It was in March 2007 that I realized I was behind Barack Obama, and what he said that day rings true with today’s Tea Party movement.  I even  remember the day, March 28th:

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama accused the Bush administration on Tuesday of pursuing a policy of “social Darwinism” that leaves every man and woman struggling.

“It’s a strategy that we’ve seen this administration pursue over the last six years, that basically says government has no role to play in making sure that America is prosperous for all people and not just some,” Obama said to applause during an appearance before the Communications Workers of America. [MSNBC]

That was three years ago.  In the interim, we now have the Tea Party.  Who makes them up? From Fox News:

Of the Tea Party supporters who responded, 20 percent make more than $100,000, versus 14 percent for the general pool of people polled. Fourteen percent of Tea Party supporters have a post-graduate education, compared with 10 percent for the general public. Twenty-three percent of Tea Party supporters have a college degree, compared with 15 percent for the general public, according to the poll.

The 18 percent of people who counted themselves among the Tea Party crowd are also mostly white, male and older than 45 years old.

And what do these Tea Partiers think?

Tea Party supporters’ fierce animosity toward Washington, and the president in particular, is rooted in deep pessimism about the direction of the country and the conviction that the policies of the Obama administration are disproportionately directed at helping the poor rather than the middle class or the rich.

The overwhelming majority of supporters say Mr. Obama does not share the values most Americans live by and that he does not understand the problems of people like themselves. More than half say the policies of the administration favor the poor, and 25 percent think that the administration favors blacks over whites — compared with 11 percent of the general public.

They are more likely than the general public, and Republicans, to say that too much has been made of the problems facing black people. [New York Times]

Big surprise:  Older white male voters who have more money than the rest of us, and also have the benefits of government programs like Medicare and Social Security, don’t really care about the poor.  Not their problem.

Even though Obama cut taxes for 98% of Americans, they think he only cares about the poor:

Bruce Bartlett, a fiscal conservative and columnist for Forbes who worked in the George W Bush and Reagan administrations is shocked by what he sees happening on the right these days. He became a conservative, he says, because he saw liberalism as driven by lofty unachievable or unreal motives whereas conservativism he believed was pegged primarily to concern with consequences and so based on cold hard reality. He reports that the Tea Parties have turned the world around. Tea Partiers yelling about taxes are delusional, he writes. They know nothing about taxes.

Bartlett was executive director of the Joint Economic Committee of Congress and Deputy Assistant Secretary for economic policy at the U.S. Treasury Department. In March he wrote: “Federal taxes are very considerably lower by every measure since Obama became president…. and last year’s stimulus bill, enacted with no Republican support, reduced federal taxes by almost $100 billion in 2009 and another $222 billion this year.” [Forbes via the Colorado Independent]

So much for “Ask not what your country can do for you…” – it’s now all about “Give me back every dollar I earn, screw the country’s future generations, and screw the poor!  It’s all about ME!”

Birther Congressman Trent Franks: What, me stoke the fires of irrational hatred and fear amongst my countrymen?

With nuts bringing guns to his healthcare town halls and Facebook taking down a poll asking readers if President Barack Obama “should be killed”, Arizona U.S. Congressman Trent Franks–a Birther Legislator!–called Obama an “enemy of humanity” [emphasis added]:

“Obama’s first act as president of any consequence, in the middle of a financial meltdown, was to send taxpayers’ money overseas to pay for the killing of unborn children in other countries. Now I gotta tell you, a president that will do that, here’s almost nothing that you should be surprised at after that. You shouldn’t, we shouldn’t be shocked that he does all these other insane things. A president that has lost his way that badly, that has no ability to see the image of God in these little fellow human beings, if he can’t do that right, then he has no place in any station of government and we need to realize that he is an enemy of humanity.”

You’re doing the country a whole lot of good, Congressman!  Ah, Arizona voters – electing someone who is recklessly speaking to dangerous undertones in our politics today.  It does not speak well about the people in his district.

