Not that any homegrown right wing militants would do that. Matt Kennard at Salon:

The lax regulations have also opened the military’s doors to neo-Nazis, white supremacists and gang members — with drastic consequences. Some neo-Nazis have been charged with crimes inside the military, and others have been linked to recruitment efforts for the white right. A recent Department of Homeland Security report, “Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment,” stated: “The willingness of a small percentage of military personnel to join extremist groups during the 1990s because they were disgruntled, disillusioned, or suffering from the psychological effects of war is being replicated today.” Many white supremacists join the Army to secure training for, as they see it, a future domestic race war. Others claim to be shooting Iraqis not to pursue the military’s strategic goals but because killing “hajjis” is their duty as white militants.

Soldiers’ associations with extremist groups, and their racist actions, contravene a host of military statutes instituted in the past three decades. But during the “war on terror,” U.S. armed forces have turned a blind eye on their own regulations. A 2005 Department of Defense report states, “Effectively, the military has a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy pertaining to extremism. If individuals can perform satisfactorily, without making their extremist opinions overt … they are likely to be able to complete their contracts.”

Tim McVeigh, you may recall, was a Gulf War I veteran who was awarded a bronze star before he bombed a federal building in Oklahoma City and killed 168 people, he deadliest terror attack in the United States prior to 9/11. Unless you want to count all the federal government-sanctioned native American massacres of the 19th century.

And yet I just heard a local radio DJ dismiss McVeigh in a discussion of Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan as some kind of one-off event. As if David Atkisson didn’t go shooting at a Unitarian Church or Scott Roeder didn’t kill Dr. George Tiller.

“Not all Muslims are terrorists,” he said, “but all terrorists are Muslims.”

Guess he’s never heard of the Continuity IRA or ETA or Aum Shinrikyo or the Communist Party of the Philippines or Kahane Chai (Israel) or the National Liberation Army (Colombia) or the Real IRA or the Revolutionary Nuclei (Greece) or the Revolutionary Organization 17 November (Greece) or the Shining Path (Peru) or the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, all on the State Department’s list of terrorist organizations and none of the Muslim.

No, better to just remain Ameri-centric and claim that only the terrorists who have attacked U.S. interests are real terrorists, and only if they’re not white Christians. And just how many out of more than a billion and a half Muslims in the world are terrorists anyway?

I can’t remember where I read this — and I hope it wasn’t my network’s Web site — but I read a story about a mother who was watching after her wounded son who was being treated for PTSD by Maj. Hasan. He scared her, she said, because he had evil in his eyes and said he thought all the troops should come home.

And because his name was Nidal Malik Hasan, I suspect. My own dark brown black Irish eyes aren’t too dissimilar to Hasan’s, and I think the troops should all come home too. Am I evil and scary? Well, some would say yes, but I don’t have an Arabic name, so I’m probably safe. Unless you believe, like Glenn Beck and his followers, that liberals who want to see the war end and our troops safely back home are at the very least in league with the terrorists. The Muslim terrorists.

Wonder if Scott Roeder thought about shouting “God is great” as he murdered George Tiller?

On Friday, a day after the Fort Hood shooting, CNN’s Anderson Cooper ran an in depth report on an American Muslim in New York who encourages attacks on Americans. Good timing there, CNN. Nothing like a little fearmongering in the middle of a powder keg.

Muslims in this country already feel marginalized and isolated from the rest of the population. They already fear harassment, intimidation and even violence because of the incredible xenophobia and racism that this country allows to run unchecked. Why else would Islamic organizations here prepare press releases condemning the shooting before they knew the name of the suspect, just in case that name turned out to be Arabic?

Conservative racists condemned CNN today for airing an interview with a soldier who said he heard Hasan shout “Allahu akbar” (”God is great”) before he started shooting and then downplayed it. Of course, that couldn’t have been because the soldier said he thought Hasan said something in Arabic and he thought it might have been Allahu akbar, but he really wasn’t sure.

Last week, the “how did he get promoted and why wasn’t anybody watching him” crap began. There were reports that he had bad performance reviews. But the FBI said Monday that he had good performance reviews.

The FBI also said he hit their radar last year when they intercepted some communications from him while wiretapping someone in Yemen. But they determined he wasn’t a threat — didn’t say anything about attacking anybody or anything like that, so they stopped watching him in December. I should note here that that would have been the Bush administration’s watch, since I’m sure the right wing lunatics will do their best to blame this on the secret Kenyan Muslim we have as president.

Then there was the doctor last week who said no way a psychiatrist would have snapped after spending years listening to fellow soldiers describing horrendous experiences in war. Of course not. No more than journalists who cover disasters and other tragedies are ever affected by what they hear.

And all the while my beloved colleagues are digging up every little thing they can in their misguided attempts to prove Nidal Hasan was a Muslim extremist.

OMG he attended counterterrorism lectures! OMG he went to a mosque where a radical Muslim was once imam! OMG the communications the wiretaps found were with that very imam!

Never mind, of course, that the very investigators who listened to those wiretaps said they saw no evidence he was part of any plot. In fact, all the evidence so far point to Hasan being a lone wolf sort of guy, who did what he did for his own reasons.

Kinda like Tim McVeigh, except Tim McVeigh actually had connections with right wing militants in this country. And David Atkisson was an avid Glenn Beck fan and Scott Roeder hung out with Randall Terry types. Terry, you may recall, commended Roeder for killing the baby killer.

The military is playing this right — they aren’t releasing information about their investigation because they don’t want to inflame an already rabid American right wing. But that hasn’t stopped the speculators from speculating and drawing the worst possible conclusions out of every little thing they hear, be it rumor or fact.

I’m ashamed of my colleagues today. When they should be fact-finding, they’re instead rumor-mongering. When they should be mindful of the incendiary atmosphere, they’re instead pouring gasoline on the flames.

But then, they have yet to admit that we have a right wing problem in this country, and until they do, we’re in for a rocky ride.

I’m not saying the Fort Hood shooter isn’t a terrorist, mind you. I’m saying he’s just as much of a terrorist as Atkisson and Roeder. And McVeigh. Not that anybody to the right of Barack Obama will acknowledge that, and he we all know he won’t either.

Wonder how Joe Lieberman’s hearing on Scary Muslims in the U.S. Military will turn out?

I’ll tell you what’s scary these days. Being Muslim in America.

Fort Hood originally appeared on A World of Progress TeamZine on November 11, 20092009-11-11T05:01:42ZF j, Y.

No related posts.

So then Connecticut Democrats finally had enough of his pro-war idiocy and tapped Ned Lamont, a fairly progressive guy, as their Senate candidate, booting ole Joe to the curb.

But Joe, whose ego must span the entire state, from New York to Rhode Island and probably beyond, couldn’t have that. So he added himself as an independent candidate for Senate, taking with him a bunch of Republicans who knew damn well their candidate, whoever he was, didn’t have a chance in hell of being elected.

Result: Joe returns to the Senate on the votes of Republicans. And boy is he paying them back for the favor. Shit, the guy even endorsed and campaigned for John McCain.

LIEBERMAN: A public option plan is unnecessary. It has been put forward, I’m convinced, by people who really want the government to take over all of health insurance. They’ve got a right to do that; I think that would be wrong.

But worse than that, we have a problem even greater than the health insurance problems, and that is a debt — $12 trillion today, projected to be $21 trillion in 10 years.

WALLACE: So at this point, I take it, you’re a “no” vote in the Senate?

LIEBERMAN: If the public option plan is in there, as a matter of conscience, I will not allow this bill to come to a final vote because I believe debt can break America and send us into a recession that’s worse than the one we’re fighting our way out of today. I don’t want to do that to our children and grandchildren.

So let me see if I have this right. First, we don’t need a public option. By “we,” I presume Joe must mean rich fucks like him, because 46 million Americans who don’t have insurance, most because they can’t afford it, beg to differ.

Second, debt is a bigger problem than Americans dying because they don’t have health care.

And third, Joe’s gonna filibuster the health care bill if it has a public option in it because … because … the conservatives have put us in massive debt?

That just doesn’t make sense.

Back when Joe came to the Senate as a Republican-backed independent, Harry Reid let him keep his Democratic seniority and committee chairmanships because he promised to back Democratic bills

Well, the cows have come home, Harry. And look at Joe now.  I don’t suppose Joe’s ridiculous opposition to a public option has anything at all to do with Connecticut’s No. 1 industry being insurance, now would it? It’s kinda like when Joe Biden, D-Visa, made sure the credit card companies, his state’s top industry, had plenty of time to screw the public before the weak regulations Congress passed took effect.

There’s a fourth thing about his comments on Hardball. He thinks the public option is being pushed by people who want government to take over all insurance. They have a right, he says, but he thinks it’s wrong.

