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This Week in God
Posted by Steve Benen, Washington Monthly on December 26, 2009 at 10:11 AM.

In the last TWIG edition until the new year, the God Machine took note of E.J. Dionne Jr.'s column this week on the ways in which religion and politics didn't cause as big a stir as in previous years.

It is 2009's quiet story -- quiet because it's about what didn't happen, which can be as important as what did.

In this highly partisan year, we did not see a sharpening of the battles over religion and culture.

Yes, we continued to fight over gay marriage, and arguments about abortion were a feature of the health-care debate. But what's more striking is that other issues -- notably economics and the role of government -- trumped culture and religion in the public square. The culture wars went into recession along with the economy.

Read the rest of the post on the flip side »

A Very Wingnutty Christmas from Chuck Norris
Posted by Thers, Whiskey Fire on December 25, 2009 at 4:12 PM.

Here comes Chucky Norris, here comes Chucky Norris, right down Chucky Norris Lane.

I'm willing to bet that President Barack Obama's Christmas address this week will shine with a religious significance that's about as bright as what was in his unusually short Thanksgiving proclamation, which gave a token reference to God via a quote from George Washington.

I defy the Providers and wager a thousand quatloos!

Even in the Obamas' superstar Christmas interviews with Oprah Winfrey and Gloria Estefan, there were discussions about Santa Claus, Christmas trees, ornaments, gingerbread houses and even their dog's Christmas stocking. Obama even gave a Christmas shout-out to all Hispanics. But there was not one mention of religion or a hint of the real reason for the season.

Serious theologians be dismayed: Neither Oprah nor Gloria Estefan were troubled with complicated contemplation of profound religious matters by the leaders of the most powerful secular nation on Earth. 

Gone are the days when presidents and most politicians publicly rejoiced in the birth of Christ. Like many of you, I still remember a day -- even in Washington -- when Christ was central to Christmas. It was an America that was far less politically correct, an America that wasn't afraid to stand up for its belief in the babe who was born in Bethlehem.

Heh. As a commie, I liked how Joe Biden went and peed in the manger of the White House Nativity. Or something. What is Chuck on about...?

Read the rest of the post on the flip side »

Pope Benedict Attacked During X-Mas Eve Mass
Posted by Staff, AlterNet on December 25, 2009 at 1:55 PM.

The Vatican's security arrangements were being scrutinised today after Pope Benedict XVI was knocked to the ground during Christmas Eve mass by a woman who tried to launch a similar attack on him a year ago.

Susanna Maiolo, a Swiss-Italian national with psychiatric problems, jumped the barricade at the start of the service mass in St Peter's Basilica and was able to grab Benedict's vestments before security guards brought her down. The 82-year-old pontiff was uninjured and went on to deliver his Christmas Eve homily and his Christmas Day blessing today, although a French cardinal's hip was broken during the incident.

Questions are being asked as to why Maiolo, 25, who jumped the barricade at midnight mass last year wearing a red sweatshirt similar to the one she wore yesterday, was allowed into the service. Last year's attack was foiled when she was tackled to the ground by security before she could reach the pope.

Read the rest at The Guardian. Video below the fold.

Read the rest of the post on the flip side »

Sorry, O'Reilly. Christians started the "War on Christmas"... in the 16th Century
Posted by Bruce Wilson, AlterNet on December 25, 2009 at 12:37 PM.

[for the real story on how the "War on Christmas" was born, and the nearly 400-year long ban on Christmas in Scotland, see 1/3 of the way through full article]

The war on the war on Christmas, made simple

A relentless war waged by secular American threatens to do in Christmas claims Bill O'Reilly. It's not a new accusation. In 1958, a John Birch Society pamphlet warned,

"The UN fanatics launched their assault on Christmas in 1958, but too late to get very far before the holy day was at hand... They are already busy, however, at this very moment, on efforts to poison the 1959 Christmas season with their high-pressure propaganda. What they now want to put over on the American people is simply this: Department stores throughout the country are to utilize UN symbols and emblems as Christmas decorations."

Read the rest of the post on the flip side »

The Birthplace of Jesus Is 'Under Siege' This Christmas
Posted by Zaid Jilani, Think Progress on December 25, 2009 at 10:53 AM.

As millions of Americans celebrate Christmas with their loved ones today, one group of people will commemorate the holiday in a state of virtual “siege.” Palestinian Christians in the West Bank city of Bethlehem, the birthplace of Jesus Christ, are living under an occupation that is squeezing the city’s only hope for economic recovery — tourism.

The Israeli “security fence” — a sometimes 8-meter tall barrier that contains guard towers and barbed-wire fortifications that the World Court has ruled is illegal — cuts deep into the Palestinian city, and severely restricts travel and supplies. The United Nations estimates that between 50 to 70 percent of the agricultural land used by the citizens of Bethlehem has been confiscated by the building of Israel’s fence and settlement expansion. As a result of the occupation, fewer than 30 percent of visitors choose to spend the night there. ”When tourists see the wall, they think they are going into a war zone,” Adnan Suboh, a souvenir shop owner told the press. ”They are afraid.”

Meanwhile, Israeli officials have let few Christians from the Gaza Strip travel to Bethlehem to make pilgrimages for Christmas. While the Strip has nearly 3,500 Christians, the Israeli government has only offered travel permits to those below the age of 16 or above the age of 35, and “only 200 Christians from Gaza” have been allowed to make the trip.

Al Jazeera English filed this report from the city, noting that it is virtually “under siege” during Christmas. Watch it:

As the Wonk Room’s Matt Duss notes, the Israeli government oftentimes disregards thehuman rights of its Palestinian neighbors. He suggests that threatening to suspend aid to Israel “is the only thing likely to change Israel’s behavior.”

(HT: Juan Cole)

Obama Thanks Troops in Christmas Address
Posted by AlterNet Staff, AlterNet on December 25, 2009 at 9:51 AM.

In his weekly address, President Obama and the First Lady give thanks to American troops. The President and Michele Obama also list some ways Americans can help out the troops over the holidays:

Rep. Keith Ellison: Public Option Still Possible If We Get Loud
Posted by AlterNet Staff, AlterNet on December 25, 2009 at 8:48 AM.

Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) said Thursday on Twitter that the fight for the public option was still on. Ellison tweeted: "Don't Quit on #PO. Still very possible if we get loud now."

From the Hill: 

Ellison's words match the sentiments of several House Democrats who in recent days have said they would fight hard to keep provisions from their bill in the final proposal after it emerges from conference committee.

But Democratic senators have firmly held that their bill will take precedence over the House's when the two are merged.

House Rules Committee Chairwoman Louise Slaughter (D-N.Y.) on Wednesday said the Senate's bill is so fundamentally flawed that the effort should be scrapped and lawmakers should go back to the drawing board. Slaughter's comments echo Republican calls to kill the bill.
 

Reality Is Sooo Boring When Compared to Right-Wing Fantasyland (Happy Holidays!)
Posted by Joshua Holland, AlterNet on December 25, 2009 at 6:32 AM.

I'm spending my first holiday season in the People's Republic of San Francisco.

When I walk the streets of this berg, I assume everyone I encounter is a pinko atheist like myself. But I'm happy to report that people here use "merry Christmas" and "happy holidays" interchangeably! And, as far as I can tell, nobody gives a flying fuck through a rolling doughnut how they're greeted.

I find this somewhat disappointing, having expected the dark troops arrayed against the forces of Christmas to be goose-stepping down Market Street all Red Army-style. Real life is decidedly dull compared to the wingnuts' fantasies, no?

Anyway, I want to wish all of our readers a very happy Festivus. May your grievances be fully aired!

And here's Daisy, wishing you all the dessicated pigs' ears your heart desires in the New Year ...

Why Our System Doesn't Work
Posted by Steve Benen, Washington Monthly on December 25, 2009 at 5:01 AM.

EVEN IN SUCCESS, 'THE SYSTEM' IS IN TROUBLE.... We've all heard the phrase, "The system worked." It's usually uttered after some contentious, tumultuous, needlessly complicated process meets with a satisfactory conclusion. The suitable result, in these cases, came not from a radical departure from existing norms, but by slowly, painfully working within the framework already in place.

When it comes to health care reform, one might be tempted to think "the system," in the broadest possible sense, "worked." We had hearings, a lengthy debate, and a back and forth that I suppose we can describe as spirited. In the end, the House culled together a majority to pass its bill, and the Senate managed to overcome Republican obstructionism and pass its bill with a 60-vote majority. It wasn't pretty, and it was excruciating to watch at times, but after compromising, cajoling, persuading, and arm-twisting, health care reform worked its way through the system.

Our politics, the argument goes, must not be completely broken, since policymakers were able to identify a problem, propose a solution, and pass legislation. It might even give someone hope -- if officials can work within the system to address the health care crisis, they presumably can do the same to address any number of other major policy challenges.

Mark Schmitt, who was pleased with this morning's vote, explains why that would be the wrong lesson to have learned.

The reason [the health care vote] feels like a loss is simply that fact, that any sense of movement or possibility in our political institutions -- and again, I mean mostly the Senate but not only the Senate -- is gone. Getting exactly 60 votes, on an issue where the ground has been prepared, is possible only on rare occasions. That Obama, and Harry Reid and his allies, hit that small target on the single issue that has eluded every progressive president before him is wonderful for both the health-care system, and for those millions who need care, but still, it does not bode well for our political future.

I've always argued that Obama viewed his central domestic mission as changing the culture and practice of American politics. The passage of health reform is a revelation of just how desperately that change is needed and how difficult it will be to achieve.

Read the rest of the post on the flip side »

Health Care Costs Curb Holiday Spending
Posted by mcjoan, Daily Kos on December 24, 2009 at 4:30 PM.

Happy Holidays, if you can figure out how to pay for it.

An opinion survey ... finds that two out of five Americans plan to spend less this holiday season because of rising health care costs, and three out of ten say health care costs have led to arguments and tension within the family....

Additional findings:

· Nearly a quarter of Americans admit that they would consider withholding information from an insurance provider if it might limit their ability to access health care. Those who consider their views “very liberal” are more likely than others to withhold information or bend the truth about their family’s’ and their personal medical history.

· Nearly a quarter of Americans are taking fewer sick days at work (a finding that bolsters concerns that workers are not taking time off when they get the flu, for fear of losing their job).

· The recession has pressured Americans to change their behavior regarding health care, primarily by visiting the doctor less. A third of Americans are concerned about losing their health care insurance and one in ten Americans has been forced to drop their health care insurance.

· More than 90% of Americans are satisfied with their insurance coverage. However, 33% do not take advantage of preventive health testing/screenings even when it is available through their current coverage—an interesting finding, given the fierce debate over mammograms, and the amendment just passed in the Senate requiring insurers to pay for annual mammograms for all women over 40. Perhaps this issue isn’t all that critical to the electorate?

· The majority of Americans feel either annoyed or frustrated by the current health care debate. Older Americans nearing retirement are following the debate most closely and tend to feel more anger, tension and helplessness.

I think the majority of Kossacks feel annoyed and frustrated by the current health care debate, too. Watching the debate in the Senate, with all the misinformation about Medicare, with all the irrelevant focus on abortion, with very few in this debate focusing on the fact that the American people are hurting and that the cost of healthcare is a huge part of that hurt is alienating. It's a reflection of how out of touch too many of our elected official are with real life.

Christmas Eve Marks the 3,000th Day of the War in Afghanistan, the 30th Anniversary of the Soviet Invasion
Posted by Zaid Jilani, Think Progress on December 24, 2009 at 3:02 PM.

Yesterday, Rep. Eric Massa (D-NY) — a 24-year Navy veteran and former Special Assistant to Supreme Allied Commander of NATO Wesley Clark — wrote an op-ed in The Hill noting that today, Christmas Eve, marks the 3,000th day of our war in Afghanistan and also carries another historic significance for the nation of Afghanistan: It’s the 30th anniversary of the Soviet invasion of that country:

As we begin our deployment of 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan, this Christmas Eve will also mark the 3,000th day of the war in Afghanistan and the 30th anniversary of the initial Russian invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. Thus far, this war has already cost the American taxpayer a minimum of $300,000,000,000 according to the Congressional Research Service (and that’s just the funding that’s “on budget”).

Sadly, the fact that we’re spending about $101 million per day in this war is the good news. The financial cost of this war is nothing compared to the fact that 937 American troops have been killed, and 4,434 have been wounded (and that’s not counting the thousands more that will carry the memories of this war for their entire lives).

Massa went on to call for an up-or-down vote on the funding for the upcoming escalation of troops, and insisted that we begin to drawdown our forces from the country — something President Obama has indicated he supports and which most Americans do as well. During an interview two months ago, former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev shared his feelings on the Afghan war, given his country’s experience there. When asked what lessons he learned “that President Obama should heed in making his decisions about Afghanistan,” Gorbachev –- who ended the Soviet Union’s 10 year war there in 1989 — replied, “One was that problems there could not be solved with the use of force. Such attempts inside someone else’s country end badly.”

