The Day Mitt was Reborn!

So my favorite headline the morning after the debate was from the Huffington Post: "Obameh". That sums it up - whoever came up with that should be promoted (are you listening Arianna?). William River's Pitt (on Truth-out.org) also did a good analysis of Obama's horrible performance last night. I sat there and was astounded as opportunity after opportunity just passed Obama by. How he just allowed Mitt to dominate the stage. Obama didn't hold Romney accountable for the innumerable contradictions, his outlandish rightward swerve during the primaries, and especially his utter contempt for those of use who struggle to survive everyday. It made me look back at Obama's speeches during the campaign this time versus last time. What emerged was the uncomfortable realization that I don't think that Obama is really invested in winning the election. I think there is a part of him that would be relieved if he lost. I can not think of any other reason for this kind of self-sabotage. Yes I considered that Obama is not naturally a fighter - that he is characterologically prone to seek the middle ground. Yes I considered that Obama does not want to appear to be the angry black man (even though he is so far from it) and turn off the few repressed racists that might vote for him. yes I considered that he was following orders from his handlers to play it safe - well they should all be fired if that is the case. They let Mitt back in and now they have to deal with it, and we may have to deal with a Romney presidency. I feel the slime rising up to grab me already.

9-12-12 - The Day Mitt Died?

Hopefully this is it for Mitt. Using an embassy press release designed to calm a tense situation that was released 6 hours before an event that Mitt used to criticize the president for apologizing to the perpetrators of murder... Unbelievable. Andrea Mitchell went half way - she said that the right wing talk barrage criticizing Mitt for being too weak influenced Mitt's decision to go all in on this one. The implication (which has been made many times before) is that Mitt will buckle under pressure and strike out to preserve his manhood. This has happened before. Do you remember the story about Mitt cutting the hair of a gay classmate? Just one of the many reports on that story: http://www.slate.com/blogs/weigel/2012/05/10/mitt_romney_hassled_gay_classmate_over_dyed_hair.html In the Slate article this paragraph appeared: "The story of Romney's temper has only made cartoonish cameos in the presidential campaign. There's been exponentially more attention paid to the Seamus story, for example, than to Alec McGillis's long read on the Romney mood . The Horowitz/Real Romney portrait allows that the candidate grew up and out of this eventually; being an asshole was his version of George W. Bush's drinking, possibly. McGillis's Romney, once he attained his own money and power, acted out in new and exciting ways." It should be concluded that fundamentally Mitt Romney's psychology has not changed. He still needs to bolster a clearly weakened ego structure, but he does it aggressively with little thought to the consequences of his actions... The analogy to GWB in the above paragraph is remarkable. That is that this personality structure lends itself to impulse control difficulties and poor judgment. I know its hard to label Mitt as having impulse control difficulties --- but the fact is that under these specific conditions (being criticized or threatened)he will act out. Ultimately revealing this underlying problem and resulting in self-sabotage. (In the hair cutting case Mitt was saved by his status - Dad the Governor). Who will save him now? Rush (Nah Rush hates him), Weekly Standard (Nah - they hate him too), Krauthammer? Brooks? Fox News? - We'll wait to see Andrea Mitchell could have connected the dots...

Taibbi on Romney and Bain

Another wonderful hit job on Romney and the financial debacle http://m.rollingstone.com/entry/view/id/31287/pn/all/p/0/?KSID=3e6972c6a4ce8fa539e420d25dc6c8b4&ints_viewed=1

Criticism of Obama with companion article

Here is an interview of Jonathan Turley by John Cusack (who knew?) with a companion article by Jason Leopold. I have excerpted the parts of the Cusack interview I thought were the most cogent Leopold: http://truth-out.org/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&id=5609:obamas-twisted-version-of-american-exceptionalism-laid-bare http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/11264-john-cusack-and-jonathan-turley-on-obamas-constitution TURLEY: That's exactly right. In fact, President Obama has not only maintained the position of George W. Bush in the area of national securities and in civil liberties, he's actually expanded on those positions. He is actually worse than George Bush in some areas. CUSACK: Can you speak to which ones? TURLEY: Well, a good example of it is that President Bush ordered the killing of an American citizen when he approved a drone strike on a car in Yemen that he knew contained an American citizen as a passenger. Many of us at the time said, "You just effectively ordered the death of an American citizen in order to kill someone else, and where exactly do you have that authority?" But they made an argument that because the citizen wasn't the primary target, he was just collateral damage. And there are many that believe that that is a plausible argument. CUSACK: By the way, we're forgetting to kill even a foreign citizen is against the law. I hate to be so quaint... TURLEY: Well, President Obama outdid President Bush. He ordered the killing of two US citizens as the primary targets and has then gone forward and put out a policy that allows him to kill any American citizen when he unilaterally determines them to be a terrorist threat. Where President Bush had a citizen killed as collateral damage, President Obama has actually a formal policy allowing him to kill any US citizen. TURLEY: Indeed. I heard from people in the administration after I wrote a column a couple weeks ago about the assassination policy. And they basically said, "Look, you're not giving us our due. Holder said in the speech that we are following a constitutional analysis. And we have standards that we apply." It is an incredibly seductive argument, but there is an incredible intellectual disconnect. Whatever they are doing, it can't be called a constitutional process. Obama has asserted the right to kill any citizen that he believes is a terrorist. He is not bound by this panel that only exists as an extension of his claimed inherent absolute authority. He can ignore them. He can circumvent them. In the end, with or without a panel, a president is unilaterally killing a US citizen. This is exactly what the framers of the Constitution told us not to do. CUSACK: The framers didn't say, "In special cases, do what you like. When there are things the public cannot know for their own good, when it's extra-specially a dangerous world... do whatever you want." The framers of the Constitution always knew there would be extraordinary circumstances, and they were accounted for in the Constitution. The Constitution does not allow for the executive to redefine the Constitution when it will be politically easier for him to get things done. TURLEY: No. And it's preposterous to argue that. CUSACK: When does it become — criminal? TURLEY: Well, the framers knew what it was like to have sovereigns kill citizens without due process. They did it all the time back in the 18th century. They wrote a constitution specifically to bar unilateral authority. James Madison is often quoted for his observation that if all men were angels, no government would be necessary. And what he was saying is that you have to create a system of law that has checks and balances so that even imperfect human beings are restrained from doing much harm. Madison and other framers did not want to rely on the promises of good motivations or good intents from the government. They created a system where no branch had enough authority to govern alone — a system of shared and balanced powers. So what Obama's doing is to rewrite the most fundamental principle of the US Constitution. The whole point of the Holder speech was that we're really good guys who take this seriously, and you can trust us. That's exactly the argument the framers rejected, the "trust me" principle of government. You'll notice when Romney was asked about this, he said, "I would've signed the same law, because I trust Obama to do the right thing." They're both using the very argument that the framers warned citizens never to accept from their government. TURLEY: The greatest problem is what it has done to us and what our relative silence signifies. Liberals and civil libertarians have lost their own credibility, their own moral standing, with the support of President Obama. For many civil libertarians it is impossible to vote for someone who has blocked the prosecution of war crimes. That's where you cross the Rubicon for most civil libertarians. That was a turning point for many who simply cannot to vote for someone who is accused of that type of violation. Under international law, shielding people from war-crime prosecutions is itself a form of war crime. They're both violations of international law. Notably, when the Spanish moved to investigate our torture program, we now know that the Obama administration threatened the Spanish courts and the Spanish government that they better not enforce the treaty against the US This was a real threat to the Administration because these treaties allow other nations to step forward when another nation refuses to uphold the treaty. If a government does not investigate and prosecute its own accused war criminals, then other countries have the right to do so. That rule was, again, of our own creation. With other leading national we have long asserted the right to prosecute people in other countries who are shielded or protected by their own countries. CUSACK: Didn't Spain pull somebody out of Chile under that? TURLEY: Yeah, Pinochet. CUSACK: Yeah, also our guy... TURLEY: The great irony of all this is that we're the architect of that international process. We're the one that always pushed for the position that no government could block war crimes prosecution. But that's not all. The Obama administration has also outdone the Bush administration in other areas. For example, one of the most important international principles to come out of World War II was the rejection of the "just following orders" defense. We were the country that led the world in saying that defendants brought before Nuremberg could not base their defense on the fact that they were just following orders. After Nuremberg, there were decades of development of this principle. It's a very important point, because that defense, if it is allowed, would shield most people accused of torture and war crime. So when the Obama administration – CUSACK: That also parallels into the idea that the National Defense Authorization Act is using its powers not only to put a chilling effect on whistleblowers, but to also make it illegal for whistleblowers to bring the truth out. Am I right on that, or is that an overstatement? TURLEY: Well, the biggest problem is that when the administration was fishing around for some way to justify not doing the right thing and not prosecuting torture, they finally released a document that said that CIA personnel and even some DOJ lawyers were "just following orders," but particularly CIA personnel. The reason Obama promised them that none of them would be prosecuted is he said that they were just following the orders of higher authority in the government. That position gutted Nuremberg. Many lawyers around the world are upset because the US under the Obama administration has torn the heart out of Nuremberg. Just think of the implications: other countries that are accused of torture can shield their people and say, "Yeah, this guy was a torturer. This guy ordered a war crime. But they were all just following orders. And the guy that gave them the order, he's dead." It is the classic defense of war criminals. Now it is a viable defense again because of the Obama administration. CUSACK: So would you say this assassination issue, or the speech and the clause in the NDAA and this signing statement that was attached, was equivalent to John Yoo's torture document? TURLEY: Oh, I think it's amazing. It is astonishing the dishonesty that preceded and followed its passage. Before passage, the administration told the public that the president was upset about the lack of an exception for citizens and that he was ready to veto the bill if there was a lack of such an exception. Then, in an unguarded moment, Senator Levin was speaking to another Democratic senator who was objecting to the fact that citizens could be assassinated under this provision, and Levin said, "I don't know if my colleague is aware that the exception language was removed at the request of the White House." Many of us just fell out of our chairs. It was a relatively rare moment on the Senate floor, unguarded and unscripted. CUSACK: I hate to speak too much to motivation, but why do you think MSNBC and other so-called centrist or left outlets won't bring up any of these things? These issues were broadcast and reported on nightly when John Ashcroft and Alberto Gonzalez and Bush were in office. TURLEY: Well, there is no question that some at MSNBC have backed away from these issues, although occasionally you'll see people talk about – CUSACK: I think that's being kind, don't you? More like "abandoned." TURLEY: Yeah. The civil liberties perspective is rarely given more than a passing reference while national security concerns are explored in depth. Fox is viewed as protective of Bush while MSNBC is viewed as protective of Obama. But both presidents are guilty of the same violations. There are relatively few journalists willing to pursue these questions aggressively and objectively, particularly on television. And so the result is that the public is hearing a script written by the government that downplays these principles. They don't hear the word "torture." They hear "enhanced interrogation." They don't hear much about the treaties. They don't hear about the international condemnation of the United States. Most Americans are unaware of how far we have moved away from Nuremberg and core principles of international law. CUSACK: So the surreal Holder speech — how could it be that no one would be reporting on that? How could it be that has gone by with not a bang but a whimper? TURLEY: Well, you know, part of it, John, I think, is that this administration is very clever. First of all, they clearly made the decision right after the election to tack heavily to the right on national security issues. We know that by the people they put on the National Security Council. They went and got very hardcore folks — people who are quite unpopular with civil libertarians. Not surprisingly we almost immediately started to hear things like the pledge not to prosecute CIA officials and other Bush policies being continued. Many reporters buy into these escape clauses that the administration gives them, this is where I think the administration is quite clever. From a legal perspective, the Holder speech should have been exposed as perfect nonsense. If you're a constitutional scholar, what he was talking about is facially ridiculous, because he was saying that we do have a constitutional process–it's just self-imposed, and we're the only ones who can review it. They created a process of their own and then pledged to remain faithful to it. While that should be a transparent and absurd position, it gave an out for journalists to say, "Well, you know, the administration's promising that there is a process, it's just not the court process." That's what is so clever, and why the Obama administration has been far more successful than the Bush administration in rolling back core rights. The Bush administration would basically say, "We just vaporized a citizen in a car with a terrorist, and we're not sorry for it." CUSACK: Obama is far more of an imperial president than Bush in many ways, wouldn't you say? TURLEY: Oh, President Obama has created an imperial presidency that would have made Richard Nixon blush. It is unbelievable. CUSACK: And to say these things, most of the liberal community or the progressive community would say, "Turley and Cusack have lost their minds. What do they want? They want Mitt Romney to come in?" TURLEY: The question is, "What has all of your relativistic voting and support done for you?" That is, certainly there are many people who believe – CUSACK: Well, some of the people will say the bread-and-butter issues, "I got healthcare coverage, I got expanded healthcare coverage." TURLEY: See, that's what I find really interesting. When I talk to people who support the administration, they usually agree with me that torture is a war crime and that the administration has blocked the investigation of alleged war crimes. Then I ask them, "Then, morally, are you comfortable with saying, 'I know the administration is concealing war crimes, but they're really good on healthcare?'" That is what it comes down to. The question for people to struggle with is how we ever hope to regain our moral standing and our high ground unless citizens are prepared to say, "Enough." And this is really the election where that might actually carry some weight — if people said, "Enough. We're not going to blindly support the president and be played anymore according to this blue state/red state paradigm. We're going to reconstruct instead of replicate. It might not even be a reinvented Democratic Party in the end that is a viable option. Civil libertarians are going to stand apart so that people like Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama and others know that there are certain Rubicon issues that you cannot cross, and one of them happens to be civil liberty. CUSACK: Yeah, yeah. And so then it gets down to the question, "Well, are you going to vote for Obama?" And I say, "Well, I don't really know. I couldn't really vote for Hillary Clinton because of her Iraq War vote." Because I felt like that was a line, a Rubicon line – TURLEY: Right. CUSACK: — a Rubicon line that I couldn't cross, right? I don't know how to bring myself to vote for a constitutional law professor, or even a constitutional realist, who throws away due process and claims the authority that the executive branch can assassinate American citizens. I just don't know if I can bring myself to do it. If you want to make a protest vote against Romney, go ahead, but I would think we'd be better putting our energies into local and state politics — occupy Wall Street and organizations and movements outside the system, not national politics, not personalities. Not stadium rock politics. Not brands. That's the only thing I can think of. What would you say? TURLEY: Well, the question, I think, that people have got to ask themselves when they get into that booth is not what Obama has become, but what have we become? That is, what's left of our values if we vote for a person that we believe has shielded war crimes or violated due process or implemented authoritarian powers. It's not enough to say, "Yeah, he did all those things, but I really like what he did with the National Park System." CUSACK: Yeah, or that he did a good job with the auto bailout. TURLEY: Right. I think that people have to accept that they own this decision, that they can walk away. I realize that this is a tough decision for people but maybe, if enough people walked away, we could finally galvanize people into action to make serious changes. We have to recognize that our political system is fundamentally broken, it's unresponsive. Only 11 percent of the public supports Congress, and yet nothing is changing — and so the question becomes, how do you jumpstart that system? How do you create an alternative? What we have learned from past elections is that you don't create an alternative by yielding to this false dichotomy that only reinforces their monopoly on power. CUSACK: I think that even Howard Zinn/Chomsky progressives, would admit that there will be a difference in domestic policy between Obama and a Romney presidency. But DUE PROCESS....I think about how we own it. We own it. Everybody's sort of let it slip. There's no immediacy in the day-to-day on and it's just one of those things that unless they... when they start pulling kids off the street, like they did in Argentina a few years ago and other places, all of a sudden, it's like, "How the hell did that happen?" I say, "Look, you're not helping Obama by enabling him. If you want to help him, hold his feet to the fire." TURLEY: Exactly. CUSACK: The problem is, as I see it, is that regardless of goodwill and intent and people being tired of the status quo and everything else, the information outlets and the powers that be reconstruct or construct the government narrative only as an election game of 'us versus them,' Obama versus Romney, and if you do anything that will compromise that equation, you are picking one side versus the other. Because don't you realize that's going to hurt Obama? Don't you know that's going to help Obama? Don't you know... and they're not thinking through their own sort of self-interest or the community's interest in just changing the way that this whole thing works to the benefit of the majority. We used to have some lines we wouldn't cross–some people who said this is not what this country does ...we don't do this shit, you had to do the right thing. So it's going to be a tough process getting our rights back, but you know Frankie's Law? Whoever stops fighting first – loses.

Conservative analysis of the Liberal Mind

I have been looking for an article to show the conservative analysis of the Liberal mind and found this one this morning from the WSJ http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB10000872396390444812704577607463243209208-lMyQjAxMTAyMDIwMzAyODM3Wj.html?mod=wsj_valetbottom_email James Taranto presents his argument that basically liberals are utopians - a charge that is as mundane as it is profane. But there is, of course, a grain of truth in this. There is an idealism that leads one to believe that accumulation of facts based in science will eventually lead to greater understanding of the world, leading to a better understanding of how to function in the world. For Taranto there appears to be something wrong with that - the notion that Gnostic idealism = Machiavelli = fascism. My reading of the article is that, in the typical polemical way that media people and political hacks exaggerate a small point to make a big point, Taranto lumps any notion of social justice/charity/empathy, etc... with notions of Utopianism. From my point of view it is important to aspire to an ideal while always knowing that it is really not obtainable - this duality escapes these kinds of author's analysis - (And I fall into the trap of writing things like - "this duality escapes the conservative mind" but I'm not really sure this is so as I don't want to fall into my own contradictions).

Lies from Newsweek and Niall Ferguson

I know I should never have subscribed to Newsweek in the first place but I thought it is just for my office. Well I got this week's issue and almost fell out if my seat. Tun I read the article and threw up (intellectually that is). Luckily others have covered the fact checking: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/08/a-full-factcheck-of-niall-fergusons-very-bad-argument-against-obama/261306/#.UDSMQWNtmYM.mailto Also see Krugman's slaying of the article in NYT and his blog. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mobileweb/2012/08/20/paul-krugman-niall-ferguson-newsweek_n_1810136.html?fb_action_ids=10151028955456947%2C4130686837931%2C10151029083916947%2C513367175356904&fb_action_types=news.reads&fb_ref=type%3Aread%2Cuser%3ABDB7f9JxhuBhtOUb2_ftZ0AZFg8&fb_source=other_multiline&action_object_map=%7B%2210151028955456947%22%3A10151066218623434%2C%224130686837931%22%3A10151066218623434%2C%2210151029083916947%22%3A10151035183652424%2C%22513367175356904%22%3A10150271417234959%7D&action_type_map=%7B%2210151028955456947%22%3A%22news.reads%22%2C%224130686837931%22%3A%22news.reads%22%2C%2210151029083916947%22%3A%22news.reads%22%2C%22513367175356904%22%3A%22news.reads%22%7D&action_ref_map=%7B%22513367175356904%22%3A%22type%3Aread%2Cuser%3ABDB7f9JxhuBhtOUb2_ftZ0AZFg8%22%7D&utm_hp_ref=fb&src=sp&comm_ref=false Disgusting stuff and more clear evidence of supposedly MSN bias and corporate control.

Good old article on market quality of health care

http://www.who.int/bulletin/volumes/82/2/PHCBP.pdf Other Commentary: http://healthaffairs.org/blog/2012/05/23/health-care-economics-101-and-the-supreme-court/#comment-198856

E.L. Doctorow editorial - great summary of right wing strategy

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/29/opinion/sunday/unexceptionalism-a-primer.html# When I read this editorial it struck me as one of the best and succinct summaries that I have read. It really drives home the significant flaws in the democracy that we have established and the underlying cultural distortions that have created the stage for our self destruction.

The republican brain

http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/8591-the-republican-brain-on-the-republican-brain

There is research on genetics of political choice

http://nymag.com/news/features/liberals-conservatives-2012-4/

Discover the economic realities

http://g-mond.parisschoolofeconomics.eu/topincomes/

More discussion of political mind

http://www.alternet.org/story/154709/the_strange_conservative_brain%3A_3_reasons_republicans_refuse_to_accept_reality_about_global_warming?akid=8479.212957.7DfCED&rd=1&t=2

The science on the political mind and climate change ideology

http://www.carseyinstitute.unh.edu/publications/IB-Hamilton-Climate-Change-2011.pdf http://comm.stanford.edu/faculty/krosnick/docs/2009/2009%20Global%20warming%20knowledge%20and%20concern%20PUBLISHED.pdf

More on the political mind

http://www.salon.com/2012/02/24/the_ugly_delusions_of_the_educated_conservative/

Liberal/conservative mind

Another article about the different psychologies of different political affiliations: http://www.truth-out.org/republican-brain-why-even-educated-conservatives-deny-science-and-reality/1330187007