Nope and Noper: House Repubs, Senate Repubs

Nope and Noper: House Repubs, Senate Repubs
 —Haley Barbour: Dems “trying to ram health care down our throats”

Not much heat or light from the Sunday talk shows today, with prominent Republicans understandably subdued after the president’s very persuasive appearance at the GOP retreat in Baltimore Friday. Video links of Obama’s speech and Q&A with GOP House members are posted here among other places. The exchanges went heavily in Obama’s favor.

It’s a good thing the Internet makes some of the Obama-GOP Q&A available, often via YouTube, because very little of the true flavor of the event came through reporting or commentary on this morning’s talk programs. No surprise there. When I clicked on the TV, I had two questions for myself (“Self . . .“). One was whether any of the prominent journalists who monopolize the Sunday morning airwaves would do justice to the president’s command of issues in that conference of House Republicans. The other was whether the bizarre incident when far-right favorite James O’Keefe entered one of La. Sen. Mary Landrieu’s offices with some of his post-frat brethren, costumed as telephone repairmen, would be mentioned. Predictably, the answer to both questions is no.

One of the biggest weapons in the corporate media arsenal against participatory democracy is simply to flatten. We are seeing it now. The words “bipartisan” and “bipartisanship” are all over the place in big media outlets–and btw I do not recall seeing that emphasis in the media during the Bush years. The effect of calling for “bipartisanship” without context, of course, is to conceal any qualitative difference between policies on one side and policies on the other.

Calling for ‘bipartisanship’ without context in political commentary is also false political reporting. There was never any hope for Republican bipartisanship with Obama, and to pretend otherwise is journalistic fraud. An easy example is the proposal to set up a federal commission on the budget deficit. Previously, Republicans called for such a commission, co-sponsored legislation to bring it about, and vilified the White House and congressional Democrats for not setting one up. Now that President Obama urges a deficit commission, Republicans are opposing it–even Repubs who were previously co-sponsors. This is simply Lucy and the football. There is no hope for genuinely bipartisan action with people like Mitch McConnell or John Boehner. To pretend that there is, that somehow the president simply hurt GOP feelings so much, that they had held their little tiny pink hands out to shake and he just ran over them with his bike, when they were doing all they could to rein in insurance company abuses, to extend unemployment benefits, to impose transparency and fairness on the banks and the financial sector, etc., is fraudulent.

The word “bipartisanship,” in this kind of journalistic flattening meant to imply that both major parties are equally at fault, that the picture is somehow ‘fifty-fifty’–‘a plague on both their houses’ is another favorite flattening metaphor–simply hammers the administration and the Dems, any time they move in the public interest.

The word “jobs” is being used the same way. Like a nonexistent ‘bipartisanship,’ seizing on ‘jobs’ to create an illusory hope or demand that the White House magically create them is simply a weapon to use against the Democrats and against Obama. Haley Barbour’s appearance today on Face the Nation was a perfect example. Barbour’s GOP talking point is that the White House concentrated on health care instead of concentrating on “jobs.” Barbour put it unfortunately, claiming in a Freudian slip that the White House was “trying to ram health care down our throats.”



A couple of obvious points here: One, a lot of people, in fact the overwhelming majority, would prefer to get “health care” when needed. Two, the GOP does not exactly have a track record of supporting jobs programs. Since at least the Great Depression, Republicans have responded to jobs programs by screaming either ‘Communism’ or ‘higher taxes,’ and they’re doing the same thing today.

Btw Barbour did not mention the word “insurance,” as in the phrase “health insurance reforms.” And that’s in spite of the fact that Barbour should know something about insurance abuses, having lost a house in Hurricane Katrina.

Barbour and the rest of the top-dollar GOP, of course, are sticking to the talking point that the way to create ‘jobs’ is ‘cutting taxes.’ For them, also of course, that means cutting taxes for the rich. If they were halfway sincere about budget deficits, they would favor raising taxes on the rich, and on corporations that ship U.S. jobs overseas, but that’s a different branch of the topic.

That one, Michigan governor Jennifer Granholm handled well. Also on Face the Nation, Granholm may have fallen into the ‘jobs’ trap, but at least she salvaged something by opposing ‘jobs’ to ‘the deficit.’ Granholm pointed out accurately that most ‘angry’ voters are much more concerned about unemployment than about the budget deficit.



Any halfway smart Democrat ought to learn from the vocabulary not being used by the GOP. What are they not talking about–McConnell, Boehner, Barbour, McCain and the rest? –They are not talking about insurance abuses. They are not talking about the cost of the Iraq war in regard to budget deficits. They are not talking about contractor rip-offs. They are not mentioning, publicly, that their presidential candidate supported the Wall Street bailout.

In spite of occasional nods to ‘infrastructure,’ they are not mentioning rape crisis centers being
cut, or libraries being closed, let alone teachers and police losing jobs. They are certainly not mentioning thousands of police, firefighters, teachers and others able to stay on the job via state funding through the stimulus program. They also have little to say about foreclosures, or about long hospital stays that drive people bankrupt–they tend not to mention bankruptcies much, either–or about domestic violence. It looks as though they are even going to oppose Obama’s excellent plan to fund student loans directly without having the taxpayers subsidize middleman private lenders imposing loan-shark interest rates. They didn’t mention that one, either.

