Month: October 2012

Announced today, and covered nationally – George McGovern is near death and is unresponsive.

Just last Saturday night, my wife and I attended the South Dakota Symphony Orchestra, in which they did “A Lincoln Portrait” (A. Copland), in which McGovern was the narrator. I was at first concerned – how could a 90 year old man stand and do a 20 minute narration in synchrony with the orchestra? But the conductor, Delta David Geier (a friend of mine, since I sing in the South Dakota Symphony Chorus), is clever – he recorded George, and thus George did not have the ordeal of standing for 20 minutes. Instead, he spoke briefly to the crowd for a moment, and I thought he did ramble a bit when he did speak. Republicans and Democrats joined in a standing ovation following his impromptu remarks. He then sat down, and the orchestra began playing this very moving and stirringly patriotic piece. The reading was good, very good. George wrote a Lincoln biography among his 25 books, so he is a scholar on the matter of Lincoln.

I have met him perhaps 6-7 times since arriving in SD in 2009. SD is a small state, so if you are interested in politics, you can move into town, and 5 days later, have a 20 minute conversation with Tim Johnson for the contribution of $50. In IL, talking to Dick Durbin is much more expensive. SD though is a cheap state to do politics in.

I went to George McGovern’s 90th birthday party. The guy was (6 months ago) still quite witty. He spoke, and said, “I’m 90, and I’m glad to be here. When you are 90, you are glad to be pretty much anywhere.” I spoke to him, and everyone at the party got a minute with him. A gracious man, a hard worker, a tenacious campaigner, and a man who strongly believed in the Democratic Party.

About a year ago, my brother-in-law (a well-known engineer in the solar energy area) was the head speaker at George’s annual conference. We met him there, and got a picture with my wife and George.

George is much-beloved in SD, and his passing, which appears to imminent, will be a sad occasion. George is the reason we have Tom Daschle, Tim Johnson, and had Stephanie Herseth-Sandlin.

I too believe in the Democratic Party. So, watch this space, my friends.

The Republicans continually astonish me. At least, the ones who believe their own bullshit do. A group of armed men attacked our consulate and another compound of ours in Benghazi, Libya and killed our ambassador and three other men. We knew this the next day. It was reported that way the next day. That’s what the administration said happened the next day. The president referred to it as an “act of terror” while talking about it in the Rose Garden the next day. The day after that, he referred to it as an “act of terror” on the campaign trail in Colorado. The only thing that was ever in dispute was what motivated the armed men? Were they incensed by a stupid YouTube video? Were they using a protest about the video as cover to launch an attack that was motivated more by the anniversary of 9/11? Were they anti-American for this reason or that reason?

That’s literally the only thing that was ever in doubt. What we knew was that armed men launched a coordinated attack on two of our compounds in Libya and killed our ambassador and three other people. The president called it terrorism. The Republicans seem to think that it can’t be terrorism if the assailants are mad about an insulting YouTube.

So, maybe we need to have an argument about what constitutes terrorism. Maybe the right-wingers should be chastising the president for calling the attacks “terrorism” when he had no right to jump to that conclusion based on the facts as he understood them at the time. After all, it’s not terrorism if it’s a spontaneous attack, right? It’s not terrorism if the perpetrators are motivated by a feeling that their religion has been insulted.

Who even knows what the fuck these Republicans are talking about. I think it boils down to nothing more than the administration had some bad initial information (some of which was provided by the Libyan government) and they relayed that information to the public and were slow to acknowledge their mistake. My understanding is that there is no record that anyone at the consulate asked for additional security. The Republicans have slashed the budget for diplomatic security. And this idea that the president didn’t call the attacks “acts of terrorism” (when he did, more than once) because his administration thought the video played a role is just muddle-headed nonsense.

I am not even sure that either the Republicans or the Democrats version of reality is correct. An act of terrorism is carried out to intimidate people and get them to pressure their government to change policy. I think our Ambassador was killed simply because his murderers wanted him dead. I don’t think they had a political goal. I don’t think things would be any different if a mob of YouTube protesters had overrun the consulate. They would have been committing murder without much expectation that it would change anything. The rage of a mob is not terrorism.

But, however you want to define terrorism, the Republicans have been keen to politicize the unfortunate death of our ambassador and three other Americans, and it has been a disgrace.

Employers will always be outnumbered by employees. And there will always be certain areas where their interests simply do not overlap. In the American system, where we really are stuck with two parties, it’s not healthy for one party to represent employers and one party to represent employees. And it actually doesn’t quite work that way. For the Republicans, they have to overcome the problem that employers are badly outnumbered. That is why they use religion and patriotism and xenophobia and race-resentment, and some regional resentment, and anti-elite rhetoric and entertainment to lure workers onto their side.

For the Democrats, there are two problems. The first is that employees have a lot less money than employers. They can try to make up the difference with small donations, but it’s a lot more work and it isn’t always enough. Second, and related, the Democrats are not trying to be a worker’s party. They aren’t anti-business. They aren’t anti-capitalism. They aren’t interested in simply taking the unions’ agenda as their own. It’s true that the Republicans make those claims, but they are not true. There are minor parties in this country that unapologetically pursue the workers’ interests, but the Democratic Party can be better understood as the party of the New Deal. And the New Deal was a compromise between workers and employers that served as a middle ground between communism and fascism. It won its political support from an unlikely coalition of immigrant city bosses, progressive-minded intellectuals, and Jim Crow-supporting Southern plantation owners and businessmen.

The system worked pretty well (if you didn’t happen to be black) because it didn’t pit workers against their bosses. It created a system of arbitration and conflict resolution that served both sides pretty well. And it allowed the country to move at a slow and steady pace toward progressive reforms for blacks and women and gays who had all suffered severe discrimination at the beginning of the process.

Things are breaking down now, though. It’s probably the result of 30 years of Reagan conservatism eating away at the project. When Mitt Romney starts telling employers to intimidate their workers and ask them to vote Republican, we’re back to the days before the New Deal when owners could use the police to break up worker strikes and fire anyone who expressed a political opinion they didn’t like. What is going to happen is that workers will become radicalized, too. That consensus that America is a hybrid country that is neither corporate/fascist nor communist/anti-business will break down and you’ll start to see workers embracing a hard-edged socialist attitude.

You can see the seeds of this in the growing income inequality in the country, and in the Occupy Movement. The problem is that our elites have been failing us, badly, and people are increasingly giving up on the consensus. On the right, they just don’t want to pay to sustain this country anymore. On the left, they can’t take much more erosion of the middle class.

You can say whatever you want about President Obama, but he’s running things how they were designed to be run. He hasn’t failed anyone who understood the hybrid system and wanted to see it propped back up and run by competent people. He’s the best hope for the kind of country we grew up in continuing on with slow improvements. The way Romney behaves with his 47% comments and setting bosses against their employees, he’d destabilize everything. Maybe you want that. I don’t.

What? Steven? I thought you don’t watch debates? That’s what you told us. Well, yeah, I don’t and I didn’t watch last night’s debate, either. I watched a wonderful Sergio Leone film in which Henry Fonda played the nastiest, meanest psychopathic killer you can imagine: Once Upon A Time In The West. Great cast by the way. But I digress.

So how did I know that Obama Kicked Romney’s outsourced butt? Did I watch post debate spin on CNN, MsNBC or (cough) Fox News? No, I went to bed.

How could I possibly know Obama did so well, then you ask. This is what I did. I asked my 17 year-old daughter this morning. She watched the first debate, and despite being a very liberal young woman she told me flat out (and with a quite disappointing tone) that Romney cleaned the floor with Obama in Denver. I said at the time something along the lines of “Oh, it couldn’t have been that bad” but she told me that yes, indeed it had been. And after viewing all the concern about the polls tightening and Romney surging with independent voters, I realized that maybe she was right.

After all, she is very intelligent — honors student in high school with a full load of Advanced Placement classes over the years including AP Physics, AP Biology, AP English, AP History – both World and US – AP Calculus, AP Chemistry, etc.

She is also well-informed about political issues, and highly motivated to pay attention to people who act like petulant brats. She’s taking her Advance Placement US Government class this year (good timing, eh) and the teacher wants all the students to watch the debates. In short, next to Rachel Maddow, she’s better informed and smarter than most of the rest of the political commentariat, whether on the right, the left, or Broderites.

So, when she told me this morning that last night went all Obama’s way, I took her at her word. And voila, all the liberal blogs and liberal pundits and even, begrudgingly, a few conservative ones, agree with her. Now, if I can just get her a gig as a political consultant on Cable TV. Personally I’d love to see her debate Eric the Red on CNN. She knows how to handle pompous idiots ignorant jackasses conservative bullies.

First, she knows her facts. (Not a requirement, I know, but it never hurts).

Second, she isn’t afraid to interrupt liars and call them on their malarkey (thank you Joe Biden for rescuing that word).

Third, despite being quite lovely and innocent looking, and having a sweet voice, she is the most competitive person I know, and loves to debate idiots fools conservatives who only know a few well-rehearsed talking points.

Fourth, she can talk louder than Chris Matthews on amphetamines.

Fifth, she’s fast with “zingers” unlike a certain Presidential candidate we all loathe, and she doesn’t have to practice them ahead of time.

Lastly, I’m her father. Trust me. I lose to her all the time.

So what do you think? Who should hire her?

I don’t think too many women liked what they heard from Mitt Romney last night. Everyone is laughing about his “binders full of women” line, but that was just one piece of a very disturbing performance. It’s nice that he had a woman as chief of staff but being chief of staff to a governor is not the kind of job where you get to leave at 4 o’clock so you can get home to cook your kids’ dinner. That’s just not plausible. That’s not what flex-time is about. There are women all throughout our workforce who are working long hours and flex-time helps them juggle their family obligations with their job requirements. It’s helps men do this, too. But a decent chief of staff works harder and longer hours than the executive that they serve. You don’t send her home early to feed the kids. Either the story is just made up, it’s grossly exaggerated, or Romney was a lousy governor who quit working mid-afternoon. Come to think of it, that may be why he didn’t even try to get reelected.

It wasn’t much better when Romney answered a question about the status of the Assault Weapons Ban by saying that he doesn’t support any new laws but that gun violence would drop if women stopped having babies out of wedlock. “Guns don’t kill people, single mothers kill people.”

Romney wouldn’t say that he supported equal pay for women. He lied about his record on contraception. He lied about asking for the binders of women. He still wants to “get rid of” Planned Parenthood. He still supports overturning Roe v. Wade.

I just don’t think women felt like Romney understands or respects them.

What the hell is this all about?

Israel vs. No. 2 Pencils

As countless students around the world took the SAT a week ago, Palestinians from the West Bank could not join their ranks. The October SAT exam was cancelled for students in the West Bank: The Israeli authorities held the exams sent by the College Board for weeks, not releasing the tests to AMIDEAST’s office in Ramallah.
[…]
This SAT cancellation has been devastating for high school seniors across the West Bank who were planning to apply to college in the United States–including those from the Ramallah Friends School. As alumni of the school, we are proud of its emphasis on global citizenship. RFS has a rich history in Palestine. It was established in 1869 by American Quakers and has since been certified by the International Baccalaureate Organization in Switzerland.
[…]
The College Board has announced that it will attempt to schedule a make-up test for those students who were supposed to take the October SAT. AMIDEAST suggested in an email that the tests were held because of an “administrative delay.” According to Michael Madormo, English teacher and Director of the College Preparatory Academy at RFS, “the SAT cancellation has been disheartening since it seems that the Israelis had the exams for weeks and despite efforts by UPS, ETS [Educational Testing Service], and AMIDEAST, the tests were not passed through customs.”

Deprive them of housing, take away their agricultural land, raze the olive gardens, denigrate their dignity.

