Tag Archives: Obama

Newsmax wants a Military Coup over Obama

I mean wow. Just wow. But the right doesn’t insight violence…nahhhhhhh

From John L. Perry at Newsmax:

There is a remote, although gaining, possibility America’s military will intervene as a last resort to resolve the Obama problem. Don’t dismiss it as unrealistic.

America isn’t the Third World. If a military coup does occur here it will be civilized. That it has never happened doesn’t mean it wont. Describing what may be afoot is not to advocate it. So, view the following through military eyes:

Did you get that? Perry doesn’t advocate a military overthrow of the Obama administration, he’s…just sayin’. Does anyone doubt that we’ll see “military coup” signs at the next tea party? Mr. Perry believes he has the pulse of our military, but his assumptions go beyond the pale, straining the limits of credulity:

It looks like link is now dead b/c they pulled it.  Wow, though.

 

UPDATE:   TPM has the full article

UPDATE II:  Huffingtonpost links to some even better stuff from other right wing inciters of violence. 

Media Matters points out that the appeals to the military follow a wave of rhetoric from the right suggesting that civilian violence against the government might be justified. Chuck Norris has asked if people are ready for “a second American Revolution.” RedState’s Erick Erickson has asked, “At what point do the people … march down to their state legislator’s house, pull him outside, and beat him to a bloody pulp?” Radio host Michael Savage declared recently that “we’re going to have a revolution in this country.”

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/09/30/obama-coup-fantasized-abo_n_304231.html

Some Not So Random Political Thoughts

Just because I was sedated and sadistically eviscerated during my stint in Third Person Rehab, I still had time in between fevered dreams to think about what was going on locally and nationally. Here are a couple of observations:

1. The seeds to defeat in Saturday’s 37th RD Special Election were sown by Bob Gilligan in 2002.

2002 was the year that the Delaware General Assembly was reapportioned following the 2000 Census. The final deal looked something like this: In exchange for the R’s carving out a seat especially for Lonnie George’s daughter, the D leadership in effect sold out Dave Brady, Rick DiLiberto, John Schroeder, and Shirley Price. 

If those last two names look familiar, they should. They’re both from Sussex County. Both of their districts were gerrymandered to the point where it was virtually impossible for them to get reelected. Gilligan also looked the other way while Wayne Smith carved a series of districts right at the minus 5% population threshold in Western Sussex, thus giving that area disproportionate representation while the more moderate eastern Sussex area got proportionately less.

Here’s how reapportionment works when it comes to population. If you take the entire population (not voters, but population) of the state of Delaware and divide it by 41 (the number of state representative districts), you would get the average population/district. The law permits a deviation of plus or minus 5% from that figure. Skillful manipulation of those numbers enabled the Rethugs to keep control of the House even after the population and popular sentiment turned against them. However, that would not have been possible had Gilligan and the D’s challenged the redistricting in Court, as several districts (Lavelle, Valihura, Schroeder) clearly did not meet the ‘compact and contiguous’ standard for drawing districts. Gilligan, of course, had no interest in doing this since perhaps the most clearly unlawful district (“The Barbell”) was that drawn for–wait for it–Lonnie George’s daughter. Not only had George and Gilligan been in Democratic House leadership together in the early ’80’s, but Gilligan had a real nice job at Del-Tech and Lonnie was his boss. Connect the dots.

So, what had been a reasonable district for Rep. Schroeder now became a monstrosity stretching from Lewes to Georgetown. That is the district that sent the lobbyist to Dover on Saturday.

Democrats should be thankful for a truly-inspired effort by Ron Robinson.  Should he choose, he has a real political future. If there is a God, Robinson will be a resident in Bob Venables’ senatorial district. It would be difficult to imagine a greater upgrade for a Senate seat than that.

A word about Melanie George Marshall. My criticism is about the shady process that got her into office, NOT her performance there.  She raises the collective IQ of the House by several points, and she is a very detail-oriented legislator who has demonstrated her effectiveness on an array of issues. Hopefully, she’ll have a district that meets minimal legal standards in 2012. 

Finally, despite the handwringing from the good government types, the D’s must grab the toro by the horns after the 2010 census, and redistrict in a manner that reflects their numerical advantage. You’ll hear the usual bleating from the Rethugs, the same Rethugs who fixed the game with Gilligan’s help for the past 20 years, but bleep ’em. If the D’s are in power, it’s time to optimize it.

