American Princess's blog

Sarah Palin on Oprah: I Prefer The Makeover Shows, I Think

2009-11-17T18:58:26-06:00

Count me underwhelmed by Sarah Palin, or, to be specific, the person Sarah Palin has become. Or, to be even more specific, the person Sarah Palin became to be interviewed on Oprah about her book yesterday morning.

As one of her very first supporters (seriously, I'm on the record as hoping and wishing for her Vice Presidential nomination back in February of 2008, even before the Weekly Standard), I can't say I'm in love with where she's ended up. Sure, she's a fabulous populist, a snappy dresser with a lot of attitude, and she has the right personality to drive her career well into the future with or without a political run (she told Oprah she hasn't ruled out the possibility of a daytime chat show), but I suspect I'm confused as to where the Sarah I believed in seems to have gone.

She just so...so...um...sigh. The Anchoress explains

It was like watching two lightly muzzled Doberman Pinschers, behaving because they have to, but with an undergrowl that translates, roughly, into “if we’re ever alone together in the yard, you’re going down…”

Oprah needed Palin for the ratings; Palin needed Oprah to push the book, Going Rogue; An American Life. Both endured hour of excruciating discomfort for the sake of their respective ends.

For Oprah, that "end" was a reclamation of a moderate image. Despite what good intentions she had entering into the political fray in the middle of the election cycle last year, her decision to back Barack Obama cost her the allegiance of millions of conservative viewers. Although I didn't quite believe she had conservative viewers before last summer, I have to say the sudden downturn in Oprah's influence has been astounding. I appreciate, though, that Oprah is expanding her horizons, honoring her committment and being impressively honest about what happened. And, to be honest, I appreciate that she conducted a good, if pretty basic, interview.

Palin, on the other hand, seemed like a less-than-perfect copy of the refreshingly honest, unabashedly conservative and practical, populist politician I'd come to know and love. The attitude that made her famous is still there - when allowed, she knows what to say and how to say it - as is her personality and uniquely American style (I couldn't help but sort of love that trashy-fabulous piece of fake hair on the crown of her head). And her kind innocence and pragmatic realism is still there; when she speaks of chopping wood, being separated from her husband for months at a time as he worked blue-collar jobs in the North Slope oil rigs and on crab-fishing vessels, her touching, accessible stories about discovering her son Trig had Downs's Syndrom, she seems like the same kind of person I knew grewing up in the auto-industry employed towns of southeast Michigan.

There's a reason she inspires millions of Americans without being perfectly qualified for a high-level Federal job: she's just like millions of Americans, and that reason is in the stories she tells. While I'm not keen on reinforcing Sarah's overused victim mentality (we'll get to that in a minute), I have to admit that the McCain campaign really screwed up by not allowing her to speak from her heart. On Oprah, she said the kinds of things I wished I'd heard from her so often during the campaign - that her experience with her Downs Syndrome child was real and that it colored her political position on abortion, how finding out Bristol was pregnant was not a happy moment for her family but one that wounded them to the core, taught them important lessons and brought them back to reality and how the campaign utterly failed in letting her share her experience when the pregnancy was revealed to the nation. Had she only had the chance to be free of the leash, I honestly believe most of the country would have a much different opinion of her, and perhaps, she wouldn't be suffering from the perpetual victimhood which makes up her most significant public flaw (heck, even my stridently progressive in-laws were charmed).

It makes sense to build that image into a personal brand. Americans, for all their claims of highbrow political beliefs, vote on personality, not substance. If she plans on ever running for office again, if Obama is any indication, it will matter much more how she appeared in the media and how she makes people feel than how she plans on, say, governing anything.

But the tough, cool exterior she exuded a few months ago wasn't really there any more. It was strange. Confronted with a body of work she could have explained away, she, as Melissa at Shakesville put it...um...*yawn.*

The show is a yawn-inducing puff piece. If anyone expected Winfrey to conduct an interview that would force Palin to account for any of the demonstrable untruths she's told about herself, they will certainly be disappointed. We are instead treated to images of Palin working out and taking care of her son Trig, and the conversation turns to trenchant subject matter such as her grandson's father, Levi Johnston. "I hear he goes by the name Ricky Hollywood now," says Palin, which might be a more withering aside had it not been delivered from the set of the Oprah Winfrey show.

There is obviously a lot of bitterness in Palin, but as Rod Dreher put it at Crunchy Con, there are only so many bitchy details about the McCain campaign and withering comments about Katie Couric's mainstream media anti-conservative bias before the idea that Sarah Palin is not responsible for any of her mis-steps starts to wear thin. By now, we know McCain sort of wanted to pin his loss on her. By now, we've figured out that Katie Couric wanted to make her look stupid, and that she was underprepared for a too-long and too-soon interview with the wrong network anchor. But by now, we want new stories. We want to move forward.

At every turn, Palin is a victim. At no time does she ever believe that she may have been partly responsible for not realizing sooner that the people she was trusting weren't on her side. Everything mis-step could have been corrected had only someone else stepped in, as evidenced by Joe Liberman's eleventh hour rescue of her Vice Presidential debate, and the her failed attempts to convince McCain's people that the half-truths circling around her head needed to be addressed. She's obviously strong, but she's struggling with some ideas about herself and politics that won't help her in the long run; I'm not entirely sure I'm ready to support another run at another office is she's not interested in applying the same tough-as-nails persona she brings to her speeches and image to the day-to-day operations of a political campaign.

Like Melissa Clouthier, who compared Sarah's interview on Oprah to her interview on Rush, I want Sarah to succeed. I don't want her to fail. I think she, her aggressive can-do attitude and refreshing honesty is absolutely necessary to the survival of the Republican party. Absolutely necessary. If there is no touchstone, no connection between lawmakers and the people they serve, if there's no hope that limited-government conservatives who haven't yet succumbed to the stagnet, putrid DC establishment still exist somewhere, somehow, the Republicans will suffer. But to succeed, she's going to need to grab the bull by the horns.

Sarah Palin must though, find a way to be at ease answering any question that the superficial, bigoted, condescending North Eastern blue bloods throw at her. Underneath, these people are insecure. It rattles them to their bones that a state college educated, wife, mother, politician and governor could best them. Their insecurity will get more piqued as President Obama continues to waffle, avoid and hide–from unfriendly press, from dictators, from tough decisions, from failure.

Sarah Palin will have to get used to wearing the mantle of leader. That means that she’ll have to own the fact that she’s so formidable that Barack Obama has finally, at long last, decided to man up and face Fox.

She sounds commanding when she's interviewed by friendlies. She had this months ago, and she showed a glimmer of it when, today, she was interviewed by Rush Limbaugh. She's just got to learn that, if she's serious about taking the reigns of the populist movement that's sweeping the country, she'll have to face down the enemy with every ounce of the same courage it took to deliver that first Vice Presidential speech at the Republican convention. Given the shot, she could really be something spectacular and someone beloved.

This is the beginning of a very interesting era in Sarah Palin's life and I'm anxious to see where it leads.

Public Funding For Abortion Or A Good Game Plan?

2009-11-16T14:25:38-06:00

When I received this assignment, I thought it would be easy to take a clear position on the issue of whether I believed the Stupak Amendment to the House health care bill was worthwhile or even necessary. As I thought further, it became less clear to me, as someone who believes in the foundations of small government and individual liberty upon which this country was built, and given the reality of the time in which we live, it became more difficult for me to make a definitive statement.

First, from Bart Stupak himself, interviewed in the Atlantic, some background on the Stupak Amendment.

Stupak said his amendment does nothing more than apply current abortion law (the annually renewed Hyde amendment) to health care reform, that pro-choicers are "distorting the hell" out of it, that he's confident his language will be included in the Senate bill, and that pro-choice Democrats have only themselves to blame for its passage on the House floor Saturday night.

The amendment itself prohibits federal subsidies from being used to purchase insurance plans that cover elective abortions, on any of the regional exchanges set up under the House bill for low-income individuals, and other Americans who don't have access to coverage to shop for health insurance. It specifies that subsidized individuals can purchase supplemental coverage, out of pocket, that covers abortions. It does not restrict coverage of abortions in the case of rape, incest, or saving a woman's life.

Frankly speaking, the Stupak Amendment was a brilliant tactical move. It allowed so-called “Blue Dog” Democrats to support a bill that might have threatened their continued employment otherwise, and provided a way for Christian and Evangelical Democrats who support a robust public healthcare option out of a sense of social justice but who consider themselves pro-life (surprisingly, the two go hand-in-hand quite often), to both cast a yes vote and quiet their conscience. Bart Stupak may have earned the ire of his more progressive colleagues, but in the end, he preserved a coalition that Nancy herself seemed unable to.

For Republicans and most pro-lifers, including, to a limited degree, myself, the Stupak Amendment was a tiny positive in an otherwise thoroughly disappointing bill. Chocked to the gills with government graft and packed with the kid of freedom-curbing governmental bureaucracy I have nightmares about, the bill represented one of the largest and most expensive government expansions in history. It might have TRIED to solve a pressing problem in our society, but as Camille Paglia put it in Salon, it failed miserably:

As for the actual content of the House healthcare bill, horrors! Where to begin? That there are serious deficiencies and injustices in the U.S. healthcare system has been obvious for decades. To bring the poor and vulnerable into the fold has been a high ideal and an urgent goal for most Democrats. But this rigid, intrusive and grotesquely expensive bill is a nightmare. Holy Hygeia, why can't my fellow Democrats see that the creation of another huge, inefficient federal bureaucracy would slow and disrupt the delivery of basic healthcare and subject us all to a labyrinthine mass of incompetent, unaccountable petty dictators? Massively expanding the number of healthcare consumers without making due provision for the production of more healthcare providers means that we're hurtling toward a staggering logjam of de facto rationing. Steel yourself for the deafening screams from the careerist professional class of limousine liberals when they get stranded for hours in the jammed, jostling anterooms of doctors' offices. They'll probably try to hire Caribbean nannies as ringers to do the waiting for them.

