I keep watching these conservative folk, totally joyless about the return of Euna Lee and Laura Ling, totally joyless in the demonstration of diplomacy, and I had an aha moment. Their egos are too large to appreciate such things as diplomacy. They can't share in the joy because they don't see Win Wins. They only see Win. If the U.S. isn't dominating whichever country we're dealing with, they think of it as weak, appeasing or encouraging the bad guy.
Hillary Clinton was a bigger person, egoless, in this instance. North Korean leaders called her a school girl, yet she was able to defer to her husband to achieve a bigger goal. Republicans continue to view the U.S. as the big kid on the block who tells everyone else what to do. But that's not the world we live in anymore and they haven't figured that out yet.
NYT: The resolution may be difficult, but it’s essential. Americans must resolve to be smarter going forward than we have been for the past several years.
Look around you. We have behaved in ways that were incredibly, astonishingly and embarrassingly stupid for much too long. We’ve wrecked the economy and mortgaged the future of generations yet unborn. We don’t even know if we’ll have an automobile industry in the coming years. It’s time to stop the self-destruction.
The slogan? “Invest in the U.S.” By that I mean we should stop squandering the nation’s wealth on unnecessary warfare overseas and mindless consumption here at home and start making sensible investments in the well-being of the American people and the long-term health of the economy.
The mind-boggling stupidity that we’ve indulged in was hammered home by a comment almost casually delivered by, of all people, Bernie Madoff, the mild-mannered creator of what appears to have been a nuclear-powered Ponzi scheme. Madoff summed up his activities with devastating simplicity. He is said to have told the F.B.I. that he “paid investors with money that wasn’t there.”
The beef:
Somehow, over the past few decades, that has become the American way: to pay for things — from wars to Wall Street bonuses to flat-screen TVs to video games — with money that wasn’t there.
Something for nothing became the order of the day. You want to invade Iraq? Convince yourself that oil revenues out of Baghdad will pay for it. (Meanwhile, carve out another deficit channel in the federal budget.) You want to pump up profits in the financial sector? End the oversight and let the lunatics in the asylum run wild.
Voters said no to incompetence and divisiveness and elbowed their way past the blight of racism that has been such a barrier to progress for so long. Barack Obama won the state of North Carolina, for crying out loud.
The nation deserves to take a bow. This is not the same place it used to be.
Election night brought a cascade of memories to Taylor Rogers, who is 82 and still lives in Memphis, where he grew up. He remembered a big crowd that jammed a Masonic temple in Memphis on an April night 40 years ago.
“It was filled with people from wall to wall,” he said. “And it was storming and raining outside.”
The men and women, nearly all of them black, were crushed against one another as they listened, almost as one, to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. give his final speech.
Mr. Rogers was one of the sanitation men whose strike drew Dr. King to Memphis. In the aftermath of the Obama victory on Tuesday night, he recited from memory the climactic phrases from the speech, the part where Dr. King said that God had allowed him to go up to the mountain and that he had looked over and seen the promised land.
“I remember it so well,” said Mr. Rogers. “Dr. King told us: ‘I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight that we, as a people, will get to the promised land.’
Sorry Palin, but America needs some fixin'. We love her but she needs some fixin'. America's education system will get the tender loving care it needs under an Obama administration. It's a massive undertaking, but at least Obama will get us pointed in the right direction.
“The United States is failing to develop the math skills of both girls and boys, especially among those who could excel at the highest levels, a new study asserts, and girls who do succeed in the field are almost all immigrants or the daughters of immigrants from countries where mathematics is more highly valued.”
The idea that the U.S. won’t even properly develop the skills of young people who could perform at the highest intellectual levels is breathtaking — breathtakingly stupid, that is.
The authors of the study, published in Notices of the American Mathematical Society, concluded that American culture does not value talent in math very highly. I suppose we’re busy with other things, like text-messaging while jay-walking. The math thing is seen as something for Asians and nerds.
Meanwhile, the country is going down the tubes. Felix Rohatyn, who helped lead New York City out of the dark days of the 1970s fiscal crisis, had an article in a recent issue of The New York Review of Books (with co-author Everett Ehrlich) lamenting the sad state of the U.S. infrastructure. Most Americans are oblivious on this issue. We’re like a family that won’t even think about fixing a sagging, leaky roof until it collapses on our heads.
New Orleans was nearly wiped from the map in the Hurricane Katrina nightmare, and 13 people were killed when a bridge in Minneapolis broke apart during rush hour, hurling helpless motorists 60 feet into the Mississippi River. Neither of those disasters was enough of a warning for us to think seriously about infrastructure maintenance, repair and construction.