ACORN Broke No Laws - Dems Still Threw Them Under the Bus
Posted by Ian Welsh, Open Left on December 24, 2009 at 2:00 PM.

As with David, I'd like to take a moment away from the holiday to highlight a story which I don't want buried.

The NYTimes reported yesterday that Acorn broke no laws.  None.  In the last five years.

But the Democratic Congress still threw them under the bus, with an illegal bill of attainder, banning them from receiving any government money before waiting to see if they really had done anything wrong.  Very similar to how they censured MoveOn for daring to challenge Petraeus.

Can you imagine the Republicans doing the same?  When the Swift Boat Vets lied repeatedly about John Kerry, did the Republicans vote to censure them?

And for that matter, did Dems try and censure the Swift Boat Vets?

Democrats constantly throw their own supporters to the wolves.  It’s one of the reasons there is little real loyalty on the left.  On the right, someone may occasionally have to take a bullet for the team, but afterwards they’re well taken care of and even rehabilitated if possible.  And major conservative organizations aren’t repudiated, nor do Republican leaders generally speak of “conservatives” with the sort of contempt that Democratic leaders reserve for liberals and progressives.

Democratic Congresspeople, as a group are weak people without strategic sense or the ability to bargain.  The exceptions, the strong ones, are unfortunately mostly conservadems - Republicans in drag like Ben Nelson.

If 40% of Dems are thinking of not voting in 2010 it’s exactly because Democrats won’t stand up for their own base.  For their own people and what those people believe in and need.  They only stand up for Pharma, banks, insurance companies and other entrenched powers.

Loyalty.  It’s a two way street.  And neither the White House, nor Congress, have shown any.

The Senate Deal May Be a Sh*t Sandwich, but If You're Hungry Enough ...
Posted by Joshua Holland, AlterNet on December 24, 2009 at 1:20 PM.

I'm pretty far to the left, so I'm not accustomed to taking fire from that direction as I have on occasion during the debate over health-care reform. I get the sense that it's become popular in some progressive circles to demagogue both the Dems' compromised reform package and anyone who doesn't attack it with lupine ferocity (the folks over at FireDogLake have kind of gone off the deep end and are threatening a primary against Bernie Sanders, of all people, because he held his nose and voted for the bill).

I'll freely admit that I'm willing to eat a shit sandwich in order to get 31 million people decent health insurance. Maybe not a shit smorgasbord, but a sandwich. And the thing that I don't get is why others aren't just as eager to gobble it down.

Here's the thing: for my entire adult life, Congress has pushed through big legislative packages that showered tax dollars on various industries. Every single year we eat a 5-course shit-meal when the defense bill is passed. The health scheme will cost us $900 billion to set up over ten years -- then it pays for itself. The Iraq war cost $915 billion over seven years, will continue to cost us in the foreseeable future, and will come with huge long-term costs in terms of veterans' care. We got fat defense contractors -- Blackwater, anyone? -- and dead Iraqis for that one.

The bailouts... nobody really knows how much they cost. But it's a hell of a lot more in just two years then we'd spend on health-care in a decade -- it was a sumptuous feast of shit. We didn't insure 31 million people with those dollars -- we bought bonuses for Goldman Sachs execs and financed Morgan Stanley's take-overs of smaller banks.

These are just two examples. I could go on -- look at the money we spend on trade promotion, R and D for the private sector, financing organizations like the IMF that impoverish developing countries. Look at how many dollars we give in tax breaks, at every level of government, to corporations to expand or relocate. It seems very odd to me to think about drawing our line in the sand on this massive give-away -- the first one I can remember that would have real benefits for real people.

Now, I'm not fighting a straw-man here -- I know progressives weren't happy about the bailouts and the costs of our imperial wars. They're not happy about the fact that Corporate America has become the worst kind of welfare queen.

But the point is that I don't remember another shit sandwich that actually delivered something to ordinary working people.

Read the rest of the post on the flip side »

GOPer Says Health-Care Scheme Won't Be Repealed
Posted by Steve Benen, Washington Monthly on December 24, 2009 at 11:41 AM.

 Sen. Mike Crapo (R-Idaho) conceded that if/when health care reform becomes law, it's not going anywhere.

"Technically it could be peeled back if the circumstances were right," Crapo said during an appearance on a conservative news radio syndicate. "But we would have to have a president who would sign such a bill, and we would have to have 60 votes in the Senate -- not just 50."

"So it would be a very tall order, and frankly, the likelihood's that that's not going to develop in the near future," he added.

That's true, but it's incomplete. Crapo's right that the legislative circumstances are almost certainly not going to materialize to facilitate a repeal, but there's also the political problem Republicans are reluctant to acknowledge.

Read the rest of the post on the flip side »

For the Record, I'm No Holocaust "Skeptic"
Posted by Joshua Holland, AlterNet on December 24, 2009 at 10:24 AM.

Earlier this week, I wrote about this silly "study" purporting to find wide-spread anti-Semitism* among progressive bloggers.

Among the really pathetic bits of innuendo that passed for evidence of this dark truth was this: a blog-post written by the very liberal Glenn Greenwald was linked to, approvingly, by David Duke. This supposedly means that, in their heart of hearts, Greenwald and Duke share a similar world-view. Duke's a well-known anti-Semite, ergo ...

Anyway, I won't provide a link, but a Holocaust denier has now approvingly linked to my post on his blog, calling me "an honest Jewish writer."

According to the logic of that study, it's now perfectly legitimate to assume that I, too, am a Holocaust "skeptic" because of the link. Or at least it's an open question. So I figured I'd just go on the record to reaffirm my long-held belief that the Holocaust really did happen!

Thanks for your attention to this matter.

*No, I don't care that Arabs are technically a Semitic people as well, and I'm not sure why commenters always think this semantic point is so significant -- I'm just employing the common usage.

The Top Ten Years of This Decade
Posted by D. Aristophanes, Sadly, No! on December 24, 2009 at 9:54 AM.

We want in on the end-of-the-decade list pr0n, thank you very much:

10. 2001: The year started ominously with a peasant blouse revival and only got worse with the worst thing that ever happened ever. Thankfully, a new generation of wiser heads with larger nutsacks would prevail in the cauldron of the very next year, and both transgressions would be avenged to this very day.

9. 2009: Some say that 2003 was worse. You know who also said 2003 was worse? Hitler, that’s who.

8. 2007: Historians will remember this year as the calm before the storm, but also as the unending nightmare two years after the hurricane. And how many Olympic gold medals did America win in what is now regarded as a nebish of a year? Hint: Just three, and they were in rhythmic gymnastics.

7. 2003: On the one hand, 2003 saw the end of a tyrant who cut off people’s hands. On the other hand, the hand just referred to was blown off in the effort to topple that same hand-cutting tyrant.

6. 2000: In 2000, it was still possible to trick non-Dilbert readers into paying you to fix their Y2K bugs. But not really. Fitting for a year that was confused as to whether it even belonged in the decade under review at all.

Read the rest of the post on the flip side »

Ezra Klein: A Win on Health-Care, but an Ugly One
Posted by Staff, AlterNet on December 24, 2009 at 8:27 AM.

On Dec. 24, in an early morning vote, the United States Senate passed health-care reform. It was the first time the body had been in session on Christmas Eve since 1963. That's fitting, as it's arguably the most important piece of legislation the body has passed since 1963.

H.R. 3590, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, passed with 60 votes, and though that sounds a razor-thin margin given the odd rules of the Senate, it is a landslide in the more normal context for major choices in American politics. The last time a president won with 60 percent of the vote, for instance, was when Lyndon Johnson trounced Barry Goldwater in 1964. Health-care reform passed the House with only 50.5 percent of the body voting for it. And the senators making up this morning's 60 votes actually represent closer to 65 percent of the population.

Read the rest at WashingtonPost.com

Senate Passes Health-Care Reform Bill; Feingold, Rockefeller Issue Appeals to Progressives
Posted by Adele Stan, AlterNet on December 24, 2009 at 7:00 AM.

Some day, I hope to pen a report on a congressional vote that does not begin with the words, "On a straight party-line vote..." Alas, today will not be the day (although, for a moment, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., appeared to have joined his Republican colleagues in voting against the bill).

At around 7:00 a.m., on a straight party-line vote, the Senate passed its version of health-care reform legislation, a feat many months in the making. So exhausted was Reid, who has been working virtually around the clock over the last seven days, that he initially voted "no" on his legislation when his name was called by the clerk, but he instantly righted -- or shall we say, lefted -- himself to vote "yes."

At his press conference after the vote, Reid quipped that his vote flub was an attempt at bipartisanship.

Despite the significance of this morning's vote, the health-care deal is a long way from done, and senators are feeling the heat from the left, as groups like the Progressive Change Campaign committee and FDL Action continue to pressure senators to bring back some form of a public health-insurance plan when House and Senate negotiators meet after the holiday recess to craft a single bill out of two. But given the Senate's peculiar arithmetic and the determination of Republicans to filibuster virtually any piece of legislation offered by Democrats, that seems unlikely to happen.

Responding to dismay from the progressive base about the loss of the public option, which was stripped from the final version of the Senate bill in order to win the votes necessary to bring the bill to the floor for a vote, several senators addressed the left's concerns directly in their floor speeches preceding today's vote.

"I am deeply disappointed [that the Senate bill] does not include a public option to help keep down costs and I also don’t like the deal making that secured votes with unjustifiable provisions," said Sen. Russell Feingold, D-Wisc. " I will work to improve the bill, including restoring the public option, when the final version is drafted." (You can view video of Feingold's statement after the jump.)

The Progressive Change Campaign Committee is targeting Feingold with an ad it is airing in his home state.

Sen. Jay Rockefeller appealed more directly to progressives. "To those on the left, who are disappointed in what the bill does not do -- and in some cases are even calling for its demise -- I implore you to reconsider, to be a part of this solution even as we keep working on others, which I promise you I will do," Rockefeller said. "And I think you know I mean that when I say it." (I will add a link to video of Rockefeller's speech once it is posted on C-SPAN.)

Defeated in their attempts to stall passage of the Senate health-care bill to death, Republicans have set out to challenge the bill's constitutionality, a theme that will likely see amplification as senators return to their home states over the holiday recess. The constitutionality question is gaining enough steam that Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., one of the bill's architects, felt compelled to issue a statement [PDF] on the subject on Monday.

So, at last the senators go home for Christmas, giving us all a little breathing room -- until the next round. Can't wait to ring in the new decade with that House-Senate conference committee negotiation.

Read the rest of the post on the flip side »

Gay GOP Group Co-Sponsors Conservative Political Conference, But Not Allowed to Speak at It
Posted by Matt Corley, Think Progress on December 24, 2009 at 3:00 AM.

Earlier this month, conservative gay rights group GOProud announced that it would be a co-sponsor of this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). But the group’s inclusion as a co-sponsor has led to a backlash from the anti-gay right, some of whom are threatening to boycott CPAC if GOProud’s sponsorship isn’t removed. CPAC director Lisa De Pasquale told Hot Air last week that she was “satisfied” that GOProud “do not represent a ‘radical leftist agenda’ and thus “should not be rejected as a CPAC cosponsor.” But David Keene, the head of CPAC’s main organizing group, tried to calm the potential boycott by using a different tactic. In an e-mail to a right-wing radio host, Keene promised that GOProud would not have a speaking spot and that gay rights issues would not be “open to debate”:

In his e-mail response, Keene admitted GOProud “has signed on as a CPAC co-sponsor, but will have no speakers and we told them that, in fact, since opposition to gay marriage, etc are consensus positions (if not unanimous) among conservatives, these topics are not open to debate.” [...]

“I know that there are those who are as opposed to the sinner as the sin, but our view is that CPAC is inclusive and welcomes all of those who agree with us on most issues. I don’t know the GOProud people personally, but we find it difficult to exclude groups because of disagreements on one or two issues no matter how important many of us believe those issues to be … other examples: we have pro-life and pro-abortion co-sponsors, advocates of restrictive and more open immigration, supporters and opponents of the war in Afghanistan and supporters and opponents of some of the restrictions adopted in the war on terror since 9/11,” he continued.

“Some of these issues draw significant support on both sides of the question from the broad movement and these we often debate at CPAC … trade policy, immigration are example … while others like abortion are consensus positions and while we accept those who differ from the consensus, we see no reason for further debate. Gay issues fall within this category,” he said.

Polls Are In: People Really Do Hate Joe Lieberman
Posted by BarbinMD, Daily Kos on December 23, 2009 at 7:00 PM.

The Award for Nonexcellance in Climate Journalism Goes To ...
Posted by Dr. Joseph Romm, Climate Progress on December 23, 2009 at 4:48 PM.

Okay, I think it’s pretty obvious to regular Climate Progress readers who the winner is.  Indeed, I was originally going to ask readers to vote on the winner from the top 10 list below — but it’d be like asking readers to vote for which major sports figure fell from grace farthest this year.  As always, though, I welcome your thoughts on the “winners” and any omissions.

