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While watching President Obama deliver his first State of the Union speech last night I was struck by how comfortable he was standing before Democrats, Republicans, Supreme Court justices, diplomats, and military leaders.  After one year in office, he appeared as though he owned the place.  He looked and sounded like he was meant to be there.  I never sensed that from Bush.  He always looked uncomfortable in those surroundings, and his speech delivery was, well… unnatural.  Perhaps even he realized he really didn’t belong there. 
 
President Obama easily moved from making serious points about jobs, national security, taxes, war, and healthcare reform, to humorous remarks about those same topics.  He also called out both parties in ways I wanted him to, but never expected to hear.  He even scolded the Supreme Court for last week’s ruling that allows corporations to fund political campaigns.

With all due deference to separation of powers, last week the Supreme Court reversed a century of law that I believe will open the floodgates for special interests — including foreign corporations — to spend without limit in our elections. I don’t think American elections should be bankrolled by America’s most powerful interests, or worse, by foreign entities. They should be decided by the American people. And I’d urge Democrats and Republicans to pass a bill that helps to correct some of these problems.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen that done before, but there hasn’t been a ruling by the court as egregious as that one for quite some time. (For further reading and illustrations about how SCOTUS sold our country to the rich, go to Clowncrack.com.)
 
And while asking both parties to reach agreements to pass laws to help the American people, he called out the Democrats:

To Democrats, I would remind you that we still have the largest majority in decades, and the people expect us to solve problems, not run for the hills.

…and the Republicans: 

And if the Republican leadership is going to insist that 60 votes in the Senate are required to do any business at all in this town — a supermajority — then the responsibility to govern is now yours as well.  Just saying no to everything may be good short-term politics, but it’s not leadership.

And while speaking about the budget, the Republicans again:

From some on the right, I expect we’ll hear a different argument — that if we just make fewer investments in our people, extend tax cuts including those for the wealthier Americans, eliminate more regulations, maintain the status quo on health care, our deficits will go away.  The problem is that’s what we did for eight years.  That’s what helped us into this crisis.  It’s what helped lead to these deficits. We can’t do it again.

Obama really is a great orator, and when he spoke about the importance of putting aside petty political games that only further divide us and prevent our nation from moving forward, you really believed him – if you were a Democrat anyway.  We’ll see how the Republicans respond.  I have a feeling that they will remain obstinate, because politics is the only game they know.

Let’s get one thing clear:  the failure of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab to detonate a bomb on an airliner over Detroit on Christmas Day was not only an extremely good piece of luck for the passengers and crew (who deserve credit for their quick thinking and courage), but also for those charged with security in the United States.  Why?  Because it highlighted flaws in the way in which we analyze and use intelligence information that has been collected on potentially dangerous individuals, and in our screening procedures at airports. 

Yet instead of celebrating our good luck we’ve been treated instead to unseemly hand wringing and finger pointing. The sources for most of this, not unexpectedly, are Republicans and the right-wing punditry.  President Obama has been criticized for his delay in making a statement and for not lending it more urgency by not, presumably, sounding sufficiently breathless.  And of course the GOP lost no time trying to make political hay out of it.  Former vice-president Cheney sounds more and more as though he can’t wait for an al-Qaida attack to succeed so that he can begin an endless round of I-told-you-so interviews on prime-time network TV.  He evidently blames Obama for not reacting in the same panicky mode as he did in the wake of 9/11.

The fact is this near miss is a gold mine of an opportunity to improve our intelligence collection and handling procedures, as well as to tighten security screening practices by, for example, speeding the more widespread introduction of newer technology such as full-body scans.

We seem to be missing a couple of essential lessons from this and past incidents.  The first is that no matter how much we may want it, the government cannot guarantee our safety.  I don’t happen to think that explosives sewn into underwear is necessarily a sign that al-Qaida has increased its effectiveness or ingenuity; quite the contrary.  But the fact remains our human protectors will always be fallible and the efficiency of our technology limited.  Big Daddy cannot always protect us.

