Benicio del Toro Walks Out on "Che" Interview

Sonny Bunch interviewed Benicio Del Toro, the star of the biopic "Che," only to have the film star storm out the door, pleading "uncomfort," when asked about the Cuban revolutionary's mass murder:

“I’m getting uncomfortable,” Benicio del Toro said after fielding a question about his new movie’s portrayal of the Bolivian and Cuban revolutions. “I’m done. I’m done, I hope you write whatever you want. I don’t give a damn.”

With that, the Oscar-winning actor walked away, abruptly terminating an interview conducted late last week to discuss director Steven Soderbergh's "Che" ...

Mr. del Toro doesn’t deny that Guevara’s persona had some darker aspects. “We have to omit a lot of stuff about his life,” he said, “but we’re not omitting the fact that he’s for capital punishment, which is the essence of that.” ...

“They didn’t do it blindly; they had trials,” Mr. del Toro said. “They found them guilty, and they executed them - that’s capital punishment” ...

Read the whole thing. I've written a least a couple of post on Che's hold on "progressive" culture, so I'll let Michael Goldfarb have the last word:

At 4.5 hours long, it can't be very easy to watch either, but hopefully that doesn't stop all the asthmatic children who, with the right amount of love and encouragement, can still grow up to execute the enemies of the revolution.

(But don't miss the short video clip with Bunch as well.)

Choke on Change: Obama Appoints Another Political Hack

ABC News reports that President Barack Obama is set to appoint former Goldman Sachs lobbyist Mark Patterson as chief of staff to incoming Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner. According to the piece:

Despite President Barack Obama's pledge to limit the influence of lobbyists in his administration, a recent lobbyist for investment banking giant Goldman Sachs is in line to serve as chief of staff to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner.

Patterson is one of over a dozen recent lobbyists in line for important posts in the Obama administration, despite a presidential order severely restricting the role of lobbyists in his administration, the magazine reported.

And don't forget, Geithner's a dissimulating tax cheat who should have never been confirmed at Treasury in the first place.

What happened to all those Democratic "most ethical" pronouncements anyway? Maybe Bob Woodward's right that "the nanny or household tax problems" are just the tip of the iceberg for this administration.

As Pat Houseworth notes:

He called for change, so what does he do? ... he appoints a Treasury Secretary that is a tax cheat to run the IRS ... nice move Barry! He plans to close down GITMO in Cuba ... of course "The Ebony Messiah" has no clue what to do with the terrorists housed there ... lots of luck with that one Barry. He appoints a hired gun, anti gun stooge, Eric Holder, as Attorney General ... this is the guy who ordered his Jack Booted ATF agents to break into a young Cuba refugees home at gun point to kidnap him and return him to Castro's Cuba, against his dead mother's wishes ...

Barry Barack Obama = Out of his league/out of his mind! And for those that voted for this lightweight, choke on your change!

Marc Thiessen at the New York Times?

Patrick Ruffini noted yesterday that the New York Times should pick Rush Limbaugh or "a comparable full spectrum heartland conservative" to replace William Kristol on the op-ed page. Ruffini also said that "The Times needs someone who is as far to the right, in as hard-edged and partisan a way, as Paul Krugman is to the left."

I haven't seen any news of Limbaugh's interest (yet), but if Steve Benen's post this morning is any indication, perhaps Marc Thiessen should throw his hat in the ring. Thiessen, who was a top speechwriter to President George W. Bush, is apparently generating the kind of white heat that the conservative punditocracy needs during this time of political opposition. As Benen notes:

Marc Thiessen, up until recently George W. Bush's chief speechwriter, has been on a roll lately. It's almost as if he perceives an opening for a new generation of outrageous right-wing commentators, and wants to stake his claim to the leadership.

Last week, Thiessen argued that if Barack Obama changes Bush's national-security apparatus in anyway, he'll invite domestic terrorism and will shoulder the blame for American deaths. Also last week, Thiessen argued in a print column that Obama "is already proving to be the most dangerous man ever to occupy the Oval Office."

Yesterday, Thiessen kept the madness going, praising the torture of Abu Zubaydah and heralding those Bush administration officials who did the torturing.

Sounds like the right man for the job, and you know he's getting to the netroots denizens when we see posts like this one, denouncing Thiessen, a former staffer for the late Senator Jesse Helms, as "an unneutered-pitbull."

Personally, Thiessen won my vote with his essay on Bush's conservative legacy:

... many conservatives who are angry with Mr. Bush today will take a better view of his presidency with the passage of time. While he took actions that dispirited some conservatives - from bailing out the auto industry to taking North Korea off of the list of state sponsors of terror - Mr. Bush did more to advance conservative priorities than any other president.

Mr. Bush enacted sweeping tax cuts. And he has the best record on judges of any Republican president - his appointments of Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito will be judged favorably over time compared to Justices Anthony Kennedy, Sandra Day O'Connor, David Souter and John Paul Stevens (all put on the high court by Republican presidents). Mr. Bush enacted free-trade agreements with 17 nations, more than any president in history. He created Health Savings Accounts - the most important free-market health-care reform in a generation. And he defeated Democratic efforts to use the State Children's Health Insurance Program (Schip) to nationalize health care.

Mr. Bush won a Supreme Court ruling declaring school vouchers constitutional and enacted the nation's first school-choice program in the District of Columbia. He has been the most pro-life president in history, securing passage of the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act, the Unborn Victims of Violence Act, and the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act. He refused to fund the destruction of human embryos for research -- and was vindicated by the scientific breakthroughs that followed.

Mr. Bush increased defense spending by nearly 73%, the largest increase since the Truman administration. He unsigned the International Criminal Court treaty, withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, and fulfilled Ronald Reagan's promise to deploy defenses against ballistic missiles. This is a conservative record without parallel.

In his final months, Mr. Bush confronted a challenge Truman never faced - a massive financial crisis. It is hard for many Americans to appreciate the magnitude of the economic collapse the president averted. But history will show that Mr. Bush's actions in the fall of 2008 rescued our economy and saved our financial system.

I don't know if Rush Limbaugh's going to warm up to that argument, but it'll certainly outrage the screaming weanies of the hardline left's nihilist netroots.

