New Year's Day Brunch at the Last Manatee

Frank Schaeffer writes today another defense of President Obama at Huffingtonpost. This time I find myself disagreeing with his attack on Paul Krugman and others on the Left, saying they can't get over Obama beating Hillary Clinton. Schaeffer is right in his praise of the President struggling in a toxic environment and still triumphing as in the Repeal of DADT, the ratification of the New Start Treaty and the unanimous approval of the 9/11 responders bill. Frank praises Rachel Maddow for her frequent public apologies when something occurs which she has expressed doubt about. But I can't shake the feeling that Frank chose the wrong targets this time.I look forward to him blasting the House Republicans in the forthcoming weeks.

It has been incredibly calm over the past two weeks in the rhetoric department. I guess conservatives really did want to take off for the Holidays. The noise level has gone done immeasurably. I am sure by the second week of January it will be raised through the roof.

Interesting factoid--In 2010, there were more private sector jobs created than in the entire George W. Bush presidency. So much for the job-killing policies of the Obama Administration. But read Paul Krugman's piece today in the New York Times. He predicts about a 4% growth rate this year and an unemployment rate around 9 percent. What Krugman has been right over the past two years is that the rate of job creation has to go into overdrive to just get back to the 2008 level unemployment rate. He also had written with the current nature of our economy based on FIRE--Finance,Insurance, and Real Estate--it can't be done. We are looking at around 8% until we make some structural changes.

Add more lunacy to the State politics--New Hampshire's legislature now has a veto-proof majority by the Republicans. The first bill they are introducing is to eliminate the same-sex act, which has seen 3,000 couples married in the last year. The same is going to occur in Iowa. Emboldened by defeating the Supreme Court justices who voted for same sex marriage in the state, the religious right aims to outlaw same sex marriage altogether. Basically, this will end up with several Prop 8-like cases.

In Georgia, the GOP is pushing a bill that would require all taxpayers to pay their taxes in gold and silver. I'm sure that can be found in the "original constitution".

Joe Miller has thrown in the towel after filing lawsuits at the Alaska Supreme Court level and then the Federal Appeals court. He lost all judicial decisions and the election as well. But he promises that he and his brownshirts will return soon.

Christine O'Donnell, who says she's not a witch, but I guess she's a grifter, is being investigated for using campaign funds for her personal use. She does this everytime she runs for office. She claims that Joe Biden and George Soros are after her as well as the GOP establishment.

Chris Christie, the portly New Jersey governor, defended being at Disney World while the Garden States was pummelled with a blizzard. He said he had a great vacation and New Jersey didn't experience any surge in unexpected deaths during the snowfall. Democrats are grousing that Christie is rewarding state contracts out to his campaign donors without competitive bidding.

Meanwhile in Florida, Medicare fraudster Rick Scott enters office with a whopping 30% approval rate. Yet, the national GOP are saying he will become a national figure--in a good sense, not in a criminal sense. Already Floridians are barking about his holding closed door meetings with corporations and trying to cut deals before he takes office. This is a case for Carl Hiaasen and his column in the Miami Herald. Speaking of Carl, I wished Matt Tiabbi had the same sense of humor.

If you want to suck on a gas pipe, be sure to read Matt Tiabbi's "Griftopia", which documents in excruciating detail the ransacking of America by almost everyone. I can't read him except in small doses chosen by my interest. In "Griftopia", we learn that Fast Eddie Rendell of Pennsylvania went to the Middle East for the purpose of selling the Pennsylvania Turnpike to the Arabs. Also that Mayor Daley did indeed sell all the parking meters of Chicago to Morgan Stanley, who were fronting for Abu Dubai and its Sovereign Wealth Fund. And the list goes on about states and cities that have sold American infrastructure and public property to foreign financial interests.

