I’ve never been a fan of bumper sticker politics: I find it overall relatively crude and demeaning not only to everyone involved (both the person idiotic enough to put something like “Miss Him Yet?” on their car and the person who has to see it while they’re headed to work or home from it) but there’s been one little trend of short-memory and revisionist history among conservatives and Republicans that I feel compelled to note.

Admittedly, the Right’s attention span has always been short, and their capacity to revise history to make themselves look glowing (see Ronald Reagan) has always been remarkable, but President Obama has been in office for 18 months and not only are conservatives trying to pretend that he’s not still busy cleaning up the messes of the past 8 years (“hurr when will you stop blaming the last guy for what’s happening now, hrurr”) but also conveniently shaping today’s issues in short-term language (instead of properly pointing at the near 30-year history of American conservatism as responsible for the deregulation of our financial industries, energy industries, and transportation industries to the point where they’re only accountable to their shareholders and the desires of their executives to line their pockets – at the expense of the American people.)

Bumper stickers like “How’s that change working out for you” and “Miss him yet?” have been appearing on the cars of the angry, who want you and I to believe that the world may as well have ended 18 months ago and now we’re all picking through the smoldering ashes of our civilization. To those questions, I have two very simple answers:

* That change is working out great for me, thanks for asking!
* No, I don’t miss him at all – in fact, I’m happily on my way to forgetting he ever existed.

Starting at the very bottom, I’m particularly glad that I have a President who, while he isn’t perfect, is leaps and bounds more perfect than the last guy, and a President who I don’t have to worry will lock me up and waterboard me if I disagree with him and don’t march in lock step behind. Now I have a President who, as a matter of policy, doesn’t strip American citizens of their rights and due process just so they can be thrown in a dark cell until the powers that be can think of what do to with them. Again – our current Administration isn’t perfect on this point, but at least they’re willing to listen to suggestions and open to changing course – the last Administration would have simply called you “un-American,” “un-patriotic,” and thrown you in a cell just for speaking your mind.

The last Administration listened in on the phone calls of American citizens without a warrant, and the last Administration locked up American citizens for no reason. The last Administration was responsible for the Patriot Act, which while it hasn’t been repealed, has been used with significantly more caution and judgment than it had been in the past. The last Administration was obsessed with the State Secrets Act and shutting down human rights lawsuits just by invoking it.

So no, I don’t “miss him yet” at all, and that “change” has been a huge breath of fresh air.

Let’s move on to some more tangible examples though:

Would Mad King George have appointed two women to the Supreme Court? Likely not.

Would McCain have signed the Lucy Ledbetter Act, mandating equal pay for equal work? Never.

Would Bush Jr. have committed to drawing down troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, even if those plans are slow to take shape? Never – they would have said even talking about leaving would have emboldened our “enemy.”

Would the Little Bush or McCain ever strive to provide health insurance to millions of uninsured Americans, pass a Patient’s Bill of Rights, put Medicare on sound financial footing, and cut near a trillion dollars from the budget defecit over the next 10 years by reforming the way Americans get and spend on health care? It would have been a laughable proposition.

Would McCain or Palin have signed an executive order mandating that “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” be repealed? Wouldn’t have even crossed their minds.

Would Bush Jr. ever thought to close Guantanamo, much less actually try? Never.

Would a Republican president ever have sought to re-vitalize the Civil Rights wing of the Department of Justice, ousting political appointments that sought only to minimize the amount of work the agency did by throwing out legitimate cases and complaints and marginalizing career lawyers who have fought for equal rights their entire lives? Nope.

Would McCain or Palin have fought to restore science and scientific analysis to its rightful place in American discourse, especially on such important topics as climate change, space science, and medicine? Never.

Would McCain or Bush Jr. be on nearly as solid terms with our allies as Obama is, and managed to completely turn around our antagonistic relationship with Russia the way he has? Never – we would have seen more bluster and saber rattling, and likely be in the middle of another war with another faceless enemy designed to make us afraid by now had we voted differently.

Would McCain ever have gleefully signed ethics reform into law that would ensure there were strong rules to make sure the the field day that Republicans had during their majority time in office prior to 2008 (remember the cascade of ethics and sex scandals coming out of Congress back then? Oh how soon the right wing forgets…) never happen again? Not a chance.

Would Bush Jr. ever have given woefully needed money to the American auto industry – even if it was unpopular – and then been able to stand behind them as, as happened last week, they all post revenue gains and profits as opposed to the record losses and debts they had over a year ago?

The economic downturn was in full swing when President Obama was elected, as were both wars and all of their issues – so blaming President Obama is only ad accurate as you can blame someone for not cleaning up someone else’s mess fast enough. Someone recently pointed to a story about the vast majority (something like 96%) of money slated for reconstruction in Iraq being unaccounted for, and snarkily commented about whether or not this was something that people would just blame President Bush for – to which I responded that yes, it is – it’s only the right that seeks to unload accountability for their own actions and leadership decisions onto the people that follow them. President Obama has accountability to cleaning up that mess, but he has no accountability for having made the mess in the first place.

To that end though, would Bush Jr. or McCain ever have pushed through legislation designed to stimulate the economy, fund thousands of new infrastructure projects, put hundreds of thousands of Americans back to work, and, with time, eventually turn the job decline into a slow but steady job incline? Not at all – there would have been some tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans (like the Bush tax cuts being debated now in Congress – you remember, the ones that did nothing to stimulate the economy or create new jobs?) and the Republicans would have resorted to their old stand-by, that people who are unemployed somehow “want to be jobless” or “deserve it.”

