Hilarious

I can't say that I'm 100% aboard the Libya action, but I'm willing to give President Obama the benefit of the doubt. However, for Republicans, even when he follows their prescription for creating the No-Fly Zone, they're never happy with him!

Thankfully, Salon has a useful flowchart of GOP response to our President.

The Mitt Romney dig may be the best.

More on the Slavery Minimalization

Haley Barbour, Republican Governor of Georgia, chimes in to defend the indefensible:

On Sunday, Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour (R-Miss) defended Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell's omission of slavery from his "Confederate History Month" proclamation.

Appearing on CNN's "State of the Union," Barber said that the firestorm of controversy raised by McDonnell's proclamation is "just a nit". "It's trying to make a big deal out of something that doesn't matter for diddly," Barbour claimed.

What's the matter with this element of the South that has convinced itself that the Confederacy was about States Rights rather than preserving the abominable institution of slavery? Ask Newsweek editor/historian Jon Meacham:

Advertently or not, Mr. McDonnell is working in a long and dispiriting tradition. Efforts to rehabilitate the Southern rebellion frequently come at moments of racial and social stress, and it is revealing that Virginia’s neo-Confederates are refighting the Civil War in 2010. Whitewashing the war is one way for the right — alienated, anxious and angry about the president, health care reform and all manner of threats, mostly imaginary — to express its unease with the Age of Obama, disguising hate as heritage.

If neo-Confederates are interested in history, let’s talk history. Since Lee surrendered at Appomattox, Confederate symbols have tended to be more about white resistance to black advances than about commemoration. In the 1880s and 1890s, after fighting Reconstruction with terrorism and after the Supreme Court struck down the 1875 Civil Rights Act, states began to legalize segregation. For white supremacists, iconography of the “Lost Cause” was central to their fight; Mississippi even grafted the Confederate battle emblem onto its state flag.

But after the Supreme Court allowed segregation in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, Jim Crow was basically secure. There was less need to rally the troops, and Confederate imagery became associated with the most extreme of the extreme: the Ku Klux Klan.

In the aftermath of World War II, however, the rebel flag and other Confederate symbolism resurfaced as the civil rights movement spread. In 1948, supporters of Strom Thurmond’s pro-segregation Dixiecrat ticket waved the battle flag at campaign stops.

Then came the school-integration rulings of the 1950s. Georgia changed its flag to include the battle emblem in 1956, and South Carolina hoisted the colors over its Capitol in 1962 as part of its centennial celebrations of the war.

As the sesquicentennial of Fort Sumter approaches in 2011, the enduring problem for neo-Confederates endures: anyone who seeks an Edenic Southern past in which the war was principally about states’ rights and not slavery is searching in vain, for the Confederacy and slavery are inextricably and forever linked.

Point sharpened by Matt Yglesias:

Meanwhile, I would note that apart from contemporary racial issues, something that links the mentality of today’s right to the mentality of the slaveowners and segregation proponents is the white southern political tradition’s very partial and selective embrace of majoritarian democracy. As long as national institutions are substantially controlled by white southerners, the white south is a hotbed of patriotism. But as soon as an non-southern political coalition manages to win an election—as we saw in 1860 and in 2008—then suddenly the symbols of national authority become symbols of tyranny and the constitution is construed as granting conservative areas all kinds of alleged abilities to opt out of national political decisions. Even if you think opposition to the Affordable Care Act has nothing whatsoever to do with race, the underlying political philosophy by which a George W Bush or James Buchanan is a national president but an Abraham Lincoln or a Barack Obama merely a sectional one remains incoherent and pernicious.

The hell with Rep. Michelle Bachmann (R-MN) calling Obama "un-American" and the likes of Newt Gingrich calling him "radical." That's all about dehumanizing our President for their own base and anyone they may be able to suck into their know-nothing vortex.

Poor Confederacy. They lost the battle to continue to the subjugation of a kidnapped race.

How galling it must be for the recidivists to have someone from that race running the country, let alone doing it so well.

Circle of Bad

Yesterday I wrote about the Confederacy and repercussions in our current day and age. The anti-federal government animosity of the past now manifests itself in the more extremist elements of Tea Party/teabaggers and their fellow travelers, as egged on by Fox News and the contemporary Republican Party that seems to cover before them, as anti-Obama/anti-Democrat/anti-health reform to the point of a wild proliferation of rightwing murder threats.

Is there direct line of culpability anywhere here? Check out the opinion of the mother of the man just arrested for threatening the life of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi:

"Greg has -- frequently gets in with a group of people that have really radical ideas and that are not consistent with myself or the rest of the family and -- which gets him into problems," said Eleanor Giusti, 83, in an interview with ABC 7. "And apparently I would say this must be another one that somehow he's gotten onto either by -- I'd say Fox News or all of those that are really radical, and he -- that's where he comes from."

