Someone is truly pissed

TUESDAY 9 MARCH 201

I'm impressed, When I get this angry, all I can do is sputter. Thanks for this.

I Am Angry

Tuesday 09 March 2010

by: John Cory, t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed 

(Image: Jared Rodriguez / t r u t h o u t; 

Adapted: HeyThereSpaceman., unforth, D Sharon Pruitt)

I am angry.

I'm tired of pundits and know-nothing, media gasbags. I'm tired of snarky "inside politics" programming. I am sick of the bigotry and hatred of "birthers" and faux patriotic cranks and their GOP puppet masters. And I'm really pissed at the Democratic Party that confuses having a plate of limp noodles with having a spine.

I'm going to vomit if I hear the word "bipartisanship" one more time.

It was bipartisanship that gave us this activist, conservative Supreme Court, a Supreme Court that says money is free speech and corporations are persons except when real people try to hold them accountable for their greed and poisonous ways.

Bipartisanship gave us the Patriot Act and FISA and illegal wiretaps and two wars and "free speech zones" and "no fly" lists. God bless bipartisan America.

I get nauseated every time the Senate explains how it takes a super majority to do anything for the American people. Tell you what, Senate Bozos, if it takes 60 votes to pass legislation, then it should take 60 percent of the popular vote to get you elected.

When some Tea Party crank says, "I want my country back," I respond, "No madam, you want your country backward."

When a deficit-mongering politician says, "How do we pay for this?," why not ask, "What did you Republicans do with the surplus we Democrats left you?"

When a compassionate conservative says, "Health care reform is socialism," why not answer, "No, sir, it is the moral and American way to care for people"?

Yes, I can hear it now: "You are naïve and simplistic. These are complicated matters and require sophisticated solutions. Democrats are a big tent and strive for balance. But Republicans block our path at every turn. We are thinking and considering new ways to work in harmony with everyone."

Bite me.

The only thing you get with "harmony" is a barbershop quartet.

Democrats, stop being Republican Lite. Stop whining about that mean GOP and their nasty messaging. Grow a pair; get a message; get a bumper sticker and hang it out there. Get some strong vivid talking points.

G-O-P = Greed Over People.

Greed kills - jobs, people and the economy.

Terrorism is Viagra for Republicans: The more fear - the more excited they get.

When a soldier dies for America, who dares ask if they were gay or straight?

Don't act so shocked, Democratic Party. Have you looked around lately?

You're losing the young vote that showed up to elect Obama. You're losing those old enough to remember real Democrats. Why? Because you don't talk to them anymore than you talk to me. You talk at me. You talk around me. You talk down to me. You talk about me. You don't talk with me. And you don't inspire and you don't champion and without that you are nothing more than an arbitrator of compromise and abdication.

You are facing a bully. Deal with it!

Republicans want the country backward. They champion superstition over science because it entrenches ignorance and bigotry and captures the easily frightened.

Republicans treat the Constitution the way they treat the Bible, with selective interpretation and selective application to others, while exempting themselves from judgment and accountability.

Republicans preach the gospel of fear because fear is darkness and darkness covers their theft of civil liberties and constitutional principles.

For 30 years the Republican Party has claimed the mantel of law and order, but now quake in dread of the American judicial system when putting terrorists on trial. How criminal is that?

Torture is illegal. Period. John Wayne and Jack Bauer were not our Founding Fathers - only in the make-believe world of Republican drugstore patriots.

"Don't ask, don't tell" needs to be repealed. Now. It is unconscionable, immoral and disgusting.

Empathy, compassion and equality are not pejoratives. They are American values proven again and again throughout our history.

Republicans believe that bake sales and cookies for chemotherapy best determine the value of life and health care because life is a pre-existing condition and the "free market" should not have to take on such a high risk - after all, no one gets out alive, so why should the corporation be left holding the bag? Unless, of course, the price is right.

Republicans believe that government should keep its hands off health care, but should put its hands inside a woman's body.