Even though three weeks ago we were told, flat-out, that the healthcare bill did not in any way provide for federally-funded abortion services, House Democrats were forced to stand up on the record and inform the American people that the “propaganda” they’d been “sold” by Republican leaders was, in fact, a carefully hidden reality. As I watched the Democrats erode the last shreds of trust moderate and independent Americans had in them by openly admitting that a GOP scare tactic was indeed, true, I couldn’t help but feel a bit of a creeping warmth in the cockles of my heart. In addition, 60 Democratic House members willingly cast their vote for the pro-life cause. They could have held out for a more weakly-worded amendment. They could have voted down Stupak and voted for something that wouldn't have explicitly denied healthcare funds to the abortion industry, or something that would have had to be “interpreted” somewhere down the line, but they didn’t. Bart Stupak and those 60 Democrats stood up for something they believed in, and that’s more than I can say for most Republicans - and for that matter most Congressmen.

That’s not to say that the GOP happily embraced the Stupak Amendment. As much as the pro-life caucus was happy that the spirit of the Hyde Amendment was honored - that no federal funds from health and human services programs would be allocated to abortion providers - it meant that the bill would pass easily. As Adrienne of Cosmopolitan Conservative observes, many conservatives initially laid the blame for the healthcare bills passage squarely at the foot of some of the most prominent pro life groups.

I’ve seen a lot of ire aimed at National Right to Life, particularly for releasing an advisory announcing that they would score “nay” votes for the amendment as opposition to life. This is an extremely difficult situation, and I don’t think that there is an easy answer. The Stupak Amendment created a dilemma that conservatives don’t see quite as often as liberals: party politics vs. issue politics...
We can discuss if Pelosicare would have passed without the Stupak Amendment, but does it matter? At the end of the day, National Right to Life and other pro-life organizations did their job. It was the fault of the Republican party and Republican House members for not doing a better job in presenting their arguments. Pro-lifers should not be blamed for the failure of the party.

To me, blaming the pro-lifers for failure seems ridiculous. As I said before, had the Stupak Amendment not been on the table, another compromise would have been found, most likely one that doesn’t expressly forbid what Stupak expressly forbids. This bill would have passed regardless; at least there’s something to show for it. Bart Stupak, of course, immediately under fire for his moral quest, must not think that his addition to the bill was an empty maneuver. After all, he’s become a top target of Democratic “house-cleaners” who are seeking to have him ousted, thrown off committees and ostracized for his “conservative” pro-life views.

Here’s where my qualms come in. While I agree with Hyde in spirit, I would rather federal funding not go to ANY health care services, preferring that health care provisions for American citizens be handled by the state in which they live. I also hate taxes, and given that someone will have to foot this bill’s hefty $1.2 trillion dollar price tag, I presume it will be the American taxpayer. Sure Obama says that it will only affect the "rich"; to Obama, though, nearly everyone qualifies as “rich.”

But back to the Hyde Amendment and why I believe taxpayers should be protected from having their cash go to procure abortion services.

I feel differently about abortion than I do about most other “social” issues. I personally believe that abortion is the destruction of innocent human life, and while I don’t necessarily believe that legality or illegality of the procedure affects whether it is occurring or not, I do believe that when the subject of abortion rears its head in the public square it should be treated with more care than even war, and especially more care than other “social justice” issues. War can be justified. The distribution of wealth is a matter left to argument. Whether it is the responsibility of the federal government to take care of the poor or the responsibility of lower bodies in society (families, communities and states) is up for discussion. Whether the state should have the power to take the life of those found criminally culpable for heinous actions and those who are a danger to the state is up for discussion, as well. The destruction of innocent human life, however, should be avoided at all costs, as it is without justification, and where people are implicated in what they believe to be the destruction of human life such as when they are forced to pay for it through their tax-dollars, I have a hard time believing such a measure is necessary. Sure, I don’t believe my tax-dollars should pay for a lot of things - unnecessary wars, the failed War on Drugs and a host of other failed or failing government programs - when it comes to abortion I’m a hardliner We’re talking about something that goes beyond just government responsibility. We’re sailing right into moral turpitude.

I'm sure those who went through basic Catechism recognize what I just listed as authentic Catholic teaching, and of course, in the wake of all of this controversy, it is, of course, Catholics who are drawing the most heat. I could go into more detail about the wrongheadedness of criticism leveled at those who voted with their conscience, and how this interlocks with a larger world view, nicely defeating NARAL's indictment of the Church as a meddling force that overlooks the needs of women in its question for Patriarchial control, but Charmaine Yoest at St. Michael's Soceity, has already done that for me.

By the way, the Catholic Church supports a public option. And, incidentally, the First Amendment protects your rights of conscience as part of your free exercise of religion. That's one right we often don't see discussed, but its there.

Now this is all well and good, of course, sitting and talking about how we feel abortion should be discussed in the public square, but the long-term livelihood of the Stupak Amendment and the current state of abortion law is only as good as the Congressional Representatives who share a commitment to it. In other words, if tomorrow, the majority of Congress flipped the other way, I would take defeat fair and square This is how a representative Democracy works: the majority decides what gets codified into law. In the end I’m grateful to Bart Stupak not just because he adequately represented the needs of pro-lifers but because he called out what was an utterly unfair initiative on the part of House Democrats: hiding a controversial policy measure in the folds of a 2000 page bill. And to make matters worse totally denying its very existence. If House Democrats want desperately to overturn Hyde, if they have a burning desire to force taxpayers to foot the bill for abortion, they have the votes in their coalition to do it, then they should grow a pair ad put the measure BY ITSELF to a full ad fair vote. If the idea of pushing American money to abortion providers is so popular, so desperately necessary that the American people are just clamoring for the opportunity such that their representatives would be remiss in not addressing it, why work so desperately to pass it secretly in the dead of night, sandwiched between doctor scholarships and tax breaks for tongue depressors (which by the way, does not apply to other FDA-classified medical devices such as female condoms and breast pumps)? Be the men you claim to be, Congress...put your money where your mouth is.

I doubt the Stupak provision will remain in the bill. I think it will be stripped out at the first available opportunity and that the healthcare bill will eventually, ultimately, fail. As the vote pushes closer ad closer to tax day, and further and further into the 2010 election cycle, even hardline Democrats will find it more difficult to support a bill that their constituents know will push them further into debt. For now, I’ll sleep well with that knowledge.

Well, at least, for now.

Is Bob McDonnell Bad For Women?

2009-11-06T17:38:20-06:00

Okay, that's an incendiary headline, isn't it? I'm not one to enter the circular firing squad on Republicans (okay, so yes, I am, but not fresh-out-of-the-box governors who are serving as a bellweather for the Democratic agenda's chances in 2010), but there are certain issues on which I feel, as a libertarian feminist, on which I have to seek clarification, the question of whether a certain candidate actively works against the interest of women being one of them.

So when I got an email from the National Organization of Women accusing Governor-elect McDonnell of saying this:

[The] " dynamic new trend of working women and feminists ... is ultimately detrimental to the family."

naturally I was concerned. Sure, I'm not always ideologically in line with NOW, but I'm not always presented with a situation wherein a politician actually states, for the record, that he's opposed to women working outside the home. NOW's mission is to preserve and promote the rights of women, and they need the support of their members (active and financial) to continue to pursue their goals, and generally speaking, Republicans are a huge roadblock to those goals. They show up and they start snooping in your bedroom, around your gay marriage and your reproductive rights. Note the use of the term "feminist" as a pejorative. Its so classic, so stereotypical, so perfect...so I had to investigate.

Bob McDonnell appears to have made a pretty strong statement...in a paper he wrote about the current Republican Party platform for a policy class 20 years ago. From a September column by Ruth Marcus in the Washington Post, which called McDonnell's statements his "Macaca Moment:"

Bob McDonnell, the Republican candidate for governor of Virginia, didn't really mean it when he equated homosexuality with drug abuse and pornography as evils that "the government must restrain, punish, and deter."...Or when he described "feminism" as one of the "real enemies of the traditional family" and criticized federal child-care programs because they "subsidize a dynamic new trend of working women and feminists that is ultimately detrimental to the family."

Or if he did mean it, he doesn't any longer. When he wrote his thesis on "The Republican Party's Vision for the Family," McDonnell, you see, was a "college student at the time, albeit a little older college student, within an academic environment and completely not restrained by the real policy world."

The paper was written in 1989 when McDonnell was a 34 year old student who had already earned a Bachelor's and Master's degree and was working on a joint law/public policy degree. He had already served in the Army and was currently serving an internship in the US House of Republican Policy Committee. So its not like it was his first time around the block. McDonnell brough the report up himself in an interview with the WaPo's Amy Gardner.

But here's the thing. The paper wasn't a 93-page blog post, stuffed to the gills with McDonnell's personal beliefs. He wasn't writing about what he had on his agenda, but rather what the Republican Party had on its agenda for the American family in 1989. Sadly enough, 20 years ago, it was acceptable to call co-habitating couples "fornicators" and warn of the dangers of gays getting the idea in their heads that they might like to have legally-recognized relationships. And while we can argue until we're blue about the propriety of such beliefs - and whether they've evolved over the last 20 years even in the public realm - that they were on the Republican agenda at the end of the Reagan era is without question. Pornography and drugs were bad (I'm pretty sure this is still the GOP position), Griswold v. Connecticut is still a case that introduces substantive due process and the right to privacy, which radically changed how the government viewed liberties and the laws that infringe on them, and the existence of federally funded childcare programs could snowball into (OMG!) children being raised by the collective and not their parents, I guess.

Hey, I didn't say the positions were good positions or that they...um...even make sense. But they were the GOP's in 1989. And that last part? That's what Bob McDonnell was referring to - its clear when you put the quote back into context.

“Further expenditures would be used to subsidize a dynamic new trend of working women and feminists that is ultimately detrimental to the family by entrenching status-quo of nonparental primary nurture of children,”

Okay, I'm still not feeling that "feminist" invective (really? federal child care = working women = nonparental primary care is the norm?), but the clouds are parting here. And McDonnell spent 90 minutes on the phone with reporters trying to part them further (from National Review):

The controversy over McDonnell’s thesis, with its inflammatory language about working women, risked destroying all this effort. But McDonnell handled it deftly. He spent 90 minutes on a conference call with reporters exhausting every possible question about the thesis. Then, the next day, when he was asked about it again at an education event, he said he’d answered all the thesis questions the day before and wanted to keep the campaign on the here and now.

McDonnell, who is generally recognized now as a "pragmatic conservative" who champions a traditionally conservative agenda along with innovative fiscal policy, also says that nowadays, he doesn't feel this way. That was 20 years ago, he maintains, and he's had daughters grow up and enter the working world, and political realities and a moderating culture have probably had an effect on his opinions, even if they did fall in line with the hard GOP in the late 80s.