I do a lot of media criticism, so I thought I would end the year with an award for the major media outlet and/or reporter who has moved furthest from journalistic excellence.  Next year I might name the award after this year’s winner, but for now, it’ll be named after Citizen Kane’s “Declaration of Principles,” which publisher Charles Foster Kane idealistically enunciated early on in the film classic, but later on “Without reading it, Kane tears it up, throws it into the wastebasket at his side.”  And no, I’m not including any of the “new media” in the list because none of them has even one-tenth the impact of any of the major media outlets on this list nor do most of them claim to be journalists.

And yes the entire media deserves a dishonorable mention for its generally poor coverage of climate science, politics, and economics this year:

• The clean energy revolution will not be televised, Part 2: Kathleen Hall Jamieson lambastes MSM for under-reporting climate bill
• U.S. media largely ignores latest warning from climate scientists: “Recent observations confirm … the worst-case IPCC scenario trajectories (or even worse) are being realised” — 1000 ppm
• CNN, ABC, WashPost, AP, blow Australian wildfire, drought, heatwave “Hell (and High Water) on Earth” story — never mention climate change

Skipping the musical number I had prepared for the awards ceremony, let’s dive straight into the top ten list:

10.  Nicholas Dawidoff, the author of the NYT magazine cover profile on Freeman Dyson — not just because the piece was deeply flawed (the media does bad profiles all the time) but because the author apparently didn’t care:

• Media stunner: When asked “Does it matter, from a journalistic point of view, whether [Freeman Dyson is] right or whether he’s wrong?” his NYT profiler replies “Oh, absolutely not.”

9.  Fox News — just because they are dreadful on every subject doesn’t mean they don’t deserve to be on this list:

• Fox News on EPA endangerment finding: “Some skeptics say regulating carbon dioxide, a byproduct of burning fossil fuels, may be a difficult task, especially since people emit carbon dioxide with every breath”
• Glenn Beck proves he’s a brainless frog, warning (?) “Barack Obama has galvanized the country…. He’s forced us to think!”
• Fox News blurts out its agenda: “Now that Jones has resigned, we need to follow through…. First, stop cap-and-trade, which could send these groups trillions,” and then put “the whole corrupt ‘green jobs’ concept outside the bounds of the political mainstream.”

8.  NYT’s John Tierney — the main reason he isn’t higher is that I’m not certain many people take him very seriously and his output level in print is on the low side (the second bullet below is actually from 12/26/08):

• John Tierney makes up stuff — does the New York Times employ several know/do-nothing fact checkers
• John Tierney IS the country’s worst science writer, not Gregg Easterbrook

7.  David Broder — uninterested in the gravest problem of our time (except, that is, when he writes nonsense about it), and more interested in quick decisions, than right ones:

• David Broder is the sultan of the status quo, stenographer of those centrists who are fatally uninformed about global warming
• Status-quo-media stunner: David Broder urges Obama to make a decision on Afghanistan right now, “whether or not it is right.”

6.  Rush Limbaugh — a buffoon, yes, but his remarks in this case are far beyond the pale even for his brand of extremism:

• Limbaugh to NY Times environment reporter Revkin: “Why don’t you just go kill yourself?”
• Limbaugh rejects an apology for Revkin

5.  Newsweek — they win a special award for the single worst story of the year, and make the top 5 here because it turns out they’ve been selling access to the subjects of that story:

• Newsweek gets duped by Big Oil — for real — in worst Big Media story of the year
• Media stunner: Newsweek partners with oil lobby to raise ad cash, host energy and climate events with lawmakers — while publishing the uber-greenwashing story, “Big Oil Goes Green for Real”

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In (Very Reluctant) "Defense" of the Insurance Mandate
Posted by Joshua Holland, AlterNet on December 23, 2009 at 3:00 PM.

I have no interest in defending the mandate that individuals buy an insurance policy. I think it's self-evident that coercing people to shell out their hard-earned cash to Big Insurance is a distinctly sucky thing.

So I won't.

I do, however, want people to take a deep breath, and at least have a serious discussion of the policy without all the hand-wringing and hyperbole that have been flying around of late.

I used to labor under the naive delusion that liberals tended to be rationalists -- sometimes too nerdy in their reliance on factual arguments -- and conservatives were the ones who appealed to our basest emotions, our fears. Thankfully, the health-care debate's set me straight on this.

Over at FireDogLake, they have a petition to kill the Senate bill. It has one of those list of ten reasons for doing so. The first:

Forces you to pay up to 8% of your income to private insurance corporations - whether you want to or not

When I read that, I had to think hard about what it is they were talking about -- there's certainly nothing in any bill I've read that says you have to pay 8 percent of your income to the insurance companies whether you want to or not.

It turns out to be some Death-Panel quality spin. What are they actually talking about? The Senate bill requires everyone to have insurance, or pay a penalty. But, if the cost of getting insured exceeded 8 percent of your income, then the fine would be waived.

The maximum penalty is 2 percent of adjusted income, which is probably around 1.4 percent or so of the average person's gross pay. That money would not go to "private insurance corporations," but would in fact defray the costs of the uninsured on our public health system.

Or consider the following from David Sirota's column in USA Today:

Worst of all, it doesn't actually extend "new coverage" to 30 million more Americans. Through the "individual mandate," it simply makes people criminals if they don't buy expensive insurance from the private corporations that helped create the health care crisis in the first place.

Again, I'm not defending the mandate so much as calling David out for pushing the idea that people who didn't buy insurance would be "criminals" -- that kind of rhetoric could appear in Townhall or The National Review or some wing-nut blog.  Obama's Gestapo will put you in a FEMA camp if you don't carry health insurance!

The big problem as I see it is that lot of people are discussing this policy in isolation, free of context. And I think the most important bit of context is this: we're not discussing a mandate alone -- it comes with subsidies that make coverage much, much more affordable for working people. Consider some numbers for the Senate bill -- again, much weaker than the House's -- that my colleague Daniela Perdomo brought to my attention the other day:

(click for larger version)

So we're mandating that people carry coverage while decreasing the costs of that coverage by up to 90 percent for the working poor, and 20 percent for a family making $85K.

Another thing to keep in mind is that we can't forbid insurers from denying coverage based on previous conditions -- something that absolutely everyone (except for the insurers themselves) believes is necessary without mandating that people carry insurance. If we did, no healthy person would have a policy -- why would you pay premiums if you could just buy a policy once you become ill?

Another piece of context that I think is missing is this:  right now, if your family's covered through an employer and you pay taxes, you are already paying approximately $1,000 dollars each and every year for the uninsured.

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3 Reasons Why Progressives Are So Frustrated
Posted by Chris Bowers, Open Left on December 23, 2009 at 2:32 PM.

If I may be so bold, I believe I can sum up, in three main points why progressives are so frustrated right now:

1. They are on the short-end of a left-progressive vs. Third Way ideological divide with the leadership of the American center-left coalition;
2. In attempts to not be on the short-end of #1, and persuade the coalition rank and file to join them, they face a massive organizational deficit against the coalition leadership;
3. Finally, if progressives look to split with the coalition in response to #1 and #2, more often than not they just end up getting squashed for it.
    

Full explanation on the flip side. 

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Commander Changes Tune, Says He Won't Court-Martial, Jail Pregnant Soldiers
Posted by Amanda Terkel, Think Progress on December 23, 2009 at 12:47 PM.

This week, news outlets reported on a controversial new policy that threatens women soldiers on active duty who become pregnant — and the men who impregnate them — with jailtime. Maj. Gen. Anthony Cucolo issued the new rule, which took effect on Nov. 4, “because he said he was losing too many women with critical skills” and needed the threat of jail and a court martial as an “extra deterrent.”

Since the news of the directive came out, Cucolo has faced strong criticism from women’s rights advocates. The National Organization for Women (NOW) called it “ridiculous.” Four women Democratic U.S. senators — Barbara Boxer (CA), Barbara Mikulski (MD), Jeanne Shaheen (NH), and Kirsten Gillibrand (NY) — wrote a letter to Cucolo urging him to rescind the policy, saying they could “think of no greater deterrent to women contemplating a military career than the image of a pregnant woman being severely punished simply for conceiving a child.”

Yesterday, Cucolo clarified the directive, saying he has no plans to court-martial pregnant women:

While violation of any of the rules in “General Order Number 1″ could lead to court-martial, Cucolo said he never intended such a drastic punishment for pregnancy.

“I believe that I can handle violations of this aspect with lesser degrees of punishment,” Cucolo told reporters. “I have not ever considered court-martial for this. I do not ever see myself putting a soldier in jail for this.”

The general said he alone would decide on each case based on the individual circumstances.

So far, there have been “eight cases of women getting pregnant while deployed under his command. Four were given letters of reprimand that were put in their local files, which means they would not end up in their permanent files and they would not be a factor in being considered for promotions. The four other women found out they were pregnant soon after they deployed; because they were not impregnated while deployed, no disciplinary action was taken.”

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A Senate Health Care Bill By Christmas?
Posted by Lindsay Beyerstein, The Media Consortium on December 23, 2009 at 11:29 AM.

Early Monday morning, the senate voted 60-40 along straight party lines to defeat the initial attempt to filibuster the health care reform bill. Yesterday, it passed the second of three procedural votes, bringing the Senate one step closer to a final vote on the health care reform bill. Majority Speaker Harry Reid (D-NV) is on schedule to vote on the bill before Christmas.

In the last-minute negotiations leading up to these votes, Reid made stiff concessions to conservative Democrats, eliminating the public option and the expanded Medicare buy-in to placate Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT). Sen. Ben Nelson (R-NE) got tougher restrictions on abortion funding, though not as tough as those spelled out in the Stupak amendment to the House bill.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), a socialist who caucuses with the Democrats, has apparently given up his threat to filibuster a bill with no public option. Instead, he's taking his turn as "the 60 vote," reports Katrina Vanden Huevel in The Nation. Sanders is using his leverage to push for waivers which would allow states to develop their own health insurance systems, possibly including single payer. Canada's celebrated Medicare program began in a single province and eventually went national.

In AlterNet, Zaid Jilani argues that President Barack Obama failed his progressive base by all but abandoning the public option. As Jilani points out, Obama is even trying to rewrite his own record on the issue. Now he says he didn't campaign on a public option. Jilani reminds us that the Obama-Biden campaign platform promised that "any American will have the opportunity to enroll in [a] new public plan.” Obama was promising a sweeping public option. Even the House bill would only make a tiny fraction of the population eligible for the public option.

It's not surprising that the health care bills before us favor vested interests in the health insurance sector. Health care companies spent $635 million on lobbying over the past two years, and 166 former congressional aides who used to work on health care legislation have registered as lobbyists, reports Amy Goodman of Democracy Now!.

Rachel Larris reports in RH Reality Check that many pro-choice groups will not back the final bill if it contains Sen. Nelson's abortion funding restrictions. Elsewhere on the Hill, the 190-member House Pro-Choice Caucus is huddling with attorneys and insurance companies to plan their next move.

The Senate bill seems destined to pass. Then the negotiations to merge the House and Senate bills will begin. The House bill has a public option and draconian abortion funding restrictions. The Senate bill has no public options and slightly milder restrictions on abortion. Realistically, the conservative Democrats have most of the leverage at this point. If even one joins the filibuster, the final bill will die. Sen. Nelson has already threatened to filibuster the conference report if substantial changes are made to the bill in conference.

At the end of the day, health care reform seems likely to eliminate discrimination based on preexisting conditions, offer subsidies for the purchase of private insurance, and set up some insurance exchanges that might bring down costs some day. These are real gains, but have been won at the cost of subsidizing the insurance companies who caused the problem the first place and leaving women's rights by the wayside.

This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about health care by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Pulse for a complete list of articles on health care reform, or follow us on Twitter.

Palin's 'Lie of the Year' Was Not a Misunderstanding
Posted by Matt Gertz, Media Matters for America on December 23, 2009 at 8:43 AM.

Video: New Ad Takes Obama to Task for Ditching Public Option
Posted by AlterNet Staff, AlterNet on December 23, 2009 at 7:13 AM.

The Progressive Change Campaign Committee is running this ad in Washington, D.C., and in Wisconsin, home of Sen. Russ Feingold. The purpose of the Wisconsin buy is to exert pressure on Feingold to push for improvements in the final health-care bill.

VIDEO AFTER THE JUMP

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What Does College Football Have to Do With Abortion? Tons, According to Anti-Choice Wingnuts
Posted by Amanda Marcotte, RH Reality Check on December 23, 2009 at 6:31 AM.