You may remember that Franks is the only Congressman to have threatened to sue the President over his birth certificate.

Why would anyone want this party back in power as long as they are composed of such shameful extremists (never mind the hypocrisy).  Even out of power the Republican Party is a national embarrassment.

Here’s the video, if you can stomach that people in Arizona actually elect people like Trent Franks to represent them:

Politico had this story in the entire Kanye West-Taylor Swift issue:  off-the-record, Obama called West a jackass.  Perhaps after a summer of strife, this is Obama’s way of uniting us over something we can all agree upon.

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Nothing has been confirmed by the White House, but this is reportedly how it all went down:  CNBC was interviewing Obama.  During the moments that are supposed to be “off the record”–remember Newt Gingrich’s mother and Connie Chung–the Swift-West business came up. Perhaps in a moment of unguarded candor, Obama called West a ‘jackass’.

Is this Obama’s Sister Souljah moment?  Maybe, because Terry Moran at ABC News tweeted it!  This caused an uproar, and ABC had to release this statement:

In the process of reporting on remarks by President Obama that were made during a CNBC interview, ABC News employees prematurely tweeted a portion of those remarks that turned out to be from an off-the-record portion of the interview. This was done before our editorial process had been completed. That was wrong. We apologize to the White House and CNBC and are taking steps to ensure that it will not happen again.

Still unclear:  how did ABC News have access to off-the-record remarks in a CNBC interview?

File this under “calling a spade a spade” – which hurts to say, because I have always loved Kanye; my Wikipedia portrait of him (above) is in my top ten favorites.  His music had a deep impact on me in 2006.

But my stomach turned as I watched Taylor Swift have her moment taken away from her.  It was…just horrible to witness.

Dammit Kanye!  Why do you make it so difficult to love you?

I feel bad for Bob Herbert at the New York Times. His column yesterday has the same tone many of my posts on this blog have had: what in the hell is going on in the United States?

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"Am I now ready to go to the healthcare town hall debate with the President, Dad?"

Right before the election I had dinner with a gay friend of mine who is a nuclear physicist.  He told me that he was voting for McCain.

“Why?!” I asked, not hiding contempt in my tone.  He smiled as if he had been confronted with this exact response dozens of times.  “Well, I vote with my checkbook,” was what he managed through his toothy grin.

Republican politics tend to be one of the ways gay men who don’t feel comfortable with who they are escape themselves.  Some people join the military; others join the priesthood; and others become Republicans.  They think it’s the “Daddy Party”, so they join it to separate themselves from the nancyboy Democrats.

As they grow up a little and realize they are voting against their interests, gay Republicans usually have to come around with the “vote for the checkbook” argument.  I had a response:

“Leaving aside the arguments that you are choosing your checkbook over your civil rights; what, exactly, about the last eight years made your checkbook stronger or was in any way exemplary of fiscal restraint and prudence?” I asked.

He had  no answer, but instead looked embarrassed.  As a former Teenage Republican, from a conservative standpoint the George W. Bush years lost the fiscal issue for the Republicans.  Anyone who still says they vote for them for fiscal reasons is apparently still living in 1988.

Herbert is one of my favorite columnists, and the tone of his writings are imbued with a sense of dumbfoundedness.  Back in January he saw the beginnings of the Republican mode of attack against Obama:

The G.O.P.’s latest campaign is aimed at undermining President Obama’s effort to cope with the national economic emergency by attacking the spending in his stimulus package and repeating ad nauseam the Republican mantra for ever more tax cuts.

[....]

Maybe the Republicans don’t think there is an emergency. After all, it was Phil Gramm, John McCain’s economic guru, who told us last summer that the pain was all in our heads, that this was a “mental recession.”

The truth, of course, is that the country is hemorrhaging jobs and Americans are heading to the poorhouse by the millions. The stock markets and the value of the family home have collapsed, and there is virtual across-the-board agreement that the country is caught up in the worst economic disaster since at least World War II.