The second lesson is that maybe Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano was unwittingly correct when she said that the system worked. Part of the “system” has to be us, the ordinary members of the public.  Just as it was the action of passengers and crew that saved that flight over Detroit, and of others who forced the 9/11 hijackers of United Flight 93 to abort their mission to crash into the White House or the Capitol, so we must all realize that we, too, have a role to play in preventing terrorist attacks from succeeding. 

After all the next attack may not come on an airliner at five thousand feet but on a crowded city bus at ground zero.

They aren’t like Republicans.  They would benefit from being more like them in some ways.  This Modern World explains:

And so did Jon Stewart about four minutes into this segment form Monday’s show:

“Mr. President, I can’t tell if you’re a Jedi ten steps ahead of everything or if this this whole health-care thing is kicking your ass just a little bit.  Why is this so hard?  Why can’t you guys just stay on message?  Remember the Bush team?  Little bit of discipline.  Little bit of repetition.  They sold us a war nobody wanted and nobody needed.”

An unusual thing happened today.  The moderate wing of the Republican Party prevailed over the far right wing.  A week after the Republican National Committee drafted a resolution to rename the Democratic Party the Democratic “Socialist” Party, the resolution has been dropped.

The moderates argued that if they passed the resolution, the public would view them as a party so devoid of new ideas that all they can do is resort to petty schoolyard name calling.

RNC Chairman Michael Steele was against the resolution all along.  His side prevailed over the unruly children in his party who still claim that “the proposal was good for the GOP.”

“It has generated the debate we had hoped for,” said Indiana committeeman James Bopp. “It was an effort to educate the American people, and it was successful.”

Yes, it was about as successful as a DNC resolution to rename the Republican Party as the Republican “Fascist” Party would be. 

I’ve made the case a few times on these pages for why the Republicans are fascists, but renaming their party?  Why bother?  They have Rush Limbaugh and Dick Cheney in the spotlights reinforcing my view every day.

Yesterday Arlen Specter announced that he was leaving the Republican Party to join the Democrats with whom he now finds himself more philosophically aligned.  Specter’s statement included:

While I have been comfortable being a Republican, my Party has not defined who I am. I have taken each issue one at a time and have exercised independent judgment to do what I thought was best for Pennsylvania and the nation.

Since my election in 1980, as part of the Reagan Big Tent, the Republican Party has moved far to the right. Last year, more than 200,000 Republicans in Pennsylvania changed their registration to become Democrats. I now find my political philosophy more in line with Democrats than Republicans.

I’ve always thought that Specter, like Lincoln Chafee and Olympia Snowe, were GOOD members of the Republican Party because they provided it with some much needed moderate views.  But as many people have pointed out, there is no room for moderates under the shrinking tent that covers the Rightwingoverse.  Specter saw what happened to Chafee, so he defected to save his Senate seat that he would otherwise first lose to Patrick Toomey, a hard-right Republican challenger, who would in turn lose to the Democratic candidate in 2010. 

Olympia Snowe used a very effective quote from Reagan in her column for the New York Times to explain why the party’s hard line on moderates is a going to make them irrelevant.

When Senator Jeffords became an independent in 2001, I said it was a sad day for the Republicans, but it would be even sadder if we failed to confront and learn from the devaluation of diversity within the party that contributed to his defection. I also noted that we were far from the heady days of 1998, when Republicans were envisioning the possibility of a filibuster-proof 60-vote margin. (Recall that in the 2000 election, most pundits were shocked when Republicans lost five seats, resulting in a 50-50 Senate.)

I could have hardly imagined then that, in 2009, we would fondly reminisce about the time when we were disappointed to fall short of 60 votes in the Senate. Regrettably, we failed to learn the lessons of Jim Jeffords’s defection in 2001. To the contrary, we overreached in interpreting the results of the presidential election of 2004 as a mandate for the party. This resulted in the disastrous elections of 2006 and 2008, which combined for a total loss of 51 Republicans in the House and 13 in the Senate — with a corresponding shift of the Congressional majority and the White House to the Democrats.

