Will the U.S. Become Ungovernable Like California?

Krugman worries.

In California, the G.O.P. has essentially shrunk down to a rump party with no interest in actually governing — but that rump remains big enough to prevent anyone else from dealing with the state’s fiscal crisis. If this happens to America as a whole, as it all too easily could, the country could become effectively ungovernable in the midst of an ongoing economic disaster.

This is the one weapon the GOP has -- shutting down the country and rendering it impotent as an economic power. Right about the time that China's and India's economies -- to say nothing of the European Union -- are on an upward trajectory. If this would happen on Obama's watch, the Dems could be put out to pasture for a very long time, particularly if they are unable to accomplish anything without them. They may have passed healthcare reform in the House, but in the Senate they have a major battle ahead of them. Obama's coattails may not look attractive enough for Dems who seek reelection in 2010 or 2012. Without support from Blue Dogs, the bill looks to be seriously weakened.

At some point, Obama needs to start thinking: "Why did I want to become president? Was it power, for me or for my party? Or was it because people in this country needed help that wasn't being provided by either party?" If the former, we can expect more compromise and less benefit for Americans on healthcare. In other words, get something passed that we can all agree on. If the latter, however, look for Obama to take greater risks, to have the true "audacity [to] hope" that he can enroll enough Americans in his vision of healthcare and fiscal conservatism to take on the Washington establishment and overcome its inertia. He would have a lot of followers among Democrats, almost none among Republicans, and, I think, a surprising amount of support from independents, whose main beef is that nothing ever gets done at the federal level. Someone showing some real cajones would really be change we could all believe in.

Chinese Racism

I wonder how my good friend, Dr. D. Titus Levi, is faring as a "dark-skinned foreigner" in the People's Republic of China.

Fringe of the Fringe

Westboro Baptist Church, which is neither Baptist nor a church, protests in front of the school attended by Obama's two daughters. Satanic spawn?

Italy's Courage, cont.

Greenwald weighs in, mostly railing against the media's coverage of the Italian court's actions. Here he comments on an exchange between Jeffrey Toobin and Wolf Blitzer on CNN:

Toobin added that "one of the things you do when you are a CIA agent, at least in part, is break the law of other countries" -- Toobin says that as though they have the right to do that without accountability, and without mentioning that causing people to be tortured is also a violation of U.S. law (after Nasr's kidnapping, the chief of the CIA's Milan office traveled to Egypt for three weeks to participate in his "interrogation").

Now, of course, if a CIA agent were caught in Russia or North Korea or China conducting espionage, he would of course be arrested, jailed, and -- I would bet -- tortured. But if a CIA agent is caught in another country breaking that country's laws -- let's say the agent is caught in London, where police arrest him after he shoots someone he thought was a radical Muslim cleric who was targeted for assassination but who turned out to be a devoutly religious retired insurance broker -- he ought to get a Get Out of Jail Free card? Insane!

So these 23 CIA agents -- who kidnapped a man in Italy and had him whisked off to a rendition site in Egypt where he was tortured, when there was no evidence whatsoever to support their contention that he was a terrorist -- these guys are just doing their jobs for the greater good of the nation and should not face any consequences?

Now that they've been convicted, these 23 agents are pretty much restricted from travelling anywhere Interpol has jurisdiction, because if anyone is caught he'll be sent to Italy to begin serving an eight-year prison sentence.

One can only hope that there is a court like this that will prosecute Bush or Cheney for war crimes...

GOP Schism Watch

Rush Limbaugh blames Newt Gingrich for Doug Hoffman's loss in NY-23.

It should be noted: NY-23 hasn't had a Democratic representative in Congress since before the Civil War. Not surprising: back then, the Democratic Party was pro-slavery and the Republican Party had Abe Lincoln as their candidate. It's so funny that now, it's those who claim to be true Republicans, "True Conservatives," who want to treat women and gays as second-class citizens, not worthy of choice over their bodies, or barred from marrying the people they love.