Now, if only he'd voted with NOW on some key issues like federal child care and federally-mandated equal pay laws? Yeah, he didn't. As Arianna of MomsRising.org points out:

[Ruth] Marcus wasn’t the only woman who was skeptical of McDonnell’s defense that he was just a kid (at 34), and that hey, he loves working women now. Why, his wife and daughters even work!

What undermines McDonnell’s defense? His actual votes against two...issues, child care and equal pay for women.

McDonnell countered these attacks with his own ad, entitled “Trust” featuring women he himself employed when he was Attorney General. He is also airing another ad, featuring his daughter, and Iraq war vet, called “Working Woman.”

Even this doesn't get my blood boiling. I'm not a fan of government-funded anything, or government-mandated anything, and federal child care programs are no exception. As a libertarian, I happen to agree with the idea that where it can be done better by the free market (and probably cheaper), it should be. Is federally-funded child care necessary? Maybe, but voting against it doesn't necessarily mean one is "anti-woman," and neither does a vote against a measure that would expand equal pay laws that are already in existence by extending the time and analysis period for lawsuits. As much as it might pain people to admit it, we have a pretty good system in place to fight sexism, and given that companies aren't falling all over themselves to have workplaces full of supposedly-cheaper women in order to maximize profits in a troubled economic time, I'm fairly certain they're at least working a little.

And, to be really honest, these are pretty standard conservative positions. Even if I disagree with them (and him), Bob's allowed to be a social conservative. If the Washington Post crowed about it and he still won independents by almost a 2 to 1 margin, I think most of Virginia might agree with me.

If you're into these laws, then I can see where the Bob McDonnell case, as a whole, might convince you that he was an evil, woman-hating Republican, but I'm just not buying it. Given the context, and the fact that I'd probably vote agains those measures, too, given the chance, I have to say this is a little thin. I'm open to being convinced, though.

I mean, he just looks terrifying.

Headed for a Healthcare Showdown?

2009-11-03T21:36:52-06:00

Right now, I'm watching Democrats hemorrhage Independents in key races, most notably in Virginia. Now, normally, I'd be making conciliatory gestures, convincing myself that I have to focus on 2010, and that the races that mattered haven't happened yet. In fact, they are so far down the road, that its impossible to tell whether tonight will have any impact on them, or whether we've spent every last shred of capital we have nabbing a few races. I'll leave the election analysis to someone else, though. I'm concerned with implications.

In a perfect world (for me), the message from tonight is pretty simple: whatever the Democrats are doing, they're doing it wrong. Faced with enormous support from, well, everyone, but particularly people who consider themselves independents, they spent the last year pushing through an agenda no one -- well, almost no one -- expected. If this indicates Americans are frightened of that agenda, or at least want it to slow down a little, then the Democratic health care initiatives are headed for a wall at 90 miles an hour. According to Politico, its already looking like its about to be delayed...again.

Democrats have blown so many deadlines for getting health reform done this year that insiders are increasingly skeptical they can finish by year’s end — and some even suggest the effort might slip to a new deadline, before the State of the Union address.

The discussions are an acknowledgment that with only two months left in the year, Democrats are still a long way from sending a bill to the president’s desk. The House could take up reform on the floor as early as this week, with a good shot at passing something by Veterans Day.

But in the Senate, Majority Leader Harry Reid is still wrangling with his moderate members to corral 60 votes just to get the debate started. And on Monday, Reid sent a letter to Republicans acknowledging that he is waiting on the Congressional Budget Office’s cost estimates and analysis to finish drafting a bill. Democrats signaled that those estimates would not be ready this week, casting further doubt on their ability to finish reform this year.

Needless to say, no one wants this to happen. If you're going to push through big legislation that has a huge price tag ($1.2 trillion on the House bill), you probably don't want to start moving the final vote close to (1) tax day and (2) an election year. If there's anything the American people are freaking out about right now, its the prospect of having less money than they already do, and the last thing they'll want to be reminded of as they seal up those envelopes for the IRS is that chances are high the checks they write will be much bigger next year. And by then, the primaries will be finished for the major national races. Newbie Democrats who want to hold their seats will be heading home to face anti-tax sentiment and a fresh wave of resentment.

But if health care doesn't get through, 2008 Democrats will have waffled on their biggest promise of the 2008 campaign, which can't look good on their permanent records.

And the bill is about to hit another roadblock. As Kathy of Stone Soup Musings notes, the two sides -- and a strange amalgamation of the two sides -- are about to go to war over how the bill addresses federal funding for abortion.

Bart Stupak is threatening to block the House health care bill from passing over the issue of tax dollars for abortion. He wants to vote his conscience and strip abortion-related provisions out of the House bill, in spite of the fact the bill already contains restrictions to prevent federal funding of abortions.

Bart Stupak is well-known to be a pro-life Democrat, and he votes with the Democratic party about 90% of the time - except when it comes to abortion. Stupak's primary argument is this: federal funding means taxpayers have to directly implicate themselves in a very volatile political issue. Now, if, say, the Congress wanted to address this issue separately, it could - it has the votes to overturn the Hyde Amendment - but instead has chosen to bury it in 1900 pages of boilerplate healthcare language. 39 other House Democrats are joining Stupak in presenting the amendment that will strip the bill of any language that could possibly be interpreted as directing federal funds to abortions.

And then, to add to the confusion, as Jill Stanek points out, there's another, competing amendment that still seems to excoriate language about abortion but not quite.

All I know is that this will all come to a head as soon as the Senate bill makes its way out of committee, onto the floor and into the hands of the American public. And that public is really hard to predict. And antsy.

But at least, by tomorrow, we'll know who they'll be watching.

Breaking Up Is Hard To Do

2009-10-27T17:13:11-05:00

Its fairly obvious that there's a massive change brewing in the depths of the GOP. Although the Tea Partiers and the "grassroots" have made it clear that Obama is their primary enemy, there's another front that's come to light in this war; the mainstream conservatives are now taking on the tough job of purging their party of big-government bureaucrats from within. Nowhere is that more evident than the battle taking place in NY-23.

Silvan Johnson adores Sarah Palin, belongs to a conservative discussion group and fumes at President Obama's spending policies. But when it comes to picking a new congressional representative for her upstate New York district, she is in no mood to help the Republican Party.

In fact, Johnson and many other conservatives want to use a Nov. 3 special election to teach the GOP a lesson about sticking to conservative values -- even though that lesson could mean the party loses a House seat it has held for decades. The conservatives are backing a third-party candidate, splitting the Republican vote and giving the Democrat a lead in some recent opinion polls.

That last part really depends on who you ask. Some polls, now, after over a week of fervor surrounding Doug Hoffman's upstart third-candidate campaign against GOP choice Dede Scozzafava, it seems Hoffman is starting to appear in the lead in district polling.

So what happened? Well, for starters, in the Bush years, the Republicans made a mockery of the conservative tradition, refused to stand in the way of bigger government, fed the beast of entitlment spending and expanded spending until Washington was bloated and, worse, intensely intrusive into the private lives of American citizens. In essence, they became no better than the Democrats they claimed to despise, alerting millions of American citizens to a truth they'd ignored out of fear: the people we send to Washington end up being, um, well, the people we're constantly trying to get out of Washington. And the electorate got sick of it.

I imagine this hit the Republicans first because for Republicans, bloating the Federal budget and poking into people's lives is, essentially, hypocritical, if you consider what were (at one time before we threw them entirely out the window), conservative values like smaller government, lower taxes and more freedom. Say what you want about Sarah Palin, but she seems to have drawn forward a renewed commitment to what used to make the party one to believe in: the values and principles that are supposed to make up the foundation of the GOP.

So, of course, when the GOP, using its recently-traditional MO, decided to appoint Dede Scozzfava, someone who may as well have a (D) after her name, to a seat vacated by John McHugh who was recently named Secretary of the Army, the "base" got angry and have spent the last few weeks actively rebuffing the party standard-bearers, even mainstays like Newt Gingrich in an effort to prove that conservative candidate who represents the values of the grassroots conservatives is more desirable than someone who, well, represents Democrats. Scozzafava is a pretty traditional moderate who leans to the left on most social issues (she has liberal views on gay marriage, won the Margaret Sanger award for her support of legal abortion), but who seems to have no opposition to raising taxes and supporting large government programs.

As a larger strategy, Newt Gingrich (who has openly and repeatedly endorsed Scozzafava), and other Republican mainstays seem to believe the road to more widespread success is to support moderate candidates whose beliefs seem to reflect the American psyche. In a sense, their theory should pan out, particularly if, when in office, the GOP were effective at passing relevant legislation that served the American people. As such, it seems the actual American psyche seems to be socially moderate (they've got that one right), but fiscally conservative. Sure, I can't claim to hold sway with American voters on the whole libertarian thing, but even if I'm a teensy bit warmer than the GOP establishment - and I'd like to think I am by virtue of being human - the natural electable "moderate" would be someone who favors a more culturally aware social agenda but who stays true to the fiscal policies that should, in effect, differ Republicans from Democrats. Anything else seems like a waste of time.

Which brings me, then to Dede Scozzafava.

As Adrienne at Motivation:Truth puts it:

Scozzafava is no conservative. She is a RINO (Republican in Name Only), and we can no longer afford to elect people who are not willing to stand up for the principles the people expect them to. Too much is at stake. She does not set herself apart from Democrats, so why would any Republican, who truly cares about principles, support her? It makes no sense.

Its true. No Republican will vote for her because she's not Republican. And if, for some reason, I wake up deranged tomorrow morning and decide to vote for a Democrat, why would I vote for a...Republican? There's a perfectly acceptable Democrat who is already in the race and that one won't threaten to sell his constituency of moderates and Democrats down the river in the event he wakes up deranged one day and decides to actually vote Republican. Poor metaphors being as they are, let me simply say this. Republicans want to vote for Republicans. Democrats want to vote for Democrats. And everyone wants someone to vote for who represents the ideology they themselves have come to support.

So then, does it make sense to nominate a Democrat for Republicans? Probably not. A few years ago, this might have been a good strategy, like giving dog food to the cat or giving me a giftcard to Payless. He'll eat the food, but only because its food and its better than not eating. I'll buy the shoes, but only because I need shoes, not because I want to support Payless's commitment to terrible, uncomfortable footwear at not-that-great prices (seriously, Target has good shoes. Meijer has good shoes. WalMart has good shoes. Payless has crappy, overpriced shoes). In the last decade or so, Republicans were pretty well content to vote for big-government moderates like (yeah, I'm going there) George W. Bush because they were just that much better than the alternative, and in George W. Bush's case, not married to Theresa Heinz Kerry and vaguely French.