The University of Notre Dame has a long history of worshipping the sport of football, complete with jokes about their "Touchdown Jesus."  As the university that still can claim the most famous football coach in college football history, Notre Dame (ND) still takes the sport very seriously decades after the fact.  They’re the only college football team with its own television contract, to have its home games televised exclusively by NBC.  The only problem with all of this is that the Fighting Irish haven’t really been that great a team in a long time.  And that’s why it was such a wise decision for them to hire Cincinnati football coach Brian Kelly, who turned his unremarkable team into a formidable power, and is believed, with good reason, to be able to do even more with the recruiting abilities of Notre Dame.

This new hire is a big deal in college sports.  No wonder the anti-choicers decided they had to have a part of it; Touchdown Jesus forbids that anything important happen that’s not "All About Them."  Hijacking health care reform isn’t enough, it turns out.  Now the Fetus People have to take on college football.

The hook is that Notre Dame is a Catholic university and Kelly is pro-choice.  Apparently, this is suddenly a contradiction, though the sports world has mainly expressed confusion over why this is an issue.  Hard to blame sports writers who ask the obvious question, which is, “What does abortion have to do with football?”

To ask the question is to miss the point, as anyone who has dealt with the Fetus People can attest.  They haven’t met many issues they can’t make about abortion.  It’s an all-purpose stand-in for everything that right wing reactionaries wish to attack---witness, for instance, Chuck Norris implying that giving people more access to general health care is the same thing as aborting the Baby Jesus.  If mammograms and blood pressure medication are the same thing as abortion, then surely hiring a pro-choice football coach is abortion.

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Disney's "The Princess and the Frog" Actually Contains a Powerful Message About Post-Katrina New Orleans
Posted by Melissa Harris-Lacewell, TheNation.com on December 23, 2009 at 5:15 AM.

Disney's The Princess and the Frog opened last week. It showcased Disney's first African American princess, prompted significant merchandise sales, and provoked racial and feminist criticism.

As the mother of a 7-year-old daughter, I knew I'd have to see the film. I went to the theater prepared to deconstruct troubling racial images, which Disney has a history of producing, and distorted notions of womanhood, which Disney makes its fortune creating. But I was mostly delighted by the music, characters, and plot. I found neither race nor gender the driving concerns of this animated film.

I read The Princess and the Frog as a forceful and insightful allegory about the restoration of New Orleans.

Like many children's stories, this one is a morality tale. Parents read to our kids not only to encourage their literacy, but also to impart lessons about our shared cultural and social values: kindness, honesty, courage, thrift, hard work, normative heterosexual relationships that result in lifelong, happy, state-sanctioned marriage. The basics.

This particular morality tale conveys lessons about the city where it is set: New Orleans.

The Princess is Tiana. She grows up in a shotgun house, in a tight-knit, black community, the child of laboring parents. Together they dream of owning a restaurant. Tiana works night and day toward this goal.

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How Obama Pushed Hard For a Public Option, Then Bailed When It Mattered Most
Posted by Zaid Jilani, Think Progress on December 22, 2009 at 4:45 PM.

In recent days, there has been an uproar in the progressive community over the Senate’s decision to drop the public option from its health care bill in order to reach the crucial 60 votes needed to break a filibuster. Given that many liberals backed a single-payer, Medicare-for-all system, the public option was seen as a political compromise.

“I didn’t campaign on the public option,” President Obama told the Washington Post. But he touted the public option on his campaign website and spoke frequently in support of it during the first year of his presidency, citing its essential value in holding the private insurance industry accountable and providing competition:

– In the 2008 Obama-Biden health care plan on the campaign’s website, candidate Obama promised that “any American will have the opportunity to enroll in [a] new public plan.” [2008]

– During a speech at the American Medical Association, President Obama told thousands of doctors that one of the plans included in the new health insurance exchanges “needs to be a public option that will give people a broader range of choices and inject competition into the health care market.” [6/15/09]

– While speaking to the nation during his weekly address, the President said that “any plan” he signs “must include…a public option.” [7/17/09]

– During a conference call with progressive bloggers, the President said he continues “to believe that a robust public option would be the best way to go.” [7/20/09]

– Obama told NBC’s David Gregory that a public option “should be a part of this [health care bill],” while rebuking claims that the plan was “dead.” [9/20/09]

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We Have a Winner! Sarah Palin's "Death Panel" Fallacy Named "Lie of the Year"
Posted by Steve Benen, Washington Monthly on December 22, 2009 at 3:30 PM.

THE POOR WOMAN CAN'T HELP HERSELF.... Just yesterday, Politifact's independent fact-checking feature announced its "Lie of the Year." It was a fairly obvious choice, but nevertheless well deserved -- the ignoble award went to former half-term Gov. Sarah Palin (R).

"The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama's 'death panel' so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their 'level of productivity in society,' whether they are worthy of health care," Palin wrote over the summer, in her award-winning missive.

It was one of the stupidest things ever written by anyone on any subject. It also cemented Palin's reputation as a crazy person with an acute allergy to the truth.

Just one day after her deranged "death panel" nonsense was named the "Lie of the Year," Palin decided to raise the specter of her insane accusation all over again.

"NOW w/the Prez "threatening" &Congress "rushing" is when we MUST pay more attention than ever 2what this HealthCare Takeover is all about," Palin wrote in one tweet. "[M]erged bill may b unrecognizable from what assumed was a done deal:R death panels back in?"

To translate this into English, the former half-term governor believes President Obama is "threatening" someone -- she wasn't clear on who -- while lawmakers are "rushing." Given that the health care reform debate lasted nearly as long as Palin's entire tenure as governor, it's hard to believe the process really has been "rushed."

Nevertheless, she believes it's important that "we" carefully scrutinize what the "takeover is all about." Who, exactly, is taking over what is, alas, still unclear.

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Thanks to Dems' Pussyfooting, Health Industry Stocks Shoot Skyward
Posted by Byard Duncan, AlterNet on December 22, 2009 at 2:15 PM.

Americans should now officially view the health care industry (and Democrats pandering to it) the same way someone who was just robbed looks at his neighbor’s brand new fur coat and sports car. The evidence has been there since day one, but rarely has it seemed so ostentatious, so nakedly boastful. Via HuffPo:

• Coventry Health Care, Inc. is up 31.6 percent;

• CIGNA Corp. is up 29.1 percent;

• Aetna Inc. is up 27.1 percent;

• WellPoint, Inc. is up 26.6 percent;

• UnitedHealth Group Inc. is up 20.5 percent;

• And Humana Inc. is up 13.6 percent.

These numbers represent the period between Oct. 27 (the day Joe Lieberman initially said he would filibuster any Senate health care measure that included a public option) and last Friday. Notice any trends?

During this same period, the Dow has only gone up 2.3 percent; and the NASDAQ has only crept up a measly 1.4 percent. This seems to rule out even the tiniest possibility that the health industry bump is microcosmic of broader economic robustness. Rather, it’s more like vulture capitalism at its most despicable.

Matt Taibbi had a good take on the larger political implications of Senate health care failures earlier in the week:

…This individual mandate that's going to force people to become customers of private health insurance companies, the Democrats are going to end up owning that policy and it's going to be extremely unpopular and it's going to be theirs for a generation. It's going to be an albatross around the neck of this party.

…

The Democrats are in exactly the same position that the Republicans were in once the Iraq War turned bad. All the Republicans have to do now is sit back and watch the Democrats make a disaster out of this health care effort. And they're going to gain political capital whether they're in the right or not. And I think it's a very- it's a terrible thing for the party.

And on how Obama got it wrong:

I mean, that's what George Bush did when he wanted to get something unpopular passed or something that was iffy. I mean, he just took, you know, if there were any recalcitrant members, he just took him in the back room and beat him with a rubber hose until they changed their minds. I mean, he could've taken Joe Lieberman back there and said, look, if Connecticut ever wants a dime of highway money again, you're going to have to play ball on this thing. That's what the president does. I mean, the president has an enormous amount of power. The leaders, the majority leaders have an enormous amount of power. And if they want to pass something, they can do it. And especially when there's a tremendous public mandate to get something like this passed. I just- the idea that they couldn't do this was- is a fallacy.

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House Blue Dog Switches Party, Stiffing Democrats for $1 Million in Campaign Funds
Posted by Adele Stan, AlterNet on December 22, 2009 at 1:00 PM.

One thing you can't say about Alabama's Blue Dog Congressman Parker Griffith is that he's afraid to bite the hand that fed him. Only in his freshman term, Griffith today announced that he would switch parties, and become a Republican -- leaving the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee holding the bag for some $1 million it spent helping Griffith get elected.

Rep. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., in his capacity as chairmain of the DCCC, today issued this statement (via RealClearPolitics):

"House Democratic Members and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee took Parker Griffith at his word and, as a result, invested a great deal in working with Alabamans to bring Mr. Griffith to Congress. We were committed to helping Mr. Griffith deliver for his constituents and successfully helped Mr. Griffith fend off the personal attacks against him from the far right.

"Mr. Griffith, failing to honor our commitment to him, has a duty and responsibility to return to Democratic Members and the DCCC the financial resources that were invested in him. His constituents will hold him accountable for failing to keep his commitments."

Meanwhile, the far right, rather than jumping for joy, has promised Griffith a primary challenger.  Here's Erick Erickson of Red State:

Rep. Parker Griffith, an Alabama Democrat is switching to the GOP today.

That is a huge blow to Barack Obama. Griffith was an extremely endangered Democrat.

We should now hope [sic] him be an extremely endangered Republican in a primary. We will not fix the GOP’s problems if we keep allowing people who are not one of us to suddenly switch the letter next to their name and magically become one of us.

Being a Republican should be about more than just the letter next to a person’s name. We can improve that seat.

Here are Griffith’s earmark requests. He voted for Pelosi for Speaker. He’s actually been more regularly with Pelosi than Jim Marshall (D-GA). We can pick this guy off and get a real Republican in that seat.

Again, changing the letter next to your name does not magically make you one of us.

Hard to say what this all means. The Democrats lose a Democrat who rarely voted with them when it mattered. The Republicans get an incumbent who will be challenged in a primary by a Tea Party candidate.

If the warfare within the GOP ranks is heated enough, the Dems could possibly win back the seat in the same way that they won in the 23rd congressional district of New York -- this time with a Democrat who might be a bit more reliable. That would require a third-party challenge, though.

Don't kid yourselves: no progressive is going to win a seat in Griffith's district, even with a split Republican vote. In the meantime, the Griffith defection means that the Democrats' majority in the House has already narrowed -- and we're still 10 months from election day.

Hey Progressives, the Health Care Fight Is Still On: Time to Push Back
Posted by Katrina Vanden Heuvel, TheNation.com on December 22, 2009 at 12:50 PM.

Like so many progressives who have fought for a public option plan which privileges the all-American principles of choice and competition, I am both heartbroken and outraged as Joe Lieberman--Senator Aetna himself--dominates negotiations on the final Senate bill.

The healthcare situation is a desperate one, with 46 million people uninsured, and those who are insured at the mercy of profit-maximizing Big Insurance. The raw politics of our time--including a GOP hell-bent on crippling and bringing down Obama's presidency and corporate Democrats who do the bidding of lobbyists--makes getting a good healthcare bill all the more difficult. Ours is not a parliamentary democracy. There are limits to what the majority can achieve.

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Women's Victory: Baltimore Crisis Pregnancy Centers Must Now Disclose The Limited Nature of Their Services
Posted by Jenny Blasdell, RH Reality Check on December 22, 2009 at 11:42 AM.

On December 4, the Limited Service Pregnancy Centers Disclaimers bill was signed into law in Baltimore City. Baltimore now leads the nation with the first enacted law in the country requiring crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs) to disclose the limited nature of their services to their clients.

Introduced by City Council President Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, the law will go into effect in January 2010.  This bill was supported by a diverse coalition of women’s groups and health organizations, and passed by a decisive 12-3 margin in the City Council.

CPCs often advertise “information on all options” or “medical referrals.” Thanks to the leadership of Council President Rawlings-Blake, they must now clarify that this does not include birth control information or abortion referrals. In essence, this bill requires truth in advertising by requiring CPCs to inform their clients if they do not provide or refer for abortion or comprehensive birth control by posting a sign in English and Spanish.  

The measure will be enforced by the Baltimore City Health Department. This law does not violate the centers’ right to free speech and, unfortunately, we suspect that they will continue to spread misinformation.  But at least now women will have a lens through which to view the so-called information about abortion and birth control they receive at these centers.

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GOPers Have Concocted Yet Another Stupid Reason to Axe the Senate Health Care Bill
Posted by Steve M., No More Mister Nice Blog on December 22, 2009 at 10:30 AM.

They can't think, they can't govern, but Republicans know how to win. So I've been waiting for the GOP to surprise us with a new direction in its health care bill-killing total war, and this, about which they're ginning up a hissyfit, is obviously the first salvo in the final phase of the war:

Reid Bill Says Future Congresses Cannot Repeal Parts of Reid Bill

Senator Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) pointed out some rather astounding language in the Senate health care bill during floor remarks tonight. First, he noted that there are a number of changes to Senate rules in the bill--and it's supposed to take a 2/3 vote to change the rules. And then he pointed out that the Reid bill declares on page 1020 that the Independent Medicare Advisory Board cannot be repealed by future Congresses:

there's one provision that i found particularly troubling and it's under section c, titled "limitations on changes to this subsection."

and i quote -- "it shall not be in order in the senate or the house of representatives to consider any bill, resolution, amendment, or conference report that would repeal or otherwise change this subsection." ...

