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A Sad Day for America |
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Thursday, 28 April 2011 10:48 |
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John Cory writes: "It is a sorry and sad day for America. Yesterday, Obama released his long-form birth certificate to cheers and applause and 'about time' comments across the great media landscape and inter-tubes. The Villagers are busy pontificating and examining and thumping their own chests in victory. Everyone is smiling and clapping and proud. Not me. What does it say about our 'media' that they have spent so much time and so much effort promoting crazy over reality? That our 'media' relishes circus clowns jumping out of their clown-cars and spraying clown-seltzer everywhere and then giddily covers the wet and stained audience reaction while ignoring the burning of fact?"
A young Barack Obama plays in the Hawaiian surf, circa 1960s. (photo: Reuters)
A Sad Day for America
By John Cory, Reader Supported News
28 April 11
Reader Supported News | Perspective
 t is a sorry and sad day for America.
Yesterday, Obama released his long-form birth certificate to cheers and applause and "about time" comments across the great media landscape and inter-tubes.
The Villagers are busy pontificating and examining and thumping their own chests in victory. Everyone is smiling and clapping and proud.
Not me.
What does it say about our "media" that they have spent so much time and so much effort promoting crazy over reality? That our "media" relishes circus clowns jumping out of their clown-cars and spraying clown-seltzer everywhere and then giddily covers the wet and stained audience reaction while ignoring the burning of fact?
And what is the result of today's release by President Obama?
Donald Trump nearly lost his hair-pet as he jumped up and down, shouting: "I'm Superman! I'm Superman! I did what no one else has been able to do. I AM the great black Kryptonite!" NBC must be Soooooooo Verrrrrry Proud!
This should never have been an issue worthy of discussion, let alone news coverage.
The mainstream media has a long history of making the incredible seem credible. If enough crazy people shout loud enough to be overheard at the Villager's cocktail parties - and especially if there is money, ratings and celebrity status to be gained - then the media will make it "news."
Remember the Clinton run for office? The great NY Times witch-hunt for Whitewater? Vince Foster? Jerry Falwell videos of murder and drug-dealing lies? The birth of Fox News, where no slander was too offensive to air?
How about Chris Matthews' constant attacks on Al Gore for being a "serial exaggerator" and a boring wonk? The NY Times and Washington Post constantly questioning Gore's manliness? Remember? Maureen Dowd and Tim Russert, pointing out he wasn't like the macho W. who had nicknames for the press on the airplane and a beer for all.
In 2004 there were outrageous and despicable attacks on John Kerry and Max Cleland's Vietnam service, challenges to combat medals and wounds and smears against the very nature of their service to their country.
Where was the media?
Parroting and promoting the vile and vicious likes of Ann Coulter and John Corsi, and others. No lie too evil or malicious not to be printed or smeared across the airwaves. ABC's Nightline undertook an "investigation" of Kerry's war record by traveling to Vietnam to find someone - anyone - who could verify or confirm his "story," because the government records of the US Navy had become "suspect."
Why, the media had such a grand time questioning those troublesome war medals that at the GOP Convention, real American patriots sported band-aids with little Purple Hearts as they cheered their Vietnam-era AWOL candidate. Wasn't that funny?
President Obama finally put all this birth nonsense to rest. Right?
Do you think there will be questions about the font used on that document? Or the mysterious curls meant to infer an aging document? Or maybe, if we listen carefully, we'll hear the whispers about how it took this long because they had to forge that document, to make it look real when really - it is not. And what about the registration date? Four days after birth?
And what is the effect?
The next presidential candidate who is Black or Latino will have to provide all of his citizenship papers up front and have them certified by holier-than-thou real Americans.
If it is a woman, she will need to show medical records proving she is a natural female with a medical certificate of virginity at marriage. Or, if she is not married, god-forbid, she will require an Evangelical certification of non-Lesbian orientation.
If the candidate is Asian, well, let's just say they are too smart with computers to get caught forging birth certificates so we'll have to figure out a different test for them.
Obama gave in to insanity so the country could move on to important matters, but the truth is, there will be no movement. As Stuart Chase said: "For those who believe, no proof is necessary. For those who don't believe, no proof is possible."
There is a stain now, a stain that will permeate future candidates who might be one of them. An outsider. A different one. In trying to satisfy the poisonous present, Mr. Obama ignored his duty to the future.
No, this is a sad day.
Yesterday morning, the media flexed its great star power and forced a president to jump through a flaming hoop to prove he was American. Viewership through venom is so much more profitable than truth or fact.
By the afternoon, they will weigh in on who the winners and losers are.
Last night, some families packed up their belongings because their home had been foreclosed on, or faced medical bankruptcy because their insurance carrier had denied treatment payments, or struggled with whether to pay their utility bill or buy a tank of gas to go looking for a job in the morning.
We know who lost.
And we didn't have to watch TV to know it.
Maybe it is time to turn off, tune out, and drop the news media altogether.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
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Obama Revealed: A Moderate Republican |
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Tuesday, 26 April 2011 10:33 |
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Ezra Klein writes: "Perhaps this is just the logical endpoint of two years spent arguing over what Barack Obama is - or isn't. Muslim. Socialist. Marxist. Anti-colonialist. Racial healer. We've obsessed over every answer except the right one: President Obama, if you look closely at his positions, is a moderate Republican of the early 1990s. And the Republican Party he's facing has abandoned many of its best ideas in its effort to oppose him."
President Obama speaks about the economy at the White House. (photo: AP)
Obama Revealed: A Moderate Republican
By Ezra Klein, The Washington Post
26 April 11
 merica is mired in three wars. The past decade was the hottest on record. Unemployment remains stuck near 9 percent, and there's a small, albeit real, possibility that the US government will default on its debt. So what's dominating the news? A reality-television star who can't persuade anyone that his hair is real is alleging that the president of the United States was born in Kenya.
Perhaps this is just the logical endpoint of two years spent arguing over what Barack Obama is - or isn't. Muslim. Socialist. Marxist. Anti-colonialist. Racial healer. We've obsessed over every answer except the right one: President Obama, if you look closely at his positions, is a moderate Republican of the early 1990s. And the Republican Party he's facing has abandoned many of its best ideas in its effort to oppose him.
If you put aside the emergency measures required by the financial crisis, three major policy ideas have dominated American politics in recent years: a plan that uses an individual mandate and tax subsidies to achieve near-universal health care; a cap-and-trade plan that attempts to raise the prices of environmental pollutants to better account for their costs; and bringing tax rates up from their Bush-era lows as part of a bid to reduce the deficit. In each case, the position that Obama and the Democrats have staked out is the very position that moderate Republicans have staked out before.
Take health-care reform. The individual mandate was developed by a group of conservative economists in the early '90s. Mark Pauly, an economist at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, was one of them. "We were concerned about the specter of single-payer insurance," he told me recently. The conservative Heritage Foundation soon had an individual-mandate plan of its own, and when President Bill Clinton endorsed an employer mandate in his health-care proposal, both major Republican alternatives centered on an individual mandate. By 1995, more than 20 Senate Republicans - including Chuck Grassley, Orrin Hatch, Dick Lugar and a few others still in office - had signed one individual mandate bill or another.
The story on cap and trade - which conservatives now like to call "cap and tax" - is much the same. Back then, the concern was sulfur dioxide, the culprit behind acid rain. President George H.W. Bush wanted a solution that relied on the market rather than on government regulation. So in the Clean Air Act of 1990, he proposed a plan that would cap sulfur-dioxide emissions but let the market decide how to allocate the permits. That was "more compatible with economic growth than using only the command and control approaches of the past," he said. The plan passed easily, with "aye" votes from Sen. Mitch McConnell and then-Rep. Newt Gingrich, among others. In fact, as recently as 2007, Gingrich said that "if you have mandatory carbon caps combined with a trading system, much like we did with sulfur ... it's something I would strongly support."
As for the 1990 budget deal, Bush initially resisted tax increases, but eventually realized they were necessary to get the job done. "It is clear to me that both the size of the deficit problem and the need for a package that can be enacted require all of the following: entitlement and mandatory program reform, tax revenue increases, growth incentives, discretionary spending reductions, orderly reductions in defense expenditures, and budget process reform," he said. That deal, incidentally, was roughly half tax increases and half spending cuts. Obama's budget has far fewer tax increases. And compared with what would happen if the Bush tax cuts were allowed to expire in 2012, it actually includes a large tax cut.
The normal reason a party abandons its policy ideas is that those ideas fail in practice. But that's not the case here. These initiatives were wildly successful. Gov. Mitt Romney passed an individual mandate in Massachusetts and drove its number of uninsured below 5 percent. The Clean Air Act of 1990 solved the sulfur-dioxide problem. The 1990 budget deal helped cut the deficit and set the stage for a remarkable run of growth.