…

I have said that, without question, we cannot prevail as a party without conservatives. But it is equally certain we cannot prevail in the future without moderates.

…

Reagan said:  “We should emphasize the things that unite us and make these the only ‘litmus test’ of what constitutes a Republican: our belief in restraining government spending, pro-growth policies, tax reduction, sound national defense, and maximum individual liberty.” He continued, “As to the other issues that draw on the deep springs of morality and emotion, let us decide that we can disagree among ourselves as Republicans and tolerate the disagreement.”

As much as Republicans have worshipped at the altar of Ronald Reagan over the past eight to ten years, you’d think they’d latch on to the key to his strategy that grew their party and gave them power for many years – Tolerance.  I guess today’s Republicans can’t accept any gray in their black-and-white world.

For now, I think that’s a good thing.  As soon as Norm Coleman does the right thing and concedes to Al Franken, the Democrats will have a filibuster proof majority and might be able to push a few important items through congress.  However, since their party is far more tolerant and can accept shades of gray under its tent, I doubt they will be able to garner very many filibuster-proof majorities.

Paul Krugman wrote on his blog about what Specter’s defection means:

… we have a party that seems to be in a death spiral: the smaller it gets, the more it’s dominated by the hard right, which makes it even smaller. In the long run, this is not good for American democracy– we really do need two major parties in competition.  But I’ll settle for getting that back after we get universal health care and cap-and-trade.

Those are both difficult bills to get through Congress without filibuster proof majorities.  I do hope we see both of them enacted during Obama’s first term though.

The economy has been getting worse and worse every day, and while President Obama was juggling with the problems of filling his cabinet positions, minority Republicans in congress seized on the opportunity to play politics with a much needed economic stimulus package.  The “conservatives” who gave us three trillion dollars of added debt during their man’s failed terms as president are now crying foul about spending money right here in the U.S. to create much needed jobs and repair our crumbling infrastructure. 

Paul Krugman explains just what is at stake:

A not-so-funny thing happened on the way to economic recovery. Over the last two weeks, what should have been a deadly serious debate about how to save an economy in desperate straits turned, instead, into hackneyed political theater, with Republicans spouting all the old clichés about wasteful government spending and the wonders of tax cuts.

It’s as if the dismal economic failure of the last eight years never happened — yet Democrats have, incredibly, been on the defensive. Even if a major stimulus bill does pass the Senate, there’s a real risk that important parts of the original plan, especially aid to state and local governments, will have been emasculated.

Somehow, Washington has lost any sense of what’s at stake — of the reality that we may well be falling into an economic abyss, and that if we do, it will be very hard to get out again.

It’s hard to exaggerate how much economic trouble we’re in. The crisis began with housing, but the implosion of the Bush-era housing bubble has set economic dominoes falling not just in the United States, but around the world.

…

So what should Mr. Obama do? Count me among those who think that the president made a big mistake in his initial approach, that his attempts to transcend partisanship ended up empowering politicians who take their marching orders from Rush Limbaugh. What matters now, however, is what he does next.

It’s time for Mr. Obama to go on the offensive. Above all, he must not shy away from pointing out that those who stand in the way of his plan, in the name of a discredited economic philosophy, are putting the nation’s future at risk. The American economy is on the edge of catastrophe, and much of the Republican Party is trying to push it over that edge.

Krugman and several other columnist were wondering when Obama “the orator” was going to speak passionately about why congress needs to pass the bill right now.  Obama answered the call last night:

NYT article here:

“Don’t come to the table with the same tired arguments and worn ideas that helped to create this crisis,” Mr. Obama told a gathering of House Democrats in Williamsburg, Va., referring to Republican demands for more tax cuts.