Republicans believe in small government - small enough to hold the "right" people and small enough to be owned and operated by the right people. And who are the right people? Them. Not you.

Democratic Party, DNC, DLCC, DSCC or whatever your acronym - I have only one question for you: Really?

You can't win against these guys? You can't get your message out against these guys? You can't give America leadership against these guys?

Really? 

 
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Let The Sun Shine In......

Don't Like the Sound of This!

March 7, 2010

Op-Ed Columnist

The Up-or-Down Vote on Obama’s Presidency

By FRANK RICH

WEDNESDAY’S health care rally was one of President Obama’s finest hours. It was so fine it couldn’t be blighted even by his preposterous backdrop, a cohort of white-jacketed medical workers large enough to staff a hospital in one of the daytime soaps that refused to be pre-empted by the White House show.

Obama’s urgent script didn’t need such cheesy theatrics. At last he took ownership of what he called “my proposal,” stating concisely three concrete ways the bill would improve America’s broken health care system. At last he pushed for a majority-rule, up-or-down vote in Congress. At last he conceded that bipartisan agreement between two parties with “honest and substantial differences” on fundamental principles wasn’t happening. At last he mobilized his rhetoric against a villain everyone could hiss — insurance companies. In a brief address, he mentioned these malefactors of great greed 13 times
.
There was only one problem. This finest hour arrived hastily and tardily. At 1:45 p.m. Eastern time, who was watching? Of those who did watch or caught up later, how many bought the president’s vow to finish the job “in the next few weeks”? We’ve heard this too many times before. Last May Obama said he would have a bill by late July. In July he said he wanted it “done by the fall.” The White House’s new date for final House action — specified as March 18 by Robert Gibbs, the press secretary — is already in jeopardy.

“They are waiting for us to act,” Obama said on Wednesday of the American people. “They are waiting for us to lead.” Actually, they have given up waiting. Some 80 percent of the country believes that “nothing can be accomplished” in Washington, according to an Ipsos/McClatchy poll conducted a week ago. The percentage is just as high among Democrats, many of whom admire the president but have a sinking sense of disillusionment
about his ability to exercise power.

Now that we have finally arrived at the do-or-die moment for Obama’s signature issue, we face the alarming prospect that his presidency could be toast if he doesn’t make good on a year’s worth of false starts. And it won’t even be the opposition’s fault. If too many Democrats in the House defect, health care will be dead. The G.O.P. would be able to argue this fall, not without reason, that the party holding the White House and both houses of Congress cannot govern.

For the sake of argument, let’s say that Obama does eke out his victory. Republicans claim that if he does so by “ramming through” the bill with the Congressional reconciliation process, they will have another winning issue for November. On this, they are wrong. Their problem is not just their own hypocritical record on reconciliation, which they embraced gladly to ram through the budget-busting Bush tax cuts. They’d also have to contend with this country’s congenitally short attention span. Once the health care fight is over and out of sight, it will be out of mind to most Americans. We’ve already forgotten about Afghanistan — until the next bloodbath.

The 2010 election will instead be fought about the economy, as most elections are, especially in a recession whose fallout remains severe. But that battle may be even tougher for this president and his party — and not just because of the unemployment numbers. The leadership shortfall we’ve witnessed during Obama’s yearlong health care march — typified by the missed deadlines, the foggy identification of his priorities, the sometimes abrupt shifts in political tone and strategy — won’t go away once the bill does. This weakness will remain unless and until the president himself corrects it.

Those who are unsympathetic or outright hostile to Obama frame his failures as an attempt to impose “socialism” on a conservative nation. The truth is that the Fox News right would believe this about any Democratic president no matter who he was and what his policies were. Obama, who has expanded the war in Afghanistan and proved reluctant to reverse extra-constitutional Bush-Cheney jurisprudence, is a radical mainly to those who believe a conservative Republican senator like Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas is a closet commie.