One of my favorite observers of Islamic Fundamentalism has come out with a new book called "Holy Ignorance". Olivier Roy, whose books this blog has written about before, takes on all fundamentalisms and concludes that they are all a symptom and not a reaction to the secularization of society. Roy always disappoints American audiences because first he pronounced political Islam a miserable failure and second he indicated that it was the educated,middle-to-upper class alienated Muslims in developed countries who were the new recruits for Islamic terrorism. He also has observed that Hamas and Iran really are operating out of a type of nationalism and not Islamic ideology. In his new book, he embraces Max Weber and Emile Durkheim's belief that has modernity advanced religious faith would diminish. On the surface this doesn't appear to be true but Roy argues quite the contrary. But he also includes in his analysis how globalization is re-shaping all these equations. The real Buddhist may end up in San Francisco for an authentic Buddhist experience and the Muslim reality is now found far from Mecca. Roy always provokes and I've found him to be lucid and spot on in his assessment of Islamic fundamentalism at least.

AEI's Norm Ornstein writes today in the Washington Post about the new phenomenon of Republican death panels in Arizona,Indiana and Texas. Norm writes that because state's have balance the budget amendments and the stimulus money that kept them afloat is evaporating,states are opting to cut Medicare and health programs for the poor. As a result, Arizona, Indiana and Texas have deprived patients about to receive organ transplants of funds for their operations. Already several patients have died in Arizona. Ornstein warns that this is a trend to come this year.

Wise guys in D.C. are wondering whether Gentleman John Boehner will commit the same faux pas this time when he reads the Constitution. Last time he read the Declaration of Independence and didn 't know the difference.

President Obama gave his New Year's greeting to the country with his message that Americans want Democrats and Republicans to work together to solve the country's problems. He always sounds so reasonable. But I think he should batten down the hatches because the House is more right-wing than at any time in our history. Every Republican elected has a conservative rating over 92%.

Today, new elements of the healthcare reform take place. For seniors, it provides free preventive care and other goodies. But the kicker is that the health insurance industry must now devote 80% of their income to real health care costs and not overhead or lobbying. The Teabagger Governor of Maine has applied for a state waiver on the restrictions on the health insurance industry. He's the first.

Dennis Kucinich appeared on Fox News to inform the audience that any attempt to repeal the healthreform bill will trigger a new movement for the public option. While realpolitik tells me no, I believe we will be heading that way soon.

The Right says that Barack Obama is going to deliver the country to native American Overlords because of his commitment to sign the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. In fact, they say he's going to give part of Manhattan back to the Indians. So, blacks,Hispanics,gays, women and now we have Indians. Boy, the Right is becoming more appealing every day.

But we should recognize that the 111th Congress--and we will dearly miss it--passed several landmark bill for Indians, including laws overhauling tribal health care and law enforcement. Congress provided some $2.5 billion in economic stimulus money to tribes and resolved four long-standing water disputes totaling more than $1 billion. Tribal leaders and Indian advocates called the 111th Congress the most productive for American indians in four decades. Congress also provided the funds to settle the 15-year old royalties case, which covers claims by Native Americans who were swindled out of payments for oil, gas, timber and grazing rights for more than a century. $2 billion went to buy up divided Indians lands from individual owners willing to sell, with lands turned over to tribes. And another $60 million goes to a scholarship fund for young Indians. A separate deal was struck with the Agriculture Department that some $680 million would go to Indians for the improper denial of farm loans.

The Indians should celebrate these achievements as well as the legal recognition of tribes, who had been waiting for years to achieve their rightful identity. Unfortunately, there doesn't look to be many more celebrations ahead.

If you want to know one basic reason the economy is flagging, compare the price of oil during President Clinton --$20.--with that under Obama--$90. But recent reports on the oil trade indicate Americans are not going to change their ways anytime soon. In fact, the Koch Brothers paid tea party members to travel to Cancun to protest the climate change summit. The target for their efforts will be to block the United States commitment to give third-world countries the United Nations mandated funds to compensate them for taking measures to combat carbon emissions in their own societies.

Both President Obama and Secretary of Energy Chu said that the United States was at a "sputnik" moment in terms of the global rivalry in developing alternative energy sources and other modes of transportation. Rep. Sensenbrenner, who will have a major say on high-speed rail, says America can't afford it. I happen to think that the House Republicans will deny further funds for alternative fuels and transportation. Ironically, this comes when the ten-year Highway Fund is depleted and needs to be funded again. This was the opening when Democrats and Republicans could have come together and put significant funds to the development of a 21st Century Infrastructure in the country.