I'll be interested to hear more about another gentleman just arrested in East Texas:

"It does appear that there were two motives: one, that he was disenchanted with the federal government, and, two, he was disenchanted with an individual who he perceived that had wronged him," says Featherston of 52-year-old Larry North, who was arrested today.

North was indicted Wednesday on a charge of illegally possessing a pipe bomb. (Read the indictment here.) Authorities had identified North as a person of interest in connection with a string of incidents in which explosive devices were placed in mailboxes in East Texas.

They say that he was witnessed putting a pipe bomb in a collection box in Tyler Wednesday. Prosecutors say North distributed 36 devices in 23 locations, but he has not been charged beyond the possession count.

When I see a Republican saying that there are (at minimum) disproportionate threats against Democrats, that the rhetoric is way too rough on their side of the aisle, and that it is never appropriate to express one's political opposition in terms of violence, let alone spit, curse, threaten or actually plan or carry out attacks, then that's a Republican I'll look at differently than the equivocating rest.

And credit where credit is due, Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK), not incidentally one of Obama's first friends when he joined the Senate:

But in a recent town hall meeting Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) offered some kind words for her, saying "she's a nice lady." Coburn added that although he and the Speaker differ on policy issues, she's a "good person."

Perhaps even more stunning than Coburn's conciliatory words for Pelosi was his criticism of Fox News.

"What we have to have is make sure we have a debate in this country so that you can see what's going on and make a determination yourself," he said, adding: "So don't catch yourself being biased by Fox News that somebody is no good. The people in Washington are good. They just don't know what they don't know.

I may not agree with Sen. Coburn on most politics, but he appears to be quite a respectable human being.

More Fun in the New World

Matt Yglesias nails it on Grayson:

I think the real issue—and the real import—of Grayson’s statement is that it involved breaking one of the unspoken rules of modern American politics. The rule is that conservatives talk about their causes in stark, moralistic terms and progressives don’t. Instead, progressives talk about our causes in bloodless technocratic terms. This is also one of the reasons that Ted Kennedy’s stark, moralistic attack on Robert Bork’s legal theories are for some reason often cast by the MSM as some kind of illegitimate smear campaign. The reality is that it was just him talking about a conservative the way conservatives relatively talk about liberals. Like Grayson he characterized his opponents’ views polemically, but wasn’t offering any kind of wild factual distortions. But moralism from the left is very unfamiliar to American political debates.

Which is why a GOP Representative withdrew his censure motion -- this wasn't Joe Wilson hollering "You lie!" at President Obama during the Joint Session address, this is a real moral question, and it serves to distract from what's really going on, because this is what cuts through the cable bullshit. And there's a lot more people who believe the core proposition that the Republicans are saying "no" to health insurance reform since they've quite publicly made it their strategy since the inauguration that who believe (despite their decibel level) that Obama wants to kill granny.

Interesting today was the Senate Finance Committee passing the more "conservative" (in the sense of measured/gradual) public option amendment by Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-WA):

The amendment creates a "federally funded, non-Medicaid, state plan which combines the innovation and quality of private sector competition with the purchasing power of the states," according to an overview.

It would be available to people with incomes above Medicaid eligibility but below 200 percent of the federal poverty level -- a very narrow window. However, Republicans fear -- and progressives hope -- that once the plan becomes law there will be pressure to expand it.

The plan would not be free. It is based on Washington state's Basic Health plan, which costs roughly 60 dollars a month, with the remainder of the premium subsidized by the state.

Private insurers would be eligible to participate in the plan, as would HMOs or other networks of health care providers.

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/01/senate-committee-passes-q_n_306831.html

Meanwhile, credit where credit's due:

Sen. Lindsey Graham, (R-S.C.) offered unusually blunt assessments of the fringe elements of his party and conservative media on Thursday, calling the popular and bombastic Fox News host Glenn Beck a "cynic" whose show was antithetical to American values.

"Only in America can you make that much money crying," Graham said of Beck. "Glenn Beck is not aligned with any party. He is aligned with cynicism and there has always been a market for cynics. But we became a great nation not because we are a nation of cynics. We became a great nation because we are a nation of believers."

Appearing before a crowd of Washington's elite power players and opinion-makers, Graham spoke largely without filter, offering acidic takes on subject well beyond Beck. The Senator called the birther community that questions the president's U.S. citizenship "crazy" and implored them to "knock this crap off" so the country could get on to more important matters.

"I'm here to tell you that those who think the president was not born in Hawaii are crazy," said Graham, who went on to dispel another myth: that Obama is a closet Muslim.

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/01/sen-graham-calls-beck-a-c_n_306434.html

Penance watch begins now.

And why does Republican Bill Bennett hate America?