Obama's Catholic Roots

There are still around 17 percent of American voters who think that Barack Obama is a Muslim. The fact is, though, that his roots are very deeply Christian.

By the time of that session in the spring of 1987, Mr. Obama — himself not Catholic — was already well known in Chicago’s black Catholic circles. He had arrived two years earlier to fill an organizing position paid for by a church grant, and had spent his first months here surrounded by Catholic pastors and congregations. In this often overlooked period of the president’s life, he had a desk in a South Side parish and became steeped in the social justice wing of the church, which played a powerful role in his political formation.

The concept of social justice comes directly from the teachings of Jesus Christ and has been carried forward with a great deal of success by the Catholic Church. This is what drove the president to community service and his actions illustrate this quite clearly. His recent meeting with the Pope was a meeting of like minded individuals who understand that service to the poor is service to Jesus Christ. As the article notes, they are kindred spirits who strongly believe in social justice and inclusion.

There isn't any mystery to the president's agenda. He wants to help people out who are less fortunate. It's just that simple.

Kneejeking Obama

Here are two great pieces which more than adequately address the knee jerk criticism of the president.

Who’s the Villain Here?

Blaming Obama First

I don't get it. Half of their base is libertarian now and doesn't give two shits about Ukraine. Ah well, any excuse to bring up Benghazi...

Obama Mental Meltdown Syndrome (And The Lying It Produces)

I didn't get a chance to catch the Bill O'Reilly interview with the president but apparently Dana Millbank did. 

O’Reilly devoted nearly 40 percent of his time to the attacks on U.S. facilities in Benghazi, 30 percent to the Obamacare rollout and 20 percent to IRS targeting.

Wow. Talk about playin' the hits for the hardcore fans. Does he actually think that most people give a shit about any of these issues?

Of course, this is their modus operandi. We now live in a society where you are not only entitled to your opinion but your own facts as well. Case in point...

Anti-Obamacare, facts be damned

“Sick kids denied specialty care due to #Obamacare,” his Twitter feed proclaimed on Saturday, linking to a conservative blog post based on a TV news report out of Seattle. His Facebook page weighed in on the same story, calling it “heartbreaking” and vowing that House Republicans “will continue working to scrap this broken law.” There’s just one problem: The shocking claim — that the President’s health reforms resulted in sick children being denied care — was flat-out false. Which Boehner’s staff must have known, assuming they actually read the material they were helping to spread across the Internet.

The anger and the hatred towards the president is so irrational that the Right is simply lying now and they don't really care.

Busted!

Dinesh D'Souza indicted for violating U.S. election law

Well, I guess "Obama's America" will be happening in a different way for Mr. D'Souza. Sorta reminds me of my assertion that conservatives are right...the END is coming but not in the way they think:)

I have to keep reminding myself that I need to be patient with jack wagons like this. Sooner or later, they get exactly what they deserve.

Riiiiight

I love how every photo of the president these days is some variation of this one.

Liberal media my ass!

Discovery!

I have been searching for awhile now for a way to address the often prejudiced and sometimes racist attitudes towards the president without provoking the usual shrill and hysterical reaction from the Right. I have now found such a way.

First of all, was that really the cover of the National Review? Yes it was.  Talk about a dog whistle! Chait is dead on right with his analysis in this piece. Here are some my favorite bits...

It is bizarre to ascribe haughtiness and a lack of a capacity for embarrassment to a president whose most recent notable public appearance was a profusely and even flamboyantly contrite press conference spent repeatedly confessing to “fumbles” and “mistakes.” Why would Hillyer believe such a factually bizarre thing? One answer is that, by the evidence of this column, Hillyer believes all sorts of factually bizarre things. But most African-Americans, and many liberal whites, would read Hillyer’s rant as the cultural heir to Northup’s overseer: a southern white reactionary enraged that a calm, dignified, educated black man has failed to prostrate himself.

But are Hillyer and other conservatives really that bad?

Before plunging further into a poisonously defensive racial debate, I should note that I feel certain Hillyer opposes slavery and legal segregation, and highly confident he abhors racial discrimination, and believes in his heart full economic and social equality for African-Americans would be a blessing. (More than two decades ago, Hillyer worked against the candidacy of David Duke.) His feeling of offense at Obama’s putative haughtiness (“chin jutting out”) might be a long-ago-imbibed white southern upbringing bubbling to the surface, but more likely a flailing partisan rage that could just as easily have been directed at a white Democrat.

