Tea for the Taxman

Here's my prediction: The teabagger movement has peaked. Or Tea Party, if that's what you prefer.

There will be some noise in November, but it's going to fade as the Obama tax cuts for the Middle Class -- the lowest rates in 60 years -- kick in as refunds, the notion of repealing healthcare reform comes to seem more and more self-destructive, their more moronic "stars" like the hideously untalented and now just plain hideous Victoria Jackson deglamorize the movement, as Fox News becomes more obvious in how they are using and abusing them -- like pulling Hannity from a Cincinnati rally today because the execs in NYC realized the local baggers were going to be charging admission for his appearance!

Most importantly, the teafolk are actually getting confronted by counter-protesters and having to justify their beliefs, which tend to disintegrate upon forced self-examination.

After all, 2/3 of these supposed anti-socialists want to hold onto their Social Security and Medicare:

“That’s a conundrum, isn’t it?” asked Jodine White, 62, of Rocklin, Calif. “I don’t know what to say. Maybe I don’t want smaller government. I guess I want smaller government and my Social Security.” She added, “I didn’t look at it from the perspective of losing things I need. I think I’ve changed my mind.”

...and they'll come to feel that way about their healthcare rights as well, albeit cherry-picking at first. And maybe some will even break away from Fox News enough to learn that much of what they say they support, like buying health insurance across state lines, is represented in reform (in this case by exchanges).

The politicization of whatever are the core grassroots sentiments amongst this 18% of the population will become an increasing problem for both the Tea Partiers (overwhelmingly disgruntled Republicans, just 8 years too late to their tea party) and GOP. If Chief Justice Roberts is so incensed about Obama "politicizing" the Supreme Court when he called them out for their highly political (i.e. classic GOP corporatist) Citizens United decision during the State of the Union, what leg does he have to stand on when a member of his own wing, Justice Clarence Thomas, is used to promote the baggers and their political agenda -- thanks to his wife's involvement with the Washington astroturfing efforts to earn off the movement?

In speaking with a conservative colleague in DC recently I learned that there's a growing division between the grassroots purists and those who are earning bank off the movement, i.e. Dick Armey's FreedomWorks. To the credit of the purist faction, they don't want to be co-opted, which may be tough considering that was the central force behind their p.r. breakthroughs.

The fact is that there are only two political parties of any heft in American right now, the Democratic Party and Fox News. The Republicans are now a satellite of the earners at Fox -- as best evidenced by psychostar Sarah Palin, former half-term Governor of Alaska turned $12 million woman. The Republican Party was simply her stepping stone to the conservative media money machine, perhaps the first or at least the most clear-cut example of this new phenomenon.

There may develop a Tea Party as some sort of rump down-ballot presence, although my guess is that it will end up being too scattered for the consistency a true national party needs to grow. It smacks of the Ross Perot party or John Anderson, simply not enough. Back in my childhood these would have been the Right-to-Life Party, maybe crossing over to the Conservative Party, although more often than not the Republican and Conservative candidates were the same, ipso the Democratic and Liberal, although there were interesting exceptions in New York State, i.e. Sen. Jacob Javits and other line-blurrers.

As long as the main opposition party to President Obama is Fox News, the system will be out of whack. If they manage to succeed in unseating him at re-election time, that's pretty much the end of democracy in America -- and since the Roberts Court has legalized unlimited corporate spending on campaigns, there's all new ways for them to spend their profits tearing down the nation's leadership and cycling back to greater profits as a result -- including getting their candidate in the White House and opening the floodgates to Berlusconi-style media/political cross domination.

Should that happen, we'll see if any Tea Partiers start to wake up...and become real patriots.

