Category Archives: Rants

The President v. The Pundit

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Daniel Hernandez, President Obama and First Lady Michele Obama at the memorial event, 'Together We Thrive: Tucson and America', at the McKale Memorial Center in Tucson, Arizona, on 12 January 2011. Photograph: Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty Images

I wish the media, including NPR and PBS, would stop comparing President Obama’s popularity to that of Sarah Palin. For example, many pundits compared reaction to his speech at the memorial service for the victims of the shooting in Tucson to her videotaped statement on the subject.
Barack Obama in the President of the United States. He has to triangulate the demands of Congress and its opposing parties, the international obligations of the United States to its foreign allies, national security, and many more concerns. The decisions of the President have real consequences, and he has to make sure things happen.
Sarah Palin was, briefly, a governor. Now, however, she is a pundit and nominal leader of an ill-formed political movement. Furnaces and air conditioning already work under pressure depending on the temperature. buy viagra without rx The generic india levitra US government does not regulate the prices of medicines. And the historic such as the Grosvenor Museum and the Museum purchase cialis online purchasing here of Contemporary Art have quite a delightful surprise that are sure to enchant you and come back for more. Ayurveda recommends the consumption of urad dal contains 189 calories, 13 gm of protein, 12 gm cialis online of fibre and just 1gm of fat. It is easy to snipe and criticize, when you don’t have to provide solutions. It so happens that her videotaped speech was highly criticized and damaged her popularity rating, whereas the Presidents speech was well received, but who cares how they compare. If the President’s comments are to be compared to anyone’s, it ought to be to John Boehner, Mitch NcConnell, or a prominent Senator. Essentially any national figure from the Republican party in a policy making role would be more appropriate, not Sarah Palin, whose opinions have no real consequences.

Why I love the Postman

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I always have a soft spot for the mail carrier, but it’s not what you might think. It’s not the uniform, and I tend of become obsessed with the letter carrier regardless of race, sex, religion, height, weight, sexual preference, etc. I like mail carriers because I think of them as real, personal agents of communication that transcends miles and oceans. They physically bring the things our friends and loved ones have written or simply touched to us no matter where we are.
Of course, they bring bills and junk, too. But they don’t forward your junk mail from place to place to place. They do forward personal mail. A letter from my parents once followed me through four countries when I was traveling in Europe and not staying long anywhere, finally catching up to me on my last stop, all with a regular air mail stamp. They forward bills too, but bills are a fact of life. Better they reach you than go unpaid until a collection agency knocks.
Yes, I am a big fan of the United States Postal Service. I always have been. I’ve moved around a lot in my life and the Post Office has always been extraordinary at making sure my letters reach me. For years I’ve done my Christmas shopping online and they get my gifts to my family every year. I have sustained some of my deepest and most important relationships with the aid of real mail delivered by postal carriers. Sure they are not perfect. Things have been delayed, lost or damaged, but its been rare, extraordinarily rare given the number of pieces that have passed through the USPS to and from me and the number of pieces they handle in general. Check out their stats. There you’ll find out things like the fact that the USPS processes 24 million pieces of mail each hour, on average.

More check-ins at Wellesley US Post Office

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Policy ≠ Politics

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President Obama announces the compromise.


A couple days ago the White House and Congressional Republicans reached a compromise on issues that included extending the Bush tax cuts and unemployment benefits.  It took a while.  In the press conference announcing the agreement, President Obama commented that the agreement is not what he wanted, but said that Republicans were holding tax cuts for the Middle Class and an unemployment benefits extension “hostage.”  Many in the Democratic base oppose the compromise, seeing it as capitulation rather than compromise, and are resistant to approval.
Mainstream media has been providing blow by blow coverage of this process.  The tell us which side which wants what but not in a lot of detail and not why.  For the most part they spend their time speculating about the impact that whatever compromise might be reached will have on the 2012 elections.  Then they let party representatives and their surrogates in the punditry argue about what agreements might be better and for the nation and how.
It’s all very entertaining.  There is drama, conflict, suspense.  Who is winning the skirmish as the pundits argue?  Who will win the battle when the legislation ultimately makes it out of Congress?  Most importantly, who’s likely to win the war in 2012!
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Don't Take My Tax Cut! And Get a Job!