“We are not going to get relief by turning back to the very same policies that for the last eight years doubled the national debt and threw our economy into a tailspin,” Mr. Obama said. “We can’t embrace the losing formula that says only tax cuts will work for every problem we face, that ignores critical challenges like our addiction to foreign oil, or the soaring cost of health care, or falling schools and crumbling bridges and roads and levees.”

…

“The scale and scope of this plan is right.  If we do not move swiftly,” the president said, “an economy that is in crisis will be faced with catastrophe.”  He added, “Millions more Americans will lose their jobs. Homes will be lost. Families will go without health care. Our crippling dependence on foreign oil will continue.  That is the price of inaction.”

Republicans, including John McCain will have none of it.  They have but one solution for every economic problem:  Tax Cuts. 

Republican efforts to drastically alter the package, by eliminating huge blocks of spending in place of expanded tax cuts, continued Thursday morning as Senator McCain proposed yet another substitute bill, including a plan to slash corporate and personal income taxes.  Democrats defeated his proposal and others.

John McCain needs to go back and watch his own speech that he gave on the night of November 4, 2008 – His CONCESSION speech, the one where he said:

“The American people have spoken, and they have spoken clearly.”

That’s right Johnny.  You lost.. by a lot.  The American people did speak clearly. They are tired of the Republicans’ failed economic policies that favor only the very richest among us.  In fact, even the very richest among us are tired of the reckless Republican tax cuts.  Here’s a snippet from a column that Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix, wrote for the New York Times today:

I’m the chief executive of a publicly traded company and, like my peers, I’m very highly paid. The difference between salaries like mine and those of average Americans creates a lot of tension, and I’d like to offer a suggestion. President Obama should celebrate our success, rather than trying to shame us or cap our pay. But he should also take half of our huge earnings in taxes, instead of the current one-third.

Then, the next time a chief executive earns an eye-popping amount of money, we can cheer that half of it is going to pay for our soldiers, schools and security. Higher taxes on huge pay days can finance opportunity for the next generation of Americans.

So take note people.  If we want to get this economy back on track, the government needs to start spending money right now on projects that will put people back to work and improve our future economic prospects.  How will we pay for it?  By raising taxes on the very richest among us who got a free ride while Bush added trillions to our national debt.

Hillary Clinton is a much better former candidate for president than she was a candidate for president. 

While listening to last night’s speech, I was convinced for the first time that she really would make a good president, and she really does have strong leadership qualities.

I could not help but think that if she had campaigned for herself instead of campaigning against Obama, she could very well have ended up with the nomination.  Her campaign’s mean-spirited attacks against Obama were what brought her down.

But that’s all behind us.  Now she is campaigning as I thought she always should have:  She’s emphasizing the differences between the party platform by pointing out the differences between the Democrats and the Republicans, and attacking John McCain for his wrongheaded support of failed Bush policies, and she’s promoting the better plans that her party supports.

And to all those Hillary supporters who say they’d rather vote for McCain than Obama, I thought she nailed it with:

I want you — I want you to ask yourselves: Were you in this campaign just for me, or were you in it for that young Marine and others like him?

Were you in it for that mom struggling with cancer while raising her kids?

Were you in it for that young boy and his mom surviving on the minimum wage?

Were you in it for all the people in this country who feel invisible?

We need leaders once again who can tap into that special blend of American confidence and optimism that has enabled generations before us to meet our toughest challenges, leaders who can help us show ourselves and the world that with our ingenuity, creativity, and innovative spirit, there are no limits to what is possible in America.

…

We don’t have a moment to lose or a vote to spare. Nothing less than the fate of our nation and the future of our children hangs in the balance.

…

That is our mission, Democrats. Let’s elect Barack Obama and Joe Biden for that future worthy of our great country.

She really delivered a great speech, and I am looking forward to hearing more from her during the next couple of months.

I came across this anti-Democrat shirt over on This Modern World.

Hilarious isn’t it?

I’ve written many posts about how mean and nasty the Republicans are, but making a joke of using Democrats for target practice?  Pretty sick.

