There must be Rum in the Rum River … Only possible explanation

There are a couple of rummys short of pint living near the Rum River in Minnesota.

I lived in Minnesota for awhile in the mid 1990s. Thankfully, not this part of Minnesota represented by Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann. Sesame’s Street’s Elmo needs to send some tapes over there to improve the educational results in Lake Elmo and some of her other communities, I fear. I’ve watched committee hearings with questioning by Bachmann and seen her ask questions that have made me question her grasp on just about everything including reality. It must run in the waters of the Rum River, because she’s not the only elected official up there that seems confused. Check this out at Think Progress and Roll Call where one of Bachmann’s constituents, LeRoy Schaffer, a St. Francis city council member evidently showed up in a tuxedo and a top hat to one of her health care town hall meetings and made the following pithy statement.

Shaffer got visibly emotional asking Bachmann about the future of health care and the role of special interests in Washington.

“I’ll be danged if I am going to give up my Social Security because of socialism,” Schaffer said, before being booed by the crowd.

How many in the room think this man probably gets all his information and news from either Rush Limbaugh or

Congress Women Michelle Bachmann explains how she came up with the theory that God Created a Flat Earth in 7 days without the help of Socialists or Communists.

Glenn Beck? Sean Hannity? Bill O’Reilly? Bueller? Bueller?

With deafening cheers and a few jeers, hundreds of people packed a health care town hall meeting Thursday held by U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann, some targeting the Republican with the kind of anger previously directed at Democrats.

“Why do you persist on distorting the president’s plan?” asked Ilya Gorodisher, 46, of the Stillwater area, accusing Bachmann of “stretching the truth to the point of lies.”

Bachmann, who represents the Sixth District, defended her claim that President Obama’s plan would crowd out existing private insurers, and suggested Democratic plans were big gambles.

“Washington, D.C., is telling the American people, ‘Trust us,’” she said.

Bachman obviously believes you can’t trust Washington, D.C. However, the Congresswoman, who lives in Washington, D.C. felt she deserved to be trusted on this issue. Bachmann (via the Roll Coll link) gives us this stunning example of why national health care is doomed to fail. Relying on personal anecdotes and faith based reliance on her medical insurance is always a way to prove your case.

At one point, Bachmann told the crowd: “I believe we have the best health care in the world.”

“I far prefer American health care than medical care in the U.K. any day of the week,” Bachmann said.

Lifting a stack of news reports about the health care problems in England, Bachmann told a story about women having to give birth in hospital hallways.

One angry male constituent yelled, “That happens here.” And Bachmann quickly retorted, “I’ve given birth here probably more times than you, sir.”

Elmo sez, only Glenn Becksters think the CIA Factbook is subject to frequent hacking and that it skews data to make other countries look good. Smart lil monsters know you can check out how the US ranks in infant mortality at https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2091rank.html

Since I don’t know any one that’s ever given birth any where but a hospital, it can’t possibly happen here, can it? My eldest daughter delivers babies in hospitals. Of course, I had two daughters while having access to good health care insurance in a hospital so I’m a serious authority on this too. Yup, never have I ever heard of any one having a baby any place else but in a delivery room in, you guessed it, a hospital! The Celestial Teapot has obviously blessed the American Health Insurance Industry personally! I mean, just ignore the U.S. ranking on the number of infant deaths as compared to any other developed economy, or for that matter developing economy. My personal experience obviously trumps it all. Plus, there’s that Celestial Teapot thing. Nah, you’re not buying it are you? Then why do some of the voters in Minnesota? She’s won elections for Teapot’s sake!!!

On a serious note, here are the rankings for Infant Mortality. If you love babies, you want to rank near the bottom not the top so higher numbers are better. Its from the CIA Factbook. Out of 224 countries ranked for 2009, the UK ranked 193. Canada was 189. The United States is number 180 which is one ranking lower than Cuba and one ranking higher than the Faroe Islands. Gee, Congresswoman Bachmann, aren’t you proud to be an American now? Our health care system rations health care so that more potential Republican babies in the US die than Marxist Babies in Cuba. It must be a communist plot!

Please Digg!! Share!! Tweet!!! and keep your fingers crossed that the fine folks in Minnesota wake up and get rid of her in 2010!!

(Oh, and since I brought up RUM you might as well treat this as an open thread with whatever cocktail you can chase down in your neck of the woods.)