Working Class Hero

The Kennedy Center Honors this year were spectacular choices and spectacle. Robert DeNiro, Mel Brooks, Dave Brubeck, Grace Bumbrey and the Boss, Bruce Springsteen. If you didn't get a chance to see the special on CBS last week, it's all on YouTube. The Springsteen tribute closed the show and, wow, it's thrilling. Here's the clips, starting with the hilarious, then moving Jon Stewart:



The second part starts has Vietnam vet Ron "Born on the Fourth of July" Kovic speaking about meeting Bruce, then John Mellencamp doing a two-part "Born in the U.S.A." segueing from his own style to Bruce's. Then comes a heartstopping duet of "I'm on Fire" by Ben Harper and Jennifer Nettles. She's new to me but blowaway great. Melissa Etheridge brings everyone spontaneously to their feet with her rendition of "Born to Run." (The edits are pretty evident here -- I've heard some whole numbers were cut for the TV special length as well.) Great watching everyone nodding and tapping to the music, especially the President and the First Lady:



The last section has Eddie Vedder followed by Sting and a cast of thousands:



The award was no doubt helped by the fact that the Boss worked for the President towards the end of the campaign, but how cool is it to have someone with tastes that some of us left out the previous eight years can actually relate to in a huge way?

I know my friends on the left love to complain about Obama, but I once again guarantee that even if a decent Dem succeeds him, we're going to miss having him as our Head of State.

Strap your hands across those engines...

Great American

Hard not to tear up watching this 86 year-old WWII veteran's plainspoken plea for gay equality:



Transcript in this post.

Save for a few stubborn states, marriage equality is just a few electoral cycles away.

Their House

I'm not sure how I'm going to make it through the inauguration if I'm already getting choked up -- in a sort of invigorating, fist-pumping manner -- looking at pictures of the Obamas coming over to the Bush's house today, the house they're moving into just 10 weeks from now. Oh, and video:



Part of the emotion is the fundamental patriotism for our democracy, typified every time there's a change of White House from one political party to a rival party. There's a lot of countries where that isn't guaranteed to happen, and for awhile (2003-2005?) some of us were worried it wouldn't. You know, martial law and a suspension of Presidential elections, like Rudy Giuliani tried to pull off after the attacks of 9/11/2001.

And it's even sweeter when the party you favor wins. The last time I got a buzz like this off the transition was when the Clintons took the door keys from the first round of Bushes.

Then there's the name. The White House. With this victorious black couple coming at the invitation of the current occupants to take a look around, talk a little policy, find out where the secret drawers are hidden, it's like fuck you historically racist America, you were actually laying the groundwork for this awesome moment, and from hereon out all limits of race or, I'd argue, gender for the job are history.

But what ties it all together are the three core themes of Barack Obama's campaign for President. There's Change -- that's the euphoric kick. There's Hope -- that's the tears. But there's a third theme that didn't get as much play as the first two in campaign iconography, but which is a core tenet of his oratory: Responsibility.

Obama believes that government has a responsibility to the people who elect it; that the people have a responsibility to carefully consider the issues, treat philosophical opponents with respect, and exercise their fair choice so as to keep democracy vital; and that we each have a responsibility to each other both on the personal and societal level.

This man is about to take on the most awesome responsibility in the world. Done right, there is no position more powerful that President of the United States of America. Hey, that's 50 states. Top that, Mevedev.

I'm an adult. I know there isn't a politician who won't disappoint me somewhere along the way. That's fine, as long as it doesn't get out of hand. There's every possibility that the headwinds will be so strong that Obama will somehow not succeed in his quest to save America and the world through his Presidency. Very, very bad, unmentionable things could happen; we've lived them all before. By the end of this, he may even end up being a "War President."

But somehow, I doubt it. Watching Obama enhancing even George W. Bush with his presence, with his soft-power hand on El Presidente's back as they head into the colonnade, I know this guy is there for a reason. I start wondering if he actually initiated the meeting, secretly, from his side. Because he appears to have even talked auto policy with Bush, maybe testing his political capital -- trying to get it decoupled from trade and actually get something done before even taking the oath.

