Herald article today: my answer to Uncle Luke
It’s District 5 day for me today. My Herald column focuses on the very little the district has seen go right over the last few decades, and answers this column by Luther Campbell in the Miami New Times: Read more
Latest Herald column: Rubio becomes the last, best hope of the tea party
My latest Herald column is up and running. A clip:
Florida has become the Holy Grail for the tea-party movement, which has entered into a kind of shotgun marriage with the Republican Party.
Republicans clearly see the tea partyers as an extension of their base, and indeed, tea-party rage against the Obama administration is having a motivating effect on Republicans and conservative independents. Yet the Grand Olds don’t seem eager to be taken over by the wild and woolly caravan loaded with everything from anti-tax Ron Paulites and Sarah Palinites to birthers, John Birch Society types and a rather uncomfortable smattering of racially charged, misspelled-sign-wielding screamers.
None of the recently successful statewide Republican candidates — in Massachusetts, New Jersey or Virginia — has touted the tea party (or the Republican Party, for that matter) in their victories, and all ran as moderates. Sen.-elect Scott Brown, crowned by the media as the ultimate tea-party conquistador, dismissed the notion in an interview with Barbara Walters.
The tea parties have yet to score a legislative win on their own merits. Their candidate in New York, Doug Hoffman, who vowed to reject the federal dollars that keep the district alive, was defeated last November, handing a House seat that had been Republican since the Ice Age over to the Democrats. On Tuesday, tea-party candidates in Illinois failed to topple so-called “RINO” Mark Kirk, who soundly defeated all comers in the Republican primary.
That leaves Florida’s former House Speaker, Marco Rubio, as the biggest tea-party star (besides Palin). And even he has kept some distance, demurring in a New York Times Magazine interview over whether he could be the “first senator from the Tea Party.”
Why the wariness? Well, tea partyers have developed something of an image problem, and can come across as an angry, monochromatic mob, depicting President Obama as a “witch doctor” or Hitler, calling for “revolution” and for “burying Obamacare with Ted Kennedy.”
Read the rest here. The column runs every other Thursday.
Line of the day: ‘bathtub ring’
“Did anybody expect Dick Cheney to become the bathtub ring of the Bush administration?” — Chris Matthews today on his NBC Sunday show.
Chasing Sarah Palin chasing the news
*It is no longer possible to hide the decline of a once great newspaper, no longer possible to hide the decline of the paper that broke the Watergate story, but is now hanging itself on the Climategate story,” writes James Romm of the Center for American Progress in Politico’s Arena, regarding the Washington Post’s decision to publish an extended version of Sarah Palin’s Facebook notes as an op-ed, in which she (and/or her ghostwriter) calls on President Obama to boycott the Copenhagen talks, and expounds on her view that climate change is an exagerated phenomenon. (Of course, she doesn’t use them kinda big, long-head words, for she is Sarah Palin.) The Post is being roundly panned for the decision to allow the obsessed D.C. press corps’ version of Perez Hilton to appear on its vaunted pages, where once Woodward and Bernstein exposed the Watergate scandal, and for appearing to pretend that there is still a serious debate over whether climate change is in fact real.
Marc Ambinder at the Atlantic chimes in, saying, “Once again, the Washington Post has given Sarah Palin the chance to harness herself to the political story of the hour.” And that, in the end, is what Palin is about. Whatever’s in the news, she Facebooks about it, and the credulous media comes a-runnin’. After all, what could be more illuminating than the views of someone who knows absolutely nothing about science, and who thinks the earth is 6,000 years old, on climate change? (Ambinder helpfully annotates the ex-half-term governor’s silly missive, for the non-Palinites out there, who after all, are the ones who know what “annotates” means…) Read more
Conservatives debate: ‘teabagger’ as the new ‘n-word’
From TPM and the National Review, news that the right wingers are hoping to either put the “teabagger” genie back in the bottle, or embrace it as a badge of honor. Maybe they could start using “teabagga” instead? Read more
5 reasons the Tiger scandal won’t hurt his bottom line
The rolling sex scandal/pay the wife to stay saga bleeding Tiger Woods may seem financially fatal to those of us snarking away at his troubles. But in the end, while I certainly don’t condone the behavior, and feel badly for his wife, I’m with ad guru Donny Deutsch, who got hammered by Mika this morning on “Morning Joe” for saying that in the end, the scandals won’t decimate Woods’ bank account (except to the extent he has to deplete it to pay off women, including Miss Elin.) Here’s why: Read more
If you read this to Glenn Beck, his head will explode
Salon.com posts a brilliant history of the Pledge of Allegiance by Michael Lind, which explains why it’s so darned un-American:
Ironically, the Pledge of Allegiance, which today is most fiercely defended by white conservative Southerners whose Confederate ancestors tried to destroy the United States in the 1860s, was written by a Yankee socialist from New York in the 1890s. Francis Bellamy was a progressive Baptist minister and a Christian socialist who composed the pledge for the 400-year Columbus anniversary in 1892 and published it in a youth magazine. His cousin Edward Bellamy, a socialist from Massachusetts (Glenn Beck, are you taking notes?), was the author of the 1888 bestselling utopian novel “Looking Backward: 2007-1887,” which described a collectivist America in 2007 in which everyone is drafted in an “industrial army” and dines in public kitchens. (Instead of an industrial army, the United States in 2007 had a reserve army of the unemployed and working poor, and instead of public kitchens we had Starbucks.)
