“There was apparently a headline after the Massachusetts election. The Village Voice announced that Republicans win a 41-59 majority. It’s worth thinking about. We still have to lead.”

and

“I have little patience for the kinds of political calculations that says the benefit of blocking everything is greater than the cost of doing nothing. That basically says if you lose, I win.”

and

“If anybody’s searching for a lesson from Massachusetts, I promise you, the answer is not to do nothing.”

H/T: TPM Livewire.

During one week in early 2009, the youth from the Nashville’s Oasis Center filmed this short documentary to celebrate Dr. Martin Luther King’s legacy and its direct result, the election of Barack Obama as our first African-American president.

Molly writes: “It was touching to see youth reach out to those local heroes who marched with MLK and sat at his feet during the Nashville lunch counter sit-ins and Freedom Rides. Some of these faces are but a few of the lesser known thousands who helped changed the course of history.”

Music by Nashville songwriter Don Henry.

They were heady days in early 2009, when we saw former Sec. of Education and now Tennessee’s senior U.S. Senator Lamar(!) Alexander join current Sec. of Education Arne Duncan in co-writing an op-ed for The Tennnessean on the importance of improving Tennessee’s charter schools laws. This was meaningful bipartisanship. It was almost—dare we say it?—statesman-like.

It seems to be shrinking. Like the ice caps.

Our hopes, however, have since been dashed. It was not long before Lamar(!) was using Glenn Beck math in a prelude to boycotting bipartisan committee meetings.

And once he had set foot on the slippery slope of being a member of Republican leadership in an era in which true leadership seems to be in hiding, it wasn’t long before he had slid down into the depths, where he saw fit (with the blessing of advisers?) to repeatedly call Medicaid a “medical ghetto.”

“Or arrogant in its dumping of 15 million low-income Americans into a medical ghetto called Medicaid that none of us, or any of our families, would ever want to be a part of for our health care.”

We’re left wondering whether he feels similarly about all government services, including public education.

Now we discover that he’s “quietly” trying to provoke teabaggers into another wave of astroturf town halls.

We can and should advocate for effective government, but achieving this model must always be done in recognition that there is a group of people, now including Lamar(!), that hate government and want to see it fail. We want to see good governance and a sound legislative process that attracts the best and the brightest to the domain of public policy. We want programs that are well-run so that they serve the American people well. With detractors and obstructionists like Lamar(!) thinking that his family is too good for government services, success is made difficult but not impossible. Fortunately, there are 100 Senators, and Lamar(!), should he choose to stand (a process requiring a spine) for re-election, will be up again in 2014.

We proudly present the 2009 Liberadio(!) Jive Turkey Award to… Lamar! Congratulations, sir. We hope that you and last year’s winner Bill Hobbs will enjoy cigars at the reception. The buffet table will be full of leftovers.

The Nobel Committee announced in Oslo that it has awarded the annual peace prize to Barack Obama, just nine months into his presidency, “for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.”

The award cited in particular Mr. Obama’s effort to reduce the world’s nuclear arsenal. “He has created a new international climate,” the committee said….

“Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world’s attention and given its people hope for a better future,” the committee said in its citation. “His diplomacy is founded in the concept that those who are to lead the world must do so on the basis of values and attitudes that are shared by the majority of the world’s population.”…

“We are not awarding the prize for what may happen in the future, but for what he has done in the previous year,” Mr. Jagland said. “We would hope this will enhance what he is trying to do.”

President Obama in Denmark to advocate for the Olympics in Chicago can’t be compared to President Bush on vacation in Crawford.

President Obama in Denmark to advocate for the Olympics in Chicago can be compared to President Bush on a four day tourist visit to the Olympics in Beijing during an economic crisis.

You’re right about one thing though, it doesn’t matter where you govern from because it’s the results that matter. Where we are at the end of one Obama term can be compared to where we were at the end of one W. term. Can’t wait for those results.

(H/T: A Kleinheider Joint)

Not taking it anymore.

What’s the difference between the loud white guys on the radio yelling me that “it’s not about race, we just hate his policies” and this loud white guy telling me that, in the words of Jimmy Carter, the “intensely demonstrated animosity towards Barack Obama” certainly is about race?

