Open Thread: Strange Bedfellows Edition

Love open threads (0.00 / 0)

Because they give me a chance to say things like --

The Obama ad that claims Romney wouldn't have captured Osama bin Laden bugs the hell out of me on several levels. Not least of which is its blatant unfairness. It was unfair when they did it to us, and it's unfair when we do it to them.

I think the goal is to make Romney to defend something he shouldn't have to, so I can appreciate the "Taste of their own medicine" aspect of it. But fighting monsters, and all that. This type of thing just alienates the sacred independents.

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by: JimC @ Sat Apr 28, 2012 at 15:29:32 PM UTC

I believe you're off-base here. (4.00 / 5)

Romney - like some other 2008 candidates, including McCain - criticized candidate Obama for his declared willingness to go after bin Laden into Pakistan, even if the government of Pakistan refused to support the mission. (Obama's statement was in response to a question, not volunteered bluster.)

It really is literally true, that most of the other 2008 candidates would not have captured bin Laden if they followed the policy they declared during the campaign.

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by: elwood @ Sat Apr 28, 2012 at 16:21:39 PM UTC

[ Parent ]

Fair point (0.00 / 0)

But I'm still uncomfortable with it as a line of attack.
 

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by: JimC @ Sat Apr 28, 2012 at 18:11:04 PM UTC

[ Parent ]

There isn't a crisp "offense / defense" line in campaigns (4.00 / 1)

(I know you're aware of that - I'm just explaining the logic behind my own level of comfort here.)

The Republicans in general and Romney in particular are attacking Obama as "weak on national defense." They are attacking his military budgets, his multilateral efforts, his holding back in Syria. One of their favorite attacks is "No timelines - it just tells the Taliban how to plan their strategy!"

You might think that concern would have made them say, "I won't tip my hand - but bin Laden should not think Pakistan is a sanctuary." Instead they said, "We wouldn't strike."

For Obama to NOT remind people of that seems like campaign malpractice to me.

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by: elwood @ Sun Apr 29, 2012 at 15:47:49 PM UTC

[ Parent ]

I kind of like. . . . (4.00 / 2)

Osama bin Laden is dead, but General Motors is alive and well.
 

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by: Dartmouth Dem @ Sun Apr 29, 2012 at 22:04:49 PM UTC

[ Parent ]

It was a good line. (0.00 / 0)

I was in the room when Biden delivered it the other day. Shame the whole big stick thing overshadowed the speech.

--
Twitter: @DougLindner

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by: Douglas E. Lindner @ Mon Apr 30, 2012 at 06:00:25 AM UTC

[ Parent ]

FYI - GoDaddy is doing damage control... (4.00 / 3)

GODaddy has been a very popular hosting company and domain-name registrar for a long time, I have used them for years. My relationship with them goes back to when they were teeny weeny. Once they got large and started advertising with hot chicks on the SuperBowl, I looked for other providers.  But last year they really stepped in it when they came down in support of SOPA...

From AtlanticOnline

... the great Go Daddy Boycott of 2011 started with a single call to action on Reddit. After the company came out in support of SOPA -- they'd even submitted a testimony to the House Judiciary Committee praising the bill's aggressive approach -- quite a few customers got on board the boycott effort last week. The company's chief executive Warren Adelman stepped forward and pulled Go Daddy's support of
SOPA less than 24-hours after the boycott went viral, but he didn't exactly speak out against the bill. He sounded so sincere at first. "Go Daddy is no longer supporting SOPA, the 'Stop Online Piracy Act' currently working its way through U.S. Congress." Adelman said in a statement last Friday, after the Reddit boycott caught fire. But then he waffled a bit. "Fighting online piracy is of the utmost importance, which is why Go Daddy has been working to help craft revisions to this legislation -- but we can clearly do better. It's very important that all Internet stakeholders work together on this," Adelman continued. "Getting it right is worth the wait. Go Daddy will support it when and if the Internet community supports it."

Public Relations makes strange bedfellows.  

 "The future is not something to be predicted, it's something to be achieved,"  unattributed aphorism

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by: susaninrindge @ Sat Apr 28, 2012 at 16:36:49 PM UTC

Coming this week: Caro's fourth volume of LBJ (4.00 / 2)

The Passage of Power. This takes up from Master of the Senate and covers the 1960 election - Johnson ran against Kennedy before getting the Veepship - through the assassination and the start of his Presidency.