"They Just Marry Someone of the Same Sex"

I usually don't air private family matters on Uh, Yeah Right, but recent events in the news and in my personal life have collided and I feel it's a great learning opportunity for me and my family.

I am the middle of three brothers, and we all have wives and children. Last month, with a couple of sets of parents in town, the 14 of us got together for dinner at a Chinese restaurant.

Now, the political opinions in our family range from far right to far left, and it always makes for interesting table talk.

On this particular night -- and I was not a witness to this conversation, so I'm relating it second-hand -- one of the adults at the table mentioned to my seven-year-old son that the rabbi at our synagogue, a man who is very dear to us and whom my children love, was married to another man. My wife and I had not yet had a conversation with our children about same-sex relationships, and so there was a bit of an awkward moment when my wife revealed that fact and expressed some dismay that it was brought up in this way. Fortunately, at the time, we were able to redirect the conversation and the topic didn't come up again.

Flash forward to earlier this week, when my four-year-old son told his brother, my wife, and me at the dinner table that he wanted to marry a boy in his class. Not wanting to re-open that topic, I fell back on the more common form of marriage and said, "Boys marry girls, honey." That's when my older son chimed in: "But Rabbi is married to a man." D'oh!!! I told him yes, that was right, and then struggled mightily for some words to help him understand. God, where my head went! Thankfully, my wife interjected, "That's a subject we'll discuss when you're a little older." Dinner continued with no further discussion on the topic of any type of marriage.

Seven years old. Good grief! I have to contend with helping my son understand same-sex relationships at his tender age? I just am not too sure of how to start.

But, today I read this piece from The Daily Dish:

Homosexuality is now unavoidable as a public issue. Explaining homosexuality to your kids is much more salubrious and PG if you can place it in the rubric of straight life - "they just marry someone of the same sex" - rather than in the rubric of dark and unmentionable sexual acts. In my experience, children get this instantly. Certainly my own nieces and nephews do. The younger generation sees it clearly. But adult fears and phobias keep getting in the way.

Of course, Andrew's right. Our reluctance to discuss this with our son is based in fear. Keeping it simple is the best policy. There's no need to get into actual human sexuality when discussing this with our children. It just is a fact of life in parts of America that people of the same sex marry each other. One day, hopefully, it will be a fact of life everywhere in the world.

On the other hand, I do understand how some same-sex marriage opponents use the hateful meme that gay marriage will be taught in schools as a way to prevent laws from passing that would enshrine it in our state constitutions. Even though I have a lot of respect for many of the teachers my children have, gay marriage is to some extent something I want to teach to my children in my home. And even though I will do that, I'm not sure I want also to have to deal with the potential confusion my young children might encounter if/when they hear different ways to understand gay marriage from teachers and other students with different belief systems. Is this just another example of my fear? Do I just have to trust that my children will "get it," as Andrew says?

I remember years ago when my older son was in preschool. We sent him to a racially diverse preschool, where many of the kids were black and/or Latino. He used to refer to some of his mates and teachers, without any guile whatsoever, as having "brown skin." My wife and I would recoil a little when he'd say those words, especially if we were in public and he'd be referring to someone he saw in, say, the grocery store. We would quickly reinforce the fact that it was impolite to talk about a person's skin color, because skin color didn't matter. "We're all humans," we would say.

After thinking about it for a bit, however, I realized that his "brown skin" comment was simply how he tried to differentiate himself from others, like he would with a girl, or a grown-up, or someone with brown eyes or dark hair. I was, I realized, projecting my own insecurities and guilt about the prejudices and racism I witnessed as a child, not to mention the anti-Semitism I experienced. When I see him with his second-grade friends now, many of whom are black, I have no fear that he is feeling any of those same prejudices that were so common in my upbringing.

Perhaps this is the crux of Andrew's argument. Children don't differentiate between straight and gay like we do because -- REALLY -- we're all just people. "They just marry someone of the same sex."