But we saw what happened with GWB and we came to a pretty solid realization: a vote for someone who doesn't represent what we believe is a vote against what we believe. And that doesn't help anyone.

The NY-23 contest is useful in the sense that it helps to test that theory in a small area before things get out of hand and we have to fight this out on a national scale. Will conservatives across the country step up and support a grassroots conservative against a GOP pick who is as undesirable as her campaign is inept? Maybe.

Will the campaign be successful? Who knows?

Will their defiance send a message to the GOP that future success is dependent on deeper screening and more rigourous ideological demands on candidates for public office running on the Republican ticket? Definitely.

Support is coming from recently-famous Republican celebrities across the country. Its allowing Sarah Palin to test her influence over the Republican base, quantifying the reach of conservative talking heads like Glenn Beck, and dragging out Election 2008 mainstays with the promise of a new shot at the prize in 2012.

How has the GOP responded? Some, like perennial GOP favorite Mike Huckabee, are choosing to sit this one out until they figure out what's in store -- whether this support and fervor is a flash in the pan or the future of campaigns. Others have responded by throwing more money and support behind Scozzafava and as the LA Times piece notes, Scozzafava's camp responded by possibly calling the Republican base a bunch of NASCAR watching rednecks from the backwoods of Georgia, which, of course, is an awesome fundraising strategy.

The future is looking...strange.

Politics: Its All About The Boobs

2009-10-20T17:47:12-05:00

A little over a week ago, Meghan McCain, columnist, blogger, quasi-conservative and daughter of former Republican Presidential candidate Sen. John McCain posted a photo of herself in a tank top on Twitter and set off a firestorm of anger that almost threatened to put breasts over health-care as the hot topic of debate. Well, almost. At the very least, there was enough nonsensical outrageously outraged outrage from the usual, Puritanical suspects for Meghan to feel the need to pen a column, questioning why it's so inappropriate to post a photo of oneself in a tanktop on a social network.

On Wednesday, I posted a hastily taken self-portrait on Twitter—which I thought was funny and silly—and within a few hours I had caused a minor media scandal. I spent most of the next day thinking about what exactly was so shocking about the picture, why there was such an immediate and nasty overreaction. After all, it’s not like I was caught making a sex tape. I certainly didn’t pose nude for Playboy. And I hadn’t even exposed a nipple.

Could it be it's because I have breasts? Because for those of you who didn't know, I have two. They're larger than some women's and not as big as others. I don't usually show off my cleavage—as I did in the photos I posted—which I will admit is not the smartest thing I have ever done. But it’s just not worth the drama it caused.

I know Meghan is new to this game, so I'll go easy on her, and as a firm believer in avoiding the circular firing squad, I'll only mention in passing that she's not the first and won't be the last to feel the wrath of the anti-sex segments of our society (welcome to the club!). After all, its not like Meghan did anything wrong. Well, other than, say, having the breasts in the first place.

To tell the truth, I agree with Meghan in principle (not really so much in practice, but I'll get to that later). Americans have a problem with breasts, and not just Meghan McCains. And before anyone starts pointing fingers about who is currently responsible, this is nothing new to the United States. We are a Puritanical nation. Sex and anything associated with it is and has been a dramatically divisive topic, and without exception, Americans think more about the political implications of sex and nudity than anyone else in the world; whether they are "for" it or "against" it, the mere topic of sex brings out the most animalistic political instincts in anyone. Compared to the rest of the world, we're sex-obsessed.

Hugh Hefner, founder and editor of Playboy and possibly the world's foremost expert on boobs (perhaps in more than one way depending on who you ask), once penned in the Playboy Philosophy that sexual liberation was only possible in a society that valued individual rights above all else. Sexual freedom only grows naturally in a free society where individuals were free to pursue their own interests and where the state refused to interfere in their personal business. Republicans, content to protest on ideological grounds even the slightest whiff of the smallest tendril of government interference in the boardroom are more than happy to poke their noses in the bedroom, and Democrats, while faring marginally better, are still guilty of censorship and mere lip service to more serious issues of individual liberty.

Puritanism and a harsh perception of what is "right" and what is "wrong" in matters of sex is deeply embedded into the American psyche. The earliest Americans were notoriously tough on sex and throughout history, humans have always had a Gnostic streak. Europe had a long time to get over it, and the Enlightenment, a period where we were more concerned about the pressing issue of earning our political freedom. As a consequence, everyone gets excited, defensive and impressively worked up about sex. That's the political landscape in which we live. When you press your boobs to a camera and put it out on the internet while presuming to be political, you naturally enter into this landscape and if you're not schooled in the ideological debate, you'll pay the price in angry mail. And its going to take a lot more than personal outrage in response to change the way that this sort of situation is handled. Its going to take a massive cultural shift for Americans to fully accept people who think differently about sex. Not that that shift isn't happening - it has been since the Thirties and continues unabated, despite the best efforts of both sides - just that that shift is not going to be easy for a society that is so self-conscious about its own liberty, for a society where sexual shame is inextricably linked to its intimate personal history. Meghan and I are of a generation for whom this sort of thing (posting personally revealing information in a quasi-pubic forum) is considered if not "normal" almost "boring." We wouldn't have that attitude if it weren't for our mothers' commitment to earning equal rights for women, our grandmothers' fight for independence, and the tireless work of activists whose sole focus was individual liberty of any sort.

Was it right for people to call Meghan McCain a slut? No. It's not. Could I have told her that would happen? Maybe. In practice, I'm a bit less sympathetic to Meghan, but only because I tend to believe that she enjoys being at the center of a fuss. I don't blame her. I do, too (though, to be truly honest, my tiny boobs wouldn't cause much of a fuss were I to don a tank top and take a photo even with a push up bra, three socks and a roll of duct tape). Those who attacked her are being outrageously silly, over the top and incredibly reactive. But they're being, quintessentially, American.

Now, I said I disagreed with Meghan McCain in principle and I'm not going to leave that hanging, though Noreen Malone of Double-X explains myself better than I can.

It all gives her a reason to write, of course, manufacturing for herself digital straw men who she can take down in her column. After the Thursday onslaught, she rushed to press with a Friday morning Daily Beast response that parsed the sentiments of her Twitter feed...

It might be a brave new world, but you still don’t see Gail Collins or Peggy Noonan flashing cleave in their author photos. That’s not because they’re old or unhip or because we’re all prejudiced against unbridled feminity. It’s simply that often, especially in a field like media, in which image is paramount, form really should follow function.

Boob scandals would be fantastic for the GOP. It would move the argument forward, discuss the ideas that drive their double-edged approach to individual liberty and perhaps move the party in a fresh, more libertarian direction. But the controversy seems to have been made to be all about Meghan McCain and not at all about the psyche of the people whose outrage drove her to apologize.

She has, in her hands, a teachable moment about the shortcomings of the party she seems so intent to rescue from the depths of George Bush-era social conservatism. But really, instead of standing up for what she did and hold her ideological ground, because - and this is key - no one who agrees with her politically believes what she did was wrong she backed off, gave in, and is now whining about how she was treated while others, like the similarly-demographic-ed conservative commentator Ashley Herzog , try to come to her defense and use her situation as an exhibit of how far we still need to go to truly consider ourselves free. Meghan had nothing to apologize for - as Evil Slutopia put it, "Meghan McCain has boobs. Get over it" - but it would be great if she would stand up and say that. Use her powers for good, if you will.

I hope she will in the future, because I think she could do a lot of good.

Taking the Court by Storm

2009-10-06T22:56:42-05:00

Her nomination to the Court may have been controversial (at least at first, until nearly everyone realized that not only was she qualified, but she was replacing, of all people, David Souter), but brand new Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor is not allowing that to hamper her first week on the bench. Instead, she's proving that she was born for her job.

By mid-morning on the first day of the Supreme Court's term, it was clear new Justice Sonia Sotomayor would fit right in -- and in particular with her talkative fellow New Yorkers.

Sotomayor peppered the lawyers with questions in a pair of cases, joining with Justices Antonin Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsburg during the oral arguments. Together, they left the other justices sitting in silence for much of the time.

In the first hour alone, Sotomayor asked 36 questions, and Scalia followed with 30. Ginsburg is particularly interested in legal procedures, and she and Sotomayor dominated the questioning for much of the second hour.

Consider me impressed. Most of the time, the newbie on the bench sits back and watches as the more experienced and inevitably older (WAY older in some cases) Justices handle the questions for the first few cases. Instead, Justice Sotomayor took the opportunity to delve right in, questioning the Maryland Attorney General on his appeal from the Maryland Supreme Court in a case involving the Miranda warning. Surprisingly, the LA Times compared her apparent position to that of Scalia's.

Maybe we're all in for a surprise. After all, as Kate Klonick of Full Court Press points out, we're only now, after her hearings, starting to get a feel for what Justice Sotomayor is really like.

She was obviously brilliant, well-reasoned and incredibly articulate — but beyond the occasional references to her Bronx upbringing and love of baseball, her personality seemed mostly under wraps.That was different from Chief Justice John Roberts' hearings, where he charmed the Senate Judiciary Committee, and more recently, Solicitor General Elena Kagan’s confirmation where she even got Sen. Arlen Specter to chuckle. Sotomayor seemed sterile in the week of hearings, probably in large part due to the fact that her identity with her race and culture (the infamous “wise Latina” remarks) would come part and parcel with any openness.
But finally, we’re getting a glimpse into Sotomayor, Human Being, and what we’re seeing is very likeable.

There will be plenty of opportunities over the coming months to see the Real Sonia Sotomayor, both as a person and as a judge, as she navigates one of the most exciting "seasons" the Supreme Court has seen in recent years. Colleen from News in Politics points out that cases up for consideration this year span nearly every ideological contention this country can produce.

The important issues that the justices will have to face over the coming months involve weapon restriction and gun rights, the display of religious symbols on public property, the verdict for juvenile criminals committing non-homicidal offenses, and international child abductions and parent custody thereof. Other cases include government takings, civil commitment for sex offenders, dog fighting, Miranda rights and terrorism.