Volume 1 came out in 1982, then another volume per decade, on average. Caro says he has just one more volume. If he keeps to that, Volume 5 will be rushed and superficial compared to the rest. One volume for civil rights, SCOTUS (Goldberg, Fortas, Thurgood Marshall, Thornberry), scandals (Bobby Baker, Billie Sol Estes, Jenkins), and - oh yeah - Vietnam??

Caro - happily! - tends to get sidetracked when he tells his story. When Johnson started weilding power in the Senate, Caro needed a digression on the history of that body - a hundred pages of digression.

The nice thing about waiting for Caro - and for Donald Knuth, and the rest of The Art of Computer Programming - is you can read slowly and still act impatient.

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by: elwood @ Sun Apr 29, 2012 at 01:05:23 AM UTC

Have been <I>patiently</I> awaiting this one (0.00 / 0)

seems like only yesterday I finished the third volume, wait - maybe it was...hm.

Seriously, I have appreciated Caro's approach since the beginning, kind of like Michener in his own way.

November 2012
Hope for a return to sanity.

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by: GreyMike @ Sun Apr 29, 2012 at 01:48:55 AM UTC

[ Parent ]

Drat, the tag worked in preview. Oh well. n/t (0.00 / 0)

November 2012
Hope for a return to sanity.

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by: GreyMike @ Sun Apr 29, 2012 at 01:50:13 AM UTC

[ Parent ]

Adding (4.00 / 1)

Nice piece on the book and Caro on the CBS Sunday Morning show today.

Fun to see someone who uses a typewriter to write, and takes notes by hand. Very retro.


November 2012
Hope for a return to sanity.

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by: GreyMike @ Sun Apr 29, 2012 at 13:55:51 PM UTC

[ Parent ]

I've rather enjoyed the new, (4.00 / 2)

politically mature president taking on Romney's weak and indefensible foreign policy positions.  It's a nice twist and, I might point out, all done without the visuals of Purple Heart band-aids.  

In other news, Norm Ornstein (of all f$cking people), co-authors a piece in the WaPo that says what everybody already knows.  The Republicans are political napalm.  http://www.washingtonpost.com/...

Not that Norm ever used the cover of GOP carpet bombing to move the AEI agenda - makes you wonder about what the adults are thinking.

Also, Charles Pierce posits a short, but very interesting take on how we continue to drift right in a center-left nation:

At that point, the Republican fringe was empowered by the simple fact that there now was no political entity pushing back at them with a force equal to theirs in the opposite direction. At the very least, the Democrats could be counted upon to give them some of what they wanted, at which point they would scream and holler and nobody noticed that the "Center" was drifting in their direction. And when they overreached - the Clinton Impeachment, Schiavo, the entire Bush presidency - they didn't have to regroup. I've often used Stalin's order to the Red Army to describe this - Ni shagu nazad: Not one step backwards - and it's true. They fight like they do not care what happens to the country either way. They fight as though they don't care if they burn their party down. The Democrats fight like they care about both things. The Democrats stopped taking risks 30 years ago. Faced with nihilism, they reach for the olive branch, which is generally sent back to them in ashes.

Read more: http://www.esquire.com/blogs/p...  

In the immediate aftermath of Since the start of the financial crisis, the Fed/Treasury lent, spent, or guaranteed $28 $29 $30 trillion to save the banking system.

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by: StraffordDem @ Sun Apr 29, 2012 at 11:43:52 AM UTC

War eats social progress (4.00 / 1)

been reading Ed Sanders book Fug You {An Informal History of the Peace Eye Bookstore,the Fuck You Press,The Fugs, and Counterculture in the Lower east Side}De Capo Press 2011, a few pages at a time...had the synchronistic experience of one night reading his worm's eye view of Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker Party, and their view of moving 'beyond politics', and the next night hearing her referred to on HardBall by Chris Matthews...

