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Psychotic PUMA's back Sarah Palin -- (and McCain)

Some time back, I defended Hillary Clinton against outrageous attacks by excited Barack Obama partisans --Obamaniacs, I called them. 

But I'll roast in hell before I raise a finger to defend the tactics of die-hard Hillary supporters scheming to defeat Obama in 2008 and run Hillary again in 2012.  The worst of them run a lunatic website called Just Say No Deal.  Their goal:  NObama!

Here's video evidence of the lunacy of the pro-Hillary anti-Obama fringe:

Perhaps the most seriously deranged member of the Just Say No Deal coalition is Darragh Murphy, founder of People United Means Action (PUMA) PAC, not to be confused with the other PUMA, Party Unity My Ass.  Murphy is so angry with the Democratic Party under its current leadership that she will absolutely not vote for Barack Obama.

Murphy's anger and resentment have caused her to embrace McCain's vice-presidential pick, Sarah Palin. Friday in an interview on Hardball she characterized Palin as a "moderate",  that despite Palin's well-publicized opposition to abortion under any circumstances, including rape and incest. Murphy calls the McCain choice "exciting":

More disturbingly, Murphy's opposition to Obama may be racist. So concludes the Brooklyn, NY, blog, Rumproast, which investigated the connection between the PUMA movement and the production of The Lost Michelle Obama Tapes.   Watch the videos. You decide if there's any racist intent.

 PUMA's claim to be good Democrats.  If so, why the praise for Palin?  Palin is not only a pro-life absolutist, she's also anti-gay, anti-tax, anti-polar bear. Her record on the environment is everything that "good" Dems abhor. So what's the attraction?

It's clear that Darragh Murphy and other rabid Hillaryites will seize any excuse to ensure that Obama loses in 2008 and McCain wins. I'm no great fan of Democratic Party apparatchiks, but teaching the Democratic National Committee a lesson is not what this anti-Obama fervor is all about.

Is the PUMA movement worth writing about?  I normally would say no, it's not, certainly not any more than singling out other fringe movements like, say,  white supremacists.  The difference here is that these people --the PUMA people-- are getting some serious face time on national television.  And there appear to be a lot of them. 

So yes, it's time to shine a light on this particluar group of malcontents, particularly Darragh Murphy, who otherwise presents herself  as  well-spoken and thoughtful young woman.  That makes her all the more dangerous.

Alternative views from the Democratic Convention

First the surprises.

Famed blogger billmon called Ralph Nader an "asshole" as he professed a rekindled loyalty* to the Democratic Party.

And gadfly David Sirota, a reliable Dem critic, claimed that progressives at the convention "finally defeated the corporate wing of the party."  He cited Ted Kennedy's "electrifying" speech as proof.

Well not so fast.  Not everyone is convinced that the Dems have gotten it right.

Stephen Zunes, for example, says that the choice of Joe Biden as vice-presidential candidate is a "stunning betrayal of the anti-war constituency." Biden, he writes

"...was perhaps the single most important congressional backer of the Bush administration's decision to invade that [Iraq] oil-rich country."

The irrepressible Glenn Greenwald criticizes Biden as an entrenched member of the political establishment which wants to make sure "...that in this election, the prevailing orthodoxies of our political system won't be meaningfully challenged."

In other words, so much for change.  (I did like Biden's speech, though.  And his family story.)

And then there's the corporate influence on the party, despite Sirota's contention that it's been finally exorcised.

Telecommunications behemoth AT&T threw an exclusive bash for the 'Blue Dog" conservative wing of the Democratic party.  You'll recall that Obama caved on telecommuncations immunity in the new FISA bill.  You also should know that AT&T is a primary sponsor of the Republican Convention which starts Monday.

(Isn't that why Nader --the "asshole"-- is running?  To challenge the rule of the  "corporate duopoly"?)

Greenwald tried to cover the AT&T event, but was told that the press wasn't welcome.  He wasn't happy:

"It was really the perfect symbol for how the Beltway political system functions -- those who dictate the nation's laws (the largest corporations and their lobbyists) cavorting in total secrecy with those who are elected to write those laws (members of Congress)... ."

