Real Stakes

So Willard lost a donor, very publicly, over his embrace of "one man/one woman" marriage as the only one he'll accept:

"I feel that I no longer wish to support your presidential campaign and ask you that you please return the maximum contribution that I gave to you last year," Bill White wrote in a letter to Romney, according to a report by CNN. "You have chosen to be on the wrong side of history and I do not support your run for president any longer."

White, a registered independent who runs a New York-based consulting firm, had given $2,500 to the Romney campaign.

White made his decision following Obama's announcement last week that he supports same-sex marriage. While he clarified to CNN that he does not agree with the president on fiscal issues, White said that Romney's speech during Liberty University's commencement on Saturday led him to believe that Romney would press for a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage -- a position that White simply cannot support.

"I feel like [Romney has] declared war on my marriage," White said. "And I could just sit back and not say anything. Or I could do something about it. And I've chosen to do something about it."

Meanwhile, in the African-American community, a leading heterosexual comes out in favor of Obama's stance:

“I’ve always thought it as something that was still holding the country back,” Jay-Z said, referencing the fact that same-sex marriage is not recognized nationwide. “What people do in their own homes is their business and you can choose to love whoever you love. That’s their business. It's no different than discriminating against blacks. It’s discrimination plain and simple.”

Though he was in Philadelphia to appear alongside Mayor Michael Nutter and announce a two-day music festival in early September, Jay-Z sat down with CNN's Poppy Harlow to chat about broader issues. When he was asked if he felt Obama's decision to come out in favor of the right of same-sex couples to marry would cost him votes (particularly with the African-American community), he shrugged. "It's really not about votes," he said. "It's about people."

Hopefully Jay-Z's influence will be felt far and wide on this issue.

Meanwhile, the Obama campaign - NOT a surrogate PAC - released this ad straight out of Karl Rove's handbook, attacking his opponent's supposed strength:



Ju-jitsu, Mr. Rove. And nice branding for Mr. Romney.

Courage

President Obama did the right thing today. After a long period of saying his position on marriage equality was "evolving," he evolved. Unlike a typical politician, he let us know where he stands, which in legislative terms is against the Federal government interfering with states that legalize the right of two gay citizens to enter into the bonds of marriage. And there are plenty of jokes available about the challenges that come with those bonds.

Here's the statement that just changed the world:

Here's Andrew Sullivan, the blogger who first convinced me to take Barack Hussein Obama seriously as a Presidential candidate a little over four years ago:

Today Obama did more than make a logical step. He let go of fear. He is clearly prepared to let the political chips fall as they may. That's why we elected him. That's the change we believed in. The contrast with a candidate who wants to abolish all rights for gay couples by amending the federal constitution, and who has donated to organizations that seek to "cure" gays, who bowed to pressure from bigots who demanded the head of a spokesman on foreign policy solely because he was gay: how much starker can it get?

My view politically is that this will help Obama. He will be looking to the future generations as his opponent panders to the past. The clearer the choice this year the likelier his victory. And after the darkness of last night, this feels like a widening dawn.

Can anyone imagine Mitt Romney taking this kind of political risk and changing history for the better? The notion is so absurd as to be beyond laughable. It's enfeebling. Has there ever been a more morally feeble candidate than Willard? Worthless as a leader, and a danger to the free world should he ever get that position.

You want to join the groundswell of tolerant Americans letting the forces of darkness, bigotry and anti-human rights know that you support our President?

Here you go.

Weak

The Romney Presidential campaign just had a high-profile resignation today, and one that should give them pause to make a fundamental change in his/their approach. But, having seen Willard kowtow to the rightwing Republican base thus far, he probably won't. As reported by Jennifer Rubin in the Washington Post:

Richard Grenell, the openly gay spokesman recently hired to sharpen the foreign policy message of Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign, has resigned in the wake of a full-court press by anti-gay conservatives.

In a statement obtained by Right Turn, Grenell says:

I have decided to resign from the Romney campaign as the Foreign Policy and National Security Spokesman. While I welcomed the challenge to confront President Obama’s foreign policy failures and weak leadership on the world stage, my ability to speak clearly and forcefully on the issues has been greatly diminished by the hyper-partisan discussion of personal issues that sometimes comes from a presidential campaign. I want to thank Governor Romney for his belief in me and my abilities and his clear message to me that being openly gay was a non-issue for him and his team.