T-Shirt Hell Going Down

Via Tigerhawk, T-Shirt Hell is going out of business:

I'm done. I'm finished. I can't take the stupidity anymore, so I'm leaving and I'm taking my website with me. As of Tuesday, Feb 10, 2009, T-Shirt Hell will be no more.

No, I'm not selling out to some douchebag corporate entity. No, we're not being sued by any of the over 40 companies that have sent us cease and desists over the years. No, I'm not going to jail (yet) and no, it's not because of the economy. Although, the recent dip in sales certainly does make the idea easier to accept, even though we still sell over 3000 shirts a week.

I started this company in June of 2001, nearly 8 years ago, with the intention of producing the best satirical, the most controversial, the funniest t-shirts on the internet. Generally speaking, I feel I've accomplished that and am satisfied with what we've put out. I made a shitload of dough along the way. I've done cocaine off the better body parts of supermodels. I've even raped and killed a mountain panda in the hills of Shaanxi. But these perks are besides the point.

I just don't feel like dealing with idiots anymore. I'll give you an example of the kind of misguided morons we deal with on a regular basis at T-Shirt Hell. We released a new shirt a couple weeks ago that says "It's not gay if you beat them up afterwards". I will not explain the irony or the social commentary of the slogan because anyone with half a brain should be able to handle that on their own. Problem is, we've been besieged with emails from angry people complaining about the "fact" that the shirt is hate speech or that we're promoting gay bashing and should take it down immediately.

Examples of T-Shirt Hell's idiots and morons at the link.

Please see my previous post for some important background perspective.

Progressive Psychopathology

From Dr. Sanity's long post up this morning:

Progressives operate under an economic model that is more genetic as opposed to cognitive. They are still functioning with the herd mentality and have yet to embrace modern civilization or individualism, preferring instead to function on an instinctual, rather than a rational level. This is why they find capitalism and market economics so repugnant.

The economic primitivism that is unceasingly promoted by the political left is a remnant of the cave-dwelling days of mankind; an idyllic era of history to which the left desperately yearns to return. The word "Progressive" is thus a simple rhetorical manipulation to diguise the essential backwardness of the left's economc thinking.

Thus, even the most perfect and glib manifestation of neo-Marxism and postmodernism ... as well as the ultimate incarnation of progressive therapeutic sensibility ... cannot hope to escape from reality.

Human nature is what it is. This is not tragic, it is simple truth. The biological fantasies of the utopians; and the delusional fantasies of Marxist, communists and socialists and all their heirs, have led to incalculable levels of human suffering all over the globe, as the proponents of these theories have tried to force humans to some "ideal" state. All these systems have failed the real-world tests in the last century; and all current versions of these ideologies will also eventually fail and fade away.

Conservatives and the New York Times

William Kristol never really took hold for me as a conservative columnist at the New York Times. Kristol's neocon creds are unimpeachable, but he never really shook things up at the newspaper or in punditland. He was, in a word, milquetoast.

Thus all of the stirrings on the left and right at the news of Kristol's last column yesterday are quite interesting. Leftists want Kristol dead and buried, so it was incomplete shadenfreude yesterday at some of the top nihilist blogs. Driftglass well represents this derangement:

Change I can believe in ....

If true, I would have to rate these six words as the happiest to be published by the New York Times as a result their own actions in the last year:

"This is William Kristol’s last column."

Of course, based on the Law of the Conservation of Villager Idiocy, I assume he has been let go to, oh, say, boss PBS, or take over as editor-in-chief at the L.A. Times, or run Citibank, or work part-time as the $175,0000/month rebranding manager for the Palin/Plumber '12 exploratory committee.

But for the next little bit I can dream that a just Universe has laced up its kicking shoes and finally, finally, finally punted this smirking, bestial, blood-soaked hack into the ranks of the unemployed and that the next we'll hear of him will be a mention in the Walton Family house organ as "Greeter of the Month" at the Sadr City WalMart.

Bestial, blood-soaked hack? Whew, that does really capture the essence of the hardline left's excoriation the Bush administration's war "cheerleaders."

On the right there's some chatter about who should replace Kristol at the Times. Since I rarely read the paper's editorial pages, Patrick Ruffini's argument really hit home:

Let me first state that I don't particularly care who writes for the New York Times op-ed page, and think all the handwringing about who will replace Bill Kristol is a collosal waste of time for conservatives ....

I will, however, say this about the selection process for the New York Times op-ed page.

The goal of conservative new media should not be to legitimize the status quo in media, but to challenge it and shift the balance of power. To hang on the prestige of a Times appointment is a mostly useless exercise by navel-gazing pundits whose sole concern is accurately describing the status quo, not moving the ball forward.

Doubly disturbing is the notion that the Times' token conservative should be someone who is acceptable to sensibility of liberal (and hence more civilized) Times readers; that only a certain type of conservative will do - a "smart," "reasonable" figure worthy of dining with President Obama.

I have a great deal of respect for Bill Kristol and David Brooks (or for that matter, Charles Krauthammer and George Will), but they play a very defined role in the process - which is to represent a safe flavor of Beltway-centric conservatism that is acceptable within the Acela corridor. I appreciate that someone has to play this role, but by engaging in this parlor game, we are playing with fire: feeding the left's desire to elevate a narrow elite of Times-worthy conservative pundits whose job it is to hold the braying Coulterite masses in check.

Hmm, the Coulterite masses? That's interesting, mainly because I've noted many times on this page that I'm actually not the biggest fan of folks like Coulter and Malkin. It's mostly the lack of nuance, not to mention a kind of unwashed right-wing anti-intellectualism, which I don't think should dominate conservative punditry.

That's said, we need fighters, and one thing I'm going to do myself over this next few years is to abstain somewhat from intra-conservative squabbles over doctrine and ideology. Whatever happens on the right is nowhere near as diabollically disastrous as the venomous effluvient seeping from the funk-cheese cracks of blogs like Driftglass and their nihilist link sponsors.

Be sure to read the rest of Ruffini, where he makes the case for Rush Limbaugh as Kristol's replacement at the Times.