As we move into the last two-years of President Obama's first term in office, it's worth mentioning that if Americans want a great country, they need to pay for it. There is no indication right now that Americans really understand the investment necessary to continue the development of the country. For the next two years, we will be treated to demogaguery on the national debt and deficit. This will be accompanied by bizarre cuts in government programs, which will make no sense to rational people.

Has Obama Killed Stephen Hawkings Yet?

The title is taken from the Investor Business Daily's assertion that the National Health Care System in Britain would terminate the life of someone as disabled as physicist Stephen Hawkings because he would not be considered valuable to society. The lesson was that Obama's Health Care reform would create the same situation in the United States. A problem--the great scientist is still alive as of this writing and continues to live in the United Kingdom where he has been all his life unmolested by the health police.

Stephen Moore's Club of Growth has been placing ads that say that the same British health care system terminates life when the medical bill hits $22,500. Maybe the British embassy should refute some of these little tales out of school. Much to my disappointment President Obama said he had no such plan to create the vaunted death panels so the bureaucrats would sit behind desks and judge disabled and crippled patients wheeled to defend their right to life.

For a political person such as myself, how is one to grabble with the lunacy pouring forth not only on this issue but every issue since the fall elections? The late, great Bayard Rustin, a friend and one of our greatest civil rights leaders, used to say whenever there was some black foolishness "When the brothers go, they really go." Maybe I should channel the smidgin of Cherokee blood and just say,"Those white people are just CRAAZZZYY." Because I can find no entry into the so-called political discourse. My son asked me to explain a comment by one of the frothing screamers at a health townhall meeting. I told him there was none--there was no discernible reason behind their statement.

Here we have the first President in my son's life that he can look up to--a young, classy guy with a touch of the nerd and articulate as hell--surrounded by a country I don't recognize. It's almost like President Obama is the only adult in a room that is peopled by whiners and complainers who all have more privilege and wealth than 90% of the country and now believe they are victims. Should my son be taught that America has gone insane?

Or maybe my attitude should be as a foreign correspondent or anthropologist watching a fascinating human society that on the surface defies our understanding of community. In this way, the current rhetoric would lack the emotive force to enrage. Instead from the observer's vantage point, we would watch with detachment some modern ritual of sacrificing the leader. These detached moments have traditionally failed. One only has to read V.S. Naipul's accounts of the South to know the outsider often fails to comprehend the magnitude of our derangement.

Perhaps imagining a writer's style will do it. Hunter Thompson would have loved today with the strange peoples dotting the terrain. What would he do with a conservative movement that takes its directives from an Australian paperbaron married to a Chinese woman and a woman who claims the President isn't an American, who is herself from Moldova and regularly gives interviews to Pravda? The whole term astro-turfing would probably end up to be one of his ESPN columns. But Hunter isn't appropriate. He amped up the quirks and visuals of the established figures of the 1970s and 1980s so we could see how truly depraved and bizarre they were, even while most people thought they were straight. Everyone today is over the top,you can't hype their style to make them any more real or understandable. And, poor Marshall McCluhan, television is no longer the cool medium--it's hot now. That's why I believe Obama appears a classic figure--he's cool and comfortable, while everyone else on the tube is amped.

Hunter won't do. James Ellroy might be appropriate for the hinky doings within the powerdrome but he too would fall short. A surprise candidate for capturing the full panorama of American madness might be Carl Hiassen. Carl's journalism has covered in microcosm some of the demented as it affects Florida, a state that almost becomes cutting-edge in the realm of mundo bizarro. Pythons freed into the Everglades; pension funds invested by the Governor in Lehman Brothers, which just vanish along the firm itself, 32-story condo buildings with a sole occupant because the real estate market has gone bust. Ghost towns of developments left by owners who would rather just give up the second home than pay the mortgage. His style, particularly his humor, might be the best antidote to the current madness.

It would be nice to say--It's all America. It's all good. But it isn't.