Why’s that Joe Lieberman, I-The Hartford? Making health insurance affordable to all Americans, and not just the rich ones, would hurt your constituency, wouldn’t it? Insurance executives would no longer be the Wall Street fat cats of Connecticut.

Most of the Western world has government-run insurance, and it’s working just fine. Hasn’t bankrupted anybody. But here in America, where capitalism means ever sticking it to the American citizen at every opportunity, conservatives, including Joe Lieberman, run screaming that a public option would be the end of the world. And that’s not anywhere near government-run insurance for all. And by the way, it’s called universal health care. Look it up.

Bankers, insurance execs and credit card company CEOs are what’s worse than terrorism, Virginia Foxx. They’re aiming to destroy this country in the name of padding their own overseas bank accounts while our government tries to appease the conservatives who want to maintain the status quo.

I don’t even care that Joe’s usually been pro-choice in his votes, even with the House health care bill coming through with its Catholic bishop-mandated limitations on abortions. Do you really think Joe will stand up to his principles, if he has any, in that regard? The House’s pro-choice caucus sure as hell didn’t. Expect Joe to go the same way.

Seriously, I’ve had enough of Joe Lieberman running his mouth as if anybody gives a shit or he actually has something constructive to say. He’s a liar. Time for him to shut the fuck up.

Will somebody please tell Joe Lieberman to STFU? originally appeared on A World of Progress TeamZine on November 10, 20092009-11-10T05:01:12ZF j, Y.

Related posts:

1. Right to health care
2. Saturday night massacre
3. John Boehner admits he’s out of touch

Yes, the House passed a health care reform bill. But in order to get the votes to make that happen, the House leadership caved to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and Rep. Bart Stupid, making women — and again I emphasize particularly poor women — collateral damage in the war to make health care affordable.

Stupid’s amendment, approved by the bishops, makes it all but impossible for women to use public option insurance to pay for an abortion. They can, of course, pay for a rider that would include abortion, but it can’t come through any government program, like the public option or the health care exchanges.

Never mind that the public option doesn’t mean government funding. What it means is that the government will provide low cost insurance that people will pay for out of their own pockets. But that’s not good enough for Stupid and the bishops.

So, while women with some means will be able to buy coverage, I don’t see poor women, who would barely be able to afford the public option itself, if at all, having any money at all for that.

Way to go Dems. And what the fuck happened to the 190 members of the pro-choice caucus, who vowed to vote no on a bill that restricted funding for abortions?

Wimps.

I could say that this bill is better than nothing, because it is, but it is far from good enough. With Obama refusing to twist any arms, I’d look for this bill to get worse when and if it ever reaches a conference committee.

And here’s the real beauty of the vote: While 64 “Dems” voted for Bart Stupid’s amendment, 23 of those (and 16 more) voted against the bill as a whole –three more and the measure would have failed, and that’s only because a single Republican — Joe Cao, the guy who beat William Jefferson in Louisiana — vote in favor.

Assholes.

But I’m not really surprised. The denizens of Washington are completely out of touch with Americans. They don’t get it that a majority support abortion rights, support a robust public option. While we have a strong center left population in this country, it’s our government that insists on being center-right. And that’s just wrong.

But here’s the thing. Health care — all of it, including abortion, shouldn’t be a political issue, any more than the civil rights of any of the population. For all the right’s fearmongering that a Democratic health care bill would do things like create death panels and rationing of care, that’s exactly what we have now, and what the right wants to stick with.

Insurance companies, whose mission is to make money and not to pay for health care, already decide who gets the care and who does not. Their rationing is based on their bottom line, not on anything so logical as medical need.

But so far, not enough people understand that, although for the life of me I can’t understand why.

As for abortion, maybe if we focused on making that procedure less necessary, we’d all get what we want. Oh, I forgot. The right doesn’t want to do that either, at least not in any sensible way. An awful lot of them want to eliminate birth control, too — something some of them are starting to say out loud, although they’ve been saying it privately for decades.

And addressing the social issues that prevent women from saying no to sex and having that understood as a real no? Ha. That, my friends, would infringe on the rights of men to have what they want when they want it. Can’t have that, now can we?

64. That’s the number. “We got more than what we thought we’d get,” Stupid said about the compromise. Here are the jerks who agreed with him:

Altmire, Baca, Barrow, Berry, Bishop (GA), Boccieri, Boren, Bright, Cardoza, Carney, Chandler, Childers, Cooper, Costa, Costello, Cuellar, Dahlkemper, Davis (AL), Davis (TN), Donnelly (IN), Doyle, Driehaus, Ellsworth, Etheridge, Gordon (TN), Griffith, Hill, Holden, Kanjorski, Kaptur, Kildee, Langevin, Lipinski, Lynch, Marshall, Matheson, McIntyre, Melancon, Michaud, Mollohan, Murtha, Neal (MA), Oberstar, Obey, Ortiz, Perriello, Peterson, Pomeroy, Rahall, Reyes, Rodriguez, Ross, Ryan (OH), Salazar, Shuler, Skelton, Snyder, Space, Spratt, Stupak, Tanner, Taylor, Teague, Wilson (OH). And, of course, all the Republicans.

Those in bold also voted against the entire bill, along with Adler, Baird, Boucher, Boyd, Edwards, Herseth Sandin, Kissell, Kosmas, Kratovil, Kucinich, Markey, Massa, McMahon, Minnick, Murphy and Nye. They had a variety of reasons — bill was too progressive, not progressive enough, cost too much. And of course, all the Republicans except Cao, who voted against it because they like things the way they are.

There was one other interesting thing about the vote. Republicans wanted the vote because they were certain it would fail. Surprise, guys. Democrats are willing to kick women to the curb just as easily as you are.

Saturday night massacre originally appeared on A World of Progress TeamZine on November 8, 20092009-11-08T07:10:40ZF j, Y.

Related posts:

1. Will somebody please tell Joe Lieberman to STFU?
2. Be careful what you wish for
3. Right to health care

They got Chris Christie into the New Jersey statehouse, although if Jon Corzine had been a better governor that certainly wouldn’t have happened. Look for Christie to be a one-termer like Corzine.

But the one they really like to point to is the guy who lost: Doug Hoffman, defeated by Democrat Bill Owens in an upstate New York Congressional district that had been in Republican hands since 1872. Here’s Rush Limbaugh:

You know what, I was reading Erick Erickson today at RedState.com, and he was the real first behind Hoffman guy. I mean, he was really pushing it on his blog, and he wrote today — I’ll paraphrase it — he wrote, “Look, the message out of this is we took out a horrible Republican.  We kept a horrible Republican from possibly winning and totally redefining the party in a way that would make it a permanent minority party.”  So in Erick’s view, yeah, it would have been great if Hoffman won, but the real victory was making sure that a Republican-in-name-only did not win.

And here’s what Erickson himself said:

First, the GOP now must recognize it will either lose without conservatives or will win with conservatives. In 2008, many conservatives sat home instead of voting for John McCain. Now, in NY-23, conservatives rallied and destroyed the Republican candidate the establishment chose.

I have said all along that the goal of activists must be to defeat Scozzafava. Doug Hoffman winning would just be gravy. A Hoffman win is not in the cards, but we did exactly what we set out to do — crush the establishment backed GOP candidate.

And make no mistake, despite the Beltway spin, we know for certain based on statements from the local Republican parties, that they chose Scozzafava based on advice from the Washington crowd.

So we have demonstrated to the GOP that it must not take conservatives for granted. The GOP spent $900,000.00 on a Republican who dropped out and endorsed the Democrat. Were we to combine Scozzafava and Hoffman’s votes, Hoffman would have won.

Secondly, and just as importantly, there has all of a sudden been a huge movement among some activists to go the third party route. We see in NY-23 that this is not possible as third parties are not viable.

Third parties lack funding and ability for a host of reasons. Conservatives are going to have to work from within the GOP. The GOP had better pay attention.

For all intents and purposes, NY-23 is a trial run for Florida. And in Florida, the conservative candidate is operating inside the GOP. If John Cornyn and the NRSC do not want to see Florida go the way of NY-23, they better stand down.

Yeah, they really showed that GOP establishment, losing NY23 to a Democrat and all. And the message was not lost on that establishment. Sen. John Cornyn, chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, did stand down. The NRSC, even though it recruited several candidates to run in 2010, won’t endorse anyone in the primaries.

And that little threat about Florida? It’s all about Gov. Charlie Crist, running for Senate. See, Charlie backed Barack Obama’s stimulus plan, and as we all know, backing anything a Democrat does is strictly prohibited in the new GOP, which views bipartisanship as a Democratically led Congress doing exactly what the Republicans want and nothing more.

