bodhi tree swaying

Ron Paul has taken a brave stance that will make him unpopular with many conservatives.

It is repeatedly said that 64% of the people, after listening to the political demagogues, don’t want the mosque to be built. What would we do if 75% of the people insist that no more Catholic churches be built in New York City? The point being is that majorities can become oppressors of minority rights as well as individual dictators. Statistics of support is irrelevant when it comes to the purpose of government in a free society—protecting liberty.

Via Think Progress

Ron Paul is a man I disagree with on many things, but he’s spot on here. This is where libertarianism and liberalism overlap.

Back in September, I posted a graph of job losses covering the final fourteen months of Bush’s presidency and the first seven of Obama’s.

I’d ironically titled the post See how Obama is destroying the US because someone had put a poll on Facebook asking the question, “Is Obama destroying our country?” The answer choices were thoughtfully provided as:

– Yes
– No
– Only a little

If you look at the comments for that post you’ll see I was criticized as “partisan,” “misreading the statistics,” and that I “do not understand what is going on.” I was also told that “Hard times are coming and you will not be prepared.”

Of course I don’t have any advanced skills in analyzing the economy, but it seemed obvious that the trend was in the right direction and that …

Here’s the article, which was published on Newsmax, and then pulled. I got the text from Google’s cache:

Obama Risks a Domestic Military ‘Intervention’

Tuesday, September 29, 2009 10:35 AM

By: John L. Perry

There is a remote, although gaining, possibility America’s military will intervene as a last resort to resolve the “Obama problem.” Don’t dismiss it as unrealistic.

America isn’t the Third World. If a military coup does occur here it will be civilized. That it has never happened doesn’t mean it wont. Describing what may be afoot is not to advocate it. So, view the following through military eyes:

# Officers swear to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” Unlike enlisted personnel, they do not swear to “obey the orders of the president of the United States.”

# Top military officers can see the Constitution they are sworn to defend being trampled as American

…

Someone just posted a poll on FaceBook evaluating the Obama presidency. The question and answer choices were as follows:

Is Obama destroying our country?
- Yes
- No
- Only a little

The graph above compares Bush’s “economic miracle” — the miracle of destroying jobs at a rate unprecedented in modern times– with Obama’s performance. Note what happened in the months since Obama took office. Job losses have declined to a point where they’re not much worse than they were before the recession got fully under way. If current trends continue it’ll only be a couple of months before we see positive gains in the number of jobs.

Then we’ll be back to the start of what may be another long nightmare of prosperity, although the nightmare of peace is something we won’t see for some time, given that the Bush administration started two wars …

Peter Clothier has a neat idea for motivating people to push for a public health insurance option. Here is what he wrote:

Step 1: I handwrite a brief letter to my Senators. “Dear Senator …, I voted for you. I have placed my trust in you. I hereby respectfully request that you unequivocally INSIST on the inclusion of a public option or its equivalent in any health care bill that goes to President Obama. Yours truly, (signature.)”

(Find your senators’ addresses here)

Step 2: I place my letters in sealed, stamped envelopes, marked in bright, unmistakable letters on the outside: PO/PO (for Public Option/Post Office) in order to identify it as a part of this effort.

Step 3: IMPORTANT! On Tuesday, September 1 at precisely NOON o’clock, I drive, ride or walk to my nearest United States Post Office and silently place my letters in the outgoing mailbox. Suppose I were to

…

Rachel Maddow’s piece is very sobering and shows how right-wing lobbying firms set on derailing health insurance reform are attempting to use thuggish behavior to intimidate legislators.

For some reason the Maddow video doesn’t display unless you visit the post — click on the title above if you can’t see it.

Stewart’s piece is lighter, but does a good job of showing how Fox News helps by endlessly recycling its own talking points (which themselves come from the Republican Party).