And finally there are all the issues that haven't been discussed at all, "contentious" issues like immigration, guns, gays, and trade, swept, so to speak, under the convention rug.

The Obama Dems certainly don't want to risk alienating the Republican vote.  How will those 'Blue Dogs' get elected if party doesn't trump principal?

*(I sympathize with Billmon, despite the Nader comment. Who cares if Nader IS an "asshole?" The rank and file Dems I see at the convention are my kind of people, too.)

Uncommon Schools: Undermining American democracy

(Great thanks to Anne Trudeau for the link.)

An angry swarm of neoliberal educational "reformers" has descended on Denver intent on influencing Democratic Party policy on how to fix schools and close the dreaded "achievement gap".  The goal of the reformers is to "fight for fundamental changes to the nation's public schools."

Those fundamental changes include:

• "Meaningful" public school choice

• Expanded charter school access

• Increased school accountability

The WireTap article linked above cites the most recent Phi Delta Kappan poll as reason enough for meddling in Democratic Party educational policy.  I read the poll differently.

No Child Left Behind has pushed test-based school accountability (and charter schools*) relentlessy since its inception.  But in the PDK poll, two-thirds of respondents either wanted to abolish the law entirely or change it significantly.  Among Democrats, those opposing NCLB reached the 75% level. 

The reformers who gathered in Denver (they also propose teacher pay for "performance") include Washington DC's "benevolent dictator", Michelle Rhee, who this year attempted to bribe union teachers into giving up tenure for significant pay raises. 

Another of the reformers is educational entrepreneur John King, the founder of an organizaton called "Uncommon Schools".  King is intent on establishing a string of exceptional, or "uncommom", charter schools, an elitist endeavor born of the perception that Horace Mann's common school ideal --a pillar of American democracy-- leads to educational mediocrity.

Since charter schools are publicly funded, any attempt to create a separate public school sector for more motivated (and usually wealthier) students, specifically the college bound, poses a direct threat to the entire edifice of public education.  Public common schools by their very nature promote tolerance and democracy.  They shouldn't become "uncommon"  communities of special interests.

That's why I say this latest "reform" effort is an assault on American democracy.  One hopes that Barack Obama and his advisors will see it that way.

*(The PDK poll respondents support charter schools by a 51 -35 margin.  I attribute that to incessant propaganda from the Bush Department of Education and to the public's acceptance of charters as 'public' and open to all.  I don't think that most people realize how selective in reality most charter schools are.  Even the most democratic of charter schools enroll far fewer at-risk students than traditional public schools.)

Rick Warren and the "New Atheists"

Pastor Rick Warren, author of the best selling The Purpose-Driven Life and praised by some as the "anti-Jerry Falwell", was asked by a Jewish woman at the Aspen Ideas Festival if she was condemned to burn in hell. 

Warren's answer --"Yes."

Such absolute certainty should be troubling to all Americans, religious or otherwise.  The fact that presidential candidates Obama and McCain submitted to Warren's  faith inquisition last Saturday should be more troubling yet.  But the Warren interrogation raises a deeper question:

Can an professed atheist ever be elected President of the United States?  Probably not.  Is that a bad thing?  Not necessarily.

I say that because atheists are every bit the "true believers" that Bible thumping Christians are, as sure of their belief in rationalism as fundamentalists are in the divinity of Jesus.  Both are convinced of the correctness of their beliefs.  They allow no doubts or uncertainties to seep into their worldviews.  No "true believer" of that sort should ever seriously  be considered for high political office.  Absolute certainty leads to almost certain political and humanitarian disaster.

Marx's dismissal of religion as the "opium of the people" led to Leninism and then Stalinism.  The Roman Catholic insistence on "papal infallibility" led to the Inquisition.  Different sides of the same "true believer's" coin. 

