more for us

More evidence of Republican zealotry/insanity, as if more were needed: Governor Sam Brownback of Kansas wants to eliminate the state arts commission by spinning it off into a private entity. This would make Kansas the only state in the Union without a state entity to promote the arts. Even [fill in the state you like least] has a state arts commission. The state's annual budget for the arts: $574,000. The Kansas Arts Commission, which is not taking the governor's plan lying down, reports that the state would consequently lose

•$778,300 in direct funding from the National Endowment for the Arts

•$437,767 in indirect grants and services from Mid-America Arts Alliance, the Kansas Arts Commission's regional partner[.]

My math says that would be a net loss to the state of $642,067. Add the $200,000 that the state expects the spinoff to cost, and the total rises to $842,067. That's before taking into account lost jobs, lost taxes on those jobs, and so on, not to mention the impoverishment of Kansan society as creative professionals flee the state. I could, if I were inclined, supply copious, convincing data demonstrating the revenue boost that the arts supply to cities and states across the country, but that's not really the point today.

I am more interested in seeing this as an example of ideological opportunism by the Republicans. We don't need any more data to know that Brownback's costly plan forms no part of a genuine budget-cutting effort. He is simply using the state's economic downturn to carry on the Republican culture wars. (Let me also take this opportunity to remind readers that, as a U.S. Senator, Brownback supported a far-right Israeli plan to annex the West Bank and Gaza deport all Palestinians therefrom.)

In the past, I might have written letters to whomever in Kansas in defense of the arts commission. In college, I organized a postcard-writing campaign to support the National Endowment of the Arts. We generated over a thousand postcards to students' individual members of Congress, and this was during a summer term. And now? 63% of the Kansas electorate voted for Brownback last year. After his fourteen years in the U.S. Senate, they surely knew what they were getting. Making matters worse, the comments from local readers at the Topeka Capital-Journal's website mostly support Brownback's plan and sneer at the arts.

I feel for the good people of Kansas who may now lose the Topeka Symphony Orchestra, founded in 1946, and other cultural riches. But my sympathy is fairly limited, for this is exactly what the people of Kansas chose in their elections. This is democracy at work. If the people of Kansas want to be governed by anti-arts, anti-math maniacs, that is their right. The one note of solace that we can take from this sorry episode: there may be more arts funding for the rest of us, who support the arts not just in the comfort of our seats at the symphony but at the ballot box as well.

I'll have the Beef Wellington, courtesy of the GOP

With the passage of H.R. 3590, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, by the House of Representatives on Sunday, many commentators have been quick to say that Senator Jim DeMint (R-SC) was wrong last July when he referred to health care reform as President Obama's Waterloo:

'If we're able to stop Obama on this, it will be his Waterloo. It will break him and we will show that we can, along with the American people, begin to push those freedom solutions that work in every area of our society.' (audio link)

DeMint may be demented, but he was right about one thing: health care reform is indeed Obama's Waterloo. DeMint was just wrong about which side had the Napoleon complex.

In warfare, there is typically a winning side and a losing side. Pacifists may prefer to think that in war everyone loses, yet ABBA grasped the essential zero-sum nature of war in their 1974 hit single 'Waterloo': 'Waterloo—I was defeated, you won the war.'



The British military leader credited with the victory at Waterloo was Field Marshall Arthur Wellesley, First Duke of Wellington. So epic was the victory that a dish was named for him: Beef Wellington.

As at Waterloo, someone had to win the epic battle to determine whether Americans deserve, like their counterparts in the other industrialized democracies, to receive medical treatment when they are ill. Waterloo was not just an epic defeat; it was also an epic victory. And like Wellington, Obama's name has already entered everyday speech by being attached to his unprecedented achievement in law: Obamacare.

Yet the Republicans in Congress still don't get it. Today they continued to try to impede passage of the so-called Senate reconciliation bill, intended by the Democrats to fix the shortcomings in H.R. 3590. Here, too, they would be well-advised to learn from the lyrics of Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus:

'My my, I tried to hold you back but you were stronger.
Oh yeah, and now it seems my only chance is giving up the fight.
And how could I ever refuse?
I feel like I win when I lose.'

Let's hope the Republicans keep on feeling like winners. Their delusional behavior only drives them deeper into defeat at the hands of President Obama, our modern-day Duke of Wellington.



Props also to Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, our Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher.

'You lie'? Bye-bye!

As Republican scare tactics against health insurance reform have reached new extremes of disgrace, I have taken comfort in the hope that such outrageous behavior would only sully the fearmongers and make President Obama shine all the more by comparison. Nothing they have done so far, from the lies about 'death panels' to the parade of forged foreign birth certificates, has surprised me. Tonight, during Obama's speech to a joint session of Congress, I was finally surprised. In the midst of refuting a lie that his reform would insure undocumented aliens, Obama was interrupted by Rep. Joe Wilson, Republican of South Carolina, falsely shouting 'You lie!' See the picture above for a mid-outburst shot of Wilson's angry snarl. For proof of Obama's statement, see the bill, H.R. 3200. Here is the relevant section in its entirety:

SEC. 246. NO FEDERAL PAYMENT FOR UNDOCUMENTED ALIENS.