According to sources familiar with the situation, Grenell decided to resign after being kept under wraps during a time when national security issues, including the president’s ad concerning Osama bin Laden, had emerged front and center in the campaign.

Most damning:

During the two weeks after Grenell’s hiring was announced the Romney campaign did not put Grenell out to comment on national security matters and did not use him on a press foreign policy conference call. Despite the controversy in new media and in conservative circles, there was no public statement of support for Grenell by the campaign and no supportive social conservatives were enlisted to calm the waters.

As I've written before, Romney is not a leader in the true sense. He appear incapable to taking a position unpopular to his base, making a convincing moral case, and either turning them around to his point of view or at least earning widespread respect for his rectitude. He's a loser, not a leader.

Per Josh Marshall, this is Romney playing into "bitch-slap politics" without the Obama campaign even having to try that hard:

The Obama campaign has spent days hammering the claim that Mitt lacked the fortitude to make the risky choice to launch a commando raid to kill Osama bin Laden. Either it was that he said it wasn’t sufficiently important or that he said he wouldn’t violate Pakistani sovereignty to launch such an attack. In either case, the core message was ‘I was right; he was wrong.’ But as I’ve argued, the ferocity of the attack itself was meant to diminish Romney as weak and helpless, a man unable to properly defend himself.

...

Against that backdrop, the sudden resignation of Romney’s new foreign policy spokesman Richard Grenell came at just the wrong time since it told just the same story about Romney as the Obama campaign has been telling all week: Romney is weak.

...

“It’s going to be difficult for Romney to take other steps like this. And that’s what’s really frightening to me,” Fred Karger, openly gay Republican candidate for president told TPM. “It’s just too tough to stand up to these groups because they have a lot of money and power. You’ve got to be able to do that, that’s leadership.”

...

In other words, Romney’s actions have spoken louder than his awkward replies to the original bin Laden smackdown. In the face of attacks meant to show he can’t stand up to Osama bin Laden, Romney shows he can’t stand down the far-right homophobes in his own party.

Or more simply, as Obama campaign's Stephanie Cutter tweeted out:

“How can voters trust Romney to stand up to the Soviets & Czechoslovakia if he's folding to rt wing on hiring gay staff?

Americans don't vote for weakies for President. There's still a canyon of time to fill between now and November 6th, so maybe Mitt can turn it around, but I believe this early imprinting is just the beginning of what's really going to fill the airwaves and, as I predicted months ago, Mitt Romney will make Bob Dole look like a winner.

This is Huge. This is a Big Deal.

This country's most populous state, my adopted home, is free at last. And I don't think I can top Taryn Southern's description of how I think most Californians feel:

By the way, I have no idea who Taryn is, but she came up in a YouTube video search and has a nice, slightly confessional YouTube Channel. But that's how the Internet works.

You can't ban marriage between two people because of gender. True love cannot be property of the state (unless you're married to Newt Gingrich). Not in the Internet Age, and you can't defund Planned Parenthood or try to censor usage.

Like it says in our song, Let Freedom Ring.

Onto the Supremes?

Tricky Dick

Richard Nixon & Bebe Rebozo?

A new biography by Don Fulsom, a veteran Washington reporter who covered the Nixon years, suggests the 37th U.S. President had a serious drink problem, beat his wife and — by the time he was inaugurated in 1969 — had links going back two decades to the Mafia, including with New Orleans godfather Carlos Marcello, then America's most powerful mobster.

Yet the most extraordinary claim is that the homophobic Nixon may have been gay himself. If true, it would provide a fascinating insight into the motivation and behaviour of a notoriously secretive politician.

Fulsom argues that Nixon may have had an affair with his best friend and confidant, a Mafia‑connected Florida wheeler-dealer named Charles 'Bebe' Rebozo who was even more crooked than Nixon.

I remember my parents and their friends joking about how much Nixon hung with this mediocre ex-baseball player all the time, but they'd never really imagine this at the time. Was foul-mouthed, bigoted Dick Nixon the ultimate homosexual masochist in the age of fascistic repression of gay rights? It would explain so much. As President, Nixon was of course part of that repression.

The only and ultimate escape for RMN: resignation.

No Big Deal

A welcome first (for such documentation and dissemination), certainly far from a last:

Welcome to America, sisters.