The teabaggers want Marco Rubio, the lunatic rightwinger backed by by looniest of lunatics, South Carolina Sen. Jim Deminted.

I’d say the teabaggers did win Tuesday. But their big victory is severely limited — to the Republican Party. Republicans are now signalling that they’re willing to swing further to the right than they already are and take their lead from the teabaggers and the 912ers and birthers and all the other crazies who make up the far right.

The plan, of course, is to make sure Obama fails, so that next year the electorate will blame the Democrats for everything bad that happens and vote them back into power, this time with a solid wingnut majority.

Not gonna happen.

Sarah Palin and Dick Armey, the leaders of the new right, swooped in and backed Hoffman. He lost, something Erickson and Limbaugh think is no big deal. Really? Losing a seat you’ve had for 138 years, with your “big guns” leading the charge, is no big deal? Just where do they think moderate Republicans — and independents — are gonna go?

NY23 voters, about as conservative as they come, rejected the right wing crazy. Even the ousted Republican candidate, Dede Scozzafava, endorsed Bill Owens, while Republicans who had backed her scrambled to throw their support to Hoffman or hide behind the nearest rock hoping nobody noticed.

There’s a chance, of course, that their master plan will work. American voters, having put GWBush into the White House twice, aren’t known for casting informed ballots. And that’s where we progressives come in.

Independents and other moderates had a clear clue a year ago. The teabaggers, of course, claim that John McCain wasn’t conservative enough and that’s why he lost. Not true. McCain was a bad candidate, it’s true, but he lost because of Sarah Palin and her neolithic ideas about all manner of things, not to mention her complete disdain for actually understanding the issues of the day and being able to discuss them without calling Democrats socialists.

Expect the fearmongering to continue from the right, my friends. They are desperate to regain control and keep this country in the dark ages from which it is so valiantly trying to climb. These conservatives are fearful people, willing to lie and use outrageous hyperbole to frighten the good people of America into voting for them.

We don’t have the ear of my colleagues. Not yet. But we can get there. We must keep pushing into their faces the truth that conservative now equals crazy. The Republicans have abandoned true conservatism thoroughly. That is the No.  1 lesson of NY23.

Those true conservatives now face a dilemma. Do they continue to go with a Republican party that is actively working to force them out, or do they take solace with a Democratic party that will listen to them, and even adopt some of their ideas?

Olympia Snowe? Susan Collins? Your state just voted to take away civil rights from an entire population, thanks to the lies the crazies told. Do you really want that legacy attached to your names? The Republican party is now Tom Coburn, James Inhofe, Mike Pence, Jim Deminted, Michelle Bachmann, Virginia Foxx and Bob McDonnell. Care to join a group that hates women, denies climate change, believes Obama was born in Kenya and thinks health care reform is worse than terrorism? Really?

Look at Arlen Specter, who bolted the GOP when faced with a teabagger candidate, and now he’s moving as far left as he dares with a more progressive Democratic challenger in his primary. Which way do you think the general election will go in Pennsylvania?

Our time is here, my friends. Make the best of it, and we’ll see true change.

Conservative equals crazy originally appeared on A World of Progress TeamZine on November 5, 20092009-11-05T05:58:32ZF j, Y.

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Doug Hoffman, the corporate backed teabagger who doesn’t even live in the 23rd district, went down in flames. Bill Owens, endorsed by the Republican candidate, Dede Scozzafava, who withdrew when the right wing whackos went after her with a vengeance, will fill the vacant seat that has gone Republican, until tonight, since 1872.

Way to go, Sarah. Pity you didn’t go campaign for Bob “women have no business in the work place” McDonnell in Virginia or Chris “I am not a crook” Christie in New Jersey.

But at least those races have no real national significance.  Voters don’t think about how they feel about a president went voting for the governor of their state, no matter how many times my colleagues say they do. They think about their state and whether or not they like what’s going on, or, in the case of Virginia, whether they want a Blue Dog Democrat like Creigh Deeds or a real Republican like McDonnell. How many progressives stayed home Tuesday for this one, not seeing any difference in the candidates?

Trying to make two governors’ races out to be some kind of big referendum on the administration is kinda like me saying that my little city electing two musicians and an actor to city council means we want more funding for the arts. We do, but that’s not why we voted those three in.

But a Congressional race, my, but that does have some national significance. Congresscritters vote on national matters up there in Congress. And there’s an awful lot of really important matters up for consideration these days. So for a Democrat to defeat a teabagger in what has been up until now a solidly conservative district, well, that’s a pretty big deal.

And it wasn’t just any Republican who lost this one. In fact, it wasn’t a Republican at all since she withdrew from the race. Hoffman was the candidate of the Conservative Party, which pretty much makes a mockery of the word “conservative.” Palin and Armey, and Newt Gingrich, who had initially endorsed Scozzafava, threw their weight into the race in favor of lunacy. They lost. What say you now, Rush Limbaugh?

Limbaugh made a huge deal out of supporting Hoffman, because, you see, Scozzafava had some “liberal” ideas about some social issues. And we all know that being a Republican these days means you disagree with the Democrats on everything. And not only do you disagree, but you must vehemently oppose everything and do whatever possible, legal or not, moral or not, to obstruct it.

But looks like the people of NY23 don’t go in for that sort of thing. It’s a close race, to be sure, but we all know about close races after close races in the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections: If you don’t vote for the winner, you just don’t count. Or does that rule only come into play when Republicans win?

Owens, to be sure, is a Blue Dog. He opposes the public option. But my god he’s better than any candidate endorsed by the trifecta of crazy.

The Republican Party needs to take a long hard look at itself now and decide who they want to be. Limbaugh, Palin and Armey? Chasing moderates like Scozzafava out will put ‘em right there. Didn’t work so well in NY23, now did it? Looks like the GOP is really gonna end up a regional party, and unfortunately that region is my native south. Some of my southern colleagues are just a little slow on the uptake and can’t take a hint until it’s too damn late.

Meanwhile, Kalamazoo, Michigan, now bans discrimination in housing, public accommodation and employment based on sexual orientation. Maine is currently falling the wrong way on same-sex marriage, but Washington appears poised to grant everything but actual marriage to same sex couples. And Maine did approve medical marijuana.

In North Carolina, where they have a congresscritter who thinks that health care reform is worse than terrorism, Chapel Hill got a gay mayor. And in Texas, where the governor thinks secession is a good idea, Houston may have a lesbian mayor — she’s in a run-off after leading the vote over three other candidates.

And still, the big story according to my beloved colleagues, is that GOP wins in Virginia and New Jersey mean the party has sprung back to life. I beg to differ. Right now the GOP doesn’t know its ass from a hole in the ground, and quite often I think the same is true of my colleagues.

So when you hear that Corzine’s loss in New Jersey is a big giant wake up call to the president, consider the source. Here’s what Tuesday’s elections really mean:

Being a Blue Dog in the south is useless. The progressives won’t come out and vote for you because they don’t see any reason to waste the time. Presiding over an economic mess will cost you an election. Being a Blue Dog in the north is still better than being a right wing lunatic. Millions of dollars from religious organizations lying about what same-sex marriage will do still trumps the truth.  The Pacific Northwest is pretty darn liberal, and, surprisingly, so is Kalamazoo.

Oh, and by the way — the special Congressional election in California went to Democrat John Garamendi.

Election night 2009 originally appeared on A World of Progress TeamZine on November 4, 20092009-11-04T06:03:01ZF j, Y.

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Oh the humanity.

Later today, you’ll see a poll that shows Obama’s approval rating above 50 percent, still, although Americans seem to disapprove of the way he’s handling things like the economy, health care reform and Afghanistan. You’ll be told that the reason people still like him even though they aren’t happy with some of what he’s doing is some kind of blissful carryover from the election last year.

Don’t buy it. Don’t buy any of it.

The reason people still like Barack Obama is that they know he’s a far sight better than anything the Republicans have to offer unless they plan on resurrecting Abe Lincoln in the next few months.

And while my colleagues try to imply that Americans aren’t happy with Obama’s job so far on those critical issues because they’d prefer a more conservative, Republican approach, that’s bullshit too.

Obama’s job approval ratings on those issues are in the 40 to 50 percent range because he’s being too conservative, trying to hard to please an opposition party that has taken it’s position as that far too literally and chosen to oppose every goddamn thing he or any other Democrat propose. Even if it’s something they proposed in another life.

See, my poll-taking colleagues don’t ask that question. They don’t ask why respondents have a lower opinion. They’re too damn stuck on this blue-red thing to go that far. It doesn’t cross their clouded minds to think that it might just be Obama’s own supporters who think he’s not doing what he promised, rather than the Rush Limbaugh deluded conservatives who don’t understand that when you lose an election, it’s because the voters didn’t like you and wanted something other than what you’ve done for the last 30 years.