These omissions map perfectly on to the omissions by large media outlets.

By the same token, predictably there was no mention today about James O’Keefe and his team–the young guys who, if you recall, almost gained access to the telephone-wiring closet in one of Landrieu’s offices under false pretenses (they were turned away by a suspicious employee at the last minute) and are now claiming that they were only there to videotape.



Stan Dai

More on that tomorrow. Suffice it to say for now that some media outlets would be almost as embarrassed as the GOP, by reminders of past Nixonian and Rovian collegiate-style dirty tricks in politics. The pattern would be familiar to any citizen with some civic literacy, but civic literacy is not a desideratum in all political circles, or in all media circles.

On a brighter note–CNN continues its excellent coverage of the disaster in Haiti. Things may be looking up, with tons of food on the way to the suffering people there.














Good State of the Union address; self-serving ‘analysis’ the morning after

Good State of the Union address; self-serving ‘analysis’ the morning after


Two days after the Massachusetts special election for the senate was safely
over, Goldman Sachs announced its fourth quarter 2009 earnings and projected
bonuses. The huge bank, a top recipient of Bush

News coverage in Haiti

Keith Olbermann on Countdown is giving a commendably succinct but eloquent description, with interviews, of what is happening in the quake region in Haiti right now.

This BBC overview fills in; near-continuous coverage on CNN and MSNBC help clarify the picture. The bright side is the global and U.S. outpouring of support. The dark side is the logistical snarl that prevents aid from reaching the people most in need of it.

Another sour note, not yet confirmed: While generous contributions are pouring in to singer Wyclef Jean’s charity, The Smoking Gun website is posting a warning of sorts. Jean’s Yele Haiti Foundation has been the recipient of quite a large amount of money in the quake crisis but has been less than regular about filing IRS returns. The irregularities according to TSG also suggest some self-dealing. Jean himself has been–commendably–on site in Haiti, helping to recover bodies for disposal.

A useful resource for donors, CharityNavigator.org, evaluates charitable organizations on several criteria; one of the highest rated Haitian orgs is the Haiti Health Foundation.

Haiti needs primitive transportation

In Haiti, collapsed roads threaten to keep desperately needed supplies–water, food, medicine–from the people who need them. The airspace at the airport is currently saturated, all flights barred until 8:00 EST tonight. And when supplies get to airport or piers, how to get them to where they are needed is a quandary.

There is no easy answer, even with the US medical carrier under way. Roads full of gaps, chasms and enormous potholes are presumably not going to be navigable by heavy-duty vehicles, however rugged. This is a tragic tug-of-war between immense need and constricted bottlenecks, millions of people needing help that can get to relatively few at a time. The capital city of Port-au-Prince needs human relay chains, bucket brigades and old-fashioned barn-raising tactics to negotiate the rubble. But how can thirsting, hungry, exhausted or injured people come up with the strength? Ideas needed, to say nothing of supplies: Wagons? Sleds with moon wheels? Hammocks?

Gurneys, surely. Drag stretchers?–looks almost helpful.


Same with approach by water surface, up to a point. If the harbor is too dangerous to navigate by ship and piers are collapsing or unreliable, then other smaller conveyances have to be part of the answer.


Undoubtedly the Army will start helio-lifting as soon as humanly possible. So an immediate aim would have to be communicating, to let the populace know that water bottles etc are en route, that they will be air-dropped, and where to stand out of the way but nearby.

I am no tech, but I understand that pontoons can carry impressive loads. However, the approach of supplies via water would also have to be communicated in some way to local people.

Getting help to Haiti is indeed, as we keep being reminded on the air waves, a challenge. One of the hurdles is getting over that tendency to think big, an almost irresistible tendency given the magnitude of the problem. Looking ahead to rebuilding, it would be a good idea to keep buildings in proportion to the inescapable fact of that massive fault line: Collapsing multi-story buildings caused more casualties than other buildings in the quake. For the immediate future, we have to remind ourselves that help has to get on the ground or into the water, by any means possible, however small.

But it is so hard to improvise–even setting fatigue or injury–when there may well be a shortage even of primitive basics like rope and planks. Hard even to rig up even a makeshift litter, hard to rig up a pallet when there is no surplus of mattresses or sleeping bags.

One bit of good news, one small step in the right direction aside from the outpouring of international support, is that refugees are beginning to congregate in makeshift camps in open spaces in the main city. Undoubtedly, as the worst-hit did in New Orleans after Katrina, they will begin to organize in some fashion.

If only help can get to them in time. It is terrible to feel so helpless to help.

Rudy Giuliani: A noun and a verb and a What was that again?

Rudy Giuliani: A noun
and a verb and “We had no domestic attacks under Bush”

 

Giuliani has
outdone himself, not easy to do. After campaigning