Prometheus Unbound

This past summer Arizona Reverend Steven Anderson was spreading the love. This from AP:

In his August 16th sermon, Anderson quoted Old Testament passages about the kind of people that God hates, and said they apply to President Obama. Anderson told his congregation that he doesn’t advocate taking up arms, but he does pray that Obama will die for the good of the nation.

My guess is that the media attention doubled attendance at his church. Oh, and he doesn’t like Jews either:

And here he is ranting against President Obama:

Once a far right conservative, and now a moderate liberal, Marty Beckerman, in Salon today, shares his epiphany:

I’ve learned to see the big picture. It doesn’t matter whether you are liberal or conservative, but it’s dangerous to always think with exclamation points instead of question marks. Your stance on any particular issue is far less important than whether your worldview is a product of inquiry or incuriosity, whether you feel more comfortable questioning the crowd or blindly marching with it.

Marty Beckerman’s shift was, in part, the result of long conversations with a liberal psychologist friend of his, Dr. Steve Edgall, and Marty Beckerman now says:

Just as Dr. Edgell steered me back to the shores of lucidity, I can encourage mellowness in others — no matter their cause — and discourage the inevitable craziness that resentment and overgeneralization breed.

In an era of pervasive stupidity and fanaticism, and with people rushing to extremes, it’s nice to hear testimony of the center, contra Yeats, actually holding (at least in one person).

And it’s one reason I voted for him.

Here’s U.S National Security Advisor, General James Jones in an interview with Spiegel this week:

SPIEGEL: Is it difficult to advise the president, Barack Obama?

Jones: No, simply because he’s a very good student of geopolitics. He understands strategy. He has a very inquisitive mind, and he prepares himself extremely well for all the meetings that he attends. You cannot come to his meetings without being prepared to say something because if you don’t say anything, he will call on you.

SPIEGEL: How does Obama react if somebody contradicts him?

Jones: He actually encourages debate. He wants people to defend their positions. He is willing to listen.

Here’s some video footage of when the bill reached 218 votes:

Here.

Know hope.

The Fox-Limbaugh industrial propaganda complex once again discovered its own limitations on Tuesday when, despite an all out push to win the NY-23 congressional seat, and giving the race a mesmerizing air of inevitability (“teabaggers are rising up in crushing numbers; we’ll win in a landslide!”), it nevertheless failed to do so. Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight says the Blue Dog Democrats should be breathing a sigh of relief:

NY-23 . . . ought to be rather relieving. Certainly, there were a whole host of local factors and unusual contingencies on the ground in NY-23. But it also spoke to the limitations of conservative populism (CP) as an electoral instrument. (You can call the CP’s ‘teabaggers’ if you want, but my term is both more neutral and more descriptive.) There’s not really any evidence that the CP movement is yet anything more than an isolated and regional one. It will almost certainly have some implications in the South — and if I were a Democratic Congressman there, I’d be very nervous. But only 18 of the 52 Blue Dogs in fact come from the South, and if I were a conservative Democrat in California, or South Dakota, or Michigan, I’d be feeling rather relieved.

My take on Tuesday’s elections: the electorate is a fickle god. You can pray to it, you can speak to it, you can throw money at it, but a god is going to do what it’s going to do. Money and propaganda are important at the margins, but in the face of larger trends (demographic or economic) no amount of bullshit, noise, or static stops the rushing train.

Democrats in 2010 need to pray to the god of the economy, not the god of the electorate. If the economy revs up next year, everything else follows. Or as Carville used to say: “It’s the economy, stupid.”

For gay equality in Maine, a good focusing question:

Brazil, Russia, India, and China. Meet the BRIC consortium as described in Salon today:

Just a concept a year ago, when the very idea of BRIC was concocted by the chief economist at Goldman Sachs, the BRIC consortium became a flesh-and-blood reality this June when the leaders of the four countries held an inaugural meeting in Yekaterinburg, Russia. The very fact that Brazil, Russia, India and China chose to meet as a group was considered significant, as they jointly possess about 43 percent of the world’s population and are expected to account for 33 percent of the world’s gross domestic product by 2030 — about as much as the United States and Western Europe will claim at that time. Although the BRIC leaders decided not to form a permanent body like the G-7 at this stage, they did agree to coordinate efforts to develop alternatives to the dollar and to reform the International Monetary Fund in such a way as to give non-Western countries a greater voice.

Alternative ideas to the dollar? Ah, that means we’re f—ed, right? Maybe conservatives are right that gold is a good investment. Hmm.

What is the South smoking? Are they even tracking the same person?

Daily Kos today displayed this telling statistic: Barack Obama has strong favorability numbers everywhere in the United States—except in the South. So extreme is the contrast, that the South essentially mirrors (in the negative) the numbers that Obama tracks (on average) in the rest of the country:

At Slate today, Karl Agne, a senior advisor to Democracy Corps, offers his take on the Fox-Limbaugh Industrial Propaganda Complex:

When we spoke with these conservative Republicans in the focus groups we did for Democracy Corps recently, what was really striking was we asked them specifically, who is the leader of the Republican Party, who speaks for the Republican Party today? And none of them in the groups we did named a single elected official. They didn’t name George W. Bush, they didn’t look to past presidencies the way Democrats did when Bush was in the White House and they looked back to Clinton-Gore and those times. Who they named was Fox News. Who they named was Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh. Those are the people who speak for the Republican Party in the minds of the conservative base voters that we’re talking about. So the centrality of — first of all, a media entity, not a partisan or ideological entity, but a media entity. And second of all, the fact that it’s so large, and so organized.

Ailes-Limbaugh 2012?

Brilliantly and thoroughly here. And here’s a cherry on top:

In terms of politicians, second to Barack Obama, I’ve always liked Jerry Brown, and it looks like he’s got a clear path to becoming Governor of California next year. This today at Salon.com:

If everything continues to go well for Jerry Brown, California could have a very familiar face as its next governor. Brown now has a clear path to the Democratic nomination . . .

Here’s Jerry Brown talking about clean technology:

Make way.

If you’re a Democrat hoping to hold off the Republicans from retaking one (or both) of the houses of Congress in 2010. This today at Politico:

The nation’s gross domestic product grew at a seasonally adjusted rate of 3.5 percent for July through September – the first growth since the spring of 2008, the Commerce Department said Thursday. That marks a sort of unofficial end to the recession that has bedeviled President Barack Obama since he took office. Economists credited the growth to consumer spending – up 3.4 percent – fueled in part by government stimulus, such as the popular Cash-for-Clunkers car-buying program.

Know hope.

The anti-science anti-vaccination hysteria circulating in the United States is having real and serious consequences to public health. Wired magazine has an interesting article on this latest example of young Earth creationism-like mass stupidity spreading across America here.

Money quote:

In May, The New England Journal of Medicine laid the blame for clusters of disease outbreaks throughout the US squarely at the feet of declining vaccination rates, while nonprofit health care provider Kaiser Permanente reported that unvaccinated children were 23 times more likely to get pertussis, a highly contagious bacterial disease that causes violent coughing and is potentially lethal to infants. In the June issue of the journal Pediatrics, Jason Glanz, an epidemiologist at Kaiser’s Institute for Health Research, revealed that the number of reported pertussis cases jumped from 1,000 in 1976 to 26,000 in 2004. . . . Looking back over human history, rationality has been the anomaly. Being rational takes work, education, and a sober determination to avoid making hasty inferences, even when they appear to make perfect sense. Much like infectious diseases themselves — beaten back by decades of effort to vaccinate the populace — the irrational lingers just below the surface, waiting for us to let down our guard. Before smallpox was eradicated with a vaccine, it killed an estimated 500 million people. And just 60 years ago, polio paralyzed 16,000 Americans every year, while rubella caused birth defects and mental retardation in as many as 20,000 newborns. Measles infected 4 million children, killing 3,000 annually, and a bacterium called Haemophilus influenzae type b caused Hib meningitis in more than 15,000 children, leaving many with permanent brain damage.

This today from MSNBC:

Flu illnesses are as widespread now as they are at the winter peak of normal flu seasons, Thomas Frieden, director for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told reporters. “To be basically in the peak of flu season in October is extremely unusual,” he said.

Barack Obama today declared swine flu a national emergency. Get. Your. Flu shots. Both swine and general. And ask about the pneumonia vaccine. It is grossly irresponsible, if you’re an adult, not to get these shots this season, both for you and your children and grandchildren. If people were to act responsibly this season, mass deaths and misery could be averted, or at least substantially curbed. With a vaccine available, it is frankly immoral to pay such gross disregard for yourself and your community. “No man is an island; each is a part of the main.”

Rush Limbaugh, the titular head of the Republican Party, has brought the Far Reich’s “love it or leave it” trope to new heights, calling on a New York Times reporter to off himself if he has a problem with global pollution issues. Here’s Limbaugh’s recent radio statement to Andy Revkin of the New York Times:

This guy from The New York Times, if he really thinks that humanity is destroying the planet, humanity is destroying the climate, that human beings in their natural existence are going to cause the extinction of life on Earth — Andrew Revkin. Mr Revkin, why don’t you just go kill yourself and help the planet by dying?

Limbaugh also likened Revkin to a jihadi.

But it’s not like Limbaugh is out of sync with his party. Here’s what Republican Daryl Metcalfe, a Pennsylvania congressman in high wack-job mode, hysterically said this week about coordinated global pollution control measures:

Any veteran lending their name, to promote the leftist propaganda of global warming and climate change, in an effort to control more of the wealth created in our economy, through cap and tax type policies, all in the name of national security, is a traitor to the oath he or she took to defend the Constitution of our great nation! Remember Benedict Arnold before giving credibility to a veteran who uses their service as a means to promote a leftist agenda. Drill Baby Drill!!!

There’s a good reason (barring a huge terrorist attack or a collapse of the economy) that Republicans will be out of power for some years. The current public faces of the Republican Party are, frankly, unhinged.

And here’s Pat Buchanan on what now appears to be the next authoritarian right wing trend that is likely to attract greater public attention (and subsequent association with the Republican Party):

In the brief age of Obama, we have had “truthers,” “birthers,” tea party activists and town-hall dissenters. Comes now, the “Oath Keepers.” And who might they be? Writes Alan Maimon in the Las Vegas Review-Journal, Oath Keepers, depending on where one stands, are “either strident defenders of liberty or dangerous peddlers of paranoia.” Formed in March, they are ex-military and police who repledge themselves to defend the Constitution, even if it means disobeying orders.

Andrew Sullivan wonders whether, at this rate of nuttiness, Republican Party identification (now at 20% of Americans) actually represents a new floor—or a new ceiling.

But the author of the book does not call Rand a “conservative” because Rand was an atheist!

Hmm.

Jennifer Burns is a University of Virginia historian, and her book on Ayn Rand is titled Goddess of the Market. Here is part 1 of 7 of a talk that she gave on Rand at Kepler’s Book Store:

Not according to Andrew Sullivan.

Sullivan thinks things are getting worse for the Republican Party, not better:

Anyone not suckered by the usual Beltway hooey . . . could see that the Republicans were drowning, not waving. Their success in airing the most bizarre claims about the president, their extremist town halls, their disavowal from the get-go of any attempt to work with the new president on anything may have helped gin up enthusiasm in their base – but at the expense of making that base even smaller and alienating by large margins the independent voters they desperately need.

If Obama gets a historic health care bill through Congress this year, and the economy starts to pick up by the summer of next year, Republicans might find that the 2010 election cycle is not nearly so much to their liking as they now imagine it will be. Of course, between now and next November, lots could go wrong with the economy and foreign policy that might save the Republicans from themselves, but right now it looks like President Obama is playing a long-term game, Republicans a short term game. Republicans may have to get thumped for a few more election cycles before they start to realize that the Beck-Limbaugh strategy for returning to power is a cruel mirage. In the meantime, Barack gets to continue to play the lithe Road Runner to a hapless and comic opposition.

Andrew Sullivan this weekend wrote an admiring piece on Barack Obama’s rope-a-dope political shrewdness here.

Money quote:

He is thinking further ahead than the Republicans. . . . And . . . when you look at it closely, you see that in all this, he has both maintained his vast ambitions and yet shrewdly minimised the political risks to himself. This is cunning, not weakness. And one day, his opponents will realise it.