For the Win

The endorsement that really counts:

Boston, MA - Mitt Romney today announced the support of conservative activist Christine O’Donnell.

“Christine has been a leader in the conservative movement for many years,” said Mitt Romney. “Christine recognizes that excessive government threatens us now and threatens future generations, and I am pleased to have her on my team.”

That's right, the one who says she's not a witch.

Meanwhile, Mitt lost a vote:



Either Romney really is so bigoted as to deny this gay ex-serviceman his rights, or he's such a soulless panderer that he no leader at all.

In any case, it all may be moot soon. Gingrich is more than the not-Romney flavor of the moment, he's the winner of the not-Romney sweepstakes. At least he'll make Richard Nixon look like a professional in the General Election.

Guess who's benefited most for the GOP debates -- and has the best organization in Iowa: BHO.

Remember this from four years ago?



Still gives me chills when he says, "They said this day would never come..."

He Just Can't Quit It

Hilarious responses to Republican Texas Governor Rick Perry's instant-classic gaybaiting ad, essentially a storm of "Dislikes" on YouTube (heading towards 300,000 Dislikes vs. 6,000 Likes as I write this) and also inspiring a bit of research that is too good to be believed:

I guess he may not want gay soldiers to serve openly and honestly in the military, but gets his fashion cues from Brokeback Mountain.

As Will Truman wrote this week, the 2012 GOP Presidential nomination process has entered an entirely new realm never seen before: satire. You couldn't write a clown show like this:

It occurred to me the other day as I was leaving a comment elsewhere: if someone had written a TV show and the plot followed the current Republican primary, I would have some serious problems with it. Namely, I would pan the show as unrealistic. A joke. Liberal Hollywood’s parody of what the Republican Party is. Herman Cain? Who the hell acts like that. There is no way that a party would seriously give a serial-adulturing, ideologically muddled, lobbying-compromised former House Leader a shot at the nomination. Hollywood couldn’t devise a more repugnant figure as the potential head of a party that they want noting to do with. The comparisons between Rick Perry and Rob Ritchie have, of course, frequently been made. But in some sense, Ritchie would seem downright normal compared to a lot of the candidates. And though the connection hasn’t been made, I see some similarities between Mitt Romney and Bob Russell, the simply unpalatable (to many) candidate who doesn’t belong there but is there because he’s there and his biography doesn’t entirely discount his presence.

Meanwhile, in the real world, a reporter who asks a stupid question echoing the GOP (especially Romney) canard that President Obama is somehow an appeaser of America's enemies, gotta love the smackdown from Mac Daddy Barack:

Yeah, ask Bin Laden. At the bottom of the deep blue sea. My prediction holds: the 2012 Obama landslide will best his 2008 win.

You read it here first.

Fascism Watch: Voter Suppression

Finally, the mainstream media is starting to notice that the GOP is systematically suppressing voting rights. From today's LA Times:

Early voting was reduced from two weeks to one week. Voting on the Sunday before election day was eliminated. College students face new hurdles if they want to vote away from home. And those who register new voters face the threat of fines for procedural errors, prompting the nonpartisan League of Women Voters to suspend voter registration drives and accuse the Legislature of "reverting to Jim Crow-like tactics."

What is happening in Florida is part of a national trend, as election law has become a fierce partisan battleground. In states where Republicans have taken majority control, they have tightened rules for registering new voters, reduced the time for casting ballots and required voters to show photo identification at the polls. The new restrictions were usually adopted on party-line votes and signed by Republican governors.

During Florida's legislative debate on the new law, a Republican state senator argued that it should not be easy or convenient to vote. Voting "is a hard-fought privilege. This is something people died for," said Sen. Michael Bennett of Bradenton, the chamber's president pro tempore. "Why should we make it easier?"

This is their way of undermining democracy in the U.S. Perhaps they feel only landed gentry - male - should have that right...per the original rules in the Constitution? Back when a slave was only 3/5 of a vote?

Seven states — Alabama, Kansas, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Wisconsin — voted to require registered voters to show photo identification at the polling place. Democratic governors vetoed such bills in five other states.

The Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law estimated that new laws across the nation "could make it significantly harder for more than 5 million eligible voters to cast ballots in 2012." The new restrictions will "fall most heavily on young, minority and low-income voters," the group said.

The Jim Crow Republican Party, with the photo i.d. as poll tax.

If Obama wins this next election, it'll be an even greater victory thanks to these rigs.