So today, while my colleagues go on and on about what this election means for Obama and the 2010 elections, they’ll be completely missing the point. They won’t tell you, for example, that their own polling from the last couple of weeks shows Republicans with truly abysmal approval ratings on all the issues and that Democrats have much higher ratings, although they too are suffering from the disgust their supporters feel about their continued lack of a spine.

Bob McDonnell, a man who thinks women have no business outside the home, will become Virginia’s governor. It has nothing to do with Obama and everything to do with Virginia’s fickle electorate and a lousy Democratic candidate.

In New York’s 23rd Congressional district, Conservative Party lunatic Doug Hoffman will likely win, after the crazies forced the Republican candidate to withdraw. This, too, has nothing to do with Obama and everything to do with the fact that the 23rd has been in Republican hands for 138 years. It’s a very conservative district. Frankly, if Hoffman doesn’t win by 10-15 points, it’s a win for the Democrats in the long run.

In New Jersey, low-life Republican Chris Christie will likely become governor. Again, nothing to do with Obama and everything to do with Jon Corzine’s inability to salvage the sinking ship of the Garden State.

In Atlanta, a Democrat will win the non-partisan mayoral race. Nothing to do with Obama, everything to do with Atlanta being a pretty damn liberal city.

In Houston, a lesbian may become mayor. I have no idea why, but  Obama’s not part of the equation.

Gay marriage may or may not win in Maine and Washington. Has to do with whether the electorate believes the lies spread by the anti-gay crowd.

Barack Obama came into office 10 months ago with a failing economy, two wars, a badly broken health care system and 30 years of conservative bullshit to clean up. 10 months? This is gonna take 10 years, people.

The Republican plan, of course, is to appeal to the short term memories of the voters and squash any long-term recollection that might attempt to break through their barriers of lies and deceit. This way, they can regain control of Congress in 2010, by which time they’ll have completely abandoned any claims of being “big tent” and have cemented themselves solidly in the insane camp. Wonder how that’s gonna play next year?

Depends, of course, on how well we present the truth, or, more precisely, how well we push the Democratic politicians into acting like they are something more than appeasers.

Up to us, my friends. It’s all up to us.

Because I can tell you, my colleagues don’t have a clue.

Election day 2009 originally appeared on A World of Progress TeamZine on November 3, 20092009-11-03T05:59:45ZF j, Y.

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3. Conservative equals crazy

Scozzafava has endorsed Owens.

Hoffman has the endorsement of Sarah Palin and bunch of other know-nothings who are clueless about New York, the 23rd district and humanity.

Scozzafava was proof that there were moderate Republicans left, but now that she’s endorsed a Democrat, maybe not so much.

The GOP keeps going further and further over the edge, and nobody’s willing to stop the bleeding. Even moderates like Olympia Snowe and Sue Collins hang back and go with the flow, ignorant or purposefully ignoring the trend their party has set.

Sad. Doug Hoffman’s party makes a mockery of the very word “conservative,” unless of course we’re willing to concede the definition to those who would have all progress halted lest their “values” be offended.

And then there’s Joe Lieberman, recently dubbed Traitor Joe, and aptly so. Oh, he still holds a few more or less progressive social ideas, but apparently, the Connecticut independent, who used his state’s Republicans to defeat the progressive Dem who topped him in the Dem primary, owes a little too much to his state’s chief industry.

Insurance.

The Hartford’s favorite senator says he’ll filibuster a health care plan with a public option. Only one thing to say to that. Make him do it. And his Republican pals too.

Day whatever: Still no Republican health care plan. The party of no, the party of the status quo.

And by the way, did you know that the current generation of gay men was caused by the Golden Girls? Yes, I’m afraid it’s true. Some guy with the outlandish name of Stephenson Billings says those four girls living in Miami turned an entire generation of American boys into gay men.

These folks will say damn near anything, won’t they?

It was only to be expected that our lonely boys exposed to these conflicted times would succumb to the nagging Golden Girls agenda. These were slender, unathletic children who were left out of the fun militarism of the Reagan years. Skyrocketing divorce rates ruined their faith in traditional relationships. Rock groups like Duran Duran and Styx encouraged big hair and overactive libidos. The show lit a match which enflamed their intense physical urges. With the utmost cruelty and immorality, The Golden Girls seized upon this opportunity to cross the hormonal wires of America’s lost generation.

The results were disastrous. Our horny, lonely boys sought out intimate comforts with likeminded Golden Girls addicts who didn’t mind each other’s theatrical voices and touch-feely hand gestures. Together, these clusters of awkward teens and twentysomethings bonded over their favorite episodes and characters, mimicking the voices and gowns of their tv friends. When the rush of cheesecake and gabfests wore thin, these hairless boys needed a harder thrill. They were so desperate for the next big trend they turned to same-sex sexual experimentation. What woman would have them now, anyway? This led to the worse excesses of early homosexual visibility– the most enormous of drag queens, the dirtiest of leather daddies, the most enticing of twinkie boys, androgyny, overeating, public sex and the birth of “camp.”

I don’t know where Stephenson Billings was before the Golden Girls, but camp was alive and well and quite grown up long before Bea Arthur ever left Maude.

I bring these things to your attention because I want you to see just what is happening politically these days, on the off chance you don’t know already. The once proud GOP has been reduced to a bunch of whining rich white Christians, mostly men, who now claim to be put upon by the PC police. Oh please, Mary. Not yet. But that’s coming if they don’t clean up their act.

Hard to sell that argument when you’re in the majority. But what’s so freaky to these guys is that there are rich, white Christian mostly men who don’t agree with them. They used to have that market sewn up tight. But the funny thing about progress is that it happens to all of us. Even those guys.

They’re awfully scared, those guys. They see the end, and it’s not what they thought it would be. At least those who still use their minds see that. Other are so completely deluded by the bullshit they’ve been taught all their lives that they can’t even conceive that anyone in their right minds could believe differently.

So when their leaders, those rich white Christian mostly men, tell them progressives, liberal, Democrats, are evil, they buy right into it. And now, it’s all coming to a head.

I’m not terribly concerned with what Barack Obama is doing or not doing. The Republicans, or whatever they’ll call themselves by then, aren’t going to retake Congress in 2010. Sure I’m disappointed by some of what he’s done and not done, but he — and we — have plenty of time. At least the man thinks about things and doesn’t go off half-cocked because some dictator tried to kill his daddy.

But this culture war is on, my friends. We’ll win, of course, but it won’t be pretty. The Republicans say that government shouldn’t be taking care of its people, that the people should do that themselves. See that happening? I see liberals doing their best at it … and a few, moderate Republicans.

But I think government should be taking care of its people, and should be made up of people who believe that taking care of one another is the right thing to do, either individually or through government if that’s not doing the trick. Government should model that behavior for those of the population who lack those values.

Those teabagger types? To them, the only good government is a dead government. One that doesn’t make sure manufacturers don’t pollute the crap out of the air and water, one that lets insurance companies rip us off daily, one that lets bankers make billions by bleeding us dry.

Back in New York, Doug Hoffman wants to see America returned to a 1950s that never existed. Joe Lieberman wants to make sure his benefactors don’t feel the pinch of a fucked up economy. Stephenson Billings wants to blame a television show for homosexuality. Wonder what he thinks caused it before the Golden Girls?

And Republican leaders want to keep things the way they are — well, and repeal everything a Democrat ever supported. Doesn’t even matter if they supported it back before the black guy got elected president.

The teabaggers are the last gasp of an archaic and no longer useful form of government — the kind that lies to its constituents on a daily basis to convince them to vote against their own best interests. My own parents are scared to death about “Obamacare” taking their Medicare. Never mind that four years ago they were complaining that there was too much waste in the Medicare bureaucracy and they’d be better off if somebody cleaned it up.

The president proposes doing just that, but they’ve “heard” he’s gonna cut their benefits, government shouldn’t mess around with their health care, even though it’s government that provides it.

And god forbid government try to provide health care to someone else. That’s a sure sign they’ll be left out.

They shouldn’t worry. Whatever comes out of Congress and reaches the president’s desk won’t help much of anybody, except Joe Lieberman’s constituency.

Yet. It’s coming though. We’ll get the health care we deserve, and gay men and lesbians will be allowed to marry, and these insane wars will end, and the teabaggers will be seen for the fringe elements they really are.

Patience, grasshopper. Patience.

Of insurance, homosexuality and conservatism originally appeared on A World of Progress TeamZine on November 1, 20092009-11-02T04:15:47ZF j, Y.

