Progressive Viewpoints

Re: GOP and Fox linking Obama to Nixon

LOL!

Think Progress » Buchanan on GOP and Fox linking Obama to Nixon: ‘It is the most idiotic comparison I’ve ever seen.’ .

“I also have to laugh,” liberal talk radio host Bill Press said during the segment. “When two Republicans want to hurt a Democrat, what do they do? They compare him to another Republican. It’s crazy.”

County presidential electoral map

Today the Oregonian published a map purporting to show that the country hasn't become more “blue” based on the blue-shift of counties, using this sort of map:

It seems from the map lie most of the country is “red”!  This supports the false meme that the US is a “center-right” country.  But it flies in the face of reality: not only did Obama win, but Democrats took many more US House seats, Senate seats, and strengthened state positions.  It was a rout!  But you wouldn't know it from this map.  Why is that?  This is because they ignore the fact that we are NOT a “geocracy”, but are a democracy (leaving aside the Electoral College and the fact that the presidential race is not the only way to define red/blueness).

When a cartographic projection of the counties is made, which adjusts the county size to make it proportionate to the population of the counties, it becomes much more obvious why Democrats did so well across the board:

Most of the county is in fact “blue”.  When viewed this way, it is much clearer why a so-called “red” state of Montana just reelected a Democrat as governor.

In fact, except for the presidential Electoral College county, areas aren't red or blue, they are purple -- a Democratic vote counts toward a Senator wherever in the state it is.  Here's what the real balance looks like:

Technorati Tags: right-wing_myths

Re: The Omen In My Mail

Conservative commentator, Kathleen Parker criticized Palin's qualifications to be VP and learned what it has been like to be a liberal for the last 30 years.

Re: The Omen In My Mail:

Allow me to introduce myself. I am a traitor and an idiot. Also, my mother should have aborted me and left me in a dumpster, but since she didn't, I should “off” myself.

Those are a few nuggets randomly selected from thousands of e-mails written in response to my column suggesting that Sarah Palin is out of her league and should step down.

Who says public discourse hasn't deteriorated?

The only reason that she thinks that public discourse has deteriorated now is that it is only now that her conservative compatriots have aimed their bile at her instead of at liberals.  The previous 30 years of vicious, bigoted, violence-tinged commentary targeted at liberals didn't count somehow in her book.

But better late than never:

More important in the long term is the less tangible effect of stifling free speech. My mail paints an ugly picture and a bleak future if we do not soon correct ourselves.

The picture is this: Anyone who dares express an opinion that runs counter to the party line will be silenced. That doesn't sound American to me, but Stalin would approve.

Readers have every right to reject my opinion. But when we decide that a person is a traitor and should die for having an opinion different from one's own, we cross into territory that puts all freedoms at risk. (I hear you, Dixie Chicks.)

Technorati Tags: Freedom_of_Speech, Freedom_of_the_Press

Broadcast media: agents of American destruction

Sent to MSNBC:

Your recent decision to replace Olbermann and Matthews from hosting the debates and election night coverage is deeply disappointing.  The kowtowing to right-wingers and the McCain campaign is inexcusable political interference in a time when America needs bold voices.  During the conventions, the right-wing bias shown by ABC and CBS was appalling as they hosted 2X the number of right-wing commentators as Democrats during [Day 2] the Democratic convention and then had NONE from the Democratic side at all during the first days of the Republican convention.

These decisions are preventing Americans from being able to make informed decisions about the future of our country and the world.  This is malfeance on a grand scale by American media.

We will not watch MSNBC during these events as a consequence of allowing yourself to be a tool of the “agents of intolerance” of the right wing in America, as even John McCain calls themselves.

Partisanship Appears to Sway Opinions on Palin - washingtonpost.com

Partisanship Appears to Sway Opinions on Palin - washingtonpost.com:

Republicans and Democrats have deeply contrasting first impressions of Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin, suggesting partisanship, not gender, is paramount in the initial public reviews.

This analysis is backwards: McCain picked Palin in a partisan move to appeal to the right-wing ideologues of his party.  The fact that the electorate splits on partisan lines after that is the obvious, natural result.

Mc-Been there. Mc-Done that. Time for a change for the better.

The two conventions are making the choices crystal clear to Americans.