Could these types of disasters happen again? They’re going to happen again. Mr. Rohatyn reminds us that nearly 30 percent of the nation’s bridges are “structurally deficient or functionally obsolete.”
We haven’t even got sense enough to keep an eye on the water we drink. Citing a report from the American Society of Civil Engineers, Mr. Rohatyn and Mr. Ehrlich write: “Current funding for safe drinking water, amounts to ‘less than 10 percent of the total national requirement.’ ”
A country that refuses to properly educate its young people or to maintain its physical plant is one that has clearly lost its way. Add in the myriad problems associated with unnecessary warfare and a clueless central government that wastes taxpayer dollars by the trillions, and you’ve got a society in danger of becoming completely unhinged. .... This is about more than the election of a president in a few weeks. The American people have to decide what kind of country they want.
Do they want one in which the top 1 percent hauled in more than 21 percent of all personal income in 2005? Do they want a country in which, as my former colleague at The Times, David Cay Johnston, has noted: the tax system “now levies the poor, the middle class and even the upper middle class to subsidize the rich”?
Do they want a country in which their democratic freedoms are eroded by a deliberate exploitation of their fear of terrorism, and their earning power is diminished by a crippling dependence on foreign oil?
These are exactly the kinds of issues that could be thoroughly explored, argued about, even obsessed over in a presidential campaign. Americans could drag their eyeballs away from their flat-screen TVs and give serious thoughts to important matters if they wanted to. Instead, we get silliness.
I just received my ballot by mail and I can't wait to fill out that rectangle. I'm kind of nervous that I'll fill in the McCain box by accident just like that poor guy who introduced Joe Biden as John McCain. Whatever you do, vote like you mean it and if you have questions about where or how, send me an email and I'll give you a step by step. Voteforchange.com is a good place to start. Bob Herbert has some good advice:
For the nitwits who vote for the man or woman they’d most like to have over for dinner, or hang out at a barbecue with, I suggest you take a look at how well your 401(k) is doing, or how easy it will be to meet the mortgage this month, or whether the college fund you’ve been trying to build for your kids is as robust as you’d like it to be.
Voters in the George W. Bush era gave the Republican Party nearly complete control of the federal government. Now the financial markets are in turmoil, top government and corporate leaders are on the verge of panic and scholars are dusting off treatises that analyzed the causes of the Great Depression.
Mr. Bush was never viewed as a policy or intellectual heavyweight. But he seemed like a nicer guy to a lot of voters than Al Gore.
It’s not just the economy. While the United States has been fighting a useless and irresponsible war in Iraq, Afghanistan — the home base of the terrorists who struck us on 9/11 — has been allowed to fall into a state of chaos. Osama bin Laden is still at large. New Orleans is still on its knees. And so on.
Just sit there and imagine her looking homely. Does anyone think that Palin would be getting away with a lack of intellect? The answer is clearly no. She wouldn't be getting away with anything. She knows she is beautiful (she is a former beauty queen participant) and she knows how to use it to compensate for what she lacks. Her visual appeal is as shallow as McCain's judgement.
Sarah Palin is the perfect exclamation point to the Bush years. We’ve lived through nearly two terms of an administration that believed it could create its own reality:
“Deficits don’t matter.” “Brownie, you’re doing a heckuva job.” “Those weapons of mass destruction must be somewhere.”
Now comes Ms. Palin, a smiling, bubbly vice-presidential candidate who travels in an alternate language universe. For Ms. Palin, such things as context, syntax and the proximity of answers to questions have no meaning.
In her closing remarks at the vice-presidential debate Thursday night, Ms. Palin referred earnestly, if loosely, to a quote from Ronald Reagan. He had warned that if Americans weren’t vigilant in protecting their freedom, they would find themselves spending their “sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was like in America when men were free.”
What Ms. Palin didn’t say was that the menace to freedom that Reagan was talking about was Medicare. As the historian Robert Dallek has pointed out, Reagan “saw Medicare as the advance wave of socialism, which would ‘invade every area of freedom in this country.’ ”
Does Ms. Palin agree with that Looney Tunes notion? Or was this just another case of the aw-shucks, darn-right, I’m-just-a-hockey-mom governor of Alaska mouthing something completely devoid of meaning?
Here’s Ms. Palin during the debate: “Say it ain’t so, Joe! There you go pointing backwards again ... Now, doggone it, let’s look ahead and tell Americans what we have to plan to do for them in the future. You mentioned education, and I’m glad you did. I know education you are passionate about with your wife being a teacher for 30 years, and God bless her. Her reward is in heaven, right?” .... Where is the evidence that Governor Palin even understands these complex and enormously challenging problems? During the debate she twice referred to General McKiernan as “McClellan.” Neither Ms. Ifill nor Senator Biden corrected her.