Obama's Post-Partisan Wimp Factor

From Doyle McManus's commentary yesterday at the Los Angeles Times:

The debate about how big the federal government should be has been at the core of American politics since the Articles of Confederation. In his inaugural address, Obama dismissed it as one of "the stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long," but it's too fundamental a question to wave away, even in the face of a crisis as big as this one.

From Jacob Weisberg's column at Newsweek:

Obama's vagueness about the federal role comes at a moment when clarity is especially needed. Our government is about to become bigger, more powerful and more expensive in order to deal with a sprawling economic crisis. Washington will take on responsibilities it hasn't shouldered in 75 years, such as directly alleviating unemployment and perhaps nationalizing banks. Many who would ordinarily reject such interventions on principle can justify them as misery relief, Keynesian stimulus or emergency management. But some see in the expansion something further-reaching—a redefinition of the government's relationship to markets transcending the current crisis.

Is Barack Obama an ideological wimp? Is the new president actually too chicken to take a firm stand on a vigorous policy program for fear of alienating GOP partisans and voters in the political middle? For someone who's seemed so self-confident in his abilities and ideas, these questions bear consideration.

In 1987, Newsweek hammered George H.W Bush with a cover story featuring the headline "Fighting the Wimp Factor." Bush 41 was no wimp, by any measure, but as Ronald Reagan's (likely) successor, he had a big presidency to follow.

Barack Obama should not be struggling with ideological wimpiness. He's probably won the closest thing to a policy mandate since Lyndon Johnson's landslide of 1964. His predecessor's been repudiated by the leftist media establishment, and the general public is skeptical that Bush 43 will win a big legacy.

But as the quotes above suggest, President Obama, aka "The One," is looking to be stymied by perhaps the shortest presidential honeymoon in memory. This not the time, from the Democrats' perspective, for weak knees. The first 100 days is when you get what you want, and if there was ever a national suspension of disbelief, it's now - we're in the moment of a new-age presidential love fest. Obama should have little worry at this point of alienating centrists, much less his partisan opponents. Obama's got a plan, and it's amazing he's not taking advantage of his bully pulpit to push it through like, well, a man.

It's time to get down to some legislative business. If you're not going to fight, get out of the ring.

Obama’s YouTube Presidency?

A year and a half ago, Vanity Fair declared the 2008 presidential race "the YouTube election."

Now with our apparently most tech-savvy chief executive yet, the New York Times is calling Barack Obama's administration "the YouTube presidency":

Lyle McIntosh gave everything he could to Barack Obama’s Iowa campaign. He helped oversee an army that knocked on doors, distributed fliers and held neighborhood meetings to rally support for Mr. Obama, all the while juggling the demands of his soybean and corn farm.

Asked last week if he and others like him were ready to go all-out again, this time to help President Obama push his White House agenda, Mr. McIntosh paused.

“It’s almost like a football season or a basketball season — you go as hard as you can and then you’ve got to take a breather between the seasons,” he said, noting he found it hard to go full-bore during the general election.

Mr. McIntosh’s uncertainty suggests just one of the many obstacles the White House faces as it tries to accomplish what aides say is one of their most important goals: transforming the YouTubing-Facebooking-texting-Twittering grass-roots organization that put Mr. Obama in the White House into an instrument of government. That is something that Mr. Obama, who began his career as a community organizer, told aides was a top priority, even before he was elected.

His aides — including his campaign manager — have created a group, Organizing for America, to redirect the campaign machinery in the service of broad changes in health care and environmental and fiscal policy. They envision an army of supporters talking, sending e-mail and texting to friends and neighbors as they try to mold public opinion.

The organization will be housed in the Democratic National Committee, rather than at the White House. But the idea behind it — that the traditional ways of communicating with and motivating voters are giving way to new channels built around social networking — is also very evident in the White House’s media strategy.
Like George W. Bush before him, Mr. Obama is trying to bypass the mainstream news media and take messages straight to the public.

The most prominent example of the new strategy is his weekly address to the nation — what under previous presidents was a speech recorded for and released to radio stations on Saturday mornings. Mr. Obama instead records a video, which on Saturday he posted on the White House Web site and on YouTube; in it, he explained what he wanted to accomplish with the $825 billion economic stimulus plan working its way through Congress. By late Sunday afternoon, it had been viewed more than 600,000 times on YouTube.

The White House also faces legal limitations in terms of what it can do. Perhaps most notably, it cannot use a 13-million-person e-mail list that Mr. Obama’s team developed because it was compiled for political purposes. That is an important reason Mr. Obama has decided to build a new organization within the Democratic Party, which does not have similar restrictions.

Still, after months of discussion, aides said the whole approach remained a work in progress, even after Friday, when the organizers e-mailed a link to a video to those 13 million people announcing the creation of Organizing for America. Mr. Obama’s aides know they have a huge resource to harness, but fundamental questions remain about how it will run and precisely what organizers are hoping to accomplish.

I thought that Saturday's national video address via YouTube was a good thing. I hope the administration continues to deliver a weekly message in that format, as I simply don't take time out to listen to a radio address, but I'm always online and would like view and write about the administration's weekly initiatives if delivered in the video format.

That would be cool, frankly.

What's not so cool is if YouTube and other newer forms of popular communications are used simply to build the authoritarian Obama cult (Organizing for America could be a 21st century "progressive youth" indoctrination system if folks turn the campaign efforts into heavy-handed state-building intolerance of political difference). Already, more and school boards and local municipalities are changing street names and buildings after President Obama, so if somehow YouTube becomes the Obama administration's ministry of propanda (already happening with Google), this is not going to be healthy for the democracy. The fact that the Obama White House has been trying to work out a system to disable tracking cookies from YouTube page views gives some indication of the less benign planning that's going into this administration's YouTube presidency.

Abortion Stimulus: Family Planning Will Help Economy

I'm looking over the papers this morning and it's literally all economics all the time.

The Wall Street Journal reports that lending at the big U.S. banks has declined even after these same institutions rolled up the TARP funds from the 2008 financial bailout. No worry, it seems, as the New York Times reports that bank nationalization may be the next step anyway. Market Watch says the U.S. economy was in a "free fall" in the 4th quarter, although USA Today offers a glimpse of recovery in its story, "Majority of Economists Expect a Slow Recovery This Year."