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Update:

On Redefining Illiteracy and Innumeracy

I’ve been highly frustrated recently by the appalling level 0f uncivil discourse at town hall meetings. Here’s the latest experience for Howard Dean as reported by the Hill. Yesterday, I watched Senator John McCain’s meeting and his was booed several times for making statements that were true by definition. The hatred in the air is palpable even over a TV screen. What reasonable person could argue with something that is true by definition? It’s the most basic proof of all.

Well, we seemed to have lost our ability to present opposing viewpoints with the use of logic, data, and information. I was thinking about this on my drive across the bayous to campus this morning for several reason. First, I had a run-in with a group of Beck worshipers (yes, he’s a loser babee, but he’s not the singer). Second, I’m in my first set of lectures where I have to set up some definitions so we can move forward with the rest. That’s when I figured it out. There’s an entire misinformation industry out there making money on confusing the intellectually vulnerable on standard definitions. It’s now so bad,that you can say that’s untrue by definition or it’s a tautology and folks will tell you it’s just skewed data or your opinion.

How can you possibly reason with any one who thinks your data is bad because their basic definition is flawed? How do you debate some one who has refitted and redefined a definition to match their argument rather than some one who looks at the definition and tries to fit the argument to the definition? Well, you can’t. Especially when they actually believe that the generally excepted definition is arguable. To me, this redefines both illiteracy and innumeracy.

When we are very young toddlers, we start learning to posit definitions with the help of our elders. Every one who has seen a toddler call every four legged furry animal a doggie has seen this happen. We say, no, that’s not a doggie, that’s a kitty or a horsie or a moo cow, until the toddler can put the animal into the correct set. The correct set is the universally agreed upon definition of the term. The toddler does not argue that your definition of kitty is your opinion. We’d never be able to communicate with any one if we each had unique definitions for every word. Yet, there are those with political and personal agendas that would make it so.

This is what has happened in political discourse. The generally accepted and agreed upon definitions of socialism, fascism, liberalism, racism, and other related terms are now malleable and debatable. Glen Beck is one example of a person that redefines and distorts these generally accepted definitions for a living. He’s the reason I beat my head against the wall whenever I have to tell person, that by definition, Barack Obama is not a socialist or a fascist. Keith Olbermann is another example. He’s the reason I beat my head against the wall whenever I have to tell a person, by definition, that Bill Clinton is not a racist. These ‘misinformants’ have completely made up their own definitions. As a result, those of us that follow the traditional, universally agreed upon definitions set up by scholars in the fields cannot have a civil discourse with any of their minions.

Here, let me show you. I’m going to borrow the Merriam Webster Dictionary of definition of Socialism. It’s short and sweet.

Main Entry: so·cial·ism

Pronunciation: \ˈsō-shə-ˌli-zəm\

Function: noun

Date: 1837

1 : any of various economic and political theories advocating collective or governmental ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods

2 a : a system of society or group living in which there is no private property b : a system or condition of society in which the means of production are owned and controlled by the state

3 : a stage of society in Marxist theory transitional between capitalism and communism and distinguished by unequal distribution of goods and pay according to work done

Take a good look at that definition and tell me, just once, when anything Barack Obama has said or done to date has had anything to do with advocating collective or governmental administration of the means of production and distribution of goods. He didn’t do it with Chrysler, he didn’t do it with GM, and he hasn’t done it to any financial institution that was held in momentary receivership, given TARP funds, or pushed towards bankruptcy. What he has done has been to take public funds and pour them into privately owned means of production and distribution of goods. GM is still owned by stockholders and now, very much, by its unions who have been enriched by tax payer dollars. All those financial institutions have not been nationalized but they have been given sweetheart loans. If he was a socialist he’d have jumped at the opportunity to grab their assets and he did nothing of the kind. If anything, he typifies cronyism. He is not a socialist.

I lifted this from the Black Agenda Report!!!

Also, the socialists themselves don’t claim him. I’ve been reading the very left leaning Black Agenda Report for months. They can’t stand him. The one openly socialist Senator we have, Bernie Sanders, doesn’t agree with Obama’s policies on health care or corporate bail outs or trade. Heck, even Socialist activist John Pilger thinks he’s a “clever corporate marketing creation.”

So, give then definition above and the data below it, can I get a shout out that BY definition, Barack Obama is NO socialist !

