so *inevitably* the role of religion would be huge. and christianity has no religious institution that can compete with it. so, logically, the role of christianity was gonna be huge.

we don't know whether christianity played more of a positive role than religion X would have played, had religion X been the monopoly religion in america instead of christianity. it's that +/- margin that I'm arguing about here.

also - the fact that christianity has been a major building block for our culture isn't something I'm arguing with, it's something that makes the variable 100x more difficult to isolate.

basically the question is whether christianity has something unique about it that would lead to it being better than religion X in this circumstance. that it would inspire civil rights leaders more than the bhagavad gita did is not some weird coincidence, it's at least *partly* due to the fact that christianity was basically a monopoly religion.

Yeah. Okay. I don't disagree with most of that. I've just been saying I don't see how it's that major of a retort to the fact that people have done some positive things based on Christian beliefs. Not just Christian institutions but like personal values they derived from Christianity. Obviously we can't compare with how things would have gone down if this country were largely Buddhist. But when someone does or believes something positive based on Christian religious values, I will happily chalk that up as an instance where the Christian religious tradition just accomplish something nice. (I don't know how I'd have typed all that if I had tentacles instead of hands, but I'm tying with my fingers, and I'll happily chalk that up as one convenient thing about fingers.)

xpost - oh see THAT'S how we're looking at this way differently:

basically the question is whether christianity has something unique about it that would lead to it being better than religion X in this circumstance

which is really NOT AT ALL the question for me, as you can probably tell from the above -- if Christian values lead someone to be (e.g.) charitable or kind, I don't know that it's necessary to do what-if comparisons to say that a religious tradition just had a positive effect on someone. (see fingers thing)

right but 'christian values' can mean a lot of things - I am fairly sure the ppl in the picture I posted upthread thought they had great christian values. so how much of it really comes from being *christian* and how much of it comes from the basic religious mixed drink which is 'faith in something beyond us' + 'some variation of the golden rule'?

so the question is whether christian values *lead* them to be chariable or kind - or whether, uh, they're just good people?

and the fact that 'just good people' seem to act pretty similarly across the world - and that mlk had a lot more in common w/ gandhi than he did w/ your average white preacher in his day, makes me think that no, the unique margin that you get w/ christian values isn't actually that important in this case.

This isn't about religion, but I wanted to mention that I blew away a co-worker today by telling her I was generally to the left of NPR and that I saw it as the closest thing we have in the U.S. to a centrist mainstream media outlet. She said "I always though NPR was, like, the radio station for the Left".

this might be true but it seems sort of tangential to the larger point, which is just the mega-obvious... christianity can be a force for progressivism or for conservatism depending on when and how and by whom its used??

zs dont you work... in the govt?

'fraid so.

^^ That's why I said what I said about being skeptical of culture. People tend to ground their beliefs in stuff, pick up their values and ideas and frameworks from places; this is culture, right? And within that culture is a big and varied pile of concepts called "Christianity," which people interpret in very different ways. But at various times people have found concepts in there that resonated and helped them do good things. Which is why I will not exactly sweat saying that Christianity has sometimes served, in our culture, as a repository of certain ideas people have used to great good. Also sometimes bad! I mean, this marginal-utility-over-alternatives approach is sorta interesting but doesn't strike me as a response to either of those basic truisms.

Maybe this is partly an issue of trying to look at Christianity as an independent force to be judged vs. looking at Christianity as a repository of values/ideas, some of which have been used for good and some for ill.

no, and I agree with the 'sometimes good and sometimes bad' statement - I just felt upthread that there was this kneejerk response to "christianity is evil" which simplified things in the other direction -> "christianity is responsible for civil rights etc."

zs dont you work... in the govt?

and the past few months have been rough, let me tell you. Hectic. Still, once we finally begin to implement our plan to take over America and force social conservatives to do our bidding, ban Christianity, force people to bow to idols, and mix in truth serum (code name: PSYCHOSNESS) into the drinking water system, it'll all be worth it.

And the greatest part is, the Americans CHOSE Obama! They voted for this!!

aahahahahahaahaha!

http://unsportsmanlikecomment.files.wordpress.com/2007/12/the-satan-pit-doctor-beast3.jpg

when i asked if u worked for the govt i meant, dont you work... for ACORN?!?!?!

o shit - it was the british all along

You might try Richard Posner, Ramesh Ponnoru, and Ross Douthat.

Agreed. I'd put David Brooks on this list of very worthwhile conservative columnists/bloggers/thinkers.

wut

is there another david brooks that I don't know about?

I shouldn't be sharing this with the general public, but on the Obama-controlled (glory be his name) computers at work, there's a word filter installed that automatically replaces anything that says "government" with "ACORN". A few people complained the first day - and haven't been heard from since - but now we don't even notice it.

lol. I like his columns. Admittedly, I haven't read him in a while.

What's this I hear about Republicans not negotiating in good faith?

Here's a good sample of his recent work:

The Obama Slide

From the stimulus to health care, it has joined itself at the hip to the liberal leadership in Congress. The White House has failed to veto measures, like the pork-laden omnibus spending bill, that would have demonstrated independence and fiscal restraint. By force of circumstances and by design, the president has promoted one policy after another that increases spending and centralizes power in Washington.

right-wing obsession with acorn is already shaping up as one of those things we'll remember nostalgically from the obama years.

who were the indigenous peoples of the internet?

guess papers protogooglers

David Brooks' Tuesday column was an excrescence on which I hope he fucking chokes in two years.

Yikes! I'll look for it.

I just linked to it.

Got it. Thx.