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Outrageous: RNC Chairman Michael Steele Makes $20,000 per Private Speaking Engagement
Posted by Lee Fang, Think Progress on December 22, 2009 at 9:21 AM.

The Washington Times today has an exposé revealing that RNC chairman Michael Steele has been “using his title to market himself for paid appearances nationwide, personally profiting from speeches with fees of up to $20,000.” In addition to his $223,500 a year income from the party, Steele is contracted by at least four outside agencies to appear “at colleges, trade associations and other groups.” Through the speaker agencies, Steele is marketed as a “Chairman of the Republican National Committee, Former Lieutenant Governor of Maryland.”

The article notes that this “unusual practice” has come under criticism from former RNC chairmen:

– “Holy mackerel, I never heard of a chairman of either party ever taking money for speeches,” said former RNC chairman Frank J. Fahrenkopf Jr.

– The job “demands so much of your time that you can work 24/7 and not get everything done, so taking time out to speak for the benefit of one’s own bank account is not appropriate,” noted former RNC chairman Jim Nicholson.

– “It just doesn’t look right using RNC resources and trading on the title of chairman to make outside money,” said former RNC chairman Rich Bond. Bond also noted that when he received honoraria, he donated the money to charity to avoid the appearance of impropriety.

But this morning on CSPAN, former RNC chairman Jim Gilmore stepped up to defend Steele’s outside income. Gilmore said the speakers fees were appropriate as long as they are disclosed, and that its “not uncommon for people to have some outside employment as well as being paid as national chairman”:

GILMORE: You know Greta, I think it’s worth writing about so the public can make their own decisions. I’m a former elected prosecutor, former elected Attorney General of Virginia, former Governor of Virginia. I was the former chairman of the RNC, among other types of posts, and I think as long as it doesn’t conflict with the work that he’s doing as national chairman, then as long as the committee is aware of his activities. I think it’s really up to the committee to make those decisions. But it’s not uncommon for people to have some outside employment as well as being paid as as national chairman.

Watch it:

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Al Franken's Anti-Rape Amendment Passes, Infuriating Several (Male) Republicans
Posted by Steve Benen, Washington Monthly on December 22, 2009 at 8:00 AM.

FRANKEN AMENDMENT BECOMES LAW.... In October, Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) proposed a key amendment to the 2010 Defense Appropriations bill. Yesterday, it was signed into law.

Motivated by the harrowing violence Jamie Leigh Jones suffered in 2005 while working for Halliburton/KBR in Iraq, Franken pushed a measure to withhold defense contracts from companies that "restrict their employees from taking workplace sexual assault, battery and discrimination cases to court." Franken's measure passed, 68 to 30. The 30 opponents -- representing 75% of the entire GOP Senate caucus -- were Republican men.

There were some implantation questions from the Pentagon, but after some additional efforts, and overcoming a Republican filibuster, Franken's measure became law after President Obama signed the Department of Defense Appropriations Act over the weekend.

Digby had a good take on this.

The reason I think it's good news isn't just on the substance (which it certainly is) but on the politics. Franken's amendment is driving the Republicans crazy because they basically voted to protect rapists and are now paying a political price for that. And now they are whining that Franken was somehow "uncollegial" because the amendment put them in an embarrassing position (which makes me wonder how many other things issues are swept under the rug because it would make members of the opposition uncomfortable.)

That's the kind of thing the Democrats should do more of. Expose the Republicans' hypocrisy and cruelty by forcing these issues on to the agenda.

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Mexico City Becomes the First Latin American City to Approve a Gay Marriage Law
Posted by Steven D., Booman Tribune on December 22, 2009 at 6:55 AM.

Mexico City showed more bravery then many North of the Border States this year when it came to gay rights, and just in time for Christmas, too:

Mexico City has become the first city in Latin America to legalise same-sex marriage, giving gay couples more rights, including allowing them to adopt children.

The bill passed the capital's local assembly by 39 votes to 20 yesterday as supporters chanted: "Yes, we could! Yes, we could!" [...]

The change will enable same-sex couples to adopt, apply for bank loans, inherit wealth and be included in the insurance policies of their spouse – rights they were denied under the civil unions allowed in the city.

"We are so happy," said Temistocles Villanueva, a 23-year-old film student, who celebrated the new legislation by kissing his boyfriend outside the city assembly.

Congratulations to Mexico City's assembly for seeing that we are all God's children, and we all deserve equal rights under the law. Unfortunately, and predictably, the conservative National Action Party (PAN) government of President Felipe Calderón has announced that it plans to mount a court challenge to the action taken by Mexico City. Calderon, as you may recall came into office under a cloud of suspicion regarding election irregularities, and his administration has been plagued by scandals. Sound familiar?

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What's Wrong With the Healthcare Bill? Ask a Nurse.
Posted by John Nichols, TheNation.com on December 22, 2009 at 5:45 AM.

Want to know what's wrong -- really wrong -- with the health-care "reform" bill being pushed through the Senate by Majority Leader Harry Reid?

Ask a nurse.

"It is tragic to see the promise from Washington this year for genuine, comprehensive reform ground down to a seriously flawed bill that could actually exacerbate the health-care crisis and financial insecurity for American families, and that cedes far too much additional power to the tyranny of a callous insurance industry," says National Nurses Union co-president Karen Higgins, RN.

"Sadly," adds Higgins, "we have ended up with legislation that fails to meet the test of true health-care reform, guaranteeing high quality, cost effective care for all Americans, and instead are further locking into place a system that entrenches the choke-hold of the profit-making insurance giants on our health. If this bill passes, the industry will become more powerful and could be beyond the reach of reform for generations."

The 150,000-member NNU, the largest union and professional organization of registered nurses in the U.S., condemned Reid's bill -- which is expected to gain Senate approval this week -- as a deeply flawed measure that grants too much power to the nation's largest private and for-profit insurers.

Specifically, the union that takes in the powerful California Nurses Association, cited 10 fundamental flaws in the Senate bill:

1. The individual mandate forcing all those without coverage to buy private insurance, with insufficient cost controls on skyrocketing premiums and other insurance costs.

2. No challenge to insurance company monopolies, especially in the top 94 metropolitan areas where one or two companies dominate, severely limiting choice and competition.

3. An affordability mirage. Congressional Budget Office estimates say a family of four with a household income of $54,000 would be expected to pay 17 percent of their income, $9,000, on healthcare exposing too many families to grave financial risk.

4. The excise tax on comprehensive insurance plans which will encourage employers to reduce benefits, shift more costs to employees, promote proliferation of high-deductible plans, and lead to more self-rationing of care and medical bankruptcies, especially as more plans are subject to the tax every year due to the lack of adequate price controls. A Towers-Perrin survey in September found 30 percent of employers said they would reduce employment if their health costs go up, 86 percent said they'd pass the higher costs to their employees.

5. Major loopholes in the insurance reforms that promise bans on exclusion for pre-existing conditions, and no cancellations for sickness. The loopholes include:

· Provisions permitting insurers and companies to more than double charges to employees who fail "wellness" programs because they have diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol readings, or other medical conditions.

· Insurers are permitted to sell policies "across state lines", exempting patient protections passed in other states. Insurers will thus set up in the least regulated states in a race to the bottom threatening public protections won by consumers in various states.

· Insurers can charge four times more based on age plus more for certain conditions, and continue to use marketing techniques to cherry-pick healthier, less costly enrollees.

· Insurers may continue to rescind policies for "fraud or intentional misrepresentation" – the main pretext insurance companies now use to cancel coverage.

6. Minimal oversight on insurance denials of care; a report by the California Nurses Association/NNOC in September found that six of California's largest insurers have rejected more than one-fifth of all claims since 2002.

7. Inadequate limits on drug prices, especially after Senate rejection of an amendment, to protect a White House deal with pharmaceutical giants, allowing pharmacies and wholesalers to import lower-cost drugs.

8. New burdens for our public safety net. With a shortage of primary care physicians and a continuing fiscal crisis at the state and local level, public hospitals and clinics will be a dumping ground for those the private system doesn't want.

9. Reduced reproductive rights for women.

10. No single standard of care. Our multi-tiered system remains with access to care still determined by ability to pay. Nothing changes in basic structure of the system; healthcare remains a privilege, not a right.

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Giuliani Won't Run For Office in 2010, New Yorkers Breathe Sighs of Relief
Posted by Adam Bink, Open Left on December 22, 2009 at 5:10 AM.

Phillip Anderson reports:

Former Mayor Rudy Giuliani is expected to announce tomorrow that he's not running for governor, U.S. senator or any other office next year, the Daily News' David Saltonstall reports.

Instead, he's expected to declare that he's staying in the private sector for now and endorse fellow Republican Rick Lazio for governor.

As I wrote before, once he bowed out of the gubernatorial race, I never thought Rudy would engage in a year-long campaign to become (likely) 100th in seniority. Personally, I thought his rumor-mongering of running for weeks was aimed at (a) alleviating his own boredom (b) drumming up consulting business (c) done because he was upset at the diminishing number of daily Google News hits on his name (d) all of the above.

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Cop Pulls Gun During Snowball Fight ... Could it Have Been 'Roid Rage'?
Posted by Joshua Holland, AlterNet on December 21, 2009 at 5:15 PM.

OK, here's an item. There's a snowball fight. Broad daylight. Young people. One of them chucks a snowball at a Hummer, which happened to be driven by an off-duty cop. The cop gets out, and decides that pulling his gun is an appropriate response. To a snowball.

The DC police department denied the allegation at first, until Reason put up footage of the incident on Youtube (video to your right).

BBC:

At one point on the video - shown on YouTube - the man identifies himself as a "detective", but refuses to give his full name.

Then he proceeds to admit to pulling his gun.

"Yes I did because I got hit by snowballs," he tells angry residents who demand to know his badge number.

He challenges them to "throw another snowball".

A senior police official in Washington DC has said an off-duty officer who drew a gun at a snowball fight behaved in a "totally inappropriate" way.

Metropolitan Police Chief Cathy Lanier said video footage left "no doubt" the office drew his gun after his vehicle, a hummer, was pelted with snowballs.

The footage showed an angry crowd gathering, chanting: "You don't bring a gun to a snowball fight".

Ms Lanier said the officer had been placed on desk duty.

[...]

Is a statement, Ms Lanier said she had reviewed all the video footage of the incident taken by the public and it was "very obvious" the officer had drawn his police-issue gun "in response to the snowballs hitting his vehicle".

"I have no doubt about this, nor has the officer denied the accusations," she said.

The confrontation ended only when other policemen were despatched to the scene, and managed to calm everyone down.

She said he had not denied the allegations.

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Right-Wing World Net Daily Poll Solicits Gift Ideas For Obama: "Arrest Warrant;" "Ticket Back to Kenya"
Posted by Lee Fang, Think Progress on December 21, 2009 at 4:15 PM.

The right-wing website World Net Daily (WND) has been the source of a variety of smears, particularly a campaign to question the legitimacy of President Obama's citizenship. While WND exists at the fringes of the conservative movement, top Republican legislators frequent the WND radio program and the Republican National Committee, among other GOP organizations, fund WND through e-mail list rentals. The website, which files regular articles about the role of Christianity during the holiday season, has a new Christmas-themed poll which asks, "What would you like to give Obama for Christmas?" Readers have responded by voting for: "a court ruling booting his ineligible self from office," "a one-way ticket back to Kenya," and "an arrest warrant":

Ridiculous "Study" Supposedly Finds Widespread Anti-Semitism on Progressive Websites
Posted by Joshua Holland, AlterNet on December 21, 2009 at 3:00 PM.

Given how ubiquitous unsubstantiated charges of anti-Semitism have become in the debate over the Middle East conflict, I’m tempted to ignore the Institute for Global Jewish Affairs’ recent “report” supposedly exposing the liberal blogosphere as a teaming hotbed of raw Jew-hatred.

It's easy to dismiss. It may dress itself as some sort of empirical research project, but the "study" is transparently devoid of any informational value, intellectually bankrupt and clearly the product of working backwards from a conclusion arrived at on ideological grounds.

But I won't ignore it, because the strategic decision to pin one's political opponents with charges of anti-Semitism only dilutes the power of that word. Then, like the boy who cried wolf, when real anti-Semitism rears its decidedly ugly head the word loses its all-important power to shame. I'm Jewish, and I don't fear sharp-elbowed criticism of Israeli policy on websites, so it's not in my interest to allow it to be conflated with true anti-Semitism, which is absolutely no joke.

