An explanation for "Obama hatred" in the media

Why are the Conservatives so angry? What is it about President Obama that seems to unhinge them? Their angry political rhetoric has been a constant for years since it is a tool they use to get elected, but the level of the anger has sharply increased since Obama was inaugurated. This is not just a few select individuals. It seems to be a group characteristic of many of the extremist right-wing. This question has puzzled me for most of 2009.

But now I learn that the columnist Charles Krauthammer is one of the "Scoop" Jackson Democrats who switched to being a Neocon conservative from having been a speechwriter for Walter Mondale. Knowing a bit about the "Scoop" Jackson Democrats who went Republican, I think I can now answer that question that has been puzzling me. Krauthammer has published some of the most outlandishly insane columns since Obama was inaugurated and those columns have become increasingly outlandish and unhinged. That he was a Scoop Jackson Democrat explains his current outlandish thinking.

I didn't become aware of Krauthammer until he had already eaten the loco weed, so I was unaware that he had been a Scoop Jackson Democrat. That is a very illuminating event. The key characteristic of the Scoop Jackson Democrats that drove so many of them was to always oppose "evil" with force. Remember, Scoop Jackson was first elected to Congress in 1941. His tenure in Congress was shadowed by Pearl Harbor, WW II, and the nuclear bombing the "unrelentingly evil" Japanese. The attitudes of that period never left Jackson, and his aides were chosen to match.

The "Scoop" Jackson Neocon defectors from the Democratic Party to the Reaganites justified their move primarily because they objected strongly to the apparently feckless policies of Carter when he did not go after those they defined as "evil" with both feet and a nuke. Reagan promised what they wanted, so Wolfowitz, Pearl and so many switched over to the Republicans. As I said, I was unaware that Krauthammer was one of them.

To make a switch that extreme required strong motivation. And now I think they see Carter redux in Obama. Obama's not attacking "evil" the way Reagan and both Bush's promised to. In fact, he is claiming that he will back off, even reducing the blockade against Cuba and offering to open discussions with the Iranian government. And there is nothing they can do about it. Obama's currently in power as President. After the last eight years they are powerless to prevent him from - in their view - acting like he supports the evil doers by negotiating with the "evil" enemy. (Of course, those "evil" enemies declare that they are justified by the evil behavior of the oppressive Americans. That's impossible of course. Americans are a unique source of "good" in the world so such allegations must be lies and propaganda put out by the evil-doers.)

I think that's the motivation behind so many of the unhinged attitudes and statements from the extremist right-wing Republicans. They expect massive force to be applied to prevent the slightest gain by the evil-doers, and they don't see it in Obama in particular or in the Democrats/liberals who elected him in general. So they feel responsible for taking any possible action to limit the "damage" that Obama and the Democrats/liberals can do until they are replaced with people who know "what is really going on."

I'd say that goes to the misunderstanding that there actually is something that can be called an evil nation or an evil group. That misunderstanding personifies national policies and tries to put a single human face on those policies. It confuses the nature of an organization with a single human individual, a process that is totally inaccurate. That error is a problem because while individual humans can be evil, even when they rarely are, they don't see themselves that way. Instead they see themselves as the good ones, and when they fear strongly they attack what they fear.

When the target of their attacks is America, it feeds the American right-wing fantasy that the frightened attackers are evil as a group and they are attacking America based on their evil nature, not because they fear attack by an ignorant unthinking American colossus. Yet American representatives are frequently self-absorbed and generally ignorant of local conditions and proud of their ignorance.

Naturally in those conditions the enemy foreigners see the Americans as evil an take actions to defend themselves. The Americans then view this is unjustified attacks by evil foreigners, so no force expended to counter them is wrong or unjustified.That justifies the American use of military in preemptive invasions and justifies the use of torture on the recalcitrant evil-doers.

You'd think a board certified psychiatrist (Krauthammer) would recognize the inherent error of attempting to personify entire groups of people and even nations as "evil." I'd guess that he at some level realizes that if he did, his personal and financial support from the right-wing would disappear almost overnight. Certainly much or all of his ample paycheck and his personal acclaim would disappear. So he is in effect bought and paid for to be a right-wing propagandist, much as is Bill Kristol who frequently published his work. My bet is that he represses such thoughts and would be angry at reading what I have just written.

Similarly, Bill Kristol's rag, the Weekly Stnadard, would disappear overnight if Rupert Murdoch's subsidy money stopped, as would the Wall Street Journal's Editorial page in its current incarnation. Murdoch is one of the super wealthy defending his fortune from the masses. Much of the direstion and funding of the conservative ideologists is sources in such superwealthy individuals and families who are defending their fortunes and social standing.

I think that at the base the right-wing is so angry because that they firmly believe this mistaken idea that the word "evil" has meaning when applied to groups of people. It doesn't.They believe that groups can each be characterized by the face and image of a single individual. They don't accept that every group is made up of shifting coalitions of smaller groups, and that the spokesmen for the group merely represent the small subgroup that is momentarily dominant in that group. The more realistic view of every group is what makes negotiation frequently very effective to modify the policies and actions of the group. In the black-and-white personified view of a group, only overwhelming force can change the behavior of that group. it also misunderstands the nature of "evil."

Evil is a characteristic of individuals, and rather rare. "Evil" requires intent and a refusal to recognize the humanity of their victims. While groups can adopt policies that conduct evil actions, like slavery, such policies are instigated by people who refuse to recognize the humanity of their victims. The agents of those evil inhumanities may not be themselves evil. They are trained and motivated to the actions they conduct. Human beings are normally very dependent on the opinions of others around them, and tend to be quite empathic of those who they recognize as human. For such individuals to conduct truly evil actions on another results in guilt and is avoided. Generally even individuals who perform evil actions are doing so because they have been taught that the actions they take are justified and the victims are not themselves human. Any effective negotiator recognizes that motivation towards human empathy, or at least operates on that assumption.

What is common, however, is black or white thinking. That is especially common politically in Conservatives. In fact, the Conservative philosophies and ideologies are designed to attract people who do not make subtle distinctions among ideas. To them a person cannot be just a little bit evil or a little bit good. They must be totally good or totally evil. Since by definition we Americans are good, the others much be evil if they disagree with us. This is how the Neocons see American foreign policy.

If you believe that to be true, you must meet evil with overwhelming force to stop them. No limits on that force are justified since they are totally evil. Any compromise with total evil is a sur"24" is a good guy. Whatever HE does is good because he is the good guy!

Obama in their eyes is not one of the good guys or he'd be a Conservative Republican, so he and his liberal Democratic supporters are clearly evil. By definition, that means totally evil. There are no gradations of "a little evil" or "mostly evil." If one is evil, they are totally evil. There are no limits someone believing this will be held to. So the more extreme of the right-wingers - the active propagandists - have been spreading every story they can imagine to convince voters of the evil they think Obama.

Are these Conservatives really unhinged? Or do they really see themselves as the truly good guys battling the utterly evil with every weapon at their disposal? I don't think they are as insane as their crazy statements are. They are simply people who have been misled by propagandists who are using the propaganda fallacy of the excluded middle - that is, black and white thinking. They feel threatened by those who disagree with them, and they are using every tool in the book to defend themselves and those like them.

Townes Van Zandt offers some good music

So here is some of it, along with a few other artists.



Here's Townes Van Zandt with Pancho and Lefty.



And here's Cocaine Blues by Townes Van Zandt



This one's fun. Cocaine Blues by Keith Richards.



Then there is Neil Young - Don't Let it Bring you Down



Then we get to one of my favorites. Neil Young with Old Man

Physicians can avoid the anti-abortionist terrorists now

The ability to get a medical abortion, though legal, has been greatly reduced by the anti-abortion terrorists to only a few places. The medical abortion solution has had the problem that in about 1 case in 1000 a serious infection can occur, so many physicians have not used the procedure. Without the availability of a drug-induced abortion the alternative for women has been to patronize one of the rare abortion clinics and run the gauntlet of the anti-abortion terrorists.

No more.

About a fourth of American women getting early abortions last year did so with drugs rather than surgery, statistics show, as a new study reported improved safety in using the so-called abortion pill.

Some experts predict that the percentage of such "medical abortions," which offer more privacy than surgical termination at a clinic or hospital, will rise even more because of the new study.

The research, done at Planned Parenthood clinics nationwide, shows that a new way of giving pills to induce abortion virtually eliminates the risk of a rare but dangerous infection.

"This is the first really huge documentation of how safe and effective medical abortion is," said Dr. Beverly Winikoff, a professor of family health and population at Columbia University. "The technology is very good and very well-used in this country and probably will be used more and more."

Two pills are used to induce an abortion. The primary drug, Mifeprex, was first approved in the U.S. in 2000. Use has risen steadily, even though manufacturer Danco Laboratories Llc. of New York hasn’t promoted it and the drug can be obtained only at a clinic or doctor’s office, not through a pharmacy.

[...]