Rather, it appears that as Democrats moved to the right to pick up Republican votes, Republicans moved to the right to oppose Democratic proposals. As Gingrich's quote suggests, cap and trade didn't just have Republican support in the 1990s. John McCain included a cap-and-trade plan in his 2008 platform. The same goes for an individual mandate, which Grassley endorsed in June 2009 - mere months before he began calling the policy "unconstitutional."
This White House has shown a strong preference for policies with demonstrated Republican support, but that's been obscured by the Republican Party adopting a stance of unified, and occasionally hysterical, opposition (remember "death panels"?) - not to mention a flood of paranoia about the president's "true" agenda and background. But as entertaining as the reality-TV version of politics might be, it can't be permitted to, ahem, trump reality itself. If you want to obsess over origins in American politics, look at the president's policies, not his birth certificate.
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The Birthers' Constitutional Illiteracy |
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Monday, 25 April 2011 19:38 |
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Intro: "Even if Barack Obama had not been born in the US, the birther version of the constitution would've excluded John McCain too."
Sen. John McCain campaigning for the US Presidency in Sarasota, Florida, in 2008. (photo: Carolyn Kaster/AP)
The Birthers' Constitutional Illiteracy
By Tom Rogan, Guardian UK
25 April 11
Even if Barack Obama had not been born in the US, the birther version of the constitution would've excluded John McCain too.
 arack Obama was born in the United States. But even if he had not been (as the birthers believe), he would still be the legitimate President of the United States. The birther movement (apparently, now led by Donald Trump) argues that article 2, section 1 of the US constitution ("No person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President") requires that the Barack Obama of their universe (that is, born "abroad") cannot be the legitimate president.
For the birthers, the translation of "natural born citizen'" is simply "those born inside the United States". To them, anyone born outside the United States is ineligible for the presidency. They are wrong.
First, a little disclaimer: the birther attacks are personal to me. I was born in London to an American father and British mother. While I have a great and abiding respect for the UK (my British grandfather was an RAF officer of whom I am incredibly proud), my ultimate allegiance has always belonged to the United States. My father is a former US diplomat and his father was a career US military officer, whose second world war service included Guadalcanal and Okinawa. I believe that my family heritage has earned my right to be a "natural born citizen" of the United States. And I believe any cogent reading of the constitution supports me in this belief.
While the thinking behind the founding fathers' adoption of the natural born citizenship clause is not clear, most legal scholars assume that the motivating intention was to prevent (English) royalist infiltration of the US government - an understandable concern at the time. Regardless of that, though, in determining the meaning of the clause, we must consider the developed law.
The Naturalisation Act of 1790 provided that "the children of citizens of the United States that may be born beyond Sea, or out of the limits of the United States, shall be considered as natural born Citizens." Just three years after the constitution's adoption, this would seem to give an early and powerful repudiation of the birther reading of the clause. But it cannot, on its own, clarify the constitution.
In United States v Wong Kim Ark, the US supreme court ruled that a child born in the United States to two US domiciled foreign parents not serving with a foreign government was a natural born citizen. This set the precedent that natural born citizenship could be granted by the principle of "jus soli", or citizenship from birth in the United States. However, as illustrated by the Naturalisation Act, jus soli cannot account for all Americans. To fill the space of absent court clarification on American citizens born abroad, Congress has provided statutory definition for natural born citizenship.
Title 8, section 1401 of the US Title Code provides these definitions to include (among other qualifying citizens) those born abroad to one American parent and one foreign parent, provided the American parent spent five years in the US prior to the child's birth. The strength of section 1401 is in its clarification of the clause in a logical manner, compatible with the constitution and in a way that can account for American citizens not physically born in the United States. Because the law grants citizenship even to the Obama of the birther universe, the birthers reject section 1401 as unconstitutional.
In contrast to the logic of section 1401, the birther reading of the natural born citizenship clause is highly problematic. Put simply, if the only natural born citizens are those born inside the United States, then many "natural" Americans are left out in the cold. The state department foreign affairs manual (pdf) notes that under the constitution's 14th amendment, US government installations abroad are not part of the United States. Therefore, according to the birther approach, this would mean, for example, that while a child born inside the United States to foreign tourists or to illegal immigrants is a natural born citizen, John McCain - born on a military base in Panama - is not.
The absurdity of such a reading of the constitution is profound. Under the birther approach, foreign service and experience are acts to be punished by deprivation of citizenship rights for the children of servicemen and women and public officials posted overseas. How can we honestly believe that the founding fathers would regard the citizenship of children of those who have served their country abroad as less than that of those residing in the United States? To make this argument as the birthers do is illogical and reflective their distorted and deficient understanding of the US constitution.
