Change is (still) Good

My first reaction to the "underwear bomber" story was that my trip tp India next month is going to be a huge pain in the ass, with all kinds of inconveniences that do zero to actually stop attacks.

My second reaction was to notice that, despite Republican politicians trying to get that ol' fear fest going again, the national response is much different. The President didn't give some stupid macho speech. Instead, he gathered information and then announced that there had been failures in the intelligence community and that they will be addressed. I have no doubt. Gone are the Bush days of seeming to think that admitting any kind of mistake at any level of the federal government was an admission of weakness. Gone are the days of "heck of a job Brownie!" and giving medals for failure.

Business as usual is no longer acceptable. I have no doubt from the President's speech today that there will be something that hasn't been seen in the last near decade. Accountability. Speaking of accountability, why am I not seeing either of these stories on TV?

Chris Good at The Atlantic has a statement from Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), the chairman of the House homeland security committee, calling for the administration’s nominee to run TSA, Erroll Southers, to receive an up-or-down vote in the Senate:

Erroll Southers, an experienced, highly-qualified nominee, continues to be held up in the Senate by someone who obviously puts process ahead of progress. If TSA is to become the kind of nimble, responsive organization the American people deserve in times like this, it will need a Senate-confirmed administrator. If nothing else, the events of last week highlighted this lack of leadership.

Remember: DeMint is holding up the new TSA chief not because of any concerns over Southers’ qualifications. He’s holding Southers up because Southers is too pro-labor. Because the last thing you want for the safety of the nation’s airports is for the individuals responsible for their security to earn a fair wage.

ABC breathlessly reported that the bomber was trained by someone that WAS RELEASED FROM GITMO!!!!!!!!11!!1! AAAAAAAAHHHHH!!!!!! (by the Bush admin. in 2007. Oh wait, that didn't actually make it onto the news broadcast - just the online article.)

Two of the four leaders allegedly behind the al Qaeda plot to blow up a Northwest Airlines passenger jet over Detroit were released by the U.S. from the Guantanamo prison in November 2007, according to American officials and Department of Defense documents. Al Qaeda claimed responsibility for the Northwest bombing in a Monday statement that vowed more attacks on Americans.

Good riddance to the (failure at every business venture daddy bankrolled) "CEO President." Welcome to the "I expect results" President.

These Guys Must Be In On It!!

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities is clearly a socialist muslim kenyan weatherman front:

Some critics charge that the new policies pursued by President Obama and the 111th Congress generated the huge federal budget deficits that the nation now faces. In fact, the tax cuts enacted under President George W. Bush, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the economic downturn together explain virtually the entire deficit over the next ten years.

Time for a Change

OK, here's a long, rambling post. I started blogging as a way to highlight things that I found noteworthy, mostly in the areas of music and politics, my main interests at the time. As it went on, music took a back seat to the politics. This is something that I've been meaning to change. It's not just that I want to talk/think less about government and politics, I also want to change my approach to discussing both.

Back in the Clinton days, I was in my late 20's. Life in America was pretty good for a lot of people and I was pretty apolitical. When I did think about politics or government, I definitiely leaned liberal, but I didn't put a lot of thought into the subject.

During the 2000 election, I had two overriding thoughts:

1) Gore was much more qualified from an intellectual level to lead than Bush, but he (and Democrats in general) were not willing or able to fight back against the Lee Atwater/Karl Rove political attack style. The Atwater/Rove playbook is basically to throw out as many baseless attacks and distortions as possible, in hopes of bogging your opponent down with bullshit which they can either spend all teir time refuting or let stand. Gore and the Democrats had took the wrong lesson from the ridiculous Clinton impeachment. They got the idea that the only way to deal with the B.S. coming from the right was to "rise above" a.k.a. ignore it.

2) Bush was a simple minded Christianist who could be easily manipulated by the Nixon administration retreads he was surrounded with. I also knew how incompetent he was from a governing standpoint because I live in Texas. I wasn't too worried at first because the debates showed him to be barely able to speak in sentences. Thanks partly to the so called "liberal press", The 2000 election somehow came to be about who you would rather have a beer with (amazing the things that seem to be important when the economy is rocking) and the alcoholic apparently was a more "likeable" guy.

Even with all that, Bush got < 50% of the vote and needed some trickery to close the deal. I don't blame him for that. I do blame Gore and the Democrats for being unwilling and unable to fight back. If you didn't really want the job, why run?

The Bush administration radicalized me politically. They increased the wealth gap, started a completely unneccessary war and declared the Geneva conventions to be "quaint" while torturing accused enemies. I could go through the top 20 ways they did tangible damage to America and the world, but that's been covered pretty thoroughly elsewhere.