Related posts:

1. Ensuring insurance
2. Man of Steele
3. Saturday night massacre

It’s not about adopting their politics, compromising our own, or even tolerating their tactics. It’s about reclaiming “We” — The same “We” that Dr. King and civil rights workers sang about, and that I remember singing about myself in church, on the occasions when we sang “We Shall Overcome.”

I

Mike wrote:

As Martin Luther King explained in his sermon “The Strength To Love”:

Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.

Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies toughness in a descending spiral of destruction.

During the whole dialogue on the teabaggers, I never heard the narrative of why these poor people were turning up at the town halls. They were turning up because they were scared of change, because the only change they have known is their standard of living dramatically decreasing over the last 30 years. I never heard anyone talk about how most of the teabaggers are the people that need health care reform the most.

In fact, we got off message entirely. We stopped talking about health care reform altogether. We failed to articulate a progressive vision these people might adopt. We took an eye for an eye, leaving everyone blind.

Very few of us made any attempt to really reach out and embrace these teabaggers on the issues that we share with them. Many of their concerns about the bailout, NAFTA-style trade deals and the general loss of trust in government are core progressive issues. We could lock arms with the teabaggers and form a powerful alliance, but, instead, we attack our potential allies because we do not take the time to engage them.

Without a doubt, King understood that the civil rights movement and the efforts to end segregation were not just about African Americans. The brutality that segregation, lynching, Jim Crow, and slavery visited upon African Americans is well documented. But the man who said “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly,” understood that systems of brutality are a two way street. He saw that the system of segregation brutalized the bodies, minds and spirits of both blacks and whites, and was therefore harmful to both.

As progressives, we are working to change — to heal, actually — the disastrous results of 30 years of conservative failure and its consequences for everything from our economy to infrastructure to health care. In doing so, we can’t afford to ignore that these consequences have been particularly devastating for the very states which have come the strongest and most strident objections to health care reform, the stimulus and other progressive attempts to alleviate those consequences.

When it comes to health care reform, the states most likely to benefit — because they have the highest percentages of uninsured citizens — are the source of the loudest objections to reform.

Overall, about 15 percent of Americans are uninsured, according to the 2008 American Community Survey. But here is the state-by-state picture:

“Thirty-one states and the District of Columbia had uninsured rates that were lower than the national figure,” an analysis written for the Census Bureau says. “All of the states in the Midwest and Northeast are included in this group. Nineteen states had uninsured rates higher than the national figure; 10 of these states were located in the South and the other nine were located in the West.”

The state with the highest proportion of uninsured is Cornyn’s Texas, where 24 percent of residents are without coverage. The other four states with uninsured rates of 20 percent or more are Alaska, Florida, Nevada and New Mexico.

States with uninsured rates between 17 percent and 20 percent also are in the Deep South and the West. They include Montana (Baucus), Arizona (Kyl) and Idaho, represented on the Finance Committee by Republican Mike Crapo.

If you superimposed the Census Bureau’s color-coded map of the states’ percentages of uninsured residents, it would bear quite a resemblance to those election-night maps of red and blue America. Yet blue-state America, through its mostly Democratic representatives, seems willing-for fiscal, political or moral reasons-to extend its hand and open its wallet so that red-state Americans can get health insurance.

“It’s not a nationally uniform problem,” says Steve Zuckerman, senior fellow at the Urban Institute and an expert on Medicaid. Because there has to be a greater improvement in coverage in the South and West, Zuckerman says, “there will be a geographic redistribution.”

We know the numbers. We’ve read the reports, and used the statistics — with a dash or two of snark — to point out the paradox of people supporting policies against their own interests, and opposing policies that would improve their lot.

But the man who dreamed that “sons of slaves and sons of slaveowners” would someday sit down together dreamed it for both the sons of slaves and the sons of slaveowners — even if the latter rejected that dream as passionately as the former desired it. He wanted to free both, when he said “If physical death is the price that I must pay to free my white brothers and sisters from a permanent death of the spirit, then nothing can be more redemptive.”

If progressives hope to achieve health care for all, an economy that works for all, a safe and secure world for all, decent jobs, livable wages — or any of our other goals — we have to want all of this for the red-faced man yelling about immigrants on the National Mall, and the woman standing up in a townhall meeting, waving a birth certificate in a ziplock bag and shouting “I want my country back!”

II

Likewise, many of the same states are at the epicenter of job loss.

America’s worsening job woes come with a southern drawl. States in America’s South, such as Florida, Georgia and the Carolinas, have flipped during the recession from putting up robust employment numbers envied by other regions to posting many of America’s most painful rates.

Seven southern states now have double-digit unemployment rates, an unusual concentration in a country with a national rate in June of 9.5 percent. The list includes Florida, which two years earlier had one of the lowest jobless rates, at 4 percent.

“This recession has walloped the Sun Belt in ways that previous recessions have not,” said economist James Diffley, managing director for regional services at IHS Global Insight in Philadelphia.

And a good bit of the blame employment numbers going south down south, a lot of it can be laid at the door of gobalization, and the advent of “off-shoring” that sounded the death knell for the southern textile industry and the jobs it provided.

For years, these mills had eluded obsolescence with an iron-hard work ethic and investments in technology that kept production costs competitive. No more. Just as the textile industry left New England for the South 80 years ago, it’s now shipping off for Mexico, Honduras, even Pakistan, thanks to looser trade laws.

Thousands of middle-aged, minimally educated American textile workers have been left behind in a landscape of shuttered plants and cool smokestacks.

The lintheads, as they were once called, have few prospects.

“Dreams? Ambitions? Goals?” Blankenship asked, as if she were talking about foreign lands. “It’s funny, but I’ve never thought about them. I always figured I’d be sewing.”

It’s the same old story, one that many American steel workers or toy makers could tell.

But the last decade has been especially harsh on the textile industry, with 441,000 jobs disappearing, a loss of 44 percent. Last year, 110 mills shut (most of them in the South), 68,000 workers were laid off and several of the largest companies filed for bankruptcy.

Even Pat Buchanan seems to understand this much.

Some of the same workers have probably gone to work in some of the auto plants that sprung up in the south, thanks to very generous subsidies for foreign automakers — $253 million in state and local tax breaks, worker training and land improvement for Mercedes- Benz; $158 million in similar perks for Honda, plus another $90 million later; $577 million in breaks for Volkswagon; another $197 million for Nissan; etc. — voted in by the same lawmakers who fulminated against the Detroit bailout. It adds up to more than $3.8 billion, and not without painful cutbacks for some.

“It’s exceedingly difficult to determine whether the returns warrant the original incentives,” said Matthew N. Murray, executive director of the University of Tennessee’s Center for Business and Economic Research. “It’s just hard to show that it’s going to produce enough tax revenue.”

Others wonder if the incentive packages don’t go too far to divert taxpayer dollars from vital state services. When Tennessee courted Nissan in 2005, for example, its $197 million gift came about the same time the state was cutting 170,000 low-income adults from its Medicaid rolls. A 1998 Time magazine report found that an Alabama elementary school adjacent to the Mercedes plant was home to 540 kids in a building designed to hold 290.

“The Mercedes-Benz plant illustrates a fundamental principle of corporate welfare,” the article read. “Everyone else pays for economic incentives — either with higher taxes, fewer services or both.”

None of the results of these incentives have come close to replacing the jobs that were lost due to the same push for globalization that gave birth to these deals. The incentives, tax cuts and other deals to get BMW to build in South Carolina, for example, hasn’t come close to replacing the 250,000 jobs lost there. The same lawmakers voted against thousands of their own constituents keeping their jobs, with U.S. auto manufacturers.

Clearly the allegiance of the 31 Republicans who opposed the loan to save GM and Chrysler is not with the United States of America, which would lose 900,000 jobs if just GM closed, and more than 2.1 million if the Big Three did. Those job losses would occur during the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. In November, the 11th consecutive month of job losses, another 533,000 people were thrown out of work, swelling the pool of unemployed to 10.3 million. The Toyota Republicans were willing to increase that.

They voted against the interests of their own states as well. Consider what would happen in a few of those Southern States whose senators led the charge against preserving the Big Three. If just GM collapsed, Kentucky would lose 20,000 jobs; Alabama, 21,000; Georgia, 23,000, and Tennessee, 29,400, according to calculations by the Economic Policy Institute.

Sen. Cochran just didn’t think it was right for the U.S. government to aid its auto industry. But apparently he’s fine with foreign governments providing subsidies to the transplant automakers in his state. And, apparently, he’s okay with spending state and federal money to help foreign automakers locate manufacturing plants in the U.S.

