Now that the National Tea Party Convention is over, where should the tea party movement go from here?  I could be completely wrong, but from what I’ve gleaned from the little actual news of the convention’s happenings I can find, it seemed like it was mostly about organizing, wack-a-doos, and red meat.  And while the first and third (and not so much the second) are good for rallying the support of your ideological base and attempting to get your favored politicians elected, those things do little to to get an agenda passed.

The trouble with many protest movements – and I’d consider the tea party movement, at least until the convention, to be one – is that they’re great for expressing what they don’t like.  Take the anti-war protesters of the Bush years.  They were against the War in Iraq (and some were against Afghanistan), but when it came time to discuss what to do about terrorism, they had few answers.  This is perhaps why protesting is a political activity that Americans tend to look down upon: they are seen as whiners.  In a nation of doers, we don’t like whiners.  We like people who get stuff done, and for the most part, those groups have not been protesters.

Now, I understand that tea partiers are not necessarily politicians, but they are certainly political actors, and supposedly have an idea of what kind of agenda they’d like to see for America, beyond “limited government” and “no universal health care.”  After all, I’ve seen the competing plans for health care written by the conservative think tanks.  It seems to me that the tea party movement is well situated to make their voice heard about these ideas.  By using their numbers to put a bug in the ear of their legislators the tea party movement has the opportunity to create the change they’d like to see.

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In the first year of his administration, Barrack Obama’s promise to elevate the civic culture of Washington, DC was about 95 percent vapid rhetoric, 5 percent reaching across the aisle with a limp handshake. Meanwhile, for the Democratic Party on the whole, it was business as usual. If the last two weeks are any indication, Phase-II of Obama-era postpartisanship might be even more cynical than was Phase-I.       

For many Democrats, Phase-I of Obama-era postpartisanship was mainly concerned with further weakening a damaged Republican brand. During the first months of the Obama presidency, Democrats/progressives were high on Tanenhaus ecstasy, convinced that they had won a sweeping mandate that was really a mirage. A few weeks after Obama was inaugurated, several of my Democratic friends explained to me, with devious smiles, how the Democratic Party was set to deliver the coup de grace to Republicans/conservatives. While Obama projected an image of exalted postpartisanship, his Democratic colleagues in Congress would ram through major initiatives, like the Stimulus, card check, cap & trade, and health care reform, completely locking out Republicans from the deliberations and, more importantly, the spoils. My Democratic friends predicted that, because Obama was so popular at that time, the Democrats would easily peel off a handful of moderate Republicans to support their agenda, while the remaining Republicans would try, unsuccessfully, to obstruct the program. When the economy started to rebound in fall 2009, the Democrats could take full credit, claiming that the New New Deal had pulled America back from the abyss – no thanks to those wily Republicans, who only care about party politics. Game, set, match.  

Phase-I of Obama-style postpartisanship backfired when the Democrats were unable to peel away more than a couple of moderate Republicans on major legislation (and later started losing stray Blue Dogs), while the economy and the deficit grew progressively worse. The Democrats’ pseudo-postpartisan maneuverings during year 1 of the Obama administration was partly motivated by the tendency of progressives to disregard political opposition and condescend toward non-elite Americans. When political and media elites began making haughty, crass jokes about town hall protestors and “tea baggers,” the malevolent side of ”progressive” culture was on ugly display, which undercut President Obama’s “hope and change” rhetoric. Recently, the activist left has been hammering Obama for allegedly being too nice to the real enemy (Republicans/conservatives), seemingly oblivious to the possibility that their gratuitous, drive-by attacks might have damaged their own movement. Of course, Obama damaged himself as well, like when he lets his mask slip, revealing just what he means by postpartisanship.              

At the National Prayer Breakfast, President Obama ostensibly offered a few conciliatory, postpartisan remarks to Republicans/conservatives, yet his idea of postpartisanship always has to be on progressive terms:  

But there is a sense that something is different now; that something is broken; that those of us in Washington are not serving the people as well as we should.  At times, it seems like we’re unable to listen to one another; to have at once a serious and civil debate.  And this erosion of civility in the public square sows division and distrust among our citizens.  It poisons the well of public opinion.  It leaves each side little room to negotiate with the other.  It makes politics an all-or-nothing sport, where one side is either always right or always wrong when, in reality, neither side has a monopoly on truth.  And then we lose sight of the children without food and the men without shelter and the families without health care.

To paraphrase what Obama is saying: The great majority of Republicans, and a small minority of Democrats, are “poisoning the well of public opinion,” which is getting in the way of the great progressive project to feed all the hungry children, house all the homeless men, and provide healthcare to all the uninsured. Nevermind those seven decades of “progressive” policies have generated net negative results in terms of reducing poverty and lowering the costs of housing and health care. Obama’s postpartisanhip reminds me of a backhanded apology. “I’m sorry that you were offended by my actions, but you can’t help yourself.”

Obama’s remarks at the prayer breakfast also sound to me like Phase-II of Democratic postpartisanship in the wake of Scott Brown’s victory. The new “postpartisan” narrative (myth/lie) is that, in the first half of 2009, Republicans were invited, with open arms, by the Democratic congressional leadership to participate in legislative discussions, but decided to sit in the corner and throw a tantrum. Now that the Republicans have a 41 vote stranglehold in the Senate, they need to step up to the big kids table and take responsibility for governing “ungovernable” America  (because no political party has ever been able to get anything done in the Senate with a razor thin 59 vote majority). Of course, that means that Republicans will be expected to help the Democrats ”save the children,” and vote for items many Republicans/conservatives would be diametrically opposed to, which are cynically attached to bills that have nothing to do with those items, or else the Republicans will have reverted once again to being partisan, child hating cretins.

Just like Phase-I, the political effectiveness of Phase-II of Obama-era Democratic postpartisanship will be determined in part by macro-forces, like the economy, deficits, etc. Unfortunately, though, the PR machinations will come into play. Hopefully, the “progressive” left will not be able to resist sabatoging Phase-II, like they sabotaged Phase-I.

Update

Right on cue, Jacob Weisberg of Slate magazine whined today that the “ungovernable” American public is becoming more ”childish, ignorant, and incoherent.” My first reaction was: Is this piece an example of the “reality based community’s” tremendous adherence to making claims based on empirical evidence? Maybe Weisburg is privy to some peer reviewed research supporting his blanket claims? Perhaps the childishness index has jumped since January 2009? Undoubtedly, the childishness index was quite low during the golden age of the post-WWII liberal consensus . . .  