Chris Hedges, who calls Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and Richard Dawkins the "new atheists" (he debated both Harris and Hitchens), said of Harris in an interview with Salon:

"The danger of Sam’s simplistic worldview is that it does what fundamentalists do: It creates the illusion of a binary world of us and them, of reason versus irrationality, of the forces of light battling the forces of darkness.  And once you set up this world you are permitted to view as justified military intervention, brutal occupation and even torture, anything, in short, that will subdue what is defined as irrational and dangerous."

Like Stalin.  Or Torquemada. *

In the  symposium with Obama and McCain, Warren posed a question about evil, and what should be done about it.  Evil is a religious construct.   And when the term is used to characterize Arabs and Muslims,  it becomes a  racist epithet and religious  slur.   What Warren should have asked first is, do you accept the notion of evil? 

There's no certainty in my mind that evil does exist in this world, either in the religious sense --as in possession by the devil-- or in  psychological terms -- as in cases of  socio- or psycho- pathology.   Individuals so diagnosed supposedly lack a conscience.  But how does anyone know for certain?  The problem posed by the existence of truly "evil" persons admits only one solution --their elimination.  That's how many justify the death penalty.

Pastor Rick Warren's questions were designed to elicit overtly religious responses.  Well, I say that  religion  has no place in a political campaign.  As I was reminded recently,  Presidents take an oath to uphold the Constitution.  They do not pledge their adherence to a  particular religious belief.

Insofar as the Constitution separates religion from state, what Warren enticed candidates Obama and McCain to discuss Saturday evening was clearly un-Constitutional.   Or, as Kathleen Parker wrote,  it was  "supremely wrong."  And certainly un-American.  

*(Much like Torquemada, the Grand Inquisitor, Sam Harris supports "water boarding", and other forms of torture, for America's "evil" enemies.)

Gonzalez not a good choice for the Portland School Board

As I suspected, the Oregonian's pick for the Portland School Board vacancy, Martin Gonzales, will serve as a safe vote for continuation of the district's disastrous transfer policy, a policy that clearly leaves most of Portland's poor and minority students behind.

What the board needs now is an outspoken champion of equal opportunity for all students.  Having run with Martin in the 2003 school board election (he finished second to David Wynde), I have a hard time seeing him as the determined agent of change the board desperately needs.  I recall Martin as soft-spoken and even rather equivocal.  I never learned during the campaign that he favored school choice and was willing to sacrifice neighborhood  schools to achieve it.  (If I had known that, I certainly would not have voted for him.)

Martin Gonzalez hints that he wants to strengthen neighborhood schools to obviate the "necessity" for concerned parents and their students to transfer to better schools.  I doubt, however, that Martin will demand of the board the money necessary to upgrade lower class schools. Candidate Steve Buel, for example, has proposed a $5 million expenditure to provide 12 Full Time Equivalent positions at Portland's lowest enrollment high schools.

Will Martin Gonzalez propose something comparably bold?

I get the impression that Martin wants what's best for the most motivated of his Latino constituency.  That's not good enough for a public school district. 

Vicki (and Gates) still have their fans

It seems that Oregonian editorial board member Susan Nielsen has interviewed all five candidates vying to serve out Dan Ryan's remaining ten months on the Portland School Board.  If Nielsens' comments are any indication of a possible Oregonian endorsement, it looks like Steve Buel is out of luck.

Buel was the only one of the five who had nothing good to say about former superintendent Vicki Phillips, at least according to Nielsen.  Given the state of the district, rife with inequities, that should make Buel the front runner.  That's how I see it, anyway.

Nielsen sees it differently. "Hurricane" Vicki was the "bracing wind Portland needed."

Rita Moore seems to be Nielsen's favorite, and, next to Buel, mine too.  You have to like someone who musters the courage to say

"If half the city fails, the whole city fails." 

Moore places the blame squarely on the school board:

"Frankly, I blame the board. They didn't ask questions, they didn't get the answers.  ... There's a real credibility gap."

I fear that such statements will not endear Rita Moore to the board which has the final say on Ryan's replacement  Nonetheless it's something the board needs to hear.

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And then there's Bill Gates, whose largesse the Portland district has become dependent on, especially when it comes to "small schools" in the city's poorest communities.