That's the kind of guy we just elected, a real leader with a real purpose for moving into this house, America's house, our house. This is the guy whom his advisers were most concerned didn't have the "pathological" desire to be President, but invented it for himself through his sense of mission.

A community organizer for our desperate nation.

Moving into our house January 20th.

Sayrahnara

Why, oh, why, is the McCain Campaign throwing running mate Sarah Palin under the bus the moment she's safely our of the lower 48?:



Doesn't know that the country abutting her state is 1/3 or NAFTA? That Africa is a continent, not a single country? And from Fox News? Ah, the pain of the backstab from the very organ that gave her life! And then there's the highbrow publication with it's own special leaks:

The disputes between the campaigns centered in large part on the Republican National Committee’s $150,000 wardrobe for Ms. Palin and her family, but also on what McCain advisers considered Ms. Palin’s lack of preparation for her disastrous interview with Katie Couric of CBS News and her refusal to take advice from Mr. McCain’s campaign.

But behind those episodes may be a greater subtext: anger within the McCain camp that Ms. Palin harbored political ambitions beyond 2008.

As late as Tuesday night, a McCain adviser said, Ms. Palin was pushing to deliver her own speech just before Mr. McCain’s concession speech, even though vice-presidential nominees do not traditionally speak on election night. But Ms. Palin met up with Mr. McCain with text in hand. She was told no by Mark Salter, one of Mr. McCain’s closest advisers, and Steve Schmidt, Mr. McCain’s top strategist.

You can check out a slideshow of Palin & Family's wardrobe bought with campaign donations at HuffPo here along with this savory nugget:

Sarah Palin left the national stage Wednesday, but the controversy over her role on the ticket flared as aides to John McCain disclosed new details about her expensive wardrobe purchases and revealed that a Republican Party lawyer would be dispatched to Alaska to inventory and retrieve the clothes still in her possession...

Guess they're not trusting her to ship back every last shiny red pump herself.

At DailyKos blogger gracchus sees an element of internal GOP class conflict in the elders trying to bury Palin now, while the wounds are fresh:

The problem is that the rich folks who run the party - and run Fox News - aren't really sincere about the party's social agenda. It's just red meat for the rightwing workies. The rich - really, the country's owners - want the party to look after their class interests, which are all economic. They don't trust the petit bourgeois footsoldiers any more than you or I do.

The problem is that the crazies are getting restless, and want to run the party themselves, not just provide the voting muscle. This makes the richies nervous: you see this with the complete lack of rich-folks funding for Huckabee (who incidentally wasn't reliable on economic issues as far as the rich were concerned).

Palin also scares them, as she's drawn from the same group, but seems even more ignorant and likely to blow up the world in search of the the end of the world and the second coming. Even short of that, she seems ignorant and incompetent enough to fuck things up even more royally than the most recent occupant of the White House did, given the chance. She'd further tarnish the brand, and probably cause everyone's portfolios to blow up. And the people who run the party aren't fools, just dedicated to their own interests: they realize that she's incredibly ignorant, and probably dangerous beyond a point they're willing to tolerate.

Setting up the pins for Mitt Romney 2012, one expects.

I'm as happy as anyone that Palin is off the national stage, although very grateful for her help in electing Barack Obama President. The fact is that she needs the oxygen of media attention to survive and will do whatever she can to escape Alaska, possibly by appointing herself to Ted Stevens' Senate seat, should he turn out to have won the vote and then be stripped of his seat by the Senate, which traditionally does not seat convicted felons.

So I wouldn't count her out forever, and she has company in the likes of Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) who managed to keep her Congressional seat even after calling for the news media to investigate how "American" are the Democratic members of Congress, and Sen. Obama. Bachmann is kind of a nightmarish hybrid of Sarah Palin and Katherine Harris, and today she's acting like we're all patriots:

After suggesting that Barack Obama had anti-American views in an exchange three weeks ago with MSNBC host Chris Matthews, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) told Politico Thursday that she was “extremely grateful that we have an African-American who has won this year.” She called his victory “a tremendous signal we sent.”

