Re-enacting the Past to Serve the Future

post from Docudharma - Front Page on 26 March 2010 09:23:26 AM. © Docudharma - Front Page

The stereotypical definition of Feminists held by many is that they are frigid, miserable, depressed, angry, and obsessed with finding systemic fault in every man and under every rock. I find evidence of this sentiment no matter who I ask or where[...]

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TPMDC Morning Roundup

post from Talking Points Memo on 26 March 2010 09:20:00 AM. © Talking Points Memo

Sarah Palin will be down in Arizona today helping to bail out John McCain in his primary against Rep. J.D. Hayworth. That and the day's other news in the TPMDC Morning Roundup.[...]

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Classic

post from Talking Points Memo on 26 March 2010 09:19:00 AM. © Talking Points Memo

The Washington Post today has a profile of Mike Vanderboegh, the 57-year-old former militiaman from Alabama who last week posted a call for people to throw bricks through the windows at Democratic offices around the country to protest their votes for[...]

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Reducing the Things They Carry

post from Border Jumpers: Bernard Pollack and Danielle Nierenberg on 26 March 2010 09:16:43 AM. © Border Jumpers: Bernard Pollack and Danielle Nierenberg

Crossposted from the Worldwatch Institute's Nourishing the Planet.The majority of farmers in sub-Saharan Africa? in some areas up to 80 percent? are women. The average female farmer in the...visit us at www.borderjumpers.org[...]

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Meet a typical teabagger

post from They gave us a republic... - Front Page on 26 March 2010 09:11:39 AM. © They gave us a republic... - Front Page

Life, apparently, didn't go the way that Randy Millam thought it would when he was growing up. Now he is 52 and he veritably defines the oeuvre of the disaffected loser...lost his job years ago and hasn't worked since, freeloads off his wife who has carried his fat ass and kept it insured, and whose honor-student daughter who is about to graduate from high school just enlisted in the Army. Unsaid about that last part is that her dad failed her and she has no other way to pay for college.

And by God, he just knows that it is all Obama's fault, because Fox News told him so.

He had no plans to throw bricks, issue death threats, spit in faces or scream racial slurs. But Randy Millam, 52, intended to make a scene, so he woke up early Thursday morning to prepare for President Obama's visit.
Millam sat at his kitchen table in Lowden, Iowa, with 14 Sharpie markers and a piece of foam board, working to condense a year of frustration into a 3-by-3-foot catchphrase. "Chains We Can Believe In," he wrote, drawing the communist hammer and sickle on the poster's top left corner. Then he grabbed an American flag, inserted batteries into a megaphone bought on the cheap for $25 and guzzled a 24-hour energy drink. Just as Obama took off in Air Force One for Iowa City, Millam loaded into his muddy Ford Fusion and drove 50 miles across the cornfields of eastern Iowa.
"The president just about declared war against the American people last weekend," he said. And it is a war Millam intends to fight.
Millam's resolve Thursday was reinforced by the sense that he was taking part in a movement -- a rising tide of anger, fear and vitriol in the wake of the health-care overhaul signed into law by Obama this week. Millam joined a chorus of discontent surrounding the president's visit: a warm-up protest Wednesday night, a greeting party of protesters waiting at the airport and hundreds more with plans to chant outside the downtown arena while Obama spoke. In the hours before he left for Iowa City, Millam watched reports on Fox News Channel about vandalism at Democratic offices and visited a Web site of the conservative "tea party" movement, where he was inspired by a Thomas Jefferson quote about how bloodshed might be necessary to protect a country from tyranny.
"I'm not ready for outright violence yet. We have to be civil for as long as we can," Millam said. But, he added, "we are watching the infrastructure of this country crumble under our feet. The government doesn't want to hear us. We have to make them listen."
[...]
..."Obama Lies!" was the reason he no longer trusted government, stockpiling firewood and bricks and starting his own vegetable garden. "ObamaCare," was what he considered the final insult to the Constitution. Even though he has health insurance through his wife's job, the politics of the past few weeks confirmed his fears about the direction of his country and gave him a "locked-and-loaded focus."

