Commentary and analysis on American politics, culture, and national identity, U.S. foreign policy and international relations, and the state of education
- from a neoconservative perspective! - Keeping an eye on the communist-left so you don't have to!
Check the video at about 2:45 minutes. We have "Coffee Party" founder Annabel Park claiming that "Democracy isn't supposed to be about two teams fighting ... it is community of people advancing common good."
Well, that's an odd definition of democracy (since, for example, political scientists consider two party competition, er, fighting, as essential to democratic government). But check Ed's additional comments on the hypocrisy.
Do you think Washington Democrats are taking you seriously?
I think last Saturday was a turning point because we had over 350 parties across the country with thousands attending. There were events in nearly every state including Wasilla, Alaska. These are real people and our movement is real. They also need to know that we are not getting to just talk. We are going to fight for representation.
Right.
I followed the "coffee parties" over the weekend, and at most we saw maybe 40 people turn out for any individual event.
Check the rest of the interview. As we've seen so many times, grassroots protests is only legit if you're a leftist.
Midnight Blue has some great screencaps and commentary on the "upstart" coffee partiers. See, "This is War – Coffee vs. Tea."
I guess all that talk of "civility" didn't work out so great.
It was inevitable after the popular and critical success of their 2001 World War II miniseries "Band of Brothers," which told the story of the drive to conquer Hitler and Mussolini, that executive producers Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg would return to finish the job. “The Pacific,” which tells the story of the war against Japan, is here -- it begins Sunday on HBO -- and is its forerunner's equal in emotive strength, weird poetry and technical bravura; it is also, if memory of the first series serves, an even more brutal and unnerving experience, appropriate to a war fought in tropical extremes against an enemy for whom surrender was not an option ...
RTWT.
Did you watch it last night? I don't think fans of Spielberg need to worry, despite Hanks' intemperate remarks the other day. The film might even be better than its predecessor, as LAT notes at the link above. And the soldiers at the film talk about killing those "slant-eyed Japs" so many times I doubt folks'll have to worry about extreme PC sensibilities. No one makes war movies like Steven Spielberg. I'm so grateful we have him out there keeping a record of what went down nearly 70 years ago.
I somehow wish HBO could have scheduled two hours every Sunday. The feel is that you're really just get warmed up with some action and then the credits roll ...
There's conflicting reports as to the veracity of Perry's dispatch. U.S. military personnel are denying basic elements of the account (on Petraeus), so there's certainly bound to be some additional fireworks. But note Perry's takeoff on the left's "Israel lobby" smear:
There are important and powerful lobbies in America: the NRA, the American Medical Association, the lawyers -- and the Israeli lobby. But no lobby is as important, or as powerful, as the U.S. military. While commentators and pundits might reflect that Joe Biden's trip to Israel has forever shifted America's relationship with its erstwhile ally in the region, the real break came in January, when David Petraeus sent a briefing team to the Pentagon with a stark warning: America's relationship with Israel is important, but not as important as the lives of America's soldiers. Maybe Israel gets the message now.
I have been informed by insiders that the author of this piece, Mark Perry, is a former adviser to Yasser Arafat and is now director of the Conflicts Forum, which advocates talking to Hamas and Hezbullah. In other words, he has an agenda.
I have also been informed that Petraeus' people deny the story completely, although my source for that is a high profile blogger who heard it from a reporter.
We've been hearing the theory that the timing of Hezbollah's Tuesday kidnapping of the two Israeli Defense Force soldiers was planned well in advance and with coordination from Tehran or Damascus. Can you speak to that?
Oy vey. There are a lot of people in Washington trying to walk that story back right now, because it's not true.
Hezbollah and Israel stand along this border every day observing each other through binoculars and waiting for an opportunity to kill each other. They are at war. They have been for 25 years, no one ever declared a cease-fire between them. … They stand on the border every day and just wait for an opportunity. And on Tuesday morning there were two Humvees full of Israeli soldiers, not under observation from the Israeli side, not under covering fire, sitting out there all alone. The Hezbollah militia commander just couldn't believe it -- so he went and got them.
The Israeli captain in charge of that unit knew he had really screwed up, so he sent an armored personnel carrier to go get them in hot pursuit, and Hezbollah led them right through a minefield.
Now if you're sitting in Tehran or Damascus or Beirut, and you are part of the terrorist Politburo so to speak, you have a choice. With your head sunk in your hands, thinking "Oh my God," you can either give [the kidnapped soldiers] back and say "Oops, sorry, wrong time" or you can say, "Hey, this is war."
It is absolutely ridiculous to believe that the Hezbollah commander on the ground said Tuesday morning, "Go get two Israeli soldiers, would you please?”
But, you make it sound like a dog with a squirrel, like there's no free will. Like the temptation for Hezbollah to kidnap the Israeli soldiers because there was an opportunity suddenly on Tuesday was somehow irresistible. Why did they have to go get them?
They are at war. Israel says they want to go get and destroy Hezbollah every day. Israel occupied their country for how many years?
But Israel withdrew from Lebanon a few years ago.