The Bellamys, like many at the time, were inspired by the integral nationalist and statist ideals that were percolating in Europe. From the 1890s until the 1940s, American schoolchildren often accompanied recitation of the pledge with “the Bellamy salute,” a stiff-armed salute of the ancient Roman kind that was indistinguishable from the later fascist and Nazi salutes. Heil Amerika! It was Franklin Roosevelt who suggested replacing the salute with a hand over the heart.
In the course of the 20th century, support for the pledge migrated from the collectivist left to the reactionary right. The original Bellamy pledge read: “I pledge allegiance to my flag and the Republic for which it stands, one nation indivisible with liberty and justice for all.” In 1923 WASP nativists prevailed in having “my flag” replaced by “the flag of the United States of America,” to make sure that young Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin, among others, knew they weren’t pledging allegiance to the old country. In 1954, Congress inserted the words “under God,” following an influential sermon by a Protestant pastor who argued that the model for the United States in the Cold War should be ancient Sparta.
Could anything be more foreign to America’s enlightened 18th-century liberal and republican traditions than this toxic compound of collectivism, nativism, Spartan militarism and theocracy?
Actually, no. Read more
David Gregory’s right wing nosedive, part 2: unions, unions everywhere
It’s as if he was reading his talking points off the RNC website (what up!) … David Gregory was even more tooly than usual this week, as he interviewed Education Secretary Arne Duncan, who has created a $4 billion, results-oriented, competitive incentive program for states, school systems and non-profits called “Race to the Top,” and the new education twosome, Rev. Al Sharpton and Newt Gingrich, who are touring the country as part of President Obama’s education initiatives. The panel did their best, but when Newt Gingrich comes off like a reasonable centrist compared to the host, we’re nearing Fox News territory.
During the segment, Gregory mentioned “unions,” “teachers” or “teachers unions” 15 times, and seemed unwilling to allow the discussion to veer off the topic of what role teachers unions are playing in the demise of American education. By contrast, Gingrich, purportedly the conservative on the panel, mentioned unions exactly once, and teachers 5 times (compared to Gregory’s 6 union mentions and 9 teacher references.) Gingrich, Sharpton and Duncan kept trying to bring up the elephant in the room — parents, and their responsibility for demanding accountability at school, but were batted down each time, until finally, at the Gregory conceded, on the way out to break, that “Parents matter. Parents have to say, ‘We have expectations for you.’” Well thanks for that. A typical exchange follows after the jump. Here’s the whole, tiresome segment, in which Gregory also shows how out of touch he is, by focusing mostly on D.C., rather than the nation’s, schools:
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Burning questions: since the Bush administration spying on us anyway, why didn’t they catch Nidal Hasan?
The right is itching to blame the Fort Hood massacre on Barack Obama. They want to charge that in the politically-correct Age of O-quarious, even the United States Army is too timid to confront an openly-declared Islamist terrorist in their midst, or even to call him such by name. They are dying to say that Obama and his Pentagon should have been alerted by the Obama FBI about the threat that Nidal Hasan posed to his fellow soldiers. After all … hadn’t he had stated his Islamist views and been in contact al-Qaida…!!! …
… in 2007 and 2008 … When George W. Bush was still president. Read more
A tale of two shooters
Both were angry, disgruntled men. Both may have been in the midst of mental collapse. Both went on shooting rampages — one day apart — with unequal but deadly results. And while one of the shootings — at Fort Hood in Texas, was more deadly, and more shocking to the national consciousness — the intent of the two shootings was nonetheless the same. So why is it that Jason Rodriguez, who shot up his former employer’s office building on Friday, killine one person and injuring four, considered just as much a terrorist as Nidal Hasan? Or why aren’t both men considered cold-blooded, perhaps even psychotic killers, similar to Seung Hui Cho, the troubled college student who mowed down 33 people on the Virginia Tech campus in 2007? Or Dylan Kiebold and Eric Harris, who committed the Columbine massacre, which left 13 people dead and 25 wounded in 1999? Are these people not fruits from the same sick tree — taking out their internal troubles on others, who conveniently are located at a place familiar to them? Read more
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