2. It is time for Obama to crack Democratic heads.

Depending on what seats are vacant, the D’s have somewhere around 58 Senators. He’s simply gotta call them all in and tell them, “We’re gonna pass meaningful health care reform with or without you. We’re not gonna count on any Republican support. The American people want this. It’s the right thing to do.  And, if you’ve been paying attention, the main reason why the Rethugs are so virulent in their opposition is b/c they’re terrified that this will prove so popular with the American people that they will be rendered politically irrelevant. As will any of you who oppose this. I intend to use the full power of my office to reward my supporters and to punish my enemies. Senators Carper, Baucus, Lieberman and Conrad, do you understand what I’m saying?”

I’m really concerned that wussiness could well be Obama’s fatal flaw. Time to prove me wrong.

With the Passing of Kennedy, Time for Obama to Emulate JFK

Though JFK inspired so many of ‘bulo’s generation with his appeal to youthful idealism, people forget that it was Lyndon Baines Johnson who succeeded in passing most of the landmark bills that JFK had proposed, but had not gotten moved through the Congress.

Here’s what LBJ did:

He resolved to complete Kennedy’s legislative agenda, and his success in this mission made him perhaps the greatest presidential legislator in the country’s history. Johnson termed his program the Great Society, and his achievements in civil rights, voting rights, easing poverty, and other measures between 1964 and 1969 rivaled and eclipsed Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. Johnson’s Great Society agenda included initiatives that touched the lives of all Americans, such as Medicare and Medicaid, federal aid to education, immigration reform, environmental and consumer protections, the creation of the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and the Department of Transportation (DOT). The Great Society also created the National Endowments for the Arts and the Humanities, food stamps, Head Start, and Model Cities, and implemented many other reforms. Subsequent presidents and congresses challenged many of Johnson’s Great Society programs. But most remained in place, serving as a safety net for disadvantaged Americans, and as federal commitments to housing, education, and other programs cherished by middle-class Americans.

Here, in part, is how LBJ did it:

Robert Dallek, the historian, said that Lyndon Johnson might have been the greatest vote counter ever in Congress, not because of his math skills but because of his unrivaled ability to read his fellow politicians and his utter ruthlessness in using what he knew.

”He knew most everything about his colleagues in the Senate — what they drank, where their wives wanted to go on junkets, whether they had a mistress or not, were they happy with their parking space, what the interests and needs of their constituents were,” Mr. Dallek said.

Mr. Dallek said that L.B.J. also instinctively understood the all-consuming neediness of his fellow politicians.

”So many of these guys who go into politics are narcissistic characters — they want attention, they need it,’‘ he said. ”People like Johnson and Hoyer and Lott know how they can turn that sort of pathology into a very constructive business for themselves.”

And, here, straight from one of LBJ’s former top staffers, is how LBJ would enact a meaningful health care bill. Read it, it’s really cool.

The Beast Who Studies Presidential History believes that, like Kennedy, Obama’s weakness is not his willingness to pursue an aggressive agenda. Quite the contrary, it his unwillingness/inability to get beyond his own innate caution to pursue meaningful change. In other words, in honor of Ted Kennedy, Obama must emulate the successor of the fallen President Kennedy.

It is time for Obama to stop allowing these narcissistic freelancing senators from pissing all over health care. It is time for him to say, “We’re getting this done with 51 votes. It will be meaningful and it will include a public option in honor of the Lion of the Senate. We’re going to break the stranglehold that the insurance companies have over people’s healthcare. I’m getting to 51 votes by any means necessary. Either you’re with me or against me.”

It is also time for Obama to unleash Biden on the Senate he purportedly knows so well. If Biden can’t get hopeless shills like Carper behind this, then the voters will have to. But keep in mind: Carper is essentially spineless and he will do nothing to jeopardize his worthless but lengthy political career. And, there’s lots more where he came from.

The time for getting bogged down in process is over. Trying to logically rebut whacko ‘death panel’ and ‘they’re going to kill grandma’ crap is a sucker’s game. Rethugs are so terrified that their corporate sponsors in the insurance industry are going to suffer a direct hit that all they’re doing is throwing up the most far-fetched shit possible. And Obama has played right into their game. Obama must call a halt to this game. He must tell recalcitrant ‘Democratic’ senators that either they’re on the bus or they’re not on the bus (yes, a Ken Kesey reference). He must take the lead  in unmasking the insanity that has passed for discourse in order to give the Senators cover (aka courage).

El Somnambulo sees this as the defining moment of the Obama Presidency. If he continues on his overly-cautious path, his will be a failed Presidency, and his failure to implement meaningful health care protection for all Americans will be his signature failure. He must articulate the vision of Ted Kennedy and he must employ the tactics of LBJ to get this done. It’s right there for him. All he has to do is step up and do what effective presidents have done.

