Playground Bullies

POSTED BY JHW22

Between Jane Hamster, the GOP leadership and the Tea Party insurgents, and a deaf and blind media, Obama needs some support. So let's be some stubborn asses and have his back!

My Manifesto

POSTED BY JHW22

I am admittedly NOT a presidential scholar. Aside from not being alive longer than the last six presidents’ terms, I have only become a serious observer of politics in the last five years. In that time I have become a mom, volunteered for a number of organizations reaching across issues I knew little about prior to my assistance, and tried to just keep up with the topics of the day. In NO WAY could I add to my list of priorities the self-education of every presidency prior to my birth, nor the presidencies of my infancy, adolescence and teenage years at times in my life when that type of subject was nowhere near important. So, with that said, I am not able to go toe to toe with anyone on what FDR, Truman, Carter or Reagan did on any given maneuver or policy fight.

But what I can say is this: I would bet that most people who make comparisons to Obama and any other President aren’t as knowledgeable on the analytics as they may like to sound. It is easy to say, “Obama needs to go all FDR on the Republicans” because it sounds good and you could probably find hundreds of blog posts, articles and Daily Kos diaries stating the same idea. But how many of the people who wrote those actually studied FDR and truly understand the nuances of his deal-making, his compromises, his obstacles and his political ammunition? How many people who make such easy statements actually have the capacity to compare with such certainty as to summarize the current President as a failure based on the FDR metrics? How many of those people are able to take scenario A of FDR and properly compare it to scenario A of Obama and not only zero in on the exact similarities but also be able to make enough matches with such similarities as to be able to make a complete judgment that the scenarios are so exact that the only outcome must be that Obama should take every identical step FDR took?

Even people who have been alive and aware during previous administrations don’t know any more of the inner-workings and logistical maneuverings that actually took place. Americans seem to think we know everything when actually, we don’t know shit. Because we read it somewhere does not make the information complete. We also tend to think that if we know A through G, then obviously the next letter is H. Well, that’s true of the alphabet but not politics.

I will concede that some of the authors of the “Obama should be FDR” pieces do know a lot about FDR. I am sure there are many who have read enough biographies and histories to have a fair handle on the situation. However, any one of them who then tries to convince me that the scenarios of each president are equal may have read history but are most definitely avoiding the reality that there is no possible way that any two scenarios faced by any two presidents can be exactly the same. You CAN NOT take a policy discussion or decision without seeing a million details that do not match history. Just as I could not figure out your ATM pin number without a multitude of potential combinations, far more possible mixtures of personalities, opposition, coordination, dollar amounts, concessions, conflicts, time-lines, external impacts, internal consequences, etc, etc, etc, mean that NO COMPARISON can be made that should or could form any judgment on the current president.

(By the way, you can substitute FDR for Truman or Carter or Reagan or Lincoln.)

Now, I am called naïve, a bot, a whatever Paul Krugman or Glenn Greenwald want to call me, but frankly, I find the naiveté in any person who thinks you can narrow an opinion of the current president down to a overwhelming simplistic and far-reaching avoidance of reality that the past is not the present. We can LOOK to the past for guidance but we can’t pretend that the past can be duplicated. In comparing Obama to any previous president is beyond simplistic and far-reaching, it is a stubborn avoidance of the frustration that HE isn’t the problem. Rather than deal with the reality of the actual problems we face, it’s far easier to say he isn’t being FDR enough. We may as well say he isn’t Atticus Finch enough. Because, although Atticus is a fictional character, the demand that Obama act exactly like another person in another time with different problems, different players, different options, is as fictionally-based as wishing he were someone who never existed. Although, technically, there was a real person Harper Lee based Atticus on, but you get my point.

SO, I do not accept any comparisons or evaluations of Obama based on prior presidents. If that’s all you’ve got, and if I were a professor, I’d send you back to rewrite your entire thesis and tell you to avoid the “Handmaid’s Tale”/”1983”/”Animal Farm” aspect of your analysis and give me your actual understanding of the options he actually faces, with the tools he actually possesses, against the challenges he actually has to overcome TODAY. THEN tell me, step-by-step and in non-black and white ways what he could have done and what he can do that would have made any other choices valid and more successful than he has been.

Let’s take the public option. Tell me how Barack Obama (and NOT FDR) could have succeeded with that. Base it on what he said and not what anonymous reports stated. Before making assumptions of what was said in back room meetings, before assuming reports are based in pure fact and no spin, look at the situation he was presented with. Consider the possibility he was on the phone every hour, talking with members of Congress (because according to the PBS documentary on the official White House photographer, Pete Souza, Obama was, in fact, on the phone more times than the media reported).

Next, consider the possibility that the media killed the public option. The American public was supportive early on. What happened? Things like “death panels” and “kill the bill” became the media focus. The media called the public option DOA long before Obama conceded, publicly at least, that it wasn’t going to survive. The very organizations who determine whether Obama’s message gets out to the American people pre-wrote history. They called it dead before anyone could actually make a dent in negotiations. In my honest opinion, that empowered the right by suggesting the possibility and by distracting the left from the discussion. The right pounced on the left’s key issue and the left freaked out over Obama. No one was left to fight the right and the lies were able to take hold in the American public.

Obama stayed on message but a certain faction of the left was so damn frazzled that we started running after our own quarterback and caused a fumble that was scooped up by the opposition who then ran to within field goal range. We won the game but barely. We would have creamed them had we protected the quarterback. But we lost focus of our priorities. Today, the law we have is helping me personally.

If everyone can pretend that they know what FDR would have done, then I suggest that people stop and consider that we would have had a public option today if the media had reported facts as opposed to speculation. We would have had a public option had Democrats held strong together and played the plays as planned rather than forgetting how to play altogether.

But would’ve, could’ve, should’ve aren’t relevant. I am saving money. My son is covered despite a pre-existing condition. My life is better because of what DID take place.

Now, without going issue by issue or point by point through the last two years, let me say this and ask that you apply it to all you have assumed, decided, declared:

What do you KNOW? Do you easily accept every report you read? Does any part ever sound just not right? Do you have questions that the report didn’t raise? And when you have that feeling, when you still have questions, what do you do with it? When you read another source that says the same thing, so you then say, “Aha, it must be true”? If you’ll recall, I have said that Republicans tend to think that if 100 websites say “bibbity bobbity boo in Kalamazoo” then it must be as written. It never occurs to them that all 100 sites using the phrase word-for-word means someone copied and pasted. 99 people copied the words of 1 person but the idea is still that first person’s. The other 99 stopped short of analysis and just repeated. THAT is not confirmation. It’s repetition. The Democrats don’t do that specifically. We don’t really copy and paste entire articles and try to pass that off as Woodward-style fact-checking. We’re too proud of our own writing abilities that we at least re-write what we read.

Democrats take an idea and revise, add their own flourishes, put their own voice to it and state it is absolute fact whether or not they ever put a second of their articulate genius toward actually finding out if that initial idea were true, unbiased or simply relevant. No, if an idea sounds kick-ass, Democrats rush out to tell the same idea in their own way without bothering to come up with an idea on their own. Inevitably, the writers who love to share other people’s ideas in their own words, accidentally slip up and start using the same words or phrases created by the first writer to summarize the situation. Presently the words are “cave” and “fight” although no one can truly articulate what either means to them. It’s really just a feeling. I remember the first time I saw “cave” used in regards to Obama and the Bush tax cuts. Now it is THE word used by all Democrats who don’t want him to but a cent or a day – even though they may not even know why a certain dollar amount is so sacred.

No one wants him to “cave” yet I’ve seen countless times where people have said they would be OK if the amount were raised to another number. How can we demand he not cave and then be willing to compromise on the number? It’s because the idea of him not caving sounds good but no one has really defined that meaning for themselves, let alone the masses of people who read that and revise that. The word has become overused by people who imprinted on it without analyzing the meaning. The same people want Obama to “draw a line in the sand” yet they really have no clue what or where the line should be, they are just certain that a line MUST be drawn. They are certain that they know a line is needed. To me, the demand is hollow without any true understanding of what the magic line should be.

Democrats don’t think beyond black and white any more than the Republicans do. For example, the federal pay freeze. The accepted assumption is that Obama froze federal employee pay to give, without a “fight”, some phantom concession to the Republicans. I have not seen, perhaps it is out there but I’ve missed it, the mention that over the last several months as the private sector has created jobs, the government has laid people off. Yes, we have had consistent job LOSSES in the government sector. To me, a pay freeze is the alternative to further layoffs of federal employees. And to me, it is a legitimate alternative. But the quick assumption was that Obama “caved”. Now, Obama did not give the reason I see in his speech. He didn’t say it’s to save federal employees from loosing their jobs. But right now we need him emphasizing job creation and not massive losses. He had to put a stop to the bleeding but Democrats won’t see that because that isn’t the message being fed. And in this case, although I wish he’d put that message out there, I can see why he won’t. But few Democrats will search beyond the blogs and articles and cable tv to find the meaning that makes sense.

In summary, I COULD go further point by point through the last two years and “prove” why Obama has stayed as true to his promises as the best presidents of our history. I could remind everyone that he has always said he is here to work with all, for all. I could point out the challenges he faces of Fox News and right-wing blogs and racism and corporate money and the Supreme Court, and on and on. But none of that is relevant to my overall point.

The overall point is that Americans stopped thinking for themselves. Today Obama was giving a speech on the economy. MSNBC cut away. CNN either cut away or never aired it. CSPAN wasn’t airing it. But www.whitehouse.gov was live-streaming it. And yet people say Obama doesn’t talk about the economy. This is one of a hundred speeches I have watched or listened to him give. He talks about the economy every day. Someone from his administration is talking about the economy every day. So why do people think he isn’t? It’s because the media controls the message and because Americans are too lazy to seek out the information. Americans assume that if the media isn’t bringing the information to them, it just must not exist. And when the media speaks, we parrot.

And then we blame the president for what we don’t hear or what we do hear.

So, perhaps I should have been clearer in earlier posts. Perhaps I haven’t put the correct message out there. Perhaps I am still failing. But I refuse to consider worthy a conversation with people who either live in a constant state of comparing two centuries, two presidents and two extremely complex realities who also rely on the very media we have all watched disintegrate over the last decade. Any Democrat who will pick and choose which articles must be true based on some in-grained cynicism or some need to justify their own desires to pretend as if they are all-knowing, are frankly, in my opinion, not a part of any solution. They may have access to, and more frequently use, real data and facts, but the spin they choose to place on the reality of today suggests to me they are as unproductive and obstructionist as Republicans.

What I look for in a true discussion is the lack of catch-phrases. If you use the buzzwords of the day, I can only assume you have either accepted others’ ideas without even applying your own verbiage. Or you have subconsciously adopted others’ thinking and therefore are going to be zombie-like in your debate. There is no getting through to the latter. So, I only want to discuss with people who have asked themselves how they formed their ideas, which sources they used, why those sources, and have they really sat and thought something through before taking a stand one way or another. If you are an expert on FDR and can tell me that 4 out of 5 scenarios of each debate Obama faces are 90% similar, then have at it. But if you’ve never actually studied the papers, letters, speeches, reports, etc. of FDR and can’t tell me with any certainty that 4 out of 5 scenarios of each debate are the same as what Obama faces now, then I don’t want to read the letters “F D R” in your response to me. (Again, you can substitute any previous president). Oh, and I should add, that when I hear journalists I actually respect say things like “Truman never polled the military” and then a month later say “when Truman polled the military” I call bullshit. And when I see other people parrot one or both of those talking points, even talking points from journalists I respect, I also call bullshit. When it comes to the DADT survey, it was NEVER about whether to repeal or not; the survey was to help the military effectively plan the repeal through effective policies and education. That is something we should honor – a prepared military. Instead, the media pre-misconstrued the report until they saw the results and have since done a 180 on the way they report on it. Thus, I see average Democrats doing the same. And that is one example where I say, unequivocally, that I have watched the media messaging seep into the subconscious of Democrats.

So, if you use any word of the day, convince me, in your own words, that you have thought through the situation on all levels. Show me devil’s advocate thinking and maybe then we can get somewhere. But if you tell me you think black simply because the media says so or because Republicans say white, and you can’t even comprehend gray in your logic, then I don’t have time for you.