The group’s study analyzed medical abortions at Planned Parenthood centers from 2005 to mid-2008 — about 228,000 cases. It found that the abortion pill was about 98.5 percent effective and that changes in how the drugs were given reduced the risk of a serious infection from about 1 in 1,000 cases to 0.06 in 1,000.

This is a major setback to the anti-abortion terrorists. Their targets no longer are isolated and obvious. So it is good news for women.

The latest take on the curiosity that is Sarah Palin

Sarah Palin is a rather sad, empty and unimaginative person of little importance. Personally she does not matter much to me. But right now she is representative of some real American problems, like why America's education system is falling behind that of so many competing industrial nations (education doesn't matter enough for public funding) and why we turn out Lawyers and financial MBA's instead of scientists and production engineers (The top career rewards aren't as big and its a lot harder to learn to be an competent engineer or scientist than it appears to be to become a celebrity.) But let me just start with Sarah. Why did she resign so suddenly out of the blue?

Josh Marshall has posted the best explanation I have yet seen for Palin's strange and rather shocking resignation as Governor of Alaska. It makes a great deal of sense to me. She is a grifter, and the grift has finished. She is getting out of town while the getting is good. So now we can wait for the announcements of her money-making opportunities. She won't keep such deals from the Paparazzi (in this case mostly political and business reporters) because that kind of publicity is what she needs to extend her celebrity. She'll tell the Paparazzi because she needs them as much as they need her. Her reason for feeding the frenzy will be that the Paparazzi will extend her celebrity and keep her bankable. That dynamic between the celebrity and the press is the core of the entire celebrity culture as well as being the business model of the such journals as supermarket tabloids, People magazine, and the business publications Forbes, Fortune and the Wall Street Journal ^[*].

My read is that Palin has a single overriding motivation and that is ambition. She has a single major asset for her ambition to ride which is her celebrity status, the result of a lifetime spent chasing celebrity with no apparent significant interest in anything else. That's been her career. Her single asset has reached its apogee and was suddenly sliding away (stolen by her "enemies") so she has taken this opportunity to renew it. She will sacrifice anything to feed her ambition, including honor and the respect that can be earned by living up to your commitments. She has just proven that by her resignation.

Why do I care enough to blog about her? Two reasons. First, like the entire Pop Music scene, she seems to be emblematic of America's long celebrity obsession fueled by greed and the power of publicity experts to milk the public through the developing new forms of mass communications being created since the 1960's. That trend is run by grifters like Sarah Palin. It is a trend that runs counter to the great strengths America has always demonstrated as a solid, hard-working middle class productive nation with a culture centered on the strengths of well-trained and experienced journeyman workers.

The creation of the barely out of her teens Britney Spears is a symptom of the disaster of that celebrity culture. But the celebrity culture to which Sarah Palin now belongs is not isolated in society. It has broader implications. It has meant that America as a society and as an economy has failed to provide adequate rewards to the very many extremely capable people who might be induced to become engineers in college and learn new ways to invent and manufacture improved products. Instead, the best and the brightest are becoming lawyers and MBA's in the hopes of somehow suddenly getting rich by cashing in on a celebrity event of some kind. America's economic rewards are being redirected to celebrity status rather than to production of real goods and services of real value ^[**].

The second reason is that Sarah Palin's case is a cautionary tale of the utter vacuousness of the modern Republican Party. Their interest is in gaining power, nothing else. John McCain chose Sarah Palin as his running mate, not because she was best qualified if as President he died she would take over and run the country, but because he simply could not be elected to the office that fed his personal ambition and his feeling that he deserved to become the next President. He bought into Palin's celebrity to feed his own unbridled and undisciplined ambition. McCain is the son of American Naval Royalty, and he deserved the job of President more than anyone else by right of birth.

McCain is a conservative in part because it is an excellent justification for laziness. He resists working for his rewards because he feels he is entitled to them by right of birth. He is angry that so many people don't just hand them over because of who he is. Give such individuals a social problem to solve that does not involve their own interest directly and their solution is "Ignore it. If there is someone else with a good idea, skills and some idea how to get rewarded for it, they will solve the problem and we don't have to do any damned thing about it. "They call that the "free market" solution. What it really results in is a statement of "Let someone else do it, I don't want to think about it because I've already got mine. What? You want me to do hard work?"

So what we have is a toxic and unproductive celebrity culture that is taking over America, together with a political party representing and built on that culture that is made up of people who offer an economic ideology that advances that toxic culture. They are in it, like Palin, solely for their own personal benefit. Sarah Palin is just one more example of that culture, together with her national political mentor, Senator John McCain. The results of that culture, both in the failure of America to remain economically competitive against so many other industrial nations and in the clear emptiness and nastiness of the conservatives running the modern Republican Party are very clear.

So tell me. Why should we care about the sad spectacle that Sarah Palin is making of herself? Should I add Governor Mark Sanford?

---

^[*]An interesting side note. I was told by the journalism prof of a public relations course I took that the articles in the Wall Street Journal that had no byline were simply public relations articles written by the company that were their subject. No real independent reporter was involved in writing them. Such an idea gives a very interesting view of such Wall Street Journal news articles.
^[**]In a world that is populated by too many people to feed and in which half the worlds population exists on less than a dollar a day, the idea that the national economy that is using up as much as a quarter of the world's resources is using them to create celebrities for export is an ethical issue I will leave you to ponder. It is clearly one that the American conservatives and the free marketers wash their hands of.

The conservative Michael Barone explains the failed strategies of all the Republican candidates

Michale Barone has become a generally reflexive conservative over the years, but as Ed Kilrore points out he remains a decent Presidential analyst. Here is his take on what each of the various major candidates for the Republican nomination for President in 2008 did wrong. He also points out that the potential candidates for 2012 don't look any more likely to get it right.

His analysis of 2008 looks pretty good to me, and I hope he is right about 2012. I do notice that he does not discuss McCain's desperation choice of Sarah Palin for his ticket, but he is discussing the primary and that was the general election.

J. P. Green discusses the fiction that Democrats must have 60 votes to pass universal health care with a public option

J. P. Green writes at The Democratic Strategist. In a recent excellent post he explodes the fiction that the Democrats must cater to the Republicans wielding the filibuster. A sample of his post, here is what it would take to apply a little discipline to the wayward Democratic Senators:

Despite all the hand-wringing to the contrary, political commentator Bill Press makes a well-stated argument that 60 Senate votes are more than enough for Democrats to get a progressive legislative agenda enacted. Writing in his syndicated column today, Press says:

For six months, we’ve heard nothing but complaining from Democrats: Our hands are tied, they insisted. We can’t deliver a public plan option for health care, or pass the Employee Free Choice Act, or repeal the Pentagon’s Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy, or do anything else we promised to do if re-elected — because we don’t have 60 votes. We have to compromise with Republicans, instead.

That excuse was phony, of course. Senate rules require only 51 votes to pass legislation, not 60. Democrats should never have allowed Republicans to pretend otherwise.

Press believes the filibuster obstacle is overstated, particularly if the Dems can find the gonads to invoke a little party discipline:

As for those wayward senators like Nelson or Landrieu, there’s only one thing Democrats are lacking: discipline. This may be a whole new concept for Democrats, who are not used to marching in lockstep. But if Barack Obama and Harry Reid are willing to play hardball by withholding committee assignments, White House invitations, campaign contributions, and endorsements, they’ll be surprised how soon Democrats will get in line.

It's hard to argue with what Greene and Press wrote. But I have. I argued that the Democrats were playing nice this year before the epic health care battle that is now in the run up phase and which should peak this month for purposes of husbanding the strength until it was really needed. It's an inside-the-Senate thing.

For various reasons if this is true then the political reporters won't report it because it involves trying to infer the motivations of the Senate players, and inferring motives is not reporting. It is mind-reading. No actual player will go on record to provide something to report.

We'll soon see if I was right, sometime in the next few weeks. After that, J.P. Green will be completely correct. July is going to be interesting for political junkies.

Conservatism scientifically exposed for what it is.

According to Battachio at Vagabond Scholar Conservatives offer no programs or proposed policies that will even remotely benefit America. He does this with several nice colorful Venn Diagrams and clear discussion. Here is Botachio's summary of conservatism's:

"... if there had been any uncertainty before, the 2007 crusade against 12-year old accident victim Graeme Frost eliminated all doubt that spite is a point of pride for movement conservatives. ( Also, most corporate journalists won't call them on it - nor will they be honest about how mainstream eliminationist talk is among conservatives.) Modern conservatism can be summed up many ways, from "You're on your own" to "Good luck" to "Screw you, I've got mine" to "Screw you, I don't have mine, but you ain't getting anything either." It's a twisted worldview, impractical and even unrealistic, generally self-serving, sometimes self-destructive, but almost always destructive to others. Rather than recognizing and trying to minimize unnecessary suffering, as an ideology it seeks to justify cruelty and callousness. Movement conservatives seldom feel responsible for their own actions or the horrible consequences of their policies. It's unquestioned dogma for them that they represent the "natural" order, that unearned privilege within their group is proof of merit or God's favor, and the real problem with America is the uppity heretics who question all that and don't mind their place.

