In the saturation coverage right after the events, the “expert” talking heads are compelled to offer theories about the causes and consequences. In the following days and weeks, newspapers and magazine will have their theories too. Looking back, we can see that all such efforts are futile. The shootings never mean anything. Forty years later, what did the Charles Whitman massacre “mean”? A decade later, do we “know” anything about Columbine? There is chaos and evil in life. Some people go crazy. In America, they do so with guns; in many countries, with knives; in Japan, sometimes poison.

Fellow Atlantic blogger Jeffrey Goldberg counters:

I am not arguing, of course, that American Muslims, as a whole, are violently unhappy with America (I’ve argued the opposite, in fact). But I do think that elite makers of opinion in this country try very hard to ignore the larger meaning of violent acts when they happen to be perpetrated by Muslims. Here’s a simple test: If Nidal Malik Hasan had been a devout Christian with pronounced anti-abortion views, and had he attacked, say, a Planned Parenthood office, would his religion have been considered relevant as we tried to understand the motivation and meaning of the attack? Of course. Elite opinion makers do not, as a rule, try to protect Christians and Christian belief from investigation and criticism. Quite the opposite. It would be useful to apply the same standards of inquiry and criticism to all religions.

Despite recent reports that Hasan’s religion may have played a large role in the shooting, I still tend to agree more with the former opinion than the latter.  “There is chaos and evil in life.  Some people go crazy.”  Just because there’s a reason behind the shooting doesn’t mean there’s any meaning in it.

On the other hand, “do we ‘know’ anything about Columbine?”  Yeah, we do.  We know a lot more about locking down schools in emergencies and paying attention to signs of mental illness or violence in teenagers.  If a kid has ambiguously angry messages and pictures of guns on their Facebook page, schools are much more likely to take notice and deal with it.  That’s a good thing.  There are lessons to learn from every tragedy and there will be lessons to be learned from Fort Hood.

But acknowledging that there are lessons to be learned and reasons behind the violence doesn’t mean that the act of shooting unarmed people is somehow meaningful.  It’s not.  It’s empty and random, a behavioral outlier.  Hasan isn’t a crusader or a messenger, he’s a drunk driver.  A day later, someone else shot six people in an office building in Orlando.  Different reasons, different lessons to learn, same amount of meaning: none.  “There is chaos and evil in life.  Some people go crazy.”

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So I’m at work, minding my own business, gettin my write on and I stumble across this post on ACLU’s Blog of Rights:

Today, a group of musicians, including REM, Pearl Jam and The Roots filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to find out whether their music was played at the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay.  The request for information stems from former Guantánamo detainees’ testimony and released government documents that document that music has been used as part of interrogations.

The Roots said in a statement, “When we found out that music was being used as part of the torture going on at Guantanamo, shackling and beating people — we were angry.  Just as we wouldn’t be caught dead allowing Dick Cheney to use our music for his campaigns, you can be damn sure we wouldn’t allow him to use it to torture other human beings. Congress needs to shut Guantánamo down.”

Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine, another of the artists who initiated the FOIA request, stated, “Guantánamo may be Dick Cheney’s idea of America, but it’s not mine. The fact that music I helped create was used in crimes against humanity sickens me – we need to end torture and close Guantánamo now.”

Documents that the ACLU has uncovered through our five-year-old FOIA request about the abuse and torture of detainees in U.S. custody detail how “torture music” was used.

Umm, say what?!?

I’m still unsure why torture is a controversial issue.  You’d think this’d be the one thing we all could agree we should not be doing.

Sad.

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10. Kleine Zeitung (Graz, Austria)
Yeah, I just won a Nobel Prize, I bought this Flavor Flav sized peace medallion to celebrate, and my head is twice the size of my body, so what?  Say something about it.  You like the tie?  Huh?  With the stars and stripes?  Say something, I dare you.

9. Super Express (New York, New York)
I have no idea what language this newspaper is in, but I’m pretty sure “Za Co?!” translates to “The F*ck?!”  It’s also fun to guess what the story on the right is about.

8. The Ottawa Sun (Ottawa, Canada)
I can’t prove it, but I’m almost positive this front page is racist.  “City wins in bus spat?”  An obvious reference to how the Ottawa Sun wishes the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott had turned out.  And Obama looks like winning the Nobel Prize is the funniest joke he’s ever heard.  ‘CISM!!