I have spent HOURS developing my opinions, my perspective, my understanding. In all of this I have concluded that the media is mostly a rapid-fire, beat the next guy, soap opera. And sadly, many Democrats, who I expect to be smarter, fall for the agenda, messaging, tone and mood set by those we shouldn’t be accepting with such enthusiasm. Yet, Democrats pick up their language, mood, tenor and assumptions for no reason I can comprehend.

Anyone who parrots the media is not worthy of another moment of my time. I have serious thinking to do and only want to participate with serious thinkers. I have a lot to learn and expect only those with integrity to teach me. If you aren’t that person, I implore you to try to be that person. Change how you get your information. Change how you process it. Change why you believe what you do. And finally, find your own damn voice in it all. You don’t have to write or speak eloquently, but know that what you think and say is your own and not some media-tainted creation.

Wake up and rub the newspaper ink off your face. We all know what the media has come to. So why do you let it be your guide?

Here We Go Again

Posted by JHW22

So, um, yes the Republicans won a lot of races. Yes, they did. So now THE talking point is that the American people rejected Obama's policies. But, um, Dems won a lot of races, too. So the idea that "the voters" spoke only one thing yesterday is just another example of how our media sets the dialogue and rewrites history with each tap on the keyboard. "The voters" said a lot of things. They said hell no to some seriously bad candidates and hell yes to a lot of good candidates. It was a mixed bag. The message should be that.

Sick of Memes? How about the "Obama doesn't tout his accomplishements blah blah blah" meme?

POSTED BY JHW22

By request, here is a comment I left on Bob Cesca's Awesome Blog. It was in response to the "Obama doesn't talk about his accomplishments" and the "they need to repeat it over and over" memes. Why pretend to rewrite it as a post when it's perfect as I wrote it? ;) I am thinking David Corn needs to read it.

(Okay, fine, I corrected a few errors)

A) The administration and Congress HAVE talked about their accomplishments -- every day! How do people think their message is supposed to get out, however, when the media cuts away from a town hall rally? When they don't air the WH daily press briefing? When they book more analysts than actual representatives for their on-air BS sessions?

www.whitehouse.gov posts information every day that shows the work they are doing: but how many Americans go there? Are we so lazy that we only want information to come to us? And then we criticize the administration when the media doesn't do that job well? Obama doesn't run the networks so this argument that they haven't touted their accomplishments enough should be aimed at the media who doesn't bother to reflect that they ARE touting their accomplishments.

B) The administration is forced, by the American media and people, to buffer all good news. They can't talk about job creation being up, the GDP being up, the deficit going down, etc. without having to say "but it's not good enough". If they don't preface and disclaim with that statement, they are "out of touch". But each time they buffer good news, people hear the "but" and not the good.

C) Rachel Maddow has done a rundown of the accomplishments at least twice before last night. I recall her doing it once a month or every six weeks or so. And that proves my point. Rachel is supportive of the accomplishments and she does a kick-ass job of presenting them. But even she doesn't "repeat" it often enough. That is not anything the administration can control, is it? Why don't WE tell the people we watch to do a better job?

We are so willing to bitch and moan about the administration but we forget that the media consistently drops the ball. And what do we do about that? Nada. We boycott them when they hire asshats. But we don't remind them that the administration's message needs to be discussed at least once a day.

S#*! Sarah Palin Says (Pants On Fire Edition)

In the aftermath of Christine O'Donnell's black magic coming out party, she has canceled a scheduled appearance on Face The Nation tomorrow morning. You'd think that a rising star like O'Donnell would take advantage of the national exposure and show her prowess in front of the camera, speak the courage of her convictions in her stance on the issues and garner even more support and donations for her campaign.  But, no. Delaware needs her, she says.  Or maybe she's heeding the advice of a certain someone who suggested she go on Fox News to let viewers know what she stands for.

So leave it to the Mama Grizzly herself to defend her Eve Harrington with a Tweet attack against CQ Politics.



The nerve of CQ Politics to railroad Christine O'Donnell like that. I mean, who could have advised her to go on Fox News? Oh... right. It was SARAH PALIN.



Granted, she didn't say "only" Fox News, but she didn't mention that she should go on other networks or even "lamestream media" in general.  Easier than shooting moose in a barrel.

ADDING... O'Donnell has also canceled an interview on Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace.