I strongly recommend that you click through to Vagabond Scholar and enjoy the post in all it's excellent color. If nothing else, rarely have I seen Venn Diagrams used as entertainingly and still be informative.

Here's a brief descripion of one of the worst things Wall Street did to the economy

Yet more on what bought the mortgage crisis on and killed off all five the biggest Wall Street Investment Banks together with AIG , the largest insurance company in the world, all of whom were too big to fail. This is from Vanity Fair. The very worst of it occurred because AIG in the form of their subsidiary AIGFP thought they could make a killing insuring risk (that is, buying the risk portion) of baskets of subprime (risky) mortgages through the use of credit-default swaps (essentially unregulated insurance policies) and because it reduced their projected costs, did not keep any loss reserves as protection against losses. Hey, that's what too big tofail means, doesn't it? In essence the credit default swaps stripped the risk off of the (inherently risky) subprime mortgages and sold it separately to gamblers. (Not all the gamblers realized they were gambling.) Then AIG's loss history got too high, so too late, they quit insuring those risks. But AIG's customers, the Wall Street Investment firms, were making a mint selling the baskets of subprime mortgages and had to have insurance on their product or the investors wouldn't accept that subprime mortgages could be safe enough to invest in. The story follows.

What no one realized was that it was too late. A.I.G. F.P.’s willingness to assume the vast majority of the risk of all the subprime-mortgage bonds created in 2004 and 2005 had created a machine that depended for its fuel on subprime-mortgage loans. “I’m convinced that our input into the system led to a substantial portion of the increase in housing prices in the U.S. We facilitated a trillion dollars in mortgages,” says one trader. “Just us.” Every firm on Wall Street was making fantastic sums of money from this machine, but for the machine to keep running the Wall Street firms needed someone to take the risk. When Gene Park informed them that A.I.G. F.P. would no longer do so—Hello, my name is Gene Park and I’m closing down your business—he became the most hated man on Wall Street.

The big Wall Street firms solved the problem by taking the risk themselves. The hundreds of billions of dollars in subprime losses suffered by Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, and the others were hundreds of billions in losses that might otherwise have been suffered by A.I.G. F.P. Unwilling to take the risk of subprime-mortgage bonds in 2004 and 2005, the Wall Street firms swallowed the risk in 2006 and 2007. Lending standards had fallen, property values had risen, and the more recent loans were thus far riskier than the earlier ones, but still they gobbled them up—for if they didn’t, the machine would have ceased to function. The people inside the big Wall Street firms who ran the machine had made so much money for their firms that they were now, in effect, in charge. And they had no interest in anything but keeping it running. A.I.G. F.P. wasn’t an aberration; what happened at A.I.G. F.P. could have happened anywhere on Wall Street … and did.

So much as David Halberstam describe the "Best and the Brightest" who got America into Vietnam at great and unnecessary loss, the Best and the Brightest on Wall Street assumed they understood what they were doing when they sold the innovative financial products.

The current result is that America and the rest of the financial world has been thrown so close to a second Depression that there seemed to be no stopping it as economies around the world have declined over the last year or more. It has only been through some unprecedented, controversial, experimental and fantastically costly government interventions that the unemployment rate is only 9.5% so far. And that is just so far. There is no real assurance yet that the delay on the drop to Depression has been more than temporarily delayed.

Sleep well. The Best and the Brightest are hard at work trying to fix the economic crisis they earlier created. Feel safer yet?

Private health insurance is desperate to kill the "public Option".

Want to know why the public health care option is desired by 76% of the polled population and under major attack by the Congressional well-bribed and heavily lobbied minions of the health insurance industry? Paul Waldman explains:

[Here is ]... one thing private insurance companies will never offer.

The single-payer and hybrid systems in place in every other country in the developed world have many admirable features: lower costs, universal coverage, and better health outcomes. But what ought to make us most envious is their security -- it's what they have and we desperately need. If you live in Canada or Germany or France or Japan, there are some things you need never fear. You need never fear that your insurance company will tell you it won't cover treatment for your asthma because you had asthma before they signed you up. You need never fear that you will bankrupt your family because of expensive treatments for a serious illness. You need never fear that you will find yourself without coverage after your insurer dropped you or you lost your job. You might fear getting sick, but you won't fear that your life will be destroyed by not being able to pay for getting sick.

In the United States, unless you're over 65, extremely poor, or a veteran -- thus, already covered by a government health insurance plan -- you do have to fear all that. That's because the central pathology of our deeply pathological health-care system is that most of us have no choice but to get health coverage from an entity whose sole reason for being is to take our money and then try to avoid paying for our care when we get sick.

That may sound harsh, but let's be realistic: The purpose of a private insurance company is to make money, as much money as possible. In this, it's like any other business. But insurance is fundamentally different from other businesses. When you buy a soda, you know exactly how much you're paying for it. And when you take your first sip, you know whether you like it or not. If the soda company wanted to give you the shaft, it would only have two ways to do it: It could give you a bad-tasting product or charge you lots of money for it. Either way, you'd only end up buying it once.

But when you buy insurance, you enter into a complex relationship with a company that promises to pay for services you haven't yet used. You start paying it substantial amounts of money right away, but you don't actually use its service until some time in the future. You're also required to sign lengthy, intricate documents full of conditions and exclusions and legalese that few people are equipped to understand. You are at the company's mercy, which makes its incentives and inclinations so important.

The private health insurance market is dominated by four gigantic insurers: UnitedHealth, WellPoint, Aetna, and Cigna. In the last five years, these companies have combined to earn over $44 billion in profits; UnitedHealth alone has made over $17 billion in profits over that period. "On Wall Street," the Los Angeles Times has noted, these companies "showcase their efforts to hold down expenses and maximize shareholder returns by excluding customers likely to need expensive care, including those with chronic diseases such as asthma and diabetes. The companies lobby governments to take over responsibility for their sickest customers so they can reserve the healthiest (and most profitable) for themselves."

[Highlighting mine - editor]

One reason why health care costs are skyrocketing is that the "insured" are willing to pay higher and higher fees to get some improved security from their health care insurance. The insurers spread this around to health care suppliers so that they, too, have a major stake in avoiding the competition provided by an efficiently provided public health insurance that anyone can get.

Remember, if you don't like the public health insurance offering, you can always buy a supplemental policy of the type already sold to supplement Medicare. But then the health insurance companies would have to face competition to provide that. As it is today, most major health insurers have no effective competition in their service areas.

America desperately needs universal health care with assured coverage by a government plan. We've needed it since before the FDR era, and the private insurers and the AMA have been about to play the Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt card and overpriced lobbyists.Right now they are spending $1.2 million per day to kill national health care and the only arguments you hear against a government provided health care plan are fear based and mostly lies.

The main event in Washington D.C. has started this month

Harry Reid has been reported today as telling the Conservative Democratic Senator Max Baucus (very powerful Finance Committee Chairman) to stop trying to compromise with the Republicans on the Health care public option and on the regressive tax on employer-supplied health benefits. This has surprised a lot of people who have a poor opinion of Harry Reid's spinal fortitude. If you are familiar with the way he stood up to Mob intimidation as a prosecutor, today's reported demand to Max Baucus shouldn't be a surprise. The real question ought to be "Why has he apparently let the conservatives and Republicans roll him all of this year." That's what is out of character. Here's my opinion.

Things have changed this month. Up until now this year the legislature has been involved in just keeping the government running, and the Republicans have been in the business of obstructing everything the Democrats attempt (which among other things is why so few of Obama's political appointees to fill plum book appointments have gotten votes and why Republican Senators keep putting holds on them.) But this is July. The health care bill is on the table for this month. The health care bill is the main event, unlike everything else that has come up before this month.

Obama, Reid and Pelosi between them have total responsibility to keep the government functioning in spite of the asinine and unified obstructionist actions and language of the Republicans as dominated by the talk show hosts. Obama has done a masterful job of playing the Republicans so that the only positions they could take to oppose him have been more self-destructive than effectively obstructionist on the large issues.

Between Pelosi and Reid, Pelosi has the easier job because of no filibuster. She still has to mollify the Blue Dogs who are almost as skittish as the Republicans because they fear the next primary. So Pelosi has compromised with both the Republicans and the Blue Dogs to a greater extent than any of us like at all.

Reid with only 59 Democrats until today as well as the filibuster which the Republicans are only mildly hesitant to use was in much worse situation than Pelosi. I'd bet he has been counting votes very closely and keeping the conservative Democratic Senators mollified.