The Republican answer to this turmoil?  Tax cuts. [....]

The question that I would like answered is why anyone listens to this crowd anymore. G.O.P. policies have been an absolute backbreaker for the middle class. (Forget the poor. Nobody talks about them anymore, not even the Democrats.) The G.O.P. has successfully engineered a wholesale redistribution of wealth to those already at the top of the income ladder and then, in a remarkable display of chutzpah, dared anyone to talk about class warfare.

Yesterday, Herbert’s column almost nine months later sounds even more exasperated:

The political debate has been poisoned by birthers, deathers and wackos who smile proudly while carrying signs comparing the president to the Nazis. People who don’t even know that Medicare is a government program have been trying to instruct us on the best ways to reform health care. [....]

The wackiness is increasing, not diminishing, and it has a great potential for destruction. There is a real need for people who know better to speak out in a concerted effort to curb the appeal of the apostles of the absurd. [....]

But there is another type of disturbing behavior, coming from our political leaders and the public at large, that is also symptomatic of a society at loose ends. We seem unable to face up to many of the hard truths confronting the U.S. as we approach the end of the first decade of the 21st century.

There is no end to the craziness. The entire Republican Party has decided that it is in favor of absolutely nothing. The president’s stimulus package? No way. Health care reform? Forget about it.

We’ve also been unable or unwilling to face the hard truths about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the terrible toll they are taking on our young fighting men and women. Most of us don’t want to know. Moreover, we’ve put the costs of these wars on a credit card, without so much as a second thought about what that does to our long-term budget deficits or how it undermines much-needed initiatives here at home. [....]

There are many other issues that we remain in deep denial about. It’s not just the bad economy that has thrown state and local budgets into turmoil from coast to coast. It’s our refusal to provide the tax revenues needed to pay for essential public services. Exhibit A is California, which is now a basket case.

The serious wackos, the obsessive-compulsive absurdists, may be beyond therapy. But the rest of us could use some serious adult counseling. We’ve forgotten many of the fundamentals: how to live within our means, the benefits of shared sacrifice, the responsibilities that go with citizenship, the importance of a well-rounded education and tolerance.

The problem is our national discourse, and that the Republicans appear to have crafted Obama and Liberals as enemies, as opposed to reasoned opposition.  It’s a dangerous step, for either side.  Winning political skirmishes to advance your ideology is fulfilling; turning a society against itself in the process is dangerous.

The current political climate is at best creating a country that is unable–and unwilling–to solve its most serious problems.  At worst, it is turning the country against itself, which can have far more violent and disastrous repercussions than the right is willing to admit as they carry guns to public debates.  The moment something big goes wrong with the emotions they are stoking, the current state of Republican politics is going to come back to bury them.

Bob Herbert, you’re not the only one exasperated, confused and concerned.

“Once these stories get out there, they’re hard to stamp out because our media do such a lousy job of speaking truth to stupid.” – Bill Maher, July 31, 2009, L.A. Times

CNN's Dobbsian President Jon Klein: "Yes! We have no standards!"

Ugh.  During the recent Lou Dobbs birther dust-up, CNN President Jon Klein confirmed a suspicion I’ve had that the cable news networks have fundamentally debased American journalism (cue laugh track).

King Birther Dobbs

Lou Dobbs should have stuck to business reporting.  Instead, Dobbs has fashioned himself after someone more of his era, Father Coughlin.  From Coughlin’s Wikipedia article:

He was one of the first political leaders to use radio to reach a mass audience, as more than forty million tuned to his weekly broadcasts during the 1930s. Coughlin used his radio program to promote Franklin D. Roosevelt and his early New Deal proposals, to issue antisemitic commentary, and later to rationalize some of the policies of National Socialist Adolf Hitler and Fascist Benito Mussolini.  The broadcasts have been called “a variation of the Fascist agenda applied to American culture”. His chief topics were political and economic rather than religious, with his slogan being Social Justice, first with, and later against, the New Deal.