Just this week the chairman of the Arkansas Democratic Party was shot and killed by a wacko with a gun, so I figured there was no way that these shirts would still be for sale – that even a Republican seller of “humorous” t-shirts would come to his senses and, given the recent murder, recognize the shirts were in bad taste and pull them from his site.  So I followed the link and, … the shirts are still for sale.

In fairness I searched around for similar anti-Republican merchandise.  I found this site, but there’s no merchandise that makes light of Democrats to killing Republicans.

More than two and a half years after the disclosure of President’s Bush’s domestic eavesdropping program set off a furious national debate, the Senate gave final approval on Wednesday afternoon to broadening the government’s spy powers and providing legal immunity for the phone companies that took part in the wiretapping program.

Barack Obama voted FOR the bill even though while he campaigned for the Democratic nomination he repeatedly said that he would not support a bill that gave retroactive immunity to the telephone companies. 

And I was just about to send him some money…  I recently read this comment in an Ostertag column on The Huffington Post :  “Senator Obama, you can tap my phone or my wallet, but not both.”  Couldn’t have said it better.

Back to the story:

“The law itself is a massive intrusion into the due process rights of all of the phone subscribers who would be a part of the suit,” said Bruce Afran, a New Jersey lawyer who represents several hundred plaintiffs in one lawsuit against Verizon and other companies. “It is a violation of the separation of powers. It’s presidential election-year cowardice. The Democrats are afraid of looking weak on national security.”

So instead of appearing weak on national security (in whose eyes?) the Democrats appear weak on Freedom and Liberty.  Way to go Dems!  Way to stand up for the Constitution and everything our country USED to stand for.

Makes me sick…

I came across the poster at the top of this post in another NYT article about a collecitve work by sixty artists that produced giant posters for an exhibition titled “Thoughts on Democracy,” a modern day response to Norman Rockwell’s “Four Freedoms” series based on Franklin Roosevelt’s 1941 speech to congress.

Our freedoms and liberties have been stolen from us at an alarming pace since 9-11, and today’s captitulation by Obama and his party to the fear-mongering Bush Republicans seems to me like a capper on the whole sickening process. 

It’s a perfect day to publish a story about the “Thoughts on Democracy” artwork, because our democracy is failing, and people should stop and think about it.  But will they?

It is Sunday afternoon at the Aventura Mall in South Florida, and I’ve come to gauge the impact of a handful of images displayed in 14-foot-high posters near Nordstrom.

…

In the mall at least, the artists’ instincts seemed to be borne out. In an hour and a half, more than 100 people walked by the exhibit. Only 8 stopped to look.

“People don’t care anymore,” said David Babich, 31, one of the few who lingered, gazing at the prints. “They aren’t as affected by stuff that happens.”

Kiss the Fist of Democracy

We have a presumptive nominee for the Democratic nomination for the office of President of the United States of America.  His name is Barack Obama. 

Most of us recognized him as the winner of the Democratic primary contest well over a month ago.  Last night he secured the number of delegates necessary to win the nomination. 

Or did he?  Clinton gave a speech last night but she did not recognize him as the winner and concede.  Instead we heard this:

Who will be ready to take back the White House and take charge as Commander-in-Chief and lead our country to better tomorrows?  People in all fifty states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and the territories, all had a chance to make your voices heard and on Election Day after Election Day, you came out in record numbers to cast your ballots.  Nearly eighteen million of you cast your votes for our campaign, carrying the popular vote with more votes than any primary candidate in history.  Even when the pundits and the naysayers proclaimed week after week that this race was over, you kept on voting.

Followed by a lot of “I,” “I,” “I… ” and finally:

This has been a long campaign, and I will be making no decisions tonight.

Hillary is STILL claiming that that she received more votes than any other primary candidate in history.  The only way she can make that claim is to count only the votes for her in Michigan and not give any of the “other” votes to Obama – a ridiculous assertion that basically says there were no Obama voters in Michigan – and to not count the caucus states’ votes, again… ridiculous.