But two things have just changed. Al Franken was sworn in today and the big initiative - health care - is in the balance. This is once in a lifetime, not just in a political career. I'm more and more convinced that the three top Democrats - Obama, Reid and Pelosi, have been gearing everything to powering the health care bill into enactment this year. That's the reason for the refusal to accept delays, and I think they have allowed some things to be enacted that they hate (I know I do) so as to not waste Presidential power on secondary issues. But now we are in the main bout. If I am right, then the gloves are going to come off.

We'll get only hints of the machinations because they aren't even inside the beltway. They are inside the Senate and House. and the Press mostly hasn't a clue, and the ones who have read Richard E. Neustadt's book "Presidential Power" will find that it runs counter to the permitted media narrative. But some reporter with inside connections on the Hill and the smarts to apply Neaustadt's teachings to the analysis has one Hell of a great book to write, much like Ted Sorenson's "Making of the President."

I won't guarantee this, of course, nor do I have original reporting to confirm it. But I've read Presidential Power and the Modern Presidents, the first edition of which was published in 1960, and which JFK was reported to have read between the election and his inauguration. Neustadt essentially wrote the the President's power is limited, and it grows with each win that he is responsible for and is diminished by each loss. Obama has essentially kept his hands off of most of the things that come from Congress, so his loss has been minimal. On the positive side, the three of them have been setting things up specifically for health care, with the Budget powers to avoid a filibuster if necessary and the rapid schedule set so that the bill is dealt with when Obama's power as an incoming President with a solid majority is at its height. The fact that Reid has not stood for any delays in the schedule for completing health care is an indication of how the three are husbanding their resources.

I really think that the power the three have been husbanding all year is about to come unleashed. When it comes down to the crunch, the health care vote is going to be the first mandatory party-line vote this year. Up until now, the Democratic defectors have gotten a "gimme." Not this time. And for those who go with the Party voting for health care and find it damages their prospects for surviving their next Primary, the Party will provide the kinds of support needed to get a win in that primary. They did it for Lieberman, to the disgust of many of us. Is this why?

As I say, I won't guarantee this scenario, but I really think I see is coming together. If so, we are about to see it work out. I sure hope I am right.

Biden's elegant Sunday morning message to the Iranians

Joe Biden's statement on Stephanoplous' "This Week" Sunday morning has got a lot of people upset that he was signaling the U.S. was giving Israel the green light to attack Iran. Frankly I consider that a wild misinterpretation of what he said and a failure to understand who Biden was really sending a signal to. Here is Biden's statement:

STEPHANOPOULOS: And meanwhile, Prime Minister Netanyahu has made it pretty clear that he agreed with President Obama to give until the end of the year for this whole process of engagement to work. After that, he's prepared to make matters into his own hands.

Is that the right approach?

BIDEN: Look, Israel can determine for itself -- it's a sovereign nation -- what's in their interest and what they decide to do relative to Iran and anyone else.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Whether we agree or not?

BIDEN: Whether we agree or not. They're entitled to do that. Any sovereign nation is entitled to do that. But there is no pressure from any nation that's going to alter our behavior as to how to proceed.

What we believe is in the national interest of the United States, which we, coincidentally, believe is also in the interest of Israel and the whole world. And so there are separate issues.

If the Netanyahu government decides to take a course of action different than the one being pursued now, that is their sovereign right to do that. That is not our choice.

STEPHANOPOULOS: But just to be clear here, if the Israelis decide Iran is an existential threat, they have to take out the nuclear program, militarily the United States will not stand in the way?

BIDEN: Look, we cannot dictate to another sovereign nation what they can and cannot do when they make a determination, if they make a determination that they're existentially threatened and their survival is threatened by another country.

STEPHANOPOULOS: You say we can't dictate, but we can, if we choose to, deny over-flight rights here in Iraq. We can stand in the way of a military strike.

BIDEN: I'm not going to speculate, George, on those issues, other than to say Israel has a right to determine what's in its interests, and we have a right and we will determine what's in our interests.

Juan Cole and Yaakov Katz explain what Biden was really saying and doing.

Biden's comment "has a dual function of sending the message to Netanyahu that if he wants to cowboy it he is riding alone, and of warning the Iranians that Netanyahu might just be wild man enough to risk such a unilateral if Iran continues to be so intransigent with regard to seeking enrichment capabilities," Cole told me in an e-mail. "It is actually quite elegant."

The Jerusalem Post's veteran national security reporter, Yaakov Katz, reached a similar conclusion, suggesting Biden's comment could mean the Obama administration is trying to force the Iran engagement train back on track after it was derailed by the recent election.

"The problem was that that the elections led to a political impasse with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad declared the winner but Mir Hossein Mousavi refusing to recognize the results. As a result, the dialogue has not begun, and if Obama now spoke with Ahmadinejad, it would be as if he were granting legitimacy to an oppressive and violent regime," Katz writes. "This is where Israel comes into play. Biden can use Israel to threaten Iran that if it doesn't settle down at the negotiating table, who knows what the Netanyahu government might do."

As Juan Cole is reported saying, "It is actually quite elegant." Biden's statement restates the obvious truth that Israel is a sovereign nation and that we do not make their security decisions for them. In addition, it puts the Iranian Supreme Leader on notice that we are not going to force Israel to forgo an attack on their nuclear facility. The US simply doesn't have the capability to force them not to do so if the Israelis feel sufficiently threatened by Iran. So the Iranians need to keep that in mind as they decide whether or not to engage with the US and other nations which are upset with their behavior.

Sarah Palin's Future

I've heard that there is talk that Sarah Palin might replace the RNC Chair Steele. That seems extremely unlikely to me.

My impression of the job of national party chair is that it's purpose is to raise funds and allocate them from the national party to everyone else to get them elected. Determining general national party strategy is a part of that, since it determines how the funds are allocated and is limited by the funds that are raised. No one, not even the Republicans, have a clue how Palin would perform organizing the raising of funds or what her priorities would be. Face it - for all her celebrity, she's a flake with no interest in or talent for administration or supervision. And planning party strategy? Palin? Really?

There are enough self-protective people in the Republican party to keep her out of that job. She'll never get it. Steele is safe from her, at least.

Her future is as a celebrity in some fashion, and not a very successful one in the long run. She hasn't the discipline, curiosity or education needed for that. She couldn't even succeed on Hollywood Squares. Not sufficiently entertaining to large masses. Her social Conservative attitudes and her celebrity and celebrity talent do seem to make her very qualified for some functions in the evangelical public Relations and entertainment functions. If one of the evangelical leaders decides he can use her, that is probably where she will wind up - if she wants it and can stick to it. I suspect that as long as she has adoring crowds telling her how great she is, she will stick to it.

That's my bet, any way. Have I missed anything?

Krugman discusses the cost of universal health care

From today's New York Times:

Let me start by pointing out something serious health economists have known all along: on general principles, universal health insurance should be eminently affordable.

After all, every other advanced country offers universal coverage, while spending much less on health care than we do. For example, the French health care system covers everyone, offers excellent care and costs barely more than half as much per person as our system.

And even if we didn’t have this international evidence to reassure us, a look at the U.S. numbers makes it clear that insuring the uninsured shouldn’t cost all that much, for two reasons.

First, the uninsured are disproportionately young adults, whose medical costs tend to be relatively low. The big spending is mainly on the elderly, who are already covered by Medicare.

Second, even now the uninsured receive a considerable (though inadequate) amount of “uncompensated” care, whose costs are passed on to the rest of the population. So the net cost of giving the uninsured explicit coverage is substantially less than it might seem.

Putting these observations together, what sounds at first like a daunting prospect — extending coverage to most or all of the 45 million people in America without health insurance — should, in the end, add only a few percent to our overall national health bill. And that’s exactly what the budget office found when scoring the HELP proposal.

[...] [Krugman explains specific provisions of the plan together with costs, and compares it to the costs that America is currently on looking towards having to spend under the current system.]

So fundamental health reform — reform that would eliminate the insecurity about health coverage that looms so large for many Americans — is now within reach. The “centrist” senators, most of them Democrats, who have been holding up reform can no longer claim either that universal coverage is unaffordable or that it won’t work.

The only question now is whether a combination of persuasion from President Obama, pressure from health reform activists and, one hopes, senators’ own consciences will get the centrists on board — or at least get them to vote for cloture, so that diehard opponents of reform can’t block it with a filibuster.

The problem now is the "centrist" Democratic Senators. That and the fact that Senators as a group are not the brightest bulbs in the box. They react to the people who actually get in touch and talk to them, preferably to donate money. Can they actually learn that their older attitudes will no longer protect them in office the next time they run for election? Can Harry Reid get aggressive with them?

Those are the remaining roadblocks to America having a semi-modern health care system.

Here's why the Washington D.C. press corps never talks realistically about the American health care system

If you have ever wondered why the Washington Post, New York Times and major TV networks never discuss singly payer (the only health system that provides universal health care at a reasonable cost) Bob Somerby, editor of the Daily Howler explains with the example of newsperson Margaret Carlson. Keep in mind that Lily Weymouth is the current CEO of the Washington Post, Washington D.C.'s hometown newspaper who recently was prepared to organize dinner salons that lobbyists were to pay $25,000 to $50,000 each to attend and meet with top Washington Post editorial staff and other Washington insiders.