Glenn Greenwald is good at highlighting government hypocrisy, no matter where it originates:

Regarding Obama’s refusal to disclose the identity of health care executives meeting in the White House, TPM’s David Kurtz notes:  "It’s an especially painful continuation of Bush policies since candidate Obama promised to let CSPAN in to cover the creation of a health care bill and his campaign website still promises transparency in meetings between White House staff and outside interests." 

There are certain times when Obama betrays the spirit of his promises and other times when he betrays both the spirit and letter.  This seems quite clearly to be an example of the latter.

To me, this is one of the most astonishing developments in the ever-shifting rationale for why the US went to war in Iraq. Thomas Friedman tells us that we went there pretty much just to kick Muslim butt in order to deliver a message to that part of the world that we wouldn’t put up with terrorism from, you know, like people who live roughly in that part of the world. Wouldn’t really have mattered which Muslim butt we kicked. Could just as well have been Saudi Arabia, he tells us. Or Pakistan. Doesn’t really matter that none of those three countries had anything to do with 9/11 (although a lot of Saudi nationals were involved, of course). The important thing is that they happened to be Muslims.

It’s like New Zealand deciding to attack Austria because France bombed the Rainbow Warrior on their territory. Just to make an example of

…

Gail Collins is often wickedly funny, and she’s in good form commenting on Sarah Palin’s quitting in order to spend more time with her family values:

• "Palin is quitting as governor because she’s not a quitter."
• "She recalled her visit with the troops in Kosovo, whose dedication and determination inspired her to … resign."
• "The timing of Palin’s announcement was extremely peculiar. Not only did she interrupt the plans of TV newscasters to spend the entire weekend pointing out that Michael Jackson is still dead, she delivered her big news just as the nation was settling into Fourth of July celebrations. You’d have thought she didn’t want us to notice."
• "It turns out that Palin believes that the only way her administration can ‘continue without interruption’ is for her to end it."
• "There is

…

Glenn Greenwald keeps up the good fight, expecting journalists to pursue factual truth (and to call authorities on their BS) rather than merely pass on both "sides" of a debate as is both were mere opinions, even when one side is factually correct and the other is bogus.

This failure to takes sides with the truth, in an attempt to maintain a faux "objectivity" leads to the media passing on government (and opposition) propaganda, lending it the appearance of truth. This applies especially with the media’s refusal to call actions taken by Americans "torture," even when Americans have prosecuted others (as torturers) for committing those identical acts (such as waterboarding) and even as those same media describe as torture those same, or essentially identical, acts carried out by other nations.

In one of his many articles on this topic, Greenwald quotes this juicily hilarious extract from

…

Didn’t get a chance to read much in the papers today — but I feel some sympathy for Mark Sanford, adulterous governor of South California. It must be a painful and humiliating thing to be caught in an adulterous relationship when you’ve built your career in part on condemning other people’s sexual ethics. But he shows no signs of resigning his office, although he insisted that Bill Clinton resign his office for a similar sexual transgression. Maureen Dowd provides a breakdown of Sanford’s hypocrisy.

Tonight I have a chapter meeting (a meeting with fellow members of the Western Buddhist Order) using an online service called Tokbox that provides free videoconferencing. Our chapter members are in New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Montana, and Washington. We’ll be continuing our study of the Bodhicharyavatara.

This is four members of my chapter: Varasuri, myself, Varada, and Priyamitra. Sunada was away.

I’ve been …

From today’s New York Times:

…experts who are trotted out on television can move public opinion by more than 3 percentage points, because they seem to be reliable or impartial authorities.

But do experts actually get it right themselves?

The expert on experts is Philip Tetlock, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. His 2005 book, “Expert Political Judgment,” is based on two decades of tracking some 82,000 predictions by 284 experts. The experts’ forecasts were tracked both on the subjects of their specialties and on subjects that they knew little about.

The result? The predictions of experts were, on average, only a tiny bit better than random guesses — the equivalent of a chimpanzee throwing darts at a board.