7. Publico (Lisbon, Portugal)
Clearly, Obama’s only next logical step is to defeat Russia’s genetically-engineered boxing machine in a 15-round death match.  Or, wait, that’s Rocky.  I’m getting my 1980s Cold War propaganda mixed up.

6. Gulf News (Dubai, United Arab Emirates)
The Middle East version of The Drudge Report.

5. Correio Brazilense (Brasilia, Brazil)
Either Tiger Woods also won a Nobel Prize or this newspaper needs to hire a new cartoonist.

4. Die Tageszeitung (Berlin, Germany)
How do you say “WTF” in German?  Za Co?!

3. The Beaufort Gazette (Beaufort, South Carolina)
This front page tells you all you need to know about the local priorities in Beaufort, SC.  Top story: Golfer in stable condition after gator attack.  Oh, and the President won a Nobel Peace Prize.

2. The Jakarta Post (Jakarta, Indonesia)
Check out the headline for the Nobel Prize story: “Some like it, some don’t.”  I love how it gives you absolutely no information and could easily be applied to any other story in the newspaper.  “Dodgers beat Cards– Some like it, some don’t.” “Police kill two brother outlaws– Some like it, some don’t.”  I also love how they made it look like Obama is checking out Miss Indonesia.

1. The Dispatch (Casa Grande, Arizona)
This might be the most awesome front page ever.  The President just won a Nobel Peace Prize.  Marge Simpson just got the cover of Playboy.  How can we link these two stories?  I’d give anything to have been a fly on the wall of that editorial meeting.

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Yesterday, he “defended” Obama critics like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh against Jimmy Carter’s assertion that their criticism was fueled by racism.  Here’s Colbert responding to Beck and Limbaugh’s claims that health care reform would amount to reparations for black people:

Those guys aren’t racist.  They’re just saying a program that helps the poor is actually a secret plot by African-Americans to steal white people’s money.  A racist would say it’s a secret plot to steal white people’s women.

The Colbert Report	Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
The Word – Blackwashing
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor

When you see it like that, you realize how insane it is that the White House gave people like Beck and Limbaugh cover by insisting that their criticism was not fueled by racism.  Like, what exactly do they have to say to qualify?  Saying that Obama wants to steal white people’s money and give it to black people isn’t enough?  Calling Obama a “racist” who has “a deep-seated hatred for white people” isn’t enough?

This brings to mind a post Andrew Sullivan made yesterday, an e-mail sent to him by a reader of his blog about what the right-wing hysteria about SOCIALISM! and COMMUNISM! actually means and why they never complained about it under Bush or Clinton.  It’s worth printing in its entirety:

Of course they are screaming ’socialism’. They’ve been doing that since the 50s at least. They’re not talking about economic redistribution of wealth – they never have been. They’ve been talking about redistribution of privilege this whole time. They called MLK a communist because he wanted blacks to have the same rights as whites, and to them that was a redistribution of the privilege that whites had ‘earned’.

In their view, white, Christian, heterosexuals have earned something that gays, non-Christians, and non-heteros have failed to work hard enough at. It’s been a class war from the outset, just not one based around income or net worth – mostly because the whites in the south were economically pretty bad off and blacks in the north were catching up to them.

This picture shows they were pushing the same buttons half a century ago that they are today. Anti-christ, communism – it’s all the same as it is today and is well known code. It’s why the protesters will decry socialism today but wouldn’t have under Bush – it’s all tied to race and other social objectives and has nothing really to do with taxation, deficits, and big government. You probably missed it when you came to the US, but this is pretty old game – particularly to guys like Carter that grew up around it.

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G-G-G-G-G-G-G-20!

Good morning world.  It’s Thursday September 24th, 2009.  You’re probably sitting at work already.  Me? I’m in my room…not at work.

Why?

Because the G-20 is in full effect, and I’m not willing to deal with the hassle.  And it might not even be bad…but you created the perception.  For those who have no clue what the G-20 is all about…

The Group of Twenty (G-20) was formally established in 1999 to bring together major industrialized and developing economies to discuss key issues in the global economy.