The thing that really got me concerned was how, post-9/11, they used fear (fed by ignorance) to sell every crappy idea they had. It got to the point where the Republicans were using fear the way advertisers use sex. "We need to lower the capital gains tax, or the terrorists will kill you in your sleep!" It's a lot easier to make people fearful if they don't have the knowledge to independently validate what you're telling them. This is part of the reason you started seeing what some have called the "war on science" and the close alignment between Fox News and the Bush administration.

An aside about Fox:

I recently posted a link on Facebook to a Pew survey that showed that Fox viewers have a different viewpoint than people who get their news from other sources. I'm actually OK with Fox wearing their affiliation on their sleeves. What I'm not OK with is when they "report" demonstrably false "news". A quick example follows.

My oldest daughter went to San Antonio recently to visit relatives. While there, she got a heaping does of Fox News and Fox News-informed opinion. One of the opinions (stated as fact) was that the text of the Senate health care bill hadn't been posted online. She asked a couple of reasonable questions (did you look online for it yourself? "No", did you confirm that via any other news media? "No"). When she got home and told me about this, we popped open the laptop and did a single Google search for the bills, which are here (finance committee) and here (HELP committee). Hell, it took longer to load the pdf of the finance bill into the browser than it did to find it online.

If you are going to tell people "facts" that are demonstrably false, you need to get them to either ignore or discount sources that contradict you. Fox seems to be successful in getting their viewers to do both.

Anyway, now that Obama is in the White House and Democrats "control" Congress (if they could ever actually get out of their own ways), my focus is on making sure that they do the right thing. From my point of view, the worst of the crisis has passed for now. I understand that on the conservative side, they see the crisis as just beginning (believe me, I get the emails from the RNC, Erik Erickson, the NRA, etc.), but that's not my problem. I'm not fired up all the time, and I won't engage on that level. Hell, I don't even watch Olbermann that much anymore. That doesn't mean I don't have opinions, I do. What it means is that if I express an opinion, and you respond with name calling or some other attempt to attack me (rather than addressing the merits of my opinion), don't expect me to play along. I don't have a need to, and I won't.

Sooooooo....All of that was a long-winded way of saying that I will be changing the tone of this blog and expanding the subject matter. Oh, and I'll be posting more often.

8 Years and No Conservative Mentions Him

Funny how quickly that conservatives erased the name "George W. Bush" from their vocabularies. How quickly he went from God's Warrior to the invisible man. But then again, I guess it's hard to lecture people on the constitution when you supported a man who violated American's 4th amendment right to be free from illegal search and seizure and whose administration was successfully sued for violating the first amendment rights of citizens:

The Ranks, who wanted to attend the President's Fourth of July address without being mistaken for supporters of his policies, wore homemade t-shirts bearing the international "no" symbol (a circle with a diagonal line across it) superimposed over the word "Bush." One t-shirt said "Love America, Hate Bush" on the back and the other said "Regime Change Starts At Home." Event staff and law enforcement ordered them either to leave the event or remove or cover their shirts. The couple responded by insisting they had a First Amendment right to remain and express their views. The two were arrested for trespassing, handcuffed, and hauled away in a police van. The charges against them were later dismissed and the City of Charleston, not a defendant in the case, apologized for the incident.

Another great example of the conservative's "free speech for me, but not for thee" attitude. I guess their mistake was not showing up with guns strapped to their legs.

I'm also guessing that it also could put a crimp in your "Obama is Hitler" meme if you start counting the unprovoked wars he's started compared to Bush (0-1), or if you start talking about Bush's refusal to comply with the Geneva Conventions prohibiting torture.

But the main reason why they have erased him from view is his legacy:

Bush's record on poverty is equally bleak. When Clinton left office in 2000, the Census counted almost 31.6 million Americans living in poverty. When Bush left office in 2008, the number of poor Americans had jumped to 39.8 million (the largest number in absolute terms since 1960.) Under Bush, the number of people in poverty increased by over 8.2 million, or 26.1 per cent. Over two-thirds of that increase occurred before the economic collapse of 2008.


The trends were comparably daunting for children in poverty. When Clinton left office nearly 11.6 million children lived in poverty, according to the Census. When Bush left office that number had swelled to just under 14.1 million, an increase of more than 21 per cent.

That's what the healthcare fight (and more fights to come) is really about, the fact that Americans are suffering tangibly from Republican policies. If healthcare reform and other "liberal" policies are successful, it will be a huge blow to conservative ideology in the eyes of non-partisan americans. It's telling that the conservatives are fighting so desparately to prevent people from ever seeing those policies in action.