Of course, through all of this, I and, really everyone, will be watching Sonia Sotomayor more closely than we typically watch for the results of reality television finales. Latoya Peterson of Jezebel points out that court handicappers will be analyzing everything about Justice Sotomayor right down to her facial expressions and the style of her robe to try to come up with some sign of how she will rule. Will she make Obama proud and become the Justice Scalia of the left side of the court? Or will she return to her history (she was originally nominated by a Republican and was once suggested as a nominee to President George W. Bush) and shock everyone by joining up with the court's conservatives? Or will she take after her predecessor David Souter and only be noticed as a Justice when something really weird happens, like property rights advocates try to take her house in an Eminent Domain related publicity stunt?

It all remains to be seen. Even Sandra Day O'Connor, who was interviewed by USA Today, seems to have no idea how this will all turn out. And not just the ideological position of the courts most recent addition. Justice Stevens, who is rapidly approaching 90 years old, is still not entirely sure where he left his car in the Supreme Court parking lot.

BlogHer is nonpartisan and even though I kind of was this week, generally as a Contributing Editor, I am not. See my contributions to the disintigration of partisan discourse at American Princess.

The 2016 Olympic Bid: Something Rotten in Denmark

2009-09-30T00:07:04-05:00

Not that I'm allowed to say anything that could somehow harm "our" (by "our," I clearly mean "Chicago's Mayor Daley") chances of getting the Olympics, but really. I mean, really. Here we are, three days from the decision and the radio host on WGN can't seem to acknowledge a viable reason to oppose the Olympics other than simple non-conformity, we're already celebrating our victory and planning out our parades and improvements and even Barack Obama is getting in on the fun

Mr Obama will travel with his wife Michelle to make a speech to the International Olympic Committee (IOC) at its meeting on Thursday. Chicago is competing with Rio de Janeiro, Madrid and Tokyo to host the event. The Brazilian and Spanish heads of state are also expected to support their countries' bids at the meeting. Mr Obama will become the first US president to campaign so prominently on behalf of an Olympic bid.

Not that he really had any choice. If Barack Obama had not gone to Copenhagen, the media, particularly in his adopted home city of Chicago, would have roasted him alive, possibly even putting Oprah on a higher plateau (not that we don't already, although I once saw her at Water Tower Place on the escalator wearing pants that were an inch too short), calling him unpatriotic, not proud of his country. Now that he chose to go, they're roasting him alive for leaving at a time of "great crisis." I'm relatively convinced the rumors are right: the IOC guaranteed us the games if we produced Barack Obama. Otherwise his taking part wouldn't be worth it. Because, as Mary of Freedom's Eden points out, there are plenty of other things out there that could take priority.

We appreciate it. Really, we do. No, seriously. I actually do. In fact, if this weren't Chicago, or, alternatively, if Chicago weren't, well, Chicago, I'd even be actively supporting it. I'm actually, to tell you the truth, finding it really hard to oppose the Olympics. I mean, who hates the Olympics? What kind of soul-less bastard wouldn't want the world's greatest athletes competing in her backyard? What kind of heartless, shiftless human being wouldn't want to promote peace and international friendship and love and touchy-feely why-aren't-we-friends its-a-small-world-after-all until they die suddenly of too much love? And when it comes to Chicago, big multi-national displays of wealth, power, and bizarre inventions is in our history. We kicked the crap out of Paris in the World's Fair department back in the day (1893). And we did that during a massive economic depression as banks were collapsing left and right, despite all odds and a violently protracted timeline, and when Chicago was most famous for slaughtering entire herds of cattle every day just outside the city limits. And, speaking of Daniel Burnham, the Chicago 2016 Olympic plan does its best to complete his perfect vision of an urban paradise, the 1909 Plan of Chicago.

The truth is, I don't want to oppose it. I want to support it. I want to volunteer to take part in one of those weird choreographed dances they make the host cities do. I want to pay ten times what tickets are worth to see a sport I don't even care about, like Badminton. I want to do my part to foster international relations by purchasing loads of drinks for foreign tourists and then giving them bad directions to popular attractions. I want to irreparably damage those same relations by renting out my apartment for an obscenely high price.

The problem is, well, Chicago.

No, dear friends, that's right. I don't oppose the Games in Chicago because, as Alan Colmes so deftly put it on his blog, I'm a conservative and just flat out can't stand that Obama would bring back a win to his fair "home city," and be honored with a ticker tape parade and more adulation than is already heaped on him without reason. Its because, living in the heart of Chicago, I know better.

Tons of projects undertaken by the Chicago city government, from Millennium Park to Block 37 to the slow zone elimination project on the Blue Line have come in way over budget and years after their anticipated end date, if they ever came in at all (see e.g. Block 37, which purported to connect all of the El lines at a central hub, but succeeded in becoming a block-long and block-wide half-done-then-abandoned eyesore). And there's no such thing as "under-budget" when it comes to Chicago; the taxpayers of Illinois are on the hook for anything the IOC, private investors and Congress doesn't cover, so if we don't turn a profit, and given the sordid history of US Olympic cities, we probably won't, we'll be paying dearly for our few weeks of fun (and that's without considering what we've already paid - $200 million of Chicago city funds has been committed just to fix up the Olympic Village site).

Right as I'm about to get rid of Todd Stroger, the Cook County executive responsible for raising Chicago's sales tax to the highest rate in the country, and just after I've been hit with massive taxes on junk food (which they can't even define), I'm going to take on an extra tax on food/trees/having windows/having furniture/breathing/whatever to pay for the Decathalon? Doesn't sound like something I would actively vote for if I could. Which I can't. The decision was made without any input from the city's population, who are about evenly split on their approval of the Games.

Sure, there will be some benefits. According to the city offices, we'll have improved transportation, some tourism - at least during the games - and of course, the jobs and economic benefits that come with actually building Olympic-sized athletic venues. Despite their optimism, though, there's really very little chance these benefits will extend beyond the city to the "entire region" as claimed (anyone without a serious interest in farmland or, for that matter, masochism, will probably not venture further south than Joliet), and the people who will stand to earn the most off the games won't be the citizens; they'll be developers, union contractors, people with sweet insider deals, members of the Daley Olympic team who have been quietly hoarding potentially valuable land (who are, conveniently, already in hot water for insider dealings in the public school system) and possibly even President Obama's Olympic SuperFan Valerie Jarratt.

If we get the Olympics on Friday, I suppose I'll be as excited as I need to be considering the circumstances, and I'll be supportive. I might even be really excited. I might not buy a tee shirt until I'm sure I won't be paying for the Olympic Village...but you know.

BlogHer is a 501(c)(3) and therefore non-partisan, but that doesn't mean its bloggers (including me!) are non-partisan. Stay tuned for more of my coverage of the Olympics if and when I have to sacrifice my sanity and my paycheck for a fabulous 2016.

It's Nothing Personal. Its Political.

2009-09-22T22:04:56-05:00

I feel like suddenly Dave Matthews has crawled out of nowhere to peddle his influence in the political sphere. Now, honestly, I thought we'd gone beyond this nonsense. Unlike more reputable celebrties with less of a commitment to mediocre elevator music, Dave Matthews seems inequal to the task of really getting into the meat and potatoes of politics. Sure, he might have been on the Rock the Vote tour in 2004, and sure he might now be an expert in environmental policy after he dropped all that waste from his tour bus off the Kinzie Street bridge onto a Chicago tour boat, but, yeah...

First, it became abundantly clear that not only is he John Kerry's choice for campaign band, but he's Kerry's running mate, John Edward's choice for a wedding band. Or, at least that's what he promised his mistress. Danielle Crittenden at New Majority has the details and a playlist he should request.

Leaks from a tell-all book by a one-time aide to John Edwards reveal that Edwards and his mistress, Rielle Hunter, made plans for a wedding to be held after Elizabeth Edwards died. These plans included a rooftop location in Manhattan and, for dancing, the Dave Matthews Band.

“Pig,” “What Would You Say,” “Too Much,” “I Did It”

And then, perhaps given that introduction, decided to wade into the debate over whether disagreement on Obama's policies is motivated by a deep-seeded racial prejudice.

CNN: President Carter said he thinks that a lot of the animosity directed toward President Obama is race related.

Dave Matthews:
Of course it is! I found there's a fairly blatant racism in America
that's already there, and I don't think I noticed it when I lived here
as a kid. But when I went back to South Africa, and then it's sort of
thrust in your face, and then came back here -- I just see it
everywhere. There's a good population of people in this country that
are terrified of the president only because he's black, even if they
don't say it. And I think a lot of them, behind closed doors, do say
it.

And that's where it really went off the rails.

Repeatedly over the last few weeks, conservatives have had their views classified as "racist," stealing any legitimate points from their arguments before they even have the chance to make them. It seems that, despite a long history we have in this country of vocal opposition to our elected leaders (a history that Reason Magazine chronicled in an article today), particularly those who have just started their terms, opposition to President Obama is immediately classified as racism.

Are the people opposed to universal health care and massive new government programs that spend the taxpayers money at a time when they have a lot less racist? I don't know. I can't possibly know what's in everyone's mind. But racism is a hefty charge, and there are plenty of other viable explanations to be exhausted before you make the Jimmy Carter Jump, an event that the New York Times Kate Phillips recently discovered has set off a war of words across the blogosphere and the country.

By stepping
into the debate in such an explicit way, Mr. Carter used labels that
the White House and others have clearly tried to avoid in the wake of
Mr. Wilson’s remarks and last weekend’s angry demonstration on the
Washington Mall. White House aides and some lawmakers had earlier
deflected or dismissed questions centered on whether a racially tinged
prism was underfoot, in what seemed a concerted effort to try to stay
above the fray.

In a television interview on Sunday, Mr. Wilson, who was officially rebuked by the House on Tuesday,
dismissed suggestions that his actions were racially motivated. One of
his sons sprung to his defense after Mr. Carter’s remarks were
publicized, saying his father didn’t have a “racist bone” in his body.

President Obama has not followed in the footsteps of past Presidents in making himself seem more moderate than the programs he proposes, substantiating some fears that he's more liberal than he let on during the election. He's assuming the office of President at a time when the population is terrified of economic collapse, unable to see the light at the end of the tunnel, and honestly scarred by a previous administration that, according to most Americans, overstepped nearly every one of its bounds in relentless pursuit of its own goals. The Office itself isn't the same as it was before Bush and Clinton took control; Americans have seen what it can do. And as Reason Magazine observes, "He took over in the middle of two wars. And he represented a shift on cultural issues like gay rights and affirmative action."