Would Bush ever have had the gravitas or political will to push through a massive financial system reform bill into law that not only forces more accountability in the financial sector but also establishes a new government agency that the public can turn to for their own protection against those massive Wall Street entities? Never. Would McCain? Hardly – he may have handed over some more money to them, but never have fought on our behalf.

So when you ask me if that “change” is working out for me, I’m more than happy to say yes.

When you ask me if I “miss him yet,” I can answer with a smile and say “miss who?”

Because overall, there’s plenty of work left to be done, and we’re not out of the woods, and everything isn’t perfect, but I’m more hopeful now than I ever have been, and I’m confident that America is moving in the right direction under a leader who at least considers the best interests of the people and the nation over their own personal whim or delusional personal “calling.”

Yup, that change is working out for me just fine, thanks. I wouldn’t trade it for anything.

My father, who proudly served in the military (partially so I would never have to) has said this to me before: that not everyone who dons a uniform is a hero, and not every hero wears a uniform. And that just because someone’s served in the armed forces doesn’t make them a hero or someone automatically worthy of praise and respect – respect has to be earned by anyone to anyone, and the clothes they wear or the life they’ve chosen shouldn’t automatically grant that to anyone.

Part of the issue here is the gradual turn of our armed services into a “hero class,” where the civilian population automatically and immediately bows to any opinion offered by anyone who’s served in the military for any period of time for any reason. And while there is much to respect about someone who’s chosen to serve our country and potentially – at a moment’s call – put their lives on the line for our freedoms and liberties, that doesn’t automatically make them a “hero.”

William Astore describes this incredibly well, while balancing the appropriate respect and appreciation for the men and women of our military and the life that they choose to lead in service of their countrymen, with the immediate refutation of the “I was a soldier so I know how the world works and how things should be” mentality that I for one hear incredibly often from people on the political right.

I can’t count how many times I’ve heard someone claim to have served during wartime as a way to not have to use facts or reality to base their political beliefs; someone who uses the fact that they either are in the service or were in the service as a way to automatically shut down a political debate.

I’ve said as much to people before: that being a solider doesn’t make you any more or less qualified to be a politician or even command a conflict any more than being a police officer makes you qualified to be a state governor or even be the police chief. Sure you have insight into one particular area of importance, but – as my dad would say – being a infantryman on the ground is admirable, but it doesn’t necessarily make you qualified to be a general.

It doesn’t preclude you from it, but it doesn’t automatically make you one – so saying “I know how the war should be fought/I know how all wars should be fought/I know whether war is right or wrong because I was in XXXX conflict” simply isn’t rational, or even remotely true, unless by saying “I was in XXXX conflict” you’re really saying “I was in command.”

Astore goes on though, pointing out that there’s more to the term “hero” than our culture has diluted it to be these days:

In local post offices, as well as on local city streets here in central Pennsylvania, I see many reminders that our troops are “hometown heroes.” Official military photos of these young enlistees catch my eye, a few smiling, most looking into the camera with faces of grim resolve tinged with pride at having completed basic training. Once upon a time, as the military dean of students at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California, I looked into such faces in the flesh, congratulating young service members for their effort and spirit.

I was proud of them then; I still am. But here’s a fact I suspect our troops might be among the first to embrace: the act of joining the military does not make you a hero, nor does the act of serving in combat. Whether in the military or in civilian life, heroes are rare — indeed, all-too-rare. Heck, that’s the reason we celebrate them. They’re the very best of us, which means they can’t be all of us.

Still, even if elevating our troops to hero status has become something of a national mania, is there really any harm done? What’s wrong with praising our troops to the rafters? What’s wrong with adding them to our pantheon of heroes?

The short answer is: There’s a good deal wrong, and a good deal of harm done, not so much to them as to us.

To wit:

*By making our military a league of heroes, we ensure that the brutalizing aspects and effects of war will be played down. In celebrating isolated heroic feats, we often forget that war is guaranteed to degrade humanity. “War,” as writer and cultural historian Louis Menand noted, “is specially terrible not because it destroys human beings, who can be destroyed in plenty of other ways, but because it turns human beings into destroyers.”

When we create a legion of heroes in our minds, we blind ourselves to evidence of their destructive, sometimes atrocious, behavior. Heroes, after all, don’t commit atrocities. They don’t, for instance, dig bullets out of pregnant women’s bodies in an attempt to cover up deadly mistakes. They don’t fire on a good Samaritan and his two children as he attempts to aid a grievously wounded civilian. Such atrocities and murderous blunders, so common to war’s brutal chaos, produce cognitive dissonance in the minds of many Americans who simply can’t imagine their “heroes” killing innocents. How much easier it is to see the acts of violence of our troops as necessary, admirable, even noble.

*By making our military generically heroic, we act to prolong our wars.

I couldn’t put it better myself.

[ Fighting Wars Won't Make You a Hero ]
Source: TomDispatch.com (via AlterNet)

Oh the poor Tea Party – they keep wanting to not be called racists, but they keep acting like racists! That AND their leadership is so busy whining and complaining that they’re being called racist that they can’t take the time to actively denounce racism in their ranks – which would probably go along way to discounting attacks that they’re racist. But then again, they can’t possibly denounce racism, because after all, the truth is? They’re not only racist, but they say and do racist things.