You can accept the most benign account of his thought process – and I do – while still being struck by the simple fact that Hillyer finds nothing uncomfortable at all about wrapping himself in a racist trope. He is either unaware of the freighted connotation of calling a black man uppity, or he doesn’t care. In the absence of a racial slur or an explicitly bigoted attack, no racial alarm bells sound in his brain.

So, they are just ignorant and don't want to reflect and change. Shocking...

Of course, this part of a larger problem.

The broad social structure of white supremacy is not a part of the working conservative definition of racism. Conservatives see racism as a series of discrete acts of overt oppression. After slavery had disappeared, but before legal segregation had, conservatives considered it preposterous to claim that blacks suffered any systematic disadvantage in American life. 

Hence the recent racism is over tweet.  They simply can't out of the black-white mindset. If racism isn't over, then the blacks and liberal whites must be continually crying wolf and trying to get free hand outs or something.

Pay close attention to how the president is criticized by the Right. The framework for the criticism is exactly how Chait describes it.

Completely Inconsolable

I've had some rather lengthy discussions with my conservative friends of late that have led me to the same conclusion as Jamelle Bouie: No matter the facts, the GOP is committed to the message that Obamacare has failed.

The Republican complaints of two months ago were purely opportunistic. For them, it just doesn’t matter if Healthcare.gov is working, since Obamacare is destined to fail, reality be damned! At most, the broken website was useful fodder for attacks on the administration. Now that it’s made progress, the GOP will revert to its usual declarations that the Affordable Care Act is a hopeless disaster. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of Americans have gained access to health insurance thanks to the Medicaid expansion or the exchanges, and many more will join their ranks as the deadline for coverage approaches. 

They are completely inconsolable and it seems they want to stay that way. 

We Are A Nation Of Laws

Breaking News from ABC | Thanksgiving Recipes

Hey, waitamintue! I though he was ramming laws down our throats like Stalin and Hitler! Who the fuck is this guy?!?

Retraction

The other day I posted this photo thinking that it was a real Michele Bachmann quote. It was actually from a Bachmann parody page so it isn't something she actually said. My mistake.

Speaking of photo mistakes, I'm still waiting for an admission of error from Kevin Baker and his merry band of American Taliban members on this photo.

I won't hold my breath.

Another Cult Member Exits Stage Left!

Clint Murphy has left The Cult, ladies and gentlemen. And it took a bout with testicular cancer to spur him into reflection. Of course, this comes after Newt Gingrich, who last week said that Republicans had "zero" ideas for a replacement to the Affordable Care Act.

“I will bet you, for most of you, you go home in the next two weeks when your members of Congress are home, and you look them in the eye and you say, ‘What is your positive replacement for Obamacare?’ They will have zero answer,” Gingrich told the Boston crowd, said a report from CNN. Gingrich said the party has a “very deep problem” with a culture that promotes negativity. “We are caught up right now in a culture, and you see it every single day, where as long as we are negative and as long as we are vicious and as long as we can tear down our opponent, we don’t have to learn anything. And so we don’t,” Gingrich said, according to video of the event from MSNBC.

Gee, Newt, I've been saying that for...oh...I don't know how many years now...

Mr. Murphy had much more to say. His Facebook post on Obamacare last week, addressed to his Republican friends, was something of a surprise:

“When you say you’re against it, you’re saying that you don’t want people like me to have health insurance.” Murphy would like to call himself a Republican, but has been too dismayed by his party’s cavalier attitude toward the health care debate. “We have people treating government like a Broadway play, like it’s some sort of entertainment,” he said. So call Murphy an independent.

Obamacare isn’t perfect, the former political spear-carrier said. “But to even improve it, to make something work, you’ve got to participate in the process. [Republicans] are not even participating in the process.”

They do a fine job of entertaining all too willing masses and a downright crappy job of participating in the process. Kind of like...oh, I don't know...a lazy adolescent who has problems with this parents?

Yep

Scandals Redux

Now that all the dust has settled down from the "big" three scandals things have pretty much played out like I predicted. Conservatives don't really give a shit about the AP phone tapping flap because they hate the media anyway. Hasn't the media always been comprised of traitors and always been a threat to national security? Yes. Yes they have.So no mas on the AP shizzle.

And the IRS flap was greeted by people with a resounding ho hum. The president's approval rating has remained about the same...a little lower of a little higher depending on which outfit you are looking at. It's pretty clear at this point that the IRS was put in a really crappy position by Citizen's United and then went off the rails after that. Had Citizen's not turned out the way it did, the targeting of Tea Party groups would likely have not happened as there would not have been as much pressure to root out the tax dodgers (side note: I'll have post about Apple coming in the next few days).