I was the going to dissect the rest of Weisberg’s rant, but Bruce McQuain so completely destroyed Weisberg’s arguments that there is not much left to tear apart.

Let me just say one thing: It is by no means irrational (or ignorant) for people to want the government to provide premium goods/services to them at a low cost while insisting that the government be fiscally prudent as regards everyone else. Similarly, if you are a land owner, the best case scenario for maximizing the value of your property is that you (or future owners of your property) would be allowed to do whatever you wanted on your property, but the neighboring land owners would be very strictly regulated (and limited in terms of use).

Our Founding Fathers understood the above problem all to well. The so-called progressive movement has been one of the more destructive forces in eroding our constitutional protections. Now that the ”hope and change” express is losing steam, and no longer having a specific symbol at which to direct their fury (GW Bush), the progressives are actually lecturing the American people about being spoiled brats? That’s rich.

Update II

Right on cue, part deux: as part of the Phase-II rollout of Obama-era postpartisanship, which is now back to being called good old fashioned bipartisanship (and not by accident), the president is now calling for a half-day bipartisan summit on health care. To help Plouffe, err . . . Obama ensure that this latest bipartisan gesture is not perceived by opponents of Obamacare as another cynical trap – heaven forbid!, Hugh Hewitt has offered several excellent suggestions for facilitating an open, rigorous, balanced, participatory discussion. You know, those aspects of the democratic process that academic-types are always claiming are in too short supply. Surely, the postpartisan Professor Obama (h/t Jay_C) would not object to ”equal time”?

A few days ago Sarah Palin called for White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel step down for calling some liberals “retarded” in their to health care legislation last August.  Yesterday, Rush Limbaugh ranted about it (emph. TP’s):

LIMBAUGH: Our political correct society is acting like some giant insult’s taken place by calling a bunch of people who are retards, retards. I mean these people, these liberal activists are kooks. They are looney tunes. And I’m not going to apologize for it, I’m just quoting Emanuel. It’s in the news. I think their big news is he’s out there calling Obama’s number one supporters f’ing retards. So now there’s going to be a meeting. There’s going to be a retard summit at the White House. Much like the beer summit between Obama and Gates and that cop in Cambridge.

A bunch of people were wondering about what Palin would have to say about this, especially since she just slammed Emanuel.  Would she go up against the big R?

Yes:

I asked Palin spokesperson Meghan Stapleton for comment on Rush’s rant, and she emailed me this:

“Governor Palin believes crude and demeaning name calling at the expense of others is disrespectful.”

Actually, I think Rush has a point (never thought the day would come).  Aren’t conservatives usually against political correctness?  I don’t know…maybe Palin is trying to retake the word “retarded” the way the PC brigade has been trying to retake “gay,” also a once favored way to call someone stupid (usually by youths).  In any case, this won’t be the first time I’ve thought Palin is less conservative than she makes herself out to be.

More on that after I finish Going Rogue. (H/T Andrew Sullivan)

While NASA mourns the loss of the Constellation program and the planned return to the moon, the space organization today announced five companies that will be awarded contracts to build commercial vehicles and the systems that will support them.  Frankly, I think this announcement couldn’t have come soon enough.

Lets face it, not much has happened in the way of space in the last…oh…38 years or so.  Sure, there’s the International Space Station, but that project is unfortunately doomed to failure.  It should have been completed years ago, but the Columbia tragedy prevented that.  After that, nobody really wanted to use a transportation system that was already old when the ISS was in its infancy.  Now the life of the station is being extended, so that it can all be torn down at about the time the last piece is put in place.  If the ISS is all we have to show in progress, than I argue that America has not gone very far since the last time we put a man on the moon (1972).

The Cold War is over, so there is nothing to influence American competitiveness for space anymore, at least not one that matters to the government.  The said, why not invite companies to do the R&D needed to get humans back to the moon, or beyond?

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Although I understand and appreciate Orson’s take on Zinn’s death, I have to say that my own view on this ‘historian’ is less kind. Read this post by David Horowitz to get an idea of what I think of Zinn and his legacy.

What bothers me most about him, though, is that A People’s History of the United States is required reading material at most universities in America and in Europe. This even though it’s nothing more than a crappy piece of propaganda by a neo-communist apologist for totalitarians such as Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong.

Zinn was a polemicist masquerading as a historian. Let’s keep that in mind whenever we talk about the guy.

Radical historian Howard Zinn has died. My sympathies go to his family. I will offer some thoughts about his work as a historian at a later time. This is not the time for a critical analysis of his work as a scholar. It is worth reporting that Mr. Zinn was a World War II veteran of the US Army Air Corps. Like Senator George McGovern, another World War II veteran Mr. Zinn went to college on the GI Bill, and majored in history. He made a career out of teaching, while McGovern did not teach history, but made a career out of politics. Both Senator McGovern and Professor Zinn reached the conclusion that the United States was wrong to become involved in Viet Nam.

While it is important to honor and respect Mr. Zinn’s service to his country in the Air Corps, it is worth noting that his negative view of the U.S. use of military power was distinctly a minority view compared to that of most of his World War II comrades in arms.

UPDATE: PoliSnark has a characteristically off-beat take on this story.

Frontpage Interview’s guest today is None Darwish, the co-founder of FormerMuslimsUnited.com and the author of Cruel and Usual Punishment.

FP: Nonie Darwish, welcome to Frontpage Interview.

I would like to talk to you today a bit about the Muslim voices for change that are increasing through the Islamic world. There is an unprecedented defiance taking place behind the Islamic Curtain.

Can you tell us what is transpiring?

Darwish: As you know, Jamie, I lived for 30 years in the cocoon of the Muslim world and I can see a huge change going on inside the Muslim world. More and more people are challenging the status quo.

After 9/11 and with constant recurring explosive Islamic terrorism, it has become harder for the Muslim establishment to keep the lid on Muslims questioning their system, religion and holy wars. Criticism of Islam is coming at them from every direction, putting Muslim clerics in a quagmire unable to honestly answer questions. Muslim scholars were never trained to answer questions critical of Islam or engage in hostile debate. But now, suddenly, they are challenged to the core like never before, not by Western critics, but by brave hosts of Arabic language shows from unidentified locations in the West and hosted by former Muslims and/or Egyptian Christian Copts.

Read the whole interview at FrontPage Magazine.

Discussion about Don’t Ask Don’t Tell has once again come about after President Obama’s vow to end it during the State of the Union tonight, and the report by ABC that Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Joint Chiefs of State Chairman Admiral Mike Mullen will testify about what steps they will take before Congress and Obama move to end the law. (H/T Hot Air).