Now I make that distinction on purpose, because it’s critical to be able to tell the difference between someone who just said or did something that’s racist and someone who IS racist. Not everyone who says something that’s racist is a racist person – and it’s those people who can be told “listen, that’s not cool,” and they’ll understand if they’re approached non-defensively. But some people – like the leadership of the Tea Party thuggery – are so busy saying and being racist and then complaining when they’re called out on it that they simply can’t be educated to their own white privilege.

This tidbit by digby at AlterNet had me laughing:

It’s interesting that after the ACORN business and the past year of obnoxious rhetoric on the far right the mainstream media is suddenly waking up to the fact that the Tea Party might just, in fact, have a teensy racist bent.

This is from a well done article on the topic in the Kansas City Star:

For many tea partiers, racism is in the eye of the beholder.

Take Ron Wight, who stood with dozens of tea party activists at the J.C. Nichols Memorial Fountain in April, complaining about the Obama administration, its socialist agenda and being called a racist.

Those like him who complain about President Barack Obama are accused of racism, lamented the semi-retired music teacher from Lee’s Summit.

Then he added: “If I was a black man, I’d get down on my knees and thank God for slavery. Otherwise, I could be dying of AIDS now in Africa.”

Wight doesn’t consider that comment to be racist.“I wish slavery had never happened,” he said. “But there are some black people alive today who have never suffered one day what the people who were black went through in the ’40s, ’50s and ’60s. Has somebody said something stupid or done something stupid? Yes, there have been incidents.

“But with everything that has been done in this country legally and socially for the black man, it’s almost like they’ve been given a great leg up.”

I think that exemplifies the most common modern form of racism — the white victim mentality, whether it means “they’ve been given a great leg up” or “they are all violent criminals and welfare queens,” the point is that racial minorities get all the breaks.

And no, these people don’t admit they are racists. Indeed, they deny it completely and claim that they are, in fact, victims of reverse racism. Just because they say it doesn’t mean it isn’t true.

For an erudite discussion of this topic, I urge you to read this Ta-Nehisi Coates essay here.

That essay at the end goes into fabulous detail on why the NAACP is absolutely correct with regard to calling out the Tea Party for its racist motivations, members, and statements. Meanwhile, people in the Tea Party, like Wight above, claim they’re just exercising their “right to free speech” while spouting hate that’s been sugarcoated in their own white privilege.

On the bright side though, we get to all watch the Tea Partiers self-destruct by doing this.

[ Racists Never Seem to Get a Break ]
Source: AlterNet

I’ve said this a number of times – while the people on the right are frothing at the mouth and burning effigies and carrying their torches and pitchforks every time anyone who doesn’t feel exactly the way they do opens their mouth (to the point of cannibalizing their own), those of us on the progressive left have a job to do that we’re not doing very well right now.

I’m without a doubt a politics-over-person, belief-over-candidate progressive, but I’m not stupid – I know when I have a good thing and I know that there’s work required to make that good thing keep working for me. Right now, my fellow progressives, we have a good thing. President Obama may not be the panacea of progressive governance, but he’s not only the best thing we’ll get right now, he’s the best thing to come along for a long time.

And yet, many of us are beating him up for not being progressive enough, not moving fast enough, not ending the war fast enough, not giving us all the full boat of health care reform enough, not reforming our financial markets enough, not creating jobs fast enough, not giving us all cupcakes and ice cream enough – and it’s really got to stop.

We’re poised with politicians in office that want positive and progressive change in America, but right now they don’t think the American people have the backbone for it because they’re too busy getting beat on by progressives who want them to move faster while the rest of us in the center and the left and even many on the right are sitting back, complacent, with our hands folded.

Many of us thought we did all we had to do when we elected Obama and the majority of Democrats that we elected in 2008 and we sat back and essentially said “go forth and make the world a better place, we’ll be here when you’re done.” We have, and continue to forget that this is a participatory process, and we need to not only encourage our politicians to make progressive change, we need to create an atmosphere and environment in not just our political discourse and media, but in our communities where that change is welcome, celebrated, and wanted.

Writing for Reader Supported News, Scott Galindez echoes this point:

This victory alone is not the change we seek. It is only the chance for us to make that change. And that cannot happen if we go back to the way things were.

It can’t happen without you, without a new spirit of service, a new spirit of sacrifice.

So let us summon a new spirit of patriotism, of responsibility, where each of us resolves to pitch in and work harder and look after not only ourselves but each other. – President-Elect Barack Obama

When President Obama accepted victory in Grant Park, he called on all of us to join him in ushering in the change we all were seeking. Did we answer the call? Have we rolled up our sleeves and fought for real change?

I would argue that very few did. Most of us celebrated and waited for Obama to do the heavy lifting. The country was facing a devastating financial crisis while conducting two wars. We were celebrating the victory, but not looking at the overwhelming challenges our new leader was facing. We expected sweeping change, but for the most part we left the battlefield and expected Obama to bring us that change.

It’s about time that we returned to that battlefield, and Galindez is absolutely right. He can’t do this without us – he never could, and although the sweeping changes that have already been made (Health Care Reform alone puts Obama in the same caliber as Presidents like Roosevelt, to be truthful) he can’t press the country forward and away from the distractions of things that will only serve to slow us down without the help of the American people. Whether it’s energy and climate change, jobs, financial market reform, or immigration, he won’t be able to do it without us.