Day talked about social justice and the mission of the Poor, the mission the church had mainly abandoned...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...
The Catholic Worker
The Catholic Worker movement started with the publication of the Catholic Worker, first issued on 1 May 1933. It was established to promote Catholic social teaching in the depths of the Great Depression and to stake out a neutral, pacifist position in the war-torn 1930s.[23] (See the Catholic Worker: The Aims and Means of the Catholic Worker.) This grew into a "house of hospitality" in the slums of New York City and then a series of farms for people to live together communally.[24] She lived for a time at the now-demolished Spanish Camp community in the Annadale section of Staten Island.[25] The movement quickly spread to other cities in the United States, and to Canada and the United Kingdom; more than 30 independent but affiliated CW communities had been founded by 1941. Well over 100 communities exist today, including several in Australia, the United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, the Republic of Ireland, Mexico, New Zealand, and Sweden.[26]
[edit]Fame
By the 1960s, Day was embraced by a significant number of Catholics, while at the same time, she earned the praise of counterculture leaders such as Abbie Hoffman, who characterized her as the first hippie,[11] a description of which Day approved,[11] though there is some evidence which indicates Day might not always have taken a positive view of the hippie movement.[27]
Although Day had written passionately about women's rights, free love and birth control in the 1910s, she opposed the sexual revolution of the 1960s and beyond, saying she had seen the ill-effects of a similar sexual revolution in the 1920s. Day had a progressive attitude toward social and economic rights, alloyed with a very orthodox and traditional sense of Catholic morality and piety.
Her devotion to her church was neither conventional nor unquestioning, however. She alienated many U.S. Catholics (including some clerical leaders) with her condemnation of Falangist leader Francisco Franco during the Spanish Civil War;[28] and, possibly in response to her criticism of Cardinal Francis Spellman, she came under pressure by the Archdiocese of New York in 1951 to change the name of her newspaper, "ostensibly because the word Catholic implies an official church connection when such was not the case".[29] The newspaper's name was not changed.

Many of our parents grew up during the Depression, but for us as kids post WWII, along side the prosperity in the boomer JFK generation came an attitude he describes as a belief in "Good Permanent Change".

"The Integration and voting rights victories in the South gave the 60's such hope,and so did laws passed by a Congress and two presidents who still drew public inspiration from Franklin Roosevelt, The Great Depression, and New Deal legislation such as Social Security and child labor laws.

All in a rush of months Johnson used his leadership to pass a bunch of Great Society laws.Among them were Medicare,Medicaid, the Freedom of Information Act, the Voting Rights Act, a law setting aside millions of acres of public land as permanent wilderness, and Johnson's executive order on affirmatiuve action. It was his glory and the glory  of a righteous Congress. At the same time however, as if possessed bya  demon of bellicosity,Johnson started up a ground and air war in Vietnam---with napalm,Agent Orange, fragmentation boms,stratergic hamlets,the Phoenix Program, and secret bombing of Laos.War eats social progress."
Fug You,by Ed Sanders  pg77-787 ~The Great Society

Never argue with stupid people, they will drag you down to their level and beat you with experience. ~ Mark Twain

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by: JonnyBBad @ Sun Apr 29, 2012 at 14:16:45 PM UTC

War eats social progress (4.00 / 1)

been reading Ed Sanders book Fug You {An Informal History of the Peace Eye Bookstore,the Fuck You Press,The Fugs, and Counterculture in the Lower east Side}De Capo Press 2011, a few pages at a time...had the synchronistic experience of one night reading his worm's eye view of Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker Party, and their view of moving 'beyond politics', and the next night hearing her referred to on HardBall by Chris Matthews...