Combing through the Hot Air comments, I’ve noticed one recurring theme amongst those against repealing the policy: That they will be forced to shower with the now openly gay servicemen (it is unclear whether or not this is also a fear among  socially conservative women as well).  Apparently these commenters are unaware of the fact that straight and gay servicemen are already showering together.

Whatever the case may be, the fear seems to be that, no longer closeted by DADT, gays will now be open to jump their fellow servicemen.  When countered with the fact that gays have the ability to restrain their sexual urges in the presence of other men, they say, “Haha, I can certainly restrain my sexuality, too, so maybe showers should be co-ed!”

Besides this only being an attempt to change the subject, this shows is that the problem is not so much with the gay servicemen and women as it is with some people’s discomfort with the idea of gay people being around them.  Rather than admit their problem, they try to invent worst-case scenarios that won’t actually happen to help them justify their support for DADT.  Meanwhile, more and more Arabic translators are getting kicked out of the military at a time we need them, just because of who they are.

These social conservatives just need to live up to the fact that a non-DADT military doesn’t mean gay people are going to sexually assault their fellow servicemembers.  And if a gay person suggests they have feelings for one of their fellows, so what?  The latter can just tell the former what straights have been telling each other for centuries: “You’re not my type.”

Update: Commenter Interested asked why President Obama can’t just rescind the Executive Order issued by former President Clinton early in his presidency.  Because the “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” policy isn’t just an Executive Order.  It actually is law; specifically Title IV, Sec. 524; Subtitle G of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 1994.  So Congress must get involved in order for this policy to be repealed.

I’ve been trying to get my mind wrapped around the arrest of journalist James O’Keefe – best known for his exposé this past July of several ACORN offices offering advice on prostitution-related crimes – for allegedly attempting to interfere with the phone system of Louisiana Senator Mary Mary Landrieu’s office.  Note that earlier reports that said they were trying to bug the system should not be followed, as this has not been said to be the case.  Yet, I’ve been racking my brains, trying to figure how else these guys could have tampered with the system.  After seeing this MSNBC article, I’m coming up with only one other explanation.  Otherwise, I don’t know anything else they could do to “tamper” with it, short of ripping it apart.

Meanwhile, Democrats and other liberals are besides themselves with glee, with Media Matters taking it upon themselves to start a smear attack on Andrew Breitbart of Big Government and Big Hollywood fame.  Of course, this was not the reaction of most liberals when the ACORN videos were released.  Mostly, they tried to sweep it under the rug, assuring us that it only happened in a few isolated circumstances, rather than admit that ACORN had a real problem on its hands.  Now they are happy the O’Keefe has been arrested, because he is a conservative, and for them, he was already a bad, bad guy.

On the other side of the issue, Republicans and conservatives have generally been more realistic in their response, or at least they were until today.  Yesterday, when the news was that O’Keefe, Joseph Basel, Stan Dai and Robert Flanagan had attempted to bug the Senator’s office, they rightly admonished the four.  Today, however, with the release of the affidavit, their response has suddenly become a lot different.

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Megan McArdle sums up the dilemma progressives face in trying to force through health care reform using single-party dominance. Quite simply, the “power to the people” pose of post-modern progressivism is increasingly exposed as a sham, and the progressive agenda revealed as fundamentally elitist — they know better than you what is good for you. Thus, the more you oppose it, the more strident many progressives become in trying to force the issue through.

The belief that the public is simply too stupid or evil to understand its own best interests is a serious barrier to progressive success. It causes them to actively reject the idea or compromise out of the belief that compromise constitutes a betrayal of a higher principle. And the belief that disagreement is can only be explained as either ignorance or actual maliciousness facilitates the move towards demonization — compromise is betrayal, dissent is heresy, and no quarter is given.

It is, however, precisely that arrogance that exacerbates the political problems progressives face in trying to force through a health care reform program. Because they have proactively rejected the mere suggestion of compromise and have moved further to characterize those who disagree as not only in error, but actually bad people, it becomes hard to spin that message. The ranks of those who actually disagree are inevitably swelled when those who merely have questions or doubts encounter the whirlwind of hatred that so many progressive activists put out. That is the reason that every time the debate over health care happens, it tends to result in a steady increase in opposition.

It is not, as many conservatives say, that America is by nature an inherently “center-right” country at all. Rather, the seemingly inevitable increase in opposition to health care reform is an inevitable result of the bad communicative choices that progressives have made. They have, it far too many cases, destroyed their own cause.

I am a strong supporter of the First Amendment right to free speech. So why am I disappointed by the latest Supreme Court decision giving corporations (including unions and non profits) the right to make unhindered and unlimited campaign contributions? Wasn’t McCain – Feingold an unfair restriction on their right to have a voice? I agree with the logic of Supreme Court on strictly constitutional grounds. Our legal system has recognized corporations as having rights to be heard and to receive fair treatment under the law.

The problem is, we have a long history of money corrupting the political process in the USA. A sordid history that goes back at least 150 years, to the early national period soon after the founders got the Constitution and Bill of Rights written and agreed to. The Civil War, and the Gilded Age which followed were times when money bought political offices, frequently brazenly and in plain sight. Quips about ‘the Senator from Standard Oil,’ were based on the hard truth, that rich men could buy votes and offices. That was how William Andrews Clark became United States Senator from Montana. Reform movements have tried to deal with this problem for the past hundred and twenty-five years, but always, each effort to reform the campaign process to keep money from corrupting the political process fails. By 2008, U.S. Senate seats were once again rumored to be for sale, this time to fill the seat vacated by the President-Elect.

The Supreme Court’s decision, freeing up any group or person to spend as much as he (or the corporation) wishes, is not likely to improve the political process, or improve the public’s belief that the political process is fair and impartial. Of course, the people most critical of this decision are often members of our political Left, who conveniently overlook the fact that the effort to force government funding of campaigns failed when their candidate, Barack Obama, decided to opt out of federal funding for his campaign when he was so successful in raising money on the internet. It wasn’t the Republican who trashed the Left’s solution to too much money in the political process this time. However, both parties have more than enough blame to shoulder for our disfunctional political system, awash in large campaign contributions from corporate donors among others.

Perhaps what we need are a couple of changes in our legal thinking. At least one would probably need to be an amendment to our constitution, recognizing a very clear and precise distinction between speaking and spending in the campaign process. The other would need to be a recognition that money corrupts the political process when too much of it is available, and it is reasonable to limit money coming into a political campaign without limiting the right of persons who vote to speak freely. I think that requires the sources of money in any campaign to be strictly limited to the candidate and persons eligible to vote for him. If that requires another constitutional amendment, so be it.

