Month: October 2011

I’m looking forward to this episode of When Billionaires Clash. It looks like some Bloomberg editors decided to really take it to the Koch Brothers by using at least 15 reporters from all over the world to look into their dirty dealings. Anyone surprised that the Koch Brothers used foreign subsidiaries to sell petrochemical equipment to Iran? I’m not. Didn’t Cheney do the same thing when he ran Halliburton? Sanctions? Who needs sanctions? That stuff is just for appearances.

Here’s an excellent article that tells it like it is. Mike Lillis of The Hill does a great job of accurately describing the political dynamics of the country at the moment. Here is the key part:

Complicating life for Obama, GOP leaders – particularly those in the Senate – have adopted a strategy of opposing the White House even on some legislation Republicans support. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), for instance, raised eyebrows at the start of the deficit-reduction debate when he helped kill a bipartisan bill – a proposal he’d previously characterized as the “best way to address the [budget] crisis” – after Obama endorsed it.

“The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president,” McConnell told National Journal last year.

The GOP’s rigidity has forced Obama to the right in order to pass anything through Congress, which in turn has only heightened the backlash from the left.

What’s left unsaid in the article is that the president is taking a bigger percentage of the flak than he should. Not only is the GOP’s intransigence forcing his hand in almost every case, but the Democrats in Congress are not united and do not uniformly have his back even for the compromised solutions he is forced to propose. At root, our problem in this Congress is that Congress is divided and cannot agree on anything. The SuperCommittee is struggling to even begin negotiations over the budget, and its likely failure to reach an agreement could lead to another downgrade of the nation’s credit rating.

Meanwhile, as the president tries to arouse the left in support of a modest, reasonable Jobs Bill, the left’s heart has left the building and is now focused on protests against corporate greed and mismanagement. Yesterday, whether lured by police or through a lack of any leadership structure, many of these protesters strayed from the agreed path and occupied the Brooklyn-bound lanes of the Brooklyn Bridge for two and a half hours, shutting down traffic and forcing many to abandon their cars. Perhaps as many as 700 of them were arrested and carted off in buses.

This is a recipe for the failure of the Obama presidency and the emergence of a conservative revolution in this country unlike anything we’ve ever seen. For a long time the activist left begged the president to really fight for jobs, both as a political and a moral issue. Yet, it was right in the middle of his push for a jobs bill that they gave up on the political process completely, turned their loving attention elsewhere, and decided to join the pox-on-all-their-houses crowd.

Perhaps the average person cannot be faulted for giving up, or for not being motivated to fight for a president whose hands have been shackled by the Republcians’ determined efforts to ruin him. But a lot of people who should know better are getting caught up in a sideshow.

Yet, the eruption of protest on the left can help the president if he recognizes the opportunity. Unlike what Steven D has recommended, I do not think the administration should align itself with the protestors. What they should do is what FDR did with Huey Long. While the protesters call for Wall Street to “Share the Wealth” the president should tack to the left but maintain himself as the safer alternative. “If you don’t give me a win on this jobs bill, these protests will continue to grow and the pitchforks will really come out.” I don’t know how many of the protesters would agree with my advice, but I do think that at least part of what they’re trying to do is to change the political consensus in this country and yank the discourse out of the death-hold it seems to have become locked in. The economy is terrible and headed into a double-dip recession, and neither the president nor Congress is capable of doing anything big or adequate to fix the problem. The answer certainly is not to give the Republicans another chance. So, maybe the left can shake things up and create a crack in the wall of obstruction.

The administration has to look at this as an opportunity, because if it doesn’t adapt to take advantage of it, his effort on jobs will die a pathetic death, and his presidency will likely follow.

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I watched a discussion on France24 television between participants on World Affairs. The conclusion on President Obama: “He is playing a double game. On issues of Wall Street reform and foreign policy.” The latter certainly as it pertains to the Arab Spring, Palestinian issue for an independent state and our strong [military] ally Saudi Arabia representing  the world Sunni community. This has been my conclusion for some time now, what do you think?

I can’t find a link for the France24 program, I’ll try to find articles with the same argument.

Obama Pulls a Clinton on Deregulation

Obama plays double-game as Egyptians continue protest

(Iran PressTV) Jan. 31, 2011 – US President Barack Obama, caught off guard by the people’s movement against the American supported regime, is now resorting to a fresh deceit in an attempt not to let Egypt slip away from Washington’s hold.

He has urged Mubarak to stop the use of violence and reverse its decision to suspend Internet and cell phone access as the country grapples with massive street protests. According to Press TV, Obama said in his first extended public comments on the Egypt protests said “The people of Egypt have rights that are universal … these are human rights, and the United States will stand up for them everywhere.”