“I have not seen the United States as a racist nation,” said Bachmann, who represents Minnesota’s 6th Congressional District, in the east-central part of the state. “In my district, I don’t sense racism, and that’s why I’m thankful that hopefully this will send a national signal across our country that America is not a nation made up of racists. ... On the same hand, I hope that the national media will not confuse disagreement with Obama’s policy positions with being consumed [by] racism.”

Racism, maybe not. McCarthyism...yes.

Well, let's hope the antidote has arrived. With Obama, is his victory, already assuming the mantle of American institution, he's an endorsement worth pushing, even in the Southern state of Georgia -- witness this campaign ad for Democrat Jim Miller, entering a run-off election against Republican Senator Saxby Chambliss:



"American is Back."

Yep, you can run with that.

Patriotism

Anyone who doesn't think Barack Obama is an underdog until the day after the election is out of their mind. The press LOVES John McCain so much so that AP reporters take care to bring him his favorite donuts, while trying to do Karl Rove's dirty work and paint Obama as someone he isn't with every angle they can try. In a week where Obama gave a major speech on the true meaning of patriotism, he still has to respond to the left on his FISA stand and the Republicans on his Iraq comments.

Obama has the cajones to let those supporters opposed to his FISA position have a place on his website, the exact opposite of the Bush/Cheney practice of screen speech attendees. He has the cajones to address the issue in writing today and tolerate, even encourage dissent. Because he believes that without differing opinions, there is no democracy.

Happy 4th of July.

Happy Independence Day.

I've been dying for a true patriotic voice ever since Cheney, Rove, Rumsfeld and Bush turned patriotism against us McCarthy Era style to get their Iraq War, and here it is, couldn't be clearer. While he goes on to talk about his childhood as an American and separates loyalty to country from loyalty to a particular leader of the government, and he calls for a new national service, sure to grow as a campaign theme leading into the Convention (with some of the leaders to be drawn, no doubt, from his current one million campaign activist recruits), here's what I think is the pivotal set-up passage:

My concerns here aren't simply personal, however. After all, throughout our history, men and women of far greater stature and significance than me have had their patriotism questioned in the midst of momentous debates. Thomas Jefferson was accused by the Federalists of selling out to the French. The anti-Federalists were just as convinced that John Adams was in cahoots with the British and intent on restoring monarchal rule. Likewise, even our wisest Presidents have sought to justify questionable policies on the basis of patriotism. Adams' Alien and Sedition Act, Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus, Roosevelt's internment of Japanese Americans - all were defended as expressions of patriotism, and those who disagreed with their policies were sometimes labeled as unpatriotic.

In other words, the use of patriotism as a political sword or a political shield is as old as the Republic. Still, what is striking about today's patriotism debate is the degree to which it remains rooted in the culture wars of the 1960s - in arguments that go back forty years or more. In the early years of the civil rights movement and opposition to the Vietnam War, defenders of the status quo often accused anybody who questioned the wisdom of government policies of being unpatriotic. Meanwhile, some of those in the so-called counter-culture of the Sixties reacted not merely by criticizing particular government policies, but by attacking the symbols, and in extreme cases, the very idea, of America itself - by burning flags; by blaming America for all that was wrong with the world; and perhaps most tragically, by failing to honor those veterans coming home from Vietnam, something that remains a national shame to this day
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Most Americans never bought into these simplistic world-views - these caricatures of left and right. Most Americans understood that dissent does not make one unpatriotic, and that there is nothing smart or sophisticated about a cynical disregard for America's traditions and institutions. And yet the anger and turmoil of that period never entirely drained away. All too often our politics still seems trapped in these old, threadbare arguments - a fact most evident during our recent debates about the war in Iraq, when those who opposed administration policy were tagged by some as unpatriotic, and a general providing his best counsel on how to move forward in Iraq was accused of betrayal.