[Campaign spokeswoman Diana] Banister said she was unaware of the previous commitments when she booked O'Donnell for the shows. She said she canceled with Fox News late Friday and with CBS early Saturday.

"We felt really bad," she said, adding the campaign apologized profusely for canceling at the last minute. Banister said O'Donnell would be pleased to appear on any Sunday news shows in the future.

Well played, Christine. Obviously, if Delaware needs you, you can't be available for Fox after canceling with Bob Scheiffer.  I'm eagerly awaiting her first Sunday appearance.  Any takers on when that might be?

Media Whore

Like mother, like daughter.

..."The final straw was him flying to Hollywood for what he told me was to see some hunting show but come to find out it was that music video mocking my family," [Bristol Palin] says [of Levi Johnston]. "He's just obsessed with the limelight and I got played."

That was then... this is now.

We can report to you exclusively that Sarah Palin's 19-year-old daughter Bristol Palin has been cast on the 11th season of ["Dancing With The Stars,"] set to premiere Sept. 20.

Doesn't the "Stars" part of the show title constitute contestants being "stars" in the first place?

The Palinization of Politics

We've all gotten used to Sarah Palin accusing the media of playing "gotcha journalism" while simultaneously using the press to her advantage until there's some pesky reporter asking questions for which she hasn't written the answer on her hand. Now it looks like others are catching on, but they're not getting away with it.

Former eBay President and CEO and current California Gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman took it to another level when she called a press conference for the publicity but refused to answer questions and actually threw out the press once it became inconvenient.



(H/T Jonathan Turley)

Qualifications

guest posted by Armadillo Joe

George Stephanopoulos' Round Table this morning had five guests. One of those guests is a Nobel Prize winner and the only voice on the panel from the left. The other four range all the way from...

...a semi-accomplished journalist who, prior to butting heads with Bush43, was most notable for his eyebrows to...

...the pedigreed scion of a wealthy and powerful Louisiana political clan with an unremarkable career as a journalist and no other discernable accomplishments unrelated to her family connections to...

...a striving, middlebrow quasi-intellectual -- slightly more journalistically accomplished than the snotty patrician from Antebellum Dixie -- and an unrepentant apologist for the excesses of his economic superiors whose only redeeming quality appears to be that his love for the game of baseball drives a dislike for the New York Yankees but whose most meaningful public act to date is switching from a bow-tie to a straight tie (presumably to put cravattial distance between him and an unlettered little snot named Tucker) to...

...the poster-child for the abject failure of our nation's compensation system for the modern CEO class -- a woman who once steered a formerly venerable brand almost into the ground but was nevertheless rewarded with a golden parachute that would make other over-compensated fellow CEO-bloodsuckers blush with shame (before saying yes anyway) -- but was also somehow still considered a weighty enough person on economic issues to not only advise on a (failed) presidential campaign but also to successfully parlay what should have been yet another career-ending black mark on the resume into an opinion-making spot on a Sunday morning news magazine to spout self-serving GOP-HQ-issued platitudes like they're immutable axioms of the fundamental structure of the universe.

These are the people that the "reasonable" members of The Washington Village, our precious Versailles on the Hudson, deem fit to sit in judgement on the first week of an Obama presidency.

Egads, I hate this country's ruling class.

"at the desk, in the chair"

guest-posted by Armadillo Joe

Howdy, Blog-O-Maniacs! Armadillo Joe here again with a website recommendation you should add to your regular surfing, at least weekly if not more frequently. Its called BAGnewsNotes and I first saw it on the sidebar over at Digby’s Hullabaloo (which you should also read daily).

The proprietor is named Michael Shaw. He’s a clinical psychologist who uses his background and training to analyze news photographs. I always learn something when I click there or see something in a new and enlightening way. In our image-drenched culture, we need more people like Michael and his contributors to deconstruct the barrage of images we are often force-fed on daily basis by our pervasive media culture, to unpack all the implications embedded in a photograph by the taker of the picture and the publisher of it when each inject any particular image into our mass media, whenever they simply go about doing their jobs. Photographs seem spontaneous, but the process of taking, culling, selecting and presenting them for consumption can often hide a deeper agenda. Being savvy about them makes us better consumers of media output.

As he puts it on his info page:

"The BAG" offers a daily semiotic analysis of news and political images from a political, cultural or psychological point of view, and is also a platform for original social photography and photojournalism.