In 2003, the grasping climber Margaret Carlson explained the process with remarkable candor in the 26-page autobiographical chapter which drove her semi-book, Anyone Can Grow Up (see THE DAILY HOWLER, 6/18/03). In that chapter, Carlson described the gruesome process by which she attained social standing inside DC’s elite. In her inspiring up-from-steerage tale, she—the child of working-class, Irish Catholic parents—ends up sitting at the right hand of Post publisher Katharine Graham!

What a story! It all began when Michael Kinsley took her to a soiree—at the home of Weymouth’s grand-mother:

CARLSON (page 22): My friends didn’t change from year to year, but their jobs did. It was Michael Kinsley...who first took me to dinner at the big, intimidating mansion of Katharine Graham, the reigning queen of Washington and publisher of The Washington Post. Every few weeks, when Henry Kissinger or Barbara Walters was stuck on the tarmac at LaGuardia, I would get a late call asking if I’d like to fill in. Following the Meg Greenfield rule—call anytime before the main course—I always said yes. Eventually, I would go as me. Like the rings on a tree, my evenings with Graham charted my evolution from rookie journalist to old timer.

“I always said yes,” this classic climber wrote. But when social climbers like the young Carlson agree to say yes, they are typically saying yes to more than a set of dinner invitations. They are also saying yes to the constellation of political views which guarantee them a continuing seat at such Very High Tables.

They’re saying yes to what The Group believes. They’re saying no to everything else.

Today, Carlson is one of the biggest fools in Washington. (She’s also a regular, simpering guest on our biggest “progressive” TV show! Surely, the gods rock with laughter.) But in her very valuable book, she gave us a very valuable look at the desire of these social/career climbers—the desire to gain acceptance at The Highest Washington Tables. But darlings! To gain acceptable at those tables, there are certain things you mustn’t say— mustn’t believe, contemplate or even discuss. Over the past fifteen years, one of the things you couldn’t discuss was this remarkable set of data—perhaps the most remarkable data-set we know of in the world:

Total health expenditures per capita, 2003

United States $5711
Australia $2886
Austria $2958
Belgium $3044
Canada $2998
Denmark $2743
Finland $2104
France $3048
Germany $2983
Ireland $2466
Italy $2314
Japan $2249
Netherlands $2909
Norway $3769
Sweden $2745
United Kingdom $2317

Those are astonishing data. Over the past fifteen years, they’ve almost never been discussed. Everyone but Krugman understands—you simply mustn’t discuss them. Long ago, Kinsley took Carlson to Graham’s house. Last week, he wrote a column in which those data, though highly relevant, simply never appeared.

That dinner at Lally Weymouth’s house wouldn’t have been about giving Kaiser Permanente access to Connolly. If anything, that dinner would have been about giving Weymouth access to her own reporters and editors—giving her the chance to show them where the lines have been drawn. On the national level, Rep. Jim Cooper is not well-known or highly visible. But he played a leading role in defeating Clinton’s health plan—and there he is in Kurtz’s report as Weymouth’s lone confirmed guest!

At dinners like this, Washington’s sprawling collection of climbers learn what they’re allowed to think/discuss. And the pay-offs for consent are huge, as Carlson explained in her book. The heart-warming end to her Climber’s Tale involved her daughter’s wedding. By now, a reigning queen was simply “Kay” in this uplifting tale:

CARLSON (continuing directly from above): One day Mrs. Graham complained that she’d never been asked to my house. A few months later, I was giving a going-away party for Kinsley, who’d been wooed to be editor of Slate.com by Microsoft’s Bill Gates. It seemed the perfect occasion to hide behind. She came, she tossed salad, she scooped ice cream. She became a fixture at my house.

[...]

When Courtney decided to get married in 2000, Kay asked if she would get married in her garden, and that began a wedding my mother would have been proud of. I didn’t make Courtney’s wedding dress, as my mother (and I) had made mine. She preferred one by Vera Wang, proving there can be progress from one generation to another.

A generation of climbers got the message. Their daughters could get that Vera Wang too—if they were careful never to mention the actual shape of world health care.

At such salons, consent gets manufactured within a grasping pseudo-elite. A Kaiser was going to pick up the tab. Was the grand-daughter of a “reigning queen” going to sketch her land’s boundaries?

If you suspect that the major media such as the Washington Post and the TV networks have a very restricted set of views they will permit to be published or discussed, It's true. Margaret Carlson's story explains why. Top pundits and editors get high social status in Washington D.C. if they go along with the prevailing D.C. wisdom and avoid discussing subjects or points of view that the major corporations (advertisers and big time lobbyists) don't want discussed. That's why single payer health insurance, the only system that is both efficient and capable of lowering the overall costs of health care in America, is off limits for discussion and serous consideration. So are most liberal positions these days. The full range of subjects that can be discusses range from very middle of the road to far right wing excluding clear extremism and racism.George Stephanopolus did not parachute in from the Clinton White House and enter the TV hierarchy at the top without understanding these rules. That he took over the Sunday ABC TV news show only shows how well he has met the demands of his masters.

Humans instinctively require membership in a pack

To add to my previous two post, my dog just reminded me why humans feel the need to join a church.

My dog, Foxy, is a mixed breed sheltie with something else. A lovely and loving little animal with a sad history. She had belonged to a family, and either ran away, or they moved and abandoned her. She was skin and bones when she politely came up to my Buddhist daughter-in-Law begging for food as she was going into work one day. Foxy was still outside her office when she left work that afternoon. Since no one was caring for her, my daughter-in-law brought her home. We tried to find her owners through the Vetinarian named on her rabies tag, but could not do so. The phone was disconneted and the Vet would not give out the name or address. That was about eight years ago and the newly named "Foxy" (with her skinny features and reddish fur she very much resembled a fox - and besides, she is a beautiful dog) is still with me long after my son and daughter-in-law moved out.

The thing is, with that history she has abandonment issues and frequently needs reassuring that she is a member of the pack. The pack is, of course, me and my daughter who live here along with the other dog of the house. Dogs, like wolves, instinctively must be members of a pack. Part of the evolution of dogs is that they have accepted people as the alpha members of the pack. Foxy's feelings of abandonment surface easily, so she is frequently appearing and looking up expectantly asking for reassurance by a few head scratches or by petting.

So what's this got to do with humans and religion as I wrote about in the previous two posts? Simple. Humans are primates with much the same instinctive demand to belong to a pack as dogs and wolves have.

Foxy just reminded me why humans feel the need to join an organization when they are "looking for roots." The humans are looking for a pack to join that will accept them. It is one of the essential emotional needs of most human beings. Family provides one pack, but with Americans and their mobile life style, the family is often not available. So people often choose to join the pack that clearly wants their membership - Churches.

The opportunity to join with others is a much stronger draw than religious doctrine for all the fact that it is instinctual and below the level of consciousness. In fact, for many of us the exclusiveness of the doctrine is often a strong turn-off. It becomes an all or nothing choice. The choice is to accept the doctrine as the price of becoming a member of the human pack, er, uh, church. That membership is probably the strongest element of the so-called "search for roots."

That's my opinion, anyway. Of course, it is an entirely secular explanation with no consideration of the unobserved, unproven and unprovable magical intervention by God.

The Southern Baptists are declining in numbers, Paving the way for a Culturally better America

The social conservatives consist largely of members of the evangelical churches - including the Mega-Churches. The grandfather of the evangelicals is the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC.) Those churches have been a key element of the conservative political alliance over the last thirty years, and their continued expansion is a part of the myth that the conservative movement is growing.

Well, the SBC is not part of the movement that is growing in numbers. The Reuters article entitled "Southern Baptists (and Republicans): old, white and in decline?">Southern Baptists (and Republicans): old, white and in decline?" reports that the SBC is declining in membership just as has been the case for the mainstream and much more liberal religious denominations they oppose.

The reason why most people that I know join a religious denomination other than the one they grew up in is that they have children and are looking for some way to connect to society in a society that is super commercial and frankly, anti-child. But Christianity does not do a very good job of providing a cultural connection for members, either. That explains the decline in the mainstream religions. It appears that the SBC, the source of some of the greatest wackinesses in the last few years, does no better that the Episcopalian or Presbyterian or other mainstream denominations. It is a common symptom in all three of the major desert religions out of the Middle East (Judaism,Christianity and Islam.)

When the various forms of idolatry (including declaring the Bible Holy and worshiping it as the evangelicals do) cease to satisfy the need for connection to the culture ("cultural roots") there is nothing else to hold the members besides the demand that they not lose their Faith under the threat of becoming ostracized by the rest of the membership. Acceding to those demands mean that you are abandoning all true religious curiosity.