This loud white guy backs up his assertion with, you know, actual facts put into context:

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

If you listened to the radio or watched the cable yesterday you were hit with the false equivalency Olbermann outlines: if you say that anything critical of President Obama is racial then your words will be twisted into, “all criticism of Obama is racial.” Then if the deniers find one instance that isn’t racial, they will exaggerate that lone proof into proof that all criticism isn’t racial.

That’s how the screaming tightie righties roll. Twisted. And so you got to ask, which of the President’s policies do comments like Glen Beck’s “Obama is a racist” and Rush Limbaugh’s “Barack the Magic Negro” and Michael DelGiorno’s “Obama is the antichrist” address? Which policies are they arguments for or against?

Go ahead, Google Obama Youth. I dare you.

Michael DelGiorno continues his irresponsible broadcasting today on 99.7 WTN, firing up parents of school-aged children by applying historically combustible rhetoric to President Obama, and then sending these highly agitated parents to your kids’ schools.

Next Tuesday, President Barack Obama will deliver a national address to the students of in public schools across the country to encourage the kids, as a letter from Secretary of Education Arne Duncan states on the Ed.gov website, to “challenge students to work hard, set educational goals, and take responsibility for their learning.”

Age appropriate follow-up discussions and activities have also been set up for kids in grades K-6 and 7- 12.

And away DelGiorno goes. But not before prefacing his fear-not-fact-based harangue against President Obama’s address to classrooms with this:

“By the way, may I say that doing this, in and of itself…there’s nothing wrong with that if the President sticks to the text we are being pre-given. There’s nothing wrong with that. The motive? The real agenda? And oh, by the way, the real curriculum behind it? Might be troubling. Here. Follow the bouncing ball.”

The subtext is, of course, “don’t look at the facts, listen to my insinuations and snide tone and be very afraid because the bogeyman is out to get your children.”

So believing it his purpose in life to drag everything down into the gutter with him, DelGiorno then used a good portion of his 3-hour radio show yesterday to sully President Obama’s address. Sandwiched between words llike “Hitler,” “indoctrinating,” and “scary stuff,” he said the following:

• Barack Obama was going to “seize control of the internet”
• Barack Obama will “keep everybody’s name and archive them who speak ill of his policies”
• “I don’t need the President to raise my kids”
• The first time any president has “spoken in secret on the internet directly to people’s kids”
• “Public education is not about education anymore it’s about indoctrination, and they (the Obama administration/Department of Education) prove it here”
• “Students will accept Barack Obama as their Lord & Saviour”
• “Does the speech make you want to do anything…besides kill yourself…”
• “They’re going to make a whole freakin’ semester out of the President”

As you know from reading about his proclivity to falsely label President Obama the “antichrist,” DelGiorno lies to further his agenda (which, by the way, is to scare the living daylights out of his fellow Americans/Christians). He didn’t disappoint when yesterday he told his listeners that the President’s address will be broadcast to their kids directly to their classrooms – in secret over the internet – so parents won’t be able to watch it. Why not on TV?, he asked. Because, he said answering his own question, they don’t want you to know how they are indoctrinating your kids.

DELGIORNO: How do you feel, in general, about the President of the United States, while you’re at work, through a website and through the teachers, are going to talk to your kids…without you there…about something you don’t know what he’s going to do? About something you don’t know what they’re going to do in classroom? I thought it was interesting. He’s either really web-oriented….why not talk to them over television? Why the internet?
SIDEKICK: Or he views them much like the Muslims do, the Vanguard of the Future. [A nudge nudge wink wink to "socialism" and Hitler youth].
DELGIORNO: Takes a radical broad to say that. You got guts girl.
SIDEKICK: Thank you.

The truth is, the address will be available to anyone to watch on the White House website as well as on *Ta Dah* C-SPAN, which the last time I checked was TV. The address will also be streamed live online at C-SPAN.org, and on C-SPAN Radio (90.1 FM in Washington, D.C., and channel 132 on XM Satellite Radio)

The simple, easily-proven truth is easy to ignore when it can’t be used to further your fear-based conservative talk radio agenda, isn’t it?

Today, DelGiorno didn’t even bother prefacing his comments but he did add what I’m sure he thinks is a grand idea to his bile. An idea he so expertly pretended (like he pretends with all his ideas) to think up all on his own you could almost hear the fake light-bulb go on atop his head.

Instead of keeping your kids at home on Tuesday, he thought “spontaneously,” why not go to school with them? That’ll show ‘em (meaning principals and teachers), he said.