The McCain-Palin ticket offers more of the same failed policies of the past that got us into the current mess: a belligerent foreign policy, even more tax cuts for the wealthy, a you're-on-your-own healthcare, our county held hostage to oil, and so forth.  Policies promoted by a impulsive and reckless McCain president who doesn't even vet his vice president pick yet who thinks this means he's a “maverick” and a hard-right ideologue for a vice-president who can feed red meat to the party wolves.

A ticket promoted by the Republican party's small-minded mockery, derision and demonization of anyone who disagrees with them.

A party and ticket who views are backed up by a media that holds Democrats to a standard of perfection in policy and flawlessness of character where they would be pilloried for personally attacking Republicans while the same media excuses outrageous and insulting and hateful conduct by establishment Republicans in nationally televised speeches (as we’ve seen in these first days of the Republican convention), speeches of little substance to frequently half-empty convention island of mostly old white people in a sea of American diversity which goes unremarked, a network media at ABC and CBS that even while refusing to host Democrats to critique the Republican convention had twice as many Republicans as Democrats critiquing the Democratic convention.

This is what Bush and the Republican party for 30 years have been promoting and doing.

Mc-Been there.  Mc-Done that.

Enough already; our country can't take any more of this.

Time for the change for the better that Obama-Biden can bring: bringing us together not tearing us apart, accepting our shared responsibilities to each other not just our personal responsibility to family, for an accountable government in our common interest not a secretive government for the special and wealthy interests of the Republican party.

Time is of the essence: Oregon's ballots go out in just 1 1/2 months; the election is over in two months, so
won't you join me in donating now to Barack Obama and Joe Biden to lead this country out of these dark days of torture, lies, politicization of ... well, everything ... and rank incompetence from the top down?

You can donate here: http://my.barackobama.com/page/outreach/view/main/willNeuhauser

HisSpace

Re: HisSpace:

It is still unclear how far Barack Obama’s talent for online campaigning will take him. But it’s worth noting that some of the best-known presidents in U.S. history have stood at the vanguard of past communications revolutions—and that a few have used those revolutions not only to mobilize voters and reach the White House but also to consolidate power and change the direction of politics once they got there.

The communications revolution under way today involves the Internet, of course, and if Barack Obama eventually wins the presidency, it will be in no small part because he has understood the medium more fully than his opponents do. His speeches play well on YouTube, which allows for more than the five-second sound bites that have characterized the television era. And he recognizes the importance of transparency and consistency at a time when access to everything a politician has ever said is at the fingertips of every voter. But as Joshua Green notes in the preceding pages, Obama has truly set himself apart by his campaign’s use of the Internet to organize support. No other candidate in this or any other election has ever built a support network like Obama’s. The campaign’s 8,000 Web-based affinity groups, 750,000 active volunteers, and 1,276,000 donors have provided him with an enormous financial and organizational advantage in the Democratic primary.

Obama clearly intends to use the Web, if he is elected president, to transform governance just as he has transformed campaigning. Notably, he has spoken of conducting “online fireside chats” as president. And when one imagines how Obama’s political army, presumably intact, might be mobilized to lobby for major legislation with just a few keystrokes, it becomes possible, for a moment at least, to imagine that he might change the political culture of Washington simply by overwhelming it.

What Obama seems to promise is, at its outer limits, a participatory democracy in which the opportunities for participation have been radically expanded. He proposes creating a public, Google-like database of every federal dollar spent. He aims to post every piece of non-emergency legislation online for five days before he signs it so that Americans can comment. A White House blog—also with comments—would be a near certainty. Overseeing this new apparatus would be a chief technology officer.

Technorati Tags: Barak_Obama

Re: Everything You Know About Fascism Is Wrong

Right-winger Jonah Goldberg is promoting his new book “Liberal Fascism” in an attempt to trash liberalism by deflecting the accusations of fascistic behavior of modern conservatism onto liberals instead.  (See also comments on stupid commentary by Rich Lowry.)

Re: NW Republican: Everything You Know About Fascism Is Wrong:

... fascism, properly understood, is not a phenomenon of the right at all.

Goldberg’s book is a fascinating exercise in Orwellian mis-speak -- reversing meanings and confusing the facts.

Let’s not forget the context of the times -- in the gilded age and in the Great Depression there appeared to be a world-wide failure of market capitalism in the sense that it was causing great hardship for the vast majority of people and benefiting only a few -- it was not promoting the General Welfare as our Constitution puts it. The question was whether market capitalism was a failure and something else was needed to replace it (communism, etc.) or whether instruments of government could be used to improve it.