The evangelical attempt to enter politics and take sufficient control of the government to use it as an evangelical tool that started with the televangelist Pat Roberts and with Jerry Falwell and Ralph Reed of the Christian Coalition early in the Reagan regime had essentially failed by the late 1990's when Ralph Reed abandoned the Christian Coalition and went off the do well for himself in politics. Roves mobilization of the evangelicals behind George W. Bush together with a new band-wagon effect gave a temporary rejuvenation to that effort, but the returns from being Republican foot soldiers was never worth it. It's effectively over now, and the only real draw for the evangelical churches remains a being a home and culture for families with young children. The decline of the SBC shows that. The actual membership of the mega-churches is generally far below the membership numbers they announce in public.

The exception to the decline, if there is any, will be in relatively isolated rural communities which have few social resources besides the church. Sarah Palin is the product of such a rural location. But the authoritarian nature of such religious organizations is not likely to hold on to a mobile population that can easily get a job in the city down the road if they become dissatisfied at the current location.

As long as the evangelicals can't get control of government in order to use it to enforce a monopoly of religion and to evangelize, they will continue to decline.

As a society, though, we really need to do something to fill that great yearning need for a connection to the culture. It's not a commercial need, so private enterprise cannot make a profit by filling it. Thus, we need to develope non-commercial ways to fulfill that need for connection and to build a better and more inclusve community. Racists need not apply. With our highly mobile population, the solutions have to be color-blind, race blind, and very inclusive of a variety of cultures and backgrounds.

No large nation other than America has a historyof diversity that will make such solutions possible.

Why do so many Conservatives make clearly insane statements?

I have long wondered why the conservatives publicly make so many absolutely insane statements. For example, Sarah Palin's Friday announcement of her resignation considered in view of her Presidential ambitions seemed utterly insane. So do the efforts of the Discovery Institute to abolish the teaching of science to our children in public schools and replace it with Bible instruction. Then I read a rather arcane literary search to find the source of an odd quotation, and suddenly I had a minor "Aha!" moment. Those people are not insane. They simply hear a different music from what I hear.

So bear with me. The way to the "Aha!" is, like so many such revelations, a bit twisty. Let me start with Mark Kleiman's posts on his problem quote.

Mark Kleiman at The Reality-Based Community recently was taken by a phrase and decided to track it down to its source. The phrase was

"Those who dance appear insane to those who cannot hear the music."

His investigation is reported at

• The Dancers vs Those who cannot Hear the Music. (Second post) and
• Bleg: Quotation Source (First post)

The posts are interesting as a literary puzzle, and the quotation itself does need some recounting of its history of use to make a lot of sense. So I read them both. And with the resolution to the puzzle, I got more than I bargained for. I got what appears to be a real lesson in how we humans understand each other - or how we fail to do so.

In explanation I need to reproduce the fruits of Mark's exploration first. It's a quotation from Henri Bergson translated from the French to English.

I would now like to draw attention, as a symptom no less worthy of note, the lack of feeling which ordinarily accompanies laughter. It seems that the comic can only shake a person up on condition of falling upon the surface of a truly calm soul, one that is well integrated. Indifference is its natural environment. Laughter has no greater enemy than emotion. I’m not saying that we cannot laugh at a person who arouses, for example, pity in us, or even affection; only that for a few moments it would be necessary to forget affection, to tell pity to be silent. In a society of pure intelligences one would probably no longer cry, but one would perhaps still laugh; whereas souls that are invariably sensitive — in agreement and at one with life, where every event would be prolonged as a resonance of feeling — would not recognize or understand laughter. Try, for a moment, to let everything that is said or is being done capture your attention; act, in your imagination, with those who act, feel with those who feel, let your sympathy open up as wide as possible, and as though struck by a magic wand you will see the lightest objects take on weight, and all things imbued with a severe color. Now detach yourself, look upon life as an indifferent observer; even dramas will turn into comedy. It is enough for us to stop up our ears to the sound of music, in a room where people are dancing, in order that the dancers immediately appear ridiculous. How many human actions would be able to resist a test of this type? and would we not see many of them go from being solemn to funny, if we isolated them from the feeling that accompanies them? Therefore, the comic, in order to produce its complete effect, in the end demands something like a momentary anesthesia of the heart. It is addressed to pure intelligence.

In essence that says "You cannot understand how the dance you see makes sense if you do not know the environment - the music - the dance is conducted in."

Or to reverse that, if someone does or says something that is simply incomprehensible to the point of being insane, perhaps you are not aware of the environment within which it is being done or said.

Which brings me to the way conservatives and liberals see the political issues that are current in today's American political climate. For one point, why did Sarah Palin's announcement of her resignation effective July 26th seem so insane? We don't know what the actual environment Palin is operating in. In terms of Palin running for President in 2012, her resignation announcement is simply insane. But her running for President is the talk of the Pundits. Palin may simply not want to run for President. In fact, Palin may not want to advance in politics at all. Some reports indicate that she is sick of it. If the music she is dancing to suggests that she simply go back to her family and look for other ways to earn a living, then her announcement suddenly makes complete sense.

Or take another thing. The idea being pushed by the Discovery Institute that science is inherently wrong and at best should only be taught to children in school in classes that contrast evolution with the Biblical myths of the creation. As a person with extensive training in science, statistics and research methods and academic management studies, I find the idea that the Creation myth could substitute for science to be literally insane. But what I do not have is a correspondingly deep grounding in the Christian Bible, since it never made rational sense to me and never had sufficient literary interest to keep my attention for long. ^*

No doubt what the Discovery Institute wants to do is push a thorough grounding in the Bible onto all students. The fact that my mother was similarly insistent and I quickly learned to resist such pressures as not responding to the things I was curious about means nothing to the religious zealots of the Discovery Institute, nor does the utter impracticability of the the literal reading of the Bible as a substitute for science. I simply don't want and have never wanted induction into their environment. But also pretty obviously, they have no use for the environment I have been attracted to all my life. They reject it (science) and want modern children to similarly do so.

The real "Aha!" for me was to realize that Creationism is NOT insanity. It is simply the rational expression of the total environment the Fundamentalist Christians have created for themselves and now emerse themselves into. They have their own school systems, their own separate churches (which reject mainstream churches and call them "Unchristian") and with FOX News, they have their own captive popular news outlet on TV. They also teach their followers that all sources outside their captive media are telling lies and should be rejected.

US Senators like Jeff Sessions and Jim Inhofe have come out of that environment and are representative of it. The apparently insane statements they make describing their beliefs are not so much insane as they are representative of the very insular fundamentalist Christian culture which is their total environment.

But the reverse is undoubtedly true. They see my statements in many cases to be quite as insane as I see theirs. That's because they have no idea of my environment and want nothing to do with it.

Religion is not the only area in which individuals from different environments see each other as spouting insane statements. True believers in Libertarianism also represent such a closed total environment, and for all the logic that has gone into assembling the theories of economic market libertarianism, it simple fails in practice whenever it is tried. The True Believers will not accept that it has failed, however. They don't consider reality and real situations to be refutation of their neat and pretty theory.

Given all that, I don't think I can any longer see what the conservatives say as being insane. It is simply representative of a very different environment. I cannot hear the music to which they are dancing. But unfortunately, they cannot hear the music to which I dance, either. The conflict is not going to end.

But since government has to operate for everyone in the area governed, it cannot operate based on any given ideology. That is the great power of the separation of Church and State given us by the Constitution. The purpose of that provision is clearly to keep the police functions of government from intervening in what is often a conflict between people who have sharply different and conflicting environments and world views. What the Fundamentalists are demanding is that their world view that is expresses as Creationism be taught as a replacement for the world view of the Enlightenment as expressed in science on the general level and Evolution in particular. But public schools are specifically set into place by government to teach students how to operate government without enforcing a specific ideology.

Both Libertarians and Fundamentalist Christians reject reality-testing of their ideologies, because science works by proving that assertion are false. The fundamentalist ideologues reject any suggestion that their ideologies are false, so they attack the schools, teachers and publications the teach other views.

That rejection is a key method of teaching and perpetuating the memes that are at the core of their ideologies. Neither fundamentalist Christianity nor Libertarianism can continually be transmitted to new converts reliably if they are allowed to test the memes against reality occasionally. That avoidance of reality-testing permits the passing on of the memes and perpetuating the doctrine.

So welcome to my analysis of insane political pronouncements. The real problem is that they are only insane when you cannot hear the music the speaker is "dancing to." Does that help?

Beats me. But it satisfies my curiosity.

---

^* A strange and very pleasant recent exception is the outstanding book entitled A Palpable God by Reynolds Price. I picked it up because his opening 44 page essay on the nature of "Narrative" was said to be the best writing on the subject out there. He then goes on to illustrate what he means by translating 30 stories from the Bible, mostly old testament. I will agree that the essay is the best I have found on the subject of what narrative is and how it works, and his illustrating stories become fascinating in context. I find the subject of the nature of narrative particularly interesting because I read that brain researchers using modern tools to study the brain in action have concluded that our memories are laid down in the brain in a narrative form.