That conservatives have had so much success getting so many to vote against what progressives perceive to be their own self-interests (assuming that livable wages, job security, etc., are in their self-interest) is alternatly mystifying and exasperating to progressives, both of which become handy fodder for cathartic bursts of snark.

III

Sure, it’s tempting — and even gratifying — to respond with a healthy dose of snark when someone like Pat Buchanan writes that working class whites are “losing their country.” But while his claims of Christianity being “purged from schools their taxes paid for, and “illegal aliens” crossing the border to get “free health care in the U.S. are risible, he actually has a point when writing about shuttered factories and jobs being sent overseas — though to get to it one has to wade through his blathering about affirmative action and undocumented immigrants coming to the U.S. to get “free health care.” (One wonders what Buchanan thinks about the thousands of U.S. citizens going to Mexico in search of health care because they can’t afford it back home.)

As Charles Lemos points out over at MyDD, Buchanan and others voted for the very policies that got us here, when they voted for Ronald Reagan and his policies.

The Christian faith purged charge is disingenuous because Pat knows that there is separation of Church and State in this country. What he is objecting to is the teaching of evolution, or the fact that we won’t allow creationism disguised as science to be taught in public schools, and that apparently threatens their world. But most of Pat’s complaints are economic in nature, though he does so effortlessly descend into a noxious xenophobia. He complains about “factories shuttered,” “jobs outsourced,” “bank bailouts,” “unbalanced books” and “trillions to Fortune 500 companies.”

Pity that Pat Buchanan doesn’t realize that he voted for that agenda when he voted for Ronald Reagan. Because his litany of complaints, at least on the economic front, are all traceable to policies enacted by Ronald Reagan and the Republican Party.

But Pat’s rant is actually quite a race card throwback to the 1970s. It was sinister then and it is sinister now. Historian Matthew Frye Jacobson back in 2006 published a seminal work entitled Roots Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post-Civil Rights America. In it, Dr. Jacobson described how the then nascent conservative movement played on white fears through attacks on the social aspects of Great Society programs such as affirmative action. Pat plays that card and follows with the free healthcare and education for illegal aliens, the favorite term of the right for undocumented workers.

And funny how illegitimacy, drug use and dropout rates are all generally higher in red state America than they are in blue state America. The states with the highest born out-of-wedlock are the District of Columbia (technically not a state), New Mexico, Mississippi, Louisiana and South Carolina. Drug use is a mix bag and harder to measure but Rhode Island (closely followed by Alaska and Arizona) has the highest percentage of regular illicit drug users and Iowa the lowest. The highest high school drop out rates are in Louisiana, Alaska, Colorado, Nevada and Arizona, the lowest drop rates are in New Jersey, Connecticut, North Dakota, Iowa and Wisconsin. The problems Pat complains about while national are deeper in the red states.

But progressives should avoid taking that approach too far, lest we make the same mistake Republicans have made for decades and continue to make — even at the risk of being limited to a southern regional party. The problems Buchanan cites are deeper in the red states, and so it the pain of those problems, and the conservative politics and policies Lemos cites don’t alleviate the problems or the painful consequences visited upon the everyday people who grow increasingly angry about both.

Their leaders don’t have answers. Faced with constituents dealing with economic hardship and worries about health care and their lack of insurance, they don’t have answers; whether it’s South Carolina governor Mark Sanford refusing stimulus funds while offering his prayers to a jobless South Carolinian, Sen. Tom Coburn telling a woman whose husband has traumatic brain injury to ask her neighbors for help, Sen. Chuck Grassley telling an underinsured man to get a government job if he wants coverage as good as Grassley’s, Rep. Phil Gingrey laughing off 14,000 Americans losing their health care every day because they lost their jobs, or Rep. Eric Cantor telling a woman whose relative has two tumors and no health care to find a government program or get some charity.

Conservatives are doing to their own constituents what they’ve done for decades where minorities are concerned. And just as their treatment of minorities has resulted in a noticeably more homogenous party, it will end up making the GOP and conservatives less and less relevant in the process of finding solutions to the problems and challenges Americans are facing now and will face in the future. They will become less and less relevant so long as they fail to address people’s needs, and fail to see that they’re not addressing people’s needs.

IV

Too often, predominantly white organizations — as the Republican party seems to have become, and seems determined to be — ponder their lack of diversity, only to end up asking the wrong questions.

It’s the same basic rhetoric I’ve heard in just about every discussion I’ve been involved in over why there aren’t more black republicans. My point has always been that Republicans – like other predominantly white organizations – spend more time asking why more black people aren’t joining them than they do asking themselves why they aren’t attracting more black supporters.

In other words, the avoid the reality that the reason they don’t attract more black supporters is because they don’t address – and aren’t seen as addressing – the needs and concerns of many in black communities. The analysis never gets further than that because it would probably undermine their current base of power. So every discussion I’ve had ends up with the other side’s argument boiling down to this: the reason more blacks don’t support the Republican party is because they don’t know what’s good for them.

That’s the nice way of putting it. The more blunt way of putting it would be much closer to the way the conservative blogger above put it. Because they are dumb. The blacks who don’t vote Republican are dumb. The anti-Bush supporters in Latin America – or anyone else in Latin America who doesn’t support the U.S. Agenda – is dumb. The folks marching against Bush and the U.S. agenda in Latin America just don’t know what’s good for them.

It’s a tactic that becomes a message that ultimately insults and alienates the people they claim to want to win over. The more constructive question to ask would be “How can we address the concerns of (fill in the blank with just about any demographic group) more effectively?” It’s also the harder question to ask and answer, because it means you also have to want to address their concerns and accept their concerns as just as valid and important as your own.

In other words, you won’t really bring anyone into your coalition or movement, because you’ve already told them it isn’t for them. Jobs, health care reform, etc. — all the things that are partially fueling their fear and anger, and your plans to solve them — are not for them.

Meanwhile, people like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh are ready to tell them whose fault it is.

It’s Rush’s America, and the right wing media that keeps them Afraid about “blacks taking over” and “foreign nationals” changing the “White, male, Christian power structure,” so they won’t trace their fear to economy and how well conservative economic policies have served them.

There is no doubt that some of the anger is fueled by racial feeling, which is not the same as saying that all opposition to Obama is explained by racism. Most Obama opponents are simply conservative Republicans who disagree with him. But there are too many racist signs at rallies and too many overtly racial pronouncements in the fever swamps of the right-wing media to deny that racism is part of the anti-Obama mix.

Obama can’t do much about those who are against him because of his race. Even a 1 percent unemployment rate wouldn’t change the minds most scarred by prejudice. But there is a second level of angry opposition to which Obama needs to pay more attention. It involves the genuine rage of those who felt displaced in our economy even before the great recession and who are now hurting even more.

… In fact, many who now feel rage have legitimate reasons for it, even if neither Obama nor big government is the real culprit. September’s unemployment numbers told the story in broad terms: Among men 20 and over, unemployment was 10.3 percent; among women, the rate was 7.8 percent.

Middle-income men, especially those who are not college graduates, have borne the brunt of economic change bred by globalization and technological transformation. Even before the recession, the decline in the number of well-paid jobs in manufacturing hit the incomes of this group of Americans hard. The trouble in the construction industry since the downturn began has compounded the problem.

Progressives need to figure out how to address those fears and concerns, and then reach out to whatever portion of Limbaugh’s audience may be reachable.

Let me define “reachable.” We’re not talking “reachable” in the sense that they can be swayed by arguments. I mean reachable through economic and political changes that ultimately relieve their anxiety and improve their lives. In other words, they can best be reached by progressive success on issues like health care reform, jobs, and the economy — because health care for all, and an economy that works for all means them too.

But, again, wanting those things for all means wanting it for them too — for the man standing on the national mall waving a copy of the U.S. Constitution, and the woman with her birth certificate in a ziplock bag; and to want it for them sincerely, not begrudgingly, but out of understanding that their anger — misdirected though it may be — stems at least in part from very real pain, suffering and need that their leaders have failed to acknowledge or act to relieve.

V

Those shouts and cries of “I want my country back” that echoed through town halls this summer come from a visceral and and very real sense of loss. As E.J. Dionne notes above, the anger that has been on display lately certainly has some basis in racism that runs too deep and reaches too far for any one president — even Obama — to address. Indeed, some of that sense of loss stems from demographic realities — the “end of white America” and the “browning of America,” recently manifested in the the growing number counties in which whites are the minority —of which people like president Obama and Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor are inevitable symbols.

But Dionne also notes, as I’ve tried to describe above, that some of that anger is rooted rooted in the real loss of an America where these same people had a reasonable shot at finding work that earned them a decent wage, enabling them to improve their lot, take care of their families, and educate their children. In exchange, many Americans were sold a bill of goods by a smiling, seemingly friendly salesman who told them they had nothing to lose and everything to gain.

It sounded like the old American promise, but even better. What they got was something quite different.

Now for the truly shocking. I was reading Fighting Poverty in the US and Europe: A World of Difference by Alberto Alesina and Edward Ludwig Glaeser. In terms of social mobility, being born in the bottom half in the United States is a life sentence of poverty. You stand a better statistical chance of becoming wealthy if you are born poor in Italy than you do in the United States.

Now consider rates of entrepreneurship. A 2005 survey showed that 28 percent of Americans would like to own their businesses. That compares to just 15 percent of Europeans. Yet Americans, it seems, are deferring their dreams while Europeans are living theirs. 14.7 percent of Europeans are self-employed while just 7.3 percent of Americans are self-employed. What’s more, the rate in the United States is actually declining. In 1994, 9.1 percent of Americans were self-employed.

This is to me all quite startling and befuddling because Ronald Reagan, who remains an adored figure by American conservatives, won the Presidency in part by claiming that the GOP was the party that wants to see an America in which people can still get rich. But the facts demonstrate quite the opposite. Reagan’s policies were nothing more than a redistribution of wealth upwards away from the middle class. By allowing the minimum wage to fall below the poverty line, he single-handedly created the working poor. The percentage of Americans living below the poverty line in 1979 was 11.7 percent. It is now 13.2 percent. And yet there is a guy in the NY-23 running for Congress by name of Doug Hoffman on the Conservative Party ticket who is proudly going around calling himself a “Reagan Conservative.” How is the failure of the last 28 years not more evident?

Progressives have to begin by understanding that the anger on the right has at least one cause that we’re equipped to address, by organizing to elect progressive leaders and enacting progressive policies aimed at addressing the economic pain, jobs, health disparities, and other problems gripping the whole country — but squeezing some regions more tightly than others.

Understanding, though, is different from pity — something Dr. King clearly understood when he said, “Pity may represent little more than the impersonal concern which prompts the mailing of a check, but true sympathy is the personal concern which demands the giving of one’s soul.”

Robert Fuller, author of All Rise: Somebodies, Nobodies, and the Politics of Dignity and the founder of a dignitarian movement Dr. King would almost certainly have seen as an extension of the civil rights movement, expands upon the difference between pity and true concern.

Though its cause appears to lie outside ourselves, hate has a secret accomplice within. Its name is Fear. “Hate is the consequence of fear,” Cyril Connolly notes. “We fear something before we hate it.”

Anger congeals to hate when people fear domination and experience the indignity of being discounted. No one, conservative or progressive, likes being taken for a nobody. Hatred takes root when fears remain unaddressed and dignity is disregarded. Imagined indignities can feel as injurious as real ones, and suffice to incite people to commit mayhem and murder.

What’s needed to initiate the winding down of enmity is for at least one party to the recriminations to stop returning indignity in kind and start allaying the fears of its opposite number. This means talking over the heads of media demagogues straight to those whose fears have left them vulnerable to hate-mongers. The epigram notwithstanding, it does not put one side at a disadvantage to “go first” in extending the olive branch. Then, it must be willing to meet indignity with dignity, for however long it takes, while not subtly compromising the process by taking pride in its own forbearance. Maintaining civility doesn’t mean giving in to others’ demands, but it does mean dealing with them respectfully.

With even a modest diminution of fear, we re-conceive our enemiesas adversaries. With a hint of mutual value, adversaries become rivals–a term acknowledging each party’s role as a teacher of the other. Finally, by recognizing their mutual dependency, rivals begin to see themselves as partners. By this time, comity has replaced enmity, and incivility is out of fashion.

Conservative politicians and right-wing media have done an impressive job of making sure that the failure of the last 28 years is, if not less evident, at least blamed on culprits who are easy to blame, but far from responsible for electing the politicians and supporting the policies that resulted in todays crises and disparities. Progressives, depending on our response, can seal the deal on the right-wing’s campaign to deceive their constituents and deflect their anger.

In an essay from October 2000, Fuller wrote:

To “nobody” individuals, or a people, is not only to do them an injustice, it is to plant a time bomb in our own midst.

The consequences range from school shootings to revanchism, even genocide. The 20th century has seen many demagogues who have promised to restore the pride and dignity of a people that felt “nobodied.” Hitler enjoyed the support of Germans humiliated by punitive measures in the aftermath of World War I. President Milosevic of Yugoslavia has traded on the wounded pride of the Serbs. People will become apologists for crimes they would otherwise condemn to get even with those they believe have nobodied them.

The people that Elk, Dionne, and others including myself have been writing about, in states hardest it by joblessness, lack of access to health care, and economic disparity have already been “nobodied” — perceived and treated as “less than nothing,” having little value or significance — by 30 years of conservatism and the economy it’s created and seeks to sustain. They shouldn’t be “nobodied” by progressives; not just because it’s the wrong thing to to, but because it runs counter to progressive vision and goals.

VI

Back in 1989, I picked up an copy of We Are Not Afraid: The Story of Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney, and the Civil Rights Campaign for Mississippi. I grew up in a home where books about the history of the civil rights movement took up several shelves, and I read as many of them as I could. So the murders of Chaney, Goodman, and Scwherner in Neshoba County Mississippi (where Ronald Reagan is said to have launched his White House bid in 1980) wasn’t new to me, but one detail of the story stood out to me: Schwerner’s ability and willingnes even at the moment of death to see past the anger the man who was about to kill him, to see their shared humanity.

Another story, a year and a month later, June 21, 1964. It was the first night of Freedom Summer in Mississippi. College students from all over the United States, who had been training in nonviolence, went to Mississippi, where black people were not permitted to vote. That night, three of them were kidnapped by the Klan–Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman. A bunch of Klansmen took them on the side of the road and were preparing to kill them. A Klansman pulled out a gun and put a pistol to Schwerner’s chest and said, “Are you the nigger-lovin’ Jew?” And Schwerner said, “Sir, I know just how you feel.” And those were his last words before the Klansman shot him.

The Klansmen couldn’t forget those words. Almost a month later, two of them in widely separate incidents confessed to FBI agents the events of that night, and both of them said those were Schwerner’s last words, and both times the agent said, “Are you sure? That’s a very unlikely thing for somebody to say.” And they both said, “Yes, I’ll never forget that.”

It had an enormous effect on the agents. And they asked people in the movement: Is this something that someone would say? And, of course, the people in the movement said, Yes, that’s what nonviolent training is about. One is the discipline not to resist, not to strike back, and the other–”Sir, I know just how you feel”– is the discipline to try to make a human connection with somebody, even the person that’s about to kill you.

The heart of nonviolence is to discipline yourself and have faith in the other guy. Mickey Schwerner epitomized it. This was an evanescent moment because nonviolence began to dissolve even within the movement, but that’s another story.

What progressives must do — not yet at gunpoint, though firearms have been appearing a townhall meetings and right-wing protests — is what Schwener exemplified: reclaim the “we” that King and civil rights workers embraced and sang about, the “we” in “We Shall Overcome.” We must have the same audacity to doggedly include in that “we” the teabaggers, the birthers, and all the rest.

It’s what progressivism has always been about: expanding “we” to ultimately include us all.

Reclaiming ‘we’ originally appeared on A World of Progress TeamZine on October 30, 20092009-10-30T04:01:51ZF j, Y.

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Of course, he was lying about public option, too, saying it would cost Texas “billions.” But that’s just what Republicans do.

Rick Perry, he’s just an annoyance. The ignorance comes from elsewhere.

And I’m not talking about the Faux News White House correspondent somehow managing to insert John McCain’s time as a POW in Vietnam into a report that somehow managed to conflate Obama’s process to decide whether to send thousands more cannon fodder … I mean, troops into Afghanistan with his support for green energy. Although that certainly counts.

On this particular day, the Faux anchors were whining, in their inimitable fair and balanced way, because Home Depot has a policy that says employees may not wear non-company-related buttons. See, that means they can’t wear a button with the pledge of allegiance written on it.

A side note — I seriously don’t get pledging allegiance to a flag. What the fuck? A flag? A piece of cloth? How about pledging allegiance to the fucking Constitution? At least that has something going for it other than some amorphous symbolic nonsense that everybody interprets the way they see fit. Makes absolutely no sense to me. Unless maybe it’s supposed to be just another way for one group of people to accuse another of being unpatriotic.

Anyway, there’s the Faux anchors, horrified that this poor trod-upon Home Depot employee can’t wear his “one nation under god” button. I mean, what’s next? Employees can’t celebrate the 4th of July?