If you knew what happend under George W. Bush and were suddenly faced with a situation where the other party had the same powers, would you be anything but thoroughly frightened? Something tells me that, no matter who had been elected President in 2008, we'd be facing a similar fate. You know, I'm sure there are some people who are very threatened by an African American President and it makes sense that they would oppose every policy on his agenda, but even the odds are that the "overwhelming majority" of animosity is racially motivated as Jimmy Carter says. Personally, knowing these protesters, I have yet to see any overt displays of racism, or any kind of racist, or "anti-" solidarity against any particularly characteristic of President Obama other than his liberalism. The "overwhelming majority" of animosity towards Obama's policies is, well, animosity towards Obama's policies.

Trust me, that's what we really afraid of.

Don't believe me, okay. Cynematic at MOMocrats makes a convincing argument that the definition of racism has changed and that the GOP's "Southern Strategy" has injected an incivility into the debate that has racial tinges. I'm still not convinced, particularly given that most polls indicate that a majority of Americans disagree with the Obama-proposed health care solution and are disappointed in his economic policy. There's only so much incivility can explain. Somewhere in this madness there are bright lights.

The problem with staying on the "racism" train is that, as I said, it strips the conservatives of their legitimate arguments. Given no chance to defend their positions, and immediately criticized and characterized as things they know they are not, they will become increasingly polarized against what they already oppose. Instead of seeing legitimate arguments, they will see nothing but a hateful response. They will not want to converse. They will not want to discuss. Treated like children, they'll walk away from the argument. They'll become resentful. They'll avoid confrontation, and instead become more resolute in what their detractors believe is an ignorant opinion. And that's deadly to what little discourse we have left in America.

No matter what, we do need each other to move things forward. We need to have arguments. We need to discuss. We can't afford petty name calling.

At least, that's what President Obama thinks.

Tea (Parties) for Two? There Are Issues That Unite Us, I Swear

2009-09-15T14:08:08-05:00

Last Saturday, conservative grassroots activists turned out in record numbers to march on Washington in protest against out-of-control spending and an ever-growing government bureaucracy.

People gathered in Freedom Plaza near the White House to march down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol grounds. The march had been originally been scheduled to start around 11 am but got under way hours early due to the sheer number of people flooding out of buses and metro stations all over D.C.

The mood, despite the protest topics of out of control government spending; health care ‘reform’, loss of freedom and liberty, lower taxes, smaller government and the First, Second and Tenth Amendments was upbeat and cheerful....They all had one thing in common; a message to deliver in person to the government to ‘Listen’, to tell Congress they ‘will not be ignored’ and that they ‘have had enough’.

Yes, I say grassroots because I am right in the middle of this movement, and let me tell you: these people can barely get everyone on a conference call, let alone Astroturf ten thousand or a hundred thousand or a millon or a bazillion or whatever to a single location at a single time. And yes, I believe the hype. Whatever size this march was, it was big and meaningful, otherwise we wouldn't be so obesses with quibbling over the numbers. Even if you think the message was incomprehensible, it doesn't make much sense to dismiss it as nothing major. And no, the freak parade that inevitably showed up doesn't count. Let they who have no freaks at their protests cast the first picket sign.

It was a big deal. And to those who were there, one of the most meaningful political experiences of the last decade. Southern Girl at Bless Our Hearts seems to sum up the conservative blogosphere's sentiments on the subject pretty perfectly.

Republicans, Democrats and Independents joined together to show that "We're not going to take it anymore..."I would be SHOCKED if this doesn't become a historical moment in our nation's politics. The mainstream media can keep this as quiet as it wants, but because the people in D.C. and cities throughout the nation that were there in the streets that day are ordinary citizens and friends and colleagues with the fence teeters--we may just see a swing. A huge swing. I know I'd be curious. Spread the word. It's getting louder and more clear every day.

Yes, she said "Republicans, Democrats and Independents." She didn't say "Republicans" or "conservatives" or "libertarians" because, to be quite honest, despite the popular opinion of the contrarians, Saturday's march wasn't about Republican politics -- hell, we have as much trouble with them as we do with the other party -- it was about putting an end to a trend, one that has been steadily becoming normal since the 1950s and 1960s: the steady growth of government and its slow yet steadily growing interference in our daily lives.

Weslyan Professor Claire Potter noticed something similar in her experience at the March.

I am sure the Republicans will try to bill this as "the people" rejecting "the President's proposals," but take it from me -- there was something far more opaque and interesting going on than that. I think the Republicans are holding on to these shock troops by a thread, and perhaps not at all. Astonishingly, one theme that seems to be emerging (and it is particularly prominent in a DVD I was given that contains two short films, The Obama Deception and America: From Freedom to Fascism) is that there is no difference between Obama and George W. Bush, a fantasy that I thought was the exclusive purview of Ralph Nader and Alexander Cockburn

Take me: I'm about as happy with George W. Bush and his marvelous legacy as I am about the return of the Romper Suit. There are, of course, reasons as to why this didn't happen under George W. Bush and they are, in a word, simplistic. Its actually the same reason the anti-war protests ended when Obama ascended to the Presidency: its not the policy, its whether you trust the guy making it. Bush's spending was obnoxious, yes, as was the Patriot Act. But it wasn't economically infeasible Cap & Trade policies, government-run health care and the threat of gun control.

But lets leave the past in the past, shall we?

The point of the Tea Parties is not partisan politics, at least when its not miscast. In fact, the things the Tea Partiers are protesting against aren't exactly things either side shouldn't be concerned about. At their root, the Tea Parties are about three things:

(1) Government intrusion in our lives is a bad thing;

(2) Government spending is out of control and the spenders are not being held accountable;

(3) Our political leaders too beholden to special (and corporate) interests to truly be trusted to work for the common good.

The first, you may disagree on, but think of this. There are certain areas of our lives where, unless its absolutely necessary, the government doesn't need to be. Franklin once said a nation that gives up liberty for security has neither, and I think that can be interpreted a million ways, including but not limited to, a nation that gives up liberty for healthcare has neither. Lets be honest here. I don't believe having to turn my drivers license in to the Walgreens clerk so that I can prove I'm not making Meth with my allergy medication is not preventing terrorism or promoting patriotism, despite the provisions location in the so-called Patriot Act. Similarly, having every last detail of my live including my sugar consumption, sexual history and voter record exposed to bureaucrats who decide whether I can receive treatment for my scoliosis seems like overkill. I believe in John Locke's theory that government should only be given as much power as is necessary to serve its very minimal functions and no more.

The second one is a bit more complex. The left and right see the role of government differently. The left sees the government as necessary to provide certain goods and services to people in a time of need, and so believes that government expansion during that time is a good idea. The right sees government as a hinderance and government expansion during a recession or depression as a movement toward a government-controlled system. But here's the uniting problem: no matter what the government spends the money on, the money has to come from somewhere. And that somewhere is taxpayers. The government doesn't have its own money. It just takes yours.

But think if we both sat down and defined the "problems" the same way, as though we were responsible consumers and investors in these programs? If we thought comprehensibly about the role of government in Welfare, assisting people in poverty and serving the hungry, but also set boundaries for that help and promoted opportunities? Its a pipe dream which the partisan political system prevents from ever coming to pass, but it solves a heck of a lot of problems. If you held the government accountable to how they spend your money, just like you hold companies you invest in accountable, wouldn't something change?

The third one I don't even have to explain. When's the last time you had a real discussion about whether health care reform will ever be passed in Washington that didn't mention some Congressperson's yearly take from an insurance company?

Yeah, thought so.

So there you have it. A few simple things we might all be able to agree on. Other than that Glenn Beck is a twit. Because he is a twit. Him and his fake crying and unmatching sportswear and fake earnestness and breaking the fourth wall and comedy tour and terrible hair. Yeah, you heard me. Glenn Beck has bad hair.

I'll leave you with a photojournal of the March from Barbara at Mommy Life who says:

As a 60s/70s radical leftist, I organized many of the antiwar marches -
even got teargassed a time or two. About the only mark I carry from
those days is that I'm still questioning authority. But today that
makes me a conservative.

See you at the next one. Come on. You know you want to.

Of Google, Glenn Beck and Van Jones

2009-09-08T21:15:01-05:00

Let me start by saying that Glenn Beck drives me bananas. Just the sight of him makes me fly into the kind of rage I usually reserve for Joy Behar and people who wear leggings without an appropriately long shirt (they aren't pants. LEGGINGS ARE NOT PANTS). In fact, I often find myself, when I am at home, alone with a television and an individually-sized Jose Curevo bottled margarita, cursing his very existence and the negative contribution he makes to an already intellectually adrift party. And he needs a new wardrobe.

But what can I say. When the man's right, he's right. And he was right about Van Jones.

Van Jones, the special adviser for green jobs to President Obama,
resigned over the weekend after it was revealed that he signed a
petition stating that President Bush may have deliberately allowed 9/11
to happen as a pretext for war in the Middle East and his past
statements about Republicans.

Mr. Jones issued a statement blaming Republicans for a "vicious smear campaign" against him.

Since when is letting the truth come to light a campaign of vicious smears?

Now don't get me wrong, you know I'm not a Jack Donaghy-level defender of the Republican brand, so know that I'm leveling with you here. What Van Jones managed to put into his own record was worth looking at. I've seen it called "New McCarthyism" and a high-tech witch hunt, but there's something that Obama and his administration should recognize about the people who make up the politically involved in this country: they can use Google.

For what Van Jones is or was (I highly doubt he'll be scarred for life), his contribution to the area of "green jobs" was significant, and his departure has a deeper meaning for those concerned about environmental movement. Britt Bravo talked about how his book, the Green Collar Economy was an inspiration and a roadmap to a new economic future. He had an impressive resume when it came to what he was hired to do: come up with green jobs. Personally, the whole thing sounds fishy in a New Deal sort of way (creating jobs out of nothing to employ people to do something that may not be economically feasible doesn't seem like a great plan and certainly hasn't worked in the past, but hey, you got elected. Make my day).

I'm trying to say he is one smart cookie.

Which means, #1, he's not easily deceived. When he signed a petition asking the government to investigate deeper into the 9/11 events to see whether the government itself had a role in the tragedy, he knew what he was doing. When he advocated radical re-distribution of wealth, he knew what he was doing. When he stood up on camera and made derogatory statements about Republicans, he knew what he was doing. And like a lot of Obama's Czar selections, his contributions to society were well-known, widely-published and objectively weird. And they were accessible. In other words, it wouldn't take a highly-motivated genius to find them.