HOUSTON — President Obama’s plan to deliver a speech to public school students on Tuesday has set off a revolt among conservative parents, who have accused the president of trying to indoctrinate their children with socialist ideas and are asking school officials to excuse the children from listening.

The uproar over the speech, in which Mr. Obama intends to urge students to work hard and stay in school, has been particularly acute in Texas, where several major school districts, under pressure from parents, have laid plans to let children opt out of lending the president an ear.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/04/us/04school.html?_r=1&hp

Am I being naively sentimental, or did there use to be a time when most any parent, despite their particular politics, would be pleased to have a school visit from the president?

Mark Steyn, a Canadian author and political commentator, speaking on the Rush Limbaugh show on Wednesday, accused Mr. Obama of trying to create a cult of personality, comparing him to Saddam Hussein and Kim Jong-il, the North Korean leader.

The Republican Party chairman in Florida, Jim Greer, said he “was appalled that taxpayer dollars are being used to spread President Obama’s socialist ideology.”

And Chris Stigall, a Kansas City talk show host, said, “I wouldn’t let my next-door neighbor talk to my kid alone; I’m sure as hell not letting Barack Obama talk to him alone.”

Haha. WTF?

guys maybe the death panels weren't a bad idea!

Herb Garrett, executive director of the Georgia School Superintendents Association, said many of his members felt that the controversy had put them in an awkward situation, vulnerable to attacks from conservative talk-show hosts if they open up instructional time for Mr. Obama’s speech, and open to accusations that they have disrespected the president if they do not.

Yeah jeez, who should we pay our respects to: the wishes of conservative talk show hosts or the President of the United States?

We had to live through the last 8 years, so suck it up right wing idiots.

This whole thing is just proof of how little credit right wingers give to their kids. "They mustn't be allowed to think for themselves, and certainly not in a public school!"

basically, everything confirms their inferiority to us!

Yes, the brainwashing techniques have worked just as we planned.

isn't it amazing how all rightwingers ever extract idiotic non sequitur generalities about others based on individual news items??

This just baffles me. These people just baffle and anger and sadden me.

And the irony is, they're praying for us.

And keep in mind also that these are the same people that want to force your children to pray in school, but don't want their children to have to listen to a speech by the President. How the manage the constant contradictions every day without suffering massive aneurysms may, in fact, prove the existence of god.

please please please secede, guys. now's the time.

^^^I would help you pack, and not even be too sad about all the cousins that would suddenly be living in another country.

i'd be happy to chip in for bricks and mortar so they can build a wall (to keep us out)!

ha in that scenario i'd be vv curious to see which of my vociferously anti-Obama extended family would take the opportunity to sheepishly move out of the Confederacy Redux, because umm come the fuck on. they may be assholes, but for the most part aren't retarded.

would miss NOLA tho ;__;

Yeah, I would miss Austin, I guess, but seriously, take Texas and secede away.

I amuse myself conemplating the ramifications of a two- (or possibly three-) part USA, with Leftcoastia and Ivyleagueopolis coexisting -- and occasionally warring -- with a heartland Bizarroland ruled by theocrats and free-marketeers.

I think you're overestimating how many in the "heartland" think like these ignoramuses.

please please please secede, guys. now's the time.

But Nixonland is a pretty fun country to live in!

Agreed, Nicole, but just anecdotally, while people might not agree with the fringe completely, I feel they're v reluctant to speak against it. They don't want to make a public break. Perfectly reasonable middle-ground republicans give people and groups who claim to be "religious" or "moral" or "protective of America" the benefit of the doubt, far more than they give to leftist voices. They see the right fringe as being "one of theirs" even when, if they knew the groups' real goals and leaders etc, it would horrify them.

(xpost) Yeah, their country will probably be the size of Lichtenstein.

I mean, this is obvious, right? Sorry, I'm not a very learned contributor to these threads, I just get MAD and can't help posting.

Laurel and Nicole you sound dangerously close to thinking of working-class red staters as real people

I was reduced to shaking anger last month while at home when my mother didn't believe what I was saying about Repub and right-wing lies & manipulation because it seemed preposterous to her -- no one would really do or say that! All I could get out was to caution her that people who do things while invoking the name of God might not be thinking about the same God she is.

Yes, but that's because for these "middle ground Republicans", like my west Michigan in-laws, the stakes have been so low. What has the religious right accomplished in the US since 1980? What's there to fear, really? (There are answers, like the war in Iraq, but that's only beginning to sink in.)

xxxxp to Laurel

Ummm where in West MI?

GR-usalem.

Alternate answer: continually rising rate of teen pregnancy paralleling the increase in abstinence-only sex ed and virginity promise groups.

xp Ah yes. 616, the area code of the Beast. My red-state family (altho technically MI goes blue thanks to the east side) lives about 80 miles from there.

Yeah, I married into the Calvin beast.

Have they seen this?

would miss NOLA tho ;__;

Get a passport.

Seeing as how West Michigan is a place where people will buy something extra at the store to not have three 6s in their receipt total, I've enjoyed that new development a great deal.

my concern is that it would be irreparably damaged.

xpost

haha I'll share that with my wife. My father-in-law, Calvin faculty, would probably not be particularly amused.

I went to that school. They can suck it.

Maybe you knew my wife or her sisters? It's a small world (when you're playing Dutch bingo).

Laurel and Nicole you sound dangerously close to thinking of working-class red staters as real people

Also, Tracer, I am not BY ANY MEANS talking about working-class people here. White collar all the way, baby. They just...don't see it.

I had dinner two nights ago with a guy who went to Calvin. In the 60s, though.