Sigh. Growing Up Dad, indeed.

How the GOP Helped the Dems Win the Health Care Debate

Sullivan shows why. A key problem in the Dem plan, other than the fact that it doesn't go far enough to rein in greedy insurers, is that, according to the CBO, the Dem plan will cost nearly $1 trillion and shave only $104 billion off the deficit over 10 years, while the GOP plan, at a price tag of $61 billion, will completely pay for itself over the same period. In that case, if we're discussing fiscal responsibility, wouldn't the GOP plan be a better option?

Yes, if the GOP plan also could manage to extend insurance coverage for the same amount of people to be covered in the Dem plan. But it doesn't. And, even though we're in this terrible fiscal crisis, the moral imperative of protecting the health of tens of millions of Americans trumps the need to "live within our means."

That said, Sullivan is right that Obama needs to couple this massive spending increase with meaningful offsets in entitlements to corporations, increasing Medicare premiums for the wealthy, and winding down two wars. And Obama should not be seen as letting up on any effort along these lines. This would be a sincere attempt to provide the public option on a "pay as you go" basis.

Your Part in $680 Billion

Without much national discussion, a new $680 billion annual military spending bill was just signed by President Obama. This, all while we're screaming about spending $96 billion, equal to 14% of the military budget, on healthcare reform. Priorities, people!

Anyway, Mike Konczal has a Nudge of the Day where he proposes breaking each taxpayer's portion of the defense budget in his/her paycheck. A person making $60,000 a year, for instance, would contribute about $97 every two weeks toward our national defense. Each year. Which could ostensibly keep going up every year. Contrast that to the $14 each two weeks this taxpayer would be spending on healthcare reform.

Let's see: $2,521 a year on wasteful defense contracting, like Blackwater, and KBR, and Halliburton, or $356 a year on helping more Americans get affordable health care insurance. Seems pretty cut and dry to me.

"Popular Sovereignty"

A Sullivan reader finds historical irony that the Republican Party, the Party of Lincoln, is today embracing the ideas of his opponent, Stephen Douglass, when it denies marriage equality to same-sex couples. Money quote from Lincoln himself:

I am not a Know-Nothing. That is certain. How could I be? How can any one who abhors the oppression of negroes, be in favor or degrading classes of white people? Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that "all men are created equal." We now practically read it "all men are created equal, except negroes." When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read "all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics." When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty -- to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.

Interesting aside in the Wiki entry for the Know-Nothing Party. In 2006, Weekly Standard editor William Kristol penned an editorial in which he blasted those in the Republican Party that embraced anti-immigrant populism without recognizing the danger of "turning the GOP into an anti-immigration, Know-Nothing party." Funny how Kristol, who later embraced a "know-nothing" like Sarah Palin in 2008, forgot to go back and read his own writing.

Establishment Republicans "Pale-in" Comparison to True Conservatives, Cont.

A reader writes:

I don't know what I was thinking, but last Thursday evening I attended an event hosted by our homeowners association featuring Chuck Devore. He said the Republican Party was backing Carly, not him. While he was charming, intelligent and articulate, I found myself glued to my chair with my hands in my lap as everyone else in the room broke out into standing ovations all evening. Although I found his views frightening, it was the positive reaction from the crowd that scared me most. All in all, I'm glad I went, because I think it's good to see a different perspective now and again.

Ah, the charms of Orange County, CA. As I'm a died-in-the-wool progressive (life-long), I would never have the stomach for an event like that. The scariest part, as this reader wrote, was witnessing the collection of radical right-wing conservatives all in one place, feeding off each other and raising the roof with their fringe ideology. And to think that these people are all around us, serving us coffee, examining our children, repairing our leaky faucets, investing our retirement funds, sitting on our school boards, etc.

It's why this wing of American politics is so dangerous and why it must be exposed as a fraud, and its followers stopped at every turn.