The more serious debate about Obama is being conducted by neutral or sympathetic observers. There are many hypotheses. In Newsweek, Jon Meacham has written about an “inspiration gap.” He sees the professorial president as “sometimes seeming to be running the Brookings Institution, not the country.” In The New Yorker, Ken Auletta has raised the perils of Obama’s overexposure in our fractionalized media. (As if to prove the point, the president was scheduled to appear on Fox’s “America’s Most Wanted” to celebrate its 1,000th episode this weekend.) In the Beltway, the hottest conversations center on the competence of Obama’s team. Washington Post columnists are now dueling over whether Rahm Emanuel is an underutilized genius whose political savvy the president has foolishly ignored — or a bull in the capital china shop who should be replaced before he brings Obama down.

But the buck stops with the president, not his chief of staff. And if there’s one note that runs through many of the theories as to why Obama has disappointed in Year One, it cuts to the heart of what had been his major strength: his ability to communicate a compelling narrative. In the campaign, that narrative, of change and hope, was powerful — both about his own youth, biography and talent, and about a country that had gone wildly off track during the failed presidency of his predecessor. In governing, Obama has yet to find a theme that is remotely as arresting to the majority of Americans who still like him and are desperate for him to succeed.

The problem is not necessarily that Obama is trying to do too much, but that there is no consistent, clear message to unite all that he is trying to do. He has variously argued that health care reform is a moral imperative to protect the uninsured, a long-term fiscal fix for the American economy and an attempt to curb insurers’ abuses. It may be all of these, but between the multitude of motives and the blurriness (until now) of Obama’s own specific must-have provisions, the bill became a mash-up that baffled or defeated those Americans on his side and was easily caricatured as a big-government catastrophe by his adversaries.
Obama prides himself on not being ideological or partisan — of following, as he put it in his first prime-time presidential press conference, a “pragmatic agenda.” But pragmatism is about process, not principle. Pragmatism is hardly a rallying cry for a nation in this much distress, and it’s not a credible or attainable goal in a Washington as dysfunctional as the one Americans watch in real time on cable. Yes, the Bush administration was incompetent, but we need more than a brilliant mediator, manager or technocrat to move us beyond the wreckage it left behind. To galvanize the nation, Obama needs to articulate a substantive belief system that’s built from his bedrock convictions. His presidency cannot be about the cool equanimity and intellectual command of his management style.

That he hasn’t done so can be attributed to his ingrained distrust of appearing partisan or, worse, a knee-jerk “liberal.” That is admirable in intellectual theory, but without a powerful vision to knit together his vision of America’s future, he comes off as a doctrinaire Democrat anyway. His domestic policies, whether on climate change or health care or regulatory reform, are reduced to items on a standard liberal wish list. If F.D.R. or Reagan could distill, coin and convey a credo “nonideological” enough to serve as an umbrella for all their goals and to attract lasting majority coalitions of disparate American constituencies, so can this gifted president.

He cannot wait much longer. The rise in credit-card rates, as well as the drop in consumer confidence, home sales and bank lending, all foretell more suffering ahead for those who don’t work on Wall Street. But on these issues the president, too timid to confront the financial industry backers of his own campaign (or their tribunes in his own administration) and too fearful of sounding like a vulgar partisan populist, has taken to repeating his health care performance.

And so leadership on financial reform, as with health care, has been delegated to bipartisan Congressional negotiators poised to neuter it. The protracted debate that now seems imminent — over whether a consumer protection agency will be in the Fed or outside it — is again about the arcana of process and bureaucratic machinery, not substance. Since Obama offers no overarching narrative of what financial reform might really mean to Americans in their daily lives, Americans understandably assume the reforms will be too compromised or marginal to alter a system that leaves their incomes stagnant (at best) while bailed-out bankers return to partying like it’s 2007. Even an unimpeachable capitalist titan like Warren Buffett, venting in his annual letter to investors last month, sounds more fired up about unregulated derivatives and more outraged about unpunished finance-industry executives than the president does.