Let's propose it was unprovoked. Israel has now said it is in a state of war against Lebanon. Fine. The fact is that it happens to be at war then against our ally, the government in Lebanon that the we [the U.S. government] set up, is being ignored here. The U.S. and Israel are at cross purposes.
Perry's obviously putting the lie to Hezbollah's military offensive against Israel in July 2006. This guy's a piece of work.
Diane Ravitch makes an extremely interesting point at the conclusion of her piece last week at WSJ, "Why I Changed My Mind About School Reform." She criticizes the Bush administration's NCLB for instigating a race-to-the-bottom in lax standards dumbing down schools, and she warns that educational choice through private school vouchers risks making public education even worse than it is. But most importantly, and most worrisome, "we are not producing a generation of students who are more knowledgable, and better prepared for the responsibilities of citizenship."
In the meantime, there was an interesting essay a couple of weeks ago at NYT: "Building a Better Teacher," by Elizabeth Green. It's a lengthy piece, but the introduction relates to my discussion above:
ON A WINTER DAY five years ago, Doug Lemov realized he had a problem. After a successful career as a teacher, a principal and a charter-school founder, he was working as a consultant, hired by troubled schools eager — desperate, in some cases — for Lemov to tell them what to do to get better. There was no shortage of prescriptions at the time for how to cure the poor performance that plagued so many American schools ...
Lemov himself pushed for data-driven programs that would diagnose individual students’ strengths and weaknesses. But as he went from school to school that winter, he was getting the sinking feeling that there was something deeper he wasn’t reaching. On that particular day, he made a depressing visit to a school in Syracuse, N.Y., that was like so many he’d seen before: “a dispiriting exercise in good people failing,” as he described it to me recently. Sometimes Lemov could diagnose problems as soon as he walked in the door. But not here. Student test scores had dipped so low that administrators worried the state might close down the school. But the teachers seemed to care about their students. They sat down with them on the floor to read and picked activities that should have engaged them. The classes were small. The school had rigorous academic standards and state-of-the-art curriculums and used a software program to analyze test results for each student, pinpointing which skills she still needed to work on.
But when it came to actual teaching, the daily task of getting students to learn, the school floundered. Students disobeyed teachers’ instructions, and class discussions veered away from the lesson plans. In one class Lemov observed, the teacher spent several minutes debating a student about why he didn’t have a pencil. Another divided her students into two groups to practice multiplication together, only to watch them turn to the more interesting work of chatting. A single quiet student soldiered on with the problems. As Lemov drove from Syracuse back to his home in Albany, he tried to figure out what he could do to help. He knew how to advise schools to adopt a better curriculum or raise standards or develop better communication channels between teachers and principals. But he realized that he had no clue how to advise schools about their main event: how to teach.
And that's the gist of the essay: How to create the better teacher, but especially, what constitutes good teaching? And if you skim down the article, Green notesthat more than 1 out of 10 professors of education have never set foot in a classroom. "Even some methods professors have never set foot in a classroom or have not done so recently." The statistics aren't alarmingly high in and of themselves. They speak more to the school of education production model that drives the teaching profession, and radically privileges "progressive" models of instruction and learning. The piece cites Diane Ravitch there as well, where she argues that the focus of "teachers' colleges" and "schools of education" subordinate substantive knowledge to methods, and thus create a "contentless curriculum."
I'll just add, first, that I'm in sympathy with Left Coast Rebel's sentiments on the Obama plan: "It will just be more centralization and federal control when the educational system needs the opposite - more local control and privatization." But second, I'm also concerned that even the best privatization and voucher programs will leave the disadvantaged with continued struggles (see another essay on that from Dianne Ravitch, today at LAT) -- and more, I'm skeptical that Obama's even serious about the schools; and mostly, I see society's larger cultural collapse as an enormity that the schools alone can't handle. Increasing wireless communications in the classroom, combined with a gangsta-loving anti-intellectualism among large numbers of kids, makes holding student attention nearly impossible nowadays. I don't have the answers, obviously. But any effort to increase local control has to be tied with a fundamental rethinking of the role of families in education. How do you get administrators, teachers, parents, and kids on the same page? In recent weeks I've seen school administrators worrying about the economy and the very survival of their campuses. I've seen teachers unions worried about nothing more than maintaining fat paychecks -- way fatter, on average, than the private sector workers paying taxes to the state. I've heard little discussion of a new 21st century culture of learning. What's the model for that? We sure need one. Kids are literally being chewed-up on the streets of the urban crisis.
More on this later, much more ...
At the video, John Houseman as Professor Charles Kingsfield. (I love the case study -- Socratic -- method and I've had good success with it ...)
Aqualung wasn't a concept album, although a lot of people thought so. The idea came about from a photograph my wife at the time took of a tramp in London. I had feelings of guilt about the homeless, as well as fear and insecurity with people like that who seem a little scary. And I suppose all of that was combined with a slightly romanticized picture of the person who is homeless but yet a free spirit, who either won't or can't join in society's prescribed formats.