And now, prevent their higher education. WTF!

What were the best and worst moments of the debate, in your opinion?

Politics is politics.  And it’s an old truism about political debates that if one side says it was a tie, then the other side won.

Given the overnight reactions by conservatives, I think it’s safe to say Pres. Obama won last night’s debate.  That was true whether you focused on style or substance.   As with their first debate two weeks ago, the candidate who won on style points—who had the best sound bites, who looked and acted more confident—also won the substantive debate.

Debate performances don’t generally swing elections.  (If they did, George W. Bush would have lost two national elections and Ronald Reagan wouldn’t have won a second term.)  But they matter—like conventions, campaign organization, speeches and rallies—at the margins.  By winning last night’s debate on the heels of Joe Biden’s victory last week, Pres. Obama has done what he can to repair the damage from the first presidential debate.  Next week’s foreign policy debate is the last time these two candidates will meet.  After that (barring an “October surprise”), it’s all a matter of execution by the campaigns.

Crossposted at: http://masscommons.wordpress.com/

The proof that the president had a bad first debate came in the immediate deterioration of his lead in the polls. I can’t dispute that he did a bad job in the first debate because the evidence in incontrovertible. But understanding what he did wrong is harder to pinpoint. My guess is that it was a combination of things that mostly came down to two. He didn’t have enough energy and he let Mitt Romney be the Alpha Dog. As a matter of substance, Obama did fine. He didn’t commit any gaffes or factual errors or even say anything he had cause to regret. He just didn’t stand up for himself and his record or take on his opponent with sufficient rigor.

Last night’s debate was different for a lot or reasons. The president let himself get pushed around a little bit early on, but not without some resistance. And he eventually found the perfect moment to rope-a-dope Romney into the threshing blades with his comments on terrorism in Benghazi. Thereafter, Obama was the undisputed Alpha Dog of the debate, which was capped by his good fortune in having the final say of the night. If it were a boxing match, Romney was knocked down at least two times and the fight ended with Mitt on the ropes taking a pummeling from the champion. The judges’ cards were not close.

Romney came into the debate with two purposes. First, he wanted to repeat his performance as the stronger male on the stage, which involved bullying the moderator and stealing extra time for himself to speak. This didn’t work as well the second time around for at least three reasons. The town hall format meant that he was stealing time from audience members. The moderator being a woman, his pushiness was more alienating. And the president wasn’t going to let him go unchallenged again.

Second, Romney was less concerned with creating ‘zingers’ than with repeating certain poll-tested themes. He wanted to let people know that he “knows what it takes to turn the economy around” and that he “knows what it takes to create good jobs again.” Through repetition, Romney wanted to burn an impression of economic competence into the viewers’ minds. And he probably was modestly successful in that task. In my personal opinion, his repetition began to have diminishing returns later in the debate because it started to seem non-repsonsive to some of the questions.

The bigger problem with his strategy is being seen this morning on the television. While he was occasionally effective during the debate, no one wants to show him repeating himself five times to demonstrate how he hammered home some theme. All of the debate highlights are either of Mitt Romney making mistakes or of the president blasting him with effective rejoinders. Last night, all the ‘zingers’ belonged to the president.

And, so, it is not hard to know why the president won the debate last night. It wasn’t anything subtle like a lack of energy or apparent desire. It was because Romney committed gaffes and the president delivered big body blows.

Winning the second debate is certainly preferable to losing it, but we shouldn’t expect the polls to snap back to the way they looked before the first debate. Some of the damage caused by the first debate is permanent, and we’ll pay a price for that for the next two years, at a minimum, with smaller margins in Congress. Romney reversed a trajectory that had us easily winning a second term for the White House, picking up seats in the Senate, and probably winning back the House. All of those things are still in doubt because the first debate did not go well.

The president did a fine job of righting the ship last night, but we all still have a lot of work to do to get us back to where things should have been. So, find your local folks and volunteer to help them out in whatever capacity you can. We need all hands on board.

Does this asshole look like he won the debate?

Well, does he?