This time Obama doesn’t have a year to arrive at his finest hour. Not to put too fine a point on it, but the clock runs out on Nov. 2.

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Let The Sun Shine In......

DOJ and Election Manipulation (continued)

By Brad Friedman on 3/8/2010 6:02PM  

 

DOJ TO REQUIRE ES&S TO SELL OFF ASSETS FROM DIEBOLD MERGER CITING ANTI-TRUST CONCERNS

The Department of Justice's Anti-trust division has determined that the purchase of Premier Election Solutions, Diebold Inc.'s recently renamed e-voting division, by Election Systems & Software, Inc. (ES&S), has resulted in a voting machine monopoly. The DoJ and nine states that have joined in a lawsuit are suing to require ES&S to divest of the assets gained in the bargain-basement priced purchase of Diebold's e-voting outfit last September.

The merger with Diebold/Premier, ES&S's second largest competitor, had given ES&S, a private corporation which already controlled some 50% of U.S. elections with its electronic voting systems, a full 70% control of the votes cast in this country. The acquisition had been opposed by election integrity organizations, Hart Intercivic (a much smaller Austin-based competitor), the New York Times' editorial board, and U.S. Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) in his capacity as chairman of the Senate Rules Committee, and was being investigated by 14 different states along with the DoJ's anti-trust division...

A settlement has been struck, pending approval by a federal judge, between the DOJ, nine states, and ES&S requiring that the private company find a DoJ-approved purchaser of the Diebold/Premier assets. Prior to the $5 million sale to ES&S, Diebold had been searching for a buyer for a number of years, even as it faced investigations by the SEC and the DoJ, share-holder class action suits, and a number of legal battles with states and country jurisdictions around the country after voting systems were found to have failed or in violation of federal and state standards. Diebold purchased the election division from Global Election Systems in 2002 for the price of $25 million.

The proposed settlement, signed by the DoJ, ES&S, and representatives of state attorneys general in Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Mexico, Tennessee, and Washington has been posted here [PDF].

An AP report on the potential lawsuit by the DoJ last week noted that "As a privately held company, ES&S issues no financial reports. It didn't tell the Justice Department about the Diebold deal because the transaction wasn't big enough to trigger the federal law that requires the government to be informed of big mergers before they are completed."

The article added that a Congressional Research Service report found the merger had given ES&S "a presence in 90 percent of the states" making it the "sole source" for election systems in "at least 20," given them "a market share three or more times that of its closest competitor."
AP's coverage of today's news can be found here.

The DoJ-ordered unwinding of the merger, however, will do little to ensure the accuracy or ability of citizens to oversee their own elections run on unobservable, easily manipulated, oft-failed electronic voting systems which use secret software made by private corporations to count votes in our public elections.

Just one recent example of the dangers of easily manipulated e-voting systems made by ES&S, Diebold, and others can be found in the current federal trial, now ongoing in Clay County, KY, of six top election officials who are alleged, as we reported last week, to have manipulated election results by flipping votes on ES&S voting machines, without the knowledge of voters, as part of a decades-long election rigging scheme.

UPDATE: The DoJ's announcement of the requirement and proposed settlement is now posted here...
* * *  The BRAD BLOG covers your electoral system fiercely and independently, like no other media outlet in the nation. Please support our work with a donation to help us keep going (Snail mail, more options here). If you like, we'll send you some great, award-winning election integrity documentary films in return! Details right here...

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Let The Sun Shine In......

Republican lack of partisanship

 

Continues to be shocking, if not surprising.

 

March 7, 2010

Retiring Dem: GOP doesn't want to dance on health care

Posted: March 7th, 2010 11:24 AM ET

From CNN Associate Producer Martina Stewart

Retiring Rep. Brian Baird said Sunday that Republicans see health care reform as 'a potent political weapon.'