So DelGiorno is firing up parents with insinuations – that the government is trying to indoctrinate their kids into a Socialist Hitler-like Obama Youth (as I heard one parent-caller today describe it), that he is making them pledge their allegiance to the President (instead of the country), and that the government wants to whip up blind allegiance in you kids in the same way terrorists want to whip it up in theirs – and then sending them in that highly agitated state to your kids school.

Oh, have I mentioned that DelGiorno’s kids go to private school so he won’t have anything to worry about on Tuesday?

More irresponsible broadcasting from Michael DelGiorno and 99.7 WWTN. Listen to the whole clip here:
Download audio file (2009-09-02-mdg-obama-address-to-kids.mp3)

UPDATE:
History from Mark Brown of NoChaser and more from Woods at Pith in the Wind and TNDP chair Chip Forrester.

Are you ready for some failure?

The Huffington Post’s Thomas B. Edsall writes today that the modern GOP is returning to a “Southern” or “white-voter” strategy because “none of their positions is likely to produce gains among non-white minorities, especially Hispanics.”

And to some extent, he says, it’s working:

The party’s opposition to President Obama’s agenda — particularly his cap-and-trade energy proposal and health care reform plan — is resonating strongly with disaffected white Democratic voters. Republican grievances about Obama, combined with race-baiting commentary from the far-right ideologues who have become some of the most dominant voices of the modern GOP, have led to a precipitous drop in the president’s approval ratings among whites.

Although I disagree that the GOP’s opposition to President Obama’s cap-and-trade energy proposal and health care reform plan is “resonating” with “disaffected white Democratic voters,” I do agree that their latest “white-only” voters strategy did backfire in 2006 and 2008 and will fail again in 2010 because of, as Edsall puts it, “the ever-growing importance of the minority electorate.”

But won’t a new Southern Strategy also – and more importantly – fail in 2010 because we live in a very different United States than we did 40 years ago?

40 years ago, painting African-Americans as inferior, dangerous, and to be feared caused violent reactions to the work they were doing to advance civil rights. Now, however, most of us realize that this kind of blanket and blind fear is unnecessary. And although deep strains of racism and institutional discrimination still exist in the United States, any attempt to whip up mindless fear against African-Americans on a mass scale will fail. And even now when Latinos are being used in their stead, haven’t the majority of us learned enough through the civil-rights experiences of the last 5 decades that we no longer have the kind of knee-jerk, fearful reaction?

That said, it does seem as if exploiting the fear of an “immigrant-horde invasion” has been put temporarily on hold to make room for portraying our first African-American president as “The Other.” And it’s evident by the terms used now to describe him – “Muslim,” “non-citizen,” – that using terms normally associated with the demonization and dehumanization of African-Americans will no longer work (which is probably how he got elected in the first place).

So yeah, the new Southern Strategy might now be temporarily successful with 10 or 15% of the white populace who either still hate black people and/or are afraid of Muslims. But 40+ years of learning from history history, a generation coming of age in a country in which “bi-racial” is the fastest growing racial category, a fast-approaching economic recovery, and an Obama first term in which we will all be better off in 2012 than we were in 2008, should deal the final blow to any “white voter” strategy the GOP hopes to exploit.

In the meantime, we’ll all have to suffer through them trying to make it work.

What's the virtue of the Proportional Response?

So in the context of this cartoon, is shooting the person who wrote the economic stimulus package a “proportional response” to disagreeing with it? No, it’s not – or at least it shouldn’t be. Which makes the violence of the thing more frightening than funny (and no, there’s not a hint of satire anywhere to be found). But in light of recent events as well as what our new president represents, the horror of the smoking gun and the bullet-ridden body is much more troublesome than the monkey imagery (which is clearly a riff on the recent rampaging chimp shot by police news story).

Besides, it’s not the first time a president has been compared to a chimp. Just run “chimp” and “George Bush” through an ol’ Google image search.

And to answer Kleinheider’s question, “Is it racist to use the expected knee-jerk reactions of some in order to stoke controversy or just bad taste?,” it’s both. And if you re-write the question this way, “Is it racist to use the empathetic reactions of some in order to stoke controversy,” then it’s evil too. We have to start having serious conversations about race in this country, as U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder recently pointed out, and we must move beyond having them only when an Imus-like controversy pops up.