Galindez goes on to address specific topics, like the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the economy, climate change, energy, and finally financial reform, where he says this:

That has to change.

On that historic night in Grant Park, Obama also said:

The road ahead will be long. Our climb will be steep. We may not get there in one year or even in one term. But, America, I have never been more hopeful than I am tonight that we will get there.

I promise you, we as a people will get there.

There will be setbacks and false starts. There are many who won’t agree with every decision or policy I make as president.

He was right, many liberals and progressives disagree with many of Obama’s policies, but let us focus on what we agree on.

While it isn’t a perfect bill, millions of Americans will have access to health care that didn’t before, and millions more will not lose their health care coverage if they get sick.

Did you know that Obama signed legislation that forces banks to honor your lease if your landlord goes into foreclosure? I wonder if McCain or Bush would have done that?

While the financial reform legislation isn’t as strong as we wanted, it is more than we would have gotten from “Keating Five” McCain.

Then there is the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009 that moves us closer to pay equity for women.

The list goes on, but too often we forget the gains and focus on the areas that we disagree on with the president.

Obama always said he couldn’t do it alone; the entrenched powerful interests in Washington are not going to just surrender. We need to support him when he is doing the right thing, and create a new political climate that allows him to change his policies when we think he is wrong.

I believe that he believes in the right things, but he can only achieve what the political climate allows. We have failed to provide the political climate for the change we believe in. It is time for us to organize and seize back the momentum for change.

Galindez apologizes for potentially offending anyone who may feel that they’ve been wrongly or inappropriately targeted by the post, but I won’t go that far. Frankly, I think the majority of Americans, especially us progressives, are perfectly happy cannibalizing Obama if he doesn’t align with us specifically on the issues that we want him to, or push as far as we want him to push.

And we desperately need to remember what our options were (McCain/Palin) and we desperately need to remember that we have a job to do here as well – and that job doesn’t entail all-out loyalty to the President, not the way the Republicans were under President Bush – but it does entail standing up for him so he can push forward even a little on the things that are important to all of us against those people who would tear him down and hold him back.

[ Blaming Obama is Easy and Irresponsible ]
Source: Reader Supported News

I’m going to let Frank open in his own words, because I think they’re not only telling of what Arizona’s “Papers Please” law means (I’m going to refer to it this way from now on) but also what this might mean for the rest of America:

Don’t blame it all on Arizona. The Grand Canyon State simply happened to be in the right place at the right time to tilt over to the dark side. Its hysteria is but another symptom of a political virus that can’t be quarantined and whose cure is as yet unknown.

If many of Arizona’s defenders and critics hold one belief in common, it’s that the new “show me your papers” law is sui generis: it’s seen as one angry border state’s response to its outsized share of America’s illegal immigration crisis. But to label this development “Arizona’s folly” trivializes its import and reach. The more you examine the law’s provisions and proponents, the more you realize that it’s the latest and (so far) most vicious battle in a far broader movement that is not just about illegal immigrants — and that is steadily increasing its annexation of one of America’s two major political parties.

Arizonans, like all Americans, have every right to be furious about Washington’s protracted and bipartisan failure to address the immigration stalemate. To be angry about illegal immigration is hardly tantamount to being a bigot. But the Arizona law expressing that anger is bigoted, and in a very particular way. The law dovetails seamlessly with the national “Take Back America” crusade that has attended the rise of Barack Obama and the accelerating demographic shift our first African-American president represents.

That’s right – the primary issue here is not one of immigration, or even legality, or even resources and costs associated with illegal immigration – we know that now that we’ve seen proof that Arizona has subsequently – and quietly – banned ethnic studies from its classrooms. This is an all out attack on all things American that aren’t white, pale, and Christian, and you can bet that Latinos in America, legal or not, won’t be the last people to suffer this kind of blow.

We’ll see weaking of anti-discrimination laws around the country, we’ll see the broadening of police powers and discretion, the same way we saw in the Jim Crow days. We’ll see more laws popping up where the sentiment is essentially “if you’re white and not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about,” and if you’re of any other religion, creed, race, or even remotely different appearance or socio-political persuasion, there’ll be hell to pay. Make note of this – these people want to tear apart the United States as we know it and remake it in their own black-and-white “Leave it to Beaver” image.

Think I’m kidding? Rich continues with what these same people think of President Obama – they’re still convinced he’s not an American citizen, and that they can somehow invalidate his Presidency by wishing that he weren’t:

The crowd that wants Latinos to show their papers if there’s a “reasonable suspicion” of illegality is often the same crowd still demanding that the president produce a document proving his own citizenship. Lest there be any doubt of that confluence, Rush Limbaugh hammered the point home after Obama criticized Arizona’s action. “I can understand Obama being touchy on the subject of producing your papers,” he said. “Maybe he’s afraid somebody’s going to ask him for his.” Or, as Glenn Beck chimed in about the president last week: “What has he said that sounds like American?”

To the “Take Back America” right, the illegitimate Obama is Illegal Alien No. 1. It’s no surprise that of the 35 members of the Arizona House who voted for the immigration law (the entire Republican caucus), 31 voted soon after for another new law that would require all presidential candidates to produce birth certificates to qualify for inclusion on the state’s 2012 ballot. With the whole country now watching Arizona, that “birther” bill was abruptly yanked Thursday.