So from that photograph and those sentiments, I began writing the words to 'Aqualung.' I can remember sitting in a hotel room in L.A., working out the chord structure for the verses. It's quite a tortured tangle of chords, but it was meant to really drag you here and there and then set you down into the more gentle acoustic section of the song.
Sun streaking cold -- an old man wandering lonely. Taking time the only way he knows. Leg hurting bad, as he bends to pick a dog end he goes down to the bog and warms his feet.
Feeling alone -- the army's up the road salvation a la mode and a cup of tea. Aqualung my friend -- don't you start away uneasy you poor old sod, you see, it's only me.
Aqualung my friend -- don't you start away uneasy you poor old sod, you see, it's only me. Whoa ...
Indeed, if the New York Times in fact remains the country's "unofficial newspaper of record," I'd say the reports of the death of the media's love affair with Obama are premature:
You might say that NYT's still into the whole "lightworker" deal.
I noticed the "enlightened" image this morning, but Pamela didn't delay busting the Times' Obama-worshipers. See, "Oganda."
Not only is this bill too radical for the American people, it’s too radical for even some Democrats in Congress. But that has not convinced Pelosi and Obama to withdraw it, or to start working with opponents to find some common-sense compromises to reform the cost structure of health care in America. Instead, Nancy Pelosi has decided to attack the structure of representative government by attempting to pass the Senate version of ObamaCare without a floor vote in the House. That’s how desperate the nanny-staters are to defy you and saddle America with a government overhaul of our health care system that we don’t want.
The House's chief Democratic headcounter said Sunday he hadn't rounded up enough votes to pass President Barack Obama's health care overhaul heading into a make-or-break week, even as the White House's top political adviser said he was "absolutely confident" in its prospects.
The administration gave signs of retreating on demands that senators jettison special home-state deals sought by individual lawmakers that have angered the public.
White House spokesman Robert Gibbs predicted House passage this week, before Obama travels to Asia, a trip he postponed to push for the bill.
"This is the week where we will have this important vote," Gibbs said. "I do think this is the climactic week for health care reform."
Actually, folks don't want this legislation, depite the misinformation being spewed by David "Astroturf" Axelrod, SusieMadrak, or any other leftist totalitarian. It ain't happening, at least not through the democratic process.
Yesterday was supposed to be the big break-out day for the "coffee party" movement. Recall Annabel Park, the sleazy Obamabotwho launched this nouveau initiative to mimic the success of the conservative tea parties. Well, so far we've got reports of at most dozens of people who've made it out to "coffee party" rallies around the nation.
Participants in the meeting signed a civility pledge and read the preamble to the U.S . Constitution together, before breaking up into discussion groups to discuss ways of moving forward.
The Coffee Party is planning additional events in the near future and is looking to expand its message of civil discourse and progress towards real solutions.
Still, with all due respect, this is just pathetic. I've been organizing for almost a year with folks in the tea parties. Our movement is a response to creeping tyranny and the destruction of individualism. And what's been the response on the left? To shut down the tea parties as "racist", "fascist," and "terrorist." You can't call for civility when the response to spontaneous protest in authoritarianism.
"We have to stop the mantra of no taxes, no taxes, no taxes," said Marcia Halpern of Palm Beach Gardens.
A few of the issues could have come straight from a tea party gathering, including criticism of the media and calls for term limits and for publicizing congressional earmarks.
Papison and several others said they hope to foster civil political debate.
But Art Brownstein of West Palm Beach, who described himself as a lifelong Democrat and a Vietnam vet, said civility has its limits.
"Sometimes it bothers me when the word 'civility' comes up," said Brownstein, who said people on "the other side....are not civil to us."
Brownstein, who is white, said "white southerners in this country are going nuts" because of the popularity of black figures like President Obama and Oprah Winfrey. He said he raised the issue because "you have to know who your enemy is."
Alana Milich, a high school teacher from Boynton Beach, agreed with Brownstein.
"The foundation of all of this is racism," said Milich, who is white.
Mary Castronuovo of Palm Beach Gardens said she doesn't want the coffee party to be defined by its criticism of the tea party.
"I would be discouraged if this group became just a counter to the tea party," she said. "We can't make them the enemy."
Sorry, Mary Castronuovo, it's too late. The "coffee parties" are explicitly anti-tea party, or they wouldn't have adopted an alternative beverage for their identity. The fact is, leftists have lost the momentum from campaign 2008. That was an absolute phenomenon of popular participation and rejection of Republican Party rule. But the shoe's on the other foot now. The tide has turned dramatically away for the Obama administration and its statist agenda. There's not going to be much more for the coffee partiers to do but attack conservatives as "raaacist" It's all Democrats have had so far, and we'll see a lot more of that going forward. These folks are desperate.
The president talks a good game, but toward the end of the clip he compares education reform to initiatives for "improving the economy, the health care system, and encouraging innovations in energy and other growth industries of the 21st century":
But we already have preview of how this administration views our children's hopes for the future. Recall my entry last May, "Don't Abandon Me, Mr. President!!" The administration dashed the hopes of inner city kids in the nation's capital when he abandoned the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship program. This was heart-wrenching slap in the face to families who really could use some "hope and change." Mary Katherine Ham reported on this at the time, "Obama Administration Picks New Way to Cop Out on Opportunity Scholarships."