Campaign finance reform on the Orson Buggeigh plan would be simple.
(1) The candidate may spend as much as he wishes of his own money on his campaign.
(2) No contributions of cash, goods or services of any sort may be accepted from any source except persons eligible to vote for the candidate.
(3) All contributions will be verified by the appropriate official responsible for supervising elections.
(4) All contributions will be a matter of public record, with the proviso that contributions above a certain dollar figure will be publicly posted on a public web site and released to the media within 48 hours of receipt.
(5) Any candidate accepting money from a person who is ineligible to vote for him will forfeit the election.
(6) Any person knowingly contributing to a candidate they cannot vote for will forfeit their right to vote. A first offense of a donation of under $200 will result in a five year loss of the right to vote, but a violation in excess of $200 or any second violation will result in a permanent loss of the right to vote.
(7) A person found to be acting as a conduit for contributions from any corporate body – for profit, non-profit, union etc – will lose their right to vote permanently, and the organization will be fined on proof the first offense, and have its charter to operate revoked on proof of the second offense.

A campaign funding system along my lines might return our political process to something closer to the republican form of government envisioned by the Founding Fathers. It might give us a more genuinely accountable government. It would certainly cut the cost of campaigning, and that would allow our elected officials to spend their time actually doing the job they were elected to do, rather than campaigning. Is this realistic? I doubt it. There is too much money in the political process to get meaningful reform enacted. Still, it would be a start.

In my next post, a few comments on some of the other corrupting players in our current money-mad system.  They aren’t just multinational oil companies and other usual suspects.

I’ve continued to try and track anti-Republican letter writer “Gloria Elle” throughout the day.  While the omnipresent “Ellie Light” has gathered the big headlines, I’ve been more interested in Elle ever since I discovered that she submitted another Letter to the Editor to the Baltimore Chronicle in July of last year, giving a none-too-flattering opinion of the career of the late Robert McNamara, the former Secretary of Defense who served during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations.

Well, actually, I’m not entirely sure whether or not she submitted it to the Chronicle first or not, or at all.  Their online version doesn’t give dates of submission, so it makes tracking down any one submission very difficult.  What I am sure of is that the same letter was published on July 8 at progressive blog Buzzflash.

I’ve found it yet again, here at a pro-Republican tabloid called the St. Mary’s Today.  I am not sure why such a newspaper would print a letter from an anti-Republican writer.  Unfortunately, I don’t know the context in which it was promoted.  However, I am interested that it’s another Maryland production, making two Maryland papers that Ms. Elle has shown up in for this particular letter.  Buzzflash, on the other hand, is based in Chicago.

I suppose the St. Mary’s Today copy could also have been submitted by Elle, but it’s just as likely it was lifted.  However, it doesn’t seem far-fetched that a liberal such as Elle would visit Buzzflash, and submit the same letter there, as well as to the Chronicle (her letters showed up at both BF and the Chronicle in back then and more recently). I have not found either letter in any other publication, nor have the lead investigators of this scandal, such as Patterico.

All that, and with the Chronicle’s pattern of publishing Letters to the Editor from the same people over time (writer “Chuck Mann” has had at least 10 make it in) makes me think that Gloria Elle may actually be a real person, and that the real Astroturfers are simply plagiarizing her work.

It’s unethical of course, but so was Astroturfing in the first place.  But I think the possible plagiarizing of Elle’s letter is even worse than the Astroturfing itself, because now it’s unfairly raised a perfectly innocent person (no matter what you think of her political views) to a higher spotlight that she probably didn’t want.  Someone like that doesn’t need the inevitable harassment associated with all this furor, just because she sent a single letter to a couple publications.

I don’t blame the likes of Patterico and co., of course.  They’re doing their job, dutifully trying to get the bottom of this.  No, I blame the Astroturfers for resorting to plagiarism to create their face grassroots campaign.  And to think, how many other people have they done this to?

Whoever is ultimately behind this, I have three words: Shame. On. You.

Gay rights activists are growing frustrated with President Obama regarding his failure to move on abolishing the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy that bars homosexuals who admit their orientation from continuing to serve in the military. It is hard to fault them. After all, in his first year in office, President Obama and his allies in Congress have expended at least some effort on behalf of each and every one of his core support groups, including unions (“card check”), environmentalists (“cap and trade”), education progressives (education spending in the stimulus bill), and left-wing populists (the new crusade against evil bankers). But action on the signature federal issue of gay rights supporters (gay marriage, for better or worse, remains primarily a state issue for the foreseeable future) has been nearly non-existent.

The neglect for this loyal support group for Democrats is mystifying in both political and practical terms. Politically, this is a case where opposition is uniquely weak and fractured and bipartisanship is a real possibility. It is likely that President Obama’s advisers are skittish about the possibility that moving to abolish DADT would risk a reprise of the 1993 debacle where anti-gay opponents handed President Clinton his political head. But the intervening 17 years has changed more than it has left the same. Hostility to gay marriage notwithstanding, overall social intolerance for homosexuality has dramatically declined, to the point that legions of openly gay pop culture figures are not even controversial at all. While this social change has not generally made its way into the highly conservative military ranks, the decline is sufficient to blunt any serious political risk of generalized political backlash. They only people who would be outraged by getting rid of DADT at this point are those who weren’t ever going to vote for President Obama or Congressional Democrats anyway.

Further, there is a serious opportunity for real bipartisanship here. It is noteworthy that some of the most recent and articulate critics of DADT in recent years have been conservatives, including former Wyoming Republican Senator Alan Simpson, who bluntly condemned “bigotry that hurts our military” in a 2007 Washington Post editorial. A raft of former officers — a form of communication that usually indicates a coded message from within the ranks of the active-duty military — has also called for the policy to be modified. While there is certainly no groundswell of conservative support for opening up the military to gays, there are enough cracks in the conservative opposition to give President Obama a serious chance to peel off enough Republican votes to put more than just a pro forma veneer of bipartisanship on the effort.