The gist:

Progressive blogs and news sites in the United States are a new field where Jew-hatred, in both its classic and anti-Israeli forms, manifests itself. This incitement is hardly monitored, as many of the most popular blogs are only a few years old and it seems counterintuitive that such anti-Semitic expressions would be found in this political milieu. Monitoring the media for anti-Semitic and anti-Israeli bigotry has so far almost exclusively consisted of reading the major American newspapers, magazines, and journals and attending to the three major news networks, as well as radio broadcasts. However, the huge amount of content in the political blogosphere makes such monitoring - which is increasingly necessary - much more difficult to achieve with any degree of thoroughness.

And they're not going to begin applying any thoroughness here. Ultimately, what the researchers actually found will come as a surprise to few readers: people tend to be mean on the internet.

That is undeniably true. They're mean, cantankerous, undignified, unrestrained and hyperbolic (obviously I don't mean you kids, who are always perfectly dignified). And that's true whatever the subject. For example, in addition to politics, I fancy baseball, and when Red Sox and Yankees fans go at it on the fan websites, it's as fierce as a member of Hamas debating an Israeli settler.

Progressive bloggers (and blog readers, which I'll get to in a moment) can offer some uncomfortable criticism. If one wants to marginalize them as fringe anti-Semites, it's easy enough to find a few saying mean things about their opponents on this issue, as one could with any other. Like baseball. Then if one works, say, at the Institute for Global Jewish Affairs, one merely extrapolates some larger, darker message about modern liberalism from that typically unconstrained rhetoric. It becomes more proof -- dubious, but eagerly accepted in some quarters -- of the rise of "new anti-Semitism" on the left.

Having established a point of agreement -- people are mean on the internet -- consider the flimsiness of the evidence the authors marshal in support of their larger thesis, at least when their ominous editorial flourishes are stripped away.

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Revealed: Bush White House Raised Terror Alert Based On Con Man's Wild Al Jazeera "Decoding" Claims
Posted by Liliana Segura, AlterNet on December 21, 2009 at 12:00 PM.

From the Dept. of You-Can't-Make-This-Shit-Up, TPM Muckracker reports:

A self-styled Nevada codebreaker convinced the CIA he could decode secret terrorist targeting information sent through Al Jazeera broadcasts, prompting the Bush White House to raise the terror alert level to Orange (high) in December 2003, with Tom Ridge warning of "near-term attacks that could either rival or exceed what we experience on September 11," according to a new report in Playboy.

We all knew the DHS color-coded terror alerts were bogus and politically-motivated -- Ridge himself recently admitted as much -- but this? This is just ... loony tunes.

According to TPM, "the man who prompted the December 2003 Orange alert was Dennis Montgomery, who has since been embroiled in various lawsuits, including one for allegedly bouncing $1 million in checks during a Caesars Palace spree. His former lawyer calls him a 'habitual liar engaged in fraud.'"

He must have been a pretty good liar to have pulled this off (at least one would hope):

Working out of a Reno, Nevada, software firm called eTreppid Technologies, Montgomery took in officials in the CIA's Directorate of Science and Technology and convinced them that technology he invented -- but could not explain -- was pulling terrorist-produced "bar codes" from Al Jazeera television broadcasts. Using his proprietary technology, those bar codes could be translated into longitudes and latitudes and flight numbers. Terrorist leaders were using that data to direct their compatriots about the next target.

The original article quotes a "former CIA official" who was incredulous when he discovered the arrangement between the agency and Montgomery:

The federal government was acting on the Al Jazeera claims without even understanding how Montgomery found his coordinates. "I said, 'Give us the algorithms that allowed you to come up with this stuff.' They wouldn't even do that," says the first officer. "And I was screaming, 'You gave these people fucking money?'" ...

In a detail that should really piss off right-wingers, credit for calling out this bullshit artist goes to ... France.

A branch of the French intelligence services helped convince the Americans that the bar codes were fake. The CIA and the French commissioned a technology company to locate or re-create codes in the Al Jazeera transmission. They found definitively that what Montgomery claimed was there was not. Quietly, as far as the CIA was concerned, the case was closed. The agency turned the matter over to the counterintelligence side to see where it had gone wrong.

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Jailtime For Pregnant Soldiers? The Army Has Made Getting Pregnant a Punishable Offense
Posted by Amanda Terkel, Think Progress on December 21, 2009 at 11:00 AM.

Major General Anthony Cucolo, who is responsible for operations in northern Iraq, has issued a controversial new policy -- which went into effect on Nov. 4 -- that allows throwing women servicemembers on active duty in jail if they become pregnant:

Under the new policy, troops expecting a baby face court martial and a possible prison term -- and so do the men who made them pregnant.

And the rule applies to married couples at war together, who are expected to make sure their love lives do not interfere with duty.

Usual U.S. Army policy is to send pregnant soldiers home from combat zones within 14 days.

But Major General Anthony Cucolo, who runs U.S. operations in northern Iraq, issued the new orders because he said he was losing too many women with critical skills. He needed the threat of court martial and jail time as an extra deterrent, he said.

All troops under his command are covered by the extension to the military’s legal code -- the first time the U.S. Army has made pregnancy a punishable offence.

Military staff judge advocates for the Army have reviewed and approved the policy. The policy is legal under military law, but it raises "a mare's nest of legal, ethical and policy issues." For example, while the policy does say that a man who impregnates a woman will receive equal punishment, it may be difficult to identify him unless the woman reveals who he is.

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What Houston's Election of a Gay Mayor Tells Us About "Red State" Texas
Posted by Amanda Marcotte, Comment Is Free on December 21, 2009 at 10:00 AM.

Some local news stories go nationwide and cause a national alarm, and some simply go nationwide and then sink underwater unnoticed. But on the very rare occasion, a news story goes nationwide and is received with a double take and a "come again?".

That's what happened when Houston became the biggest city in the U.S. last week to elect an openly gay mayor, Annise Parker. Yes, that would be Houston, Texas – the largest city in a state that's assumed worldwide to be nothing but a hot bed of gun-toting, Bible-thumping rightwing reactionaries. Obviously, it's time for the rest of the world to start taking a more complex view, and start thinking of Texas as more than the home of George W Bush.

Parker's election inadvertently revealed the dirty little secret that native (and liberal) Texans like myself have known and been trying to publicize for a long time, which is that Texas is far from a conservative monolith. On the contrary; not only do all the major cities in Texas vote consistently for Democrats, but some rural areas on the Texas-Mexican border have been marginal to consistently "blue" for some time now.

This lines up with the larger national trends in America. Republicans only win elections by controlling white-dominated rural and suburban areas, and almost all other parts of the country lean towards the Democrats. And thus Republican power is being chipped away at slowly through pure demographics, as the nation as a whole grows more racially diverse and more urban. In many ways, Texas is ahead of the trend, since the state has not had a white majority since 2005.

Despite the cold, hard facts, however, Texas is still seen as the old conservative stereotype. In fact, the mainstream media went to some lengths to downplay the significance of Annise Parker's election. The initial AP story covering the victory dedicated a lot of ink to the low voter turnout, without noting that this is typical in an off-season run-off election. It failed to mention that both candidates in the run-off -- Annise Parker and Gene Locke -- are Democrats, or that Locke also brings liberal bona fides to the table as a former civil rights activist. Anyone reading Andrew Malcolm's account of the election in the LA Times, in which he calls Parker "conservative" and refuses to mention that the actual conservative candidate, the Republican, got knocked out of the running in the first election, would not get a true picture of Houston politics. So wed are many mainstream media writers to the "Texas is a conservative monolith" narrative that Democrats are being turned into Republicans in order to make the story work.

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It's Time For Americans to Get Comfortable With Black Santa
Posted by Melissa Harris-Lacewell, TheNation.com on December 21, 2009 at 9:00 AM.

On Sunday night I indulged two of my favorite obsessions, the Christmas holidays and sentimental Americana, by watching Oprah Winfrey's special "Christmas at the White House."

This televised tour of the decorated White House immediately evoked my holiday musings from last year. In the month after Obama's election I felt like a kid at Christmas, with visions of a black president dancing in my head.

I have always been an over-the-top lover of all things Christmas: cookies, stockings, carols, lights, twinkly trees, sappy TV movies, egg nog, and wrapping paper. I was raised in a secular, humanist household. I came to Christianity as an adolescent. This means Jesus is a second string character in my holiday memories. It is Santa Claus who occupied the central iconic position of Christmas during my childhood.

And for me Santa Claus always was, is now, and always will be a black man.

Part of my investment in Santa's blackness derives from my personal biography. My father is a brown-skinned man who smokes a pipe and has had a full beard of gray hair since my infancy. Black Santa looks like my dad, so I am drawn to him. But my father is nothing like a jolly elf. Professor Harris is a stern disciplinarian and a politically engaged intellectual. I can't imagine anyone less likely to hang out with toy-building magical creatures while wearing a fur-trimmed red suit.

My attachment to black Santa is rooted in a fierce racial consciousness I have nurtured since childhood. In my adulthood I have revised much of my unthinking, black nationalist assumptions. My feminist commitments, interracial political work, and emerging cosmopolitan sensibilities make me somewhat less likely to exercise an automatic preferential option for blackness. This journey of political consciousness is also reflected in my holiday choices.

In college I added Kwanzaa celebrations to my holiday calendar. It was a way of countering Christmas commercialism and asserting my connections to black culture. Later I learned the brutal, misogynist history of Kwanzaa's founder, Malauna Karenga, and I became less enthusiastic about the holiday. I have experienced similar shifts in racial consciousness as a researcher, writer, political advocate, and Christmas enthusiast.

But through it all my insistence on and attachment to black Santa has never wavered.

As a kid, black Santa represented a benevolent spirit of goodness and kindness directed toward African American children. Black Santa cared about little girls who look like me. I did not need blue eyes or blond ringlet curls for black Santa to find me adorable. Black Santa did not put a blond baby doll under my tree. He knew that I needed to rock, hold and nurture a baby doll with brown skin and kinky hair. Black Santa expected Nat King Cole to be playing on the stereo when he arrived on Christmas Eve.

The election of Barack Obama has changed my thinking about black Santa a bit. I am now convinced that black Santa is equally important for white Americans. Barack Obama is now the President of the United States. He is a deeply imperfect president. Racism still exists during his presidency and will persist when it is over. Obama cannot cure racial inequality. But he, Michelle, and the girls have altered the face of the first family.

Symbols matter. They help shape our understanding of national culture and identity. A president is not a country, but he embodies the national identity. Santa is the secular, commercial symbol of a religious holiday, but he nonetheless embodies the popular imagination of the holiday.

It is time for Americans to get comfortable with black Santa.

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As Military Launches New Attack In Afghanistan, U.S. Ambassador Suggests Extended U.S. Occupation
Posted by , Democracy Now! on December 21, 2009 at 8:00 AM.

In Afghanistan, the U.S. has launched a major combat operation in the Uzbeen Valley. Five U.S. Special Forces have reportedly been wounded in the early stages of the attack. The new assault comes as the U.S. has begun sending the first wave of the 30,000 additional troops ordered by President Obama earlier this month. On Thursday, the first Marine battalion deployed under the escalation left Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. Battalion member Lance Corporal Joseph Jones was asked about his mission.

Lance Corporal Joseph Jones: "This is what we do: kick down doors, and we look for people and shoot at people. This is what we do. This is what I signed up to do. I don't know about everyone else."

Georgia Republican Saxby Chambliss Has No Idea What Roe v. Wade Actually Says
Posted by Jill Filipovic, Feministe on December 21, 2009 at 7:00 AM.

Can someone please send Saxby Chambliss a copy of Roe v. Wade? Because it does not say what he thinks it says.

The Senate healthcare bill’s language on abortion "sets up a Supreme Court challenge," one senator warned Saturday.

Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) asserted that the compromise on abortion contained within the bill, which would seek to segregate federal funds from subsidizing health plans covering abortion, is unconstitutional.

"What this provision does that Sen. Nelson negotiated sets up a Supreme Court challenge. Roe v. Wade's pretty clear on federal funding for abortion," Chambliss said at a Capitol Hill press conference early this afternoon.

The compromise was set up to win the vote of Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.), who had previously threatened to vote against the bill unless he was satisfied the bill wouldn’t provide federal support for abortion. Nelson announced on Saturday morning that he’d reached an agreement to his satisfaction, and would vote for the bill.

Pro-life groups, including the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, have rejected the compromise language.

"And now, you're seeing that law that was laid down years ago in Roe v. Wade thrown up in the air. It's pretty obvious that votes have been bought," said Chambliss, who didn't signal whether or not he would lead a legal challenge to the bill.

Doesn't this man have a staff to vet facts before he gives press conferences?

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John McCain Trashes Obama for Failing to Foster "Bipartisanship"
Posted by Steve Benen, Washington Monthly on December 21, 2009 at 6:00 AM.

THE UNOBSERVANT SENATOR.... Just think, if John McCain wasn't on one of the Sunday morning talk shows every other week, we wouldn't be able to hear insightful whining like this.