If your only view of schools is to "instill" values and mindsets into children to make them properly obedient and respectful, but not to think or question, then you have a problem with anybody who has incorrect views doing so. There's more than a little projection going on.

California has to secede too, right - it's way ahead of the southern pack in banning gay marriage unless I misread what 8 was all about. I nominate my old home for capital of the new confederacy

Naw, the capital of Confed II has to be Tupelo fucking Mississippi.

I guess if Lincoln could've had the foresight not to save the Union we wouldn't even need to have this conversation now! Idiot Lincoln.

California seceeding would be great and it would be neither the left wing nor right wing powerhouse people act like it is (depending on mood).

isnt the south just the WORST

Don't have to tell me. During the 2007 drought our governor held a public prayer for rain.

Has it rained since?

j/k

It rained soon after, thanks to JHVH

When I was a child, a large segment of America's schoolchildren were hustled into auditoriums and libraries to watch a triumph of our nation's socialist space-exploration program that in fact turned out to be live video of a bunch of people dying: WHERE WERE THE TEARS FOR ME

I remember my psychotic shop teacher wouldn't let us watch that anyway because there was some important woodworking project that day.

huh my generation just got OJ's verdict.

^ i remember this day clearly

me too, in fact i heard about the explosion from a shop teacher!

(the Challenger explosion, not the OJ verdict.)

I was always upset that when Reagan died news gathering didn't stop and the cable networks didn't unearth every commentator of the last 40 years to discuss the Gipper's greatness.

uh what? it was kind of like that in DC; time stopped that week

i saw that coffin everywhere, on the front page of every newspaper i passed, all week

It was a joke.

is that what you're calling it

Reagan should die every election cycle.

I wonder how long they will keep all this up? Do they want to use up all their Hitler mustaches in the first year?

http://stopsocialism.files.wordpress.com/2009/06/hitler_obama_0-preview.jpg

It looks like Barack Hitler there is making a familiar gesture in criticism of his detractors.

His hair is fabulous btw.

http://obamaisliterallyhitler.tumblr.com/

YOU KNOW WHO ELSE WORE GLASSES?
DO YOU KNOW WHO ELSE LIKED COMMANDING YOUR AIRWAVES?

DR DEMENTO

http://www.parade.com/news/2009/08/09-what-obama-can-teach-americas-kids.html

Such a strange man

"These are tough times for American children for a couple of reasons. The rise of the machines..."

http://www.parade.com/export/sites/default/images/-v4/news/2009/0809/spotlight-bill-o-reilly.jpg

is this his actual family, or is he just embracing all the children of america?

^^^ saw that in It's a Small World this weekend

I was distracted by his camel toe.

well thanks for that

Generally, if you're over 50 and posing with kids it's a good idea to CLOSE YOUR FUCKING LEGS.

maybe he was trying to show off his virility

whereas if you are 25 and posing with kids, SPREAD 'EM WIDE

^^^^ewwwwwwww false binary...

that's what SHE said!

they would like ouija boards
http://www.thenextright.com/patrick-ruffini/can-we-have-buckley-back

how to defuse:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SCNs7Zpqo98

I like that vid.

Is it possible that Al Franken isn't a joke? That he may make a good Senator? Remember what a joke Ted Kennedy was.

Although I might also say that the title of the video should be "Franken talks down TO angry mob." He dodges the bigger issues, like the the fact that Medicare is itself a problem right now, because it pays for over-treatment, and doctors and hospitals have no incentive to recommend anything but the most expensive possible procedure to people who are fully covered for that procedure. AND YET this is not an argument against Medicare or a public option, it's an argument in favor of regulation of the private system, because that is actually what is creating the disincentive in doctors and hospitals to do anything but waste public money.

It's complicated. I sympathize with him for not explaining it as clearly as he could, because explaining it in terms that are too cut-and-dry might get him stoned to death on the spot.

Kenan, I kind of feel Al's pain here because some of the dimmer members of my family (while not 'challenged' enough to go the full teabag) maintain a wall of wilful ignorance about many issues they should be properly left-activist about, especially healthcare, especially being related to me and my history of health. I will completely stan for MN being one of the best states for healthcare coverage and cost; Al is right to want to judo it out nationwide.

Suzy, I have a very similar family. My stepmom has a chronic and incurable liver disease that is a constant financial burden on the household, and my dad still tries to explain Glenn Beck conspiracy theories to me. (Though he may have eased up on that in the last few months. I'd like to think he's "pulling his advertising" as well.)

http://i25.tinypic.com/23l5ab.png

xo And yet, so often when you get down into the depths of what people with these opinions really think, when you call all their bullshit and present them with the most unemotional form of reasoning you can muster, you hit a wall. Sometimes you hit it very early, and sometimes a bit later, but eventiually you always get to "na na na na i can't hear you." It's not just the right wing that does this, either. Although, to be fair, they do it a lot sooner and a lot more blatantly.

present them with the most unemotional form of reasoning you can muster, you hit a wall.

the problem is, humans don't think like that. Emotion and logic are constantly intertwined in how we experience the world and cognate new ideas. Persuasive communication has several different aspects to it, one of which involves an emotional element.

xp

The problem with almost all public debate now is that everybody debates, and even worse, thinks, in terms of talking points. The debate is seen as a clash of ideologies and good v. evil, and so much pride is at stake that very rarely does compromise and humility enter the equation, and you need those two things for most people to listen and admit they might be wrong about their beliefs.

xp Oh I know. Try arguing with something like "How can you tell a mother that her newborn infant should die instead of the teenager down the hall, just because a panel said so?" Arguing that the infant is going to die no matter what, while the teenager might live, so resources spent on the infant are only going to be a financial burden on the family and the healthcare system overall... well, I haven't found a good way to approach that. Anyway not a convincing one.

xp I try so hard not to think in talking points. I really do.