But after Senator Biden suggested that John McCain’s answer to the nation’s energy problems was to “drill, drill, drill,” Ms. Palin promptly pointed out, as if scoring a point, that “the chant is ‘Drill, baby, drill!’ ”
How’s that for perspective? The credit markets are frozen. Our top general in Afghanistan is dialing 911. Americans are losing jobs by the scores of thousands. And Sarah Palin is making sure we know that the chant is “drill, baby, drill!” not “drill, drill, drill.”
Why should we be trusting someone who didn't have the foresight to predict what might've happened? Why should we trust someone who is screaming: I need it now! I have a gut feeling that this is a con job. It may be an emergency, something may need to be done quickly, but in two days, a week. What's the harm in hashing it out over 2 weeks? Is the market going to explode?
NYT: Does anyone think it’s just a little weird to be stampeded into a $700 billion solution to the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression by the very people who brought us the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression?
How about a second opinion?
Everything needs much closer scrutiny in these troubled times because no one even knows who is in charge, much less what is going on. Have you ever seen a president who was more irrelevant than George W. Bush is right now?
The treasury secretary, Henry Paulson — heralded as King Henry on the cover of Newsweek — has been handed the reins of government, and he’s galloping through the taxpayers’ money like a hard-charging driver in a runaway chariot race.
“We need this legislation in a week,” he said on Sunday, referring to the authorization from Congress to implement his hastily assembled plan to bail out the wildly profligate U.S. financial industry. The plan stands at $700 billion as proposed, but could go to a trillion dollars or more.
Mr. Paulson spoke on the Sunday morning talk shows about “bad lending practices” and “irresponsible borrowing” and “irresponsible lending” and “illiquid assets.”
The sky was falling, he seemed to be saying, and if the taxpayers didn’t pony up $700 billion in the next few days, all would be lost. No time to look at the fine print. Hurry, hurry, said the treasury secretary.
His eyes, as he hopped from one network camera to another, said, as salesmen have been saying since the dawn of time: “Trust me.” More.
Ignorance must really be bliss. How else, over so many years, could the G.O.P. get away with ridiculing all things liberal?
Troglodytes on the right are no respecters of reality. They say the most absurd things and hardly anyone calls them on it. Evolution? Don’t you believe it. Global warming? A figment of the liberal imagination.
Liberals have been so cowed by the pummeling they’ve taken from the right that they’ve tried to shed their own identity, calling themselves everything but liberal and hoping to pass conservative muster by presenting themselves as hyper-religious and lifelong lovers of rifles, handguns, whatever.
So there was Hillary Clinton, of all people, sponsoring legislation to ban flag-burning; and Barack Obama, who once opposed the death penalty, morphing into someone who not only supports it, but supports it in cases that don’t even involve a homicide.
Anyway, the Republicans were back at it last week at their convention. Mitt Romney wasn’t content to insist that he personally knows that “liberals don’t have a clue.” He complained loudly that the federal government right now is too liberal.
“We need change, all right,” he said. “Change from a liberal Washington to a conservative Washington.”
Why liberals don’t stand up to this garbage, I don’t know. Without the extraordinary contribution of liberals — from the mightiest presidents to the most unheralded protesters and organizers — the United States would be a much, much worse place than it is today.
There would be absolutely no chance that a Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton or Sarah Palin could make a credible run for the highest offices in the land. Conservatives would never have allowed it. More
Bob Herbert at the NYT says let's forget about Sarah Palin. We've got bigger fish to fry, or bigger moose to make into moose burgers. Palin will be on the charm offensive tomorrow night and she'll wow em even if they're not wowed. Palin is designed to be like the bludger in Quidditch.
NYT: But the Democrats should not push this stuff too far. Ms. Palin is a lot more appealing personally than the often testy guy at the top of her ticket. And the inescapable reality is that there are millions of voters who identify with her, and may be quick to resent attacks that they perceive as bullying or overkill.
Here’s the deal: Palin is the latest G.O.P. distraction. She’s meant to shift attention away from the real issue of this campaign — the awful state of the nation after eight years of Republican rule. The Republicans are brilliant at distractions. Willie Horton was a distraction. The chatter about gays, guns and God has been a long-running distraction. And we all remember the Swift-boat campaign.
If you want a real issue, forget all of the above and revisit Monday’s front page of The New York Times. Hundreds of families are being forced out of their homes each month in Louisville, Ky., because of mortgage foreclosures. With record numbers of poor and homeless students, the public schools are struggling.
Herbert talks about his most excellent story about how the republicans are appealing to the "white working class," also known as the voters who wouldn't vote for a black man. He also wrote about Obama's unforgivable offenses. Shame on Obama for being presidential.