Dobbs as a modern-day Coughlin was evident with his alarmist xenophobic advocacy journalism on the subject of immigration. Now he enters the fracas as a light of hope for the “Birthers”, recently tying the two issues together to say Obama might be an illegal immigrant:

I’m starting to think we have a document issue. You suppose he’s un — no, I won’t even use the word undocumented, it wouldn’t be right.

The birthers are primarily composed of southern redneck Republicans (the party’s base, and Dobbs’ demographic):

The conspiracy has a regional flavor. Overall, even including Democrats and independents, only 47 percent of respondents in the South said they believed Obama was born in America, with 23 percent saying he was not and 30 percent saying they were unsure. In the Northeast and Midwest, the percentage of respondents who believe Obama was born in the U.S. was over 90 percent.

Ninety-three percent of Democrats say the president was born in the United States, as do 83 percent of independents.

Virtually nobody except for Lou Dobbs and America’s Backwater Republicans gives any serious consideration to the birthers.  So why is Lou Dobbs on CNN  promoting the tin hat redneck crowd’s most delusional hope to an international audience?  Ratings – the only thing that matters in cable news.

After Dobbs first salvo on behalf of the birthers was aired on CNN, he continued giving fuel to the birthers on his radio show by stating that, “Obama should put his birth certificate out there. I’m still looking for validation.”

Dobbs has no intention of backing down, but at least the birther nonsense seems to have hurt his ratings. Thank God for small favors.

Important lesson via CNN President Jon Klein

The most important lesson to be learned here has nothing to do with the birthers, and everything to do with how cable news is operating.  CNN’s President, Jon Klein, has had to defend Dobbs before, but his recent defense is illuminating:

We have no control over what he says on his radio show. It’s not a CNN radio program so he does what he does on the radio separate from what he does on our air. So we ask you and anyone writing about this, to look at what he says on CNN. It’s the only thing we control.

“It’s the only thing we control” is not correct.  You control giving Dobbs a platform.  You control what kinds of opinions you judge to be worthy of airing.

The defense Klein raises is problematic for the public interest, something that a news agency is supposed to hold supreme after “truth”.  It tells people turning to CNN that the network could care less about the integrity of the people they want you to hear, as long as they do their nasty business off ‘their air’.

Yeah, but…Dobbs did say these things on ‘your air’, Mr. Klein, and continued with them on his radio show.

Lou Dobbs as Father Coughlin is one thing, but the debasement of cable news journalism is more evident at Fox News, where few standards are in place for the pedigrees of their pundits, as I wrote last week:

Whether it be foul-mouthed stalker Rachel Marsden; the scandal-fabricating Aaron Klein; former gay porn star and male escort Matt Sanchez; or the crazy racist Hillary supporter Harriet Christian; the number of bottom-feeders with few journalistic–or personal–ethics who are paraded before us by the mainstream media is startling.  It’s not even a left-or-right issue.

With cable news thinking people like this are worth listening to, and people actually listening, there appears to be absolutely no way to fix this breakdown in our national discourse on cable news.  When there are no standards for opinion-makers, the quality of Americans’ opinions suffers.

Thanks, Jon Klein, for confirming that your network could care less what your pundits do and say when they are not on ‘your air’.  It logically follows that David Duke could have his own show on CNN, as long as he doesn’t talk about white supremacy on ‘your air’.

Or maybe even the white supremacy bit is okay, if you appear on Rachel Maddow.

Confused about Obama’s new regulatory proposals for the financial industry that virtually destroyed the global economy?  One is a Consumer Protection Agency.  John Ydstie, National Public Radio’s economics correspondent, does an excellent job of explaining it all.

This new agency would look at [things like interest-only balloon payment mortgages] and, I guess sort of modeled after the Consumer Product Safety Commission, which says, ‘Hey, you can’t sell a toaster that burns down a house,’ and they would say, ‘Hey, you can’t sell a mortgage that makes someone lose a house.’ – John Ydstie, National Public Radio’s economic correspondent

Listen to the the full explanation at NPR here.