Benghazi, of course, is still going strong inside the bubble even with people outside of the bubble not really caring about it all. Clearly, this is all the Right has to stop a Hillary Clinton presidency so they are getting an early jump. It continues to amaze me how tone deaf conservatives are on the priorities of voters. This simple fact was summer up recently in my Honors Civics class when students in all three blocks wondered why DC was talking so much about scandals and not actually governing. Even the libertarian kids find the continued personal attacks on the president and Democrats to be counter productive and have wondered to me many times if Republicans simply want to keep losing election after election.

Voters want to see action on immigration, the budget, and jobs. Some Republicans are getting this message and don't want to see a repeat of 1998. But far too many want to "win." That's why I say, keep it up, dudes! We'll take back a few more seats in the House and hold the Senate in 2014 followed by a Hillary Clinton presidency and full control of both houses in 2016 at this rate.

No Shit

Likely, a hot item!

President Juice

At the press conference on Tuesday, ABC's Jonathan Karl asked the president whether or not he had "the juice" to get things done in Congress. Mr. Obama smiled and quoted Mark Twain about premature demises but the question made the rest of the nation wonder...does he?

It's fairly obvious that the president has a great deal of disdain for Congress. This would include his own party as well as the Republicans. He doesn't have the patience for the schmooze game and he lacks assholeishness of Lyndon Johnson to make people's lives a living hell until they pass what he wants passed. So, he opts to play the long game and that means that in the short term, he looks weak and ineffective. Hence, the comment about juice.

But reporters like Karl should take note of what the president has accomplished thus far. That's pretty impressive, if you ask me. It demonstrates that his opting for longer term victories is a much more effective strategies. Besides, the political media is locked in the 48 hour news cycle and has the emotional intelligence of Kim Kardashian so what do they really know?

What many also fail to note is that conservatives simply don't want to allow the president to win...anything. Senator Pat Toomey, co-author of the Manchin-Toomey gun safety bill, summed it perfectly.

"In the end it didn’t pass because we’re so politicized," Toomey told editors from Digital First Media in an interview published Wednesday by the Norristown Times Herald. "There were some on my side who did not want to be seen helping the president do something he wanted to get done, just because the president wanted to do it."

There's a word for that...what is it?....I can't quite seem to remember what it is...hmm...:)

David Firestone echoes this sentiment.

It doesn’t really matter how many business groups say the immigration system has to change, or how many suburban voters are disgusted by the easy access to guns for criminals. For these Republicans, the visceral hatred of the president is their only guiding star, and they are absolutely convinced the voters in their districts feel the same way.

I call it Obama Mental Meltdown Syndrome (OMMS). Not to be outdone by the Bush Haters and still stung by the fact that at least they had a reason to loathe our 43rd president, OMMS sufferers remind of children. They stomp their feet, foam at the mouth, and just can't stand the fact that "the other side" is, in reality, winning. President Obama is transforming this country to a center left one just as Ronald Reagan moved it to the center right. They know this is happening and that's why they are doing precisely what they are doing.

The problem for them, however, is that voters are not on their side. Further, the president and the Democrats have learned that they need to be more aggressive in an ongoing way in rallying support. 2014 is not going to be 2010, hence the transformation of the president's campaign machine into Organizing For America.. If conservatives continue the way they are now and don't pass immigration reform, for example, 2014 is going to be very kind to the president. 2016 will be even kinder.

Moreover, if Hillary runs and wins, which she likely will given all of this and the very weak GOP field, you can say buh-bye to the politeness and soft peddling of Congress by the White House. Heck, she'll make Lyndon Johnson look like Mother Teresa!

The Bible?

Like many Christians in America, I tuned in to watch the History Channel's epic mini-series, The Bible. After a few minutes into the first episode, I realized how naive I was in thinking that it would be even mildly intelligent. I mean, Noah was Scottish, for pete's sake!

They made a small effort to make the characters...ahem...browner...but really, the main ones were white with Jesus looking like the usual seventh member of the Allman Brothers Band. Worse, the devil was black and looked like...well...

Can we ever get to the point in this country where being a Christian means taking an honest look at the historical times of the Bible and chucking all the western myths that go along with it? I'd like to see some scholarly and intelligent depictions as well ass analyses of the stories of the Bible rather than the those like this series from the History Channel which are made for someone with the maturity of a second grader.

Hmm...

And that's the end of the mouth foaming over Benghazi...