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) ripped into the president on Sunday for abandoning his pledge to foster bipartisanship in Washington, accusing Obama of creating a more toxic political environment than that which existed during the Clinton administration.

"In some ways, of course, yeah," McCain told Fox News Sunday when asked if the Obama White House was more partisan than Bill Clinton's. "At least under Hillarycare they tried to seriously negotiate with Republicans. There has been no effort that I know of -- of serious across the table negotiations -- such as I have engaged in with other administrations. And that was the commitment that the president made."

That McCain actually seems to believe this demonstrates just far gone the poor guy really is.

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Conservatives Continue Their Assault on Climate Science ... And Reason
Posted by Brad Johnson, Think Progress on December 21, 2009 at 5:00 AM.

As President Obama brokered a last-minute deal with China, India, and other nations to jointly fight global warming, American conservatives continued their assault on reason when it comes to climate science. All through the week, right-wingers from Rush Limbaugh to Fox News highlighted the fact that Copenhagen, the site of the international climate negotiations, received snow at Christmastime, which they falsely characterized as a “blizzard.” Now the Drudge Report and others are highlighting the real blizzard sweeping up the East Coast as a supposed contrast to “global warming”:

Even CNN’s Ed Henry piled on, saying “DC snowstorm chills Pelosi’s global warming trip,” calling it a “strange twist.” Drudge, of course, linked to the story.

In reality, intense winter storms of this type are an observed result of climate change. As the Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States report issued by the federal government describes, warmer oceans and shifting atmospheric circulation are bringing “stronger and more frequent” winter storms to the United States:

– “Cold-season storm tracks are shifting northward and the strongest storms are likely to become stronger and more frequent.”

– “In winter and spring, northern areas are expected to receive significantly more precipitation than they do now, because the interaction of warm and moist air coming from the south with colder air from the north is projected to occur farther north than it did on average in the last century. The more northward incursions of warmer and moister air masses are expected to be particularly noticeable in northern regions that will change from very cold and dry atmospheric conditions to warmer but moister conditions. Alaska, the Great Plains, the upper Midwest, and the Northeast are beginning to experience such changes for at least part of the year, with the likelihood of these changes increasing over time.”

– “There is also evidence of an increase in the intensity of storms in both the mid- and high- latitude areas of the Northern Hemisphere, with greater confidence in the increases occurring in high latitudes. The northward shift is projected to continue, and strong cold season storms are likely to become stronger and more frequent, with greater wind speeds and more extreme wave heights.”

Health-Care Debate Gets Really Weird: Coburn Prays to Smite Enemies, Whitehouse Says GOP Hearts Aryans, Dean Dials It Back, and Everybody Hates Ben Nelson
Posted by Adele Stan, AlterNet on December 21, 2009 at 1:51 AM.

SCROLL DOWN FOR VIDEO

At 1:00 a.m. Eastern Time this fine Solstice, the Senate voted to bring a health-care reform bill to the floor. The procedural vote known as cloture required 60 votes to break a Republican filibuster, and the Democrats managed to pull off a straight party-line vote after a lot of ugly horse-trading.

Despite the nearly two feet of snow that enveloped the Capitol in the last days of Advent, no one seemed to be much in the holiday spirit, except, perhaps, for Howard Dean, the former DNC chairman and Vermont governor who had been leading a progressive revolt against the deal negotiated by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid after the Nevada senator traded away any vestige of a public health-insurance plan in order to get his 60 votes.

Last week, Dean told MSNBC that he would advise senators to vote against the bill, but by Sunday morning, he was in a more generous mood, telling David Gregory, host of NBC's "Meet the Press," that he was withholding judgment until the Senate bill was reconciled with the House bill in a conference committee (video after the jump).

While Dean may have handed his old nemesis, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, a late Hannukah present, it seemed that he was among the very few in a generous mood.

VIDEO AFTER THE JUMP

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Too Late: Obama Organizers Finally Rail Against Obama on Health Care
Posted by Daniela Perdomo, AlterNet on December 20, 2009 at 11:00 PM.

As Congress stumbles toward some parody of health care reform, and the White House sends its talking heads out to parrot that this is the delivery of Obama's promises, those who once provided the grassroots manpower for the President's presidential campaign have finally started to voice their mass dissatisfaction.

On Thursday morning, Andy Stern, the head of the nation's largest labor group, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), sent out an internal e-mail to all of its employees titled "Where do we go from here?"

The e-mail, forwarded to me by an SEIU organizer, detailed the massive union's internal "Town Hall-style telephone call" recently that confirmed what has already been so clear on the micro level -- progressives are pissed, en masse.

Indeed, Stern wrote, "SEIU does not accept that this monumental effort - that this reform that is so necessary to the health and wellbeing of our economy, our families and our future - can be over without a fight. A fight to make it work for you and your families."

But the clincher was the note on which he ended: "President Obama must remember his own words from the campaign. His call of 'Yes We Can' was not just to us, not just to the millions of people who voted for him, but to himself."

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It Ain't Perfect, but I'd Support the Senate Health Bill
Posted by Booman, AlterNet on December 20, 2009 at 10:45 AM.

As Al points out, Teddy Kennedy would have voted for this health care bill. I just watched Bernie Sanders and Ben Cardin explain how they secured money to forgive medical school tuition for doctors who go into primary care, which they believe will give primary care access to 20 million Americans who don't have that access now. They're voting for the bill. I'd vote for it, too. Hopefully, the bill will improve in Conference. But, considering that we had to win over all 60 members of the Democratic Caucus (including Ben Nelson and Joe Lieberman) the bill we have is close to as good as could have gotten. I believe, in retrospect, Reid should have cut a deal with Snowe for her support of the base bill. With her vote secured, he wouldn't have had to make so many concessions to Nelson and Lieberman, and we'd have a triggered public option going into Conference. I am confident that we could have had that and we lost it the moment the triggerless public option was put in the base bill. Others may think Lieberman would have thrown a tantrum anyway, but I disagree. He only acted because he realized Reid had to have his vote. Nevertheless, this bill is only slightly worse than the best that could have been expected.

I know people are pissed off about that, but this was the situation from the beginning. Really, after months of lobbying and activism, nothing much really changed from the beginning to the end.

Is Techno Chicken Gay (Not That There's Anything Wrong with That)?
Posted by Staff, AlterNet on December 20, 2009 at 9:33 AM.

Sadly, No! is in one of those crappy-video wars so popular in some corners of the blogosphere, and posted this one, which we think is just hilarious:

GOP's New Prayer Guru Says Gays Possessed By Demons
Posted by Bruce Wilson, AlterNet on December 19, 2009 at 1:43 PM.

As the Rachel Maddow Show has recently showcased, on December 16th the Family Research Council sponsored a "Prayercast" event, attended by GOP luminaries including Senators Jim DeMint and Sam Brownback, and House Representatives Michelle Bachmann and Randy Forbes. But FRC head Tony Perkins did not lead the prayer event. That honor fell to Lou Engle, Founder of TheCall. Besides leading the capstone stadium rally for pro-Proposition 8, antigay marriage organizers last November 1, 2008 at San Diego's Qualcomm Stadium, Lou Engle could also be found, at a special ceremony at a Virginia Beach megachurch last summer, anointing and blessing GOP presidential hopefuls Mike Huckabee and Newt Gingrich.

Meet the Republican Party's new spiritual guru, Lou Engle:

[below: excerpt from 2007 Engle Las Vegas speech. see here for extended transcript.]

"My son Jesse, he's nineteen years old. God has given him dreams, to go to San Francisco to launch a house of prayer, one block from the Castro District - where the homosexuals boast the dominion of darkness. He's going there with weeping in his heart. With the dream that prayer is stronger than the dominion of that spirit.

...He said to me, "dad," he said, "as long as I'm there I don't think the Lord will judge San Francisco." [boos, angry murmur from Engle's audience]...

He's nineteen years old. He's starting to cast out homosexual spirits out of our new converts. It's scary*. The whole thing's scary. But fathers are to send their sons into the darkest places."

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The Violent Repression of Peaceful Palestinian Protests Continues
Posted by Jonathan Pollak, AlterNet on December 19, 2009 at 11:40 AM.

On a pitch black early December night, seven armored Israeli military jeeps pulled into the driveway of a home in the West Bank town of Ramallah. Dozens of soldiers, armed and possibly very scared, came to arrest someone they were probably told was a dangerous, wanted man - Abdallah Abu Rahmah, a high school teacher at the Latin Patriarchate School and a well-known grassroots organizer in the village of Bil'in.

Every Friday, for the past five years, Abdallah Abu Rahmah has led men, women and children from Bil'in, carrying signs and Palestinian flags, along with their Israeli and international supporters, in civil disobedience and protest marches against the seizure of sixty percent of the village's land for Israel's construction of its wall and settlements. Bil'in has become a symbol of civilian resistance to Israel's occupation for Palestinians and international grassroots.

Abu Rahmah was taken from his bed, his hands bound with tight zip tie cuffs whose marks were still visible a week later, and his eyes blindfolded. A few hours later, as President Obama spoke of "the men and women around the world who have been jailed and beaten in the pursuit of justice" upon receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, Abu Rahmah's blindfold was removed as he found himself in a military detention center. He was being interrogated about the crime of organizing demonstrations. In occupied Palestinian territories, Abu Rahmah's case is not unusual - about 8,000 Palestinians currently inhabit Israeli jails on political grounds.

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Senate Reaches 60 Votes for Health Bill
Posted by Igor Volsky, Think Progress on December 19, 2009 at 9:43 AM.

This morning, Sen. Ben Nelson (D-NE) held a press conference to announce that he would provide the 60th vote for cloture on the Senate bill with the manager’s amendment.” Nelson praised the Obama administration and Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) for addressing his concerns but warned his colleagues, “I reserve the right to vote against cloture vote if there are material changes to this agreement in the conference report. ”

Abortion and Medicaid expansion may have been the largest sticking points to winning over Nelson’s votes, but Nelson dodged a question about the extra Medicaid matching funds for his state and instead highlighted the amendment’s changes to flexible savings accounts (FSA), rural hospitals, and a new report that would study successful malpractice reforms “to find out more information out about it,” Nelson said.

The abortion language — which allows states to prohibit abortion in their exchanges and requires strict segregation of private and public funds — may be the most significant alternation. In the video below, Nelson lays out the compromise:

First of all there are 12 states that have banned abortion in public plans and there are 5 states that have banned abortion in both private and public plans. We wanted to make sure in this legislation that it was clear that there was no preemption of the right of states to continue to make those bans.

Watch Nelson explain how the funds would be segregated:

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Why Won't the GOP Accept the Gift They Say Health-Care Reform Will Be for Them in 2010?
Posted by Steve M., No More Mister Nice Blog on December 19, 2009 at 5:23 AM.

Bill Kristol sneeringly reminds us where he stands on health care legislation:

There's a really big snowstorm coming to D.C.tonight. It would be unsafe to ask all the staffers and Hill employees who'd be needed at the Capitol if Congress stays open all hours this weekend.... So from the point of view of public safety and personal well-being, Ben Nelson can do everyone a favor, announce today he won't vote for cloture, and let everyone stay home this weekend.

... we'll all benefit from a nice holiday break during which we can talk with the American people and recharge our batteries, and that he looks forward to seeing everyone in the New Year.

But we're hearing on the left -- I'm inclined to believe it -- that this bill is largely a giveaway to the insurance industry, with a mandate that will fill insurers' coffers but inadequate subsidies to make the mandatory purchases truly affordable. So why isn't Kristol secretly hoping this corporate-sellout bill passes? Why isn't he eager to see the insurers' pockets lined?

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Bill Kristol: Snow's Coming and Health-Care Reform Is Really Inconvenient for Lawmakers
Posted by Steve Benen, Washington Monthly on December 18, 2009 at 5:16 PM.

BILL KRISTOL, PUBLIC SAFETY ADVOCATE.... Bill Kristol makes no secret of the fact that he hopes to see Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) kill health care reform. But today, the Weekly Standard editor came up with a new reason for Nelson, not just to kill the bill, but to do so today.

There's a really big snowstorm coming to D.C.tonight. It would be unsafe to ask all the staffers and Hill employees who'd be needed at the Capitol if Congress stays open all hours this weekend, as Harry Reid intends, to drive to and from work--especially since many will have to do so at night, and they won't be well-rested. So from the point of view of public safety and personal well-being, Ben Nelson can do everyone a favor, announce today he won't vote for cloture, and let everyone stay home this weekend.

Yes, Bill Kristol wants support for a Republican filibuster because it's likely to snow.

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Peggy Noonan Outdoes Herself, Blames America's Problems on "Adam Lamberts" of the World
Posted by Liliana Segura, AlterNet on December 18, 2009 at 3:54 PM.

For reasons I can only blame on Twitter, I read Peggy Noonan's newest column late last night and went to bed soon after. This morning I woke up thinking, "Surely, not. It must've been some sad, low-intensity nightmare. No serious person would write an article that ridiculous."