Enter Glenn Beck. Who found what Van Jones wasn't hiding.

So maybe the moral of this story is that the Obama administration, if it wants to avoid legitimate criticism he should heed the knight in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and choose wisely. Because, no matter what the current crop of administration lackeys like to think, if I disagree with your policies, I'm still allowed to criticize them. I swear I am. I can oppose them and everything. And I can make a big stink about you believing in them if they don't appeal to a majority of people. And that's what's happening with the Czars.

I don't honestly believe Obama is stupid enough to believe that no one will ever Google the men and women he appoints, or that whatever low-level staffer was in charge of printing out the Wikipedia pages on the Czar appointees was asleep at the wheel, as Real Clear Politics' Froma Harrop seems to suggest. In fact, I believe more closely in the idea that Nice Deb does: Obama knows exactly what he's doing.

This was no failure of the vetting process. Van Jones was exactly what
Obama had in mind for his green jobs Czar: a community activist cut
from the same cloth as himself.

This is just what Obama wants and believes. Its just...not exactly what people expected, and not exactly what America wants. Its no accident of not looking closely enough. Its an accident, perhaps, of coming too far too fast, before the country was conditioned to accept it, before the country was desperate enough to buy it. What's worse, is that each time someone like this is appointed to another un-elected position, it deepens the wounds of distrust. Sure, I didn't trust the Bush Administration further than I could throw them plus the elephant that represents the GO, but I didn't really care enough that the NSA was wiretapping me or that I had to give over my drivers license number just to get allergy medication to take to the streets in protest. Its these incremental encroachments on liberty that, yes, are truly terrifying, but are honestly unnoticable. If you want to be a dictator, do it slowly. Czars who advocate radical tax policies, eugenics and a host of other things most people are only exposed to in 101 level political science are just too much too fast.

So I guess my advice to Obama is, if you really want to control us, you have to be more subtle. Or at least make the hunt for information harder. These fast balls straight down the middle are getting boring.

And heaven knows, we don't need you to keep Glenn Beck on television longer.

Everyone Needs a Little Clarity

2009-09-01T19:34:22-05:00

The election seems like ages ago. Ah, how fondly I remember it: SNL sketches, terrible suits, embarassing debates, promises made that would never be kept. Especially when it comes to the latter, haunting memories of those long days and nights aren't something we want to relive again and again and again. But, there are some things that just won't die, and for the Obama administration, its those sneaky little campaign promises that seem to be coming back to haunt him.

One thing I did like about Obama during the campaign was that he seemed genuinely committed to "open and honest government." That is, a government whose actions (and transgressions) would be out in the open for the general public to read and criticize (or laud as the case may be, though lets be honest here: I'm probably not going to laud. There's not a lot of lauding I do of pro-government policies). Transparency was supposed to be a key characteristic of his administration, in a departure from the norm of both sides, who, for the last several decades have worked their little gray-flannel covered patoots off to hide every last action, reaction and lobbyist dinner from the wary eye of the electorate.

Of course, I'm using so many italics because, after all this time, we're not only not seeing transparency from the Obama administration, we're seeing the exact opposite.

Section 431(a) of the bill says that the IRS must divulge taxpayer
identity information, including the filing status, the modified
adjusted gross income, the number of dependents, and "other information
as is prescribed by" regulation. That information will be provided to
the new Health Choices Commissioner and state health programs and used
to determine who qualifies for "affordability credits..."

Over at the Institute for Policy Innovation (a free-market think tank and presumably no fan of Obamacare), Tom Giovanetti argues
that: "How many thousands of federal employees will have access to your
records? The privacy of your health records will be only as good as the
most nosy, most dishonest and most malcontented federal employee.... So
say good-bye to privacy from the federal government. It was fun while
it lasted for 233 years."

This is really just the beginning. Whether its Cash-for-Clunkers, health care, national security, or really just what they've been doing these last few months, the default position is to refuse to release information and force the public to find a way to figure out how to get the skinny on the inner workings of Washington DC.

So, aside from me griping about not being able to snoop on what they're doing, what is to be done about the lack of transparency in government? Well, the answer is so simple, even I can handle it.

What Obama does may affect me, but in the long run, the policies and decisions that have the most impact on my life on a daily basis are not made in the hallowed halls of Congress. In fact, they're probably made no more than 20 blocks from me at City Hall. For most people with kids, those decisions are made at a local school district office by a local school board.

And that's where you can go to start demanding transparency. It starts at home, kids.

Recently, I've seen a wave of blog posts just like this, from Medina County Moms, about how school budgets are tightening even as taxes increase, forcing parents and teachers to dig into their own pockets to pay for necessary school supplies.

It takes a lot of supplies to run the average public school classroom,
and one might assume that school’s budget to cover the costs. But in an
era of cost-cutting and economizing, the ex pense is increasingly
shouldered by parents and teachers, rather than just taxpayers.
Teachers spend an average of $500 of their own money each year on
school materials, according to a National Education Association survey,
while the typical student-supplies list now includes everything from
hand sanitizer to safety pins, sandwich bags to batteries.

Some schools are forcing teachers to take furlough days, and many are telling parents (and unsuspecting friends and neighbors) to expect to see more fundraising for extracurricular activities like sports and band.

Which is weird, because, as a whole, school budgets are actully bigger than ever.

So, okay, where am I going with this?

Well, as it turns out, there are ways to find out why your school is forcing you to buy more beef summer sausage, gift wrap and frozen pizza kits and forcing your kids teacher to take unnecessary days off and a cut in pay by asking for your school district to give you their budget. Sunshine Review, a wikipedia-type project that focuses on local government transparency, has a Back to School program on right now that provides parents with step-by-step instructions on how to file Freedom of Information Act requests with their school district, and even has a ten-step "idea guide" on what to ask for. And in case you were wondering, if you live in Florida, the focus of their campaign, your school probably sucks.

And of course, there's the Sunlight Foundation. Once you've cut your teeth on your local public school, they can help you expand into deeper waters. Federal waters. So you can get to the big guns like the ones that are currently trying to get all of my user information off my computer.

Not that I'm, you know, paranoid or anything.

Just a note: BlogHer is nonpartisan, but its bloggers (like me!) definitely aren't. Don't hold them responsible for my views!

Healther Skelter: The Intimidation Won't Work

2009-08-21T14:12:51-05:00

Okay, so we're currently living in a climate of fear. I personally understand that I will be audited by the IRS next year because there's no chance someone didn't report me to flag@whitehouse.gov, but at least I know I'll be in good company. Thank God for H&R Block, though.

Of course, individual activists will probably not be subject to an X-Files-movie esque FEMA guided roundup and subsequent declaration of martial law. The government never does anything that overt. Plus, other than the possibility of spending the rest of my life having my ear chewed off by Glenn Beck, the possibility of living in a camp (no rent, three square meals, no telemarketers) doesn't strike me as that bad. Its too bad, really. Insurance companies, on the other hand, had better watch their backs.

In a move some fear is a reprisal for opposing President Obama’s health care plan, Democrats sent 52 letters to health insurers requesting financial records for a House committee’s investigation.

Reps. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., and Bart Stupak, D-Mich., sent a letter warning health insurers that the House Energy and Commerce Committee is “examining executive compensation and other business practices of the health industry...”

I know we’re supposed to hate the evil insurance companies for providing Americans with a service they need/want at prices they can afford. And I’m also not going to pretend as though insurance companies are completely innocent when it comes to lobbying for policy maneuvering that best impacts their bottom line. But the ruling political party putting the insurance industry in the cross hairs for daring to oppose their policy agenda?

Feel. The. Fear. Its coming. And worse than being merely fear, its fear that comes with a hideous Henry Waxman 70's porn star style mustache. I'm trembling.

But okay, lets do what we're supposed to do here and reel the whole thing back a bit with the help of Open Secrets and the Sunlight Foundation. After all, we have nothing to fear from the government (aside from its existence, but that's an entirely different discussion).

Are insurance companies pumping millions of dollars of lobbying money into the system? Yes. Its DC. Everyone is pumping millions of dollars into lobbying everything. They have to send low level staffers out to guard the cars for Pete's sake. According to the Sunlight foundation, the amount of money expended by the insurance industry wooing Congressmen is in the tens of millions, and that's not even counting the amount of money they spend wooing YOU, the consumer with flashy ads, PACs and 527s. According to Open Secrets, last year, the health sector as a whole spent over $150 million dollars trying to win the love of our elected leaders. And thanks to the possibility of health care reform this year, they're well on their way to breaking their own 2008 record.

So who gets the money? Well being a Republicanish type voter (depending on the weather and whether John McCain is within a ten thousand mile radius), I'm not proud to admit that we're the go-to guys for corporate donations. Those greedy greedy capitalists! Heck, even The Hill is trying to report that the insurance companies are so far up the pipes of the Republican machine that they're paying for people to turn up at healthcare townhalls and scream uselessly into the faces of stricken Congressmen. Right? Right?

Well, no. For one, I've met more than my share of the people turning up at town hall meetings and as of yet, none of them have received a check, and last I checked they made their own signs. You can tell. Big corporations don't misspell things.

But I could go on all day with reality. Lets check the facts on who's benefiting most from health insurance dollars, shall we?

It turns out that, last year (2008), according to Open Secrets, contributions to Democratic representatives eclipsed contributions to Republican representatives by about $15 million overall. Obama himself brought in a whopping $20 million from health special intersts, FAR surpassing his Republican opponent John McCain (Approx $7 million). In the first three months of 2009, the difference between Ds and Rs became even clearer, with 60% of all health service lobby money going to Democrats.

And the worst offenders, individually? Quite a few are Democrats. At least one is a former Presidential candidate. And as far as I'm concerned, you can have Orrin Hatch.

Maybe the question you're now asking yourself isn't so much what's going as as "why?" It doesn't make sense. If Republican logic is to be believed, the public option will put private insurance out of business. After all, with a public option that is free to taxpayers (in a manner of speaking), why would any employer choose to purchase private insurance, and when its the government competing, well, you really can't compete. They own you, after all. It only makes sense that insurance companies would be falling all over themselves to stir up trouble for the Democrats.