It is a sad and depressing tale, and it makes me angry. This guy is just a couple of years older than me and younger than my husband. He is from a rural area, just like we are, but we took the same road out of town a generation ago that his daughter has decided to take.

In other words, different choices and we could have wound up in the same position he is.

Well, except one thing - the orders-of-magnitude difference in innate intelligence.

My husband and I are both smart enough to know that if you can take a megaphone and a stupid sign and yell and scream on a public street for two or three hours, our freedoms are just fine...unlike during the Bush era, when protest was strictly verbotten.

But he bought into the Reagan bullshit three decades ago when he was a young man, and can't even begin to comprehend that thirty years of republican neglect and maintaining that "government doesn't work" then once elected proving it - is actually why he is now a pathetic loser - and why the infrastructure is crumbling. He and far too many others bet on the wrong horse. Now they are facing the consequences of those bad decisions and they don't like it one little bit.

Guess what? Too fucking bad. The world has moved on.

Millam looked across the street at the students and shook his head. "They don't understand that our government doesn't listen," he said. He had spent the past week calling congressional offices and the White House to tell them about his feelings on health-care reform, waiting through hold times only to reach answering machines and busy signals. Maybe he could enlighten these Obama supporters. He stepped closer to the street and raised the megaphone.
"I voted for a Democrat once," he said. "I was young once. Kumbaya and all that. Then I grew up. If you believe in freedom, you need to come to this side of the street."
Nobody moved.
"If you don't think it takes 2,700 pages to explain a health-care plan, come to this side of the street."
Still nothing.
"If you haven't given up on our Constitution, on our founders, on the hope and dream of a free country, then come to this side of the street."
Finally, one student walked across. He wore dark sunglasses and carried a poster-board sign, made moments earlier. It read: "These People are Idiots." He stood with the protesters, his sign mocking them, while he listened to an iPod.

And with that, I would say that these folks have...dare I say it?...Yes, I dare...

Met their Waterloo.

All those astroturf organizations that were whipping this shit up aren't going to fund their folly any more. The battle was waged, and they lost. The "tea party" morons have served their purpose and run their course.

Now they are going to end up going back to being the lone disaffected losers that they are and that we have always known they were. Need evidence that they are too incompetent to mount a protest and the kid with the sign and the shades was right? Obama didn't see these idiots protesting because they were collectively too stupid to spread out around the arena and keep their eyes peeled and they therefore...wait for it...missed an entire presidential motorcade.

And one last thing...I am Sick. To. Fucking. Death. of assholes like this fatassed, freeloading, probably a racist, loser thinking that they are the "real America" because...Why? Because they are white? Male? Fifty? Why are these fringe lunatics the "real America" when 53% of us voted for Obama and sent wide Democratic majorities to the House and Senate to give him a Congress he could work with and get some things set right, knowing damned good and well that it takes longer to clean up a mess than to make it?

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"Progressive" Reform

post from TalkLeft on 26 March 2010 09:11:00 AM. © TalkLeft

Ezra Klein:

What you're seeing here is the tension between being a conservative and being a Republican. It's not that you can't be both at the same time, but that you have to know which wins when ideological push comes to electoral shove. [. . . The health reforms] were defined as conservative as recently as two or three years ago. [. . . ]

The way [the health bills] saved money -- cuts to Medicare and a tax that rolled back the tax break for employer-sponsored insurance -- were conservative as well. Cutting Medicare and ending that tax break are, for instance, the keys to Rep. Paul Ryan's alternative budget proposal.