Now then, Rich dives into the tricky topic of race itself, and how as much as the Tea Party wants us to believe they’re not racially motivated, they entirely are. He’s absolutely right – this isn’t about Arizona, it’s about a wave of nationalist, far-right conservative hatred that’s sweeping across the country, piggybacked on the anger of white men that people they don’t resemble are starting to take their rightful place alongside them as the people who steer our country. His own remarks can close:

The one group of Republicans that has been forthright in criticizing the Arizona law is the Bush circle: Jeb Bush, the former speechwriter Michael Gerson, the Homeland Security secretary Tom Ridge, the adviser Mark McKinnon and, with somewhat more equivocal language, Karl Rove. McKinnon and Rove know well that Latino-bashing will ultimately prove political suicide in a century when Hispanic Americans are well on their way to becoming the largest minority in the country and are already the swing voters in many critical states.

The Bushies, however, have no power and no juice in the new conservative order. The former president is nearly as reviled in some Tea Party circles as Obama is. Even conservatives as seemingly above reproach as Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina now invite the nastiest of blow-back if they fail Tea Party purity tests. When Graham had the gall to work with Chuck Schumer of New York on an immigration reform bill, the hard-line Americans for Legal Immigration punished him by spreading rumors about his private life as loudly as possible. Graham has been backing away from supporting the immigration bill ever since.

It’s harder and harder to cling to the conventional wisdom that the Tea Party is merely an element in the G.O.P., not the party’s controlling force — the tail that’s wagging the snarling dog. It’s also hard to maintain that the Tea Party’s nuttier elements are merely a fringe of a fringe. The first national Tea Party convention, in Nashville in February, chose as its kickoff speaker the former presidential candidate Tom Tancredo, a notorious nativist who surely was enlisted precisely because he runs around saying things like he has “no idea where Obama was born.” The Times/CBS poll of the Tea Party movement found that only 41 percent of its supporters believe that the president was born in the United States.

The angry right and its apologists also keep insisting that race has nothing to do with their political passions. Thus Sarah Palin explained that it’s Obama and the “lamestream media” that are responsible for “perpetuating this myth that racial profiling is a part” of Arizona’s law. So how does that profiling work without race or ethnicity, exactly? Brian Bilbray, a Republican Congressman from California and another supporter of the law, rode to the rescue by suggesting “they will look at the kind of dress you wear.” Wise Latinas better start shopping at Talbots!

In this Alice in Wonderland inversion of reality, it’s politically incorrect to entertain a reasonable suspicion that race may be at least a factor in what drives an action like the Arizona immigration law. Any racism in America, it turns out, is directed at whites. Beck called Obama a “racist.” Newt Gingrich called Sonia Sotomayor a “Latina woman racist.” When Obama put up a routine YouTube video calling for the Democratic base to mobilize last week — which he defined as “young people, African-Americans, Latinos and women” — the Republican National Committee attacked him for playing the race card. Presumably the best defense is a good offense when you’re a party boasting an all-white membership in both the House and the Senate and represented by governors who omit slavery from their proclamations of Confederate History Month.

In a development that can only be described as startling, the G.O.P.’s one visible black leader, the party chairman Michael Steele, went off message when appearing at DePaul University on April 20. He conceded that African-Americans “really don’t have a reason” to vote Republican, citing his party’s pursuit of a race-baiting “Southern strategy” since the Nixon-Agnew era. For this he was attacked by conservatives who denied there had ever been such a strategy. That bit of historical revisionism would require erasing, for starters, Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms, not to mention the Willie Horton campaign that helped to propel Bush 41 into the White House in 1988.

The rage of 2010 is far more incendiary than anything that went down in 1988, and it will soon leap from illegal immigration to other issues in other states. Boycott the Diamondbacks and Phoenix’s convention hotels if you want to punish Arizona, but don’t for a second believe that it will stop the fire next time.

[ If Only Arizona Were the Real Problem ]
Source: The New York Times

An open letter from Frances Beinecke, of StopGlobalWarming.org, calls out the people who are out rallying against clean and sustainable energy because they somehow think that clean air and water is somehow a political debate and not a scientific one (or really, a matter of basic human rights). Quite honestly, the fact of the matter is that the mountain of evidence for climate change – and the fact that the so-called “climategate” scientists have all been absolved of their so-called doubt (proving the controversy was more political than scientific anyway) – has been largely ignored by the people who would rather stick their heads in the sand and ignore the real changes in the world around us is getting to the point where their ignorance is starting to threaten all of us.

Even otherwise progressive groups like minority groups in Washington are taking aim at clean energy and climate legislation because they fear for the economic impact on their communities. To aside to this for a moment, I completely understand and empathize with the black community and the latino community; anything that will put a strain on the economy will hit minorities disproportionally, but this kind of short-sightedness is what’s caused progressive movements for racial equality and opportunity to stall in the past. Unfortunately it’s the old guard of civil rights leaders who are more interested in their personal position than the best interests of the community that resist these kinds of efforts and then whip up their followers into a frenzy with fears of massive job losses and economic tragedy – rather than embrace the promise of the future, educate our children in new technologies and industries, send them off to be engineers and scientists instead of businessmen and women, in order to be ready for a changing world – we’re stuck clinging to the past, and to old ideas.