No? Are you going to give me the guilt by association argument? He knows a few socialists, therefore he is a socialist? (In that case I should be a Christian and a Republican because most of the folks I know, work with, live by and are related to are those and I’m neither.) What else can you do? Well, if you’re a Glenn Beck Acolyte you will take his misdefinition and tell me, just wait because I will eventually be proven wrong or that my data is skewed or that I really don’t know a thing about real socialism. I was even told by several Becksters that my data was skewed and my facts were wrong when I sent them to look at the CIA website containing the CIA factbook. I was told that all sites can be hacked. What do you say to people that think the CIA website can be hacked and that they manipulate their data to make Cuba look good?

Anyway. I picked this example, but I could’ve just as easily deconstructed the Bill Clinton is a racist meme which I just

One of the Media Ministers Of Misinformation

may do when I get pissed enough about that too! This is the deal. We are letting a few on air personalities turn people into illiterate and innumerate shrieking morons. It’s a problem when you’re in a democracy. I may have a captive group of students with whom I can reasonably demonstrate what socialism is and is not because that’s part of my job. But how do you reach the millions of folks that listen and watch these gasbags? They all need to be removed from whatever airwaves because they’re damaging the democracy for their own personal gain. Their corporate masters need to be boycotted and punished for profiting from the proliferation of ignorance.

Please Digg!! Tweet!! Share!! and Boycott Media Misinformants and their corporate Sponsors!!!

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Enough is Enough!

Left Blogistan is alive with the sounds of open dissent. I can only say, it’s about time. Here’s a good example from TheHill.com aptly headed Obama picks fight with left on Health Reform. The news, however, is this fact. A public option is not a liberal option. It’s the option that every advanced economy in the world has chosen in some form. We already have a public option for seniors. We’re the majority, in every sense of the word, on this issue. This fight is not with the Left. This fight is with our babies who die in bigger numbers than most countries, our families bankrupted by inadequate insurance, and the many many ill people who are simply numbers on a spreadsheet that provide a mark-up of 30 percent or more for a industry based on always saying no!

Even in the real Socialized medicine haven of the. U.K., former Prime Minister Maggie Thatcher knew she had an unassailable object because it makes peoples lives much improved and they wouldn’t give it up once they had it. Here in the U.S., we’re not even talking socialized medicine despite the bleating of the right wing media machine. We’re talking about extending something we already have–Medicare– reformatting it so it benefits doctors, hospitals and patients rather than a superfluous, bonus paying, extraordinary profit making, third party payer. How can you lose the high ground on an issue that’s been so easily solved in nearly every other country that’s not an economic or political basket case? How can you lose momentum on an issue that polls showed people supported until you botched the policy so badly?

Liberal Democrats have insisted a public insurance option is necessary to ensure competition for private insurers. Just this week, former Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean predicted there could be Democratic primary challenges if a healthcare bill without a public option is approved by Congress.

Dean also told liberal bloggers gathered last week at the “Netroots Nation” convention that the only piece of reform left in the House bill that is worth doing is the public option.

The left wing of the Democratic party already has been irritated by concessions its leaders have made on healthcare to centrists in the House and Senate.

Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-Texas) told CNN on Sunday it would be “very difficult” for her and other liberals to support legislation that does not include a public option.

“The only way we can be sure that very low-income people and persons who work for companies that don’t offer insurance have access to it, is through an option that would give the private insurance companies a little competition,” she said.

The last word in the Sunday TV Spin Zone was given to North Dakota Senator DINO Kent Conrad. This man has fewer folks in his entire state than do most neighborhoods in any major city in America. Why does he get to frame the debate?

In an interview on Sunday, Mr. Obama’s senior adviser, David Axelrod, said the president remained convinced that a public plan was “the best way to go.” But Mr. Axelrod said the nuances of how to develop a nonprofit competitor to private industry had never been “carved in stone.”

On Capitol Hill, the Senate Finance Committee is expected to produce a bill that features a nonprofit co-op. The author of the idea, Senator Kent Conrad, Democrat of North Dakota and chairman of the Budget Committee, predicted Sunday that Mr. Obama would have no choice but to drop the public option.

“The fact of the matter is, there are not the votes in the United States Senate for the public option,” Mr. Conrad said on “Fox News Sunday.” “There never have been. So to continue to chase that rabbit, I think, is just a wasted effort.”