So all of this is good to know when considering the administration's new education initiative out this week. See the Los Angeles Times, "Obama Seeks to Overhaul No Child Left Behind":
President Obama said he would send to Congress on Monday a blueprint for overhauling the nation's education program and the No Child Left Behind project to improve schools, support teachers and set standards that would give high school graduates "the best chance to succeed in a changing world."
Worried that the U.S. is falling behind in education, Obama warned Saturday in his weekly address that "the nation that out-educates us today will out-compete us tomorrow."
He said America had "lost ground" over the last several decades, pointing to 15-year-olds who no longer are near the top in math and science compared with their peers around the world, high school graduation rates that have lagged behind most other wealthy countries, and a United States that no longer leads the world in producing college graduates.
"Unless we step up, unless we take action," Obama said, "there are countless children who will never realize their full talent and potential."
In the Republican response to the president's remarks, Sen. Scott Brown of Massachusetts said Obama, in the first year of his administration, had spent too much time and energy on healthcare and other issues and not enough on trying to end the recession.
Brown said that "an entire year has gone to waste. Millions of Americans have lost their jobs, and many more jobs are in danger. Even now, the president still hasn't gotten the message."
I'll have more on education issues tonight, and will append an update here. The president means well, but until we deal with the deeper culture of anti-intellectualism we'll continue to wallow in mediocrity.
Patrick left links to nearly half-a-dozen "Purple Haze" videos, the first one below is live from Atlanta in 1970:
Actually, I'm quite open to suggestions for music posts. But why Patrick's "shock" at seeing a Hendrix video in the sidebar? It's no big deal. The dude obviously should spend some time visiting AmPow before going off!
I've been around the rock-and-roll block a few times, eh?
Not only that, I can't stand paleocons, actually. So, advance demerits for that.
In any, case, I've got a broad range of musical interests, as readers know. You name it, from punk and rockabilly to new wave techno-pop to '60s-era pyschedelic and '70s-era corporate rock to '90s-era grunge to heartland and blues. I'm learning more all the time as well, and it certainly helps to have a teenager who's totally plugged into iTunes all the time!
And I'll tell you, I went to high school in the '70s, and Jimi was big with some my homies. I shifted, by graduation, to power-pop, British punk, and L.A. hardcore, but you never forget the early influences. That said, Patrick whines a lot about not getting FMJA links, so I'll toss him a bone. Nice videos as well, although I quite dig that one at the sidebar -- obviously an early rendition of "Purple Haze," raw in its styling and percussion.
Patrick's other Hendrix links are below: I've listened all of them, and they're awesome. I like the Atlanta clip best, which I've embedded at top; but Hendrix live at the Isle of Wight is at the first link below. That's pretty cool:
At for the sidebar video, I can just dig the raw sound, and I get a kick out of Mitch Mitchell on drums. So, no apologies. Worry about your own blog circling the drain, buddy.
In his essay, "Vile Conservative Thought About Euthanasia," Ron Chusid once again assures readers that he's got the superior knowledge to make sense of the issues of the day, and to make hash out of those "stupid" conservatives purported to be flailing away on the current ideological/political issues in debate:
One problem with discourse between liberals and conservatives is that conservatives have zero understanding of what liberals actually believe. The modern liberal movement has largely developed from a merger of traditional liberal thought with a reaction to the authoritarianism and denial of science and reason by the right wing in recent years. Conservatives, who tend to be mislead on so many subjects, tend to believe the distortions of liberal thought promoted by the right wing noise machine and comments about liberals from the right tend to have virtually nothing to do with actual liberal thought.
Ron's taking a whack at Dan Riehl's essay "Isn't It Time To Euthanize Reid's Wife?", now trending at Memeorandum. Readers should check the links. It's a tempest in a teapot, really. Dan made a Jonathan Swift attack on the Democrats, who have shown repeatedly that they couldn't care less about human life (as it relates to abortion politics in particular). Dan snarked about how Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's wife was "pretty well used up and has probably been living off the taxpayers for plenty of years to begin with." Looking at this in cost/benefit terms (Nancy Pelosi's especially, since the House Speaker claims that abortion services are cost-effective budget items in Obama's health program), perhaps Landra Reid medical care was rationally inefficient?
Again, check Memeorandum for the outrage. I want to stick with Ron Chusid. Ron's blog is called "Liberal Values," and while one might think that he'd be a proponent of "classical liberalism" (with its stress on free markets and individual liberty), the guy has twisted political ideology into some strange brew of progressive leftism that masquerades as enlightened thought. Indeed, I meant to write something about Ron earlier, but ran out of time. He wrote an essay a couple of weeks ago that was so bad that I'm almost moved to suggest he hang up his keyboard for blogging malpractice. The post was titled, "Coffee Party Makes Tea Party Supporters Jittery." The title alone should send up some red flags. No conservatives are getting jitters over the "coffee party" parasites. These people are Obamabot Astroturfers, and Annabel Park is a radical left-wing hack. If any one's got the jitters, it's Ms. Park. I posted on her coffee party YouTube when her story hit WaPo a few weeks back, and she was jonesing for some attention. The fact is that the tea parties have captured the mantle of grassroots activism today; and the left -- now that it's in power and failing -- is hoping for a way to recapture some momentum. I actually feel kinda bad for them in that sense. They've definitely got to get some mojo working before November.