Well, there might be things the insurance companies fear more than socialized medicine. Right now, insurance companies don't have to compete. As Ann Coulter so elegantly put it (don't get your shorts in a knot, I just like her prose ON THIS POINT), "U.S. health insurance companies are often imperious, unresponsive consumer hellholes because they’re a partial monopoly, protected from competition by government regulation. In some states, one big insurer will control 80 percent of the market. (Guess which party these big insurance companies favor? Big companies love big government.)" Quite a bit of this problem could be solved by lifting the federal law that keeps insurance companies from competing across state lines. But a very select group of people prooooobably don't want that.

Why not? Because if you don't end up liking your coverage with one insurance company, have your benefits declined or payment is refused, you can tell your current insurance company to take a hike and find a new one. And that's probably just the first in a long line of examples.

Personally, the thought of government involvement in health care gives me the willies. I grew up in Michigan with neighbors who escaped the Canadian system so they could get treatment for the wife's breast cancer before she died. Another friend of mine moved here because, in Canada, they make you wait two years to treat an autistic child, and even then, you have to have a diagnosis practically as the child is leaving the womb, because if they aren't aged 3-5 years when they begin treatment, they won't begin treatment at all. Its not hard to see why, and the rationale is totally understandable: the people who pay the bills make the decisions and when government pays your bills, government makes the decisions.

I prefer the freedom to choose for myself. But that's just me.

Don't Cry For Mark, Argentina

2009-06-26T09:56:12-05:00

The governor of South Carolina went missing this week, has been recovered, and then, once recovered, managed to totally make up a story about where he'd been, a story which was quickly disputed by those nasty things: facts. It turns out that he wasn't so much hiking on the Appalachian Trail by himself as he was visiting a mistress he's had in Argentina for some time, that his wife recently discovered and kicked him out of the house over. Now, it seems that he may be in danger of losing what little remains of his political career.

Republican Gov. Mark Sanford struggled to maintain political support Thursday, after acknowledging that he used state funds in 2008 to pay for an extramarital tryst with a woman in Argentina.

The governor's spokesman, Joel Sawyer, said Mr. Sanford had no plans to resign. The governor called the meeting to "obviously discuss recent events, and will get updates from some cabinet officials on various news at their agencies," Mr. Sawyer said.

"The purpose of this trip was an entirely professional and appropriate business development trip," Mr. Sanford said in his statement about the 2008 encounter in Buenos Aires. "I made a mistake while I was there in meeting with the woman who I was unfaithful to my wife with." He went on to say he planned to repay the "full cost of the Argentina leg of this trip."

Not that I'm a geography expert, but I remember that Family Channel show, Christie about a young, privileged, New England woman who moved to Cutter Gap to teach the hapless residents of that godforsaken mountain town how to read and how to love, and from my understanding of that fictitious historical account, neither Atlanta Airport nor his apparent destination, Argentina, is really anywhere near the Appalachian trail. But hey, who am I to judge, right? Well, except when taxpayer funds are used to pay for the trip drawing judgment, of course. And when Mark Sanford is an outspoken supporter of "traditional marriage," yet doesn't practice what he preaches.

There were few people who insist that Mark Sanford is the Future of the Republican Party. The REAL Future of the Republican Party is someone who would probably rather try to eat a live weasel than take the reigns of what amounts to being the last, sputtering death whistle of a sliver of a glimmer of a political party. Mark Sanford is not that man, and I can say that comfortably, as I really never thought of him as that man before. Being a jerk isn't an impeachable offense, but such a breach of ethics has to be punished somehow. 2012 fading off into the distance has to be painful.

I mentioned the outspoken support for "traditional marriage" (quotes, yes, since the definition never seems consistent) because the subject has been particularly touchy recently. Sanford spent the last several weeks loudly voicing his opposition to President Obama's decision to extend certain benefits to the same-sex partners of Federal employees, preaching that the sanctity of marriage had to be preserved, and that every health insurance benefit extended was one step closer to the degradation of a sacred religious institution. You may or may not agree, but it seems fairly clear from the last several weeks -- this jaunt to Latin America, the selfish antics of Jon + Kate, whose viewed their marriage (and their children) as speedbumps on their road to stardom, and the countless divorces, adulterous relationships and philanderings of public officials we witness on a daily basis -- that same-sex partnerships are not the biggest threat to the institution of marriage in America.

It does seem, though, that our political leaders are having a difficult time admitting that. Even President Obama, who took steps to challenge the Federal Defense of Marriage Act (or DOMA), seems to be willing to do nothing more than stick a toe in the pond to test the water, to the dismay of some of his supporters.

President Barack Obama's announcement Wednesday offering limited benefits to the same-sex partners of federal employees failed to quell growing anger in the gay community that gay rights issues were getting short shrift at the White House.

In fact, Obama's promise to offer ancillary employee benefits - such as long-term-care insurance and the right to use sick leave to care for domestic partners - while still denying more valuable benefits, such as health insurance and retirement funds, may have further agitated gay and lesbian activists who were already fuming over other perceived snubs.

"Are they kidding us? Domestic partnership benefits WITHOUT health insurance because of DOMA?" gay fundraiser and activist David Mixner told POLITICO in an e-mail. "It is like rubbing salt in the wound."

It seems strange, right? If you're going to challenge DOMA, and that is what this action clearly intends to do, why only take a baby step? The ensuing litigation will no doubt be the same whether some benefits were extended or all benefits were extended, and in this case, the benefits are not even "some:" they were already available with special approval from the government. For someone marketed as strongly progressive, and moreso as a card-carrying member of a new generation, raised more tolerant and worldly then their parents, President Obama is showing political leanings that are surprisingly like...his predecessor.

Mark Sanford, as Emptywheel at Firedoglake notes, signed his own death warrant by knowingly violating the vows he sought to protect politically. He signed his own death warrant by forgetting that his actions have an impact on the believability of his words and the integrity of the entire anti-same-sex marriage movement.

Obama has an option to avoid the same image problem; he has an opportunity to engage culture, take a large step in a direction he believes is the right one, and fulfill the promises he made during his campaign.

You can read more about Mark Sanford's history on the subject of gay marriage and find a comprehensive collection of his public statements over at Pam's House Blend, where Pam Spaulding has been cataloging the incident and its larger political impact.

Rebecca at OUPBlog has a convincing argument as to why Obama should treat DOMA with care rather than take an all-or-nothing approach, stating that he must step with care or risk losing all of his capital with more conservative members of his own party who are still concerned about repealing the law.

The Sad State Of Playboy

2009-06-02T08:13:58-05:00

Oh, Playboy. You're about to be sold, just got a new CEO, and are considering embracing the under 35 crowd in a vain effort to remain relevant. You almost make me weep.

There was a time when Playboy was one of the most relevant social commentaries on the market, and its underlying philosophy -- which advocated and championed the radical individual rights that define American democracy and led the way for the sexual revolution -- a force in the American mind. Even simple, little me, the quintessential midwestern girl-next-door, couldn't hope to escape its influence; it was Hefner's carefully crafted Playboy Philosophy, which was molded after the Classical Liberal/modern libertarian ideals of Locke, Hobbes and Mill, that defines even the modern limitations of my own libertarian ideology.

But in recent years, Playboy has responded to culture in a way that is antithetical to its own original ideal, hiring models that are increasingly plasticized, celebrating the seedy and pushing the envelope further and further and further. Little did I expect, though, to find Playboy, long the more moderate of the adult publications, indulging in thinly-veiled rape fantasies, but then...there's Guy Cimbalo:

But there is a way to reach across the aisle without letting principles fall by the wayside. We speak, naturally, of the hate f*ck. We may despise everything these women represent, but godd*mmit they're hot. Let the healing begin.

I get the sense that Guy woke up one morning, or was desperate one evening, and realized that he's sexually attracted to women who he does not agree with politically. And not in any small way. Had he felt superior to any of the women, he might have listed them as "pity f***s, or "maybes." But instead, he apparently decided to describe them with significant emotion, covering his bases by couching it in his own hatred of conservative ideals. I'll use the word "apparently" a lot here, as I have no real idea of what went through Guy's mind as he penned this piece, nor what emotion would drive him to so thoroughly flout the boundaries of decency.

Instead of celebrating the fact that his libido reached "across the aisle," with, say, an only-midly sexist "run-down" of attractive, Republican women, Guy apparently decided to express his love in the only way he found acceptable: degrading them, demeaning them, and ignorantly labeling them as objects of hate and derision (he couldn't even bother to get Amanda Carpenters employer right). The misogyny that oozes from his every word is palpable: if these women only had the decency to stay silent, they'd pass the "looks test" necessary to sleep with the author, but as they have opinions different from his own, he's "forced" to still have sex with them in his imagination, but with the caveat that he's the one wielding hateful power through sexual abuse.

Classy.

I almost feel sorry for him, particularly since Playboy, in a move that has massive metaphorical connotations, shrunk from Guy's piece, removing it after it garnered almost 60,000 views.

I almost feel sorry for him.

At what point will this kind of flagrant, almost violent sexism reach its saturation point? At what point will society finally understand that it is not funny, nor ironic, nor even remotely acceptable to degrade women, to turn them into sexual objects and treat them as though their accomplishments, their personalities and their mere personhood are of no consequence?

I am not shying away from the fact that conservatives are just as guilty of this exploitation as liberals, though the methods are much different (it seems liberal men have a habit of connecting political ideology to the victims of their attitude); I am merely saying that forty years after the liberation movement began, prominent members of our society who express progressive values, and who write for reputable publications cannot even manage to self-censor their own misguided feelings before they become available for public consumption? What will it take? It seems even the outermost limits -- the ones that proscribe the kind of angry hatred for women that drives this "dangerously-close-to-rape" fantasy piece -- are not clearly marked or even routinely acknowledged. And that Playboy, which has always claimed to celebrate women, would publish it, speaks volumes about their editorial board, and the dramatic absence of any remaining real philosophy.

These women are all strong, incredible, intelligent women. I know many of them, and respect all of them. They don't deserve to be treated in this manner. No woman does. And this attempt to denigrate the women on this list is an implicit attempt to denigrate women everywhere who choose to speak up in public.

Also talking about this:

Media Lizzy is following the story with updates and reactions.

Emily Kaiser of the Blotter believes that outrage over this article should cross the political aisle in ways Guy wasn't willing to.

Jenn Q. Public of the New Agenda delves deeper into the term "hate f***" as an apparently euphemism for rape.