What's hard about is that when you're debating someone that you don't really know (e.g. online) or someone you don't think worth your respect (some stranger from that party that's hosting a townhall or is speaking) there isn't that incentive to treat the other person that nicely and give them their humanity, and so why not just resort to talking points and vitriol? Take the shortcut.

In your head you're just dealing with some faceless political opponent, anyway. And I don't think it helps that almost half of America is, in a way, completely alienated from the mindset of the other half.

You are absolutely right! Maybe that's why I keep going on these small but (hopefully) polite fool's errands of responding to people who send out batshit mass emails, or friends of friends on Facebook who say things that seem a bit off (but not completely retarded -- there is a threshold). It may not result in changing anyone's mind, but I at least feel like I did something toward talking outside the bubble. Whatever that's worth. And I don't know that, either.

Mostly it's a man in the mirror kind of exercise. Conditioning myself to not accept what I'm told merely because people that I trust in unrelated areas of life told them to me. Trying to remind myself that people who are wrong may not be TOTALLY wrong, and usually at bottom want the same things that I do. Etc. I should start meditating in the morning if I really want to maintain that attitude.

I once called a friend of my parent's a fascist because he was explaining that all Arabs are liars and that we probably need to kill a bunch of them to make the world a better place. I apologized later (because my parents were pretty upset that I called him that) and I felt pretty poorly about it. Though not because I was wrong, dude is clearly on the fringe on the right (his wife later became a full-blown birther, I don't know his opinions on the subject, and they've both started taking shooting lessons to prepare for the Muslim invasion), but because that kind of claim, "you're a fascist," has been parodied so much for good reason. Once you call someone that, all discourse has broken down. There's really nothing else to say. It could be that he later examined what could have possibly elicited that reaction in me, and maybe tempered his outspokeness in measure because of it, but that's giving him a lot of credit, especially considering the tone of his previous opinions. If I could have done it over again, I would've restrained myself. Possibly tried some kind of Socratic method of asking him questions, trying to trick him into his own illogic. But I'm not a Yoga master quite yet... :/

One might say that the discourse broke down when he suggested killing a bunch of people to make the world a better place?

One might, but I'm not trying to "blame" someone for the turn the conversation took. I'm considering my role as an actor in the conversation independent of his beliefs. Assuming there is a way to defuse that kind of dialogue, I clearly failed in doing so.

It sounds like a goal, though. I should brush up on some of my (astonishingly, considering) decent classical education, and try to use it, since so few others seem to.

I'm kinda preparing since I'll be visiting my parents a lot during the upcoming holidays and I'll have to dialogue with their friends at some point. In the past, I've totally elided any political conversation through changing-the-topic, excusing myself from the table, simply humoring them. But it would be nice to have a dialogue that wasn't all crazy, even if the originating point was their crazy opinions. I mean, this is a community that has totally formed a cocoon. My parents told me these two people aren't the only two taking shooting lessons (I don't know what all these upper-middle-class people think they're gonna do with their lessons, but whatever. It's emotional, not logically). There could possibly be a difference made there -- and if not, I could at least feel better about my experience there.

High rhetoric. Be David Hume. An appeal to judgement IS an appeal to a sentiment.

(in theory.)

I'm sure Hume and Cicero will go over like gangbusters with that crowd.

Well, you don't have to quote them or provide footnotes or anything. Best if you don't.

I don't think he meant I should quote Hume to them... I'm guessing more that I apply his sentimentality theory as logical jujitsu?

Tbh, not quite sure how that'd work.

I suppose it's easy for me to say "Your family are zombies now. Leave them and run for the hills," but that's what happens when your parents are democrats and you live in Berkeley.

xp Ok, yeah. I'm not sure either what Hume would make of "Kill 'em all!" since he assumed that we're all driven by an innate morality beyond any societal standards. Then again, the world he lived in isn't any smaller than the one people create for themselves here and now.

xp The parents/family aren't the problem. It's the community they live in.

Hume was also a racist.

Which is why ignoring these people is always an option, even if it's a particularly unsatisfying one for me. XP

xp Not any bigger, either.

Blue-shirted teabagger at 3:55 in the Franken video brings up GOP talking point "We don't have enough doctors". Doesn't this mean a huge opportunity to create tons of new jobs while at the same time fixing health care woes?

The only way that doesn't work is if the narrative is stuck on "nope, can't do anything, we have to ration care, and damn if illegals are gonna see a doctor before my grandma!" Which is a thread that contains most of the GOP's arguments.

Is it possible that Al Franken isn't a joke? That he may make a good Senator? Remember what a joke Ted Kennedy was.

It's very possible. Franken's a smart guy.

Although I might also say that the title of the video should be "Franken talks down TO angry mob." He dodges the bigger issues, like the the fact that Medicare is itself a problem right now, because it pays for over-treatment, and doctors and hospitals have no incentive to recommend anything but the most expensive possible procedure to people who are fully covered for that procedure. AND YET this is not an argument against Medicare or a public option, it's an argument in favor of regulation of the private system, because that is actually what is creating the disincentive in doctors and hospitals to do anything but waste public money.