What a surprise then to read that Madison High will no longer be a recipient of Gates money.  According to Employers for Educational Excellence, the organization charged with distributing Gates' money, Madison wasn't committed to "small, fully autonomous high schools."

Silos, in another words. 

Opposition to those silos was what caused counselor David Colton to lose his position at Madison.  It also prompted a faculty vote of no confidence in Madison's principal, a vote that Superintendent Carole Smith criticized. 

In the end, the district lost big time, both the Gates money and the battle with Colton.

David Colton is back at Madison.

The lessons of war

(This is the third in a series on Andrew Bacevich, the outspoken critic of American foreign policy, militarism, and pretensions to empire.)

First there was Vietnam.

As a uniformed officer who served in Vietnam (1970-71), Andrew Bacevich initially "bought into the institutional view" that America's loss in Southeast Asia was the fault of politicians, the media, and of the American people.  They had "screwed us"  --meaning the military.  After his retirement from the army, however, Bacevich began to see the war in a radically different light:

"Since getting out of the Army, since trying to make sense of the Cold War and U.S. foreign policy from a different perspective, I've come to see the Vietnam War differently as well. ... And I've come to see the war as just utterly unnecessary, misguided, and mistaken. A monumental miscalculation that never should have happened, but that did happen due to some deep-seated defects in the way we see ourselves and see the world."

What followed that realization was a series of books written to explore and expose those "defects", culminating in Bacevich's recently published, The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism.  In an adaptation from the book for TomDispatch, Bacevich discusses the lessons we should have learned from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, neither of which has turned out as planned.   The lessons are these:

• "War's constant companions are uncertainty and risk."  No matter how well planned, wars are "sure to give rise to unexpected consequences."

• The use of military force has limitations.  Whatever the objectives, the use of  military force in the Middle East is not the answer.

• Preventive war launched to eliminate  "possible future" threats doesn't work.  

• Lastly, the "formulation" of military strategy "has become a lost art."  Civilian leaders (Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, for example) tend to conflate "strategy with ideology".   Military leaders are increasingly reluctant to set them straight, to speak truth to power.

Bacevich concludes that, instead of a larger army more lavishly funded, we need "... a smaller -- that is, more modest -- foreign policy...":

"Modesty implies giving up on the illusions of grandeur to which the end of the Cold War and then 9/11 gave rise. It also means reining in the imperial presidents who expect the army to make good on those illusions."

Unfortunately, given that both of our presidential candidates support an increase in military spending, those illusions and the "imperial" presidency seem unlikely to fade from the scene anytime soon.*

*(Which is why I've argued that the impeachment of George W. Bush, that most "imperial" of presidents, is a necessary step for Congress to take, if for no other reason than to serve as a cautionary tale for future presidents.) 

Bacevich on politics

Andrew Bacevich describes himself as a distant observer of politics.  He admits to being a conservative.

Nevertheless, the former Army colonel, West Point graduate, professor of history and international relations at Boston University, and author of The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism, decided in 2006 to vote for every Democrat possible on the promise of the Democrats ending the war in Iraq.  

As we know, they failed to deliver on that promise.  Instead, as Basevich puts it, the Democrats

"... absolutely, totally, completely failed to follow through on their commitment. Now, there was a lot of posturing. But, really, the record of the Democratic Congress over the past two years has been - one in which, substantively, all they have done is to appropriate the additional money that enables President Bush to continue that war."

Congress has in effect "thrust power and authority to the executive branch" and abdicated its responsibility to advocate for the "common good".  Congress has become a thoroughly dysfunctional branch of government:

"The Congress exists primarily to ensure the reelection of members of Congress."

Will it be different under an Obama presidency?   In response to Bill Moyers question about whether he expects either John McCain or Barack Obama to "rein in the imperial presidency", Bacevich replied:

"No. I mean, people run for the presidency in order to become imperial presidents. The people who are advising these candidates, the people who aspire to be the next national security advisor, the next secretary of defense, these are people who yearn to exercise those kind of great powers. They're not running to see if they can make the Pentagon smaller. They're not."

Nevertheless, Andrew Bacevich will vote for Obama (and here) come November solely on the grounds that Obama "...has promised to end the U.S. combat role in Iraq."  But, as he wrote in the Boston Globe, Obama must go further:

"The challenge facing Obama is clear: he must go beyond merely pointing out the folly of the Iraq war; he must demonstrate that Iraq represents the truest manifestation of an approach to national security that is fundamentally flawed, thereby helping Americans discern the correct lessons of that misbegotten conflict."

As a progressive, I for one am not convinced that Obama will go further, that he has in fact learned the lessons of preemptive war.  He has already announced, for example, that he wants an expanded military, that he wants to send more soldiers to Afghanistan, that he will leave some combat troops in Iraq.  And he has threatened the use of military force against Iran.  

A vote for Obama, by the standards Bacevich lays out, requires a long leap of faith.

Bacevich on Carter

I've long held that Jimmy Carter is our greatest ex-President.  Those who agree say Carter's legacy will be determined not by his single term in the White House but what he has done since.

Andrew Bacevich, the author of a stunning new book on the militarization of American foreign policy and the growth of the imperial presidency, has a different perspective.  In an interview Friday night with Bill Moyers, Bacevich declared that Carter is the only President in the last 60 years, Democrat or Republican, who "...recognized, I think, the challenges awaiting us if we refused to get our house in order."

Bacevich is referring to the energy crisis, and more specifically to Carter's 1979 "malaise speech", which many blame for Carter's loss to Ronald Reagan a year later.  Bacevich views that speech as prophetic:

"It's a very powerful speech, I think, because President Carter says in that speech, oil, our dependence on oil, poses a looming threat to the country. If we act now, we may be able to fix this problem. ...

"He had a profound understanding of the dilemma facing the country in the post Vietnam period. And of course, he was completely hooted, derided, disregarded."

I've only heard one other person speak of Carter as President so favorably --Portland-based progressive talk show host Thom Hartmann.  One of Hartmann's favorite riffs is telling how Carter installed solar panels on the White House roof only to see Reagan take them down as soon as he moved in.

That's an apt metaphor for Ronald Reagan, the "modern prophet of profligacy", as Bacevich dubs him in his book.  Indeed, profligacy --the "non-negotiable" American life-style of extravagant consumption-- is at the heart of Bacevich's critique of American militarism and the quest for empire.  Americans have been conditioned to believe that the "...problems we face are problems that are out there somewhere, beyond our borders."

Bacevich calls that notion, the belief that the looming limits on American consumption --the price of gas, for example-- are caused by conditions in other countries, an illusion.  He begins the book with a quotation from the Bible:

"Set thine house in order."

"Our major problems", Bacevich says, "are at home."  We won't find their solutions in the oilfields of the Middle East. 

(More on Bacevich and The Limits of Power coming soon.)

Why Bayh?

Bloggers and pundits are speculating that Senator Evan Bayh, the centrist DLC Democrat from Indiana, is way up there on Barack Obama's list of possible running mates.

The question is, why? 

Why would an anti-war candidate pick a pro-war co-sponsor of the 2002 Senate resolution authorizing the use of military force in Iraq as his vice president?  It undermines one of Obama's signature campaign themes.

David Sirota calls Bayh "a shameless Bush parrot... ."  He is.  Yet the media typically describes him as an attractive and photogenic politician (ignoring his silly almost-parted-in-the-middle hairdo.)

Naming Bayh as his running mate risks alienating what remains of Obama's progressive support.  He can ill-afford that.

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Speaking of pro-war politicians, slacktivist proposes replacing Andrew Jackson's murderous mug on the twenty dollar bill with ... Satchmo!

Yes, that's right --Louis Armstrong.  Fred Clark --he's the slacktivist-- says that Jackson doesn't deserve the honor.  I agree.

Too bad Armstrong is no longer with us.  He's a vice-presidential choice I'd readily accept.  Satchmo was, after all, America's jazz ambassador to the world.