I wonder how Sherri Goforth of Tennessee feels as the picture of modern “Old South” racism?

What you are looking at in this post is a photo the executive assistant to Tennessee Republican state Senator Diane Black sent out from her government office with the subject “Historical Keepsake Photo”.  It shows portraits of the 44 presidents of the United States; however, it’s unlikely that the Obama “spooked eyes” approximation is really our President looking his best.

The haplessly-surnamed Senator Black chairs the Senate Republican Caucus, and a note on the e-mail said it was paid for by the Tennessee Republican Party.  GOP officials denied that it was theirs.

The racist Goforth, who will keep her job for Senator Black, also saw nothing wrong with sending the photo; she just sent it to the “wrong list of people”.  According to Christian Grantham of Nashville is Talking:

I spoke with Sherri Goforth minutes ago to confirm she sent this email. She confirmed she had sent it and also said she had received a letter of reprimand from her superiors but said she will stay on the job.

When I asked her if she understood the controversial nature of the photo, Goforth would only say she felt very bad about accidentally sending it to the wrong list. When I gave her a second chance to address the controversial nature of the email, she again repeated that she only felt bad about sending it to the wrong list of people.

“I went on the wrong email and I inadvertently hit the wrong button,” Goforth told NIT. “I’m very sick about it, and it’s one of those things I can’t change or take back.”

Best response to that came from Wonkette:

Yes, yes, Republicans must be careful not to hit the “wrong button” when sending out the racist bullshit. Sadly, our liberal technology sector has yet to create a button that would only send your racist fuckwad idiocy to fellow mouth-breathing racist cretins who think there is NOTHING as funny as the idea of … people with dark complexions. Even when you’re just sending the Funnies to proper white folk, there is still often a “N.L.” who will complain about old-fashioned Southern comedy.

But Senator Black has protested that she is friends with all kinds of colored folks:

In fact, Black says, she’s “reached out to people all over this world” as a nurse. As evidence of her racist-free heart, she cites her trips to Haiti, the Dominican Republic and Guatemala. She went deep into the jungles of Guatemala like a great white bwana to help babies.

“I spent time in Haiti during the time of Aristide working with people with black skin who needed medical help,” she says. And if that’s not enough, her family once hosted a Brazilian exchange student in their home. Wow!

In response to Black’s love of the dark-skinned, a comment by “Jake” to that post wrote this:

So, she has “reached out to people all over the world” (selectively)… What about the people in her own district? Are they too common to deserve her time and attention? The LGBT community certainly did not meet her exotic qualifications.

Jake’s comment was expounded upon at Daily Kos:

For those of you not familiar with her boss, Senator Diane Black, she’s a Republican who was the main Senate sponsor of S.J.R. 127, a trigger amendment passed this year that, if passed in one more legislative vote and by a ballot initiative, will allow abortion to quickly be banned in Tennessee should Roe v. Wade ever be overturned.  She also rudely cancelled a meeting with GLBT activists from her own district (you know, people she was elected to represent) at the last second by saying that they “wouldn’t change her mind” and therefore she didn’t even need to hear from them.  So in other words, a really charming individual who’s doing SO MUCH for the people of her district.

Is now the time to remind readers that former Tennessee Republican Party Chairman Chip Saltsman sent out the “Barack the Magic Negro” song as a “gift” to Republican National Committee members during his bid to head the RNC?

Old habits die hard, ay Tennessee?

As if the right-wing fringe politics of the nationally-organized tea parties are not embarrassing enough, almost nobody showed up for them. 

Staten Island's Republican fringe show up for a party that almost nobody else cared about. Image: Emmanuel Dunand / AFP / Getty

“Tens of thousands of people” across the United States showed up at the tea parties to denounce taxes, Barack Obama, evolution and whatever else they could throw on the plate. 

To give you perspective on the turn-out of ”tens of thousands” across a country of over 300,000,000 people, at Denver, Colorado’s Gay Pride Parade in 2008 there were 250,000 participants in attendance.

An estimated 800,000 people protested the Republican National Convention in 2004. 

Tens of thousands nationwide, even with right-wing media stars hyping these events?  Perhaps nobody showed up because most Americans think that they are paying a fair amount of their taxes.  Robert Schlesinger  at U.S. News & World Report:

According to Gallup, for only the second time in more than half a century, a plurality of Americans (48-46 percent) think that they’re paying the proper amount of taxes. The only other time that that has been true since 1956 was in 2003 when 50 percent of Americans felt they were paying the right amount in taxes. Drilling down a bit deeper, the slim plurality comes entirely from Democrats, who 55-40 think we’re paying the right amount of taxes (up sharply from 2008 when they thought so 47-45). Independents narrowly disagree, with 48 percent saying taxes are too high and 46 percent saying they’re just right–though that figure too has narrowed sharply, as it was 54-40 in 2008. And Republicans are not surprisingly opposite Democrats, with 53 percent saying taxes are too high and 43 percent saying they’re about right. (Really? Forty-three percent of Republicans think taxes are correct? I thought it was an article of GOP faith that taxes are by their nature too high.)

A separate Gallup poll released today showed that for the first time in 15 years a plurality of Americans think lower-income people are being taxed fairly (usually, they are seen as overtaxed), while by a margin of 50-43, they believe that middle-income taxpayers are taxed at the proper rate (this has fluctuated fairly rhythmically over the decade). Nobody likes the wealthy, of course: 60 percent of Americans think them under-taxed, 23 percent think they pay their fair share, and 13 percent feel that they are overburdened. (The “fair share” and “too much” numbers both declined this year, while the “overburdened” number went up.)

I support President Barack Obama and I particularly support his agenda.  So it is with remorse that I have to write what is obvious:  Senator Chris Dodd needs to go.   He is directly responsible or had his hands in some of the most appalling abuses in the financial industry.  Particularly egregious is that he is the one who wrote the legislative loophole that allowed those unethical AIG bonuses that tore the country apart.

"I apologize if we had some confusion." We're not confused any more, Senator Dodd.

Dodd originally denied that he did this (he lied) and then when confronted with evidence, admitted it was his hand who wrote the loophole.  “I apologize if we had some confusion,” said Dodd, who initially said that any notion of his involvement in the bonus loophole was “ridiculous”. 

He tried to shift some of the blame to the Treasury Department, but that doesn’t hold up.  Dodd is not a puppet of the Treasury and his lying and then shifting of blame is enough that he should not be allowed to continue to represent the people of Connecticut.  That AIG employees were lobbied to donate to Dodd, who was the largest beneficiary of AIG money, is the icing on the cake.

 Dodd’s problems are his own.  As Hartford Courant columnist Helen Ubiñas wrote,  ”Could be the one about the funky mortgage deals, the precious Irish cottage, the obscene AIG bonuses or even the latest about his tanking poll numbers.  Reader’s choice, really.”

If Senator Dodd really cared more about representative government than about his own power, then he would step down and allow another Democratic candidate to run in the general election.  With someone as smarmy as Dodd, that seems unlikely.  So it is up to the people to be unforgiving, which they should be.  There should be no room in our democratic government for liars and those who pull the sort of ethically-challenged shenanigans that Dodd has pulled, and lied about.  Yes, it sucks to lose an incumbent Democrat, but that’s not what’s important here.   The fundamentals of our governing principles are.

If the Democratic primary voters don’t do what’s right, then elect an independent challenger.  If there is no viable independent challenger, then vote for the Republican, which pains me to say; however, the last eight years should have taught all of us that politics needs to take a back seat to holding our leaders accountable.   I think it takes liberals to show how to dispose of our own trash, as opposed to lionizing them (see Rush Limbaugh) and embracing them (see Senator David Vitter).

Chris Dodd needs to go.