So, that’s it. The high rate of infant mortality we have here in the U.S. (worse than many developing nations), the appalling number of personal bankruptcies due to folks with either no insurance or underinsurance, and the number of people that have no access to even the most basic services other than the emergency rooms are simply Axelrovian ‘nuances’. TheHill.com continues to describe the back pedal, the sell-out, the cave-in, or what ever pejorative metaphor for the big Obama cop-out.

What’s that, Lassie? Little Timmy fell down the well?

I’m not sure what Secretary Tim Geithner is smoking these days, but I’m sure there’s a huge market for it.  Maybe we could tax it then pay off the national debt.   The news of the Treasury Secretary’s trip to China is just developing enough of a surreal feel that I felt like Photoshopping a Buddhist begging bowl on to Beavis and entitling it Timmy Does China.  However, I’m not that skilled at photo shop and I’m still trying to finish this paper on currency regimes so I don’t have the time to be that creatively unpaid.  Let’s just label this a big enough reality disconnect to either be drug induced or a product of Hollywood.  Well, not exactly Hollywood, but CNBC, is that close? This blurb is from a thread today at Market Watch.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said Tuesday that China has confidence in the U.S. economy, even as official Chinese editorials and news reports berated Washington for selling a “devalued dollar.”

Geithner, who was wrapping up a two-day visit to China, said officials there shared his positive economic outlook for the U.S. and understood the Obama administration’s need to run higher deficits for a temporary period.

“They’ve got a pretty good feel for what we are trying to do and are very supportive,” he said in an interview with CNBC.

I’m still wondering if the folks in charge of protocal and explaining how other cultures work are understaffed at the White House.  Not since POTUS gave HRH an ipod with his speeches on it has there been such a misread of cultural differences.  Somebody needs to explain to the Treasury Secretary that criticizing your future hosts (who are well known to be hyperconcerned for their national image) for currency manipulation in front of a world wide audience isn’t going to really get them to open up to you.  Giethner’s confirmation hearing was labelled by the WSJ to be a China Bash.

Geithner’s visit to Beijing, his first since assuming the helm of the U.S. Treasury, included scheduled meetings with Chinese President Hu Jintao, Premier Wen Jiabao, and the nation’s top commerce, finance and banking officials.

In the CNBC interview, Geithner downplayed his earlier criticism of Beijing, in which he accused the Chinese government of keeping the yuan at an unreasonably low level against the U.S. dollar in order to boost China’s exports.

He did say, however, that China recognizes the need for a more flexible exchange-rate system, saying such a move “will help them … to use monetary policy to address future growth and inflation challenges.”

Geithner’s comments contrasted with the downbeat look at the U.S. economy reported in China’s state-run media.

I’m actually beginning to wonder if Geithner knows exactly what ’state-run media’ implies here.  Maybe a refresher from the State Department would have helped him on that too.

The “Incompetence Crisis”

All last year,  ALL  I heard was how experience didn’t matter.  I heard that being ‘ready on day one’  was a meaningless campaign slogan.  I was told that what mattered was perceived good judgment, intelligence, and speaking skills.  I remember watching the first Democratic Debates and thinking, this guy isn’t ready to be dogcatcher, let alone President. There were no wonky answers on economics or foreign policy.  There was never a show of any detailed plan.  There was always just a nice speech read from a teleprompter with a preacher’s patois, incredible (somewhat contradictory) promises, and messages that could have come from a motivational seminar instead of a political campaign.  I never got on the bandwagon.

I finally found a home over here in the Pumasphere with people of similar thought after being treated like a scourge by other sites (blog or MSM) that had gone over to the hope side.  I’ve been getting used to my role as pariah. I was thinking I’d have to live with it for at least a year.  I figured I’d start getting the you were so right calls sometime in the fall.

Boy, was I wrong!

I figured that because of my experience during the early calls for the Iraq war.  I was the one saying “Iraq has nothing to do with 9/11.  Iraq is a different agenda.  Iraq is a bad idea.”   I actually had some one get up in a restaurant to tell me what a lousy, unpatriotic American I was that didn’t deserve to live in the US. I became a the scourge of all true American patriots.  I’ve been thinking that my 9/11 protest was just a character building experience that would serve me well during the Obama fascination period and that it would probably take a few years of, yet again, being a scourge to all true American patriots before the worm would turn.  Luckily, I found a other like minded out in the Pumasphere so I don’t have to be quite alone as I was with my opinion on the Iraq Invasion.