Obama Reminds Republicans Of Their Free Enterprise Mantra

This has to hurt.  But I guess having your own words used against you never feels good.

Why would it drive private insurance out of business? If private insurers say that the marketplace provides the best quality health care; if they tell us that they’re offering a good deal, then why is it that the government, which they say can’t run anything, suddenly is going to drive them out of business? That’s not logical.

It shouldn’t drive them out of business unless their product is crap.  That said, there are industries that are thriving along side a public competition… FedEx and UPS come to mind.

EDIT: by cassandra DKosTV has the video:

Joe Klein Speaks The Truth

Via Balloon Juice.

To put it as simply as possible, McCain–and his cohorts–are trying to score political points against the President in the midst of an international crisis. It is the sort of behavior that Republicans routinely call “unpatriotic” when Democrats are doing it. I would never question John McCain’s patriotism, no matter how misguided his sense of the country’s best interests sometimes seems. His behavior has nothing to do with love of country; it has everything to do with love of self.

McCain’s, and other Republicans’, behavior is disheartening.  I can only think they know nothing about our history with Iran.  That, or they’re looking for an(other) International crisis.  And for those who claim Obama’s words on Iran aren’t strong, firm, clear, etc. enough… please use the thread below to write exactly what you think he should be saying.  You know, attempt to write something more than Obama sucks.

Lunch Break News

You’ve been told a lie – Monsanto and the Agribusiness lobby want you to think chemical farming is vastly superior to organic farming. Organic farming can feed about as many people as chemical farming, and in the developing world, it could feed 80% more. Check out the science. (DKos)
Obama leads Republicans by about 20 points on terrorism – Who do you trust to do a better job handling the threat of terrorism — Obama or the Republicans in Congress? Obama leads 55% to 34% in this WaPo/ABC News poll, but let’s face it – Congressional Republicans are even less trusted than the GOP brand as a whole. (Greg Sargeant)
Work begins on world’s deepest underground lab – Deep in an old South Dakota gold mine, they’ll build a lab thousands of feet below the surface to catch dark matter. The depth is necessary to be protected from cosmic rays. (AP)
Is a Counter Coup in the Works in Iran? Hashemi Rafsanjani, head of the Assembly of Experts, which has the ability to elect and remove the Supreme Leader (Ayatolla Ali Khamenei) is said to be considering a slightly more democratic theocracy – replacing the dictatorial Supreme Leader position with a “leadership council” of top clerics. The reality in Iran is that theocracy and democracy coexist there, and the current protests are not a rejection of theocracy, but a demand for real checks and balances. I don’t believe a theocracy can ever function with effective checks and balances, of course; but most Iranians do, and whatever leadership emerges is likely to represent reform, not revolution. (MyDD)

This is an open thread – share the news.

That Didn’t Take Long

To play the tired PC card. Which, we are already clear, is basically the default position of retreat for those who can’t find rational or civilized arguments for their daily fear and loathing and paranoia.

There is simply no attempt to delegitimize political speech from this site.  We absolutely welcome it.  We do work pretty hard though, at treating illegitimate political speech as, well, illegitimate.  And the illegitimate consists of the Talking Points — the effort to get conservatives everywhere to be on the same message every day.  The effort to slant the news coverage to the conservative position simply because this message is coming from so many places.  The effort to recast the world in terms where conservatives area always being abused by liberals.  Those talking points are traditionally lies – or, optimistically, a selective choosing of facts – designed to get the rest of the world to participate in their daily fear and loathing and paranoia.

Even David A’s post can’t quite manage an intellectually honest or coherent critique of leftist speech without making it all up pretty much wholesale:

  • There’s no evidence whatsoever that the debates in the US over whether the Iraq war was legitimate or well prosecuted somehow put our troops in danger.  Here is the made up bit: “Our enemies used quotes from the Daily Kos and Keith Olbermann types to justify their attacks on Americans and our allies.”  There is no proof of this, of course, but is more of the bad leftovers of the period of time when conservatives were delighted to try to bully critics of the war into silence.  Let’s remember that this was a worldwide debate and one that the conservatives pretty much lost. And you can’t just claim a thing for it to be true.
  • And Jon Voight?  No one is pushing back against him because of Evan Thomas’ really awful bit of hyperbole.  People are pushing back on him because he too resorted to stupid name calling – calling Obama a false prophet when the vast majority of people who keep characterizing Obama as either the messiah or as a prophet are Republican Christians.
  • Then we get some really confused BS about Jews.  It’s hard to make any sense out of this, but David creates the point that “President Obama’s supporters who blast Israel” (an attempt to make all of us anti-semitic and no where near true for the majority of his supporters) pretty much out of thin air.  Rev. Wright has changed his anti-Semitic locution of the day from “Jews” to the absolutely no better “Zionists”.  Wright deserves his long walk in the wilderness.  But David wants to use this somehow to pretend that this shooter is not a right wing extremist.  Even though “right-wing extremist” would be pretty much the definition of Nazis (among others) in this century.  And this delusion would be the hallmark of someone working overtime to never have to think about the complicity of some of the people he makes common cause with in egging on the apocalyptic rhetoric of fear and loathing and paranoia.
  • “If you criticize Sotomayor, then you are a racist opposed to women and Latinos. If you called Alberto Gonzales a killer and a criminal, then you are a patriot”  Another lie.  If you criticize Judge Sotomayor in racialist terms, you are a racist.  And that has been the terms of the debate from much of the right.  If you are criticizing her opinions, then you are engaged in exactly what the process is for.  Gingrich calling her a racist and other wingnuts trying to find signs of racial privileges in her past are racist.  Period.  The atavistically racialist critiques of Judge Sotomayor has no bearing on her judicial performance and it is the racialist stuff that has gotten not just all the criticism, but all of the press.  Now to be joined by the slow walking and obstructionist efforts.  If you don’t want people to think that you are a racist, then get the people speaking about Judge Sotomayor for your party to dial the racialist stuff back.

I could keep going, but you do get the point.  David – as is required by longstanding wingnut rules of engagement – makes up the stories that will support the worldview needed to be able to listn to his radio handlers and beleive every word they say.   A worldview that casts Dems – or at least these Dems — as the meanies while conservatives are just doing the absolutely right thing by indulging in their irrational fears and paranoias and prejudices.

What is apparently not PC about this is that we call him on this.  We don’t let him get away with this made up way of the world.  We don’t let him get away with not looking at the abundant bigotry in denying one class of people the rights that all of the rest enjoy.  He would prefer to be completely unchallenged, so that he can go back to his blog and his buddies with smug tales of teaching liberals something today.

Forget that.  As long as you start from a dishonest place, you get called on every bit of it – the lies, the not-facts, the selective-facts, the stupid math, the cherry-picked polls, the revisionist history – all of it.  As long as your politics starts with what you are scared of, you bet we’ll have something to say about that.  As long as your only comfort in how your ideas are treated here is to retreat to delusions of victimization, we’ll remind you that you are your own worst victimizer.

You are perfectly free to believe and say what you like.  But Political Correctness is not defined in terms of your own personal victimology or in not being in any position to adequately defend yourself.  But being in a better position to defend yourself requires much more work than listening to your radio handlers every day.

President Obama Orders Stephen Colbert to Shave His Head

As usual, Colbert is crazy and his guests are good sports. If you hadn’t heard, The Colbert Report is broadcasting from Iraq this week. Make this an Open Thread and tell us what is on your minds.

The Colbert Report Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Obama Orders Stephen’s Haircut – Ray Odierno
colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Stephen Colbert in Iraq

The Family That Paved America’s Way for the Obamas

 ‘Bulo thinks that, without this family coming into the homes of tens of millions of Americans every week, the embracing of Barack Obama might well have been delayed for many years, and may never have happened at all.

The impact of this family, as a positive influence on the black community, as well as on America as a whole, has never been fully-appreciated, IESHO:

[dailymotion]http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2belk_cosby-show-sing-night-time-is-the-r[/dailymotion]

BTW, there is no such thing as ‘too much Ray Charles’.

And, it’s time to face it. Phylicia Rashad was Michelle Obama before Michelle Obama was Michelle Obama.

Breaking: Obama to Name Republican Guv as Ambassador to China

If you’re seeking to do away with your potential political rivals, you could do worse than sending them on a long sojourn to China.

CNN is reporting that:

 President Obama has selected Republican Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. to be his ambassador to China, sources tell CNN.

Huntsman, who speaks Mandarin Chinese and has adopted a daughter from China, had been touted as a potential rival to Obama in the 2012 presidential election.

Huntsman, 49, is a former deputy U.S. trade representative and ambassador to Singapore. A Mormon, he did missionary work in Taiwan, the Salt Lake Tribune reported.

David Plouffe, Obama’s 2008 campaign manager, described Huntsman as “the one person in that (Republican) party who might be a potential presidential candidate,” U.S. News and World Report reported earlier in May.

Huntsman seems well-suited to the post, and he’s probably developed strong diplomatic skills governing as a moderate in redder-than-red Utah.

IESHO, a stroke of genius on Obama’s part.