What was true in the black community then is true in the latino community now – as much as our respective minority communities rail against progress in America, we thus seal the coffins of our own social placement. When the rest of the world leaves us behind and the privileged minority in America is the only group with the wealth to keep up with it, we’ll still be left behind because we insisted on not adapting as opposed to staying ahead of the curve, where we really ought to aim.

And to people who seem to think this is a political debate, where opinion can be flung about as fact? Beinecke has a message for them:

Saying the Earth is flat doesn’t make it so. Nor does ignoring climate change make it go away. Still, we haven’t heard the last of the deniers. Now that clean energy and climate legislation is moving through the Senate and has the backing of the White House, we will likely hear more talk of “hoaxes” and “cons.” The fossil fuel industry, which has the most to gain by delaying climate action, is eager to amplify these false claims.

But next time you hear them, email, call, or write to the journalist or politician and demand to know where they get their facts from. If their standards are higher than the IPCC’s then they should be happy to share their evidence.

And when you want to get the truth behind the counterfeit theories, visit this great Union of Concerned Scientists’ Fact Checker site, where real climate scientists assess questions through the lens of science not politics.

But back to point; energy and climate are scientific realities that we need to acknowledge. Instead of clinging to an antiquated way of life, we need to collectively acknowledge that our current fuel sources and energy sources are unsustainable and work to forge new industrial paths that will help us live in tune with the world around us instead of in contrast with it. I, like a number of people who are both minorities and scientists as well as pundits, believe this is not only possible, but necessary for our collective survival.

[ Climate Change Is a Scientific Reality, Not a Political Debate ]
Source: StopGlobalWarming.org

I’ve heard this call in the past: that conservative America used to stand for something different than the fearmongering, warmonger, evangelical nonsensical rambling that prevails today, but I always have difficulty with the notion – the conservative America that I see today seems to have always been there, even back through the days of the civil rights movement – but according to some people conservatism used to not be as paranoid and hateful as it is today.

Russell King, for example, recalls his youth growing up in a very conservative part of America, and seeing a set of beliefs and principles that fit in well with the American consciousness as opposed to today, where they’ve seem to completely run amok:

Dear Conservative Americans,

The years have not been kind to you. I grew up in a profoundly Republican home so I can remember when you wore a very different face than the one we see now. You’ve lost me and you’ve lost most of America. Because I believe having responsible choices is important to democracy, I’d like to give you some advice and an invitation.

First, the invitation: Come back to us.

Now the advice. You’re going to have to come up with a platform that isn’t built on a foundation of cowardice: fear of people with colors, religions, cultures and sex lives that differ from yours; fear of reform in banking, health care, energy; fantasy fears of America being transformed into an Islamic nation, into social/commun/fasc-ism, into a disarmed populace put in internment camps; and more. But you have work to do even before you take on that task.

Your party — the GOP — and the conservative end of the American political spectrum has become irresponsible and irrational. Worse, it’s tolerating, promoting and celebrating prejudice and hatred. Let me provide some examples – by no means an exhaustive list — of where the Right as gotten itself stuck in a swamp of hypocrisy, hyperbole, historical inaccuracy and hatred.

He’s absolutely right, but then again, this open letter has always been an invitation to the political right. They’ve always stood on that ground; the side of fear and isolation, of homogeneity, assimilation, repression, and conformity, as opposed to diversity, education, liberation, and understanding. I’m always wary of commentaries like this because it makes me wonder whether or not the perspective of where conservatism has gone astray is ever not tinted by the rose colored glasses of the so-called “good old days,” which were great for the socially-sanctioned privileged minority.

Even so, King makes excellent points about exactly what it is about conservatism today that seems to awkward and crazy when viewed by people who are more aligned with mainstream politics. There was a time when even the staunchest conservatives wouldn’t find themselves in the forests of Idaho with machine guns training to kill all the brown people in America, or sending threatening letters to governors around the country with rambling, self-contradicting rants and manifestos about how America is clearly a corporate state.

Conservative America has without a doubt gone off the deep end, and while I take King’s letter with a grain of salt, I also acknowledge the fact that he has an excellent series of points about where they need to go if they want to rejoin the rest of us.

[ Exposing the Deep Swamp of Republican Hypocrisy -- How a Party Alienated the Nation ]
Source: AlterNet

I think we’re all angry, but John Cory, writing for Reader Supported News, is specifically angry at political coverage in the media today, and the way the media’s own language and methodology for reporting the news has changed the way politics in Washington is conducted.

Cory’s essay sparks the same kind of passion and insight that made me found Not So Humble so many years ago now, and keep updating it every time there’s something worth calling out to the masses.

Because I really can’t cut him up, here’s the essay in its entirety, with urging from me to go see the original at Reader Supported News and to support their efforts to bring sanity to political news coverage on the web:

I am angry.

I’m tired of pundits and know-nothing media gasbags. I’m tired of snarky “inside politics” programming. I am sick of the bigotry and hatred of “birthers” and faux patriotic cranks and their GOP puppet masters. And I’m really pissed at the Democratic Party that confuses having a plate of limp noodles with having a spine.

I’m going to vomit if I hear the word “bipartisanship” one more time.

It was “bipartisanship” that gave us this activist conservative Supreme Court. A Supreme Court that says money is free speech and corporations are persons except when real people try to hold them accountable for their greed and poisonous ways.