The reason for this is the second reason that now is the time to move on abolishing DADT — the practical problems with the policy. It is noteworthy that a vastly disproportionate number of discharges under DADT take place at the Defense Language Institute in Monterrey, California. This is where the military trains its linguists, most pertinently including those linguists that are vital to ongoing efforts against al-Qaeda. Getting rid of DADT would allow the military to retain people in critical skills like this during a time when those skills are desperately needed in the military. Indeed, continuing DADT is insanity in such situations. None of the recycled 1993 arguments about the imagined dangers posed by homosexuals to unit cohesion are likely to have as much bite when advocates of reform can point to such obvious disadvantages to indulging in anti-gay posturing.

At the end of the day, this is an issue where the President’s progressive instincts align with both political opportunities and the practical realities important to the very same moderates and independents that he is currently hemorraging from his political coalition. Thus, it is time to “man up”, Mr. President. The groundwork is now well-set and there are no more excuses for inaction. End DADT.

Patterico and his commenters have spent a lot of time today digging up more instances of “Letters to the Editor” appearing in multiple locations.  An example has focused on one Gloria Elle, and Jan Chen, who have identical letters posted in two newspapers:

Jan Chen of Seattle writes to the Northwest Asian Weekly (a small Asian paper serving the Seattle area):

As one listens to the Republican anger over health care reform, one can imagine an anti-government protester cheerfully paying premiums on insurance policies that drop you after you make a claim, or happily sauntering out of an emergency room that denied them treatment because of a coverage problem. One can imagine a town hall sign-waver enthusiastically forking over most of their pay to bill collectors after suffering a catastrophic injury, thinking, “Wow, the free market system is great.”

Meanwhile, Gloria Elle writes to the Baltimore Chronicle — on the same page as Mark Spivey and Ellie Light:

As one listens to the Republican anger over health care reform, one can imagine an anti-government protester cheerfully paying premiums on insurance policies that cancel you for making a claim, or happily sauntering out of an emergency room that denied them treatment because of a coverage problem. One can imagine a town-hall sign-waver enthusiastically forking over most of their pay to bill collectors after suffering a catastrophic injury, thinking, “Wow, the free market system is great.”

Jan Chen and Gloria Elle certainly have a similar writing style, don’t they?

They do.  Patterico notes that a Tweeter has also found the same content used by a writer, Cherry Jimenez of Bloomington, in the Indiana Daily Student. One of his commenters has noted that the letters appear on a blog called Buzzflash, run by a Mark Karlin & Associates.  Furthermore, I’ve discovered that Gloria Elle has written at least one other letter to them that has also appeared in the Baltimore Chronicle.

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The collapse of the Obama mystique is prompting ”progressives” to sort themselves into two different camps. The first camp, the Ellie Light incrementalists remain steadfastly behind The One, believing that Obama was thrust into an impossible situation and has been getting a raw deal not just from Reich Wing America, but from the media, progressive poseurs, etc. The second camp, which consists mostly of the pseudo-revolutionary activists, is now throwing Obama under his own bus. The social justice warriors of the second camp have been biting their tongues ever since Obama came into office with Geithner, Summers, Stimulus, and TARP II and they have grown more restless in recent months. They are seething over Guantanomo, the spurning of single payer health care, and other crimes against humanity.

Demoralized by the Massachusetts debacle, some members of the second camp are now angrily, openly declaring that Obama is a failure (contributing to Democratic failure is perhaps the most unforgiveable crime of all). A political science professor at Hofstra University, David Michael Green wrote a scathing, stream-of-consciousness harangue against Obama entitled, ”How to Squander the Presidency in One Year.”

Barack Obama has now, in just a year’s time, become the single most inept president perhaps in all of American history, and certainly in my lifetime.  Never has so much political advantage been pissed away so rapidly, and what’s more in the context of so much national urgency and crisis.  It’s astonishing, really, to contemplate how much has been lost in a single year. 

Several of Professor Green’s criticisms of Obama are well placed: the president’s weak leadership skills; his oversized campaign promises, followed up by meager results; his inability to connect to mass audiences on major policy initiatives; Obama’s  over/misuse of the bully pulpit, which turned ”being everywhere into being nowhere,” causing bored viewers to tune out his “ubiquitous self.” As the piece goes on, Professor Green’s tone gets more bitter and sarcastic:

Hey, why not inject yourself into Cambridge, Massachusetts community police politics while you’re at it!  Or the New York State Democratic Party gubernatorial primary!  Or you could deliberate for weeks about which breed of dog to get for your kids!  That’s a great use of the president’s political capital! . . .  And, finally, perhaps the most important thing one can do – and the thing that helps explain many of the other items above – is to adopt really, really pathetic policies. 

In coming months, unless Obama takes an even sharper turn to the left, we can expect to see many “Why I regret supporting Obama” mea culpas from the left. The brutal honesty of some pieces will seem refreshing and even comical, especially to right wingers who are enjoying their turn at schadenfreude. But when frustration with the slow pace of “progress” prompts the harder leftists to yank off their masks momentarily, the scene will not be just fascinating – at times, it might be disturbing.

When Professor Green isn’t blistering Obama, he gives the reader a glimpse of an ideological vision that is breathtaking in its demagogic malevolence. 

According to the professor, the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections “were stolen,” Congress is all “dickheads on the Hill,” and the health care “corporate vampires” are “real-life granny killers.” The Republican Party “spent three decades downsizing the middle class, plunging the country into wars based on lies, deregulating every protection in sight, fattening up corporate cronies, wrecking the environment, trashing the Constitution and polarizing the country politically.”  Also, Obama continued the “policies of [his] hated predecessor [GW Bush] in every meaningful policy area . . . he is basically running George Bush’s third term.” Sounds like the professor is engaged in first rate social scientific research. Of course, when it suits them, professors like Green will hold up their credentials as social “scientists,” and insist that they’re mainly interested in the dispassionate pursuit of emperical evidence, not “value laden” ideological agendas. 

In Professor Green’s parallel universe, Rahm and the other Chicago Alinskyites must be wilting violets because he thinks the Obama administration has been way too nice to his political opponents:  

Never engage, never respond, never preempt, never attack, never fight back. Help your enemies, so that they can crush you more effectively!  Start by not even realizing they are your enemies. Then, treat them with greater respect than your friends, even though they’ve run the country over a cliff. Defer to them at every opportunity. Consult with them even as they insult you to your face. Allow them to run Congress, even though they have small minorities in both houses . . . Never associate them with the destruction they’ve caused. Never label them the treasonous hypocritical liars that they are.