But Ron Chusid's problems are deeper than blog-post propaganda titles. He's seriously ignorant about the ideological basis of the tea parties, and he makes some really awful historical analogies. He's doing whatever readership he has a great disservice. He notes, for example:
The Coffee Party has many conservatives upset. One of the more irrational attacks on it comes from the Legal Insurrection blog. The attack begins:
The Coffee Party is a political parasite which presents itself as something it is not…
The author figured out that the Coffee Party really is a put down on the Tea Party. Wow Sherlock, next you are going to question whether Rick really went to Casablanca for the waters perhaps even figure out that there was some gambling going on? I’m afraid that, as with many conservatives, this type of satire is just going totally over his head.
The post as written is quite nonsensical but perhaps the worst irony here is to try to support the Tea Party by complaining that a critic is something it is not. There are few if any prominent groups which pretend to be something they are not than the Tea Party.
Worst of all, the Tea Party pretends to be something it is not when it uses imagery of the American Revolution. The Revolution was a classic battle between liberalism and conservatism, and in any analogy to the American Revolution the Republicans are the Tories.
Let me go item by item here: First: William Jacobson delivered a crushing rebuke to the "coffee parties" at the post cited by Ron Chusid. These people have foisted themselves off as some spontaneous grassroots reaction to the tea party movement, and William dug around a bit to reveal Annabel Park's substantial ties to the Obama presidential campaign and the radical left's netroots establishment. None of this is mentioned by Ron, which clearly impugns his little snarky asides he's reduced to uttering.
Second: Ron criticizes the tea parties for pretending to be something that they are not. His evidence? Well, first of all are these bogus claims suggesting that President Obama "cut taxes." Of course, this is the real nonsense. As I showed in my essay, "Obama Didn't Cut Taxes." the administration has handed out "tax rebate" checks but has NOT cut marginal tax rates. Basically, it's a gimmick, and in fact, the Democrats are expected to raises taxes to finance the healthcare reform, so Obama's claim that he's cutting taxes for 95 percent of Americans is a blatant lie.
Third is this claim that tea partiers are actually protesting against budget deficits that are the fault of "George Bush and the Republican Party." Now this is just a patent lie by Ron Chusid. Yeah, the U.S. ran large deficits under 8 years of out-of-control government spending, and that's while the Bush administration fought the war on terror and wars in Afghanistan and Iraq with bipartisan votes in Congress. But, while deficits did increase during the Bush years, the projected fiscal explosion of the Democratic Obama administration is unprecedented. Even the mainstream press took Obama to task."See the Wall Street Journal, "Obama Submits Largest Budget in History, But Networks Portray Him as Fiscal Conservative." And according to another piece at WSJ:
As for the deficit, CBO shows that over the first three years of the Obama Presidency, 2009-2011, the federal government will borrow an estimated $3.7 trillion. That is more than the entire accumulated national debt for the first 225 years of U.S. history.
By President Obama’s own optimistic projections, American deficits will not return to what are widely considered sustainable levels over the next 10 years. In fact, in 2019 and 2020 — years after Mr. Obama has left the political scene, even if he serves two terms — they start rising again sharply, to more than 5 percent of gross domestic product. His budget draws a picture of a nation that like many American homeowners simply cannot get above water.
Indeed, if that's not enough, we have the widely circulated chart from the Heritage Foundation, popular on conservative blogs when the tea parties took off last year:
And finally, fourth, Ron Chusid argues that "the Tea Party pretends to be something it is not when it uses imagery of the American Revolution," and " in any analogy to the American Revolution the Republicans are the Tories."
This is really awful analysis and reductionist history. Anyone who knows anything about the tea parties is aware that activists have had both parties in the crosshairs. True, we have seen some movement to synthesize the tea parties with the GOP, but key conservative activists have repudiated Republicans who have abandoned tea party principles. Keli Carender, who started anti-big-government protests even before they were called tea parties, was interviewed at New York Times last month. And as she noted there, even Sarah Palin would have to "campaign on Tea Party ideas if she wants Tea Party support," and "... 'if she were elected, she’d have to govern on those principles or be fired'."
And I'm just going to ignore this this patently stupid remark about how the Republicans are the tories."
Ron Chusid needs to get it together. His attacks on conservatives are worse than the routine fever swamp posts at the most disgusting left-wing blogs. He positions himself as some kind of sophisticated analyst with a deep grounding in limited government philosophies. But in the end, his writing amounts to nothing more than uninformed smears and hack jobs, and not very good ones at that.
'They voted for somebody they'd never heard of in Barack Obama because he ran on the platform of a very devoted centrist."
