I'm not quite so egotistical as to think that a post announcing that I've returned to the Campus Progress community to start blogging again is worthy of its very own space here. That being said--I'm back.
On to more important things.....
Very little confuses me more about the Republican Party than their refusal to engage with perhaps the most important issue of the day: making sure our earth remains inhabitable.
A strange coalition of Christians with what can only be described as weird theology joins forces with the traditional short-term thinking business interests to oppose progress to ensure future access to a healthy environment. And Democrats refuse to make this into the issue that it should be. The Republicans have had no problem scaring Americans into a war in Iraq, scaring Americans into tax cuts for the wealthy, scaring Americans into re-electing a President to save them from terrorists.
Over the next couple of years, I plan on covering Georgia's gubernatorial race pretty closely. Despite Georgia's red state status, this is one of the more vulnerable governor's races up in 2006. Besides, Montana elected a Democratic Governor, and Virginia hasn't voted for a Democrat for President in a few dozen years but was willing to elect Mark Warner. So don't be fooled.
Sonny Perdue defeated incumbent Roy Barnes in 2002 in a huge Republican sweep year--still riding the tide of 9/11, Republicans had a big year in Georgia, beating Max Cleland and Roy Barnes. But Democrats still held both the Senate and the House...that is, until Perdue convinced four Democratic Senators to jump ship and switch parties, giving Republicans control of the Senate for the first time since Reconstruction.
In fact, Perdue won, in large part, for two reasons. Barnes ticked off the teachers, giving Perdue a slight opening. But the biggest election issue? You'll love it... Read More »
A few months ago, RachelGoodman noted the presence of a significant (and still present, from what I can tell) gender gap here within the Campus Progress blogosphere (and in the larger one as a whole as well).
Chris Bowers goes into a bit more depth on the subject, noting what he sees as four reasons for the lack of a strong female presence in the blogosphere:
1. The acceptability of sexist language
2. Hillary Clinton Hatred
3. The general male domination of political punditry
4. Men as the traditional upkeepers of the internet (programmers, techies, anyone teaching a Computer Science course).
I told myself I would not contribute to the ridiculousness of this whole Terry Schiavo debate. After all, the rude pundit, kos, and Atrios have all weighed in on the issue, and I think for the most part it's been made clear that
A. This should not be the media circus that it is
B. The Republicans in Congress are beyond ridiculous for intervening and
C. did I mention ridiculous?
As atrios notes, public opinion is OVERWHELMINGLY against the Republican Congress on this one, so I'm note even entirely sure why they're doing it. Unless they truly believe in this stuff and, in that case, may God bless their souls.
Now I, unlike Michelle Malkin and the Republicans in Congress, am not up for politicizing this whole Terry Schiavo thing to gain a couple of political points. But I do think it has helped me finally understand the frame we need to be using to understand the way that conservatives view women's bodies and the entirety of their economic beliefs.
They are for living for the sake of living.
Obviously, this doesn't apply to themselves, individually, but only to everyone else. They should all merely live for the sake of living. They don't care about improving lives, or about quality of lives. But as bad as things may get for you, whatever you do, just keep living. But think about it, all of their policies fit within this framework. It's not about promoting a higher quality of life, or about making sacrifices so others can get ahead.
Of course, this flies entirely in the face of Christ's teachings, but they've never been ones for particularly caring about accuracy in their theology.
How bizarre? Yes, I know, and I think the American people could know as well. So it's our responsibility to frame it in a way that they will listen to.
Update:Chris Bowers has more analysis of the Schiavo mess that the Republicans have dug themselves into. Since the election I knew the only way Progressives would have a way back into power would be through the classic Conservative overreach. Gingrich did it with the government shutdown, and now Republican leadership has been fooled by the vigils outside Schiavo's hospice into thinking the public would be all about it.
Oops. The Emperor has no clothes, folks. See them for all their nakedness.
Update 2: My deepest apologies to all of you for making you think about Republican nakedness.
Turns out I'm not the first person to think of this mainstreaming corruption thing. Check out this article from January in Salon. You have to watch a short ad to see the whole thing, but oh how well worth it it is.
In fact, it's so well worth it that I almost guarantee you won't make it all the way through, which is why I'm going to stop (probably) posting every time I come across another Bush administration corrupt scandal. Why? Peter Dizikes sounds off an alarming THIRTY FOUR (34) scandals of the first four years of the Bush administration.