“Bipartisanship” gave us the Patriot Act and FISA and illegal wiretaps and two wars and “free speech zones” and “no fly” lists. God bless bipartisan America.

I get nauseated every time the Senate explains how it takes a super majority to do anything for the American people. Tell you what Senate Bozos, if it takes 60 votes to pass legislation than it should take 60% of the popular vote to get you elected.

When some Tea Party crank says, “I want my country back,” I respond, “No madam, you want your country backward.”

When a deficit-mongering politician says, “How do we pay for this?” Why not ask, “What did you Republicans do with the surplus we Democrats left you?”

When a compassionate conservative says, “Healthcare reform is socialism,” why not answer, “No, sir it is the moral and American way to care for people.”

Yes, I can hear it now: “You are naïve and simplistic. These are complicated matters and require sophisticated solutions. Democrats are a big tent and strive for balance. But Republicans block our path at every turn. We are thinking and considering new ways to work in harmony with everyone.”

Bite me.

The only thing you get with “harmony” is a Barbershop Quartet.

Democrats stop being Republican Lite. Stop whining about that mean GOP and their nasty messaging. Grow a pair, get a message, get a bumper sticker and hang it out there. Get some strong vivid talking points.

G-O-P = Greed Over People.

Greed Kills – jobs, people and the economy.

Terrorism is Viagra for Republicans: The more fear – the more excited they get.

When a soldier dies for America, who dares ask if they were gay or straight?

Don’t act so shocked, Democratic Party. Have you looked around lately?

You’re losing the young vote that showed up to elect Obama. You’re losing those old enough to remember real Democrats. Why? Because you don’t talk to them any more than you talk to me. You talk at me. You talk around me. You talk down to me. You talk about me. You don’t talk with me. And you don’t inspire and you don’t champion and without that you are nothing more than an arbitrator of compromise and abdication.

You are facing a bully. Deal with it!

Republicans want the country backwards. They champion superstition over science because it entrenches ignorance and bigotry and captures the easily frightened.

Republicans treat the Constitution the way they treat the Bible, with selective interpretation and selective application to others while exempting themselves from judgment and accountability.

Republicans preach the gospel of fear because fear is darkness and darkness covers their theft of civil liberties and Constitutional principles.

For thirty years the Republican Party has claimed the mantel of law and order but now quake in dread of the American judicial system when putting terrorists on trial. How criminal is that?

Torture is illegal. Period. John Wayne and Jack Bauer were not our Founding Fathers – only in the make-believe world of Republican drugstore-patriots.

DADT needs to be repealed. Now. It is unconscionable, immoral, and disgusting.

Empathy, compassion and equality are not pejoratives. They are American values proven again and again throughout our history.

Republicans believe that bake-sales and cookies for chemotherapy best determine the value of life and healthcare because life is a pre-existing condition and the “free market” should not have to take on such a high risk – after all, no one gets out alive, so why should the corporation be left holding the bag? Unless of course the price is right.

Republicans believe that government should keep its hands off healthcare but should put its hands inside a woman’s body.

Republicans believe in small government – small enough to hold the “right” people and small enough to be owned and operated by the “right” people. And who are the “right” people? Them. Not you.

Democratic Party, DNC, DLCC, DSCC or whatever your acronym – I have only one question for you: Really?

You can’t win against these guys? You can’t get your message out against these guys? You can’t give America leadership against these guys?

Really?

[ I Am Angry ]
Source: Reader Supported News

I’m with Marc Ash here – I still like President Obama, for a number of reasons, not just the ones he outlines here – personally, I think the President is doing an amazing job, especially against a disjointed Republican party that’s intent on just stopping any positive improvements he can make because they know the whole “saddle him with the problems and then blame him for all of it when he fails to fix it” isn’t going to work. He can fix it, he has the agenda, and he has the people behind him – they have to stop his activity and slow him down at all costs so they can continue to blame him for any negativity in the state of affairs.

President Obama also has to deal with a fractured Democratic party, a good portion of which is too conservative for its own good and unwilling to get in line behind some of America’s most needed priorities, like health care, jobs, and climate change. He’s got a lot of gridlock to deal with, and yet he manages to spend time pushing his agenda – and all without the help of his party, which is so busy defending itself.

Anyone who enrages Republican wing-nuts as effectively as Barack Obama can’t be all bad. In fairness, he does it without trying. In fact, just the opposite, he reaches out to them, which infuriates them all the more.

…

All of which can be argued to be “business as usual” for the American President. I guess what I like about Obama is that I get the sense that he would like to, for lack of a better word, change things. The missing link here is what kind of pressure is Obama facing behind closed doors? Even in the public realm we’re seeing unprecedented resistance to Obama’s attempts at reform, from conservative Republicans and Democrats alike.

I like the things Obama has tried to do: Health care reform, foreclosure mitigation, his comments on the outrageous decision by the Supreme Court’s five corporate lawyers to essentially duct-tape a for-sale sign to America’s electoral system. All of these things are a departure for an American President. He is indeed trying.

What concerns me are the things Obama has agreed to: An extension of the US Campaign in Afghanistan, an acceptance of the Bernanke-Geithner “Wall Street must be saved,” mantra, a don’t-ask don’t-tell policy on torture past and present.