Not just over-treatment. Waste and fraud generally are huge problems for Medicare. To their credit, the Bush Admin. and -- in an even more aggressive way -- the Obama Admin. have dramatically ramped-up efforts to combat these problems. For instance, with respect to fraud at home-health agencies, Medicare and its intermediaries are conducting random inspections of the agencies; interviewing patients of the agencies to ensure that they are legitimately homebound and need services; suspending the Medicare payments of agencies with the highest percentage of "outlier" patients (patients that utilize a statistically higher-than-expected amount of Medicare-reimbursable services); and interviewing physicians to ensure that they actually recommended certain patients for Medicare-related treatments. With respect to waste and Durable Medical Equipment (DME) providers, Medicare and its intermediaries (under the Bush Admin.) moved away from reimbursing providers based on prevailing community rates and toward an auction system, where only "winning bidders," i.e., those offering to provide DME products at the lowest prices, would be eligible for Medicare reimbursement. The first round of contracts were awarded, and the new system was about to begin, when Congress postponed it for three years. But Congress took this action only because the DME industry agreed to a new Medicare reimbursement structure that saved the government the same amount it expected to save under the auction system.

Anyway, Kenan is right; none of this is an argument against reform. It's just evidence of the need for additional reforms, to ensure the system works as intended.

The length of that paragraph alone is an argument for single-payer.

lol. OTOH, I am a long-winded oaf.

I was only halfway joking! Maybe not even halfway.

Me too!

OMG sisters!

Blue-shirted teabagger at 3:55 in the Franken video brings up GOP talking point "We don't have enough doctors". Doesn't this mean a huge opportunity to create tons of new jobs while at the same time fixing health care woes?

Not is you assume that no one will ever go to medical school again if we institute any kind of more managed health care policy. But yeah, it is a big like arguing against green energy because we might use up all the wind.

a BIT like arguing, etc.

Which has been done.

Like arguing against green energy because we might use up all the wind, and we have TOO MUCH wind to begin with.

It's just the whole 'Oh no we don't have enough doctors, we have to ration care' is one of the big bases of their argument against health reform, and yeah it assumes that a shortage of doctors is something that can't be fixed. Which is silly.

Big O needs to just point this out and say 'Look, this will create tons of jobs as well!'

The jobs are not very immediate though. What's the situation with medical training - are there lots of trained docs who can't get jobs and would be ready to take them, or does the cost/length of training mean that numbers would need to be expanded gradually over time to meet the new demand?

I keep going on these small but (hopefully) polite fool's errands of responding to people who send out batshit mass emails, or friends of friends on Facebook who say things that seem a bit off (but not completely retarded -- there is a threshold).

I did this to a friend-of-a-friend on Facebook the other day that started off as a diatribe against immigrants taking up all our healthcare costs and then veered into completely retarded territory when he started claiming Vikings were in the Americas before anyone came over the Bering straight and how everyone would understand him when we're all forcibly converted to Islam in 10 to 20 years.

How do you even argue with something like this? There's no learning to be done, no desire for any presentation of a differing opinion.

We are dealing with people who do false equivalency and other forms of confirmation bias. I know it's probably unhelpful and snotty to say to a loved one, but I've been having to hit my mom with: "there's a reason they're not called THINKING POINTS, you know."

On a related note, George Lakoff actually put out a book entitled _Thinking Points_ for that exact reason, as a way of talking to people who don't nec. agree or share any sort of the same mindset as you do.

The gateway to being a physician is basically like 98% getting into medical school, since almost everybody graduates from medical school and passes the boards and gets into residency. So any change you make in opening the door a little further won't begin to pay out for at least seven years down the line. Plus more students will pretty much guarantee the need for more infrastructure, which probably means medical school somehow getting more expensive. It's getting pretty close to being $50k per year in tuition as an average at the private schools and out-of-state publics anyway.

I think the patient demand is high enough to keep everybody with an MD or DO in practice as long as they want, but the economics of running an independent practice are pushing a lot of people away, since the only way to have a margin outside of the lucrative specialties is to see as many patients as possible. Or you can go boutique, if you have a patient base willing to support it.

Last night I had a conversation with a psychologist who works at a VA hospital. He told me one of the biggest challenges he faces is discharged patients who draw benefits (like, $2000 a month or more) just to show up, but who, unlike equivalents in other countries, are not given any financial incentive to actually, you know, get better - continue treatment, find jobs, etc. - and instead draw this de facto pension in perpetuity. He was frustrated more than anything else, because he wants his patients to find happiness and better health. But it's a perfect example of how much of a mess this really is. The VA is often lauded as government health care done right, yet even it is as wasteful and hard to reform as anything else. Imagine lowering those payments or even threatening to take them away. That would go over like a lead zeppelin. And this is an example of a system that works.

FUCK. Van Jones resigns.

ugh

it's gonna be a great day for comments threads everywhere

But Jones had turned into a political liability for President Obama after statements he made prior to joining the White House came to light. Last week Jones apologized for a six-year-old petition he signed, alleging government complicity in the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

* * * *

On Saturday, Jones came under more fire after Verum Serum posted an excerpt for an anti-war CD that Jones appeared in which also featured Mumia Abu-Jamal, who was convicted of shooting to death a Philadelphia police officer in 1981. But that case has turned into an international cause celebre with critics arguing that Jamal's death row sentence should be overturned.

Did not know that about Jones. With that background, he is a political liability.

I don't give a damn; the petition is years old. When Bush wanted John Bolton, he rammed in him through as a recess appointment.

I guess it goes back to my old feelings that the country is right-of-center. So it's easier for Bush to push someone like Bolton on the public than it is for Obama to push Jones on the public.

But OTOH, maybe the political climate of the country has changed more than I assume.

I guess it goes back to my old feelings that the country is rightwhite-of-center.

but it was pretty clear the guy had to step down. it's not like he was so invaluable to the administration that they were gonna weather the bullshit on his behalf.

The Beltway is right of center. The rest of the country responds to economic stress depending on the man in the White House.