Washington (CNN) – A retiring House Democrat who is himself unsure whether he will back his own party’s health care reform bill criticized congressional Republicans Sunday for their lack of bipartisanship on the issue of health care.

“Tom DeLay was on ‘Dancing with the Stars,’” Rep. Brian Baird, D-Washington, said on CNN’s State of the Union, referring to the Republican former House Majority leader, who was also a guest on the show.

Later: DeLay explains turn on DWTS

“We don’t have a dance partner,” Baird said. “We don’t have someone on the other side who is seriously willing to say, ‘If you do these things, you will have our support.’ And the reason is they see it as such a potent political weapon.”

Assuming - as many in his party have recently – that the final health care reform legislation will get no Republican support, Baird defended use of a Senate procedural measure called reconciliation which allows certain budgetary bills in the Senate to be passed with just 51 votes.

“The choice you’re left with is a majority vote which I think most people think is how we ought to do things anyway,” Baird told CNN Senior Political Correspondent Candy Crowley. “And, secondly, the Republicans used reconciliation on multiple times including for the mother of all deficit increases, the Bush tax cuts.”

Baird previously voted against the health care reform bill that passed in the House. Now the Washington Democrat is trying to determine whether he will support a final bill based largely on the version passed by the Senate but modified slightly to address some issues of particular concern to the White House and House Democrats.

Related video: Dem unsure on health care

Baird, who was a practicing neuropsychologist before being elected to Congress, told Crowley he supports the idea of overhauling the health care system. “We have to do something and I actually applaud President Obama and the Democratic Party for taking this difficult challenge on,” he said.

“The question is: Is this the best way we can do reform?,” Baird said of his reservations. “It is very complicated. It will be expensive.” Baird quickly noted that both the House and the Senate bill would be largely paid for and have both been projected to reduce the deficit over time.

Baird said he would have approached crafting a bill “a good bit differently.”

“I would like to see us start and say ‘What are the things we can agree on?’”

The Democrat told Crowley he thought most Americans agree that “you should not discriminate against pre-existing conditions. I think it makes a lot of sense to be able to buy policies across state lines so you have competition and you can carry your policy with you if you move or lose your job.

“The complexity, I think, worries a lot of people,” Baird added.

Baird also said Sunday that he is not swayed by the notion of voting in favor the bill because his impending retirement means he will face no political consequences for supporting an unpopular piece of legislation.

“My personal struggle is, quite frankly, could we not do this in a much more simple, elegant, direct, straightforward way? I think we could. I doubt I’m going to get a chance to do that, so the difficult choice for some of us is to say: ‘This is not the bill I would write, by a darn sight, but it is certainly better than the status quo. What would we do if we don’t have this option?’”

Asked by Crowley whether he would vote against a final bill after determining it did not met his personal criteria even if that vote meant that one of the president’s top domestic agenda items would not pass, Baird did not hesitate: “Yes.”

But Baird quickly sought to clarify. The retiring Democrat said it would be “a tragedy” if some type of health care reform was not enacted. “And so that’s the choice. I don’t think this bill is what I would like to see us do if I ran the universe, as it were, but I don’t get to do that so the status quo is unsustainable.”

After a year of legislative work on health care reform on Capitol Hill, the White House has recently stepped in to try to move the process forward. Right now congressional Democrats are waiting for the administration to release final legislative language for a bill that would be put to a vote in both chambers through the reconciliation procedure. The bill crafted by the White House would contain a number of tweaks to the health care reform bill passed by the Senate late last year. In order to harmonize the provisions of the two separate bills passed by the House and Senate last year, the House will be asked to pass the Senate bill unchanged and then both chambers would be asked to vote on the White House bill.

Senate Democrats have had to fall back on the reconciliation process after losing the critical 60th vote in their caucus when Republican Scott Brown won a recent special election to occupy the seat held for decades by the late Democratic Sen. Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts.

Follow Martina Stewart on Twitter: @MMStewartCNN

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Let The Sun Shine In......

Is It Doomsday for the Consumer Financial Protection Agency?