That's the answer from Marco Rubio when asked about his stunning rise to national prominence as a Republican challenger to a popular Republican officeholder in the key electoral state of Florida. Underlying this strange political season, says Mr. Rubio, is the president's rapid uncloaking in office as anything but the postpartisan that voters thought they had elected.
"Within weeks," says Mr. Rubio, "he began trying to implement what appears to everyone else to be the left-of-center politics of the last 50 years, but in a much more aggressive way, using the excuse of a severe economic downturn as justification for growing and in essence redefining the role of government in America."
The 38-year-old former Florida Speaker of the House is a bundle of energy. He rushes in late from dropping his car off at the shop and is due to pick up his kids from school soon. He talks fast and taps his toe even faster. He's challenging Florida Gov. Charlie Crist in the Republican primary to fill the seat of retiring Sen. Mel Martinez, and his ascent has caught a lot of people by surprise.
Mr. Crist, a popular and successful governor, was considered the heavy favorite. He had been on John McCain's vice presidential short list. He had no trouble collecting Republican establishment endorsements for his Senate bid: the National Republican Senatorial Committee, Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, Sens. Jon Kyl, John Cornyn and Lamar Alexander, to name a few.
Mr. Rubio nods when I mention his former longshot status. "When I got into this race, I understood that all the traditional metrics of politics were against us. Name recognition, money, trappings of office, connections, endorsements, you name it.
"Obviously, things have happened outside of our control since then," he smiles.
Rand Paul has run his U.S. Senate campaign as the consummate outsider: a grassroots candidate drawing support from regular Joes and Janes. Now that his candidacy has gained momentum, he's beginning to pick up support from the Republican establishment.
Once dismissed as an oddball and extremist with little chance of being elected to the Senate, Paul is now considered the man to beat in Kentucky. Paul — the son of former Republican presidential candidate and Texas congressman Ron Paul — tried to win favor among state GOP bigwigs Friday by offering his support to Republican congressional candidates in a "take back the House" rally in Lexington.
"With decisions about political support, a lot of people sit on the fence until they are pretty confident of who's going to win," said University of Kentucky political scientist Stephen Voss. "Paul has reached the threshold where a lot of people have decided he's a safe bet."
Paul and his chief rival, Kentucky Secretary of State Trey Grayson, are running for their party's nomination to replace retiring Sen. Jim Bunning, a former major league pitcher enshrined in the National Baseball Hall of Fame. Republican leaders urged Bunning, 78, not to seek a third term, fearing he had become so unpopular he couldn't win.
Grayson was the GOP establishment's early choice, quickly garnering some 65 GOP endorsements and benefiting from a campaign fundraiser in Washington attended by some 20 Republican U.S. senators, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky.
Voss said Paul now is the clear front-runner heading into Kentucky's May 18 primary election, citing numerous polls that show he has amassed a sizable lead with his calls to rein in government spending, stop taxpayer bailouts of private companies and balance the federal budget.
Nine-minute duet with Beyonce already being touted by some as successor to Michael Jackson's Thriller.
With some grunts, G-strings, heavy product placement and an enormous amount of hype, the 21st century's take on feminism and social commentary arrived this week with the video to Lady Gaga and Beyonce's duet, Telephone. Within 12 hours of the video being released on the internet it had half a million hits and nearly as many blogs eagerly dissecting the possible meanings behind the nine-minute video.
Already being touted by some as the successor to Michael Jackson's Thriller, Telephone continues Gaga's tradition of elevating her songs with clever videos. This time she and director Jonas Akerlund have created a melange of Russ Meyers, Quentin Tarantino, Thelma and Louise and the brief incarceration of Paris Hilton to make a film about lesbian murderers, set to the lyrics of a woman complaining about people phoning her in a nightclub.
While Beyonce is clearly the more talented, her brand of sexiness looks dated next to Gaga. Bloggers have been decoding the meaning behind the sunglasses made of cigarettes, but one might just as well try to decipher the dress Gaga once wore made of Kermit the Frogs: she does it because it's funny.
Gaga, never averse to ascribing depths to her work where others might see shallows, has claimed that the video's meaning came from "the idea that America is full of young people that are inundated with information and technology". Her intention, accordingly, was to "turn it into something that was more of a commentary on the kind of country that we are".
There's more at the link. The video, for example, "feels very zeitgeisty."
It's clear that no one in current pop culture can touch Lady Gaga. She's bold and frequently outrageous (recall her blackface fashion turn), and she's both attractive while exotic, and her music's avante garde.
Mostly, though, what does it say about the culture. Music videos are at the leading edge of social hip, but no doubt mainstreaming female prison exploitation for today's youth is ahead of its time. And not even going on about the aggressive profanity -- sheesh!
And to think, I heard this song for the first time just this morning, while driving to pick up a new pair of reading glasses one my boys. They both had already seen the video. That's not how it used to work when I was a kid, but fortunately I'm in the loop -- and I've definitely had a talk with my kids about this. I'm okay with the culture as long as the lines, for them, are bright between fantasy and reality.
Newt Gingrich still relishes stirring the pot of the culture wars.