I'm not sure I agree with that. But in any event, that is a bad formula for long-term Democratic success in Presidential elections: When the economy is good, public preference is for the GOP; When the economy is bad, public preference is for Democrats.

http://michaelscomments.files.wordpress.com/2009/09/augustunempdata.jpg

I can't get to that webpage (http://innocentbystanders.net?). Can you link to it? I'd like to see the interpretation of the data.

I just got to that website (through my own inadvertent hyperlink), and that can't be the right site.

the problem with that graphic is that the people who keep dragging it out don't seem to understand it. what it means is not that "the stimulus has failed," which is the standard right-wing spin. what it means is that the economy is even worse than projected by the administration. the only thing that graphic makes a case for is more and bigger stimulus. and there were a lot of people at the time, on the left and right, who said the administration was lowballing the likely unemployment picture. lots of people have been saying since late last year that unemployment was going to go over 10 percent. but if you recall, in february obama was getting grief (from bill clinton as well as republicans) for being "too negative" about the economy, so i think the administration deliberately chose the rosiest scenario.

in any case, that graphic doesn't mean what people seem to think it does. but i've given up trying to explain it, because the people using it aren't interested in anything real, just cheap political points.

Yeah, that was my impression, too.

What the graphic says to me (and what a lot of economists also say) is that what that shows is that we are going through a structural change in US economic history, a continuation of the evisceration of what was the bedrock of the US economy, the middle class skilled manual labourer. What it shows is that applying the paddles to old industry has failed and any stimulating should be in the form of nurturing new industries. To the administration's credit it has done both, but imagine what could have been done if the money that went into GM and chrysler had gone into job creation rather than job maintenance.

Incidentally, a lot of the money going into stimulating new industries hasn't been distributed yet and when it does it will take some time to take effect, new plants take time to build. I wouldn't be rushing to say that this aspect of the stimulus package has failed.

The Van Jones thing sent me into a drinking tailspin last night.

The saddest thing is that the pool of candidates to fill his shoes in Washington is very, very small. Certainly no name jumps out the way that Jones' did. When he was appointed as Green Jobs Czar it felt like one of those rare democratic moments when EXACTLY the right guy for job received it.

any stimulating should be in the form of nurturing new industries. To the administration's credit it has done both, but imagine what could have been done if the money that went into GM and chrysler had gone into job creation rather than job maintenance.

ed otm

are these new industries actually going to hire former auto workers or other blue collar types?

Hell no.

alleging government complicity in the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

This is his biggest mistake. Everyone knows the GOP and the GOP alone is capable of keeping the country safe. Except for that day.

fuck truthers imo. I have no problem with someone losing his job for getting involved with a faddish conspiracy theory.

it looks that way now. but jones signing that petition doesn't bother me because.. this is unsayable in the mainstream media i guess, but.. the context was just extreme mistrust of the bush administration on every possible level. and it was circulated in 2004, a year after said administration had cooked intelligence to justify invading iraq, while most mainstream politicians and journalists rolled their eyes at the unserious far-left left fringe groups and bloggers who stubbornly refused to go along with the case for war. so many of the other allegedly crazy accusations about the bushies have turned out to be accurate that these days, it becomes necessary to redraw the boundaries of the crazy, leaving 9-11 conspiracies as one of the few out-there accusations.

that petition looks nutty right now, but it's at least *possible* that i signed similar internets petitions myself in 2004 because come on, they'd just lied us into a preemptive war, and part of the lying involved telling the american people that there was a connection between iraq and 9-11.

xpost

I'd have no problem either, if only he wasn't playing a key role in giving Obama good advice on a subject that will affect BILLIONS OF PEOPLE for generations

it becomes necessary to redraw the boundaries of the crazy, leaving 9-11 conspiracies as one of the few out-there accusations.

or, we could do the unthinkable and avoid crazy altogether

are these new industries actually going to hire former auto workers or other blue collar types?

― velko, Sunday, 6 September 2009 12:33 (1 hour ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Quite a lot of them are, cf. A123 systems grant funded Battery plant in Livonia, MI. Plenty aren't going to be in MI, though, jurisdiction shopping is a powerful thing (Saft will be in Florida, Valence in Texas).

I only know about batteries, not sure about other stimulus funded industries.

http://earth2tech.com/2009/08/05/battery-grant-winners-a123systems-rakes-in-249m/

what i'm trying to say is, in the context of the year 2004, having just watched the bush administration make this trumped-up case about wmds and ties to al-qaeda and use it to launch a preemptive war in iraq, it would be impossible to overstate the suspicions of many on the left as far as what the bushies were capable of doing.

I get what you're saying. but I lived in Berkeley, CA in 2004 and have spent toooooo many hours of my life arguing w/ otherwise smart people who were truthers to have any sort of sympathy in this situation.

that the left has no boundaries w/ its suspicions is not an excuse of any sort, it's a problem. most of america already thinks we sound crazy - 'the government caused 9/11' certainly wasn't helping our cause.

impossible to overstate the suspicions of many on the left

But it's not just the left! Big reason why the Tea Parties and all that have been so 'effective' is channeling this bipartisan mistrust of the government that came about in a big way through all the truthers.