Humans have been equipped by evolution, not only with language, but also with the narrative form of structuring thoughts in language. That, it seems to me, also has massive implications on how human societies are formed and aggregated into larger structures like clans, towns, and Empires. In an oral age, story-tellers carried the knowledge of human civilization to others as well as stories being the primary way of passing knowledge from one generation to another.

It also may be the explanation why such written stories as The Torah, the Bible and the Koran consist of are so central to organized western religions.

America is stalled in its move towards democracy

Here is what John Hank Edison says:

This Fourth of July, let's give America the birthday present she cannot do without. Let's give the people back their Declaration of Independence.

The Declaration of Independence sets forth a worldview that, back in the 18th century, served as the foundation of our new nation. This foundation was composed of the principle of human equality and the rights of self-determination implied by the famous phrase "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."

Back then, this foundation was sufficient to support the society we hoped to build, one free of the economic monopolies, religious authoritarianism and military brutality embodied, respectively, in the English nobility, the Church of England and England's Redcoat soldiers. As large as these forces loomed over the colonists in the New World, these were forces still dwarfed by the Atlantic Ocean, the American wilderness and the sheer number of people they aimed to dominate.

In a day of bayonets, wooden hulls and musket balls, mere consciousness of the principle of human equality was enough to give the people confidence in their ability to rewrite the social contract, even if it had to be written in their own blood. "Give me liberty or give me death," Patrick Henry cried. In his day, he could calculate the odds of success as reasonable against an enemy that was still on a human scale. He could look his enemy in the eye and say to King George with confidence, our equality is self-evident.

When we won our independence, we dismantled all the power platforms setting some human beings above others. Against the concentration of wealth and power of the classist aristocracy, we built the one-person, one-vote principle. Against the psychological oppression of religious authoritarianism, we constructed the doctrine of separation of church and state. And against the physical domination of mercenary armies, we instituted civilian control of the military.

But then we lost our way.

Think about that. After the slaves were freed and the power of the wealthy plantation owners who had dominated much of America's politics were displaced, the newly developed large corporations (especially the railroads and the banks) marshaled their forces and came back to again dominate American politics. The big banks and corporations quickly took over the Republican Party and effectively dominated America through successive "Financial Panics" that they caused until the massive failure that we now call the "Great Depression occurred.

The period of the 1930's showed a massive uprising of the American people fighting to defend themselves from the corporate and banking would be masters, and they took over the nation. They held it through WW II and the Korean War, and then in the '50's the banks and corporations came back. Their abortive effort to regain control though control of the House of Representative in 1952 was reversed in 1954 after the House performed fully as badly as the Gingrich-dominated House has. Only it was a time of people power and they were quickly replaced. Wikipedia has a pretty good description of what happened in the Republican Party when they chose a Presidential nominee:

The fight for the Republican nomination was between General Dwight D. Eisenhower, who became the candidate of the party's moderate eastern establishment; Senator Robert A. Taft of Ohio, the longtime leader of the GOP's conservative wing; and Governor Earl Warren of California, who appealed to Western delegates and independent voters.

The moderate Eastern Republicans were led by New York Governor Thomas E. Dewey, the party's presidential nominee in 1944 and 1948. The moderates tended to be interventionists who felt that America needed to fight the Cold War overseas and resist Soviet aggression in Europe and Asia; they were also willing to accept most aspects of the social welfare state created by the New Deal in the 1930s. The moderates were also concerned with ending the GOP's losing streak in presidential elections; they felt that the personally popular Eisenhower had the best chance of beating the Democrats.

So even within the Republican Party the power of the people represented by the northeast moderates dominated the choice of Presidential candidate in 1952. But Ike had to choose Nixon as his Vice President to mollify the Conservatives, much as in 2008 McCain had to choose Sarah Palin. But the expanding Cold War gave force to the militarily expansionist elements that were often represented by the John Birch Society. The closeness of the 1960 Presidential election in part represented the growing power of the Corporate and the Cold War Hawk Republicans. Then the Goldwater takeover of the Republican Party in 1964 represented the victory of the Western libertarian Republicans in a party dispirited and disorganized by the 1960 loss of the Presidency and the general confusion caused by assassination of Kennedy. Goldwater's ideological-based disdain for the Republican moderates doomed his election attempt even before it started.

The Vietnam War, greatly expanded by LBJ to mollify the conservatives so they they would not be able to prevent his passage of Medicare, crippled the American populist movement. The nation coalesced around the hardliners and the military as it always has in time of war, while the Progressives of both parties recognized both the idiocy and the futility of the war in Vietnam. The Banks and corporations went with the Military-Industrial Complex for a variety of reasons. The success of the Civil Rights Movement was cemented institutionally by the Civil Rights act, though, so the weakness of the Progressives was not clear. In the meantime, Medicare removed one of the major problems the Progressives worked to correct. [Before Medicare, when a person reached age 65 the health insurers canceled any existing health insurance. There was none sold to those over age 65, including group policies. All retirees were on their own medically after age 65. LBJ had removed this irritant to the middle class with Medicare.]

Nixon became President in 1968 because of the Vietnam War. Nixon was a brilliant but very conflicted man. He was a foreign policy hardliner, but he tried to stop inflation with a price freeze (which didn't work) but which was anathema to the free market Conservatives. It was his personal insecurities and paranoia that drove him to his criminal actions, and as a Conservative he was not restrained by the Rule of Law at all. The Progressive reaction in both Congress and in the media caused him to have to resign or be impeached. Ford had no time in office and no national power base. Carter was elected as a reaction to Nixon but if he ever had a clue regarding the nature of the Progressive American public he never displayed it. Worse, he disdained politics and the political parties, doing nothing to build the Democrats to deal with the Republican-based Corporatocracy. In the meantime the corporation Republicans were building for their comeback with Reagan as the figurehead. Reagan's victory in 1980 (with the assistance of the Iranian Revolutionaries) was a foregone conclusion.

You can tell that the corporations were fighting to come back because since 1970 labor overall has not shared in the profits resulting from the increases in industrial productivity. Those profits, and they are substantial) have all almost totally gone to the wealthiest families in America, and they love it. Beginning when Reagan was in office the cnservatives started eliminating the power of unions to set wages and they started to reduce taxes on the income of the most wealthy. The inheritance tax is a pet peeve of the wealthy families that dominate the conservative movement.

Since 1970 total US consumption has increased because the size of the working population grew and because consumers were extended new forms of credit to make purchasing goods and services easier. This accounts for the rapid expansion of credit cards and their distribution to more and more uncredit-worthy customers, followed by the expansion of equity loans on home mortgages also expanded the consumer purchases. Then when the Asian Credit Crisis threatened the American Economy, the Ayn Randian Libertarian Alan Greenspan started rapidly expanding the money supply to lower interest rates and keep the economy going. Greenspan's refusal to clamp down on mortgage lending practices was another part of this expansion of money to the consumers, just to keep the economy going and avoid Recession. He really believed without evidence that the Mortgage Banks would not intentionally make bad mortgage loans, but the system paid big immediate payments to such loans. They did it without consideration of what happened later to them. Housing, of course, grew to become fully half of Gross Domestic Product (GDP.)

The other thing that happened during the Reagan Regime was that Ralph Reed and the Christian Coalition of Evangelical Fundamentalists allied with the Conservative corporate and foreign policy hardliner Republican politicians. This gave the Republicans the foot soldiers to win elections in areas that were not dominated by military and government contracts and wealthy bankers. The corporations and bankers provided the funds to the Republican conservatives needed to win the elections. It was a match made in heaven, if all that matters is winning.

Except, that as part of the deal the Republican Party had to buy the Social Republican issues and implement them. This has been done primarily by packing the federal judiciary with social conservative judges. Other than that, failure to enforce federal laws protecting abortion providers and the slow advance of legal restrictions on abortion, the social right wing has got very little out of the deal. The moderate Republicans who objected to the social conservative issues were driven out of office over time.

The dissatisfaction of the social conservatives themselves was getting clear by the late 1990's (Ralph Reed left the Christian Coalition), until Karl Rove pushed the born-again George W. Bush into the nomination for President in 2000. He had the money from his father's connections and the approval of the social conservatives. The social conservatives and the social conservative-packed Supreme Court gave Bush the election in 2000, but the social conservatives have really gotten very little out of the deal. They are currently abandoning politics as had been characteristic for them before the growth of the Christian Coalition.

Now America has stalled in economic growth, found two wars to fight (one unnecessary) and the threat of the Depression has activated the mass of the population again to fight the Corporatocracy that has brought us all these disasters. Those are the forces that elected Barack Obama.

But they are difficult to keep mobilized without an immediate threat to bring them out and unify them. Obama's efforts to slow and stall the economic dive into deep Depression has removed most of the immediate threat. The mass population is beginning to drop away. Unfortunately, the delay on the dive into Depression has not been accompanied by the necessary structural reforms that would prevent the Depression from happening. The corporatocracy is fighting those reforms like trapped weasels, and being successful at it. The renewal of the dive into Depression becomes more likely every day those financial reforms are not enacted.