I think I can honestly speak for a number of us around here.  We didn’t expect to be proven so right so quickly.  At least I didn’t. I was hoping that maybe it wouldn’t be as bad as my gut and head had deduced.  So many of my friends said, he’s not Dubya, so he’s got to be better, you’ll see.   After all, we’d get rid of a lot of really evil signing statements that restrict women’s reproductive choices, the right of all people to love and marry whom they wish, and we’d move ahead on science again.  I’ve said this before, but nearly any democrat would have done any of those things–including Joe Lieberman. Lieberman is one of those folks that I consider marginally a democrat, but even he would have done those things if he were POTUS.  We certainly wouldn’t see any nasty supreme court appointments either.  These were marginal hopes and small changes that I could cling to while knowing that eventually, I would be proven right.  I just didn’t even imagine it would wind up quite like this, quite so fast.

So, if I haven’t made myself clear here, Rush Limbaugh and Governor Jindal may be cheering for a failure.  I’m not in that camp at all.  I’ve just been quietly sitting here telling myself that with all the beautiful things written into the constitution as well as the resiliency of the American people, that perhaps it won’t be quite as bad as I thought it would be.   After all, we survived the incompetency of George Bush and the lunacy of Dick Cheney. Things can’t fall apart that fast!

Boy, was I wrong!

Pumas are the new Cassandras.  Our warnings, unheeded, demonized, and marginalized, are now the stuff of MSM op ed pieces.  I’d like to point you to a few that are searing Obama with legitimate criticisms.   I would think they came from one of the edgier Puma sites but they don’t.  One is from CNN. The other from the UK’s Prospect.  I also have two from the NY Times.  These comments are simply alarming.

A quick breath up from the global economy for me and …

back home … here.

To this headline at Politico:  Obama Losing Stimulus Message War

and to this quote:

At this crucial juncture in the push to pass an economic recovery package, President Barack Obama finds himself in the most unlikely of places: He is losing the message war.

Despite Obama’s sky-high personal approval ratings, polls show support has declined for his stimulus bill since Republicans and their conservative talk-radio allies began railing against what they labeled as pork barrel spending within it.

The sheer size of it — hovering at about $900 billion — has prompted more protests that are now causing some moderate and conservative Democrats to flinch and, worse, hesitate.

and more from Today’s New York Times:

For all the saber-rattling, the fate of the bill, which is the centerpiece of President Obama’s economic agenda, seemed tied up in a meeting on Thursday in the Dirksen Senate office building, where Senator Ben Nelson, Democrat of Nebraska, and Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, were leading an effort to cut the price tag of the bill.

Talk about your little engines that could!  I could almost enjoy this if it wasn’t so painfully important to get this right.  So far, President Obama has mailed in a letter to WAPO, scheduled a national news conference on Monday, and had a super bowl party and the senators from Maine and Nebraska remained unmoved by the charm attack!

Something tells me that this Congress is not going to take this new President very seriously if this keeps on going.  Some one remind me, here, who is the majority party?  Why are the Republicans acting more in control now than they were say, six months ago?

Senator Lindsey Graham even sounded dynamic on Fox with this little gem.

President Obama has been “AWOL” in negotiations over the economic stimulus package, Sen. Lindsey Graham said Thursday in a scathing rebuke of the new president.

The South Carolina Republican told FOX News that Obama has not been providing leadership, and he criticized the president for giving TV interviews and writing an editorial touting the package, rather than addressing the complaints of lawmakers.

“This process stinks,” Graham told FOX News, before repeating a lot of his criticisms on the Senate floor. “We’re making this up as we go and it is a waste of money. It is a broken process, and the president, as far as I’m concerned, has been AWOL on providing leadership on something as important as this.”

How macho can one be if the senate’s most closeted log cabin Republican can manage a more masculine soundbite than President Obama?  I mean, it’s down right embarrassing.  I’m going to have to wear a papersack over my head to vote Democrat any more, if this keeps up.

If you’ve read anything I’ve written here recently, you know what I think about what needs to be done.  This is ridiculous.  Its worse than a sexfree honeymoon!  How can some one come in and screw the one big thing up so quickly?  Meanwhile, I’m planting the Obama Victory Garden this week.  It’ll save me some time in the breadlines.

