tales of copper city

Religion is poetry

Today is Christmas and I'm a little disappointed that I started out with bloviating about liberalism.

On this day, after a Christmas Eve celebration at St. John's with so many people I love, Carole and I find ourselves talking about what we believe and what we don't, and I nearly always wind up with one person, James Carse.

Carse is a student of religion generally, which is why I think he goes further than anyone else in capturing the dilemma of those raised as Christians or Jews but who balk at a lot, a whole lot, of the theology (in the case of Christianity).  Here ia a recent interview with Carse on Salon that captures where he's coming from.  

And what's missing from that interview is his profound spirituality, a spirituality of everyday life.  I have written a lot about him in the past (see the entries under "Carse" as a category, listed on the first page of the blog), and he has helped me enormously, encouraged me to keep on trying to make sense of things "religiously", when the conventional ideas of "God" just don't help anymore.

 

"When in doubt, shout!"

Social psychologists have long known that people who are convinced, who have made up their minds, and who are confronted with strong evidence to the contrary, don't change their views but raise their voices, dig their heels in, and start looking for others who agree with them.  

Does this sound familiar?  

"A letter to a whiny young Democrat"

My friend Dennis Nelson passed along this column from San Francisco, titled "A letter to a whiny young Democrat,"  by Mark Morford of SF Gate.

It is a very good reminder of how messy governing is, and how hard it is to deal with a whole bunch of things at the same time, and get it right.

Rush Limbaugh and the politics of the big lie

Rick Perlstein, in  The Daily Beast, shows how Rush Limbaugh effectively unhorsed the President of the United States early in his administration.  President Obama had just signed a stimulus package that included tax cuts for 95 percent of American taxpayers.  The Republicans seemed headed for real disaster as Governor Jindalh delivered his famously stupid respone. 

 Yet Rush Limbaugh simply said, ""Pay no attention to what Obama says. He means the opposite in most cases. What he says is irrelevant."

The Obama administration said nothing, did nothing, and today most Republicans and a hell of a lot of Democrats believe that the Dems raised taxes.

Speaking of necessity...

Read Nicholas Kritof's column, "Our Banana Republic," in the New York Times, on the huge inequalities in income and wealth in the U.S., ranking us behind some countries we have labeled "Banana Republics."

If the Dems don't act to prevent the super-rich from gaining one more windfall they will be seen for what they are: wimps that can't stand up to any kind of pressure.

Pretty soon, we'll see an op-ed from some prominent Blue Dog Democrat urging that the Bush tax cuts be preserved intact, in the name of bringing the party home to the political center. 

Of course, when the opposing party is so far to the right it is nearly off the face of reality, the "center" is a pretty crazy place to be also.

And by the way, my native Texas is seriously considering dropping Medicaid to avoid a budget crisis.  And if you that's bad, consider the platform of the Texas GOP, which includes re-criminalizing sodomy, making gay marriage a felony, restricts citizenship to persons born in the U.S. of U.S. citizens, and so forth. And so forth.  This is the party of Abraham Lincoln.

And I thought we would gradually get better at this business of politics, that we would learn from our mistakes.

Liberalism as necessity

Gabrielle Giffords, D-AZ, our U.S. Congresswoman, narrowly defeated her opponent in a tough election fight. This will be Giffords third term and she is a strong member of the House, she is politically astute, she voted for health care reform in a district with a lot of Republicans, and she is also a member of the Blue Dog caucus.

Giffords was quoted in the Sierra Vista Herald as saying that the Democrats must become more centrist if the party is to survive. (The pic is from the S.V. Herald story.)

With all due respect to a member of the House that I like, voted for, and made telephone calls for, this is hogwash.  The Democratic president is already centrist and he's still called a socialist by a right-wing that has become an enormous con game, a party preaching the populism of the little guy and once in office doing everything it can to enrich the big guys.

Will Obama be going presidential?

Dan Froomkin at The Huffington Post has some excellent ideas about how much Obama can get done without the House and Senate.  

It's really remarkable how much leeway a president has if he has the guts to take advantage of it. The list of opportunities to act without Congress is very, very long.

I hate to say it, but George Bush would take this path.

Obama would have to act like a president, be a president.

Two pieces with bad news

Here's two articles with very bad news for Democrats, both in the New Republic:  John Judis's "The Lost Generation," and Jonathan Cohn's prediction that the Republicans will be in power in the House for a very long time: "The House is Republican and it Ain't Going Back." 

At my stage of life, I would be grateful for 10 years, but to endure this impasse will be very difficult indeed.

Let the analysis begin

Kevin Drum of Mother Jones has a quick brief summary of how the loss by the Dems was worse than the historic model predicted.  If so, why?

Here's my guess:  the Dems ignored the populist revolt against the financial melt-down. Obama simply treated the economic train wreck as a problem that needed fixing. The Tea Party was a populist uprising that wanted the villains to be named and taken to central booking.  No matter how many times Obama was asked to do just that, he didn't budge.   

George McGovern, a real hero

One of my heroes in American politics is George McGovern, who lost disastrously to Richard Nixon in 1972.  Here is an interview with him that focuses on his life and particularly on the 1972 campaign. It reveals a generous but tough-minded spirit that we really needed in 1972, but instead we got the man who not long after was forced to resign.  There's an awful lot of insight into American politics in this interview in two parts.

McGovern's loss just goes to show you, the public isn't always right, and the good guys ofen lose.  I lived in Washington, D.C. during the early days of the McGovern campaign when Gary Hart was in command, and one day in 1971, a group of us from a recovery meeting in a church just behind the Supreme Court noticed him walking by, and we all gave him a thumbs up, and he grinned and waved. We hated the war even more than we disliked the President, the war that LBJ unleashed.

Years later, when Carole worked as the administrator of the Institute for Policy Sciences at Duke (now the Sanford School of Public Policy), McGovern spent a semester giving a seminar on American politics and history, and Carole asked me to join her and McGovern for lunch not far from our house in Duke Forest.  And a year later, on an early morning walk in Washington, D.C., I ran into him out walking and we stopped an chatted for a few moments. What a gracious, smiling, and wise man he is.