Professor Green sees politics in terms of “the people” versus “their enemies.” In theory, he is labeling only bona fide vampires as the real enemies, but where do you draw the line? If a mid-level 55 year old executive makes $175,000 a year working in financial services or health insurance, but lives in high cost New Jersey, is he/she one of the vampires? By the time Professor Green is done with his demon hunt, I almost wonder if the enemies of the state actually outnumber “the people.” By the way, are college professors who make extra money on consulting services part of the people or the enemy class? On the other hand, if you’re a proponent of capitalism, Professor Green says you did not deserve that multi-million dollar bail out bonus you got from the federal government. Did my check get lost in the mail? I hate to go all Dick Durbin, as way too many people toss out Hitler et al references. But, how far removed is Professor Green’s rhetoric from Pol Pot style class demonization?

The scariest part, though, is when the professor gives his advice on how Obama can still save his presidency, although he does not think that Obama is man enough to carry out it successfully:

The obvious solution, of course, would be a sharp turn to the left. Go where the real solutions are. Fight the good fight. Call liars ‘liars’ and thieves ‘thieves’. Do the people’s business. Become their advocate against the monsters bleeding them dry. Create jobs. Build infrastructure. Do real national health care.  End the wars. Dramatically slash military spending. Produce actual educational reform. Launch a massive green energy/jobs program. Get serious about global warming. Kick ass on campaign finance reform. Fight for gay rights. Restore the New Deal era regulatory framework and expand it. Restore a fair taxation structure. Rewrite trade agreements that undermine American jobs. Rebuild unions. Fill the spate of vacancies in the federal judiciary, and load those seats up with progressives. Rally the public to demand that Congress act on your agenda. Humiliate the regressives in and out of the GOP for their abysmal sell-out policies. 

Professor: How would it be feasible to ram through even one-third of what you suggest above? Well, maybe after the vampires are neutralized . . .

The investigators of the blogosphere are hot on the trail of the elusive (or omnipresent; take your pick) Ellie Light.  And now research has started into finding information about and where some of her friends are, including Mark Spivey, Janet Leigh, Gloria Elle, Jan Chen, Jen Park, Lars Deeman, John F. Scott, Earnest Gardner, and probably many more by the end of the night.

Just in from Patterico is the news that Sabrina Eaton, the Cleveland Plain Dealer reporter who broke this story, has received some new correspondence from Ms. Light:

In a Sunday morning e-mail to The Plain Dealer, Light denied speculation that she’s actually President Obama, his wife, Michelle, or National Security Council member Samantha Power.

“I’m flattered, and I must give the Tea Partiers credit for even knowing who [Power] is,” Light’s e-mail said. “But what I want to point out is that, if I were a person trying to imply this huge groundswell of support for our beleaguered president, then I would have signed the letter with different names. However, as you may have noticed, my main point is that absence of support for the president.

“I am not surprised that an article that tends to discredit a pro-Obama letter-writer has lots of readers. I understand that there are 10 million dittoheads that daily scour the airwaves, print and online press for something nasty to say about the president, so I’m sure your article will get more hits,” she wrote in another e-mail later Sunday. “I’m not sure why you would write me that people would probably be interested in what I have to say. My impression is that my letter could contain Chinese food recipes with a Pro-Obama subject line, and the event would be interpreted as fodder for that same highly-motivated, but narrow class of people.”

I immediately thought of one name: Mitch Stewart, the Director of the Democratic National Committee’s Organizing for America.

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Please see the bottom of the full article for updates.

I was reading an article at Patterico today (h/t NewsReal Blog and our own Michael van der Galien) on an apparent Astroturfing effort by a woman name Ellie Light.  The story is that she’s been sending letters to media organizations in 18 states.  The trouble is, she’s been claiming residency in many of these states.

However, what really caught my eye was the mention of an article written last week by Glenn Greenwald.  Patterico calls it “unrelated” to the Light story, but I don’t think it is.  What Greenwald writes about sounds very similar to what Light has been doing.

After reading Greenwald’s article, I realized what was going on was not Astroturfing but a possible propaganda campaign.

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PoliSnark assesses the threat as low. And lame too.

Charles Johnson and LGF did great work in exposing the CBS plot to use forged documents to influence the 2004 election. But since then, LGF reads like a combination between the photo essays at Althouse and a transcript of a disintegrating middle school clique. LGF’s rivals for the former title of Best Right-Wing Extremist Site try their best to imitate his methods even while finding more and more obscure doctrinal excuses to dress it up in. Yawn.

Please consider adding PoliSnark to your RSS feeds and spread the word. Politics doesn’t have to be clinically earnest all the time, does it?

Progressive activists like Paul Krugman and Steve Benen have been promoting a remarkable reaction to the success of a conservative arguments against health care reform packages — double down on progressive purism by passing the Senate bill and then make it more compliant with costly progressive demands for government-regulated “public option” health care by using reconciliation to circumvent a Senate filibuster.

Even leaving aside the practical problems with this plan (using reconciliation would still require some procedural votes that could be filibustered), the plan proposed by Benen is remarkably stupid in political terms. What it amounts to is, having already politically stabbed themselves in the gut by drastically overreaching with massive spending proposals coupled to a massive increase in the regulatory power of the government over individual lives, now they demand Democrats twist the knife and spread the damage. More moderate Democratic Senators would be asked to fall on their political swords just so a few intolerant hard-line progressive purists could run the table.

At the point that voters in one of the nation’s bluest states were persuaded by conservative criticisms that the Democrats’ health reform plan was too costly and too repressive of individual liberties, progressives like Krugman and Benen are insisting that using blatant procedural tricks to make it more costly and more repressive is the only way to “save the Democratic Party”.

Whatever they’re smoking needs to be debated more under the rubric of drug legalization than health care reform.

Maybe someone with a better understanding of the law-making process, specifically at the state level, can help me understand this question.  I ask in reference to laws regulating the granting of same-sex marriage licenses.  Today I discovered that four states, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, and Rhode Island, do not have laws for or against gay marriage.

“Odd,” I thought.  Surely these states should be counted amongst Massachusetts, Connecticut, Iowa, Vermont, and New Hampshire, all states which have legalized gay marriage in one fashion or another?

Apparently, though, I’m wrong.  Upon further research, Rhode Island and New Jersey both have “domestic partnerships,” which I suppose answers the question for them.  However, New York and New Mexico don’t have this, do not explicity ban gay marriage, and yet in 2004 the state governments took action to ban further gay marriage licenses from being issued after a couple dozen were given out in the wake of San Francisco’s issuing of same-sex marriage licenses.