There's lots more, but the best story is the news that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced that the Democratic stimulus plan working through the Congress will include hundreds of millions in funding for "family planning services":

STEPHANOPOULOS: Hundreds of millions of dollars to expand family planning services. How is that stimulus?

PELOSI: Well, the family planning services reduce cost. They reduce cost. The states are in terrible fiscal budget crises now and part of what we do for children's health, education and some of those elements are to help the states meet their financial needs. One of those - one of the initiatives you mentioned, the contraception, will reduce costs to the states and to the federal government.

STEPHANOPOULOS: So no apologies for that?

PELOSI: No apologies. No. we have to deal with the consequences of the downturn in our economy.

Gateway Pundit says, oh, that's great, "Much like how a genocide would reduce costs."

The Complexity of American Ideology

Some folks might have caught the generally flawed discussion at Forbes this week on "The 25 Most Influential Liberals in the U.S. Media."

Since the Democrats are in power with a new administration, and much of the governing conservative philosophy has been abandoned (by Republicans) or repudiated (by Democrats), it's certainly a worthy effort to pin down not just the top liberal thinkers, but to lay out some kind of liberal philosophy as well.

There's a lot of problems here, however. The first is that no one in American politics really agrees on what liberalism is any more. The second is that Forbes' top 25 is wholly arbitrary and plainly unserious in its effort to really identify a core set of writers and public intellectuals who'd best represent what it means today to be "liberal." According to Forbes:

Broadly, a "liberal" subscribes to some or all of the following: progressive income taxation; universal health care of some kind; opposition to the war in Iraq, and a certain queasiness about the war on terror; an instinctive preference for international diplomacy; the right to gay marriage; a woman's right to an abortion; environmentalism in some Kyoto Protocol-friendly form; and a rejection of the McCain-Palin ticket.

That's fair enough, except the authors needed some kind of qualification for the use of "liberal" in the American context. In history and political philosophy, liberalism has a significantly different foundation than that implied by the welfare-state liberalism that defined the Democratic Party throughout most of the 2oth century.

Traditional liberalism is best referred to as classical liberalism. It's foundations are found in the natural rights and social contract theories of the 17th and 18th centuries, best represented by John Locke and Thomas Jefferson. These thinkers stressed the innate God-given rights of the individual in the state of nature. Key concerns here are life, liberty, and property/happiness, and classical liberals evinced supreme skepticism of governmental power, and thus sought to proscribe the authority of the state, whose ultimate authority was to preserve and protect the natural rights of the individual. Ron Chusid, whose blog is "Liberal Values," discusses the problems of liberal nomenclature:

When I use liberal in the name of this blog, I am referring to liberalism in both its broad historical sense and with consideration of the variations in meaning internationally, as opposed to indicating support for any narrow partisan views. Some have suggested that I use the term classical liberalism instead, but I have preferred to leave this open, not wanting to be concerned about whether any specific views I hold fit into this label. Recent events have also forced me to tolerate more government activity in the economy than I would have previously supported. I have given homage to the birth of classical liberalism, and its stress on both personal and economic liberty, during the enlightenment in the subheading of the blog title.

American liberalism, which precedes even the bastardized liberalism in the Forbes authors' framework, stresses a substantial role for government and the state in promoting civil and political equality and in guaranteeing relative outcomes in economic activity. The Democratic Party through the administrations of Franklin Roosevelt to Lyndon Johnson sought to expand government's role in society at the expense of personal liberty, yet maintained national security commitments that would hardly characterize the Democratic political establishment today. Since the Vietnam War, contemporary liberals have sought to rein-in military spending and have resisted the use of force in foreign hostilities. Liberalism today is marked by unlimited "choice" in reproductive health (roughly abortion-on-demand), total separation of church and state, and aggressive affirmative action to promote underqualified minorities. Contemporary liberal are "tax-and-spend" on the economy, and they promote a "root cause" approach to criminal justice that seeks to soften victims' rights in favor of expansive protections for the accused.

The second problem for the Forbes piece is its extremely imprecise selection of the "top 25 liberals." The list positions Paul Krugman and Arianna Huffington at numbers 1 and 2 (and we could quibble with that as mischaracterization, although they're both classic "establishment"). But after that we see a number of personalities we'd normally consider center-left or moderate, such as Fred Hiatt, Hendrik Hertzberg, Thomas Friedman, and Fareed Zakaria.

Most problematic is the inclusion of a number of bloggers on the extreme left of the ideological spectrum. These include Glenn Greenwald, Josh Marshall, Markos Moulitsas, Andrew Sullivan, and Matthew Yglesias (and less so Kevin Drum and Ezra Klein, although the difference compared to the aforementioned is slight). The inclusion of these seven bloggers can be interpreted a number of ways, but for the most part we'd more appropriately refer to them as far-left radicals or secular progressives. Either way, this bunch represents the demands on the contemporary ideological left for extreme change in society's policies, processes, and institutions.

The extreme left goes beyond traditional 20th century Democratic liberalism to call for the repudiation of the hierarchies of the establishment and the overthrow of the most cherished traditional values and assumptions of the people. The radical secular push on gay marriage extremism is a key case in point, as is the tremendous backlash against the aggressive use of state power to combat terrorism domestically and overseas.

In contrast to the Forbes definition, we're not talking here about a "certain queasiness" with the war on terror or the "instinctive preference" for international diplomacy. Today's secular progressives are screaming antiwar absolutists who are now seeking war crimes prosecutions for former GOP leaders who launched wars at home and abroad amid tremendous bipartisan cooperation of the two major parties.