Nothing in this subtitle shall allow Federal payments for affordability credits on behalf of individuals who are not lawfully present in the United States.

Someone definitely lied during the speech, but it was not President Obama.

Besides Wilson's lie about lying, what kind of savage shouts at a president speaking before Congress? The incident reminds me of the despicable conduct of another South Carolinian, Senator Preston Brooks. On May 22, 1856 on the floor of the U.S. Senate, Brooks beat Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts nearly to death, trapping him under his Senate desk and bashing his head with a cane. Sumner was unable to return to the Senate for three years. Brooks's constituents back home saluted his crime by sending him new canes to replace the one he had broken on Sumner's head.

How will South Carolinians respond to Wilson's disgrace? Will they applaud the shame brought on their state, or will they reply to Wilson's 'You lie!' with a resounding 'Bye-bye!' come the next election? I say, let's help them restore their state's good name.

Rob Miller is a Democrat and an Iraq war veteran running against Wilson for the U.S. House seat in the Second Congressional District. I just contributed money to Miller's campaign, and I urge you to do the same by clicking this link. Miller's campaign website provides more information on his positions and his career. NPR fans may want to listen to him in the January 7, 2005 episode of This American Life.

Whether you are from South Carolina or, like me, not, we all have a stake in restoring civility and respect to public dialogue. Please join me in ejecting a caveman from the halls of Congress and replacing him with a distinguished veteran of the U.S. Marines who served in Iraq and Liberia.

works every time

How long before Congressional Republicans catch on to President Obama's favourite tactic? My guess is never. Today's New York Times headline says it all: 'Democrats Seem Set to Go It Alone on a Health Bill', the implication being that they had no choice. Here's how Obama's brand of rope-a-dope works:

-First, he goes out of his way to appear bipartisan.

-In response, the Republicans, being Republicans, don't give an inch and in fact trip over themselves sprinting further rightward.

-Finally, Obama gives up on working with the other side and does what he has to do: he goes it alone, like the headline says.

Now that there are reports of self-appointed militiamen carrying assault weapons to the president's public events, can you blame him?

I know that many on the left are concerned that the Democrats will be sold out by their conservative wing, the so-called 'Blue Dogs'. Given the public stage for a couple of weeks, they, too, have shot their load and come up empty. Witness the other heavy-saturation news angle of the week, from yesterday's Times:

Headline: 'Alternate Plan as Health Option Muddies Debate'

First paragraph: 'WASHINGTON — The White House has indicated that it could accept a nonprofit health care cooperative as an alternative to a new government insurance plan, originally favored by President Obama. But the co-op idea is so ill defined that no one knows exactly what it would look like or how effectively it would compete with commercial insurers.'

Indeed.

Even if the Blue Dogs persist in opposing the 'public option', i.e. a proposed system of government-provided health insurance to those who want it, the numbers are irrefutable: the Democrats have sixty seats in the Senate and, most importantly, although the five or six Blue Dogs in the Senate may vote against the legislation, they would not dare vote against cloture. How could they? Congressional Democrats will never be as disciplined or uni-minded as their Republican counterparts, but not a one of them would dare support a Republican filibuster. For those Blue Dogs who fear that a vote in favour of the public option would hurt them in their home states, the chance to vote No is exactly what they need to prove their conservative bona fides to both their supporters back home and the insurance-company overlords who bankroll their re-election campaigns.

President Obama is the Iceman. No one in American government has more sangfroid. He lets a few weeks go by, acts like he's willing to compromise, allows people to think he's being indecisive; then when it's all over, his enemies have slain themselves, he gets to do what he wants legislatively, and he ends up looking like Mr. Nice Guy. That is tactical genius. After Obama's inauguration, people were quick to compare him to FDR. Time may prove that the better comparison is to the great political tactician of the twentieth century, LBJ.

requiem for the Rockefellers

When I was a kid, the Republican Party stood for two things: greed and Cold War hawkishness. That is no longer the case, and the rejection of the financial bailout plan by House Republicans today confirms it.

Ronald Reagan came to power in 1980 by luring religious and racist conservatives into supporting deregulation and tax policies that benefitted the rich. Logically, the Republican coalition never made any sense. Entrepreneurs and people in business depend on ambition, ideas, innovation, science, technology, and so on. They tend to value talent, education, and the willingness to overturn tradition when something new and risky dangles the possibility of greater profits before their greedy eyes. Religious conservatives are the opposite. At their worst, they elevate tradition over innovation, fear over science, and the narrow narcissism of 'small-town values' over education and cosmopolitanism. And let's not forget that they profess a religion full of prohibitions against usury. The party leaders who hatched this coalition of opposites were strategic geniuses, but now the party is over.