And I thought that Dodd was on our side.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?

by Alison Hamm, Media Consortium Blogger

Just when the Democrats need to be tougher than ever on financial reform, Senate Banking Committee Chair Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT), seems to have given up completely and put the proposed Consumer Financial Protection Agency (CFPA) at risk.

Last fall, Dodd called the Federal Reserve's regulatory efforts an "abysmal failure." And yet, on March 1, he proposed housing a consumer protection agency within the Fed instead of establishing the CFPA as its own independent entity. This drastic change in strategy has left many Democrats shaking their heads. WTF, Senator Dodd?


A change in focus
As Andy Kroll reports for Mother Jones:

Dodd appears to have switched his focus from out-reforming the White House to out-compromising just about everyone. As the Senate banking committee prepares to release a draft of a comprehensive reform bill as early as this week, Dodd has repeatedly conceded to his Republican counterparts on key issues, almost guaranteeing that the Senate's measure will be far more lenient on the banking industry than the legislation the House passed in December...

Dodd's willingness to appease Republicans like Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), the main GOP negotiating partner, and Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.), the banking committee's ranking member, has disappointed Dodd's fellow Democrats and reform advocates who urge a tougher crackdown.

Whither the CFPA?

Dodd's latest GOP compromise is part of a bigger problem: The Democrats have mishandled financial reform. As Nomi Prins writes for AlterNet, "Dodd's latest effort at creating a new Consumer Financial Protection Agency would render the regulator utterly powerless, but it's not the only issue Democrats appear willing to sacrifice to Wall Street campaign contributions. Right now, just about every other major element of the so-called Wall Street overhaul seems headed for disaster."

Although the establishment of the CFPA has been fiercely opposed by the banks and Republicans, it has widespread approval among progressives and the general public. So why has Dodd apparently abandoned it through compromise? Maybe because he's following the lead of his fellow Democrats. Prins notes: "Since June, we've been waiting to see whether Democrats had the spine to make sure the final agency would actually do something, or quietly gut reform with a barrage of loopholes."

There's still time for Dodd to push real reform before he retires. Or, like Prin says, he could "continue to wimp out for Wall Street, pull a Robert Rubin and secure a cushy job in banking come 2011. The next few months will indicate whether Dodd cares more about his legacy than his wallet."
 

Solis a 'bright spot'

But maybe there is hope. Department of Labor Secretary Hilda Solis has made considerable progress, as Mark Engler emphasizes for Yes! magazine. Engler calls Obama's Labor appointment a "bright spot" in the administration's first year—a move "that illustrate[s] the difference that a progressive-minded administration can make when it stands up to corporate interests and is unafraid to act in the public good."
Engler writes:

Under the Bush administration’s Department of Labor, the crisis of wage theft was summarily ignored. In March 2009, the Government Accountability Office issued a report saying that the department’s Wage and Hour Division had for years 'left thousands of actual victims of wage theft who sought federal government assistance with nowhere to turn.' Secretary Solis made reversing this trend a defining initiative of her department. Even before the report had been released, she had commenced the hiring of 150 new field investigators to enforce wage and child labor laws, as well as 100 more to police government contractors working on stimulus programs.

As Engler argues, officials would do well to follow the lead of Secretary Solis and demonstrate "what can be accomplished when regulators are encouraged to actually do their jobs—to fight for the interests of workers, for example — vigorously and creatively."


Buffet on banking

Finally, GRITtv's Laura Flanders reviews Warren Buffet's annual letter to shareholders, in which Buffet warns his clients that their financial advisers’ advice is skewed by the financial system. As Flanders notes:

Ironically, just as Buffett's letter was being published, the man it'll take to make any agency happen -- Christopher Dodd -- is agreeing to defang the agency, strip it of independence and most prosecution power.

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Let The Sun Shine In......