Van Jones really did not deserve trial by right-wing media but their method involves going after people who have trained themselves to ignore personal abuse, after a lifetime of not pandering to bullies. These people are bullies in the 'look what you made us do, you're no better than us!' mould. I would argue that the way the Bush administration took its eyes off the terror situation they were explicitly told to monitor throughout Summer 2001, and were warned about on September 10th, makes them culpable on some level for what happened the following day. Does the GOP really want to go *there*?

i've been thinking about the tea parties.. i wonder about some of the style of obama's campaign, the 'yes we can', the fairey HOPE posters, some of the reallllllly devoted volunteers.. that stuff kind of turned me off & seemed like such a mismatch, since on the issues he's a moderate, not a radical at all. but just going on style, you might think he's bringing radical change. and on the left you probably WANT that (and everyone goes insane during the primaries), and on the right.. once he gets elected, suddenly passing cap-and-trade looks to you like COMMUNIST SOCIALISM DESTROYING THE COUNTRY OMG PANIC

the right would have launched those lines of attack anyway, I wouldn't go too far into some kind of "Obama brought this on himself" theory

I wouldn't be rushing to say that this aspect of the stimulus package has failed.

What I've read suggests that the stimulus and the Obama Admin.'s ''unflinching support for financial institutions'' had pulled the economy off the edge of the cliff.

I'm writing from my cell now, but I'll try to dig-up and post the links to some of those articles later today.

xpost i didn't say obama brought this on himself. i'm just wondering whether an unintended consequence of some of obama's extremely dedicated supporters & their way of expressing it.. is that his opponents are profiting, by using this stuff to claim he's actually a radical in order to stop any change at all from happening. some show on fox late last week replayed a video in which a bunch of celebrities pledged to support president obama, some cheesy inspirational hollywood thing that doubtless obama had absolutely zero control over, and i thought.. ugh, why do you need to produce this narcissistic video about yourselves, you're not doing obama any good here & you are handing the right more BS evidence that he is indoctrinating kids to socialism or whatever.

I see what you're saying, but I'm not sure that trying to avoid any activity that could possibly set off insane right wing fringe outrage (ie, virtually ANYTHING) is a good strategy.

that would be a terrible strategy! it's a good thing no one's advocating it..

The text of Obama's Education Indoctrination Nazi Speech has been released:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/MediaResources/PreparedSchoolRemarks/

And it reads about like you would expect. I'm laughing, though, imagining K-3rd graders sitting through this. It's a good speech, but it's definitely aimed toward the older kids.

Odds that the "parents keeping their children home" crisis is a GOP-manufactured fake trend?

The speech is certainly not worth all the controversy it caused. Maybe the idea of doing a back-to-school speech conceived when Obama's ratings were still high, and he wasn't so polarizing a figure. That's the only rationale I can think of for why the White House went through all sorts of trouble to deliver a speech that won't do them much good, and only provided cannon fodder for the opposition.

x-post

More right-wing manufactured than GOP.

Actually I think it might be a good turning point for him - attacking this speech is really beyond the pale and shows how frothy-mouthed the right wing has become. I'd like to think on-the-fence moderates will see this.

Provided cannon fodder for the opposition? An education speech?

I still don't get this idea of not doing things that are worthwhile, like telling kids to work hard in school, to try to avoid baffling lunatic "trouble" from wingnuts. When they scheduled the education speech, I'm sure no one at the White House could have guessed that ANYONE on earth would have any sort of problem with it. And then when the socialist indoctrination bullshit came up, what were they supposed to do? Cancel?

otm

Actually I think it might be a good turning point for him - attacking this speech is really beyond the pale and shows how frothy-mouthed the right wing has become.

I had the same hopeful thought earlier today, but really, how many more idiot "controversies" does it take? The Death Panel thing was, what, last week? Thoroughly debunked, but still floating around. The Birther thing was all of last month...

he wasn't so polarizing a figure

Had to laugh at this. It doesn't matter what he has done or will do, the conservative noise machine will use it to polarize the electorate, no matter how much they have to distort it to get that result.

x-post

That's just it, they probably didn't foresee the speech being a problem, and they weren't going to cave in and cancel (nor should they).

And cannon fodder for the right is what almost all of his rhetoric turns into nowadays. My point is that by giving speeches like this he doesn't gain that much on the left or with moderates, I don't think, and only gave the right something to complain about. He was stuck between a rock and a hard place.

My old school district is not showing it! Which flies in the face of everything we were taught about respect and civic engagement when I was there. Facebook rebellion and e-mailing of supt. being organised by friend who was punk, is now librarian on a moto guzzi.

My point is that by giving speeches like this he doesn't gain that much on the left or with moderates, I don't think, and only gave the right something to complain about. He was stuck between a rock and a hard place.

This is just nonsense. The president will continue to do the normal things presidents do, and people who don't like it can continue to fuck off.

yeah. this has a pretty direct demographic and purpose, which is schoolchildren and getting schoolchildren to straighten up and fly right.

What I'm curious about is why Obama's approval ratings are dropping the way they have been dropping (even among independents and moderates who voted for him). Attributing it to right-wing attacks is only partially correct because partisan attacks are always going on (i.e. blaming the plane crash on gravity). They couldn't sink his presidency so why are they so effective and disruptive now? Why are people who voted for him now so skeptical?

Will you just cut that po-faced bullshit out before I suggest-ban you?

Don't be so touchy. I don't mean to be so ponderous but I'm not trying to troll either.

My own gut feeling is that Obama's ratings are dropping because, in the face of the onslaught of right wing attacks, he is viewed as caving in when he should be showing pointed, strong leadership.

I think many people who voted for him wanted him to put Washington DC's house back in order for them. That was the "hope" they bought into. They would like him to take Congressional Democrats by the scruff of the neck and bring them into line behind him, with or without the Republicans. They wanted some ass kicking and some effective action.

Instead, his attempts to placate, coax and earn respect by giving respect appear to be accomplishing little but chaos. Meanwhile Rome burns.