And, as they are want to do, the Faux anchors read some e-mail. Honestly, I’m surprised some of these people know how to use e-mail. My very favorite of the comments was this one (and I’m sorry but I must paraphrase — it was early in the morning and my powers of total recall were not yet functional).

I’m glad Home Depot has this policy. Do we want people to wear atheist buttons? Or Mao Rules buttons? Or Muslim buttons? This policy keeps out other offensive buttons too.

Maybe it was sarcasm God knows that would go over the heads of Faux anchors. I do tend to believe that if I see it on Faux News, somebody somewhere really is thinking that way. But it’s the kind of thing Andy Borowitz would say. Or The Onion, and Faux anchors have fallen for Onion reports before.

But this was an e-mail sent directly to Faux News, from someone who was obviously watching that morning. Granted, so was I, and if that someone else had enough brain power at that hour of the morning to punk those bozos, god bless her. Maybe we should join her. The Faux News team did choose to highlight that particular e-mail for some reason. I suspect it’s because they agree — or at least they know their viewers do.

Gosh, such nobility. We’ll sacrifice our god-given right to wear buttons saying we’re a Christian nation because we sure don’t want those atheist, or, heaven forbid, Muslims to be wearing their buttons.

Me, I’d wear my Militant Homosexual button. Or maybe Commie Dyke would be better in this case.

But dontcha just love how these folks are all about how companies should be allowed to decide all kinda things — just not what kinda buttons they wear? As if it’s some kind of 1st Amendment issue.

Oh, yeah. I forgot. These folks don’t know that the 1st Amendment doesn’t apply to corporations. It applies to the government, as in “Congress shall make no law.” And I’ll just bet that Home Depot’s button policy wasn’t handed down from Congress.

Y’know, I’ve worked at plenty of places where the dress code says not to wear shirts with slogans, particularly political slogans, or shirts from competing interests. It’s logical. When you’re serving the public, you just don’t know who’s gonna come through the door. For example, I can tell you that every plumbing company truck I see with a McCain-Palin sticker is crossed off my list of companies I’ll do business with. Obama stickers do not get crossed off, although I seriously worry about a company that allows its employees to post their political preferences on their vehicles — or the owner’s, for that matter. But no sticker, no problem. Kinda my own little “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy.

But that’s how I feel about a lot of things. You’ve got your opinion, I’ve got mine. As long as your opinion doesn’t infringe upon my space, we’re fine.

And no, I don’t mean  you can’t talk about your opinion. You certainly can. But the second you think your opinion should be elevated to the point of law — well, that’s where it infringes.

There are certain opinion-type things that have been elevated to law, and for good reason. Killing people is bad, for example. Taking things that don’t belong to you. Those things hurt other people.

Other things don’t hurt a soul and have no business being legislated. Like going to church, synagogue, temple, orange grove, mosque etc., or marrying the person you love, regardless of that person’s gender, and your own. And you can even change which church, synagogue, orange grove, temple or mosque you go to.

I’m sorry, but this shit’s just not that difficult. I guess that whole “love thy neighbor as thyself” thing never really took hold — or maybe there’s just a lot more self-hatred out there than we ever thought.

For sure there’s a lot of fear out there. A lot of insecurity. Why else would someone feel the need to install his or her beliefs above everyone else’s, in place of everyone else’s? Why else would one be so offended that a “one nation under god” button is banned from a workplace under a workplace policy that says “no non-company-related buttons?”

Got me. But then I don’t understand why people are afraid of a black president either.

Button, button, who’s got the button? originally appeared on A World of Progress TeamZine on October 28, 20092009-10-28T04:01:56ZF j, Y.

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They would, of course, if they could admit that perhaps there is some power far greater than us, and that if there were, that power likely is the inventor of evolution. I mean, come on, what brilliant method of creating life on a chaotic planet. But that’ll never happen, and I digress anyway. So soon after starting …

So someone asked if human beings were still evolving, and the answer, of course, is a resounding yes. We’re not seeing so much physical evolution, of course, but those things seem to take millions of years for the most part, so that’s not at all surprising.

But we are seeing, and have seen for millennia, mental evolution on a grand scale.

Back in the day, when we were first standing up and looking at the world around us — and above us and below us — it was damn hard to understand, and understandably so.

My cat, who has lived his entire life indoors, thinks he wants to go outside and see what that’s like. But on those occasions when he escapes, he manages about four steps past the door and looks up. He freezes. Cannot move. I catch him and bring him back inside. That look up — at the sky — I can imagine the only thought going through his little cat brain is OMG WTF WHERE’S THE CEILING????

In our early days, we humans likely had similar reactions to what we were seeing. We coudn’t explain night and day, rain, thunderstorms, volcanoes, tides, rivers, trees … well, we coudn’t explain much of anything. Hell, it’s pretty doubtful way back when that we had any inkling of procreation.

So we made up stories. We could see, clearly, that there was something going on that was beyond both our understanding and our ability to duplicate it. Somewhere along the way, “that’s just the way it is” had to change, humans being curious creatures who need explanations.

The stories we made up changed through the years. Various groups of us, living in different places, had different stories to explain the same things. In Egypt, the sun was the eye of Ra. In Greece, it was Apollo and his golden chariot. Some Hindu myths regard the sun as a King who rides seven horses.

Now we know, of course, that the sun is a big flaming nuclear fusion reactor, and some of us humans know a lot more about it.

As human knowledge evolved, our stories had to evolve too. Knowledge was quite often met with derision, of course, as it is now. Hard to change those old belief systems, y’know.

Our ability to figure out things kept getting better though, and through the centuries we’ve been able to explain a lot more things in our physical world than we could back when we barely had language. So the stories, the myths of our history, gradually became more ethereal — and much harder to prove or disprove.

We learned to write, and recorded what we learned. We learned to photograph, to record sound, to record moving pictures. And we learned to manipulate all that so that it was no longer proof of anything either, at least in certain hands.

And all the while, we were also learning more about ourselves and the world we live in — even the universe we live in. In the last 3,000-4,000 years, we’ve learned an awful lot. I daresay an ancient Greek would be awfully confused if she suddenly dropped into downtown Manhattan, or even an empty field in Iowa.

What kind of stories would she need to make up to explain airplanes? Or television? Or buildings obscured by clouds?

Hopefully, some elitist academician with a working knowledge of ancient Greek would come along to help her out.

But who’s helping those of us humans who were born here and now to understand the changes we’ve been going through? Some of us were lucky enough to get the help we need, but others are still lost in the mindset of a century ago — or even further back in our history.

Facts mean nothing to far too many people. How many people still believe Saddam Hussein had a hand in 9/11? Probably about the same number who believe that Barack Obama was born in Kenya or is a secret Muslim.

Not to mention those who believe the earth is only about 6,000 years old. In fact, somewhere else I read that the earth’s birthday was last week sometime. My colleagues spend far too much time coddling these folks, pretending that their quaint and horrifically wrong beliefs somehow are pertinent to our lives.

Pretty much like the jurists who believe the Constitution is a static document, meant to be taken literally and interpreted only based on its specific content. As if the founders believed the world would never change.

Of all the people in this country’s history, those founders knew about change. They were children of The Age of Enlightenment. They wrote that document so that it could be changed, could be reinterpreted to better fit in an ever-changing world, with the ever-changing and ever-growing knowledge base of the humans who would live under it.

So now, here we are, still evolving, and still fighting those who believe evolution itself is a fantasy. But here’s the thing: Those people are really afraid of change.

Barack Obama, who turns out not to be the agent of change some hoped for — not yet, anyway — scared the bejesus outta those folks with all his talk about change.  That’s gotta be the scariest word in the English language.

Change. It’s the only thing that’s certain, when it gets down to the wire. We humans are still evolving, still changing. What we believe is changing. And what we’ll accept for ourselves is changing.

For some of us, accepting being second class citizens is out. Permanently. Having executives make billions while the bulk of us struggle to pay the rent or mortgage — gotta go. Destroying the planet so those executives can make all that money — no. Bigotry, hatred, war — ain’t gonna study that no more.

We are opposed, fought tooth and nail on these changes. Someday, we’ll fight change too when it’s too fast for us. But for now, we’re on the side of new, bright beginnings.

Change. Not to socialism. To something new. Something we’re in the process of inventing, creating, evolving.

Not easy. Nobody said it would be. But worth it, oh yes.

We’re in the process of becoming who we are meant to be, and there will always be those who would prefer we didn’t. It’s just too frightening for them, opens too many doors to too many places they’re afraid to go.

They’ll either follow or they won’t. The choice is theirs.

For us, though, the choice is made. We go through the doors, forward into the future.

And what we do today will then be history.

A brief history of history originally appeared on A World of Progress TeamZine on October 26, 20092009-10-26T04:28:43ZF j, Y.

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