Enraged and Apoplectic

 

Tea Party Movement Hopelessly Divided Into Enraged, Apoplectic Factions

February 15, 2010 | Issue 46•07

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WASHINGTON—Organizers of the Tea Party movement, a group opposed to the federal government’s attempts to alleviate the ongoing financial crisis through increased spending and taxation, announced today that their members have split down reactionary lines into those who are apoplectic in regard to the Obama administration and those who are merely enraged. “This rift is absolutely irresolvable,” screamed red-faced events coordinator Daniel Hume, head of the movement’s apoplectic faction. “We believe that now is simply not the time to be irrationally furious about unprecedented economic policies that have had little more than a year to start showing any signs of effectiveness. Now is the time to be foaming-at-the-mouth, incoherently livid about them.” A third camp of angry protesters had reportedly emerged from the recent upheaval, but its entire membership tragically died from massive brain aneurysms shortly after the group formed.

This is from the onion. O.K. Be honest. How many of you thought the article was for real?

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Let The Sun Shine In......

Continuing with Turkey Tuesday

Hey, we cannot be expected to be serious all the effing time. Well, can we?

Politics

Latest Sarah Palin Speech Opens Sixth Seal 02.24.10

IDAHO FALLS, ID—"Admittedly, this is not what we were expecting," said a University of Cambridge doctor of divinity. "The Bible speaks of a beast with seven horns and seven eyes, not a raven-haired woman from the north who knows not what foolishness she speaks of." more»

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Some bullshit happening somewhere

You gotta see this. Hey we have to laugh or we'll all go insane.

http://www.theonion.com/content/video/breaking_news_some_bullshit?utm_source=videoembed

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More Palin Hypocrisy; This Time It's Healthcare

Can anyone really take this woman seriously? 

by Jeffrey Joseph

With President Obama working hard to take his message of healthcare reform to the people and health insurers looking to raise rates, it appears rather telling about the larger debate that Sarah Palin, FOX contributor and one of healthcare reform's most public opponents, has been such an overt hypocrite about the topic.

Reminiscing about her childhood, Palin recently told a group in Canada about how she and her family used to cross the border to receive healthcare in Canada. It indeed proved an "ironic" admission, as she called it, though Palin left it unclear if she realized in what way. This same woman has denigrated healthcare reform efforts in the U.S., which aspire to move the nation closer to the rankings of the far more successful Canadian system, as "downright evil." Even now, years after she and her family reaped the benefits of Canada's universal healthcare, Palin had the audacity to criticize that system for needing to allow a "private sector takeover" as if that model has always served her well in the past.

Palin's story reveals more about how much of a joke she is, and not just because of her stand-up performance on Jay Leno. The interview with Leno had her actually parroting FOX's motto in demanding "that there needs to be the fairness, the balance in there. That's why I joined FOX." Surprisingly, she did not appear to make that utterance in good humor, perhaps unwilling to test the audience too much. As one member of the audience and author of the Going Rouge coloring book noted, Palin's humor appeared to fall flat and require a laugh track to make it presentable. She may have had better luck eliciting laughter if she tried her line defending her incredibly hypocritical telepalmer incident by claiming that God does it, too.

No wonder Palin so regularly denigrates the media, of which she is a member, and tries to exclude others from her events; the jokes that she makes intentionally hardly have the desired effect, but the real humor and insight into her values come from Palin's attempts to be serious. For the adequately informed, Palin makes for an unwitting jester. Unfortunately, for a number of people willfully ignorant of Palin's hypocrisy, the views she pretends to hold could harm the progress of the concerned citizens who would rather not have to cross the border for healthcare. They should ask for the the would-be comedian to be pulled from the stage -- and choose to Turn Off FOX.

Please send in tips and success stories to turnofffox@gmail.com, look out for us on Twitter @turnofffox, and join us at BuzzFlash in the Campaign to Turn Off FOX News. And please forward this article to a friend. You can drive the message home by obtaining a Turn Off FOX Bumper Sticker. Just Click Here.

Originally posted at Turn Off FOX.