Krugman Gets It Right Again

Two things stuck out in my mind when I finally read the inaugural speech written by Jon “the groper” Favreau. The first was didn’t some one get a fact checker for this kid or at the very least get him a calculator? (Turns out I wasn’t the only one that noticed this one, it hit immediately on the wire at MarketWatch.)

LONDON (MarketWatch) — Less than a minute into his presidency, Barack Obama committed his first gaffe. That’s wrong. Forty-three Americans, including Obama, have taken the oath of office.

The new president of the United States said in his inaugural address that “Forty-four Americans have now taken the presidential oath.”

Then I thought, well that’s nothing new considering how much Obama re-invented all kinds of history and things in the primaries: like we have fifty seven states, a great lake in Oregon, the US army liberated Auschwitz and on and on. But the second one really disturbed me because plagiarizing and paraphrasing great thinkers in a major speech without crediting them is just plain something one should not do. I wasn’t the only one who caught it. Economist and columnist Krugman caught it also. The prez’s economic meme was a wrangled and mangled copy of something the great economist John Maynard Keynes once wrote.

Or consider this statement from Mr. Obama: “Our workers are no less productive than when this crisis began. Our minds are no less inventive, our goods and services no less needed than they were last week or last month or last year. Our capacity remains undiminished. But our time of standing pat, of protecting narrow interests and putting off unpleasant decisions — that time has surely passed.”

The first part of this passage was almost surely intended as a paraphrase of words that John Maynard Keynes wrote as the world was plunging into the Great Depression — and it was a great relief, after decades of knee-jerk denunciations of government, to hear a new president giving a shout-out to Keynes. “The resources of nature and men’s devices,” Keynes wrote, “are just as fertile and productive as they were. The rate of our progress towards solving the material problems of life is not less rapid. We are as capable as before of affording for everyone a high standard of life. … But today we have involved ourselves in a colossal muddle, having blundered in the control of a delicate machine, the working of which we do not understand.”

But something was lost in translation. Mr. Obama and Keynes both assert that we’re failing to make use of our economic capacity. But Keynes’s insight — that we’re in a “muddle” that needs to be fixed — somehow was replaced with standard we’re-all-at-fault, let’s-get-tough-on-ourselves boilerplate.

At least some body in the press didn’t overlook it this time. Krugman caught one more ripped off and just plain wrong idea that I missed. It appears our “new Era of Responsiblity” message came straight from what Dubya called for eight years ago. Oh, dear.

The Dakini’s Office Pool

 

It’s almost the New Year.  Having once dated a New Yorker for an extended period of time, I got used to William Safire (whose column I miss a lot) and his end of the year Office Pool.  He always had a list of predictions that challenged you to beat the pundit.  Some of my favorite questions had to do with the results of elections as well as topical things like the number of troops left in Iraq by the end of the year.

You can be as snarky, hopeful, truthful, or scary right on as you wish. 

 

Here’s a few of them to get you started:

 

When Inclusion is Really Exclusion

When I heard that Rick Warren was invited by PE Obama to say a prayer at the inauguration,  my first thought was that Obama’s pandering to the religious right was more than just electioneering.  Obama seems intent on including them in his administration.  To me, this  bodes poorly for science, rational thought, and civil rights.   I was hoping he might ask some one like Rev. Gene Robinson, an Episcopalian Bishop to give the prayer because it would demonstrate a true commitment to civil rights.  Rev. Robinson is openly gay and his appointment has been an ongoing source of controversy.

I was pleased to read Jeffrey Feldman’s blog today to find there was some one else out there with similar feelings.  I always find the Feldman’s analysis of how people looking for positions of power  ‘frame’ cultural and political issues fascinating.  Feldman believes that Obama is not leading on civil rights issues but ‘tinkering’ and points to previous democratic leaders who took bold stands on civil rights issues.  I’m going to highlight his main points, but would suggest you go look at the entire essay.

Obama, Feldman believes,  comes up short on the leadership scale.

Marriage equality for gays and lesbians is not just some “social issue” akin to school uniforms, warning labels on music or smoking in restaurants.  It is the current epicenter of the civil rights movement in America.