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The Tea Party and Ayn Rand |
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Sunday, 24 April 2011 12:06 |
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Intro: "Ayn Rand is a cult figure for Tea Party types, but if a bad movie gets them reading, they may be surprised by her ideas."
Author and Objectivist philosopher Ayn Rand. (photo: Hulton Archive/NYT/Getty Images)
The Tea Party and Ayn Rand
By Megan Gibson, The Guardian UK
24 April 11
The Tea Party and Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged
Ayn Rand is a cult figure for Tea Party types, but if a bad movie gets them reading, they may be surprised by her ideas.
f Ayn Rand were alive today, would she be a member of the Tea Party?
The controversial writer - whose philosophy, Objectivism, advocates the "virtue of selfishness" - has long been something of a literary hero to American conservatives and the rise of the rightwing populist movement has only worked to increase Rand's popularity.
Tea Party members can't get enough: references to the writer's works appear on their protest signs; political favourites such as Rand Paul namedrop her; and they seem staunchly devoted to promoting the first instalment of the three-part film adaptation of her epic tome, Atlas Shrugged, which opened modestly, if not quietly, last weekend in around 300 theatres across the US. The conservative grassroots group Freedomworks took the helm in promoting the film, sharing the online trailer with its mailing list and hyping the movie's opening day - 15 April, America's tax day.
The low-budget movie with its cast of nobodies received resolutely scathing reviews - it garnered a dismal 7% from critics on Rotten Tomatoes - yet, through conservative support, it still managed to pull in enough revenue to justify expanding the film to more screens. By the end of April, Atlas Shrugged: Part 1 could be on as many as 1,000 screens.
Despite the buzz, rigorous devotees of Objectivism aren't likely to appreciate Atlas's big screen treatment. For the uninitiated, Atlas Shrugged depicts a dystopian US where irrational government officials work with greedy socialist corporate heads to impose draconian regulations and taxes on those who have achieved success through hard work and natural talent. The novel's heroine is Dagny Taggart, an ambitious railroad executive, who teams up with Henry Rearden, an innovative metal manufacturer, to set out to save the country from being crushed by the collectivist government. Along the way, they partake in rambling diatribes about the glory of achievement and the nobility of pursuing greatness. It's rousing stuff - the first time, anyway - until it's belabored again and again throughout the novel. Sound familiar?
The sections of the book that made it into Part 1 certainly seem written directly for current conservative interests, namely that a small section of the population must fight against the oppressive restrictions and heavy taxation of a socialist government. Yet, probe beyond the triteness of Rand's plot and the fragmented rendering of her philosophy, and striking discrepancies between her Objectivism and conservative sentiment become apparent.
Yes, Rand was a staunch advocate of capitalism and limited government. She was also a staunch advocate of abortion rights and sexual hedonism, and an atheist to boot, which her conservative admirers have largely ignored. Rand and her characters maintained that morality wasn't something that could be imposed by outside institutions, rather should be a consequence from individuals acting in their own rational self-interest. Which, obviously, steps way out of line with the thinking of the Tea Party, which encompasses the religious right .
As Jennifer Burns, the author of Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right, has said, today's conservative pundits have found that they "can use the parts of Rand they want to use and not engage the rest". Which is where one of the most glaring incongruities between Tea Partiers and Rand's philosophy appears: Rand, almost above all else, championed the individual over the collective. The notion that a populist movement is using her name and economic philosophies to mobilise their broader political goal is laughable. During her life, Rand was outspoken in her disgust for Republicans, feeling that they were soft on individuals' rights. Today, it is only Randians who can argue that her philosophy is being inadequately promoted.
However, there is a silver lining for Rand purists: while the movie's publicity has managed to stir up paltry interest among cinema-goers, it has succeeded in awakening a larger interest in the literary work. Rand's novel has sold around 100,000 copies a year in the US since its publication, and since the financial crisis and the rise of the Tea Party, that number has increased five-fold. The movie's publicity has only propelled sales yet higher - the opening weekend saw the book version of Atlas Shrugged shoot to the No 4 spot on Amazon's bestseller list.
So, while the Tea Party's promotion of Rand has made a splash, Objectivists can take comfort knowing that the impact has largely been on book sales. If one has to delve into Randian territory, it's better to go straight to the master's words rather than a choice interpretation of them or convenient soundbites.
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omeone very smart once said, "Your labels are your handles."