European fascism was a response to this situation by merging of the state and corporate goals together (this is Muscolini’s classic statement) with nationalism providing justification for totalitarian, militaristic control of the population.

The very meaning of the word “liberal” is in opposition to this entire construct, and in any case it is obvious that behavior of liberals (regardless of how you attempt to redefine it) have not classically promoted corporate welfare over the people by giving corporations control of the apparatus of government as the Republican Party's “K-Street” project and Bush administration assigning industry and its lobbyists to head the agencies that are supposed to provide oversight of those industries.

FDR’s response during that period was to recognize that capitalism is the worst form of economy except for all the others (because it relects the way individuals are motivatied and also how people act in groups) but that it has inherent defects for those same human organizational reasons. So that checks and limits on the excesses were an appropriate role of the people to exercise through their government to prevent the externalization of the costs of capitalism onto the people to the benefit of the few corporate owners (of which the Clean Air Act, etc. were later versions in the 1970s -- oh yeah, that as a Republican who passed that, for all the flaws of Nixon).

There is a simpler explanation for Goldberg’s book than the proposition that (a) everything that (b) all of us know about Fascism is wrong, it is that what all of us know is in fact correct and it is simply that one person, Goldberg, is all wrong.

The accusations of fascistic behavior by the modern conservative movement, as exemplified by crony capitalism (think K-Street project among many others) are hitting too close to home, so he’s mounting a classic Karl Rovian defense: accuse your opposition of what is in fact one of your own great weaknesses -- damn the facts and damn hypocrisy, just win!

[This was posted anonymously on NW Republican because their comment section seems to have trouble accepting my TypeKey.]

Technorati Tags: right-wing_myths

Re: Rich Lowry on Liberal Fascism on National Review Online

Find that claims of fascist tendencies in the American conservative movement, as it exists today, getting too hot and hitting too close to home, they go on the attack.

Following is a great example of the manipulative ways of the right-wing.  They delve deep into history, but then selectively apply parts to twisted generalizations, while ignoring the plain, accepted meanings of words, in order to re-invent (or at least sufficiently muddy) the meaning of words.  (Similar to how they redefine the Constitution.)

Rich Lowry on Liberal Fascism on National Review Online:

The operational meaning of the word “fascism” for most liberals who invoke it is usually “shut up.” It’s meant to bludgeon conservatives into silence. But many on the left also genuinely believe that there is something fascistic in the DNA of contemporary conservatism....

In his brilliant new book Liberal Fascism, Jonah Goldberg (a colleague of mine) demonstrates how the opposite is the case, that fascism was a movement of the left and that liberal heroes like Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt were products of what Goldberg calls “the fascist moment” in America early in the 20th century....

By what standard, then, are they considered conservatives who took things to extremes?

Goldberg sees the fascist exaltation of youth, glorification of violence, hatred of tradition and romance of “the street” in the New Left of the 1960s...

By what standard, Mr. Lowry, are today's conservatives fascists and liberals not?  How about this one:

Fascism is an authoritarian political ideology (generally tied to a mass movement) that considers individual and social interests subordinate to the interests of the state or party. Fascists seek to forge a type of national unity, usually based on (but not limited to) ethnic, cultural, racial, religious attributes. The key attribute is intolerance of others: other religions, languages, political views, economic systems, cultural practices, etc. Various scholars attribute different characteristics to fascism, but the following elements are usually seen as its integral parts: nationalism, statism, militarism, totalitarianism, anti-communism, corporatism, populism, collectivism, and opposition to political and economic liberalism.

And what is the tiresome conservative obsession with the 60s as if everything they disliked about that era defines all liberalism?  Move on, conservatives.  That was 40 years ago.  For most liberals, the 1960s are not a defining moment, because they're too young (me, at 50 wasn't part of that for heaven's sake).

Technorati Tags: right-wing_myths

Clip: Denying the Truth: Petraeus, Iraq, and Our Pontius Pilate Press

Re: Arianna Huffington: Denying the Truth: Petraeus, Iraq, and Our Pontius Pilate Press - Politics on  The Huffington Post:

Like Pontius Pilate washing his hands of responsibility, too many in the Washington press corps want to pretend they are leaving the question of “what is truth” to their readers -- refusing to admit that there is even such a thing as truth. Instead, they remain resolutely committed to presenting two sides to every story -- even when the facts are solidly on one side.