Its all heady and informative stuff. I think what he does is pretty brilliant generally, but the analysis excerpted below moved me in a way I can’t fully explain. Though I can't really quantify it, I give credit here mostly because it did move me to create a blog post about the process itself, rather than the subject. So here it is:

I should note that, within days, this photo is going to look completely mundane. For the moment, though, it's profound to the eye as the first White House photo of Obama officially at the desk, in the chair.

Unfortunately, it will probably take me a few viewings to shake off the echo of "W" (who actually rarely sat at that desk -- except for photo ops, which typically revealed a surface as uncluttered as we see here). For the moment, I still see him sitting in that striped chair, far right, with that adolescent grin on his face and a couple of boom mikes over his head, yukking it up with whomever of the steady stream of dignitaries happened to be parked beside him.

One other note about the picture and the handiwork of new WH photographer Pete Souza, by the way. Whereas Bush and Rove were obsessed with framing "W" with "the other George," notice how Souza's angle insures that Obama -- in his first photo from the Oval Office -- is introduced, in the sweep of the scene, by Lincoln.

Again, I can't explain it, but something in all of that deeply moves me. Maybe its the feeling that the grownups are once again in charge and that their being in-charge connects in the most powerful office in the world (both figuratively and literally) to a long line of great Americans and somewhere in those previous generations, in the painted gaze of men long dead who faced down graver threats than those we face today and triumphed, I can find some reason to not completely give in to all of my apocalyptic nightmares of boot-stomping American corporate fascism, "The Road"-style environmental degradation and a Road Warrior post-petroleum future that now all seem to have been part of a horrific eight-year fever-dream, a fever that broke this past Tuesday around 12 noon Eastern.

What is that sensation? That urge...? That feeling...? Its so new and yet old, somehow. Familiar but still fresh and exciting. What is it?

Oh yeah!

It's spelled H-O-P-E.

Sirota: A Trade Transition

David Sirota's latest article about Hillary Clinton and her NAFTA position... or positions.

When it came to sex, Bill Clinton made us debate the definition of "is." Now, when it comes to economics, Hillary Clinton wants to debate the definition of "long," claiming this week in Ohio that "I've long been a critic of the shortcomings of NAFTA."

True, Clinton has recently criticized NAFTA — the 1993 trade policy whose lack of labor and environmental protections encourages companies to move American jobs overseas. But cheap campaign rhetoric over a few months does not make one a longtime critic — especially considering the record.

...in this, the age of stenographic journalism... Clinton simply figures that if she says she has "long been a critic" of NAFTA, then the assertion will be transcribed as truth.

That said, her U-turn is about more than dishonesty — it is about the public will.

Read the whole article here.

Lewis Black - Conservative Media Fights Back

One of my favorite comedians, Lewis Black gives us a quick look at the response to the "liberal bias" in the media. Yeah, I know you're laughing.

Jeff Cohen's New Book

There's a great post on TruthDig.org along with an mp3 interview with Jeff Cohen on his new book, "Cable News Confidential: My Misadventures in Corporate Media".

Cohen was the communications director for the 2004 Kucinich campaign, founder of Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting. His life in media includes being a "pundit" for CNN, FOX and producer with MSNBC.

Here's are exerpts from his book:

"What I found inside cable news was a drunken exuberance for sex, crime and celebrity stories, matched by a grim timidity and fear of offending the powers-that-be—especially if the powers-that-be are conservatives. The biggest fear is of doing anything that could get you, or your network, accused of being liberal."

*****************

"As I sat at my MSNBC desk watching Bush or a top associate carry on, I knew painfully well that my network would not be following the administration event with a critical view, no matter how dubious or manipulative were the official claims. To do so—to practice actual journalism—might prompt the dreaded charge of 'liberal bias.' "

*****************

"When Phil Donahue toughly interviewed big-name guests, MSNBC execs were petrified that the VIPs would be offended and not make return engagements. They’d complain that Phil was “badgering” the guests. “Access is everything in Washington,” Phil later told a reporter. “If you’re the executive producer at one of the big news shows and you piss off Karl Rove, you’re not going to get Condi or Rummy or any of those guests who would legitimize your show as a serious, important program.”