Go here and you will see that Obama won the popular vote by any reasonable method of counting votes.  More importantly he won more delegates, and that’s what matters.

So why did Hillary spin her tired old yarn in last night’s speech?  I can think of only one reason:  To discredit the winner.

And about that “Who will be ready?” bullshit?  Not her!  She won’t be participating in the general election for president. 

Has anybody told her she lost?  Seriously.  You’ve got to wonder…

There were two other speeches last night.  Here’s what John McCain said in New Orleans:

Pundits and party elders have declared that Senator Obama will be my opponent.  He will be a formidable one. But I’m ready for the challenge and determined to run this race in a way that does credit to our campaign and to the proud, decent and patriotic people I ask to lead.

…

When Americans confront a catastrophe they have a right to expect basic competence from their government… Our disgraceful failure to do so here in New Orleans exposed the incompetence of government at all levels to meet even its most basic responsibilities.

The wrong change looks not to the future but to the past for solutions that have failed us before and will surely fail us again.  I have a few years on my opponent, so I am surprised that a young man has bought in to so many failed ideas. Like others before him, he seems to think government is the answer to every problem; that government should take our resources and make our decisions for us.  That type of change doesn’t trust Americans to know what is right or what is in their own best interests.  It’s the attitude of politicians who are sure of themselves but have little faith in the wisdom, decency and common sense of free people. That attitude created the unresponsive bureaucracies of big government in the first place.  And that’s not change we can believe in.

What?  Hey John!  Do you know what the government is?  It’s “We the People,” and we ARE the ones that have to find solutions to our problems.  We on the Left have chosen Obama as our candidate because we think he best represents OUR ideas for solving the many problems we face today.  When he is elected president, he will be making decisions based on what all Americans think is in their own best interests.  

Mr. McCain, you are being extremely cynical when you say your opponent has “bought in to so many failed ideas.”  You mentioned the “disgraceful” failure of the Bush Administration’s response to Hurricane Katrina.  The government failed because it wasn’t a government of the people headed by a president who represented the people.  It was a government who’s primary mission was to return favors by appointing cronies and giving away billions to the rich people that got him “elected.” 

And what about that twisted first sentence of the second paragraph above:  “The wrong change looks not to the future but to the past for solutions that have failed us before and will surely fail us again.”

Are you suggesting the president should not look to the past?  Are you crazy?  Whoever is elected president must surely look to the past to see what types of policies worked and what types of policies failed.    The successful policies of the past are good starting points fore developing new solutions for today’s problems.  The policies that worked in the past should not be ignored.

Now to the main event.  Obama’s victory speech.  If you missed it, go watch it or read it now. 

Here’s the part of it that I thought was a great response to McCain’s “government is not the answer” bullshit.

So it has been for every generation that faced down the greatest challenges and the most improbable odds to leave their children a world that’s better and kinder and more just.

And so it must be for us.

America, this is our moment.  This is our time, our time to turn the page on the policies of the past, our time to bring new energy and new ideas to the challenges we face, our time to offer a new direction for this country that we love.

The journey will be difficult. The road will be long.  I face this challenge — I face this challenge with profound humility and knowledge of my own limitations, but I also face it with limitless faith in the capacity of the American people.

He needs to keep making these types  of speeches to remind people that he really does represent something different from the status quo, and that it’s not just him that will turn things around, it’s us, and he will lead the way.

There’s a lot of work to do between now and November.  He will be hammered by the mean, nasty, hypocritical R’s.  There will be rough times in the next six months, but when he comes out of them, he needs to return to what he said tonight.  There will be plenty of opportunites to flesh out the details of his platform, and he’ll have to make convincing speeches and win some tough debates to show the Democrats have a better plan.  But now he now has the entire Democratic party behind him (Let’s hope Clinton makes a gracious exit soon… ) so he should be able to tap the best (dare I say elite?) minds of the party, and run an unbeatable campaign.