Mike Huckabee was the sign of things to come. His presidential campaign of earlier this year was exciting because, had he won the Republican nomination, it would have torn the party apart. Here was a conservative, small-state Republican who appeared ready to follow Jesus's populist gesture of overturning the money-lenders' table. His candidacy represented an emergency to the Bush Republicans and the coalition that kept them in power.

The rich-religious Republican coalition finally ended today. Today's 777-point drop in the Dow Jones Industrial Average set a new record, and Wall Street knows who is to blame: the Republicans in the House of Representatives who rejected the Paulson plan because bailing out 'the Wall Street elite' violates their insane ideology.

The Rockefeller Republicans, what was left of them, were already becoming Obama Republicans. Now I wonder if they will even stay in the Republican Party much longer. People in business know that homophobia, fanaticism, anti-science, and anti-elitism are bad for business. Their tolerance for conservative excess has expired.

That the Republican Party will soon be little more than a regional cabal of conservative anti-elitist fanatics is good for the Democrats but bad for the country. Today, September 29, 2008, we are all in the clutches of the most militantly ignorant political faction that Republican machinations have spawned: men and women of zeal who know nothing of economics but believe in giving the 'elites' their comeuppance. These maniacs will bring the republic and the national economy crashing down in order to teach the rest of us a lesson in responsibility and the magic of the market.

During the past seven years of misrule by Bush and Cheney, I have had frequent recourse to these famous lines from Yeats's poem 'The Second Coming':

'The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.'

Little did I know that the worst was yet to come. Whatever their misgivings about the Paulson bailout plan, Democrats have had to make common cause with Bush and Cheney against an even graver threat: the economic suicide that Bush's former shock troops stand poised to visit on all of us. Now we will all reap what the Republican 'geniuses' have sown.

spunk is not enough

Why have Republicans welcomed John McCain's choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate? We know that he chose her after meeting her only once, in February. We know that she was mayor of a town of only 6500 people before being elected governor of Alaska, population 680,000, in 2006. We also know that her husband was a member of an Alaskan secessionist party until 2002. It is one thing to think that women are dumb enough to support Palin just because she is a woman. But many Republicans genuinely seem to like Palin and to think that somehow the rest of us will, too. What are they thinking?

Today's Republicans don't seem to care about competence, intelligence, or achievement. To them, ideology is the one and only measure of a candidate's worth. Yes, many Republicans share Palin's opposition to abortion under any and all circumstances, her refusal to believe in global warming, and her belief in creationism, but that is true of many in the party these days. Most Democrats support Barack Obama because of his Democratic agenda, but he is also an impressive individual who, by his achievements and special talents, inspires confidence. The Democratic Party generally does not run unqualified, unintelligent people for national office.

Let's look at the tale of the tape. Obama, with no connections and only one parent, graduated from Columbia and Harvard Law, where he was president of the law review. He taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago for twelve years. He mastered the bare-knuckled politics of Chicago and served eight years in the Illinois state legislature. Joe Biden similarly made his mark on the world by his own efforts and at a young age. Elected to the U.S. Senate at the age of twenty-nine, he has distinguished himself on both the Judiciary and Foreign Relations Committees.

John McCain, as the son and grandson of navy admirals, relied on the affirmative action of his connections to get into the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis, where he graduated 894th out of 899. His ignorance and embarassments in economics and international affairs are widely known. Palin has no valuable experience to speak of and professes to know nothing about Iraq or the office of the vice-president. Like McCain, she appears to have been a lackluster, uncommitted student, in her case bouncing around a number of schools without distinction. From Wikipedia:

'Palin attended Hawaii Pacific College — now known as Hawaii Pacific University — in Honolulu for a semester in 1982, majoring in Business Administration. She transferred in 1983 to North Idaho College. In 1987, Palin received a Bachelor of Science degree in communications-journalism from the University of Idaho, where she also minored in political science.'

McCain and Palin are mediocrities in every way, and mediocrities have no business leading the free world. I see voters on television and in the press speaking about how they identify with Candidate X or Y, but this is not a suitable way of choosing elected officials. We don't need the common man or woman in positions of national leadership. What we need is the uncommon man or woman. The president and vice-president should be total freaks: individuals of daunting achievement and visionary intellect. We should be in awe of their talents, not ridiculing their eloquence and intelligence.

From what I can tell, Republicans really seem to think that Americans will support Palin just because she looks like a crazed Tina Fey. One word that has been repeated a lot is 'spunk'. Here is an instance from the Los Angeles Times for September 1, 2008:

'"She's spunky," said Gail LeMay, 58, a retiree. "She really brings life to the campaign." LeMay marveled that McCain looked "to the tundra" to pick his running mate.'

We don't need a president who is spunky and we don't need a president who is funky. We need a president who is smarter than the rest of us because the problems we face will require intelligence, judgment, and skill to solve. Spunk, alas, is not enough.