What is more, today's radicals finesse and hide their true ideological project. Andrew Sullivan still clings to the conservative label while pushing the most aggressive (and literally unhinged) attacks on people like George W. Bush and Sarah Palin. On gay marriage particularly - what I've identified as the signal policy of today's progressive nihilism - Sullivan excoriates anyone who disagrees with his position, bitterly denouncing them as "Christianist" - a meaningless term of derision used to attack traditionalists and Republican moralists. As R. Andrew Newman has written:

If you refrain from punching your fist in the air exuberantly over the holiness, the exaltedness, the eye-spinning splendiferousness of same-sex marriage, if you fail to demand this very nanosecond that courts make it the law of the land, Andrew Sullivan knows what you are: a bigot, a hatemonger, a torture-supporter, even a Bush-backer ... You're a "Christianist."

Glenn Greenwald's just as bad on civil liberties, attacking anyone as "Beltway blowhards" or some such epithet of totalizing excoriation (Greenwald has routinely compared former Bush administration officials to Nazi German war criminals prosecuted at Nuremberg). Matthew Yglesias is essentially a Marxist pacificist anti-American who adopts the most extreme-leftist line possible on any of the major issues of the day. Of course, none of these people are identified for the genuine radicalism they represent, which in itself is an indication of how far the American political spectrum has evolved to a solidily leftist orientation. As far-left blogger Steve Benen noted today, in a satirical comment on the increase in Democratic Party identification in 2008:

Obviously, the only appropriate conclusion one should draw from this is that the United States is a center-right nation, and Democrats have to govern in a more conservative fashion if they expect to stay in office.

Actually, Benen confuses America's traditional conservative political culture of individualism and political liberty for ideological orientation. But his sarcasm points to how today's left conceives and advocates a radical secular progressivism as the defining ideological orientation for American politics. This is not John F. Kennedy's Cold War liberalism. This is the totalizing quasi-Marxist project of New Left revolutionaries of the 1960s.

All of this suggests that the term "liberal" is actually not so useful to describe leftist orthodoxy in the age of Obama. The president himself has long been associated with progressive causes and post-structural academic theories. His reincarnation as "pragmatic" is politically expedient and disingenuous. The back and forth cooperative relationship between Barack Obama and today's progressive radicals (Moultisas' anti-Semitic Daily Kos led the Obama campaign's public release of the president's certificate of live birth) is an indication of how established secular progressivism is in the mainstream Democratic Party hierarchy.

Some on the left will naturally dismiss this discussion as "wingnuttery" (they absurdly think they are "the center"), but even top liberal-centrists like Senator Joseph Lieberman have identified today's Democratic Party as hijacked by the hard-left partisans of the netroots fever swamps. Radical progressives are hardly "liberals" according to the traditional conceptions of the term. Folks pushing for what might be identified as a democratic-socialist model (note the small "d") would possess greater analytical clarity, as well as ideological integrity, by coming out as radical secularists rather than some incoherent mix of the leftist-libertarian-progressive labels now regularly used to disguise their repudiation of establishment traditions and moral exceptionalism.

Implications of the Left's Ugly Inauguration

From Sherman Frederick, of the Las Vegas Review Journal, "The Ugly Side of the Inauguration: Obamamania's Mean Streak":

There is a growing faction of the American left that seeks revenge more than righteousness.

Intolerant of dissenting views, this faction thinks as comedian Janeane Garofalo does that some members of the opposing political party should be "jailed." Terrorist acts (such as mailing envelopes of white power to Mormon temples because the gay marriage vote in California went the church's way) are seen by this faction as understandable and acts of legitimate political expression ...

... in light of the things we saw at the inauguration, it may be time to revisit the dangers of intolerance and hate - no matter the color of the person who makes them - and nip this ugly mean streak in the bud.

Note something about the conclusion, where we should "nip it in the bud."

To do that we'd have to restrict freedom of speech and political liberty. So as bad as leftist intolerance is, the solution's worse than the disease. It's better for folks of common sense and good moral standing to continue writing and highlighting the simple ubiquity of leftist intolerance and the Democratic-authoritarian hero-worship in Obamania.

It's not far-fetched to start thinking about a GOP comeback as early as 2010. James Pethokoukis says "Obama Looks Like a One Termer." Conservatives will be able to make the case against the Democratic Party without restricting liberty. The party's hardline base will pull the Obama administration to the left, and the president's own delusions and megalomania, amid his calls for the largest expansion of government in American history, will also wear thin on the great silent majority of folks who wanted change, not slavery.

Gay Community is Losing Friends

I think Debra Saunders is a little late to California's gay marriage debate with her essay today, "The Gay Community is Losing Friends," at RealClearPolitics and the San Francisco Chronicle. Or, she might be early to the next big round, since the California Supreme Court is expected to rule on the constitutionality of Proposition 8 sometime in early-March.

Saunders doesn't add to much that is new to the discussion. What I found interesting, though, is the comment thread at the Chronicle's page, where the responses are running about 25-to-1 against the writer - no surprise given San Francisco's ideological milieu.

She's being attacked as a "bigot" who's spouting "typical putrid swill." At least one comment has been deleted for violating terms of service, which was quite possibly a death threat (recall that fellow Chronicle columinst Cinnamon Stillwell has written about her experiences with hate mail).

I did find one sympathetic comment among the many attacks, which really sums up things:

Debra Saunders' final words of her fine piece say it all --- "The gay community's failure to show tolerance is costing it friends." And California Justice Marvin Baxter's dissenting opinion, in slapping the majority court's reasoning, also says it all --- "The court does not have the right to erase, then recast, the age-old definition of marriage ... in order to satisfy its own contemporary notions of equality and justice." This is a no-brainer for the majority of people of a Christian nation who understand that our creator brought Sodom and Gomorrah to ruin for a similar homosexual lifestyle. Gavin Newsom and the Devil would make a delightful gruesome twosome, most probably with the Cal Supreme Court's blessing.

As noted, we'll be seeing a rekindling of left's attacks on California's marriage traditionalism in a few weeks. The response to Saunders' essay is just a glimpse of how nasty things are going to get.

Black American Life Chances Under Obama

I heard it multiple times this last week amid the euphoria of President Barack Obama's inauguration and first days in power: Black children now have a role model in the world's most powerful office. Obama has fulfilled the dream of every American, but especially African-Americans, who can rightly claim that "anyone can be president of the United States."

Well, expectations are high, and certainly not unwarranted. But let's get real: President Obama takes office at at time of existential crisis for many in the black community. Charles Blow, at the New York Times, wrote last week that if we really want "change," it's going to take a revolution in personal responsiblity as well as a public commitment to lift the black underclass from the depths of poverty and social pathology. Check out these numbers:

• According to Child Trends, a Washington research group, 70 percent of black children are born to single mothers. Also, black children are the most likely to live in unsafe neighborhoods. And, black teenagers, both male and female, were more likely to report having been raped.

• According to reports last year from the National Center for Children in Poverty, 60 percent of black children live in low-income families and a third live in poor families, a higher percentage than any other race.

• A 2006 report from National Center for Juvenile Justice said that black children are twice as likely as white and Hispanic children to be the victims of “maltreatment.” The report defines maltreatment as anything ranging from neglect to physical and sexual abuse.

There was a big controversy in 1965 when Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who was then Assistant Secretary of Labor, delivered his report, "The Negro Family: The Case for National Action." One of the most controversial public policy documents in American history, the Moynihan report declared that the breakdown of the traditional black was the basis for the crisis of dependency, poverty, and social disintegration for that community.

Today, it's practically taboo to focus on the tangle of issues underlying the report's conclusions, especially the problems of teen pregnancy, out of wedlock births, and the scrouge of family abandonment by the black male. On top of this, we've seen develop over the last couple of decades an oppositional culture among blacks which finds large numbers of youths adopting attitudes that reject the norms of educational attainment and traditionalism, attitudes that instead facilitate a culture of victimology.

How do we get out of this mess? More "social" spending? More "aid" to education, or more "qualified teachers" in our inner-city schools?

I was reading the Vegas Guy's blog the other day, and he's teaching at a school this semester that features a student-body demographic that is "98 or 99 percent" black. This passage was especially striking, where he discusses his class assignment of Martin Luther King's "Letter From Birmingham Jail":

I've been working on a new unit dealing with Dr. King's "Letter From A Birmingham Jail,"which I think is his most impressive work, including his speeches. Despite the fact that most of my students are black, very few know that he wrote a letter from jail, much less the content or even what prompted him to write it in the first place.

The Vegas Guy also spoke of a school assembly, which the principal had called because he had "been hearing our students call each other nigger (or is it nigga?) while in the halls ..."

I'll be discussing these issues in more detail as we get deeper into the Obama era, and I want to recommend to readers Juan Williams' essential book on the black crisis, Enough.

For now just note that there's some research that says that Obama's presidency itself can help black student performance, and thus the president's role modeling will improve black life chances in the United States.

The New York Times had a piece Thursday discussing a research variant of the "stereotype vulnerability" hypothesis, which holds that "racial and gender stereotypes interfere with the intellectual functioning of those taking the tests." According to the Times story, "Study Sees an Obama Effect as Lifting Black Test-Takers," education researchers have found that "a performance gap between African-Americans and whites on a 20-question test administered before Mr. Obama’s nomination all but disappeared when the exam was administered after his acceptance speech and again after the presidential election."

Apparently, the research sample wasn't large, and the paper has just been submitted for peer review, but the authors were "surprised" to find a statistically significant "Obama effect" on black testing performance.

I don't doubt there could have been such an effect, but the notion that President Obama's accession to the White House is going to magically lift generations of black youths to the heights of educational and socio-economic success is a bit too optimistic for me. Like the Vegas Guy, I work in a "disadvantaged demographic." While Latinos are the largest ethnic group at my college, I teach large numbers of traditional inner-city blacks. After ten years at the college, I can recount only a handful of students from that population that I'd subjectively label "Harvard material." And that's sad, too, from a personal level of having been brought up in an educated household and culturally-rich living environment.

What is happening today in the black family is one of the most important social challenge facing the nation. Well before Barack Obama was even close to winning his party's nomination, a saw a sense of the tremendous promise for black America that an Obama presidency might hold.

That promise will not be realized if researchers, teachers, and the progressive education establishment push worn-out models of relativist pedagogy and touchy-feely learning paradigms that lift the responsibility for learning off the shoulders of today's youths and their families.

I'll have more on this in future essays.

"A Breath of Fresh Air": A Reader Writes

Here's a snippet of the e-mail Rusty Walker sent me yesterday, by permission:

Hi Donald Douglas,

You are a breath of fresh air. A California professor that is not leftist! Wow. Good for you. I thoroughly enjoy your Blog. I am 62 and a Republican. I was an artist for 16 years in San Francisco surrounded by the bleeding heart left; then, in the private college sector in Arizona for 20 years, now I am a full time artist ....

I appreciate having you out there in the school system with those young impressionable minds. They are unreasonably stirred by his good looks and charm, listen to his lofty platitudes, rather than the lack of substance in his speeches.

It's always nice to get letters from readers. They are few and far between, and that makes them all the more appreciated.

A lot of the appeal of blogging is community, and it's reassuring to know that when we write there's an audience out there that's moved and energized.

Keep the e-mails coming, and be sure to check out Rusty's excellent homepage.

Obama Breaks From Bush's Divisiveness?

It's hard to take the mainstream press seriously these days, especially when the bulk of "leading" political news stories are nothing more than hopped-up op-eds. This afternoon's case in point? Liz Sidoti at the Associated Press, "Obama Breaks From Bush, Avoids Divisive Stands" (double links, here and here, for posterity):

Barack Obama opened his presidency by breaking sharply from George W. Bush's unpopular administration, but he mostly avoided divisive partisan and ideological stands. He focused instead on fixing the economy, repairing a battered world image and cleaning up government.

"What an opportunity we have to change this country," the Democrat told his senior staff after his inauguration. "The American people are really counting on us now. Let's make sure we take advantage of it."

In the highly scripted first days of his administration, Obama overturned a slew of Bush policies with great fanfare. He largely avoided cultural issues; the exception was reversing one abortion-related policy, a predictable move done in a very low-profile way.

The flurry of activity was intended to show that Obama was making good on his promise to bring change. Yet domestic and international challenges continue to pile up, and it's doubtful that life will be dramatically different for much of the ailing country anytime soon.

RTWT, at the link.

I rarely write about AP's journalism, but this one cries out for some deconstruction.

Bush policies, on Afghanistan, anti-terror law enforcement, Iraq, as well as domestic programs like tax relief, were not "divisive" upon initiation, and even programs like warrantless wiretapping - which generated tremendous backlash among extreme-left partisans - enjoyed majority support across the general public. And on the war, as I noted some time back, "since 2003 there's never been a majority in public opinion that supported an IMMEDIATE withrawal of all U.S. combat forces from Iraq (see Polling Report).

Sure, Bush governed firmly and held steadfast to his beliefs, which was in fact a blessing for our nation and the Iraqi people, as I noted in my recent Pajamas Media essay, "George W. Bush’s Legacy: Moral Vision."

In contrast, Barack Obama's starting out explicitly partisan, with his repudiation of 25 years of pro-life family planning programs in rejecting the Reagan administration's "Mexico City policy," which banned taxpayer funding for international abortion providers.

Note too that Gallup reported Wednesday that "Americans Lean Against Closing Guantanamo." But Obama's frozen the military commissions there as the first step in closing up shop, apparently unmindful that the American states in the federal system and our international allies do not want dangerous terrorists as guests at their prisons (for more on this, see "Obama Gives Terrorists A License to Kill").

So, tell me ... what's so un-divisive about that? Indeed, President Obama himself must be worried about some partisan division, or he would't be trying to shut up his political opponents.

The Associated Press story is just part of that huge media-propaganda chatter that some pass off as "journalism."

Ain't it a crying shame?

Should You Pay the Nanny Tax?

Caroline Kennedy is the last person I'd have thought who'd fail to pay taxes on domestic help, considering how big an issue this has been in the last couple of decades of national politics. The New York Times offers some explanatory perspective on why we're still seeing these scandals popping up and derailing promising political opportunites:

The nanny tax issue simply won’t go away.

Ever since Zoë Baird, President Bill Clinton’s first nominee for attorney general, withdrew her name from consideration because she had broken rules relating to household employees, the issue has tripped up public figures every couple of years.

This week, it became part of the chatter around Caroline Kennedy’s decision to pull out of contention for New York’s vacant United States Senate seat. This month, Timothy F. Geithner’s nomination for Treasury secretary hit a snag over, among other mistakes, an issue relating to a housekeeper.

Every time this happens, it leaves a little pit in the stomach of hundreds of thousands of people who are breaking the law themselves. Various estimates put the tax cheat rate at 80 to 95 percent of people who employ baby sitters, housekeepers and home health aides. In 1997, taxpayers filed 310,367 household employee tax payment forms with the Internal Revenue Service. By 2006, the latest year for which data are available, the number was down to 225,441.

Given the unease, why don’t household employers pay the taxes and other costs that other larger employers do as a matter of course?

“The chances of getting caught are slim,” said Arthur U. Ellis, president of the Nanny Tax Company in Chicago, which helps clients pay on time. “And why should I pay for something when the vast majority of people are not paying it?”

Some employers don’t want to pay the extra 10 percent or so on top of the employee’s salary to cover the taxes and other costs. The employees often balk, too, because they don’t want taxes withheld from their paychecks. They may demand higher wages to make up for money that an employer takes out, raising employer costs even more.

Perhaps the most daunting part of all of this, however, is how much effort and paperwork it takes to do the right thing. Just how complicated is it to comply? Let us count the ways in the list below, which I derived in part from I.R.S. Publication 926, the “Household Employer’s Tax Guide.” What follows should serve as a good starting guide for anyone who’s finally been scared straight by the news this month ...

Check the link for the rest.

Remarks of President Barack Obama, Via YouTube

Well, we know President Barack Obama refused to give up his CrackBerry, and now he'll certainly cement his reputation as the hippest tech-generation president yet, with his first YouTube national address today on his administration's American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan:

President Obama admits, toward the end of the talk, "I know that some are skeptical about the size and scale of this recovery plan."

I'll say. Man, that's one gargantuan expansion of government Obama's peddling, and there's debate whether the recovery package itself will stimulate the economy (Keynesian multipliers, and what not), rather than the natural recuperative powers of American hard work and initiative at the aggregate level, facilitated by incentives to produce, save, and invest through lower marginal tax rates.

On Thursday, Robert Barro, a Harvard University economist, labeled all of this leftist stimulus talk "Democratic voodoo economics."

Obama Seeks to Supress Dissent, Consolidate Cult

I spoke of the Obama presidential cult last night, and I specifically questioned whether Obama himself hasn't consciously built it himself. Well in thinking about that question, keep in mind that the president has admonished his critics on the right for not getting on board The One's propaganda express.

Brian Maloney has more:

To the 58 million American voters who've refused to join Barack Obama's creepy cult, these are difficult times. With the mainstream media eagerly awaiting their Dear Leader's orders, independent-minded citizens are left with few places to turn as they race to save the country they love.

Adding to the discomfort is the way some GOP moderates have seemingly jumped on board Obama's ship, oblivious to the likelihood that it will soon sink as his political bubble bursts, dot.com-style.

One non-believing medium their Messiah has yet to dismantle is talk radio, where Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity have been pounding away at Obama's hollow rhetoric and empty promises. During the course of the campaign, the King Of All Egos went after the FOX News Channel host by name, but now he's aiming squarely at his most outspoken foe: El Rushbo himself.

Maloney cites the New York Post's report on this, then continues:

Beyond the absurdity of a Democrat barking orders at his political opposition, he's especially foolish to air his fear of Limbaugh and talk radio in a public setting. Now, what was long suspected by conservatives has been verified by the man himself.

The timing was no coincidence: after a rocky first week in office, the Obamists are also faced with a resurgent Fox News Channel, where ratings have been climbing since the moment he took office.

In particular, Hannity's Limbaugh interview, which took place in the latter's Florida studios, scored fantastic audience figures for the former's network. In overall viewers, Thursday's Hannity nearly trebled his MSNBC competition and almost doubled CNN's Larry King.And after a wildly successful fall ratings survey, talk radio is looking forward to record numbers with the installation of the Obamists.

One of the central characteristics of political authoritarianism is systematic state suppression of dissenting opinion. That Obama has taken such a direct swipe at his critics provides more information and support for the hypothesis of a self-promoted personality cult in the office of the presidency.

By the way, Fox News was covered in a piece last week at the New York Times which signaled the growth of the networks rebirth in political opposition: "Fox News Primes Itself for a Shift."

Fear and Imbalance! Fox News is the Enemy!

You know Jon Stewart can be very funny, but frankly I rarely watch his show or similar folks like Bill Maher, et al., as they have no sense of proportion (not to mention taste), and frankly they serve as the shock-troops of the mainstream establishment's cultural commissars.

Personally, I don't rely on Fox for all of my news and information, and I'm no big fan of people like Ann Coulter or Rush Limbaugh. But let's take a breath here as we read Captain Fogg, who's sounded the tocsin against Fox News as "the enemy":

The people who watch Fox usually don't watch anything else. They have no idea that the lies and distortions they've been hearing are often repudiated and disproved by all the other news services. They haven't a clue that one of the largest anti-American campaigns, indeed the most organized program of treason against truth, justice and democracy is broadcasting 24 hours a day. Fox is using and will use everything they can find to undermine confidence in our government and anything it does and as you can see is hoping our country will fall and our hopes will fail. To me, it constitutes as great a danger to our future as any foreign enemy or global economic collapse. Traitors, saboteurs, liars and purveyors of irrational hate, Fox News is the enemy and anyone who hopes not just for our survival, but our improvement owes it to the world to use every opportunity to expose them.

That's really strong (and this is not satire), but don't even get me going about the liberal press, where reports from even left-leaning organizations have confirmed a large and systemic bias throughout 2008 against John McCain and the GOP, and in favor of Barack Obama and the Democrats. Not only that, the public is not fooled by any leftist allegations of "traitors, saboteurs, and liars" at Fox News. Indeed, 7 out of 10 Americans agreed in October that most journalists wanted to see Obama become president in 2008.

It's natural for partisans of both left and right to attack and discredit their opponents. It helps, though, to have the facts - not to mention moral integrity - on your side. That, I'm afraid is not the case concerning the ravings of comedy talking heads like Jon Stewart or his unhinged followers who dwell in the bottom muck of the nihilist fever swamps of the progressive left.

Where Are the Obama Anti-War Protests?

Obama is taking a firm stand on counter-terror policies in South Asia, as evidenced by U.S. military operations against terrorist sanctuaries in the Pakistani hinterland.

Here's the Washington Post's article, "2 U.S. Airstrikes Offer a Concrete Sign of Obama's Pakistan Policy":

Two remote U.S. missile strikes that killed at least 20 people at suspected terrorist hideouts in northwestern Pakistan yesterday offered the first tangible sign of President Obama's commitment to sustained military pressure on the terrorist groups there, even though Pakistanis broadly oppose such unilateral U.S. actions.

The shaky Pakistani government of Asif Ali Zardari has expressed hopes for warm relations with Obama, but members of Obama's new national security team have already telegraphed their intention to make firmer demands of Islamabad than the Bush administration, and to back up those demands with a threatened curtailment of the plentiful military aid that has been at the heart of U.S.-Pakistani ties for the past three decades.

The separate strikes on two compounds, coming three hours apart and involving five missiles fired from Afghanistan-based Predator drone aircraft, were the first high-profile hostile military actions taken under Obama's four-day-old presidency. A Pakistani security official said in Islamabad that the strikes appeared to have killed at least 10 insurgents, including five foreign nationals and possibly even "a high-value target" such as a senior al-Qaeda or Taliban official.

It remained unclear yesterday whether Obama personally authorized the strike or was involved in its final planning, but military officials have previously said the White House is routinely briefed about such attacks in advance.

Readers of this blog know that I called for exactly this response in November and December after terrorists laid siege to Mumbai. I'd actually like to see cross-border commando raids as well, but there's hope.

Now, anyone even remotely familiar with U.S. military command and control knows that U.S. airstrikes cannot proceed without approval from the top. But that doesn't stop antiwar airheads from blaming the loss of "innocents" and "children" on the Bush administration:

The airstrikes were part of a program begun by the Bush administration and authorized to continue by President Obama, but he himself does not personally authorize each strike.

It does no good to blame Bush at this point. Obama could stop the drone attacks at a moment's notice. For all the tortured reasoning from the left, the Obama administration has no choice but to play hardball with hard military power against the foes of America and the West. The U.S. raids will send the possible signal of U.S. posture and intentions. The Obama adminisration is letting it be known to hostile audiences worldwide that American policy will display continuity and even escalation of pressure in the face of radicals who are committing acts of violent mayhem around the world.

So where are the Obama administration antiwar protests? As we can see, those on the left so far will only blame Bush - they're irked that Obama's "continuning Bush's policy" of military force.

World Can't Wait has decided they'll protest the "evil BushCo":

... when such promises of continued wars of terror are being made it is a time to continue the resistance that is needed in the face of this. And a group of activists who recognized this moment gathered at D.C.’s Union Station and brought into sharp focus the disconnect between what the people of this country and the world hope for and what Obama has promised. For a solid hour a dramatic action was led by World Can’t Wait and joined by members from Arrest Bush, and Code Pink ...

Yeah, Code Pink, the folks who received tickets to the inauguration from the inside Democratic connections in Congress. World Can't Wait has said they're going to "stand up to this" no matter who the president is, but there's no announcement of planned protests at the page.

There's no mention of Obama at After Downing Street either, amid all the ads for t-shirts and posters exhorting folks to "Arrest Bush and Cheney."

And ANSWER's got an announcement up for a "Palestine Public Forum & Teach-In" in Los Angeles, where activists can learn "the real aims" behind the media's lies on "The U.S./Israeli War on Gaza." And the group's national page features a poster promoting a "March on the Pentagon" to end the "occupation" of Afghanistan and Iraq that features President Bush's mug - in March 2009! By God, Bush will have been gone for two whole months, and they'll still throwing shoes at the vile "BusHitler"!

The hypocrisy is exquiste, but consistent of the hard left, in any case.