Without those reforms the march economically downward into Depression will be soon coming back. The current apparent floor under the financial collapse is based entirely on the government stimuli. The best that can be said about the indications of an economic "bottom" is that it is just that it represents where the economy is currently able to operate. There is little indication that any economic-based recovery is occurring so far. So without the government stimuli the economy is headed further down the tubes. But this time, on Barack Obama's watch, so that he gets the blame. The Republicans are actively opposing all actions that might prevent this in hopes that the march to Depression will resume and that Obama can be blamed.

That's the context within which Obama has presented this challenge to the American people in today's Saturday U-Tube address. If the mass support Obama got that elected him President is not followed by support is the actions Obama has to take to restructure the economy we are in a world of crap. Here's Obama's challenge.



Are you ready to take up the challenge? Your decision will make or break America.

Palin announces resignation as AK Governor effective this month

Sarah Palin has announced and promised this morning to resign as Governor of Alaska before the end of July. This decision is firm enough so that the Lt. Governor has been scheduled to be sworn in Sunday, July 26.

Alaska's Channel 2 has this includes this about her announcement:

The former vice presidential candidate has long been rumored to be considering a run at the Republican presidential nomination in 2012.

Palin did not address those rumors at the press conference at her Wasilla home, during which she did not take questions from reporters.

She implied that her real decision was not to seek re-election, and that the resignation was a natural step after that in order to avoid a lame-duck final 18 months of her term.

"With this announcement that I'm not seeking re-election, I've determined it's best to transfer the authority of governor to Lieutenant Governor (Sean) Parnell," Palin said. "I'm determined to take the right path for Alaska, even though it is unconventional and is not so comfortable.

"And I am willing to do this so this administration, with its positive agenda and its accomplishments and its successful road to an incredible future for Alaska, so that it can continue without interruption and with great administrative and legislative success."

[...]

Already among the Democrats, Bob Poe has announced he will run, state Sen. Hollis French has started the ball rolling toward a run, and former congressional candidate Ethan Berkowitz said that if he were to run for anything in 2010 it would be for governor.

"With so many fronts that have been left in a state of stagnation while Governor Palin has been pursuing her national goals, I think that it's a good statement on the governor's part that she's recognizing we do need a fulltime governor," Poe said. "She's stepping aside from that, I think that the campaign is obviously going to get much more interesting very quickly and I look forward to the debate and discussing with the future candidates how we can move Alaska forward."

Talking Points Memo has posted the Full Text of Palin's Resignation Speech.

There has been strong speculation that Palin was going to announce that she would not run for reelection as Governor next year, and that seems to be a significant part of the reason she is announcing her resignation at this time. There is also further speculation that since she is a wildly unethical politician, even by Alaska standard, she has been caught out on something big enough to scare her into the resignation in hopes of heading off the investigation and prosecution.

Talking Points Memo also reports:

Andrea Mitchell says sources close to Gov. Palin say she is now "out of politics for good."

I'd give the rumors and speculation about her concern about an investigation as high likelihood of being right. But if they are not right, (or if by resigning now she heads off serious investigation of a crime that cannot be covered up) then my own speculation is that she still maintains Presidential ambitions for 2012, and feels that between the blizzard of ethics complaints (handled by her own appointees and dismissed) and the heavy national media attention that goes along with having been Republican nominee for Veep and who is talked of by many as a strong candidate for the Republican Presidential nomination in 2012, her advisers may have noted that she is failing as Alaska's Governor. It's reasonably certain that her failure is becoming more widely accepted in Alaska.

If she actually still harbors the fantasy of running for President, it will be impossible with a record of failure as Governor. That is no doubt a fact big enough to sink into Sarah Palin's narcissistic self-centered world. Of course, the problem is not her performance. It is that her enemies want to find any weapon possible to stop her. (Blame other for the reactions to her own failures.) In any case, the media is finding the cracks in her protective armor, and can't be stopped.

So she may have decided that her best bet is to resign and try to run for President as an outsider rather than as a sitting (failed) governor. She is rather clearly narcissist enough to think that she alone made John McCain's Presidential Campaign work, and to think that all she has to do is get back into the National Limelight without the damage of being a (failed or failing) sitting governor. About the only other politician recently in the media limelight that would think that way is Rod Blagojevich.

My last thought, though, is that unless something terrifically bad has already happened, this is a disastrous decision on her part. I wouldn't be a bit surprised to hear that she has reconsidered and announces that so many supporters are unhappy with her resignation that she simply cannot disappoint them that way and will not resign this month after all. She really is that erratic - as this announced resignation with only thin rationale strongly suggests.

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Addendum 9:19 pm CDT
Howard Fineman makes the case for why Sarah Palin is still a leading candidate to win the Republican Presidential nomination for the 2012 election. Frankly, I don't doubt that she could win a plurality in a multi-candidate race for the nomination. Especially considering the fact that the Republican Party is rapidly shrinking to where it consists entirely of the radical right-wing extremists.

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Addendum II 12:22 am CDT July 25, 2009
Think Progress posted an interesting article yesterday evening about the strong rumors in Alaska that the FBI is investigating a Construction Company [Spenard Building Supplies (SBS)] which may have been bribing Sarah Palin to get the government contracts they have recently received.

Obama is too serious about peace for many Jewish groups

M. J. Rosenberg writes:

...self-proclaimed "mainstream" pro-Israel organizations (i.e., the organizations of the right and center right) are deeply worried that President Obama is going to keep pushing Israel towards an end of the occupation and peace. Their immediate worry is that Obama does not distinguish between good settlements and bad ones. And also that Jews are backing President Obama not Prime Minister Netanyahu. In other words, their organizational flock is not following the leaders.

The Arab - Israeli conflict has poisoned all middle eastern politics for 60 years. These guys don't want it resolved, and they fear that Obama does.

Let's hope Obama is really serious about forcing peace.

Want to see what the White House employees make?

In the interests of greater government transparency, the Obama administration is publishing the titles and pay rates for the members of the White house staff.

Bob Gates exploring not enforcing "Don't Ask Don't Tell" at times

Obama is getting a bad rap from the media and the homosexual community on "Don't Ask Don't Tell" (DADT.) Should he abrogate the Rule of Law to prevent injustice to homosexuals who serve honorably in the military? The media and the homosexual community think so. They want immediate results because people are getting hurt and the security of America is being damaged by the injustices daily. The Obama administration is saying that Congressional action is required.

CNN News has a wire story that Secretary of Defense Bob Gates is exploring "...Obama Administration plans to selectively enforce the “don’t ask don’t tell” ban on gays in the military so that some gays could serve."

Here's what Bob Gates says he is doing:

“What we have is a law — be it a policy or a regulation — and as I discovered when I got into it, it’s a very prescriptive law. It doesn’t leave much to the imagination for a lot of flexibility. And so one of the things we’re looking at — is there flexibility in how we apply this law.”
The secretary appears to be proposing interim measures. “If somebody is outed by a third party … does that force us to take an action? And I don’t know the answer to that, and I don’t want to pretend to. But that’s the kind of thing we’re looking at to see if there’s at least a more humane way to apply the law until the law gets changed.”

President Obama is catching a lot of flak for not unilaterally taking Presidential action to overturn or refuse to enforce the existing law that requires the Pentagon to discharge homosexuals when they surface or are exposed in the military. If it were a right-wing subject, George Bush showed he was not bound by law that the Congress has passed and the President has signed in accordance with the requirements of the Constitution. The misuse of signing statements was just one method the Bush administration got around enforcing law they did not like.

But Obama is a Constitutional Law lawyer, he is very intelligent and capable, and he is simply not a person to take extreme actions on his own except in extreme situations. That's a major reason we elected him President after this last eight years. In spite of the personal injustices currently still being perpetuated on homosexuals in the military who have for one reason or another been accused or exposed as exemplified by Air Force Lt. Col. Victor Fehrenbach, this is not a broad "extreme situation" that requires immediate Presidential action that violates the law. Obama is going to apply the Rule of Law, unlike the previous administration. He's right. Congressional action is required.

What Bob Gates is describing is the only set of executive branch actions that can alleviate any of the injustices prior to Congressional action, unless the courts provide an injunction stopping the current enforcement of DADT. The legal backing for such an injunction is either absent or supports the banning of homosexuals, so court action is not on the horizon. This is the best possible action possible prior to the necessary action by Congress. So Congress is where everyone should focus their wrath.

Media? Are you listening? Grow up and get it right. There's nothing complicated about this.

This one of my "Rule of Law" posts. The Rule of Law, together with the U.S. Constitution, are core to what it means to be "an American."I don't think we Americans can relegate the enforcement of the Rule of Law to the legal profession alone. The rest of us have to understand it and recognize when it is not being applied.