Let that sink in for a second.
Among them are some of the obvious: Gitmo, the Valerie Plame Affair, Armstrong Williams. But some of them, like perhaps the indictment of a New England BC04 campaign chairman for conspiracy or the wiretapping of the U.N., you may not have heard of. Take a glance through--definitely some useful ammo.
It would be comical if it weren't so terrifying. The fact that I can write one of these a WEEK should say something very telling about this administration.
RAW STORY has the latest corruption pickup, a virtual smorgasborg of corrupt activity. First, you have this group, the National Center for Public Policy Research, that has been sending Social Security "fright mail" to the elderly, arguing that their benefits are in danger of being cut unless the elderly send them money. Check one of these letters out here. . Sound like any College Republicans you know?
But that's not all, folks. There's more after the jump... Read More »
I hate this damn lie about Republican "greatness" toward blacks because Truman split the Democratic party and nearly lost the Presidency rather than keep civil rights out of the 1948 platform. Kennedy and LBJ destroyed the old Democratic party and stood up to the racists of their OWN party. And where did those old reactionary, black hating Democrats go? Mmm.where is Trent Lott, and Strom Thurmond, and Jesse Helms, and Zell "dark pottage" Miller, and all the old racist Democrats? Why lo and behold they are now Republicans!
You wanna know the difference? When Republicans were power and the reactionary Democrats and racists worked hard to disenfrancise and defeat the rights fo all citizens, the Republican party sat on their hands. When the Democrats came to power after the 1930's, they used their majority to work against the racists and reactionaries. That is the difference sir. You point me a Republican President after Lincoln who would destroy his party rather than give quarter to homophobes or racists. You show me a Republican President after Lincoln who stood up against the reactionaries in his own party. You show me a Republican President who sacrificed his Presidency or chances thereof for the sake of Civil rights the way Truman, Kennedy, and LBJ did.
That's why I wrote this editorial. Pretty good, if I do so say myself :-)
So let me get this straight. We’re going to borrow $2 trillion to fail to fix a system that doesn’t need immediate fixing in the hopes that we can get rid of a guaranteed benefit and replace it with a risky program that might, but probably won’t, pay out more than we’d get now? And we’re going to do it all while cutting the deficit in half in the next five years?
But hey, this is Bush administration logic. Next, we’ll hear that invading Iraq will pay for itself ….
Take a peek. It was written in response to this baloney published just last week. Can't let that conservative silliness go unchallenged, now can we?
I may just make this a weekly (or heck, biweekly) as long as the Bush Administration keeps giving me this ridiculous ammunition. The latest? Perhaps you heard recently that the Bush administration has argued that the very arguments it wants to use to defend the infinite detention of inmates at Gitmo et. al. are secret. As in, we can't tell you why we need to do it so just trust us.
ATTORNEYS FOR the Justice Department appeared before a federal judge in Washington this month and asked him to dismiss a lawsuit over the detention of a U.S. citizen, basing their request not merely on secret evidence but also on secret legal arguments. The government contends that the legal theory by which it would defend its behavior should be immune from debate in court. This position is alien to the history and premise of Anglo-American jurisprudence, which assumes that opposing lawyers will challenge one another's arguments.
It gets better...
Most recently, it urged that the case be dismissed on the basis, yet again, of secret evidence -- this time supplemented with what a Justice Department lawyer termed "legal argument [that] itself cannot be made public without disclosing the classified information that underlies it."
Judge Bates is cautious and generally deferential to government concerns. Yet he was evidently disturbed by this argument, at one point asking whether the government could identify "any case in which . . . even the legal theory for dismissal is not known to the other side?" The government could not.
The title of the article is "Injustice, In Secret." These kinds of attempted precedents have enormous impacts on us. I don't want to grow up in this sort of world.
The comparisons to 1984 and Brave New World are trite and overused. But how else to describe a world in which every day enormous steps are taken to curtail freedom?
It's become everyday. Normal. Page A12 of the Times. Certainly not an ISSUE.
Corruption has become such a hallmark of this administration that the American public has come to accept it as fact, inevitable, and not even particularly bad. Now don't get me wrong, I'm sure Clinton had his smoke-filled rooms and backdoor deals. But the tragically scary thing about this administration is that their corruption gets aired out to the public, and Bushco just doesn't care. And why? Because WE don't care.
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