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THE FIFTH COLUMNIST by P.M. Carpenter

"Let us now praise Rahm Emanuel.

"No, seriously."

With those eight catnipping words, the Post's Dana Milbank ignited a classic Washington firestorm last month, which has yet to die out. Within the commentariat, the shortest route to Beltway notoriety is to gather intelligence on what most everyone else is writing, and then just write the opposite. In Milbank's curmudgeonly case of the 21st of February, however, a certain truth also inhered, which is what made the flames of outrage burn so hot and hurtful.
"Sacking Emanuel is the last thing the president should do," wrote Milbank, implicitly urging that the next thing the president should do is to sack Valerie Jarrett, Robert Gibbs and David Axelrod -- all "part of the Cult of Obama. In love with the president, they believe he is a transformational figure who needn't dirty his hands in politics," which of course for a politician can be hygienically fatal.

"Now in trouble," concluded Milbank, "Obama needs fewer acolytes and more action" -- and on that note the Post's columnist swung back onto the Beltway ramp of critical conventional wisdom; he simply took the contrarian route to get there.

Which is why Providence created columns and columnists in the first place. They've always been with us, whether in the form of "anti-administration" graffiti scratched on clay tablets or inked on papyrus scrolls or smuggled as samizdat. Yet political columnists mostly follow the lead of the 16th century's Michel de Montaigne, perhaps the world's true ur-columnist, who once confessed, as I recall in paraphrase, that in male beauty or athletic ability or even learnedness he may place second, but in political opinion he takes a backseat to no man. You gotta love it.

As I did Milbank's contrariness, but also because of its essential truth (in my superior political opinion). Emanuel may not be lovable, but he does provide presidential contrast: his earthy calculations, as Milbank noted, nicely and more importantly and even more necessarily balance the president's airy idealism.
And in that Milbankian phrase -- "the president's airy idealism" -- is where things get really interesting, since Obama is generally assaulted by the inexhaustibly noble commentariat at large for favoring a compromised pragmatism over unshakable lofty intent.

"Obama prides himself on not being ideological or partisan -- of following, as he put it in his first prime-time presidential press conference, a 'pragmatic agenda,' " accurately wrote last Sunday the NY Times' Frank Rich, with whom I have always found myself in virtual uniform agreement. Virtual. Because here, Mr. Rich erred in his restatement of flawed conventional wisdom: "But pragmatism is about process, not principle."

I appreciate that my simply saying that isn't so doesn't make it so, so I'll quote instead from one of the philosophical co-founders of American Pragmatism, William James: This approach, and here I'll relate it to national governance, is "fully armed and militant" (my emphasis) he wrote in 1907, in the thick of the Progressive Era, because "It appears less as a solution ... than as a program for more work, and more particularly as an indication of the ways in which existing realities may be changed" (his emphasis).

Changed, it is almost needless to add, for the better. "If there be any life that it is really better we should lead," James reflected, "and if there be any idea which, if believed in, would help us to lead that life, then it would be really better for us to believe in that idea...." And that's what lies at the practical though transcendently principled and progressive core of Pragmatism, America's only authentically original philosophy.

Rich also ventured that "Pragmatism is ... not a credible or attainable goal in a Washington as dysfunctional as the one Americans watch in real time on cable" -- and here, I'm somewhat resistingly back in agreement.

Pragmatism may indeed be the only cure for our dysfunctional government, as President Obama philosophically, and perhaps instinctively, understands -- But is the government's dysfunctionality in fact too far gone? And the answer to that question is what historians will be writing about 50 years hence; not, as I think Dana Milbank quite subtly understood and expressed, whether Rahm Emanuel stayed or left.

Please respond to P.M.'s commentary by leaving comments below and sharing them with the BuzzFlash community. For personal questions or comments you can contact him at fifthcolumnistmail@gmail.com
THE FIFTH COLUMNIST by P.M. Carpenter

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Let The Sun Shine In......