Then I remembered: Peggy Noonan is not a serious person.

Sure, she writes for a Serious paper -- The Wall Street Journal -- and is invited to share her analysis on Serious programs ("Meet the Press"). She writes like she speaks: primly, with an air of breezy, high-class intellect. I imagine she writes beautiful cursive.

She is well groomed. So well groomed, in fact, she believes it is her right -- nay, her obligation -- to publicly humiliate those who fail at grooming. (Noblesse oblige, Mika. Don't take it personally.)

The last time I read Lady Noonan, in late November, she was being driven down Manhattan's Fifth Ave -- a perennial source of inspiration -- and was so moved at the sight of the Bergdorf Goodman building ("tall, stately, mansard-roofed") -- it instilled her with a sense of deep relief:

It looked exactly as it looked 10 years ago, 20, only better. Because it's there. New York has been so damaged by the crash, and last year at this time small shops, the ones with the smallest margin for error, were closing. And now I see more that are opening, and Bergdorf's is preparing its Christmas windows. The sight of it came like an affirmation. We're still here. I am so grateful.

Emphasis hers.

It was not the first time she wrote a Thanksgiving-themed column that celebrated the survival of the ruling class as the rest of the country went to hell. After all, impressionistic validations of her own sense of privilege are her forte. (If Berdorf survives, that means the rich survive; Food stamps? Collectibles of the goblins to the north.)

But I digress.

It appears Peggy Noonan decided this week that she is done feeling grateful about the survival of luxury goods and is back to being worried.

At first glance, it appears she is concerned about the economy:

The news came in numbers and the numbers were fairly grim, all the grimmer for being unsurprising. A Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll reported this week that more than half of Americans, 55%, think America is on the wrong track, with only 33% saying it is going in the right direction. A stunning 66% say they're not confident that their children's lives will be better than their own (27% are).

It is another in a long trail of polls that show a clear if occasionally broken decline in American optimism. The poll was discussed on TV the other day, and everyone said those things everyone says: "People are afraid they'll lose their jobs or their houses." "It's health care. Every uninsured person feels they're one illness away from bankruptcy.

All too true. The economy has always had an impact on the general American mood, and the poll offered data to buttress the reader's assumption that economic concerns are driving pessimism. Fifty-one percent of those interviewed said they disapproved of the president's handling of the economy, versus 42% approving.>

At this point, I ask myself, "Where is she going with this?" After all, Bergdorf is still standing, so it can't be all about money, right?

But something tells me this isn't all about money.

Ah.

It's possible, and I can't help but think likely, that the poll is also about other things, and maybe even primarily about other things.

Hmmm…go on.

Sure, Americans are worried about long-term debt and endless deficits. We're worried about taxes and the burden we're bequeathing to our children, and their children.

Do go on.

But we are concerned about other things, too, and there are often signs in various polls that those things may dwarf economic concerns. Americans are worried about the core and character of the American nation, and about our culture.

She's really building up the suspense and if you're like me you are dying to know what this looming threat to our "core and character" is. Finally, after setting up the following parallel -- "It is one thing to grouse that dreadful people who don't care about us control our economy, but another, and in a way more personal, thing to say that people who don't care about us control our culture" -- she tells us:

In 2009 this was perhaps most vividly expressed in …

Oooh, ooh! I know! The torture memos? Bagram? Rush Limbaugh?

… the Adam Lambert Problem.

…the Adam Lambert Problem?

American Idol winner Adam Lambert? This guy?

Yes, America, Peggy Noonan has peered into the soul of our nation -- it resides somewhere near Berdorf, I assume -- and concluded that, of all the indignities suffered by Americans in 2009 -- say, paying billions in taxes for wars and bank bailouts while seeing health care reform virtually torpedoed -- Adam Lambert's highly sexualized -- homosexual -- performance at the American Music Awards -- an episode she calls, simply, "the Adam Lambert incident on ABC in November" -- was the poison pill that has us all feeling so depressed. (Who knew?)

This incident, she says solemnly, was a betrayal of the American family. With this incident, the great unspoken "compromise" of American television -- pay for smut on cable but don't drag good people into it -- was "breached."

It was a broadcast network, it was prime time, it was the American Music Awards featuring singers your 11-year-old wants to see, and your 8-year-old. And Mr. Lambert came on and -- again, in front of your children, in the living room, in the middle of your peaceful evening -- uncorked an act in which he, in the words of various news reports the next day, performed 'faux oral sex' featuring 'S&M play,' 'bondage gear,' 'same-sex makeouts' and 'walking a man and woman around the stage on a leash.'"

"Mr. Lambert's act left viewers feeling not just offended but assaulted."

Noonan goes on to insist that she, personally, does not waste too much time worrying about such vulgar things (apart from writing entire columns condemning them). "In the great scheme of things a creepy musical act doesn't matter much." But she observes that "increasingly people feel at the mercy of the Adam Lamberts, who of course view themselves, when criticized, as victims of prudery and closed-mindedness. America is not prudish or closed-minded, it is exhausted. It cannot be exaggerated, how much Americans feel besieged by the culture of their own country, and to what lengths they have to go to protect their children from it."

So there you have it. The "Adam Lamberts" of the world are trying to impose their values on your children. Am I dreaming, or is this really a fundraising appeal from the National Organization For Marriage?

I agree with Noonan about one thing: Americans are exhausted. From endless war, from lay-offs, from the craven politicians who build their careers on false populism only to betray the ideals they claim to represent just when it matters most. People feel betrayed, yes, but not for the reasons Noonan pretends they do.

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Deal Reached in Copenhagen ... And it Looks Like Crap
Posted by Tara Lohan, AlterNet on December 18, 2009 at 2:44 PM.

The first inkling of reports are coming out of Copenhagen that a deal has been reached, but it's looking like it won't be anything to celebrate. It is most definitely not a legally binding agreement either. Don't worry though, it's just the future of the planet on the line.

The Washington Post reports:

The deal provides a means to monitor and verify emissions cuts by developing countries but has less ambitious climate targets than the United States and European governments had initially sought, according to an Obama administration official and other sources familiar with the talks

The official, speaking earlier on condition of anonymity, said a "meaningful agreement was reached" following a multilateral meeting between Obama and the leaders of China, India and South Africa. "It's not sufficient to combat the threat of climate change, but it's an important first step," the official said.

The deal appeared to fall short of even modest expectations for the summit. As part of the agreement -- brokered after a last-minute meeting between Obama and his counterparts from China, India and South Africa -- industrialized and developing nations agreed to list their national actions and commitments in their fight against climate change, while vowing to take action to prevent the Earth's temperature from rising by more than 2 degrees Celsius. In addition, they agreed to provide information on the implementation of their actions, which would be subject to international review and analysis.

Just to be clear, "falling short of even modest expectations," is really, really bad.

Matthew McDermott reporting from Copenhagen for Treehugger summed up the immediate reaction thus far:

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Rich Guy Michael Wolff Bravely Fights Tyranny of Waiters, Flight Attendants
Posted by Tana Ganeva, AlterNet on December 18, 2009 at 1:46 PM.

Do you ever wish America were ruled by the wealthy, instead of poor people working in the service industry? In Newswer today, Michael Wolff bemoans the vile oppression suffered by the upper-middle class at the hands these service-industry "tyrants". 

Mockery seems gratuitous. Also, blinding rage is making it hard to be jokey. So, just see for yourself:

Among the worst things you can do in upper-middle-class, politically-correct, don’t-call-attention-to-yourself culture is insult a service person. This is counter-intuitive because one of the things that is most often done in upper-middle-class culture is complain about service.

[...]

... while we all have experienced the tyranny of the public interface of the service economy, we continue to accept a standard of ritual and propriety which, even as we curse them privately, sees service people as an oppressed minority who shouldn’t have to be confronted with their tyrannical impulses and personal incompetence.

To do so, even though everybody has been a victim of such tyranny and incompetence, is an upper-middle-class gaucherie. It remains a signpost gaucherie even though millions of upper-middle-class people have pondered with their therapists the roots of their inability to send back a rotten dinner in a restaurant. (emphasis added.)

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Did We Expect Too Much From Obama?
Posted by Adele Stan, AlterNet on December 18, 2009 at 12:39 PM.

Cross-posted from TPM Cafe Book Club, from a discussion of Max Blumenthal's Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement That Shattered the Party.

NOTE: As part of discussion that's been taking place all week at TPM Cafe Book Club, Max Blumenthal jumped off from a premise of his fine book, Republican Gomorrah, about the right's use of what he calls a "salvation narrative" to shape its politics to ask if the left did the same in its embrace of Barack Obama in the presidential campaign. This is my response.

Max Blumenthal is onto something significant here with his idea, laid out in his post, Obama, the Fallen Messiah, that the enthusiasm shown Obama during the presidential campaign by progressives stemmed from a sort of secular salvation narrative. I suspected something like that during the campaign, just gauging from my own emotional response to Obama's campaign speeches. If I, a jaded reporter, was getting that lump in my throat, then how much more deeply were activists feeling the Obama magic?

In Republican Gomorrah, Max quotes Eric Fromm in Escape From Freedom:

If we do not see the unconscious suffering of the average automatized person, then we fail to see the danger that threatens our culture from its human basis: the readiness to accept any ideology and any leader, if only he promises excitement and offers a political structure and symbols which already give meaning an order to an individual's life.

Although Blumenthal uses that quote to illustrate how religious right leaders stuck by former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay even after evidence emerged of his corruption, I think Fromm's formulation applies as well to the left in its wild embrace of Obama during the presidential campaign. The apparent difference between the left and right is that the left allowed itself to feel betrayed by the cold shock of reality when Obama proved to be something that did not comport with its ideology.

For years, I have believed that America is a traumatized nation, especially in the course of the last decade. (I'll have a piece on AlterNet next week on precisely this topic.) The trauma, I believe, is felt as deeply by progressives as right-wingers, though processed through different narratives.

The American trauma of the new millennium didn't begin with 9/11; it began with the 2000 presidential election. Never before in their lifetimes had Americans seen, in an obvious way, their electoral system near to collapse. The month and a half of not knowing who the next president would be, and how that decision would be arrived at, totally screwed with our sense of self as a nation, which hinges on the perceived sense of the strength of our democracy. We're all raised on the belief of American exceptionalism. It's in our bones, whether or not we accept it intellectually. So, when the decision of our presidential election was taken by a Supreme Court fiat, progressives, understandably, were reeling.

Then there was 9/11.

Then the invasion of Afghanstan.

Then the virtual suspension of the Constitution with the USA Patriot act, and later the abuse of the FISA surveillance law.

Then the invasion of Iraq, on false pretenses -- pretenses many progressives believed were false all along. Yet they witnessed Democratic senators and members of Congress go along with the president so as not to look wimpy. Obama was among the few who voted "no" on the Iraq war.

Then Iraq got ugly.

Then there was the 2004 election, which many believe was stolen by Bush in Ohio.

Then the economy tanked.

So, yes, progressives were, indeed, a traumatized lot by the time of the 2008 presidential election. Never mind our personal stories of whatever familial dysfunction shaped us as individuals: Abuse and addiction are hardly limited to those on the right (though, as Max seems to suggest in Republican Gomorrah, they may be overrepresented in the religious right), but we use different tools to address them.

Along comes Obama, a man whose very appearance spoke to the progressive urge for racial reconciliation, and whose ability to speak to the best in us was nothing short of inspiring. And he had his own redemption story, as outlined in his memoir, Dreams From My Father. He went through a dark spell, he tells us, of drug use and racial resentment. He came from a dysfunctional family and never knew his father. He came through all this to win his way through Columbia University. Instead of going to a white-shoe law firm upon his graduation from law school, he became a community organizer -- which, for progressives, is roughly analogous what a commitment to tithing means to adherents of the religious right.

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Mr. Equality Goes to Washington: D.C. Legalizes Same-Sex Marriage
Posted by Amanda Terkel, Think Progress on December 18, 2009 at 11:47 AM.

This morning at the All Souls Unitarian church in Washington, DC, approximately 150 activists and same-sex couples congregated to witness marriage equality become law in the nation’s capital. “I say to the world: An era of struggle ends for thousands in Washington, D.C.,” said Mayor Adrian Fenty (D), who also invoked his biracial upbringing and noted that it was illegal for his parents to get married 40 years ago because they were an interracial couple. Several other officials spoke, including David Catania (I), the council member who sponsored the bill. When Fenty signed the bill, he held it over his head and the room erupted in cheers.

Watch some highlights from the event:

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Krugman Says Don't Kill Senate Health Bill ... Is He Right?
Posted by Jill C., Brilliant at Breakfast on December 18, 2009 at 10:03 AM.

What a cynical exercise this entire health care reform debate has been.

Now we have a situation in which Joe Lieberman, who rakes in cash from the insurance industry and whose wife is a lobbyist, and others stuffing their pockets with insurance company cash, are holding hostage real reform on the backs of those who can't afford