Given the enormous challenges that lie before us, we can no longer afford these sorts of divisions. None of us expect that arguments about patriotism will, or should, vanish entirely; after all, when we argue about patriotism, we are arguing about who we are as a country, and more importantly, who we should be. But surely we can agree that no party or political philosophy has a monopoly on patriotism. And surely we can arrive at a definition of patriotism that, however rough and imperfect, captures the best of America's common spirit.

The fact that this speech got drowned out by the MSM's protective hue over Wesley Clark's statement about McCain's POW experience not being in unquestionable qualification for Commander-in-Chief, that Obama has to message-battle previously planned MSM conjecture stories casting doubt on his mortgage rate without any hard evidence, barely reporting, shows what he's up against each and every day. That's one of the main reasons Nettertainment is so strongly for his candidacy, damned the purity trolls and all the other torpedoes.

Oh, and even if I believe Obama is an underdog as a challenger to the MSM status quo, let alone as a mixed race candidate trying to be the first in 44 thus far, I do believe he is a (finally, Democrats) winner at heart, and that's what makes him so important to support.

After all, he's just flipped the poll numbers against McCain in the traditionally big red state of Montana.

God bless America.

Independence

Just watched the second episode of HBO's John Adams, and without going into a detailed analysis, I just have to say how gratifying it is to be reminded that this great nation was born of insurrection.

The short pieces of battle scenes, like with the Massachusetts patriots in the woods after routing the British redcoats attacking Concord, play almost like science fiction genre, what with our ridiculous inability to teach Civics any more.

The episode climax with the vote for and unveiling of the Declaration of Independence, intercutting the big event public reading in Philadelphia replete with drums and John Adams, and Abigail Adams reading it with their children, touched all that deep American patriotism I learned as a child and am ready to believe in again should a certain Senator from Illinois be sworn in as President next January.

Thanks to our Constitution, America can have a revolution every four years without a single drop of blood being spilled. There are times for boldness and times for moderation. Maybe the makers of John Adams thought that with this episode they would mainly tap into contemporary feelings about our own Kingly George. But there's something else going on here that they could not have predicted.

I've begun to argue that a consensus is building. It can still be derailed, but it is a powerful thing when it builds, it is out of the ordinary, it has vast consequences, all of which is what makes it historic should it succeed.

It's important to be reminded, as I was by the episode tonight, that our Declaration of Independence, the decision to dissolve union with the mother country and invent a brand new government, had to be by acclamation (12 for, NY abstaining due to deep Tory ties but not standing in the way).

The decision of the Founding Fathers to accept the mantle of insurrection is why we're all here today. And at this moment of American history, consensus on insurrection, through the legal means of Presidential Election, is going to be what's needed.

Not impossible.

Rally Round

I could write about John McCain's temper or the massive uncounted votes in Harlem for Barack Obama, or even the fallen soldier bracelet he's been wearing since the soldier's mother gave it to him at a rally yesterday.

I could go over how, sure, he's a brilliant orator, but his policies do exist quite fully and are pretty damned smart. I could show pictures of his hugely successful rally in Eau Claire today. I could rejoice that for the first time Obama has overtaken Clinton in the "poll of polls" and worry about how many primaries or caucuses are still left for that to play out.

(The answer is 18 starting with Wisconsin and Hawaii this Tuesday, including Guam on May 3rd, and tailing out with Puerto Rico on June 7th for a grand total of 1075 delegates.)

I write about this wild change, where now 45% of Americans now believe that socialized medicine would be better for our country, besting 39% who think it'd be worse. I could tell you my thoughts on Hillary Clinton again choking up on the campaign trail just before a primary, while her campaign alienates still more voters with its arrogance.

But instead, I'd like to pause for a little patriotism. Something we can all rally around:



After all, we've already had two gay Presidents.