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Petition: Tell Congress: Protect Workers, NOT Millionaires!


Senator Scott Brown made a fiery speech a couple of days ago as he blocked the Senate from considering an extension of unemployment benefits. He said that first we need to find a way to pay for those benefits without raising the deficit. At last report the unemployment rate in this country stands at 9.7% and Brown wants to put their ability to buy groceries, pay their bills, mortgage or rent payments in doubt while Congress turns its attention to the deficit.
I believe that Washington has finally turned its attention to the deficit in earnest, and that Brown’s theatrics are not necessary.  The report that bipartisan National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform has just been released provides outstanding recommendations for debt reduction. Holding the unemployed hostage during the holiday season is little more than political theater. Brown needed an issue to distinguish himself on, and he chose this. Nice, Senator! Pick on the unemployed. They’re so busy job hunting they won’t be paying much attention!
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The Senator, the Unemployed and the Millionaires

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Read: "Congress lets unemployment benefits expire: 'What now' and six other questions


Senator Scott Brown blocked the extension of unemployment benefits for millions of Americans.

About 8,400 Americans will see their unemployment benefits cut off by the end of this week, according to the Labor Department. By the end of the third week of December, aid to 1.36 million Americans will be interrupted, the agency said.

Brown says that we can’t afford the extension and that we need to start focusing on “what is important,” the federal deficit.
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Fox News Chairman says NPR Executives are Nazis, "of Course"

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Fox News, a News Corp subsidiary


Honestly, I am think that Fox News Chairman Roger Ailes and most at that network live in a reality that is different than mine.
I was just pointed to an interview with Howard Kurtz in which he said that President Obama “has a different belief system than most Americans” and that on his recent travels he “told by the French and the Germans that his socialism was too far left for them to deal with.”  I don’t know if Ailes believes this or if it is part of the continuing campaign of the right to paint the President as so radically different from us that he is somehow threatening, but the statements are not simply wrong, they are absurd.
President Obama is a capitalist and he believes in our system of representative, Constitutional democracy.  He has given no indication otherwise.  He would not have risen in the party system were that not the case and he certainly would not have got elected to the highest office in the land, either.  The Presidents differences with the the opposition are differences of degree, not belief systems.
As for France and Germany telling him that his socialism is to far left, well that is ridiculous.  Germany, France and the United States do have differences on approaches necessary to stimulate their economies because in a global economy what is done in one country impacts the others, but the questions concern the means and scale of intervention and have nothing to do with ideology.  France and Germany are also democratic, capitalist states, but both are fundamentally more socialist in character then the US.  Both have and have had for some time, state funded systems of education, government owned rail systems, universal health care, strong labor movements, etc.
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Frank v. Beilat, No Contest

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The top mailing was meant to give me three reasons for firing Barney Frank, but in fact the mailings themselves were 3 reasons NOT to vote for Sean Beilat!


When I picked up my mail today I found a magazine, a fund raising appeal, and four political mailings relating to the elections next week, three of which were targeted against Congressman Barney Frank.  According to the first mailing, Americans for Limited Government believe he “no longer represents ‘us'” and that Nancy Pelosi “has him in the palm of her hand.”  Sean Beilat for Congress sent two mailings.  The first claims that Frank “and his “rich friends… live by a different set of rules,” and  the other that provides three reasons why voters should “fire Barney Frank on November 2,” claiming he caused the financial meltdown, bailed out friends in the financial sector, and accepted vacations from the people who got federal bail out money.
These claims are, at best, exaggerations, some of them outright falsehoods.  They are examples of some pretty intense negative campaigning and an obvious attempt to mislead the public.  Quotations are taken out of context, presented in the mailing to look like press clippings, and topped with the logos from the newspapers’ mastheads so they look like actual published news articles, when in fact they are taken from opinion pieces or editorials.  They are not objective analyses.
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If You Spend Enough Money, Will People Believe Your Lie?

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"Perry pushed for a law that lets insurance companies raise homeowners’ rates without having to justify the increase." Back to Basics, --Wednesday, September 8th, 2010.


Spending by interest groups, so-called Political Action Committees and Unions most notably, is up well over 5 times what it was in the 2006 midterms, according to an article in New York Magazine.  Spending is up on both sides of the aisle, but these third-party groups are putting most of their money behind Republican candidates by a huge margin, approximately 7 to 1, according to The Washington Post!  This was all made possible by last years Supreme Court decision saying that limits on spending were essentially the same as limits on free speech.
I have a problem with this because I don’t think a pharmaceutical corporation should have a stronger voice than a network of cancer survivor groups just because they can spend more on campaigns, but I suppose outside spending isn’t all that different than spending by the candidates themselves.  Nothing stops a multimillionaire candidate from using his own funds to vastly outspend opponents on advertising.  In a sense this is buying the election, but legally it’s not seen that way.
What is disconcerting is the out and out dishonesty of the campaigns.  I am not naive.  Politics has always been a dirty game.  But in this election it seems that the fact that the backers of those PACs with the patriotic names can remain anonymous has emboldened them.  Politifact.com, a non-partisan service that evaluates the claims of political discourse, evaluated 31 claims made in the advertisments of these third party groups in the current campaigns throughout the country.  Only 5 were rated “mostly true” and two “true.”
Think about that for a minute.  31 claims were made in the political ads of third party organizations analyzed by Politifact.com.  On 16% of those were claims were based substantially on fact, on only 6% were essentially true.  All others were significant distortions of the facts or outright lies.
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What Americans Know about Religion

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How many of the symbols can you identify?

Today the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life released a survey testing a broad range of religious knowledge, including knowledge of major religious texts, core teachings of various faiths and major figures in religious history.  According to an AP article summarizing the results, the survey found that

atheists, agnostics, Jews and Mormons outperformed Protestants and Roman Catholics in answering questions about major religions, while many respondents could not correctly give the most basic tenets of their own faiths.
Forty-five percent of Roman Catholics who participated in the study didn’t know that, according to church teaching, the bread and wine used in Holy Communion is not just a symbol, but becomes the body and blood of Christ.
More than half of Protestants could not identify Martin Luther as the person who inspired the Protestant Reformation. And about four in 10 Jews did not know that Maimonides, one of the greatest rabbis and intellectuals in history, was Jewish…
The study also found that many Americans don’t understand constitutional restrictions on religion in public schools. While a majority know that public school teachers cannot lead classes in prayer, less than a quarter know that the U.S. Supreme Court has clearly stated that teachers can read from the Bible as an example of literature.
“Many Americans think the constitutional restrictions on religion in public schools are tighter than they really are,” Pew researchers wrote.

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FactChecking ‘The Pledge to America'

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Get a load of that title! Click for text, with pictures.


FactCheck.org is the website of a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that to reduce the level of deception and confusion in U.S. politics for voters

by monitoring the factual accuracy of what is said by major U.S. political players in the form of TV ads, debates, speeches, interviews and news releases. Our goal is to apply the best practices of both journalism and scholarship, and to increase public knowledge and understanding.

They are a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania and not related to any political party.  They simply check facts.  In these midterm elections, they are a good place to turn for the truth behind the spin in any given campaign.  This post, for example, shows that both the Republican and Democratic candidates for Senator in Nevada are making false claims about each other.
So what about the Pledge to America that Republican Party leaders recently made?
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