There he was last month in Akron, Ohio, telling an audience of 300 people that President Obama was out of touch. Why? Because the president did not understand the gut-level appeal of the pickup truck at the center of Scott Brown’s winning campaign to wrest a Massachusetts Senate seat away from the Democrats.
“What if I have to haul a moose?” Mr. Gingrich said, to laughter. “You cannot put a gun rack in the back of a Smart car.”
The audience was enraptured, and many called out for Mr. Gingrich to run for president in 2012. He said in an interview that he was considering it and would make a decision by this time next year.
Of course, Mr. Gingrich, 66, carries substantial political baggage from his downfall as House speaker after the 1998 elections, and even some allies are skeptical that he will run (he opted out in 2008). But even if he is merely playing to the truism that potential presidential candidates garner more attention than noncandidates, he is clearly enjoying a moment back in the limelight.
Shortly after his visit to Akron, Mr. Gingrich spoke at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington. He waded to the lectern across the ballroom floor to the throbbing beat of “Eye of the Tiger,” with lights flashing and thousands of well-wishers shrieking his name. No one else made such a rock-star entrance.
Like Sarah Palin and others who have discovered that they can command a political platform and a good income without running for office, Mr. Gingrich remains relevant by having built himself into a one-man industry churning out speeches, books, films and policy positions. And as the architect of the Republican takeover of the House in 1994, he is much sought after for advice on how to replicate that feat this year.
“People frequently begin a conversation with, ‘Newt called me and said X and thought we should do Y,’ ” said Bill McInturff, a Republican pollster. “He’s a former speaker, former third-in-line to the president, and people respect his energy and ideas.”
Mr. Gingrich knows how to convey ideas in pithy language (“death tax”). He created the “Drill Here, Drill Now, Pay Less” slogan in support of domestic oil drilling that the party adopted in 2008. He helps train candidates on how to run successful campaigns. And his Contract With America, the 1994 document that spelled out the Republican agenda and helped nationalize the Congressional elections, has inspired at least two spinoffs this year — one by House Republicans, the other by the Tea Party movement.
I seriously doubt that many tea partiers will credit Newt Gingrich as an inspiration. And after meeting him in February, my sense is that he's a one-man special interest group looking out for the interests of no one but himself. He talks a great show, but he's cozy with the big monied factions of American politics, and he's all too ready to help moderate/leftists take over the GOP (i.e., Dede Scozzafava). As my friend Grizzly Mama said at my post:
I have been quite shocked at Newt's seemingly new love for the left - what with his coziness with Pelosi and defense of Scozzafava. I'm like, DUDE, what is going ON with you???!!
This whole meme that social conservatives are segregated from the tea parties is a bunch of baloney. Politico offered the poorly sourced article this morning, "Tea Parties Stir Evangelicals' Fears." (See a critique at Gateway Pundit, "Figures. Politico Uses Evangelical Obama Voter In Tea Party Hit Piece.") And tonight the New York Times follows suit with an erroneous but more nuanced essay: "Tea Party Avoids Divisive Social Issues" (at Memeorandum). Fact is, for the past year I've stood on the front lines of the tea parties with folks who are both economic and social conservatives; and while abortion, gay marriage, and other hot-button social questions have genuinely been off the radar, this notion of a huge gulf between purported conservative factions is a leftist canard.
For most of a year, the small-government advocates of the "tea party" movement have stolen the spotlight from the Republican Party's veteran performers: the Christian conservatives who have long driven voters to the polls for the GOP.
Now the veterans are stealing the tea partyers lines.
In news releases, mission statements and interviews, prominent social conservatives increasingly are using the small-government rhetoric popular with the tea party activists and long used by economic conservatives -- but with a religious bent.
Their websites explore the morality of debt and the risks to religious freedom posed by growing government. Like the tea party activists, they reverently invoke the Founding Fathers, but emphasize the role the founders' faith played in their writings.
The rhetorical shift is evidence of the potency of government growth as the galvanizing issue on the right. While economic and social conservatives have a history of tensions, many conservatives see the unified opposition to President Obama's healthcare plan and stimulus spending as an opportunity to strengthen the bridge between the two camps before the November elections.
LAT has its own source credibility problems (i.e., Grover Norquist, cited therein, is not to be trusted), but the overall thrust of the article is accurate, and -- amazingly enough -- even some hardline secularist airheads aren't quite fooled by the faux tea party/conservative splinter meme.
Moral clarity deeply encompasses economic liberty, but also so much more. With that in mind, the sooner this dirtbag moral train wreck of an administration is dumped down the gutter, the better.
This essay, from Steven Cook at Foreign Policy, is a real disappointment. See, "What the Neocons Got Right":
Let me start out by saying that I do not believe the neocons got Iraq right. It may turn out right or it may not. It's too early to tell. So far, the March 7 elections look pretty good as the counting gets under way, despite 36 deaths. Analysts will likely point to the hard, messy coalition bargaining that is sure to come as evidence that Iraq is moving in the right direction. After all, Iraqis are processing their grievances through democratic institutions, which says a lot about how far the country has come since the dark days of 2006 to 2007. Perhaps it's my skeptical nature, but I am not ready to declare victory. We have seen too many "corners turned" and "watershed moments" in Iraq for me to be confident that anyone inside or outside the U.S. government actually understands Iraq.