So can someone explain to me how the states get away with deciding who does and does not get licenses, if there is no law already decreeing a certain group cannot have them?  I may be answering my own question, but I suppose state marriage license laws give the governments wide latitude to decide who can get them?  Otherwise, marriage officials could grant them to Farmer John and his animal (the coupling that social conservatives everywhere fear) where a law for or against it is not on the books.  I know this tends to be the case in law making anyway.  Laws are written vaguely, so it is up to the executive branch to decide how to interpret and implement them.

Of course, I could be wrong about this explanation, so some illumination would be appreciated.

Scott Brown became a the newest Senator from Massachusetts last night, and conservatives could not be more pleased.  Some conservatives and liberals alike have claimed that this is a huge win for conservative policies, or for Dems a message against their policies, and that the Obama administration and Congress should wise up and think about centering themselves, like Clinton after 1994.

While I would agree that Democrats need to think about actually starting to work with Republicans on legislation, and while I’d like them to move to a more centrist agenda economically, I would argue that the attitude the Democrats have shown toward the political process this year, combined with a still weak economy, is the real reason Brown won last night.

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Former Clinton adviser Lanny Davis has reacted to the Democratic Party’s loss in Massachusetts by advocating a return to a more moderate Democratic Party willing to actually work and compromise with Republicans in a way more nuanced than simply demanding that Republicans immediately support Democratic policy initiatives or be excluded and condemned for intransigence as “the party of ‘no’”.

Davis is correct that opposing and demonizing Republicans (and by extension conservatives and most moderates as well) has become the hallmark of left-leaning politics over the past year. This is particularly true in the blogosphere, where strident activists rule and where even speaking to the “other side” is treated as an intolerable betrayal. The real question is whether this process is reversible or whether the emotional extremism that seems to dominate progressivism is a self-reinforcing cycle. If the party views the Massachusetts loss as a wake-up call, then there is no reason Democrats cannot return to a more incremental model of change built on a strategy of peeling off moderates like Susan Collins, Olympia Snow, and even various free-styling Republicans on specific issues, like Lindsey Graham on judicial nominations or John McCain on campaign finance.

But if Democratic activists stick with their strategy of demonizing opponents rather than engaging them, then Davis’ call will fall on deaf ears. As long as conservatism and moderation are deemed to be not just errant but evil, then compromise and negotiation will continue to be seen as “a deal with The Devil”. Furthermore, as the behavior of far-left activists demonstrates, there is a major emotional payoff built in to the demonization — the opportunity to pose as an avatar of righteous vengeance is a powerful narcotic which clearly drives some of the more strident voices from the extremes.

The purists addicted to this drug aren’t going to go away, of course. The question is whether they will be allowed to continue to control broader forums. The Democratic Party is no so much a coherent actor as an institutional prize to be won or lost. In the aftermath of President George W. Bush’s unpopularity and Sen. John McCain’s lackluster and bumbling campaign, it was fairly easy for the activists to capture the Democratic Party. Their excesses, even in the rare cases where a heavily biased media bothered to report them, seemed either justified or outweighed by the overall moderation promised by then-candidate Obama and a raft of moderate-seeming Congressional candidates in the mold of Heath Schuler. But once in power, the mask came off, as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other Democratic leaders ruthlessly chopped Republicans completely out of the process, often using the very same techniques about which they had claimed outrage only months earlier. These actions were justified in the language of vengeance and demonization — Republicans, conservatives, and moderates simply deserved nothing less than the harshest possible treatment for their thought crimes. How can such thinking be corrected simply by losing an election? It probably can’t. The loss in the election becomes converted by such thinking into just further evidence that Republicans, conservatives, and moderates are evil.

But reasonable Democrats have an opening, if they choose to take it. If, rather than making excuses and trying to blame Bush yet again for their troubles, mainstream Democrats choose to finally hold to account their own ranks of extremists and intolerant haters, they can recapture their own party’s message and make it more policy-focused and less vengeance-focused. The choice faced by the moderate voices in the Democratic Party as well their ancillary wings in the blogosphere is simple — they can continue to enable and endorse the intolerant radicals in their midst, or they can once again become credible as analysts and effective as policymakers.

But they can’t do both.

TMV columnist Swaraaj Chauhan highlights an article at The Independent that criticizes “eco-nags” and “eco-bores” — the people who constantly preach at everyone in sight about their moral failures to comply with the endlessly growing list of criteria necessary to be tolerably “green”. Chauhan’s characterizations, to say the least, fall short of a fair look at the political and social dynamic of environmentalism. Chauhan characterizes environmentalists as “self-less” and their critics as “paranoid”. He also appropriates Gandhi to endorse the environmentalist movement and condemn all who might raise even so much as a questioning eyebrow as servants of “greed”.

I dissent. In fact, I think Chauhan’s rather ridiculous characterization exposes the self-serving side of environmentalist posturing in and of itself. The current state of environmentalism seems a form of moral preening — a very self-promotional way for “green” adherents to publicly display their moral superiority and, more the to point, gain political and social power by doing so. By characterizing themselves as “self-less”, environmentalists gain for themselves a wide-ranging exemption from criticism and dissent and also gain for themselves a political advantage to demand policies that advance their political power and personal careers apace.

An excellent example of this selfish environmentalism can be seen in the academic funding scam run by the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). By advertising itself as neutral and all of its critics as corrupt, the IPCC has positioned itself as the go-to forum for dictating the direction of global policy regarding climate change. The IPCC has spread this self-interested posturing down the academic food chain, refusing to fund studies that do not commit in advance to supporting the IPCC’s preferred scientific findings and policy-making prescriptions. The consequence of this is to make “climate change” scientists’ careers dependent upon their compliance with the “self-less” agenda of the IPCC. In short, the upshot is that climate change science actually is being bought by “greed” — but by the “green” side just as much as the “evil corporations” side.

Then again, maybe I am just one of those horrible “paranoid” people who can never live up to the Gandhian ideals of our “self-less” moral superiors like Swaraaj Chauhan. After all, how dare I criticize those “self-less” environmentalists? They just love the planet. Awwww.

Or then again that whole “eco-nag”/”eco-bore” slam hit Chauhan a little too close to home. And since he belongs to not one but two groups (environmentalists and left-leaning TMV contributors) that are highly intolerant of criticism, I suppose this particular reaction is predictable.

Moderate Democratic Senator Evan Bayh of Indiana is first to the post with a diagnosis of what’s going on with the sudden and precipitous collapse of Democrats’ electoral juggernaut — the abandonment of moderates in favor of the far-left fringe of the party.