The reason why his numbers have been eroding, but are still fairly high, is because most voters are patient enough to give him more time to show results. If things are still this messy next Jan 1, his numbers will slip into the low 40s, is my guess.

That sounds plausible. Support was dripping from somewhere but the right's idea that "America has woken up!" doesn't seem to fit (would the same people who voted for him desert him so easily so soon?) but the idea that there are a lot of disappointed, but willing to forgive if Obama is willing to be sorry, lefties who are not being supportive atm seems otm. There are probably some moderate republicans who voted for him who are now phoning in to Glenn Beck every day, but those types don't explain the current mild angst.

My own gut feeling is that Obama's ratings are dropping because, in the face of the onslaught of right wing attacks, he is viewed as caving in when he should be showing pointed, strong leadership.

That's precisely it, and the Beltway never understands this. When politicians don't take principled stands, that's when the public loses interest.

Isn't the most obvious explanation just that the recession has deepened, unemployment etc has gotten worse since Obama was elected? I mean whether it's right or not to blame Obama for the recession, people increasingly are going to.

agreed^^

gosh, the recession couldn't have deepened -- last month Newsweek said it was over!

Man, reading that speech makes me wish that Mr. Rogers was still around to help out. I feel he was one American pop figure from our post-war media age onward who had the greatest empathic link with young children, along with the ability to communicate with them in such a way to make us all feel safe, wanted, and understood.

Obama's slipping ratings = Health reform failure due to 'bipartisan' nonsense.

lol

Yes, seeing the guy's major initiative flounder in the face of lots of angry people probably isn't helping his ratings, but it's hardly the sole or (I'd argue) even most important factor. It's the economy that's causing anxiety and his willingness to give up ground to no avail imo.

I know that sometimes, you get the sense from TV that you can be rich and successful without any hard work -- that your ticket to success is through rapping or basketball or being a reality TV star, when chances are, you’re not going to be any of those things.

This paragraph is a dick (2 out of those 3 things require hard work, President Nerdbama) but the rest of the speech is great.

obama's slipping ratings = 46% of american voters didn't vote for him and actually don't agree w/ lots of stuff he's doing.

approval ratings among democrats/inds is more important. not having the approval of people who voted for sarah palin = wah wah wah.

This paragraph is a dick (2 out of those 3 things require hard work...

Spencer Pratt is the hardest working man in show business (or at least in the business of showing off your wife's "business")

I got two hours of sleep. "Business." I'm out - I love you all.

gosh, the recession couldn't have deepened -- last month Newsweek said it was over!

― My life is butthurt so badly (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, September 7, 2009 6:57 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

I'm getting really sick of how this cover is being misunderstood by everyone from Obama to Rush. The cover is supposed to be ironic-- that the recovery is predicated on bubbles that may be vulnerable (hence the balloon), and that it comes witha big asterisk.

http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/newsweek-recession-over-cvr.jpg

it's not exactly subtle. Come on.

It looks like the cover of Highlights.

bad numbers for the big o cause the no-strings bank bailout and dynamics of the health care debate is starting to look like a whole bunch of "no we can't" :(

btw can somebody help me out here - you always hear "well they're doing it this way cause that's the only way to get the insurance companies on board" .. why the hell do they have to be on board? i wasn't aware that guardian life voted on bills in congress.

insurance actively worked to undermine this the last time around (Clinton)

xposts: obama's approval ratings don't mean anything right now, and i'm glad that there's no obvious signs of panic from the white house about them. he's gotta fight his way through health care and cap-and-trade, and he's going to take a lot of hits along the way. then 2010 will start with him having a lot more wins than losses in his column, the economy weak but improving and the republicans still with no ideas, no leadership and a lot of craziness that will have already started to seem boring. dems will hold both houses in 2010, obama will be re-elected easily in 2012. how much he'll actually be able to do along the way, i don't know, but i'm not very worried on the political front in the short term.

Not sure where the blame will fall this time.

Maybe a combo of poor messaging on the part of Obama administration (I was reading somewhere the other day - try to summarize Obama's health care message in one sentence), wingnuts/death panel crazy shit, media eager to play up controversy and rivalry and not so much to play up facts, and a GOP that is all too ready to embrace fearmongering, and unwilling to offer up an alternative to Obama's proposals.

dems will hold both houses in 2010

Let's not count those chickens quite so soon...

Basically my feeling right now is "We've got to give those fighters more time!"

I think a lot of people were taken by surprise at the volume of crazystupid that has been given traction by the media in a gawky, some-say way, as if it were part of legitimate discourse.

Let's not count those chickens quite so soon...

i know, i know. but the senate isn't even remotely in play, and i really don't see the house flipping. because when it comes down to it, what are people really going to be mad about? that obama passed a health-care bill? i don't see it. (and i'm not prone to underestimating the weirdness of the american electorate. i just think for the moment, democrats don't need to be thinking about 2010. they should be thinking about what they can get done between now and whenever the next republican administration takes office.)

insurance actively worked to undermine this the last time around

in what ways? i confess i don't know the history. is this code for saying there are senators in the pockets of the insurers and unless the insurers make the right noises those senators will vote nay?

Insurance companies funded insurance lobbies which flooded news outlets with op-eds criticizing the plan, no doubt had their hands in the pockets of the GOP, and infamously pushed the "Harry and Louise" commercials which arguably put the nail in the coffin.

You hear about insurance companies behind the anti-public plan Town Hallers as well as getting on board with 'progressives' to 'work towards health care reform'. They are actually on 'both sides' of the debate this time. The reason? They want a mandate sans public option, which will deliver them tens of millions of new customers, the least profitable of which will be subsidized by taxpayers.