…  When Lincoln took office, the abolition of slavery was the epicenter.  When Wilson took office, the women’s suffrage movement was the epicenter.  When FDR took office, poverty was the epicenter. When Kennedy took office, segregation was the epicenter

Thinking about Obama’s presidency in terms of an  ‘epicenter’ of civil rights changes how we think about Rick Warren speaking at the inauguration.

Rick Warren is not just a pastor opposed to gay rights. He is a highly political leader of a mega-church who has compared abortion to the Holocaust and opposed marriage reform in terms equivalent to the bigoted plaintiffs in Loving v. Virginia–the landmark 1967 civil rights case overturning anti-miscegenation marriage laws.  In an era where gay rights are the epicenter, Rick Warren is a widely recognized voice arguing against those rights. 

Translating Rick Warren into the terms of previous civil rights eras is the key to seeing why his role at Obama’s inauguration is so troubling. By comparison, if this were Lincoln’s inauguration, Rick Warren would have been the equivalent pro-slavery pastor giving the invocation.  If this were Wilson’s inauguration, Rick Warren would have been the equivalent of an anti-women’s suffrage pastor saying a prayer.  For FDR, he would have been the same as inviting a pastor opposed to rights for the poor. For Kennedy, he would have been the same as inviting a pastor who spoke out repeatedly about the dangers of desegregation. 

In each of these cases, for the President-elect to invite the a voice known for arguing against progress–and to do so in the name of political peacemaking, as Barack Obama has done with Rick Warren–would have revealed a tinkerer on civil rights, not a leader.

Feldman raises just one faucet of leadership where Obama fails.  Obama’s cabinet appointments are being ‘framed’ as pragmatic.  Obama has said he wants to be surrounded by folks that are not idealogues, but folks that will get things done.  I guess I have to raise the question of how important is getting a bureaucracy to work when the overall goals are based on functionality and not vision.  This is where I think Feldman sees the gay rights as symptomatic of Obama’s lack of leadership skills.  As President, Obama should be doing more than just making history based on appearances.  If Obama is ’symbolic’ of civil rights gains, then what does it say to choose Warren, some one who assaults the civil rights of both women and GLBT Americans? 

I feel compelled to add my voice to those asking Obama to disinvite Warren.  What would it say if Obama, instead, asked Rev Robinson to contribute this prayer instead?   Wouldn’t the inclusion of Rev. Gene Robinson make a compelling statement towards the future of  civil rights in this country?  Wouldn’t this be a strong statement given that the President Elect’s supporters contributed so heavily to the defeat of Prop 8 in California?  This would be a sign of leadership and not just a going along with what worked to get Obama elected.

A message from PEER

As a public employee, I found myself frequently in the position of watching higher-ups do things that were not ethical, responsible or mindful of the public welfare.  I have less problems with that now that I work for a University as a prof endowed with intellectual freedom.  Other agency employees don’t have that same protection.  I have worked for ‘other’ agencies. There was also very little I could do about it.  One of the groups I support is PEER.  This is a group called Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility.  It was formed, in part, because of the incredible suppression of scientific evidence that has occurred recently to further business interests.

I’d like to bring this latest action memo to your attention as I think you’ll agree, it’s an interesting one.

 

As word of President-elect Obama’s environmental team was being authoritatively leaked around town, one name jumped out at us – Lisa Jackson, until recently head of the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, was tapped to head EPA. 

Anguished DEP employees (and a few who had resigned in disgust) urged us to put the word out about Jackson, including her -

• Failure to tell parents or workers at the Kiddie Kollege day-care center for three months about mercury contamination in the former thermometer factory it was located in (kid you not);
• Efforts that set water quality standards so low that aquatic life in the state’s rivers and lakes would be poisoned – and that was according to the Bush administration, which also had to intervene to rescue New Jersey’s crippled Superfund program; and
• Suppression of science, politicized decision-making, and an embrace of secrecy (even invoking “executive privilege” to shield her meeting calendars from public view).

In short, her former staff at DEP would be the last to nominate her for promotion.  The stories from DEP workers are eerily reminiscent of what we have been hearing from dispirited EPA staff during the Bush years.

As one might imagine, our note of dissent on the Jackson pick is being drowned out by a chorus of happy talk.  We will be urging the Senate and anyone else who seriously want to evaluate Ms. Jackson’s record to talk to the parents of the Kiddie Kollege toddlers.

As one might imagine, I have a feeling that in the coming years, more than ever, PEER will be called upon to tell inconvenient truths.