The members of the G-20 are the finance ministers and central bank governors of 19 countries: Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, South Korea, Turkey, the U.K. and the U.S., as well as the European Union, represented by the rotating council presidency and the European Central Bank…

After consultation with his G-20 counterparts, President Obama agreed to host the next meeting in September and chose Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, as the site. With governments and international organizations now hard at work to reach the objectives set out at the Washington and London Summits, the meeting in Pittsburgh will give Leaders the opportunity to take stock of the progress made and discuss further actions to assure a sound recovery from the global economic and financial crisis. (Ed: The previous two meetings took place in 2008, and April 2009, respectively)

In laymen’s terms, the G-20 is like the SuperFriends…only instead of saving the world using heat vision or a golden lasso, they try to save the world by using money, strengthening current lending procedures and accountability, and at the very least putting on a front that they care about the environment.  I know, they sound like heartless bastards to me too.  But then they made a wonderful action plan for the world to see, and all was forgiven.

Caught up? Good.

All of that being said, I sincerely wish that the G-20 was 8 million miles away from here (space, I guess?) due to the absolutely retarded nature of the protesters.  They vary, from the anarchists, to the green-peacers who want to save the environment, to those who seemingly want a true/direct democracy as opposed to the actual federal/constitutional republic America currently has in place.  And of course, on its face, all of that seems well and good (eh, not really) but it never goes down the way its “planned”.  Example? Well, I did hear, first-hand, that protesters were using various methods to slow traffic to a stand still…then they were slashing the tires of people waiting in traffic.  All in an effort to…make people have to buy tires, maybe?  Honestly, unless Obama has a second cousin that lives in Sewickley (a Pittsburgh suburb) and you’re indirectly trying to get payback,  you are on the most counter-intuitive, just plain dick-move protest movement I have ever heard about.  Slowing down traffic doesn’t throw the government into anarchy; rush hour happens everyday.  All it might do is get your ass beat (Ed. Note: I didn’t hear about any tire slashing in any of the “rough neighborhoods of Pittsburgh”.  I dare protesters to try it there).  Not to be outdone, Green Peace decided to hang a 50 foot banner from a bridge right after morning rush-hour, basically endangering their own lives and the lives of drivers on the bridge.  Awesome. I can’t decide if protesters get so focused on their protests that the completely forgo the usage of common sense, or if its a lack of common sense that makes you waste all of that money to get to a city to just hold a sign in the first place.

Couldn’t you do more good by donating money to greenpeace for environmental research, case studies, etc. than driving your car for 36 hours to Pittsburgh creating CO2 emissions all the way here?  Then to top it off, the bridge stunt stops traffic, so now you have cars being run longer than they necessarily would have, putting more CO2 into the air, while the cars wait for the cops to pull you up off the bridge…

Greenpeace’s actions are maybe not the smartest, but at least at the present time, they aren’t actually publicizing an attempt to stop the summit…Right, Pittsburgh G-20 Resistance?

Thursday, September 24, will feature a People’s Uprising, a mass march to disrupt the G-20 summit. We’ll be starting at Arsenal Park at 2:30 pm in Lawrenceville, a vibrant working class community in the city, and marching to the G-20 summit downtown. Our theme is “Power from Below, Not Impositions from Above.” Our only permit is our feet and voices. The G-20 is in the house, throwing a party. Let’s crash it.

Friday, September 25, we’ll be working to undermine the G-20 summit by attacking their power, making connections to the local manifestations of their neoliberal agenda. The folks that gather in the convention center represent large governments that draw their power from collusion with powerful corporations, governments that draw their wealth from resource extraction and destruction to our world, and governments that maintain their forces through the direct violence of police forces and militaries. Without these structural supports, their power will disintegrate. The G-20 is in a house of cards: let’s shake the table.

Sigh. First off, whoever wrote this sounds like they’re writing for a Michael Bay movie (Transformers 3?)

Optimus Prime — looks like the Decepticons are in the house…throwing a party.

Ironhide — Lets crash it!

Optimus Prime — Autobots, lets roll out!

Secondly, did no one read the action plan?  I heard this weird rumor that those people in that summit are trying to help people.  And if they weren’t, why would they bother having a summit in the first place?  They already run their respective countries one way or the other.  Its not like the American public made Obama the president because he mentioned he’d be attending the G-20 summit in his campaign speeches.  Why would these various nations go through the huge cover-up of attending the G-20 just so they could…do what? If the government of any country plans on screwing over its constituency, they don’t have to fake going to a summit to do it; they just do that shit.

And for everyone worried that the government is too big, and our society is too capitalist, and there’s too much corruption?  Maybe. Probably not. Move.  Maybe our government is too big.  But I do know two things: 1. your protesting is not going to do anything to dissuade the country from the course its been on for the last 230 years; it was like this when you were born. 2. you don’t hate this place enough to move somewhere else.  Maybe our country is too capitalist.  But, firstly, get off the notion that we’re purely a capitalist society (wave hello to price floors/ceilings on consumer goods, minimum wage, unions). 2. you don’t hate this place enough to move somewhere else.  Maybe our government is corrupt.  But I do know that we elected those officials ourselves. 2. I don’t see a large influx of people to Canada.

And to everyone who is hell bent on America instituting a pure democracy.

Dumbest. Move. Ever.

There are roughly 300 million people in America. Try getting everyone to cast a vote on one single issue.  Let me then bring up the fact that we can’t even get 60% of the country to vote for the man who is currently in charge of the country.  Now expand your one issue to the hundreds of issues that would need to be voted on, on an almost daily basis…

Yes, we do elect officials for a reason, thanks for asking.

You know what else throws a wrench in the plans? Not every person is well versed on everything.  There is a reason that every baseball player doesn’t run for president…they don’t know what the hell they’re talking about.  Hell, I know there are people that can’t name two amendments to the Constitution, and that’s supposed to be the foundation of America itself.  You end up with some informed people who are voting for a reason, and the rest are either not voting or they are lemmings; blindly following or at least relying on someone else.  Now tell me how that’s different than the republic form of government we have right now.

At the end of the day, holding up some signs in front of a popular Starbucks doesn’t do anything more than piss off people that are trying to get their vente caramel latte.  For the most part, the stuff people are protesting about are issues that are so large, you can guarantee the leaders already know your issue.  And if for some reason they don’t know? Well, guess what?  At least in America, we elected that guy.  Don’t like it? We would have had the same result in the wonderful pure democracy that you wanted, so suck it up.  And sure, you have the right to protest; that’s one of the great things about America.  But, trying to get your voice heard to the detriment of other people that haven’t done anything wrong?  That just makes you an ass hole.  In any case, you can call it my naivete if you want to, but I don’t think 20 of the most important leaders in the world would come together just to waste the world’s time.  The only thing the protesters seem to be doing is slashing tires, fear-mongering (obviously not all, but some), causing thousands of extra police to flood the area, and ensuring that many businesses board their store fronts up; to ensure they still have a business on Monday.

Oh, and traffic. You bastards are trying to kill traffic over here.

…and that’s why I hate you.

Game. Blouses.

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First up.  Brendan Ayanbadejo

Ayabadejo plays for the Ravens and just published a pro-gay marriage column on The Huffington Post, dropping obvious and rational observations like:

If Britney Spears can party it up in Vegas with one of her boys and go get married on a whim and annul her marriage the next day, why can’t a loving same sex couple tie the knot? How could our society grant more rights to a heterosexual one night stand wedding in Vegas than a gay couple that has been together for 3, 5, 10 years of true love? The divorce rate in America is currently 50%. I am willing to bet that same sex marriages have a higher success rate than heterosexual marriages… I think we will look back in 10, 20, 30 years and be amazed that gays and lesbians did not have the same rights as every one else. How did this ever happen in the land of the free and the home of the brave? Are we really free?

Indeed.

With John Amaechi coming out, gospel singer Tonex coming out, sports and “homophobic” black church folk are whippin the ass of hip-hop and R&B in their support of LGBT folk’s basic civil and human rights, this despite the fact that the imaging of black men in popular music is so homo-identified it almost approaches parody.

Next up.  Murs, rapper extraordinaire, drops rational on why it’s hard to be a female emcee in hip-hop:

In my mind, Murs’ candor here is as radical a statement as Kanye’s about homophobia, if not more.  We are far too complacent about Black women’s role in, and relationship to, hip hop.

Dope dope dope.

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“The argument has always been the same,” Harjo said. “‘We are honoring you,’ they say. ‘No, you’re not,’ we reply. ‘Shut up,’ they say. That’s pretty much the divide for 17 years.”

The Redskins can claim the name is not meant to be offensive, but consider this.  It was chosen by their first owner, George Preston Marshall, a virulent racist who pushed to segregate the NFL for a decade (from 1934 to 1945) and refused to sign black players to the Redskins until 1962, when he was forced to by the federal government.  According to Wikipedia:

[Marshall] is best known for his intractable opposition to having African-Americans on his roster. According to professor Charles Ross, “For 24 years Marshall was identified as the leading racist in the NFL”. Though the league had previously had a sprinkling of black players, blacks were excluded from all NFL teams just one year after Marshall entered the league.  Ross asserts that Marshall propelled the NFL to institute a “color barrier” akin to that of its baseball brethren. …

While the rest of the league began signing individual blacks in 1946 and actually drafting blacks in 1949, Marshall held out until 1962 before signing a black player. Moreover, the signing only came when Interior Secretary Stewart Udall issued an ultimatum – unless Marshall signed a black player, the government would revoke the Redskins’ 30-year lease on the year-old D.C. Stadium (now Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium), which had been paid for by government money and was owned by the Washington city government…

The flipside of this argument is that Marshall picked the name Redskins to honor the team’s Native American coach William “Lone Star” Dietz, and thus the name was not originally meant to be offensive.  Bill Poser, writing for a University of Pennsylvania’s blog on linguistics, argues:

I think that it is well established that redskin is taken by most people today to be disparaging. What is more interesting is whether it has always been so, as Harjo et al., as well as various others, claim. One interesting piece of evidence is the origin of the name Washington Redskins. In 1933, George Preston Marshall, the owner of the team, which was then located in Boston, renamed it the Boston Redskins in honor of the head coach, William “Lone Star” Dietz, an American Indian. When the team moved to Washington in 1937 it was renamed the Washington Redskins. George Marshall clearly did not consider the name disparaging.

Notice that Poser begins his argument in favor of the name Redskins by acknowledging that the name is “disparaging” to most people today.  Really, that’s the end of the discussion right there, since “matter which may disparage” is not protected under trademark law.  As for whether the name was always disparaging, it doesn’t matter.  American history is filled with words that were acceptable 70 years ago that are not today.  Whether a racist like Marshall considered the name disparaging in 1933 is irrelevant.  At the least, it speaks to a man who saw everything through the prism of race.  Marshall could have named the team the Washington Lone Stars, after Coach Dietz’s nickname.  Instead, he chose to single out Dietz’s race.  What would the response be if the Rooneys “honored” head coach Mike Tomlin by changing the Steelers name to the Pittsburgh Coloreds?  (Another word that has evolved over time.)

But the worst thing about the Redskins name may be that it forces millions of fans to be complicit in the franchise’s history of racism.  It’s one thing to be a fan of a team with an ugly past– most Major League Baseball teams fall in that category.  It’s another thing to preserve and pass down that legacy to fans too young to remember commercialized racism and segregated sports leagues.  Every dollar that goes to the Redskins is a validation of George Marshall’s belief that basic respect of other human beings is secondary to entertainment.  It’s an embarrassing testament to the unwillingness of Redskins fans and ownership to face up to their franchise’s original sin.

There are already a number of newspapers around the nation who refuse to use the word Redskins, and most of them are in areas with significant Native American populations.  There’s no question the name is disparaging.  In 1962, it took an act of federal government to force George Marshall to integrate his team.  It’s amazing that 47 years later, long after his death, it may take a Supreme Court ruling to finally put his ugly legacy to rest.

UPDATE: Gather round, kids, it’s analogy time.  It’s not a perfect one, but it’ll do.  Here’s what anyone who defends the name Redskins basically amounts to.

Imagine we’re living in the Jim Crow South and segregated drinking fountains have just been outlawed.  And imagine there’s a large group of people who want to keep the “Whites only” and “Coloreds only” signs over the fountains, even though the signs no longer have any power.  People can drink from whatever fountain they want, they just want to keep the signs up because they’re a part of our history and it would be too much of a hassle to change them.  Of course, African-Americans feel angered and humiliated by the signs, and they fight for decades to get them taken down, but that’s only because they don’t realize the signs aren’t meant to be offensive.

That’s what Redskins fans and ownership amounts to.  They’re people who see no problem with keeping “Whites only” and “Coloreds only” signs over the fountains.

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It’s foolish to think we can hold onto a majority by playing it safe and not getting anything done.  There is a whole lot of room to move between playing it safe and being crazy single-minded drones like Republicans.  No one is saying we should copy their MO, just a little of their conviction.

When we lose seats in 2010, as is highly likely, then we’ll all take to the blogs whining about how the Republicans are ramming stuff down our throats that we don’t like.  What the fuck are we doing now?

Ugh…you know, the truth is that though Democrats are supposed to be the liberal party, the party of opposition, they are not.  They truly are a hodgepodge of people who don’t like the modern Republican Party.  That doesn’t necessarily equal liberal or progressive.

So we have one party and a bunch of people who don’t like that party.  That’s it.

There are two things this brings to mind for me.  The first is the interview Bill Maher did with Bill Moyer a few weeks ago, where Moyer said that the reason Democrats can’t seem to accomplish things that have large public support (like meaningful health care reform) is because America is actually not a two-party democracy, it’s a one-party corporatocracy.  While we think we’re sending our representatives to Washington with our votes, our representatives think (correctly) that they’re actually being sent to Washington by the money they’ve raised from various corporations.  And because Democrats and Republicans get their money from the same corporations, they basically have the same non-progressive, status quo agenda once voted in, regardless of how they frame it in speeches.

Republicans are less hypocritical in this respect because conservatism by definition is keeping things as is, and Republicans are great at getting that done (hence their exclusion from the title of this post).  Democrats, on the other hand, have the extra hurdle of keeping things as is while making it look like they’re delivering on the change they promised.  Of course, there are always social issues that will genuinely get the support of one party over another; and for that reason alone our votes are still worth something.  But if the issue involves some large corporation’s bottom line– even for issues as grave as war– it’s almost always going to go whichever way Wall Street pushes it.

The other thing tigger500’s post brings to mind is a post by Matthew Yglesias a few weeks ago about how the prevailing moral value in Washington is cynical self-interest.  Yglesias writes:

For example, Senators who genuinely do believe that carbon dioxide emissions are contributing to a global climate crisis seem to think nothing of nevertheless taking actions that endanger the welfare of billions of people on the grounds that acting otherwise would be politically problematic in their state. In other words, they don’t want to do the right thing because their self-interest points them toward doing something bad. But it’s impossible to imagine these same Senators stabbing a homeless person in a dark DC alley to steal his shoes. And what’s more, the entire political class would be (rightly!) shocked and appalled by the specter of a Senator murdering someone for personal gain. Yet it’s actually taken for granted that “my selfish desires dictate that I do x” constitutes a legitimate reason to do the wrong thing on important legislation.

So basically you have a lot of politicians, Democrat and Republican, whose primary guiding value on every issue is whatever will help them get reelected.  Voting for health care reform may be a godsend to the millions of their constituents who are uninsured and underinsured and the millions more who are vulnerable to health-care-induced bankruptcy.  But if that means opening themselves up to attack in 2010 from a primary challenger who might run commercials labeling them a socialist or might put their picture up next to a potentially unpopular Obama, they won’t do it.

And if there’s any doubt that self-interest is the prevailing value in Washington, consider that 90% to 98% of House incumbents get reelected every term, which is among the highest incumbency rates in the world (over the last 20 years, the Senate has been between 75% and 96%).  There simply is nothing else that gets accomplished by Congress with that kind of bipartisan consistency.

With that said, Obama will get some version of health care reform passed this year, if for no other reason than because he’s gotten the insurance companies on board.  That’s the good news.  The bad news is that he’s gotten the insurance companies on board, which no doubt means that somewhere there’s been a tradeoff where the American people are getting screwed at the expense of higher profits.  If Matt Taibbi’s enlightening and devastating Rolling Stone article is any indication, our government is currently fixing our broken health care system by putting lipstick on the pig and then forcing everyone to buy into it (two things Obama vehemently opposed during the campaign).

The public option has already been watered down because Republicans argued against it, saying it would provide Americans with better coverage at lower cost and thus force insurance companies to improve their services or go out of business.  Let me say that again.  The argument against the public option is that it would provide Americans with better coverage at lower cost.  Is there any question who our politicians really work for?

The bottom line is that there are certain very serious crises– like health care and global warming– that involve deeply entrenched corporate interests, and our government in its current state cannot fix them.  The inmates will never regulate the asylum (as we saw illustrated by last year’s financial collapse), especially if it means getting back in their cells and handing the keys over to the warden.

The maddeningly simple solution to all this is two-fold: campaign finance reform and congressional term limits. Campaign finance reform, if done properly, will take the corporate money out of politics.  It will ensure that our health care legislation will not be written by politicians whose campaigns are dependent upon funding from Aetna, Blue Cross, and Kaiser Permanente.  It will ensure that our global warming legislation is not sponsored by the good people at Exxon Mobil.  And it will ensure that our leaders in Washington don’t dedicate half their time and resources to raising money.