In fact, Bayh’s diagnosis is both true and predictable. Whenever a political party claims overwhelming control of the government, there is a tendency of the impractical radicals and intolerant purists to take over. They simply come to believe that the size of their advantage means that they no longer need to restrain themselves in imposing ideological purity. Socially conservative radicals in the Republican Party misplayed their hand after 1994, resulting in the gradual erosion of their sweeping mandate and, eventually, in the sweeping of the Republican Party out of the halls of power in 2006 and 2008. And now the mirror image process is already well under way among the Democrats.

The trouble is that moderates in both parties tend to only be accepted (tolerated, actually) when they are vital to obtaining a temporary win. But during those times, when their votes are desperately needed, they are also resented by the purists. They are thought to be sell-outs, charlatans who in fact betray The Cause. As a result, at the very instant their votes are no longer needed, it’s “payback time”. The hallmarks of this process can be seen in the over-the-top, rage-fueled vendettas against moderates like Sen. Joe Lieberman that has swept through far-left activists since 2006.

Inevitably, the cycle will continue. Republican gains in 2010 and 2012 may result in another shift in power, potentially large enough to give Republicans control of much of the government. In order to fulfill that lofty goal, however, Republicans will have to rely on relative moderates that offend the purist sensibilities of the base. And then the purists will declare jihad against the moderates as soon as a majority appears to have been achieved. That jihad will result in a decline and collapse of the Republican majority and a return to a Democratic majority built on intra-party compromises with moderates, after which far-left activists will re-declare their war on moderates again. And round and round we go.

The special election in Massachusetts is over, and the unexpected has occurred. A conservative Republican has been elected to fill the senate seat held for 47 years by Robert M. Kennedy, who came to be called the Liberal Lion of the Senate. Scott Brown’s victory over Martha Coakley should be a wake up call – to the leadership of both major political parties.

The general public of the United States can generally be characterized as being in the center, or perhaps more accurately, slightly to the right of center. We tend to value personal liberty, equal opportunity, relatively small government, open and accountable government, and fiscally responsible government. Both the Republicans and Democratic parties have claimed to represent those values during every election cycle, but they have tended to govern with ways which conflict with those basic values, increasing the national debt, and with quiet deals to financially supportive interest groups. Those back room deals tend to support big business when the Republicans are in power, and unions and moneyed progressive interest groups when the Democrats are in power. Both parties have tended to misread electoral success with rather modest margins as a mandate to play to their extreme fringe. The Republicans tacked too far to the right after the 2000 election, and the public followed its tendency to ‘vote the rascals out’ when irritated by the political over-reach. The Democrats followed the same course. Republicans cut taxes and created sweetheart deals for business (with substantial support for economically indefensible low income loan practices pushed for cynical political purposes by Democrats like Barney Frank) after 2000. These actions, by both parties, helped create the financial bubble which burst in 2008. The Republicans, however, had been in charge, and their man was President, so it was understandable that the public showed their disapproval at the ballot box in 2006 and 2008. Republicans were unseated, and Democrats, many claiming to be moderates wanting balanced budgets, were elected. A year ago, the Democrats were looking at a reversal of fortunes. They now held the White House and both houses of Congress.

President Obama ran a smart campaign, promising a centrist, fiscally responsible government, and promising to deal with the economic crisis that was threatening to overwhelm the economy. The public voted for Obama – he was bright, optimistic and telegenic – everything Senator John McCain was not. But after being sworn in – a year ago to the day – President Obama ignored the campaign promises, and tacked to the left. An overwhelming sense of hope for substantive change became frustration and then anger when the public realized that they had not obtained change. Indeed, the Who had it right. “Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss” could be the Democratic campaign song. A public angry with government by strong arm tactics practiced by Republicans like Tom Delay and Jim Lott discovered the new boss, in Nancy Pelosi, was simply Tom Delay in a dress. After all the talk about bipartisanship, the progressive wing of the Democratic Party showed itself to be no change at all from the bad old boss on the Republican right.

After the election of 2008, the Democrats got busy governing. they did this not from the center, but by muscling through bills that appealed to the Paul Wellstone progressive fringe of the Democratic party, using the same old closed door committee practices that the public had found so objectionable when used by the Republicans. The Cap and Trade bill, the health care plan, and the efforts to rush to a binding agreement on CO2 emissions all appealed to the far left base of the Democratic party. However, these all showed no evidence of the open government Mr. Obama promised, and all were rushed through with indecent haste, by steamrollering the Republican minority.

The public is trying to be heard, despite the best efforts of the mainstream media echo chamber. The big media keep telling the Democratic politicians what they want to hear, and trying to tell the public what it thinks the progressive elite thinks is appropriate. The public is making itself heard. At the voting booth. The arrogance of the Democratic leadership in trying to make the payoffs to the Progressive elite in 2009 matches the hubris of the Republican leadership steamrolling the moderate, middle of the road Democrats in 2001. Short memories these politicians have. The public is doing what it can to be heard. The election of Scott Brown should be a wake up call to the Democrats – and the Republicans.

People are serious about getting government to address the economic issues, reduce spending to live within our means, and not pass huge national debts on to future generations. None of this will be easy, nor will it be simple or universally popular. Honest persons should recognize that the political leadership of both parties have contributed to the situation we are in. We will need to accept grown up solutions to our problems, which have been brought about by childish faith that politicians could give us large government with limitless benefits at the same time as lower taxes. We will need to recognize that a balanced budget will require some reduction of government services, and an increase of taxes. Thse are serious matters, and they should be discussed in open sessions of Congress, not closed committee hearings, rushed through before anyone in the public can ask any embarrassing questions of their representatives or senators. Scott Brown ran promising to resist the political practices of the past. If we are to have any hope of change in the political structure, we will need to elect people who will make responsible votes, and recognize that the present form of government spending beyond its means is not sustainable.

Mr. President, the ball is in your court. Giving the responsibility for governing to the most progressive members of the Democratic caucus has not worked well for you. that did not work well for President Clinton, either. Now, do you want to salvage your presidency? My advice is to send Madam Speaker and Mr. Reid packing. Maybe a bit of housecleaning in your cabinet would be in order as well. Get some serious moderates, and yes, get yourself a real conservative on board. Listen to them. That doesn’t mean governing to satisfy the far fringe of the Republican party. But it means doing what you claimed you would o when you were campaigning: be President of ALL Americans. That won’t be easy. Your predecessor stated he wanted to be a uniter, not a divider. He found that was not easy. You’ve got a lot of issues demanding your attention. A last quote, as advice. From a Democratic president: “It’s the economy, stupid!”

Good Luck, Sir.