The effort by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's government to bar certain politicians from politics was one prominent warning sign that Iraq might actually be moving toward the "Arab mean" -- Middle Eastern leaders have been reverting to this tactic since Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser invented it in the early 1950s. More profoundly, there seems to be an undeniable logic to Iraqi politics that concentrates power in Baghdad, which does not bode well for democratic development. It remains an open question whether the U.S. military's almost seven-year mission in Iraq has undermined the unwritten codes, norms, and rules of behavior that governed Iraqi politics for the better part of a century before Operation Iraqi Freedom. We'll just have to wait and see.
I guess it needs to be said, but if events in Iraq haven't proved neocons right, then there's really no point in making the assessment at all. But notice what Cook is saying: The al-Maliki government is another Nasserite regime? And the concentration of power in Baghdad -- which is of course the seat of power in Iraq -- bodes ill for democracy? Maybe Foreign Policy should have commissioned someone else to write this essay. What's happening in Iraq is exactly the stuff of a vibrant democracy, and the popular participation and repudiation of terror confirm the finest expectations of neoconservative idealism. Last week's election was the culmination of years of change -- essentially revolutionary change -- that's nothing short of miraculous. As the Wall Street Journal points out:
It takes a cynical mind not to share in the achievement of Iraq's national elections. Bombs and missiles, al Qaeda threats and war fatigue failed to deter millions of Iraqis of all sects and regions from exercising a right that is rare in the Arab world. Even the U.N.'s man in Baghdad called the vote "a triumph."
On Sunday, 61% of eligible voters came out in Anbar Province, a former extremist stronghold that includes the towns of Fallujah and Ramadi. In the last national elections five years ago, 3,375 people—or 2%—voted in Anbar. The other Sunni-dominated provinces that boycotted in 2005 saw similar numbers: over 70% turnout in Diyala and Salaheddin and 67% in Nineveh, all higher than the national average of 62%. American Presidential elections rarely have such turnout.
Although Iraq still sees sectarian violence and terrorist bombings all too much, there is no question that the country has made monumental change to its political system and in a relatively short time.
This week's free and fair elections are yet another example of a young democracy taking hold in a country where just a few years ago real elections and campaigning were unthinkable.
No country in the Middle East gives its people more freedoms than Iraq does today. NGO's are being created weekly; a civil society has emerged to challenge the government's decisions, demand transparency, represent minorities and bring attention to people and issues that were ignored in the past.
Iraq has a free press that is unrivalled in the Arab world, unobstructed access to the Internet and a military that is becoming a force to be reckoned with in the heart of the world's most unstable territory.
While Iraq's very young democracy is messy, incomplete and imperfect, it is currently the envy of the Arab world.
Another week, another episode of health-care drama, another round of headlines proving the end is not yet nigh. The polls are dismal, the Democratic caucus is in disarray, it is spring of 2010. Yet the ObamaCare dozer grinds on, and on, and on.
What has been driving the machine these past few painful months is the fantastical (at this point) Democratic belief that somewhere at the end of "comprehensive" health care rests good politics. The left in particular is pushing these Democrats-must-pass-health-care-for-their-own-political-good arguments, and clearly some of President Obama's advisers buy it. In the interest of sanity, let's go through the theories.
The most popular might be termed the "If We Build It, They Will Come" hypothesis. The White House loves this one, and has been peddling it to any Blue Dog it can coax to the Oval Office. Americans just don't understand the health bill. Democrats haven't done a good job selling it. Once it is in place, the polls will improve.
This might have been compelling, say, last July. There has since been an inverse relationship between the number of times the president briefs the country and the public's view of reform. Whatever their view on individual elements of the legislation, Americans now firmly believe the sum total is a monstrosity that will harm the economy, cost too much, raise their premiums, and result in higher taxes.
Moreover, the bill offers nothing in the short term to change that view. Its taxes kick in immediately; its benefits are delayed for years. Every time an insurer hikes premiums in coming months (as they will), Democrats will get to explain why ObamaCare isn't working. History holds no examples of unpopular Washington policy quickly growing in public favor. History is brimming with illustrations of legislation the public came to hate even more than when it passed.
An equally popular theory is the "We Must Close the Enthusiasm Gap" line. Democrats are demoralized. If the White House does not provide its base a big victory, they will sit out the election. The activists themselves have seized on this theme (and on Rahm Emanuel's head), in hopes of driving the White House left. "Democrats on Election Day 2010 are going to get an a**-whoopin' of biblical proportions if things don't change right now," warned filmmaker Michael Moore in an open letter to the White House.
To believe this is to believe that a liberal base that remains furious with the White House on Guantanamo, on Afghanistan, on cap and trade, will turn out in enthusiastic droves because the White House passed a health bill that the same base views as a cop out. That base doesn't want a health-care victory; it wants a public option. Unless the president is prepared to give it to them, Democrats might not want to bet November on base support.
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