“It made virtually no difference whether participants had doctorates, whether they were economists, political scientists, journalists or historians, whether they had policy experience or access to classified information, or whether they had logged

…

The kind of president we need…

is the kind of president capable of thinking in this way:

“My job is to help the country take the long view — to make sure that not only are we getting out of this immediate fix, but we’re not repeating the same cycle of bubble and bust over and over again; that we’re not having the same energy conversation 30 years from now that we had 30 years ago; that we’re not talking about the state of our schools in the exact same ways we were talking about them in the 1980s; and that at some point we say, ‘You know what? If we’re spending more money per-capita on health care than any nation on earth, then you’d think everybody would have coverage and we would see lower costs for average consumers, and we’d have better outcomes.’ ”

The statement, of course, is by President Obama …

Jon Stewart is concerned that Obama’s rhetoric so closely parallels that of George W. Bush, but Jason Jones says, “I guess when Obama says this stuff I don’t think he really means it. And that gives me hope.”

I’d have thought it was the other way around myself, but Jones’ version is funnier.

Brilliant clip from Stewart:

“Fox News: Really scared about what might happen; oblivious to what already has.”

I caught up on the inaugural speech almost 24 hours late due to a hospital appointment and a lack of television. I’d heard some of it on the radio but missed a chunk in the middle, and so it was only thanks to Bittorrent that I was able to download the video and see, if not the surrounding events, at least the botched swearing-in and the inaugural speech that followed.

I found the event itself very moving — the visuals definitely added to the sense of this being a momentous occasion — but wasn’t much impressed with Obama’s speech. Paul Krugman hits the spot in today’s NYT in describing one of the things I noticed as I was listening:

…in his speech Mr. Obama attributed the economic crisis in part to “our collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age” — but I have no

…

Frank Rich sums up the pitiful figure of fun that is George W. Bush:

We like our failed presidents to be Shakespearean, or at least large enough to inspire Oscar-worthy performances from magnificent tragedians like Frank Langella. So here, too, George W. Bush has let us down. Even the banality of evil is too grandiose a concept for 43. He is not a memorable villain so much as a sometimes affable second banana whom Josh Brolin and Will Ferrell can nail without breaking a sweat. He’s the reckless Yalie Tom Buchanan, not Gatsby. He is smaller than life.

It’s well worth reading the whole of his brilliant piece.

Sitting here in these chairs that I’m going to be proposing but in working with these governors who again on the front lines are forced to and it’s our privileged obligation to find solutions to the challenges facing our own states every day being held accountable, not being just one of many just casting votes or voting present every once in a while, we don’t get away with that.

Pretty distinctive cadences, eh?

The whole article is worth reading.

Georgia Representative George Broun is apparently worried that President-elect Obama will establish a Gestapo-like security force to impose a Marxist or fascist dictatorship.

“It may sound a bit crazy and off base, but the thing is, he’s the one who proposed this national security force,” Rep. Paul Broun said of Obama in an interview Monday with The Associated Press. “I’m just trying to bring attention to the fact that we may — may not, I hope not — but we may have a problem with that type of philosophy of radical socialism or Marxism.”

Broun cited a July speech by Obama that has circulated on the Internet in which the then-Democratic presidential candidate called for a civilian force to take some of the national security burden off the military.

“That’s exactly what Hitler did in Nazi Germany and it’s exactly what the Soviet Union did,”

…

From the Telegraph:

Fears are growing that Mr Obama, who will become America’s first black president following his inauguration next year, will be the subject of an assassination attempt.

The secret service is reported to have already investigated more than 500 death threats against Mr Obama during the presidential election contest. Last month, two neo-Nazi skinheads were arrested for conspiring to assassinate Mr Obama.

He is expected to be protected by a secret service detail with hundreds of close-protection agents. Over the past few weeks, the US government has also begun secretly testing a new ultra-secure presidential limousine able to withstand most bomb blasts and terror attacks. Details of his movements will be a closely guarded secret for all but his most senior aides.

The scale of US presidential security is already on a different scale to that for British Prime Ministers with huge …