Two Gay Soldiers

This video's a YouTube hit, a moving real-life moment that feels like America at its best:

And then there's this milestone in Presidential debate history, the first time a U.S. soldier was booed by the audience:

A Republican Presidential debate milestone.

Working Help

The movie version of The Help, so to speak, works, which is both surprise and a relief. It's the best kind of Hollywood common reader movie, a.k.a. "middlebrow" entertainment designed to enlighten as well as, ultimately, uplift and delight. In the tradition's best movies -- say, The Best Years of Our Lives, To Kill a Mockingbird, there's enough complexity that we accept the movie as a truthful reflection of a problematic real world era.

We accept the flattening of historical complexities into good guys and bad guys in return for the superior performances of actors like Viola Davis, who holds the movie together as focused voice and biggest journey, the journey of self-respect that was the foundation of the Civil Rights Era and resonates in the ongoing struggle today.

While being fairly labelled as Civil Rights light, it's effective in bringing painful questions back, including what led up to the era.

Slavery, America's original sin, was about the complete denial of a human being's identity, the person as property, that identity to be bought and sold no matter how many times it breaks up a slave family. The uneasy truce that followed the Civil War for 100 years was essentially a recodification of the old system, with personhood still denied by an epithet, by the devilish nerve to kidnap young men and women in the night and hang them from trees.

The biggest historical news moment in The Help is the shooting of African-American rights activist, Medger Evers, happening in the very town of Jackson where the movie's set. Considering the tripling of death threats against the President when Obama took office, there's something palpable about the film for our time, a safe place to think about a time when America was not as fair, in law or custom, as it is now. As the film has a comedic heart, its irony is more ultimately more positive than negative, but it's an emotional experience throughout, in large part due to the exemplary cast of women.

Viola Davis' Abiline is given the main voice, not Emma Stone's Skeeter although the trailer would have you fooled into thinking it's all through the white chick's eyes. Davis, 41, has won two Tony's and was nominated for an Oscar for Doubt, so I think the only question is whether she gets nominated in the Best Actress category or the more likely chance of dominating as Supporting Actress. There's an argument to be made that it's an ensemble piece, but you can't submit Stone as Best Actress without betraying the story. I haven't read the book, but saw that it uses three voices -- Abiline, Skeeter and Minny -- which the filmmakers wisely consolidated into Abiline.

Davis is the lead, with Stone close behind and the terrific Octavia Spencer as the rebel, Minny. I loved seeing Jessica Chastain playing the opposite of her idealized mother figure in The Tree of Life, Allison Janney is great as Skeeter's mom, Sissy Spacek and Cicely Tyson are welcome anchors at the senior end, and Stone does come out of this a leading lady who can act, is naturally attractive in an interestingly non-bombshell way, and may just be the current smart it girl of her young generation.

I don't want to post the trailer because it's both misleading and spoiler-filled. Just trust me that you don't have to feel guilty going to see it. Even white Liberal guilt.

Someday, it'll probably be a musical.

I Knew It

Michelle Bachmann Revealed To Be Elaborate Joaquin Phoenix Performance Piece

“I also wanted to see just how long I could get away with it. I’m sorry if it spun a bit out of control. I honestly thought I’d get called out after two, maybe three weeks tops. No one is as surprised as I am that people took ‘Michelle Bachmann’ seriously.”

...

“Seriously, I’ve completely run out of ideas for where else I can take this character. It seems there is literally nothing I can sign, do, or say, including making vague death threats, that will cause people to meaningfully question ‘Michelle Bachmann,’” Phoenix said. “I’m releasing her rap album next week. Between that, and this press conference, I imagine this whole social experiment will finally come to an end.”

And the shameless Rick Perry - hoax as well?:

Who else would compare the Civil Right Movement to lifting taxes and regulations on the rich?

Koch Head

Freshman Republican Gov. Scott Walker of the great state of Wisconsin is one of the guys (per Forbes) fueled by the Koch Brothers, doing their bidding in his now seemingly rash attempt to steal the rights of public unions to collectively bargain under the guise of reducing the deficit, in a Shock Doctrine of his own making:



People are starting to think Walker is an asshole, and he's just upping the ante with "dire" layoff threats. Sieg heil. But other GOP Governors are already distancing themselves from trying to eliminate the worker's universal right to collective bargaining. With US union membership down to maybe 11% of the national workforce. And there's definitely shock resistance engaged and in motion.

Meanwhile, in Chicago, Rahm had a most excellent night.

McRepugnant

Does Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) really want to go down in history as the last man standing between the bankrupt policy of DADT and its repeal? Does he really want that to be his legacy? Even his bosom buddy, Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) is strongly (and admirably, tough as it is for me to admit) for repeal.

Here's what I'm wondering: What the hell is his reason? A list of possibilities:

• Political: He's so nervous about alienating the dominant rightwing votership in Arizona - because in six years he'll have to run again?

• Personal: He's homophobic, like a lot of older dudes.

• Misinformed: He has a complete misapprehension of how service people who are gay and those that know they are gay interact with each other professionally?

• Egomaniac: He's a grump who just wants to thwart something and act like he's the military expert?

Per the Andrew Sullivan post link above, he's acting anti-Constitutional, on one hand denying civilian command of the U.S. military (which I do doubt he'd be doing under a Republican President) -- that's called fascism -- and, on the other hand, somehow making the military a democracy where majority rule of soldiers would dictate with whom they would serve, rather than their orders.

I always thought that soldiers were supposed to follow their orders without question. But maybe that's only the order John McCain personally approves of. Yep, that last reason is looking more and more likely every day.

Enjoy your legacy, Sen. McCain.

Truth Will Out

So much for Tea Party principles. Rand Paul has flipped his flop for earmarks, as any politician interested in re-election will do from the day they're sworn in:

One Tea Party hero, Senator-elect Rand Paul (R-KY), jumped on the anti-earmark bandwagon early, making “a ban on wasteful earmark spending in Washington D.C. one of the key points of his campaign” in March. Lambasting lawmakers who opt for “photo-ops with oversized fake cardboard checks,” Paul vowed to “dismantle the culture of professional politicians” even if he “ruffled a lot of establishment feathers” while doing it.

But after joining the GOP flock on Election Day, Paul is singing a different tune. In a Wall Street Journal profile this weekend, Paul signaled an about-face on his earmark position, committing to “fight for Kentucky’s share of earmarks and federal pork.”

Truth will out: Texas conservatives suck at governing, and their state is about to feel massive, massive pain:

Texas faces a budget crisis of truly daunting proportions, with lawmakers likely to cut sacrosanct programs such as education for the first time in memory and to lay off hundreds if not thousands of state workers and public university employees.

Texas' GOP leaders, their eyes on the Nov. 2 election, have played down the problem's size, even as the hole in the next two-year cycle has grown in recent weeks to as much as $24 billion to $25 billion. That's about 25 percent of current spending.

The gap is now proportionately larger than the deficit California recently closed with cuts and fee increases, its fourth dose of budget misery since September 2008.

Maybe if Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX) can somehow (as he's asking) succeed his state from Social Security and Medicare, he can finish turning it into a Third World state. The potential upside: illegal immigrants fleeing across the border back into Mexico. With plenty of Texans following.

The best thing may have happened -- best for President Obama and the future Democratic Majority. Now he can even get tough on Don't Ask Don't Tell repeal.

Now with an opposition force screwing up in the House daily, he's got everything he needs to run against in 2012.

Getting Better All the Time

In the wake of two recent gay teen suicides, journalist Dan Savage and his husband created the "itgetsbetterproject" where, beginning with the two of them, gay, lesbian, bi-sexual and transgender adults post videos telling their own stories for the benefit of young people to let them know the pain, bullying, doubts and suffering they are going through right now are only temporary.

These videos are staggering in the emotion they inspire (which reaffirms my theory that we don't cry at tragedy as much as we cry at acts of goodness in the midst of injustice). There are dozens of them, maybe hundreds before long, a collection of citizen voices that shows the Web at its best. It is humanizing writ large.

Go dig for yourself, but here's a few of my favorites. This girl, in particular, is unbelievably articulate, inspiring and, ultimately, loving, movingly so in the final moments:



This video that just went live is from a collection of Google employees. I'm particularly impressed by the courage of the transgender participant, but the overall effect is so strong:



It makes me wonder if bigots watching this will decide to switch their search engine of choice. The following video by Dallas' Turtle Creek Chorale is interesting for a number of reasons. It's a large collection of voices, drawn from religious congregations in, yes, Texas, and when the actual performance starts we see the pictures of all too many gay kids who took their own lives -- the power of classical music to break our hearts, the power of this ensemble of strong, accomplished musicians en masse to strengthen them:



Lastly, my favorite President of my lifetime thus far:



I'd like to imagine El Presidente George W. Bush making a video like this during his Presidency. Or, had he won, President McCain. Or (fear it) imaginary President Palin.

But I can't.

GoOfy P!

Christine O'Donnell is Alicia Silverstone in Clueless:



She also claimed in the same debate that we didn't "finish the job" when we fought the Russians in Afghanistan (hey wha? Maybe if she means funding the Mujahideen and empowering Bin Laden, then sorta) but you get the sense she might be confused with finishing the job in Iraq. Or something.

Another wacky GOP Senate nominee, John Raese in Virginia, has pegged the number of space lasers we need to defend America at 1,000. I don't know about you, but I prefer one thousand death lasers to be aimed away from me.

And poor wackbagger Carl Paladino, running for NYS Governor, can't catch a break. Yesterday he apologized for some of (and certainly not all) of his anti-gay speech to the ultra-orthodox Jewish group in Brooklyn, so today the Rabbi of that group, Yehuda Levin, withdrew his endorsement:

The rabbi, Yehuda Levin, who helped write those remarks, said Mr. Paladino “folded like a cheap camera” because of the uproar they had set off. And the rabbi said he could no longer support Mr. Paladino’s candidacy for governor of New York.

“Which part of the speech that you gave in Brooklyn to the Orthodox Jewish community are you apologizing for?” Rabbi Levin asked at a news conference in front of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, on Fifth Avenue. “Will we see you next year with your daughter at that gay pride march?”

Well, that would be a happy outcome. But the Rabbi showed how small his world really is:

Rabbi Levin said Wednesday that Mr. Paladino probably did not write his apology either. He suggested that “militant gays” wrote it and handed it to a naïve Mr. Paladino.

Because that's what they do, right, Rebbe?

GOTP Hate Speech

The Grand Old Tea Party candidate for Governor of New York State, Carl Paladino, met with Orthodox Jewish supporters in Brooklyn today and gave a gay-bashing speech:

“I just think my children and your children would be much better off and much more successful getting married and raising a family, and I don’t want them brainwashed into thinking that homosexuality is an equally valid and successful option — it isn’t,” he said, reading from a prepared address, according to a video of the event.

And then, to applause at Congregation Shaarei Chaim, he said: “I didn’t march in the gay parade this year — the gay pride parade this year. My opponent did, and that’s not the example we should be showing our children.” Newsday.com reported that Mr. Paladino’s prepared text had included the sentence: “There is nothing to be proud of in being a dysfunctional homosexual.” But Mr. Paladino omitted the sentence in his speech.

Awesome timing, Carl, given the recent suicide of a gay Princeton freshman when his roommate broadcast his intimate moments on the Web. While the audience he met with may have approved (and I'd bet any closeted homosexuals in the audience were clapping the loudest), this isn't a message likely to resonate well with NYS voters, and I'm looking forward to seeing the next poll numbers.

The American Prospect has a very interesting interview with Simon Rosenberg of the progressive NDN think tank where he states:

You've got trend lines where one party is dropping and one party is gaining -- it's indisputable at this point. If you're a Republican right now, and you look at this environment, the party that's dropping a month out usually loses. If you're a candidate or a political party in a close election and you're dropping a month out, and the other guy's rising, you usually lose, because those dynamics are very hard to adjust.

Rosenberg's reasoning is that the GOP have shown themselves unready to lead, with their "Pledge" DOA and too many fringe candidates -- like Paladino. But he also speaks directly to the Democratic failure of message and moment:

Part of what went wrong with the Democrats in the last two years is that too many Democrats have political Stockholm syndrome. Many Democrats grew up in an era with a conservative politics that was ascendant and center-left politics was in decline. What happened in 2008 was the conservative jailers left, and were defeated, the door to the ideological jail opened up, the sun was shining, the Democrats could leave, and they didn't leave.

Amen, brother. Which is why we need to elect Dems like Alexi Giannoulias, running for President Obama's old Senate seat in Illinois. He shut down opponent Republican Mark Kirk in 55 seconds -- Kirk still hasn't answered Giannoulias' question face-to-face on Meet the Press Sunday morning:

So Congressman, saying you're a fiscal hawk doesn't necessarily make it true, and your voting record proves that it's not true.

The question is – for the congressman – the $700 billion in tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans – we don't have $700 billion – so my question for the congressman is which country do you plan on borrowing $700 billion from? The Saudis? China?

Because there is no answer.

Double Trouble

I was prepared to continue touting the Democratic Party's chances in the next election, until this and this. So the Dems punt on the incredibly popular vote to let the Bush tax cuts on the rich fade while keeping them for the rest of us, and the Obama Administration loses the gay vote for at least this cycle maybe more. WTF -- DC insider thinking?

Here's the thing: we want something to fight about. The Teapublicans have something. Even the establishment Republicans. They want power. They want to defund the entire Federal safety net, roll us back into the Robber Baron era. But Obama and the Dems aren't rallying the base. They aren't whipping up the enthusiasm. They aren't making me want to fight for them -- not today.

We still remember how El Presidente Bush didn't care what the law was, he just did what he and puppetmaster Cheney wanted. I don't know the details behind the Executive Branch obligation to defend laws the Congress has passed against judicial review, but why not just let it slide? Bush would have, if he didn't believe in it.

Yep, the GOP are worse. The Dems are vexing, but they aren't equivalent, not if they let the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy expire and take the Middle Class out of the hostage position. The Republicans have already brought down our banking and housing system, and their only ideas are the same ones that got us there. Paul Krugman's review of their "Pledge" (I prefer the furniture polish) is blisteringly accurate on the direct threat to our Republic if they regain power:

On Thursday, House Republicans released their “Pledge to America,” supposedly outlining their policy agenda. In essence, what they say is, “Deficits are a terrible thing. Let’s make them much bigger.” The document repeatedly condemns federal debt — 16 times, by my count. But the main substantive policy proposal is to make the Bush tax cuts permanent, which independent estimates say would add about $3.7 trillion to the debt over the next decade — about $700 billion more than the Obama administration’s tax proposals.

True, the document talks about the need to cut spending. But as far as I can see, there’s only one specific cut proposed — canceling the rest of the Troubled Asset Relief Program, which Republicans claim (implausibly) would save $16 billion. That’s less than half of 1 percent of the budget cost of those tax cuts. As for the rest, everything must be cut, in ways not specified — “except for common-sense exceptions for seniors, veterans, and our troops.” In other words, Social Security, Medicare and the defense budget are off-limits.

So what’s left? Howard Gleckman of the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center has done the math. As he points out, the only way to balance the budget by 2020, while simultaneously (a) making the Bush tax cuts permanent and (b) protecting all the programs Republicans say they won’t cut, is to completely abolish the rest of the federal government: “No more national parks, no more Small Business Administration loans, no more export subsidies, no more N.I.H. No more Medicaid (one-third of its budget pays for long-term care for our parents and others with disabilities). No more child health or child nutrition programs. No more highway construction. No more homeland security. Oh, and no more Congress.”

Drown it in a bathtub. Right.

And then there's that GOP propensity to paint our President as The Other. Bitter Palin spewing "Barack Hussein Obama" as her evil tentacles grow. Quitter Governor Reality Politics Star as harbinger of the apocalypse.

As Jon Stewart said in response to a question from Bill Reilly, Obama ran as a visionary but appears to govern as a functionary. I don't think that is entirely fair, and I think in retrospect the Obama Administrations accomplishments will add up to visionary.

But did he have to file in support of DADT?

A'Courting We Shall Go

Per the top-notch blogging by Andrew Pincus on Talking Points Memo, on her first day responding to questions from the Senate Judiciary Committee, Supreme Court Justice nominee Elena Kagan did just fine. She actually had a great line that I heard replayed on the radio, to which I laughed out loud:

...during her discussion of terrorism-related legal issues with Senator Graham, he began a series of questions about the failed Christmas Day bombing of the plane headed for Detroit by asking where Kagan was on Christmas Day. Kagan: "like all Jews I was probably at a Chinese restaurant."

I have to say I was prepared to hear her remark that like all Jews she was at the movies, but now that everyone of all religions seems to go to the movies on Christmas, her answer was funnier.

Meanwhile, after slamming deceased Supreme Court Justice and Civil Rights giant Thurgood Marshall yesterday, it appears the GOP Senators who did so can't name a single decision of his as an example of the "activism" they alleged.