They're so desparate that they are willing to incite the simple-minded in their ranks to violence, while trying to maintain plausible deniability ("I had no idea you would interpret my calling the President a 'grandmother killer who must be stopped at all costs while we still have our guns' as a call to violence".) It's working, and it's dispicable.

The Old Double Standard

I just got done watching ABC News trot out 3 right wing commentators to criticize President Obama for taking a week of vacation, 7 months into his first term. So I did a quick web search and found this:

well-funded anti-reform group Conservatives for Patients Rights has been preparing a new ad attacking President Obama’s Martha’s Vineyard vacation.

Another quick search and I found this (note the date):

08/06/2001 - Updated 10:24 PM ET
CRAWFORD, Texas — Taking a 30-day working vacation at his ranch after six months in office, President Bush is spending too much time away from the White House, according to a USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup Poll.
...
Bush's advisers are sensitive to the perception that he doesn't work as hard as some of his predecessors. If Bush returns as scheduled on Labor Day, he'll tie a modern record for presidential absence from the White House — held by Richard Nixon at 30 days. Ronald Reagan took trips as long as 28 days.

I can't help but think that the current criticism is rooted in the idea that the President is predisposed to be, you know, "lazy and shiftless" (for reasons they finally learned to not call out explicitly in public.)

SEC to Start Doing Its Job!

From Marketwatch:

SANTA MONICA, Calif. (MarketWatch) -- It was created in 1934, but just this month the Securities and Exchange Commission decided to form an Investor Advisory Committee charged with protecting investors and to give people a voice in oversight.

Um, excuse me, but wasn't this supposed to be the SEC's mission all along?

The whole reason the U.S. created the agency in the first place was to regulate the stock market and stem abuse following the Great Crash of 1929. Look at how it has strayed, representing largely the interests of Wall Street at the expense of Main Street.

Indeed, during the Bush administration, SEC Chairman Christopher Cox routinely was criticized for passing rules and regulations that weakened investors' rights. For years the commission was warned of Bernie Madoff's scam but chose not to fully investigate.

Commenting on the committee's formation, SocialFunds.com said it's a "marked departure from many of its activities under the previous administration." The agency admitted it fell down on the Madoff case and others. Lapses of enforcement have been chronic and well publicized.

A view from the Justice Department

Found this to be pretty interesting:

I think the President respects, and wants to restore, the Department of Justice to its rightful place: as representatives of the American people in the cause of justice in defense of the Constitution. And not, as it has been in large measure for the last 8 years, a White House tool for implementing ideological policy goals, law be damned; and, perhaps more damaging, as a shop to help cover, excuse me, a lot of ass.

Those days are gone. I can see it from here, where I sit, on the inside.

So, for President Obama to make that statement--"The Department of Justice and our courts can work through and punish any violations of our laws"--he meant it.

He is not shutting the door on prosecutions. He could have shut the door today, but he did not.

He's going to let this Department--a group of attorneys who cherish their independence and role as protectors of the Constitution and the laws of this nation--look into the matter.

And:

Here's another little secret: I work with conservatives. People I would clearly classify as conservative ideologues. I have a guy next door with some pretty zany views on some things. He walks into a booth and likely pushes every candidate button I do not. The guy is Hannity lite. He's a nut bag.

But you know what? You put my legal writing next to his, and there's no difference in argument. His position on certain sections of the law are the same as mine, and the same as everyone in our office. Because it's the law. It says A, we argue A. Because in 90% of our cases, the law always says A. And that's true even though we're doing some things in a relatively hot policy area. Not to brag, but my office is not doing asset forfeiture work or postal truck crashes. We are doing stuff in hot areas.

You can read the whole thing at Daily Kos.

Bush Lift of Guns in Parks Ban Defended by DOJ

It was really stupid when Bush enacted it. I can't think of any reason we would want to keep it in place. From where I'm sitting, things like this and this are giving me a pretty poor impression of the Obama DOJ.

Leahy Truth Commission

On a DailyKos diary, Sen. Patrick Leahy lays out his reasoning for a Bush administration crimes 'truth commission'.

Here is the link to the petition.

This is too easy

(alternative title: Dispatches from the other side of the looking glass)

More RedState comedy. It's kind of hard to take anything you say seriously when you lead with crap like this:

3. The Verdict on President Obama's First Prime Time Presser: Pain.

What we saw tonight in President Obama was a man who, flailing about for words and faiing to form cohesive sentences and responses, turned in a stumbling, meandering performance worthy of the most extreme caricature of George W. Bush.

A sample:

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

...And Mr. Bush: