Political Cortex: Brain Food for the Body Politic

"The two parties have combined against us to nullify our power by a 'gentleman's agreement' of non-recognition, no matter how we vote ... May God write us down as asses if ever again we are found putting our trust in either the Republican or the Democratic Parties."~~W.E.B. DuBois (1922)

Marilyn Davenport's recent journey into the ugly world of racism exposed the under belly of a county, party and state with a tragic history of ugly racist conduct.

An important strategic aspect of the 74-year-old Orange County Republican Central Committee member's conduct relates to her angry counter punch embodying a familiar "the best defense is a good offense" strategy.  

Rather than permit the onus to reside on a tasteless act depicting President Barack Obama as a descendant of chimpanzees, Davenport denounced the revelation of her e-mail as "cowardly".

Even the "apology" of sorts that Davenport delivered was conditional as well as decidedly lukewarm.  Davenport explained that the e-mail was sent to a selective few people she knew who could presumably "understand" her intent.  

Presidential political strategists find that the road to victory often stems from establishing tactics based on successful past paradigm results.

When the Tea Party was given credit for helping Republicans score dramatic gains in the 2010 midterm elections that included winning control of the House of Representatives, many Washington watchers recognized that the way the victory was achieved was reminiscent of what happened in 1994 in the middle of President Bill Clinton's first term.

The shattering victory of the Republicans caused Clinton to initially experience crushing depression according to many on the D.C. presidential watch.  Meanwhile Republicans chortled at the prospect of winning the presidency in 1996.  

There were many independent observers not influenced by GOP euphoria who also believed that the tide was running so strong that it would be difficult for Clinton and the Democrats to surmount it.

Much is being written about the death on Saturday of master director Sidney Lumet at 86 so the focus here will be on the manner in which he exquisitely interacted with master actors and developed critical subject matter.

Lumet stated that, while it was essential to entertain audiences in film, his goal was to supply something more.  He did this by tackling some of the most complex and controversial material through showing human beings confronted at critical crossroads.

Henry Fonda was an actor who stood for bedrock truth in the manner of James Stewart and Gary Cooper, but often with a measure of complexity.  It was a master stroke to cast Fonda in the lead of Lumet's first film, "12 Angry Men", a gripping look at the controversial subject of capital punishment humanized through the experiences of New York City jurors in a case of a young man being tried for murdering his father.

A younger Fonda had received critical praise for playing an outsider thrown into a rush to judgment by townsfolk to apply lynch law justice to a group of strangers headed by Dana Andrews in "The Ox-Bow Incident", released in 1943.  

As someone perceived as a capitalist mogul Donald Trump was associated with a certain type of political expectation if he chose to become involved in presidential politics.  At first blush the expectation was an issues approach comparable to Mitt Romney, seen in the context of a chieftain of wealth within the Republican Party.

Some seasoned pundits who make a living attempting to ascertain actions of politicians were taken aback last week when Trump fervently raised the birth certificate issue regarding President Obama.  

According to the conventional wisdom Trump would be expected to challenge former Massachusetts governor Romney for the more tidy and orderly Republican vote, those who follow the maxim of Calvin Coolidge that "The business of the country is business."

Trump instead invaded the province of Mike Huckabee without so much as a knock on the door and fought him tenaciously for the Tea Party vote.  After the initial shock waves wore off pundits began to analyze the surprising behavior of the mega rich property developer from New York City.

Eric Alterman wrote recently that Michele Bachmann should not be taken seriously as a national political force.

Alterman is correct that the public has a right to expect that a Member of Congress from Minnesota and putative Republican presidential aspirant like Bachmann has an obligation to possess a requisite amount of knowledge to fulfill any kind of positive role within the American political system.  

To be taken seriously Bachmann needs to have at least some of that quality they refer to as gravitas.  This stems from knowing certain important facts and taking sober and reasoned positions on basic issues.

What troubled Alterman and scores of other Americans is that recently Bachmann proclaimed that America's Founding Fathers detested slavery and eliminated it.  As many respondents pointed out, any informed grade school youngster knows that slavery was not abolished until Abraham Lincoln waged a bloody civil war.  

The CIA was on the job and ready to roll when it came time to overthrow a popularly elected leader in Iran to assist the interest of British Petroleum in Iran in 1953.

That same CIA was on the job to assist a future dictator named Saddam Hussein and his Baathist Party gain power in Iraq.  It was the days of the Cold War so the rationale was that the Communists in Iraq must go, and so a dictatorship steeped in blood was launched.

There came a time when the New World Order, a term used reverently by President George H.W. Bush, decided that it was time to take over Iraq's oil interest and so conflict was launched.  

Can we suppose that U.S. Ambassador to Iraq April Glaspie was just confused and making an independent blunder during that famous interview with Saddam Hussein when she said that an occupation of Kuwait on his part would be an "Arab-Arab" issue and not the concern of the United States?  Had she talked to no one in the Bush Administration in advance?

The recent Japan tragedy brings into sharp focus the ongoing debate concerning nuclear power.  

The loss of life and vast property destruction to a global economic power brings into focus with increased acuity the longstanding debate over nuclear power and the right's insistence that concerns about its inherent danger is a non-existent canard being promulgated by the lunacies of a panic stricken left.

Concerns about the potential danger of nuclear power are met with the same measure of ridicule as trepidations about climate change.  All too often points raised by scientific sources are trivialized by talk show noise and false bravado.  It is given traction by the ranks of listeners who derive comforting assurance by such verbal broadsides.

Rush Limbaugh has been a voluble and persistent source of comments to a sea of faithful listeners eager to devour such appetizing morsels.  In the cases of such disturbing instances of global tragedies occurring through climate and nuclear dangers, comfort via an "ignorance is bliss" scenario can be more understandable than other subjects in the Limbaugh lexicon.

The Gilded Age of America in the late nineteenth century embodied ownership of politicians.

While political bosses like Boss Tweed and Jim Fisk controlled and owned politicians, these representatives knew what their corporate sponsors expected.  It was a period when the United States Senate was called The Millionaires Club.  The corporate owners pulling the strings on their bought political puppets saw that they were sufficiently enriched as they did their bidding.

Similarities abound on what is occurring now and what happened in that corporate dominated post-Civil War period.  While reformers such as William Jennings Bryan and the populist movement called for the direct  election of United States Senators, corporate string pullers denounced such "radical" notions and preferred the then current system of state legislatures selecting them.  

Guess who pulled the strings on state legislators and observe what is happening currently.

The current conflict involving Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker and Republican attempts to prevent collective union bargaining is a resumption of a practice that has been long associated with the Republican right.

The Democratic president associated with nurturing America's labor movement was Franklin Delano Roosevelt.  By developing a partnership between labor and the New Deal the crafty president developed, an association was in place between the union movement and the Democratic Party.  

It not only enabled Roosevelt to secure four presidential victories, but sowed the seeds for successes beyond Roosevelt's lifetime for liberal Democratic chief executives extending from Harry Truman's Fair Deal, to John Kennedy's New Frontier, and culminating with Lyndon Johnson's Great Society to the end of the sixties.

Roosevelt, who was elected in 1932 on a platform of balancing the budget, one conservative enough that Barry Goldwater later remarked that he would have been comfortable running on it, began experimenting with Keynesian economics and therein forged a Democratic Party surge.  

The 1960 presidential election between Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts and Vice President Richard M. Nixon launched the modern political television era.  Following that exciting race, which ended with Kennedy scoring a wafer thin popular vote advantage of one-tenth of one percent, the art of political campaigning would be changed forever while also becoming considerably more expensive.

There were very few televisions around when President Harry Truman scored his huge upset win over Governor Thomas E. Dewey of New York in 1948 and they were owned by the nation's more affluent citizens.  

Four years later the medium was in its teething stages in the political sphere.  A major ad run by Republicans on behalf of General Dwight Eisenhower recited some major economic party talking points followed by the candidate appearing and stating that he intended to change all that after the election.

As incumbent President Eisenhower was in his last few months of his second term he passed along advice to his vice president that it would be foolhardy to participate in televised debates against his Democratic Party opponent.  

Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck ostensibly stand for freedom and extension of human rights but the facts reveal a different result.

A current case in point surrounds recent events in Egypt.  To lovers of democracy throughout the world the confluence of events, brought about through a coalescing of freedom lovers in Egypt seeking to bring an end to a three decade dictatorial regime noted for suppression of basic rights and rigged elections, was an example of grassroots democracy in action.

Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck immediately sounded sirens of discontent to their loyal patrons.  Limbaugh was alarmed that the demonstrators were leftists and included a number of feminists.  

What is a leftist to Limbaugh?  Based on his alarmist messages to a core audience that has made him a multimillionaire, anyone to the left of the Limbaugh-Beck-Fox News axis constitutes a dangerous leftist threat.  

When the recent Egyptian uprising in the wake of three decades of power of President Hosni Mubarak began there were immediate comparisons made between current demands for democracy and the collapse of the Soviet Union, made abundantly manifest to an international audience with the collapse of the Berlin Wall.

The 1989 culmination of the Soviet Empire differed from the current events in Egypt in one basic area.  Russian leader Mikhail Gorbachev demonstrated an awareness that times and circumstances had dramatically changed from the days of the unchallenged rule of Joseph Stalin.

Gorbachev's awareness led the Soviet government to institute glasnost and perestroika, Russian for openness and reform.  As a result sweeping changes had occurred by the time that the Berlin Wall was torn down, beckoning the death knell of a Soviet Union that had been experiencing enhanced economic difficulties for some time.

The current Egyptian protests were so spontaneous as to catch the world community flat-footed.  It was a product of the computer age, a shrewd use of social networking to promote a response to a rigid dictatorship through online communication followed by strategic coalescing.

For tribute paid to President Reagan at the 100-year mark of his birthday, a huge impact of the Reagan years can't be forgotten — though it collides with the sunny "rebirth" notion of the centennial remembrance.

In 2 terms as president,  Ronald Reagan launched a government-deficit, tax-cut, soaring dollar policy which shifted the economy sharply to buying more and more the goods manufactured in other countries instead of made onshore, and also selling US assets and bonds (rather than goods) to foreigners, thus turning the US into a net debtor nation, quite abruptly.

The chart below appeared in an article in Fortune magazine in 2003 by Warren Buffett and Carol Loomis (graph viewable also here (pdf) or here.)

For the first time in modern times when the nation was not at war, the U.S. turned to financing the economy by giving foreigners ownership of more of our assets than we had a financial stake in assets of theirs abroad.

President Barack Obama's State of the Union Message reveals a broad difference between his cool, dispassionate, conciliatory political operating style as contrasted with that of the more passionate Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Robert F. Kennedy.

Obama's address to the nation was a cooler, less passionate version of FDR's call to greatness to his fellow American citizens in his first inaugural address in which he stated, "We have nothing to fear but fear itself."

In the midst of the most gripping economic crisis since the Great Depression that greeted Roosevelt when he assumed office in March 1933, Obama spent much of his time extolling America as a great nation and Americans as doers determined to carry forward that legacy.  He sought to rise above partisan politics in summoning Americans to greatness.

A grand fallacy behind Obama's approach was soon revealed when Congressman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin delivered the Republican Party's response.  The conciliatory style of Obama was sharply contrasted with more boiler plate neoconservative jargon reflective of the statement by Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell after the 2010 midterm elections when he candidly explained that the party's goal was to make Obama a "one term president."

"Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress...but then, I repeat myself."~~Mark Twain

Two of the world's richest men and the Spanish government have pledged $150m (£101.7m) to battle disease and improve health in Central America and Mexico. Carlos Slim and Bill Gates are to fund a project jointly with Spain aimed at improving nutrition and maternal health and fighting dengue fever and malaria. The two men and Spain's Princess Cristina announced the project in the Mexican capital, Mexico City. The project also aims to reduce infant mortality and boost vaccination rates.

It generally happens in world history that change comes to rural areas later than it comes to cities and that, no matter where you are on the planet, rural areas are more conservative politically, which is saying the same thing, really, since conservative means to want to hold on to what was good in the past, or not to change too much. Whether you are talking about rural Pakistan, or rural Russia, or rural Wyoming, the people who live--and are separated from each other by fields and forests --are likely to hold tight to traditional values and be suspicious of change.

 That could be good, of course, but the bad side is that rural areas are also more likely to resist the mingling of races that comes with commerce and cities, or the rise of women's rights, or mixture of social classes, or experimentation with education and health care, or, in fact any other form of government intervention to assist those who are in trouble.  

"Going to church no more makes you a Christian than sleeping in your garage makes you a car."~~Garrison Keiler

The poll published today shows the public prefers now for the Dems to hold Congress, 45% to 40% — and a roundabout flip from a month earlier, when the preference for Democrats was turned around, 41% then for Democrats having majority control to 44% for the GOP.

You can read the details here. There's an anti-incumbent leaning that still makes the result hard to interpret.

Change is the process by which the future invades our lives~~Alvin Toffler, "Future Shock"

Each time it appears that Republicans can't get any nastier, any more bereft of morality, they wrap themselves in the flag, grab their guns and Bibles, and manage once again to hit the bottom of the ethical barrel. A good example is Ben Smith's recent startling revelation in Politico.com, which exposed the dirty tricks Republican National Committee (RNC) operatives were planning to play, not only on Democrats in the upcoming elections -- but on their own donors. Smith writes...

by CODY LYON

...Perhaps the school system's decision is based in fear rooted in flawed and prejudiced assumptions, that by allowing a teenager to bring her same sex date to such a traditional event as the prom, the powers that be may appear to be condoning gayness to the local masses. More likely,moral concerns extending from literal interpretations of scripture, verses located on the same pages where one finds instructions for the stoning of adulterers and punishments for wearing certain types of textiles. But then again, the Mississippi prom case is more likely just another piece of fallout from a very commonly held membership in a society where there is a quiet tolerance of homophobia which is nothing more than a phobia of homosexuality itself....

There is a fascinating yet potentially dangerous transformation currently taking place in American political journalism. We are witnessing the return of a purely partisan press. At the dawn of the 19th Century, John Fenno's Gazette of the United States propagated the views of the Federalist Party and Philip Freneau's National Gazette served as a mouthpiece for Jeffersonian Republicans. Now, at the turn of the 21st Century, we have Keith Olberman of MSNBC and Sean Hannity at FOX.

After the recent Supreme Court ruling that gave corporations "personhood" status, I was pleased to see President Obama publicly call them out on it.  This is the Obama I voted for. 

Sadly, this Obama has been conspicuously absent since being sworn in as President.  It's time for "this" Obama to stand up at last for the people who put him in the White House in the first place, the folks on "Main Street," rather than those on "Wall Street." 

I know you need your sleep now,
I know your life's been hard.
But many men are falling,
where you promised to stand guard.
~~Leonard Cohen

My friend Bernie says he's suffering from Afghanistan information exhaustion. "During all those months that Obama was dragging his feet about escalating the war in Afghanistan, did you ever get the impression," he asked, "that foxes were in the hen house, chickens were squawking and running around crazily, wolves were tearing the foxes to pieces, and farmers were shooting wildly into the coop with no regard for the innocent?"

I stared at him, mouth agape, my mind trying to shore up all that activity. "Well ... I --"

"And that's just the generals -- David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal -- and their boss, or cohort, defense secretary Robert Gates. They were everywhere -- everywhere!" Bernie said, rolling his eyes. "And still are. Turn on the TV, pick up a newspaper, open a magazine, check out Congress, look under a rock -- peek behind a tree -- and there they are. They're a three-man brigade -- "we're going in, we're coming out -- we're winning, we're losing. Or maybe not. We won't know for 15 years...20 years...or until it's over --"

I've spent a good part of the last week re-reading Neil Sheehan's book, A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam. Partly, this is just happenstance; I found a nicely annotated hardback copy in a local used book store. But it's also because I wanted to look again at the 1962-64 period of the Vietnam War to see how much it resembles our current situation in Afghanistan. I don't have good news to report.

Biochar, the modern version of an ancient Amazonian agricultural practice called Terra Preta (black earth, TP), is gaining widespread credibility as a way to address world hunger, climate change, rural poverty, deforestation, and energy shortages... SIMULTANEOUSLY!

If you talk to God, you are praying; If God talks to you, you have schizophrenia.~~Thomas S. Szasz, The Second Sin

If you keep on excusing, you eventually give your blessing to the slave camp, to cowardly force, to organized executioners, to the cynicism of great political monsters; you finally hand over your brothers~~Albert Camus