I guess what redeems Obama for me is that he agrees to these things without losing his disdain for them. I wanted change, and in fairness change really hasn’t come yet. The intriguing thing is that Obama may actually want these changes too, and seems to. My impression is that he is meeting resistance in a number of significant forms.

Ash dives into the nature of the presidency and of how Obama may not have completely met up to the sweeping progressiveness that brought him into office (part of which I think is somewhat imagined frankly – I think a lot of progressives and liberals – myself included – made him into a super-liberal that he really never was, and never sold himself to be) but he’s pushing as hard or harder than anyone else could in this situation.

Ash also calls out a group that I’ve mentioned before too – fellow progressives.

The tea party crowd is merciless and relentless in their condemnation of Obama, but there is another group that stands just as ready to indict and convict Barack Obama: Progressives. Progressives are just as unyielding in their judgment of Obama, just as determined to derail, to thwart, to oppose, what they see as unacceptable governance. Progressive social objectives may be better reasoned and better argued, however, at the end of the day we may be seeing a Faustian synergy developing between two groups with diametrically opposed social agendas. Progressives and tea-baggers working on separate but parallel tracks to discredit the same president. Strange bedfellows indeed.

We now have a bona fide intellectual in the Oval Office – such things are rare. This is a man of understanding and insight, but his power to achieve change for good is not greater than the dedication of his supporters. Obama has to rally his supporters through a visible commitment to action, and his supporters must be willing to stand tall beside him.

[ I Still Like Obama ]
Source: Reader Supported News

Republicans are literally cheering over their victory in Massaschusetts – they’ve taken to caling Cosmo model turned Senator Scott Brown “Number 41,” meaning they now have the votes required to filibuster any and every Democratic bill that comes to the floor of the Senate, and they’ll gleefully use the power if they feel like it.

A number of Democrats really are ready to pick up the wrong lesson from this – it’s not that their agenda is too bold, it’s not that their agenda is too radical or out of step with what people in America want, it’s that there’s a conservative minority that’s very good at message control and spin, and they’re exceptionally good at framing any debate so the populist path looks like some horrible ideal. The only thing they’re better at than this is at turning out loud, angry, ignorant people to town hall events, and yes – now to the polls.

What’s needed here isn’t for Democrats to turn and tuck tail at the possibility of losing seats, what’s needed is for strong progressive voices to stand up and speak loudly and clearly to the American people – not just in support of progressive, populist policies, but also in support of President Obama. I’m not really a “candidate before principle” person, but the cannibalization among progressives of Obama and his platform has a lot to do with all of the recent criticism he’s received. The right is capable of unifying around a candidate they may not entirely like just so they make sure they have a seat at the table – the left is already starting to forget that before Obama came to the table, they couldn’t unseat the most unpopular President in modern history – it’s time we reminded Obama of his platform and the people he represents…without tearing him down and letting the right laugh at how little we support our own leadership.

Speaking of that constructive criticism, I’m not the only one who has some – Dan Kennedy, writing for the Guardian, has some choice words for President Obama as well:

Obama’s attempts to find compromise solutions did not stop Republicans from labelling him as a radical – or their nutty tea-party allies from calling him a “socialist” and worse. And, in retrospect, that was going to happen no matter what he did. His real problem has been that, to his supporters, he looked as though he’d been sucked into the very system he was elected to reform. Thus an Obama ally like Martha Coakley, a loyal Democratic apparatchik who’d long been criticised for her reluctance to take on political corruption in Massachusetts, became the perfect foil. (Coakley is best known for prosecuting Louise Woodward, a British nanny accused of killing a baby in her care.)

For Obama, the lesson of Coakley’s defeat is that he needs to start fighting for principle the way he did during his campaign. Had he demanded and won a stimulus package big enough to restart the jobs engine, and if he’d insisted on a stronger healthcare bill and pushed for quick passage, he’d be in far better shape politically right now.

There are signs that he and other Democrats understand their dilemma. The House of Representatives may pass the Senate version of the healthcare bill intact, thus bringing the months-long process to a merciful close. Maybe then they can start explaining to the public what’s in it for them – something they have failed at pathetically for many months.

Even more promising, Obama is finally starting to go after Wall Street. Now Obama is proposing a tax to recoup some of the billions of dollars in bailout money the bankers received, and has referred to bonus payments as “obscene” at a time when many “continue to face real hardship in this recession.”

In a sense, Obama may be lucky in comparison to Clinton 16 years ago. The Republican revolution led by Newt Gingrich in 1994 snuck up on the Clinton administration. The Republican revolution symbolised by Scott Brown, on the other hand, is an early-warning signal.

The White House and the Democratic Party still have time to change course. Surely Obama knows his strategy of reaching out to Republicans was an utter failure. It’s time to try something new – not necessarily a lurch to the left, but a move toward passion and populism and idealism of the sort that impressed so many millions of Americans during Obama’s historic presidential campaign, and that we’ve seen so little of since then.

Hear hear. This is the key – Obama may not need to march left-wards just to please his progressive base (although I’d be happy to see it) – what he really needs to do is get the voices that helped get him elected back up front and center stage to help sell his policies and his case to the American people as the historic agenda that it is – and the one that will reassure the American people that his path is not the last guy’s path, and his path has a light at the end of the tunnel – and regardless of what those on the right want to say, it’s not an oncoming train.

[ Time for Obama to Fight Back ]
Source: The Guardian UK