Human rights activists and protesters have blasted the United States for being too indifferent in its comments on the situation. Earlier this week, US Vice President Joe Biden said in an interview that Mubarak, who has used power tactics to remain in power for 30 years, is not a dictator.

While Bahrain demolishes mosques, U.S. stays silent …

While Bahrain demolishes mosques, U.S. stays silent

(NcClatchy) – In Shiite villages across this island kingdom of 1.2 million, the Sunni Muslim government has bulldozed dozens of mosques as part of a crackdown on Shiite dissidents, an assault on human rights that is breathtaking in its expansiveness.

Authorities have held secret trials where protesters have been sentenced to death, arrested prominent mainstream opposition politicians, jailed nurses and doctors who treated injured protesters, seized the health care system that had been run primarily by Shiites, fired 1,000 Shiite professionals and canceled their pensions, detained students and teachers who took part in the protests, beat and arrested journalists, and forced the closure of the only opposition newspaper.

Nothing, however, has struck harder at the fabric of this nation, where Shiites outnumber Sunnis nearly 4 to 1, than the destruction of Shiite worship centers.

The Obama administration has said nothing in public about the destruction.

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Bahrain — and its patron, Saudi Arabia — are longtime U.S. allies, and Bahrain hosts the headquarters of the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet.

Doctors who dared to treat protesters sentenced to 15 years in Bahrain

Saudi UN Address Endorses Statehood for Palestine

Last week SUSRIS provided a comprehensive report on the question of Palestinians seeking statehood at the opening of the 66th session of the United Nations General Assembly and its impact on US-Saudi relations. [Special Report: Saudi-US Friction Over Palestine at the UN]  It follows detailed coverage of speeches and op-eds, most notably by former Ambassador to the United States Prince Turki Al-Faisal, which warned of consequences for the Washington-Riyadh relationship.  As the Palestinian request moves through the United Nations we are pleased to provide for your consideration the statement of Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud Al-Faisal at the General Assembly.  You can find more on this important diplomatic drama in the SUSRIS Special Section “Palestine, the UN, Saudi Arabia, and the U.S.“

Foreign Minister Prince Saud Al-Faisal delivered a statement issued on Monday to the 66th session United Nations General Assembly in New York in which he stressed the critical nature of ending the Palestinian-Israeli conflict to Middle East peace. “The Arab-Israeli conflict still predominates and overshadows all issues of the Middle East. No other regional conflict is more influential upon world peace,” he said.

When addressing the necessity of Middle East peace, Prince Saud highlighted the efforts by the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz to secure peace in the region and the lack of cooperation from the Israelis. “The Arab states have clearly expressed, through the Arab Peace Initiative launched by Saudi Arabia and adopted by the Beirut Arab Summit in 2004, their commitment to achieving just and comprehensive peace based on the rules of international law. However, we were not met by any reciprocal commitment from Israel.”

• Obama Behind the Scenes – Photo Gallery

"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."

Even as the crowds slowly grow in Lower Manhattan to protest our financial overlords, those same overlords are desperately trying to persuade New Jersey Governor Chris Christie to get into the race. They succeeded at least in getting Christie to start looking at the logistics of a campaign. And Christie’s advisors are asking at least some potential supporters to hold off endorsing anyone else until next Wednesday.

If Christie gets in, it might create the three-way race I’ve been predicting would very possibly result in a brokered convention.

Today:

Yesterday:

I was watching Family Feud yesterday (don’t worry, it’s not a habit of mine) and the question was, “Name something you’ll have to give up if gas prices get any higher.” The woman’s answer was “My bicycle.”

I thought that answer perfectly represented our political discourse in this country.

If Dick Durbin is right and the Senate Democrats don’t have the votes to pass the American Jobs Act, then the Republicans have an incentive to forego their usual filibuster and let the bill fail a simple majority up-or-down vote. However, I get the feeling that the Dems could muster the votes through the amendment process by stripping out things that certain Democrats find objectionable. I think the Dems may be playing opossum.

What’s troubling, even here at this site, is the degree to which the left has tuned the president out and is investing its energies elsewhere. It may be a fool’s errand to hope for solutions from this Congress, but there is still a political battle to be fought over who is to blame. And if we give up that fight we will lose it.

Maybe the single most depressing thing about our political culture is how the left is so willing to act the puppet to the right’s puppeteer. They make it so the government is dysfunctional, so we give up on the government. No. We must engage them in battle and win the argument. Otherwise, we lose.

I think Chris Christie’s extreme obesity raises serious questions about his health. In July, he was hospitalized because he couldn’t breath. If he were to run for and win the nomination, we’d have to utilize much more than the ordinary scrutiny on his running mate, who could become president at any time. But Christie is not too fat to be president. He’s too much of a dick to be president.

Hello again painting fans.