Day talked about social justice and the mission of the Poor, the mission the church had mainly abandoned...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...
The Catholic Worker
The Catholic Worker movement started with the publication of the Catholic Worker, first issued on 1 May 1933. It was established to promote Catholic social teaching in the depths of the Great Depression and to stake out a neutral, pacifist position in the war-torn 1930s.[23] (See the Catholic Worker: The Aims and Means of the Catholic Worker.) This grew into a "house of hospitality" in the slums of New York City and then a series of farms for people to live together communally.[24] She lived for a time at the now-demolished Spanish Camp community in the Annadale section of Staten Island.[25] The movement quickly spread to other cities in the United States, and to Canada and the United Kingdom; more than 30 independent but affiliated CW communities had been founded by 1941. Well over 100 communities exist today, including several in Australia, the United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, the Republic of Ireland, Mexico, New Zealand, and Sweden.[26]
[edit]Fame
By the 1960s, Day was embraced by a significant number of Catholics, while at the same time, she earned the praise of counterculture leaders such as Abbie Hoffman, who characterized her as the first hippie,[11] a description of which Day approved,[11] though there is some evidence which indicates Day might not always have taken a positive view of the hippie movement.[27]
Although Day had written passionately about women's rights, free love and birth control in the 1910s, she opposed the sexual revolution of the 1960s and beyond, saying she had seen the ill-effects of a similar sexual revolution in the 1920s. Day had a progressive attitude toward social and economic rights, alloyed with a very orthodox and traditional sense of Catholic morality and piety.
Her devotion to her church was neither conventional nor unquestioning, however. She alienated many U.S. Catholics (including some clerical leaders) with her condemnation of Falangist leader Francisco Franco during the Spanish Civil War;[28] and, possibly in response to her criticism of Cardinal Francis Spellman, she came under pressure by the Archdiocese of New York in 1951 to change the name of her newspaper, "ostensibly because the word Catholic implies an official church connection when such was not the case".[29] The newspaper's name was not changed.

Many of our parents grew up during the Depression, but for us as kids post WWII, along side the prosperity in the boomer JFK generation came an attitude he describes as a belief in "Good Permanent Change".

"The Integration and voting rights victories in the South gave the 60's such hope,and so did laws passed by a Congress and two presidents who still drew public inspiration from Franklin Roosevelt, The Great Depression, and New Deal legislation such as Social Security and child labor laws.

All in a rush of months Johnson used his leadership to pass a bunch of Great Society laws.Among them were Medicare,Medicaid, the Freedom of Information Act, the Voting Rights Act, a law setting aside millions of acres of public land as permanent wilderness, and Johnson's executive order on affirmatiuve action. It was his glory and the glory  of a righteous Congress. At the same time however, as if possessed bya  demon of bellicosity,Johnson started up a ground and air war in Vietnam---with napalm,Agent Orange, fragmentation boms,stratergic hamlets,the Phoenix Program, and secret bombing of Laos.War eats social progress."
Fug You,by Ed Sanders  pg77-787 ~The Great Society

Never argue with stupid people, they will drag you down to their level and beat you with experience. ~ Mark Twain

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by: JonnyBBad @ Sun Apr 29, 2012 at 14:16:46 PM UTC

"In our sleep, pain which cannot forget (4.00 / 1)

falls drop by drop upon the heart
until, in our own despair, against our will,
comes wisdom through the awful grace of God."

In the immediate aftermath of Since the start of the financial crisis, the Fed/Treasury lent, spent, or guaranteed $28 $29 $30 trillion to save the banking system.

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by: StraffordDem @ Sun Apr 29, 2012 at 21:32:45 PM UTC

[ Parent ]

Peace Frog (0.00 / 0)

Never argue with stupid people, they will drag you down to their level and beat you with experience. ~ Mark Twain

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by: JonnyBBad @ Sun Apr 29, 2012 at 14:35:58 PM UTC

Very odd bedfellows... (0.00 / 0)

David H Koch is major sponsor of Nova programs on WGBH. Apparently WGBH has a firewall between fundraising and editorial/production, but one does wonder. It's been this way for quite a few years.
http://watchdogprogressive.com...
Keep a eye out, shall we?

JillSH

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by: JillSH @ Sun Apr 29, 2012 at 19:42:33 PM UTC

I've got no steady address.. (4.00 / 1)

I believe Bill Staines does have a steady address in New Hampshire - but Pony Express isn't too far wrong.

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by: elwood @ Mon Apr 30, 2012 at 00:27:07 AM UTC

Rove attacks Obama for being likable (0.00 / 0)

When they tried this "celebrity" thing a few years ago, it fell flat--especially because McCain was attacking Obama for lacking experience, then he turned around and picked Palin. But now Obama has experience. And he's likable. Romney has neither of those things.

Anyway, aside from 2 seconds of blaming the President for economic problems that (a) are not his fault (b) would be worse under Republican policies and (c) would be better if they would stop blocking his agenda, this is an excellent ad for the President, courtesy of Karl Rove:

http://youtu.be/lhXGkeMdOJs

--
Twitter: @DougLindner

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by: Douglas E. Lindner @ Mon Apr 30, 2012 at 05:58:07 AM UTC