Congressional term limits will put a big dent in the plague of Washington self-interest.  It will ensure that all 535 members of Congress aren’t at all times facing a future reelection bid.  It will ensure that there are no nine-term 91-year-old U.S. Senators who are faced with the choice of getting reelected and rejoining lifelong colleagues back in Washington to work for another six years or going back home to West Virginia to die.  And it will ensure that things like morality and the greater good have a bigger say in our government, and that every decision Congress makes isn’t solely dependent on the individual fortunes of those voting.

Will campaign finance reform and congressional term limits solve all our government’s problems?  No.  We’ll think of new ones.  But the fact is, our political system is broken; it works reliably and efficiently for those in it, but not for the people it’s meant to serve.  Simply put, corporate money and unlimited term limits are cancers that infect everything our government does.  Unless we cut them out completely, the concerns of ordinary Americans will continue to be a distant third on Washington’s list of priorities.

POSTSCRIPT: Right now, in a case that has received very little media attention (Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission), the Supreme Court is in the process of lifting the current restrictions on corporate spending in political elections.  Needless to say, this would pour gasoline on every single issue our country faces.  The corporate personhood argument being made by conservative justices is based on the belief that our founding fathers intended for corporations to have the same rights and privileges– including contributing to political campaigns– as individuals.  First, this entire argument is based not on any prior court decision or anything our founding fathers ever said, but on an off-the-record comment made by Chief Justice Morrison Waite in 1886.  Second, this is a case where legal theory pales in comparison to the stark reality of what a Biblical flood of special-interest money would do to our government.  Meanwhile, Justice Sonia Sotomayor– in one of her first significant actions on the Court– is challenging the entire foundation of corporate personhood law.  Unfortunately, she appears to be outnumbered.

Related posts:

1. On Politics and the Sorry State of Affairs (or, you know, the Democrats)
2. Confused by the Health Care Debate?
3. How Facebook taught me to fear and loathe Sarah Palin

ABC News reporter Terry Moran caused quite a commotion tonight on Twitter after writing the following: “Pres. Obama just called Kanye West a “jackass” for his outburst at VMAs when Taylor Swift won. Now THAT’S presidential.”

Although it wasn’t long before Moran removed it, with over a million followers, the tweet quickly bounced around Twitter through various users. (And it can still be found here).

Now, an ABC spokesperson explains to POLITICO what happened:

In the process of reporting on remarks by President Obama that were made during a CNBC interview, ABC News employees prematurely tweeted a portion of those remarks that turned out to be from an off-the-record portion of the interview. This was done before our editorial process had been completed. That was wrong. We apologize to the White House and CNBC and are taking steps to ensure that it will not happen again.

I think deep down Kanye is a fragile guy who uses the bravado to hide insecurity, and a comment like that from the president is going to sting.  I also think the VMAs are half a step up from the Kids Choice Awards and everyone is taking this whole thing way too seriously.  As for Obama, maybe he should train some of that fire away from pop stars and onto the obstructionist Republicans he keeps rolling over for.  I don’t know what Obama says to reporters off the record, but I’d be surprised if he’s ever called Glenn Beck a jackass in public.  He tends to be very careful about not offending the people who will never, ever vote for him.

Related posts:

1. Joe Wilson, Kanye West, and conservative priorities
2. Is Kanye West is the new King of Pop? Kanye West thinks so
3. The new Kanye West Photoshop meme

White man interrupts the President of the United States during a nationally-televised speech to Congress: not so bad.  Black man interrupts pop singer during speech to fake awards show audience on cable television: kind of a big deal.  I’m not saying Kanye isn’t a jerk, I’m just saying relax, everybody.  It’s not that serious.

By the way, my favorite defense of Joe Wilson:

But is this actually the worst of times in congressional politics? Not really. When the going gets tough, congressional politics has often gotten ugly. Throughout much of the 19th century, legislators disliked each other so much they often got into fistfights on the floor.

Yeah, also throughout much of the 19th century: slavery.  So is the 19th century really the best barometer for modern-day values and etiquette?

In conclusion, this might be the greatest sub-15-second YouTube video ever:

Related posts:

1. Is Kanye West is the new King of Pop? Kanye West thinks so
2. Obama calls Kanye West a “jackass”
3. The new Kanye West Photoshop meme