This week I’ll be continuing with the painting of the Cape May, New Jersey shingle style house. It is seen in the photo directly below. (I’m using my usual acrylic paints on an 8×8 inch canvas.)

When last seen, the painting appeared as it does in the photo directly below.

Since that time I have continued to work on the painting.

I have concentrated my efforts on two specific areas for this week’s installment.  First, to the right rear of the house, a bush now occupies and fills the formerly empty space.  It will receive some highlights and shadows in the next few weeks.  I had attempted to paint the shed seen in the photo but it didn’t look right.  The bush fills the space nicely and carries up the green color seen in the lawn.

The second area of progress is seen front and center.  The front steps have now been defined in the same way as the porch posts.  I still need to paint blue shadows.  These will further define that space and provide a 3 dimensional quality. Stay tuned.

 
The current state of the painting is seen in the photo directly below.

That’s about it for now. Next week I’ll have more progress to show you. See you then. As always, feel free to add photos of your own work in the comments section below.

Earlier paintings in this series can be seen here.

While it’s the Republicans who keep bewailing their presidential candidates, a new Gallup poll is excellent news for whichever crackpot or pretend-crackpot wins the Republican nomination:

In thinking about the 2012 presidential election, 45% of Democrats and independents who lean Democratic say they are more enthusiastic about voting than usual, while nearly as many, 44%, are less enthusiastic. This is in sharp contrast to 2008 and, to a lesser extent, 2004, when the great majority of Democrats expressed heightened enthusiasm about voting.

That enthusiasm peaked at 73 percent in 2004 and 79 percent in 2008. This week’s numbers look more like 2000, when “more enthusiastic” Democratic responders peaked at 40 percent. That enthusiasm gap – far more than Ralph Nader’s two percent – cost Al Gore an election he should have won in a walk, in a time with the most peace and prosperity the U.S. has seen in a generation (at least). Obama, needless to say, doesn’t have that advantage.

It gets worse:

The difference between Democrats’ enthusiasm and Republicans’ enthusiasm can be summarized by plotting the difference in the two groups’ net enthusiasm scores — that is, the percentage of each group saying they are more enthusiastic minus the percentage less enthusiastic.

Democrats’ net enthusiasm (+1) now trails Republicans’ net enthusiasm (+28) by 27 percentage points. By contrast, Democrats held the advantage on net enthusiasm throughout 2008 — on several occasions, by better than 40-point margins….The current balance of enthusiasm among Republicans and Democrats is similar to what Gallup found in the first few months of 2000.

This seems, basically, like a quantification of common sense. It’s no secret that Obama isn’t firing up his base, which is angry with him for any number of reasons above and beyond the ongoing financial morass which would normally doom any re-election effort. We’ve seen it in this past month in the tepid public response to the Obama jobs bill. The White House has been trying without a lot of real visible success to whip up both public and congressional enthusiasm for Obama’s bill – a program which, while constrained by both Obama’s temperment and political reality, would still do a lot to improve many real lives in concrete, meaningful ways.

Meanwhile, the Occupy Wall Street protests, which have generally involved a few hundred people at a time, have been sucking up enormous progressive media oxygen, pro and con, in the last week – far more than the jobs bill is getting, for an action that has no concrete outcome in mind and that will, even if highly successful, directly, materially improve the lives of nobody. (It would make some of us feel better, however…)

There are a lot of reasons for this contrasting reception. Probably the biggest was teased out by another recent Gallup poll: a record number of Americans, not just those on the right, no longer thinks government can solve our problems. That isn’t just necessarily an ideological disposition: it is also, among many on the left, an assessment that the Democrats, as now personified by Obama, can’t solve our problems, and the Republicans, as personified by an endless teevee parade of lunatics treated as though they are sober and sane, could not care less about them.

Candidate Obama in 2008 was the best example in a generation of the political truism that optimism sells. In 2012, nobody is optimistic. Both Obama and his eventual opponent will be running primarily on the appeal that they’re not their opponent. The difference is that for the Republican nominee, anybody other than Romney or Huntsman will have an enthusiastic base who knows, despite the general election nods to centrism, that He (or She) Is One Of Us.

In 2011, almost nobody is saying that about Obama. Now, 12 months is a long time in politics, and Obama will have a lot of money to polish his image. He is a prodigiously talented campaigner, too. But most Americans’ impressions of him, for better or worse, are pretty set at this point – a point in which Democrats are a lot less enthusiastic about their guy than Republicans are about whomever their nominee might be. And if poll results hold, it’s also bad news for the Democrats’ hopes of holding onto either the House or Senate.

Unless Obama can change a lot of perceptions of him in the next year, the fact that electing a Republican is the surest way to destroy what’s left of the economic well-being of most of the country won’t be just Obama’s best argument. It will be his only argument.