We're coming to the end of the George W. Bush era. We have an opportunity and we should be focusing on issues, Herbert says.
You know, stuff like inspiring people, giving awesome speeches, meeting with foreign leaders, conducting himself in a presidential way -- the nerve of that man! Bob Herbert says it best:
Let’s see if I’ve got this straight. Barack Obama is a United States senator, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and his party’s candidate for president of the United States — and yet it was somehow presumptuous of him to meet with foreign leaders last week during his trip to the Middle East and Europe.
I’ll say this about Senator Obama. He sure raises people’s hackles. I’ve never seen anyone so roundly criticized for such grievous offenses as giving excellent speeches and urging people of different backgrounds to take a chance on working together. How dare he? And 200,000 people turned out to hear him in Berlin. Unforgivable.
The man has been taken to task for promoting hope, threatened with mutilation by Jesse Jackson for suggesting that a lot of black fathers could do better by their kids and had his patriotism called into question because he wants to wind down a war that most Americans would dearly love to be rid of.
John McCain can barely stop himself from sputtering at the mere mention of Senator Obama’s name. He actually ran an ad blaming Mr. Obama for high gasoline prices. Even Republicans had a good laugh at that one.
And yet Mr. Obama continues to treat Senator McCain respectfully. As far as personal character is concerned, Mr. Obama has scored very well, indeed. read the rest cause it's good.
I have a theory about the Obama hate syndrome -- I'll post on that some other time. Herbert also says that Obama's economic offense, key to winning, is coming. If the past two days are any indication, I'd say Obama will lay out the details in the coming days:
The word is that an economic offensive may finally be coming from the Obama campaign.
Anna Burger, the secretary-treasurer of the Service Employees International Union, was part of a wide-ranging group of advisers on economic issues who met with Mr. Obama in Washington on Monday. “He has very serious policies, not sound bites, for addressing the long-term and short-term issues that are having such a dramatic effect on people who are working and trying to make ends meet,” she said.
Translating those ideas into a compelling economic narrative for his campaign — something Mr. Obama has not yet done — is the key to defeating John McCain.
NYT: “What’s he doing?” is the most common question heard recently from Obama supporters.
For one thing, he’s taking his base for granted, apparently believing that such stalwart supporters as blacks, progressives and pumped-up younger voters will be with him no matter what. A taste of the backlash this can produce erupted on the candidate’s own Web site.
Thousands of Obama supporters flooded the site with protests over his decision to support an electronic surveillance bill that gives retroactive immunity to telecommunications companies that participated in the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping program. The senator had previously promised to filibuster the bill if it contained the immunity clause.
If I were advising him, I would tell him to confront the matter head-on, meeting as often as possible with skeptical, and even hostile, working people in Pennsylvania and elsewhere. Let the questions rip, and answer them honestly.
No one has an obligation to vote for Mr. Obama, and it’s certainly not racist to vote against him. But the senator can make it clear that it is wrong to dismiss a candidacy out of hand solely because of the race or ethnicity or gender of the candidate.
that's what "bittergate" (it now has a cute name) is all about. obama was trying to explain why fewer white working class voters were supporting him. pennsylvania apparently has a large number of people (we will see) who wouldn't vote for a black person. pennsylvania's governor and clinton backer ed rendell has said as much.
obama's words were misinterpreted because obama didn't say, well, they won't vote for me because i'm black. i'm sure that would've rocked the media world. obama has a deeper understanding as to why working class voters feel the way they do and he tried to explain. obama doesn't blanket anything in racism. that's not his message. he wants to win the heart and minds of even the racists because that's the kind of person he is.
hillary, the cunning politician that she is, pounced on elitism as a way to have more sway with the voters who wouldn't vote for a black person. it's all part of her distort, distract and exploit politics. mccain piled on. he's been saying how much strength working class voters give him and of course, he's using the issue to solicit donations. ick.
nyt: There is no mystery here. Except for people who have been hiding in caves or living in denial, it’s pretty widely understood that a substantial number of those voters — in Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia and elsewhere — will not vote for a black candidate for president.
Pennsylvanians themselves will tell you that racial attitudes in some parts of the state are, to be kind, less than enlightened. Gov. Ed Rendell, Hillary Clinton’s most powerful advocate in the state, put it bluntly last February: “I think there are some whites who are probably not ready to vote for an African-American candidate.”
This toxic issue is at the core of the Clinton camp’s relentless effort to persuade superdelegates that Senator Obama “can’t win” the White House. It’s the only weapon left in the Clintons’ depleted armory.
obama explains it well to the philadelphia inquirer:
