Cartoon du Jour

Tom Toles/Universal Press Syndicate

High Expectations, Promises Unfulfilled: Why We Are Disappointed With Obama

I'll begin this essay by declaring that it is my view that President Obama has not been the major disappointment that has left many liberals and blacks shaking their heads. I'll also note that given the watershed 2008 election and the eight dark years before it, our expectations for the next four were bound to be much too high.

Yet I share some of that sense of disappointment.

While acknowledging the realities of the time in which Obama governs -- an economic crisis that was inherited and a Republican opposition that has been determinedly obstructionist while not so subtly questioning his ability to lead as well as suggesting his patriotism is lacking because, you know, blacks are less patriotic, I have struggled over this long, hot summer to put my finger on the root of the malaise that threatens to overshadow the Obama administration's considerable accomplishments.

What I keep coming back to is this: Even though Obama was been a consummate insider and a magna cum laude graduate of the brass knuckles school of Chicago politics, he campaigned as an outsider that would shake up Washington but Washington shook him up instead.

Some examples:

* Obama chose many of the very same insiders who were asleep at wheel or looked the other way as the seeds of the 2008 economic collapse were sewn. Mind you that outsiders would not have had the experience of insiders, but they would have been possessed with an insight that most of the insiders clearly lacked.

* Obama has played much too nice with the Republicans. Presidents lead by example and Obama's legendary cool has been salutatory. But it became obvious within hours after his inauguration that endless negotiating with an opposition that would not hesitate to bring down the government -- and has twice nearly done so this year alone -- was a zero-sum game. Besides which, voters had given him majorities in both houses.

* Obama, in part because of the opposition, has been content (that perhaps is not the right word) with a half a loaf when a whole loaf was called for. The passage of a sweeping health-care reform law is the signal accomplish of his first term, but it omitted key provisions in the original draft. Ditto with the economic stimulus.

* Obama has equivocated on the war in Afghanistan. Despite taking out Osama bin Laden, as well as being far more decisive on national security issues than Republicans have given him credit for, he has been reluctant to come to terms with the obvious: The U.S.-led NATO coalition cannot "win" in Afghanistan in the conventional sense and it is long past time to get the hell out. Ditto with Iraq.

* Obama has been an admirable communicator who has been compared to FDR in some respects, and his public addresses at key junctures of his presidency have been masterful and elucidating. But he has been unable to articulate an effective alternative to the Republican narrative. FDR did and it worked.

* Obama's inability to articulate that alternative is because he has either lost sight of who he is or never really knew in the first place. Labels can be too simplistic, but is he a liberal? If so, why has he governed like a moderate and sometimes spoken like a conservative? Perhaps because he has tried to please both sides -- or all sides -- too much of the time.

* Obama has been suckered by Republicans on the greatest challenge of his presidency. That is jobs creation in the face of mounting economic inequality. The economy will not begin to recover until millions more Americans can return to work, but they have been largely forgotten because of the Republican mantra that government spending must be cut, whereas an increase in spending is what is badly needed.

* Obama issued go-free cards to Bush administration torture regime perpetrators. His rationale in not ordering the Justice Department to investigate these evildoers is understandable if vexsome. He did not want to begin his presidency with Republicans screaming blue-blooded murder over what they would view as political prosecutions, but they screamed anyway about practically everything else.

If you are among the minority of voters who believed in 2008 that a maverick has-been from Arizona and a wingnut from Alaska were preferable to a fresh face from Illinois and a running mate with outstanding foreign policy credentials, then you not only expected the Democratic challenger to be a disappointment but hoped that it would be.

But it is probable that few of the nearly 70 million Americans who voted for Barack Obama have not been disappointed as I have to an extent and others have to a great extent.

Is it possible that Obama has simply lost his mojo and no longer believes in what he thought he stood for? Or perhaps that audacity of hope stuff was . . . just stuff?

New York Times photograph

Cartoon du Jour

Ted Rall/Universal Press Syndicate

Rick Perry: Extremism In A 10-Gallon Hat

When Barry Goldwater, in accepting the 1964 Republican presidential nomination declared that "extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice," the conservatism he represented bore scant resemblance to the extremism of 2012 GOP wannabes Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry, whose singular talent appears to be really pissing off people about other people.

Bachmann, of course, is a known quantity whose record of nuttiness pretty much rules out her being the nominee, let alone a vice presidential running mate. Perry, however, is something of an unknown quantity so it will take a while for his extremism to percolate through the body politic.

An aspect of that extremism is the way Perry flaunts his personal faith and intermingles it with his duties of Texas governor, and he recently called on the power of prayer to end the drought that has seared much of the state. Perry is a Methodist, a faith that preaches inclusiveness, but he believes that Jesus Christ is the one true savior and has excluded Jews, Muslims and other faiths from prayer-based events.

None of this may prevent Perry from getting the nomination considering the power of the Republican's fundamentalist base and that Mitt Romney, the one-time frontrunner, has been refusing to take presidential-like stands on the issues, most recently his cowardly absence from the debate over the federal budget deficit. Meanwhile, Sarah Palin probably has underplayed her hand -- witness her absence from last night's Iowa debate -- and may find herself out of the race before she is even in.

Perry's trump card, to the extent that he has one, is the economy. He can point to his record of creating jobs in Texas through promoting a business-friendly environment, but most of those jobs are for cheap labor.

Nevertheless, it's hard to see the national economy improving sufficiently when the presidential campaigns kick off in earnest 13 months from now to become a non-issue. But President Obama has a trump card, as well, and that is Perry's extremism, of which religious fundamentalism is the keystone and a huge turn-off for the majority of voters from whom religion is an important part of their lives but don't persistently flaunt their godliness in public.

Regardless of the state of the economy, it is hard to see Perry drawing sufficient Independent support. Besides which, we all know what happened the last time a Texas governor was elected president.

Will Rummy Finally Be Held Accountable?

The upshot of the Bush Torture Regime — the systematic use of Nazi-like interrogation techniques against foes and friends like — has been deeply dissatisfying. The mainstream news media has been studiously uncurious about the criminal behavior of top administration officials and their lackies, and none have been held accountable.

But that may be about to change.

A federal district court judge in Washington, D.C., ruled earlier this month that a lawsuit against former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, one of the key architects of the torture regime, could go forward. While other lawsuits brought by so-called enemy combatants against ranking administration officials have foundered, this one is different because the plaintiff, identified in court papers as “Joe Doe,” is a former military translator who claims that he was tortured by U.S. forces at a Camp Cooper, a military base in Iraq, and the judge found that American citizens don’t lose their constitutional rights simply because it’s wartime.

Meanwhile, a three-judge court of appeals panel in Chicago came to a similar conclusion this week in green-lighting a lawsuit against Rumsfeld filed by Donald Vance and Nathan Ertel, both American military contractors who also claim they were tortured at Camp Cooper.

Vance, a Navy veteran who went to Iraq as a security contractor, contacted the FBI when he observed suspicious activities such as illegal weapons trading with American troops for liquor at the Iraq security firm where he worked. But when Army soldiers raided the firm, Vance and Ertel were detained as suspected enemy combatants and tortured. The Army was unaware that Vance was an informer.

Neither were ever charged, and in a familiar scenario, both were merely released at the Baghdad airport and had to make their way home on their own.

Rumsfeld’s lawyers argue that even even if the plaintiffs’ versions of events are true, Rumsfeld should not be held accountable because it was unreasonable that he would have known that the abuse he authorized was unconstitutional. Besides which, the court rulings are a troubling intrusion into the executive branch’s war-making powers.

Sadly, the Obama administration has taken the same position.

Conflagration On A Distant Planet

I haven't invested in stocks since the dot com bubble burst in March 2000 and my 401(k) was pretty much wiped out even though my investments were toward the conservative side. When the dust had settled, I was out about $60,000, a not inconsiderable sum that would have come in handy when it came time to retire in 2009. Well, I'm still working.

Nearly half of American households owned stocks in 2000, but that number has headed steadily south as the wealthiest Americans consolidate their grip on practically everything of value that can't be nailed down and our trust in financial institutions ebbs. Today less than 20 percent of the bottom 90 percent of Americans wealth-wise own stocks, and come to think of it, none of my closer friends are invested in the markets, while the Dear Friend & Conscience, who had considerable holdings, didn't like the omens she was seeing beginning in 2005 -- or her Merrill Lynch stockbroker lying through his teeth -- and converted her stocks into CDs.

All of this makes the current global financial turmoil seem like a conflagration on a distant planet.

I find the widely-accepted view that the turmoil is due in large part to the U.S. debt crisis and the subsequent downgrade of Uncle Sam's bonds by Standard & Poors to be unconvincing. The bigger problem has been and remains the economies of European countries. Besides which, the U.S. economy has been in the crapper for several years, Congress has been abrogating its financial responsibilities for many years, the financial markets have been robust in the last year or so, and big corporations have been making obscene profits.

So why now?

Speaking of besides whiches, S&P is a criminal enterprise that like its competitors, you probably don't recall, whistled past the graveyard as Enron self immolated and one Wall Street firm after another went on a subprime junk buying spree but kept their triple-A ratings. The toxic mess that Wall Street created helped deepen the Bush Recession and more or less led to where we are today.

Where we -- that is to say you and I -- are on the 10th day of August is screwed, glued and tattooed, and I am not heartened by President Obama's assertion on Monday that "we've always been an always will be a triple-A country."

Methinks once the turmoil passes — and there was a big sign on Wall Street yesterday that it already has in the form of a 429-point leap in the Dow — it is time to get real serious about raising the taxes of the super rich, either directly or by closing loopholes, and Obama will be abrogating his responsibilities if he doesn’t push hard on that.

Americans of most stripes have lost faith in the political system just as my friends and I have lost faith in the financial system, and compelling the super rich to ante up is a long overdue corrective. Besides which, it will be a terrific campaign theme against those wealthy-coddling Republicans in 2012.

Cartoon du Jour

Tony Auth/The Philadelphia Inquirer

Beautiful Photograph du Jour

GANNETT
Photograph by Murdo Macleod for The Guardian

Why 2011 Will Be The High Water Mark For The Tea Party & A Reactionary GOP

There is a wonderful spring-fed swimming pool a short drive from our mountain retreat that even during the dog days of summer is refreshingly cool. The regulars who congregate there include a half dozen folks in their seventies and eighties. Most are widows. The only guy is a retired Air Force fighter pilot and Vietnam veteran. The gals include two retired school teachers and a librarian. All are moderates, all vote for Democrats and Republicans pretty much in equal measure, and all are on fixed incomes and therefore dependent on the government for their well being and relatively good health.

The Tea Party and reactionary Republicanism would seem to be in ascendancy. This bloc twice nearly shut down the federal government this year, humbling if not humiliating the president and their own party leadership during prolonged debt limit negotiations that often resembled a cage match. But the power of this bloc is fleeting and 2011 will be its high water mark.

There are several reasons for this but one rises above all others: The Tea Party and reactionaries do not represent the interests of the good folks at the swimming pool. In fact, they don't give a damn about them. They want to strip them of Social Security, Medicare, food stamps and other so-called entitlements. Which in the case of these folks entitle them to decent lives and a shot at decent health after decades of faithfully paying taxes and giving back to their country over long, relatively low paying careers.

* * * * *

The rise and eventual fall of the Tea Party is a topic that I have visited often beginning with the 2010 mid-term election.

Republican Party leaders, desperate for short-term votes as opposed to developing and executing a strategy for long-term growth, first handed the keys to the party pickup truck to Christianists who were determined to continue fighting culture wars that had little appeal to mainstream voters, and then to Tea Partiers determined to impose an ideological purity on Republican candidates that resulted in driving away many of the party's moderates.

To say that the GOP has made a hash of things since it's mid-term election victories nine months ago is an understatement, and it's clear that the series of self-inflicted disasters it has suffered since then stem from the mistaken notion that the 2010 victories were a mandate. They were no such thing.

What the victories were was a result of a stew of anger, resentment and uncertainty amidst a recession that wouldn't quit. While that was to an extent a repudiation of the Democratic Party, it was not an endorsement of the GOP.

It also was inevitable that the Washington meat grinder would wear down some Tea Partiers and that was obvious when only about half of the Tea Party caucus voted against the final deficit compromise bill. Tea Party Darling Representative Allen West was among those capitulating, and as unthinkable as it is, he may face a primary challenge next year for his "sell out."

* * * * *

Perhaps it is willful naivete, but even after all these years, even after watching hijinks in this country that would turn the warmest heart to ice, I continue to believe in the inherent goodness of the American people. Yes, the folks at the swimming pool and many millions of others who would bleed red, white and blue for their country and for whom no sacrifice would be too large. People who understand that Tea Partiers and reactionaries are the epitome of selfishness and are incapable of playing fair.

This is not to say that the Democrats and few moderate Republicans left standing in this era of conservative purity tests hold the high ground.

They do in principle. But the blocc that twice nearly shut down government did have a point amidst all the bombast. Government spending is out of control, and those Democrats and moderate Republicans have a perhaps once-in-a-generation opportunity to not merely pay lip service to that harsh reality but to act on it.

But in a kinder and gentler yet firm way that will enable them to solidify the high ground as the Tea Party becomes a footnote in the history of American politics.

Cartoon du Jour

Pat Oliphant/Universal Press Syndicate

Beautiful Photograph du Jour

STAC AN ARMIN
(St. Kilda Archipelago, Scotland)

Photograph by Murdo Macleod for The Guardian

Letter From The Eastern Cape: A Missing Handbag & A Good Deed Gone Bad

By SUSAN WINTERS COOK

It seemed simple enough, the boys had some very young puppies they were trying to sell by the side of a busy highway. I was worried because the puppies were exposed to searing sunlight and had no water. Cecil stopped the truck so I could speak to the boys and try to correct the situation. That entailed my returning to the truck twice for something to shield the puppies and some water. I suspected the puppies were stolen but was not willing to resolve the situation by buying all of them to get them out of the hands of the boys.

I did not realize that my small little brown shoulder bag had fallen out of the truck. We drove off and only discovered the loss 15 minutes later. We hurried back to the scene and found the boys and puppies gone.

The bag has two zippered compartments and a little pocket on the side. Inside it has slots for cards and cash. The leather strap disappeared years ago, so I now use a strong black webbing strap that is long enough for me to hang the bag across my chest, making it more difficult to pinch. As I recall I bought it at K-Mart in the States over 20 years ago.

My passport is my only valid form of ID right now so it was in the wallet (my application for permanent residency that would give me a South African ID has been in the works for over 15 months) along with my drivers license and bank cards. All those things that make our lives work. There was a bit of cash, but not a large sum, and my Blackberry.

This is a rural area. Chances are pretty good that people here don’t know the value of what was in that bag. They -- especially young boys -- would not know how to manipulate the information on the Blackberry -- my email and Facebook accounts to invade my life. But that assumption could not be guaranteed. The cards and my cell phone account could be frozen easily enough. The passport would be a headache because the nearest consulate is 400 miles away.

Cecil dropped me off at the house so I could begin the process of dismantling my survival system. I had photocopies of everything, which helps, but then there are those never ending recorded messages with options, long conversations with bank people, the people who don’t answer the phone at the cellular service office and the woman who gives me bad information over the phone at the consulate. I keep an extra cell phone with a pay-as-you-go SIM card for emergencies so I could still communicate. (The SIM card is the basis of our cellular system. It slips into a slot in the phone and carries all the phone's information.)

Finally, after about 3 hours I got the cards canceled, faxed the cellular folks to shut down my SIM card, and scratched my head about my passport, having been told I could only report it missing in person. I changed my email address and my Facebook password. I phoned my lawyer to see if we could find a tracing agent who could track the cell phone signal; I could tell it was still on by calling the number. I knew the window of opportunity would not be long, but we did not find someone who could do that. The police didn’t even know it was possible.

Cecil picked up our wonderful African neighbor and farm manager David and they went to the scene of the crime, found nothing, searched some of the nearby rural locations for the owners of the puppies with partial success, and then dealt with the police. The police could only report my bag lost instead of stolen.

I laid awake that night with the reality that with no credit card I could not buy an airline ticket, and without my passport or DL I could not get on a plane. I knew I could drive on the copy I have of the DL and an affidavit from police. But I did not relish the idea of that gruelling 9 hour drive to Durban to get a passport.

The next morning David and I returned to the police station so I could get an affidavit about the loss. We posted some signs offering a reward. We chatted with two men who tried to sell me something by the side of the road. Their eyes lit up about the reward and I figured that the information would now spread very quickly over the “bush telegraph” that still exists in rural African communities. It has been true that rural communities have their own ways of correcting problems.

Over the weekend I shopped to replace my bag and contemplated all the nuances of this situation -- how dependent we are on these items, how vulnerable we are because they are so difficult to protect. For all the times I have carried that bag with the strap securely positioned across my chest and back, even while driving, hidden it from view, kept my passport hidden in a zippered compartment, kept color copies of everything hidden at home or in my computer, kept credit cards to a minimum, it was the one out- of-the-norm situation that resulted in the loss. I made note of that.

Monday morning we heard from the two Wannabe Detectives. They had recovered my documents and knew where to find the phone. David and I met them at the police station and there was great excitement when I paid the reward offered for the documents. I even got my favorite little bag back. They then drove with David and me to the house where the puppies had come from. A youth joined us in the car, he could direct police to the location of the boy who took the phone home with him, to Mgwali, a location more than 50 miles away on unpaved roads in a very remote region. He -- I call him Bad Boy -- was a relative from Mgwali who had been visiting a local family here. He had scuppered away with the phone, but he had left the bag and documents behind.

The Youth who joined us was a quiet, serious boy. I did not fully understand the nuances involved, but I did understand that he was not involved with the puppy issue or the theft.

We stopped by another police station to get the police to go after the Bad Boy, but they told us Mgwali is in another jurisdiction even farther away. The Wannabe Detectives, very pleased with the cash in their pockets, hopped out at a tavern and said they would wait for us there. David, the Youth and I drove to Mgwali and made the decision to search without the police. We ended up at the very well maintained village home of an elderly man who explained that Bad Boy is a grandson who was orphaned and is now with him, and he’s a handful. He was very sorry, but Bad Boy had just taken off down the road. The Youth and some other boys looked for him for an hour. Finally, accepting that Bad Boy didn’t want to give up the phone, we decided to return home and wait for the family to contact me.

The Wannabe Detectives were three sheets to the wind when we met again and were very happy when I gave them a partial reward that had been offered for the phone. We left them at the tavern. David and I took the Youth back to his home. I asked David if I should give the remaining reward to the Youth, he agreed. It was after we dropped him off that I got the worst of the news. The Bad Boys had stolen the puppies from the Youth. When they took off with my wallet, they left the puppies there by the road, and they wandered off and died. So it seems that my attempt to do a good deed not only resulted in a great deal of trouble for me, Cecil and David, it also resulted in the miserable death of those puppies, and that it was the Youth who took the biggest hit of all.

I can only hope that the hand that took those puppies out of this life came quickly and was a loving and gentle one.

Over the next two days we made phone calls to Bad Boy’s grandfather to see if he had managed to recover the phone. Bad Boy claimed he has never seen the phone in question. So David and I went to the police station to file a claim of theft instead of loss. This would enable the police to be the ones to pressure the boy into returning the phone. It’s not so much the value of the phone, but the process of making Bad Boy understand that this is not acceptable and will get him into trouble.

This police station is a tiny post in a tiny community. It’s not a busy place. But the police put up a great deal of resistance to opening a case for theft and pursuing the lost phone. David and I had to argue with three officers up the chain of command for over an hour to get them to do so. The highest ranking officer hinted that if the detectives should return the phone a gratuity would be in order.

David and I located the Youth and I gave him a bit more money since I had come to understand his situation in this drama. I have heard no more word about the Blackberry and consider it lost forever.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Susan Winters Cook is a photojournalist and humanitarian who has lived in the Eastern Cape region of South Africa since 1997. She previously was a staff photographer for the Philadelphia Daily News, where I was her editor when she made several trips to South Africa to chronicle the enormous changes in that country after Nelson Mandela's release from prison.

Cook's profile of a regional African National Congress leader's struggle to survive transitional political violence won the prestigious 1994 Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award. From 1997 to 2003, Cook produced an AIDS education periodical for the province, has produced documentaries for the provincial premier, and most recently produced a documentary about a Cape Town squatter community building its own housing.

Cook lives with her husband, anthropologist Cecil Cook, on a farm where she raises emus.

All photographs copyright Susan Winters Cook

From Ireland To U.S., The Roman Catholic Child Sex Abuse Scandal Seems Endless

Those solemn men in robes who tell women what to do with their wombs but have proven beyond a doubt that they are incapable of telling their priests what they can't do with their willies, are still at it. I speak, of course, of that bastion of hypocrisy and perversion -- the Roman Catholic Church.

Herewith a round-up:

VATICAN URGED IRISH CHURCH TO LAY OFF

My late father's side of the family is devoutly Irish Roman Catholic, and while my father quietly renounced the church after leaving home at age 18, much of my childhood was informed by Masses, prayers before dinner at my paternal grandmother's house and the religious imagery on the otherwise bare walls of her modest row home. All of this makes the reality that the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland is dying all the more extraordinary.

Nearly 88 percent of all Irish are Catholic and numbers on how many of them are leaving the church are unreliable, but there is no doubt that the church is dying there thanks to a Vatican-sanctioned wickedness that has continued under the unwatchful eye of Pope Benedict XVI. It is difficult to be shocked anymore over the sex abuse scandal that has roiled Ireland for years involving hundreds of priests who abused thousands of children in a Catholic-run childcare network and, of course, were protected by the church.

But a new government report is a jaw dropper: Even after supposedly tougher Vatican guidelines were put in place in 1996 requiring that the police be notified about all child abuse allegations, two-thirds of such cases were kept from authorities by the archdiocese from 1996 to 2007 because, it seems, of a secret Vatican letter that urged treating the guidelines as non-binding.

"The rape and torture of children were downplayed or managed to uphold instead, the primacy of the institution, its power, standing and ‘reputation," said Taoiseach Enda Kenny, the Irish prime minister. "It is difficult to read the report . . . and avoid despair."

It is the first time that there has been direct evidence that the Vatican deliberately attempted to thwart law enforcement inquiries into the abuse, and the response from the Vatican to the report and letter was predictably unapologetic. Spokesman Father Federico Lombardi said the report was "somewhat unfortunate and disingenuous" and claimed there was nothing in the letter that could be interpreted as encouraging a cover-up.

There have been calls for the Irish government to expel the papal nuncio, but a government minister has ruled that out in the service of keeping diplomatic channels open.

HISTORY REPEATS ITSELF IN PHILADELPHIA

Closer to home, Cardinal Justin Rigali has finally stepped aside as head of the Philadelphia Catholic Archdiocese amidst a lingering sex abuse scandal that came to a head in February when a grand jury found that there had been a horrifying range of crimes, including rape, committed by priests and that high-rankling archdiocesan officials had sought to cover them up. A grand jury had issued similar findings in 2005, but little was done.

Cardinal Rigali had asserted early in the year that there were no priests in active ministry who had been accused of abuse, but then reversed field and suspended 21 of them in one day, prompting criticism that he should have alerted prosecutors sooner.

The cardinal's successor as the head of the region's 1.5 million Catholics is Archbishop Charles J. Chaput, a pop-off who has spoken out in favor of denying communion to Catholic officeholders who support abortion and gay rights. He also criticized the University of Notre Dame, a Catholic institution, for granting President Obama an honorary degree in 2009 because of his stance on abortion.

MIAMI VICE

John C. Favalora likes attractive young men to sit on his lap and allegedly treats them to trips in the Florida Keys. He was, until recently, part owner of a company that makes "all natural" erection-inducing beverages. He's also the Archbishop Emeritus of Miami.

Favalora, who was the most powerful Catholic official in Southern Florida from 1994 until last year, stands accused of cultivating what one group of Catholics describes as a corrupt "homosexual superculture" in the 195 churches, schools, missions, seminaries, and universities that make up the Miami Archdiocese.

If their allegations are to true, for 16 years Favalora ran his organization like the Mafia don, rewarding his favorite homosexual sons and forgiving their many indiscretions. These allegedly include rampant sex, embezzlement, alcoholism, and the railroading of chaste priests among them—while punishing those who tried to complained.

Cartoon du Jour

Warp/The New Yorker

Deficit Talks Upshot: Neither Political Party Won While Americns Lost Big Time

Although the links between the excruciatingly slow recovery from the Bush Recession and the record-high federal budget deficit are to an extent incidental, it is sadly ironic that an upshot of the deficit cap compromise hammered out on Sunday is that less money will be invested in the economy, which is to say the nation's future prosperity, and the recovery could bog down even more.

While the Republican hard heads who forced a compromise in which President Obama and Democrats can take no pride would deny they are imperiling an already shaky recovery, that is exactly what they have done even if the cuts are on the small side in 2012 and don't begin mounting up until 2013 and 2014. The only bright note is that there will be long overdue Pentagon cuts.

It is incumbent on the president and his party to hammer the imperiling-the-economy line home in the run-up to the 2012 campaign as a counterweight to depressing jobs creation numbers.

But then why did the president and his party capitulate to the tune of $2.4 trillion over the next 10 years, as well as gladly kick the can down the road on where most of those cuts will be coming from?

Obama would blame Tea Partiers at every impasse in deficit negotiations, but he own leadership was wanting.

He said on Sunday night that the compromise "begins to lift the cloud of debt and the cloud of uncertainty that hangs over the economy," but if anything the uncertainty will grow because he was unwilling to stick to his guns, whatever they were.

The economy grew no faster than the population during the first six months of the year in part because of spending cuts at the state and local levels, and now the feds are piling on to. If timing is everything, in this case it truly sucks.

Cartoon du Jour

Steve Sack/Creators Syndicate

Obama Needs To Get His Cows In A Row

A giant sigh of relief is emanating from the White House now that the budget deficit crisis has sort of passed. This however will not be a victory for President Obama and the Democrats as much as a train wreck averted, but there are still plenty of cows to be cleared from the tracks before year's end and the beginning of serious 2012 presidential campaign politicking.

Chief among those cows is jump-starting an economy that is technically out of recession but far from being out of the woods. You would recognize this cow because it has a sign around its neck that reads "Will Work For Hay."

Jobs growth is excruciatingly slow and for this the president and that deeply divided Congress must share much of the blame. The rest should be saved for big business, which has shed jobs by the millions while turning obscenely high profits.

Then there are the war cows. Yeah, the ones wearing fatigues and flak jackets.

Obama must continue the draw down of American troops from Iraq no matter how big a mess the country remains. This is because Iraq will always be a big mess. And he must make good on his commitment to begin a draw down of troops from Afghanistan. For the very same reason.

Then there is the health-care reform cow. You would recognize this cow because it is nursing a young calf.

While health-care reform is the signal accomplishment of Obama's first term, the job is far from complete, and the area needing the greatest attention is medical cost transparency; that is, curbing huge premium increases by insurers and requiring hospitals and drug companies to post the actual prices that patients and consumers have to pay.

Finally, there is the immigration reform cow. You would recognize this cow because it lost its Green Card. Or more likely never had one.

Obama came to office vowing to reform immigration policies, something that George Bush pushed for but failed to achieve. Reform must include an amnesty program
which would grant legal permanent residence status to the nearly 11 million illegal immigrants in the U.S. and quicker visa approval for high tech foreign employees.

Cartoon du Jour

Ted Rall/Universal Press Syndicate

Beautiful Photograph du Jour

BABU
From JR Photoblog

Yo GOP: A Party Divided Cannot Stand

With apologies to Abraham Lincoln, that is the harsh reality facing the Republican Party as it looks into an abyss called 2012.

Having learned none of the lessons from its loses in 2006 and 2008 elections and having misread the victories of 2010 as a mandate, the GOP is not only no closer to recapturing the Senate and White House than it was a year ago, it is considerably further way.

That is no mean feat, and the reasons are easy to decipher.

Party leaders, desperate for short-term votes as opposed to developing and executing a strategy for long-term growth, handed the keys to the party pickup truck first to Christianists who were determined to continue fighting culture wars that had little appeal to mainstream voters, and then to Tea Partiers determined to impose an ideological purity on Republican candidates that resulted in driving away many of the party's moderates.

When the smoke clears in the next few days from the high-stakes deficit reduction imbroglio, which will be less a victory for President Obama than a rout for Republicans, the wheels will have come completely off the pickup truck, leaving the passengers to have to hitchhike into town. That town, of course, is somewhere south of the Mason-Dixon Line since the party has worked assiduously to shed black and Hispanic support and for all intents and purposes has shrunken into a regional entity.

* * * * *

For Republicans, 2010 was the year of big promises and 2011 was going to be a year when those promises would be fulfilled.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the Promises Land: The party leadership recognized that smaller government is something that most voters could gladly support, but accomplishing that on the backs of have-nots, seniors and the infirm while cosseting the super rich and Wall Street fat cats was something that horrifies most of those voters.

And so you had the sight yesterday of House Speaker John Boehner warning the rank and file at a closed-door meeting to "get your ass in line" in trying to beat back an open revolt from the Tea Party wing of the party caucus, while born-again maverick John McCain took to the floor of the Senate to mock the Tea Party wing for thinking that Obama and Democrats will get the blame for a default if Republicans refuse the raise the debt ceiling.

By that flawed logic, "Democrats would have no choice but to pass a balanced budget amendment and reform entitlements and the Tea Party Hobbits could return to Middle Earth," he said, quoting a Wall Street Journal editorial.

"This is the kind of crack political thinking that turned Sharron Angle and Christine O’Donnell into G.O.P. nominees," he jeered.

Indeed.
When, you might ask, are Republicans finally going to get it? "It" being that substituting governance with polarization is a sure loser and will remain so.

I for one am not holding my breath.

Cartoon du Jour

Pat Oliphant/Universal Press Syndicate

Why The Republicans' Alternate Universe Is About To Collide With Reality

Much has been written in recent months about the alternate universe in which many Republicans live. It is a universe populated not by hard facts, empirical knowledge and an understanding of economics and history, but by a denial of reality. With the federal debt crisis on center stage, these realities in particular present themselves:

* The crisis is a direct result of the profligacy of the Bush era, notably the billions of dollars spent on the Iraq war hard on the heels of a tax cut for the wealthy.

* The very Republican leaders whose intransigence has fueled the crisis, notably Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, supported the war and voted for the tax cuts.

* The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office this week found that the House Republican debt plan fell short of its projected savings while the Democratic Senate plan met its projected savings.

The Republican response when confronted with these realities is not surprising, but nevertheless still astounding:

* President Obama is to blame for the deficit crisis.

* Who voted for or supported what in 2002 and 2003 has no bearing on 2011.

* The Congressional Budget Office is coming up with numbers "out of thin air."

You don't have to be a rocket scientist, yet alone a Wharton School graduate, to see what will happen next:

The Republicans will have to bow to reality and compromise or blow whatever slim chance they have of taking back the Senate and White House in 2012. A failure to do so will come down on them like a ton of bricks when elderly and infirm voters start going to mailboxes to get their government checks and find nothing there.

Pray Tell: What In The Name Of God Is Going On With American Politics?

Politicians have been invoking the name of God since forever, but in an era when a substantial portion of the Republican base is hard-core Christianist -- true believers who openly disparage Islam and other faiths -- the practice has become particularly tiresome. And troublesome when you consider the shocking number of homegrown incidents in which Christianists have backed up their beliefs with deadly firearm attacks.

This is not to say that John Boehner or Michele Bachmann, to name two especially egregious name droppers when it comes to the Almighty, are about to lock and load. But there is a connection between faith-based violence and some of the religious flapdoodle that spills from the mouths of Republicans in torrents these days. And I'll be damned if I can think of a single incident in which an adherent of a more egalitarian faith shot up a church or an abortion clinic because God told him to do so.

Don't get me wrong. I've given up on the separation between church and state as a practical matter. Besides which, religion informs our view of human life for many of us and there is no reason why it shouldn't seep into politics.

I don't take issue with politicians falling back on their religion when it has context. But much if not most of such talk is as shallow as the politics are conservative, and invoking the Almighty's name when the subject is the federal debt ceiling is beyond tiresome.

Then there is the role of religion in subjugating the rights of women. Here again Republican politicians, or a goodly number of them anyway, justify workplace discrimination and deny women access to reproductive care because that's how they read their Bible.

* * * * *

There is a widely held view that all that is great about America is grounded in God. It is not. Not by a long shot, nor is that what the Founding Fathers believed.

When Thomas Jefferson spoke of "inalienable rights," he was not affirming God but denying King George. Jefferson, in fact, was a deist who rejected the claim of the divinity of Jesus although he kept a Bible close at hand. It was not an oversight that the word "God" does not appear in the U.S. Constitution. And when Abraham Lincoln minted the words "In God We Trust," it was for the consumption of others; he himself was determinedly irreligious.

* * * * *

It has been 50 years since Americans elected the first Roman Catholic president, yet religion looms large for Mitt Romney's campaign.

There is an old saying that Americans are suspicious of any religion other than their own, and Romney has the handicap of being a Mormon, a widely misunderstood denomination outside of the American spiritual mainstream that some religions consider to be a cult despite, perhaps ironically, it's deep commitment to family values.

How outside?

While nearly half of Republican voters have identified themselves as evangelicals in recent primary exit polls and they make up a highly influential part of the GOP base, a mere 20 percent have indicated support for Romney, who at this point would seem to be the only candidate with even a slim chance of beating President Obama.

It should be understood that evangelicals don't necessarily not support Romney because of his faith. He is a notorious flip-flopper and will have to do more than assemble a crack campaign team and raise buckets of money, both of which he has done, to survive the Republican primaries.

But it nevertheless is a shame -- and shaming -- that while the Constitution stipulates that there be no religious test for public office and it is my belief that a candidate's private beliefs should be off-limits, Romney will be dogged by his beliefs every day from here on out by Republicans -- officeholders and rank-and-file alike -- who believe there is only one God. Their own.

Cartoon du Jour

Michael Ramirez/Investors Business Daily

Beautiful Photograph du Jour

A pelican plays with a plastic cup at the Prague Zoo

Photograph by Michal Cizek/AFP-Getty Images

Grover Norquist: Democrats' Best Friend

SSH! GENIUS AT WORK

The last time that I visited the budget deficit debacle was in a post titled "The Great Republican Retreat of 2011." The headline pretty much said it all -- that the GOP House leadership was hell bent on grabbing defeat from the jaws of compromise -- and would rue the day it made promises that defied fiscal reality.

After weeks of moving deck chairs on their Titantic, the best that the House leadership has been able to come up with is a balanced budget Constitutional amendment that has about as much chance of becoming law as Rush Limbaugh has of flapping his beefy arms and flying. Oh, and raising walking out of budget meeting with the president and vice president to an art form.

In the end, the Senate Republican leadership probably will hold its collective nose and sign onto a Senate compromise bill endorsed by President Obama and supported by a goodly number of Republicans that makes substantial cuts in government spending, including areas that many of the president's supporters are going ballistic over because they had assumed were sacrosanct.

No, boys and girls of the liberal persuasion, nothing is sacrosanct when you're a deal maker like Obama.

The cuts are not nearly the size the House leadership originally pursued by using through-the-looking-glass mathematics, while the compromise bill includes a long overdue overhaul of the tax code (read tax hikes for the rich) that runs against the grain for Republicans determined to hold the line on taxes while devastating entitlement programs.

And making sure their pet projects back home are funded, most conspicuously a $700 million bridge that would link Minnesota and Wisconsin.

* * * * *

The Republican Party, of course, is stumbling through an era where ideological purity and ultimatums have replaced governance, and while there is plenty of blame to go around, Grover Norquist has worked tirelessly to earn the biggest share.

Norquist, who as a strategist launched Newt Gingrich on a series of policy blunders and gaffes that have made him the darling of late-night TV comedians and later became cozy with super lobbyist and now ex-con Jack Abramoff, has been the party's primary no-tax-increase enforcer through his Americans For Tax Reform. By Norquist's crude calculus, if a budget default shuts down government, deprives seniors of the Social Security checks and roils Wall Street and global markets, what's not to like?

Republican officeholders have not dared to cross swords with him, which helps explain why Norquist's paws are on every GOP defeat of consequence since the party ceded the White House. Until the deficit disaster that most conspicuously was Paul Ryan's reverse Robin Hood plan to lower the deficit by screwing the middle class and poor while rewarding the rich.

You can be sure that Norquist has more rabbits in his hat. Democrats sure hope so.