Obama Orders EPA to Lead Chessy Bay Cleanup

More proof that elections matter. And great news for one of America’s most endangered waterways. From today’s Washington Post:

President Obama took a dramatic step to revive faltering efforts to clean up the Chesapeake Bay yesterday, issuing an executive order that could empower the federal Environmental Protection Agency to set a more demanding timetable and penalize states that fail to meet it.

The order, signed yesterday, signals a far greater federal role in the bay cleanup, instructing the EPA to coordinate efforts by several federal departments and work with state governments to reduce pollutants flowing into the bay. It gives the agency enforcement authority if states miss established goals.

“I can assure you that the EPA is ready to enforce these goals,” said EPA Administrator Lisa P. Jackson, who said a “compliance and enforcement strategy” would be negotiated with state leaders in the coming weeks.

In taking the lead from a coalition of state governments, which admitted last year that their 25-year cleanup effort had failed, the administration is positioned to mandate more stringent cleanup goals than politically sensitive state officials could publicly embrace. EPA leadership and enforcement could serve as a cudgel over state legislatures whose focus on parochial issues has often fractured coordination efforts.

This is an example where Federal intervention was probably necessary. The conflicting political and regional interests, plus intrastate and intrastate battles, required the Feds step in to save this waterway. 

Gee, it’s great to have a functioning government again.

Deep Media Thought

Today, while you listen to everyone say that Presdient Obama did a great job last night (and he did) , please recall that they all thought Bush’s “there must be some WMD’s around here somewhere” routine was hilarious.

The Washington press corps is a bunch of idiots.

More Catholic than the Pope.

I’ve got my differences with his Holiness, Pope Benedict XVI, but at least I feel he is a consistent man as to placing the utmost value on human life. He opposed the Iraq War as unjust and spoke out about it frequently. He is against the death penalty. He is against stem cell research. And undoubtedly, he is against abortion. On two of the four recent political issues I mentioned, right wing social conservatives find themselves allied with the Pope, and they have used that agreement to demonize liberals and Democrats as evil over the last 25 years, even though they themselves do not agree with the Pope on the death penalty, Iraq, and the aspects of Catholicism that focus on poverty and social justice.

In the April 29, 2009 issue of the Vatican’s own newspaper, the L’Osservatore Romano, there was an opinion piece by the newspaper’s foreign affairs contributor on President Obama’s first 100 days in office. And he was insufficiently accusatory and condemning for the right wing’s tastes.

To the dismay of many conservatives, the Vatican’s own newspaper […] has offered what one antiabortion Catholic blog called “a surprisingly positive assessment of the new president’s approach to life issues” — so positive, in fact, that a spokesman for the National Right to Life Committee was moved to criticize Pope Benedict XVI’s daily.
[…]
The April 29 essay by Giuseppe Fiorentino […] painted Obama as a moderate on many fronts. “Some have accused him of practicing excessive statism,” Fiorentino wrote, “if not even of making the country drift toward socialism.” But “a calmer analysis,” he said, suggests that Obama “has moved with caution.” […] On abortion and the other life issues, the article concluded that Obama “does not seem to have established the radical changes that he had aired.”

In loosening the rules on federal funding of stem-cell research, the paper noted, Obama did not go as far as many in the antiabortion movement feared he would. “The new guidelines regarding embryonic stem cell research do not in fact follow the [prospective] change of route laid out months ago,” Fiorentino wrote. “They do not allow for the creation of new embryos for research or therapy purposes, for cloning or reproductive ends; and federal funds can only be used for experimentation with surplus embryos.”

Then came a carefully worded sentence declaring that “these measures do not eliminate the reasons for criticism in the face of unacceptable forms of bioengineering that work against the embryo’s human identity, but the new regulations are less permissive than expected.”

In response, the legislative director of the National Right to Life Committee said the assessment was “not helpful” and “there’s nothing middle of the road about the substantive policies that this administration is pursuing on life issues.”

Not helpful. That begs the question, helpful to what ends? Helpful to protecting “life” in America? Or helpful in opposing President Obama? EJ Dionne goes on to make the point that right wing conservative Catholics have no credibility when it comes to life issues, for they refuse to criticize Republican politicians who fail to fulfill their promises on abortion. Further, right wing social conservatives have no problem with supporting the death penalties and wars of choice. And they have no problem with taking from the poor to give to the rich. Yet they criticize the Vatican for being “not helpful” on opposing President Obama. The Vatican is not supposed to be “helpful” in opposing President Obama. It is not an arm of the RNC.

I have said this before and I will say it again. The biggest mistake that social conservatives made was to choose sides in the partisan war. Now they have no credibility, and that is sad.