[. . . T]here was no doubt the bill looked like the reforms Mitt Romney signed into law in Massachusetts and that the conservative Heritage Foundation advocated in the early Aughts. There's no doubt that it was more ideologically conservative than any major reform bill that had come before it. [. . . ] If Republicans had cut a deal on revenue, we could've capped the tax break for employer-sponsored insurance and there would've been no increase in Medicare payroll taxes. Health savings accounts and tort reform could've been much larger parts of the bill. [. . .] If Republicans had offered 40 real votes for Wyden-Bennett, I would've been on their side in this debate. [. . .] There's definitely no way to square [conservative] past preferences and the rhetoric they abetted this time around. And in the final analysis, the bill is worse -- both from their perspective and mine -- for that opposition.

(Emphasis supplied.) My biggest beef with Ezra Klein was always the disingenuous image he cultivated as the progressive voice on health care reform. He is no progressive on health care reform. He readily admits it here. This does not mean he is wrong in his views. (My views on foreign policy and preventive detention are hardly progressive. But I do not present them as such.) Just that he was not progressive (neither was Obama.) And the health bills are simply a progressive loss on the issue of reform (the expansion of Medicaid is clearly a progressive triumph.)

Speaking for me only

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Non-Linear

post from Talking Points Memo on 26 March 2010 09:10:00 AM. © Talking Points Memo

It would be as foolish to say where things are going based on the last week as it was to make predictions on the same basis two or three weeks before. But I hope the current sense of turnabout (whether temporary or lasting) shows people once and for all[...]

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An Idiot's Guide to Handling Radical Right Hate

post from Docudharma - Front Page on 26 March 2010 09:08:53 AM. © Docudharma - Front Page

We old codgers have to smile at the surprise and near panic on the Left generated by some recently publicized instances of Radical Right hate and violence directed at supporters of the health care bill. Radical Right terrorism is older than the[...]

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The State of the Senates Coburning

So the Senate went into recess, and they'll "continue working" on an agreement with Coburn Friday morning. I don't know if they'd actually go home without passing an extension or wait until the cloture clock winds down and do an actual vote. Regardless,[...]

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Winning has given Dems. momentum and the GOPers
are starting to doubt themselves

It's like the Democrats finally beat up the schoolyard bully. And, it turns out the bully is all talk and really a wimp. Winning seems to have inspired Obama and the Hill Democrats. Losing has caused angst in the GOP. That's the assessment from one of the papers that covers Congress, The Hill:

Political momentum has shifted so fast over the last week that it has given Republicans whiplash.

Democrats are heading into the two-week Easter recess in high spirits after passing the most sweeping domestic policy reform since Medicare was enacted four decades ago.

President Barack Obama on Thursday dared Republicans to make healthcare reform a campaign issue.

?They?re actually going to run on a platform of repeal in November,? Obama said. ?Well, I say go for it.?

But even as some Republicans talk of using healthcare as a cudgel, others are questioning the hard-line opposition strategy that limited their input on the substance of healthcare reform and may deny them any chance of shaping financial regulatory reform later this year.

Cracks emerged in the unified front Republicans held throughout most of the healthcare debate.

Congress is taking a two week ~~vacation~~ district work period. Let's hope the Democrats come back even more fired up. The GOPers are regrouping and plotting their next moves of obstruction. But, we need to exploit the "cracks" in the "unified front."

And, let's keep that momentum going til November. Passing more progressive legislation -- and being bold about it -- will help.

Markos tracks the "intensity gap" in the "Daily Kos Weekly State of the Nation Poll." This week, that gap, which has favored the GOP, narrowed. The tracking poll is here. The analysis arrived via email:

While both sides saw big spikes in their numbers, Democrats were particularly energized, with that intensity gap narrowing from 11 points to a far more manageable seven. First the first time in over a year, Democrats have a reason to get excited about their party, and are newly engaging in the political process.

This intensity gap will bear tracking the rest of this cycle. Democrats can continue to close the gap by ending Don't Ask, Don't Tell, passing tough financial regulatory reform, make progress on comprehensive immigration reform, and continue to talk tough against the obstructionist GOP.

The base has awakened. Democrats keep to it inspired.