Chris Matthews Forgot Obama Was Black

One of the reasons I love CM is that he speaks honestly even when it's un-PC, offensive, or wrong. For instance - in trying to compliment (backhandedly it turned out) Obama after the SOTU he said he "forgot he was black tonight". Since Ta-Nehisi Coates is my go-to guy for breaking down racial issues - go read what he said (for the record: I agree w/ TNC even though I love CM).

Pelosi on Health Care Reform

As I said to some friends yesterday in the press, we will go through the gate. If the gate is closed, we will go over the fence. If the fence is too high, we will pole vault in. If that doesn’t work, we will parachute in. But we are going to get health care reform passed for the American people for their own personal health and economic security and for the important role that it will play in reducing the deficit.

Nice.

Science vs Religion

(via KKP) Last week Stanley Fish reviewed Barbara Herrnstein Smith's new book Natural Reflections: Human Cognition at the Nexus of Science and Religion. Fish's review is dense, but excellent. Then, the other day, the author responded to Fish's column. I'm not even going to try and explain the ideas but I'll just suggest you read it because there's so much material and philosophy in there.

But if I were to summarize one version of the argument I would say: "Science asks 'what' .... Religion asks 'why'".

Cooking with Cannibus

Anyone catch the front page article in Westword ("Pot Luck") this month on the owner of 8 Rivers Jamaican restaurant putting on classes on cooking with pot? Turns out you can infuse butter, oil, and alcohol with ganja and then use it as an ingredient in your favorite dish. Classes are like $20 and open to anyone (except you need a medical marijuana card to sample).

I can just see it: the chef making all this gourmet food being made with pot - the curry, the sativa soup, etc. ... and then after dinner the chef's on the phone ordering Little Caesar's $5 PIZZA PIZZA!

What's the Most Effecient Way to Kill Cows?

Back when I was a junior in college I took a whole philosophy class on David Hume. I don't remember much about the class aside from a comment my professor made about an autistic woman who - for some reason that was relevant to the discussion - was very good at designing efficient ways to slaughter animals. Well today, Talk of the Nation had Dr. Temple Grandin on ... an autistic professor at Colorado State who is a consultant to the livestock industry and animal activist. Her autism allows her to think like animals and construct the stockades in such a way that the cows have less stress as they are led to slaughter. This has to be the lady my professor was talking about back then. Fascinating.

Oh, and Claire Danes is going to play her in an HBO biopic next week.

Grants' Legacy is Buried in U.S. Grant's Tomb

(via Yglesias, again) Name a great U.S. President - A great civil rights President: Lincoln? TR? FDR? LBJ? .... U.S. Grant?! This essay argues that General Grant was one of the greatest progressive presidents. His administration bore the Department of Justice, the Civil Rights Act of 1875, the 15th Amendment, and attacked Klan violence. Grants presidency represented the brief period in American history where blacks could vote and elect their own representatives, and his Administration's "corruption" was a convenient explanation for why the period failed ... while the author argues it was really the rightward turn in the Supreme Court and then (without the black vote) the Republican Party's embrace of the Robber Barons that led to another 100 years of injustice.

Fredrick Douglas said of Grant:

"To Grant more than any other man the Negro owes his enfranchisement and the Indians a humane policy. In the matter of the protection of the freedman from violence his moral courage surpassed that of his party."

Farm Bill Fun

(via Yglesias) The Farm Bill is probably the most influential bill that no one pays any attention to. Everyone loves small family farms (I do - I have one) and any incentives to help the little guy, but the Farm bill is mostly one big corporate subsidy. It affects trade, environment/land use , food, and health policy. Anyone who likes Michael Pollan, Food Inc., or has an interest in organic food ... or who cares about obesity and corporate welfare should pay attention to the joined-at-the-hip relationship between Ag politics and Big corporations.

Tonight Obama is supposed to propose a spending freeze in the SOTU. . . but Big Ag committee chairs will probably ignore that and keep on subsidizing the big guys.

For You Lawyers

Some funny t-shirts.

"The Good Fork"

For all you "foodies" out there - a friend of mine has just started a blog on the Denver Restaurant scene - The Good Fork. Go give it some traffic!

Toon Says it All

Scott Brown Won

... which really sucks. But, to put it in perspective (unlike how the MSM has viewed it), did we really think the "60" democratic votes that included ex-GOP Arlen Specter, Lincoln, Ben Nelson, Bayh, etc. was a "unanimous" caucus?

MUST READ Yglesias on this ... and this (how it probably just provides an excuse for Dems to not do what they didn't want to do in the first place)

Black Cowboys

The Denver Post has a nice piece on unappreciated Frontier Black History - and the Nat'l Western Stock Show's attempts to spotlight the contributions blacks have made to the development of the West.

Also here are some early Black Westerners being honored tonight at the Rodeo in honor of MLK day:

Clara Brown (1803-85): The slave freed by her Kentucky owner became the first African-American woman to reach the Colorado gold fields, earning passage by cooking for miners. In Central City, she opened a laundry, saved her money and earned fame helping the less fortunate. She is called "The Angel of the Rockies."

Justina Ford (1871-1952): The former home of Colorado's first female black doctor, at 3901 California St., serves as the Black American West Museum and Denver's Ford-Warren Branch Library is named in her honor.

Cranford Goldsby (1876-96): Known as Cherokee Bill and the black Billy the Kid, this famous bank robber and train bandit won his first gunfight at 18 years old and was hanged two years later in Fort Smith, Ark., for the deaths of 13 men.

Barney Ford (1822-1902): He was born a slave but became one of Denver's leading pioneer businessmen who established literacy classes for blacks and fought for their right to vote.

Willie Kennard: This marshal is credited with taming the gold-mining camp of Yankee Hill, about 25 miles west of Denver, in 1874.

Nat "Deadwood Dick" Love (1854-1921): Born a slave in Tennessee, he became one of the Old West's most famous riders, ropers and shooters.

Bill Pickett (1870-1932): The first African-American inducted into the National Cowboy Hall of Fame.

Not Saying Much: But Obama is More Fiscally Conservative

(via Ezra) Arch-Conservative Washington Times tells how Obama has been more successful with cutting spending than W was:

President Obama notched substantial successes in spending cuts last year, winning 60 percent of his proposed cuts and managing to get Congress to ax several programs that had bedeviled President George W. Bush for years.

The administration says Congress accepted at least $6.9 billion of the $11.3 billion in discretionary spending cuts Mr. Obama proposed for the current fiscal year. An analysis by The Washington Times found that Mr. Obama was victorious in getting Congress to slash 24 programs and achieved some level of success in reducing nine other programs.

Among the president's victories are canceling the multibillion-dollar F-22 Raptor program, ending the LORAN-C radio-based ship navigation system and culling a series of low-dollar education grants. In each of those cases, Mr. Obama succeeded in eliminating programs that Mr. Bush repeatedly failed to end.[...]

By comparison, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget says Mr. Bush won 40 percent of his spending cuts in fiscal 2006 and won less than 15 percent of his proposed cuts for 2007 and 2008.

Ezra points out:

And if you compare the major early initiatives of George W. Bush and Obama, the picture is even starker. Bush cut trillions in taxes without paying for it and added trillions in Medicare spending without paying for it. Obama, by contrast, put the stimulus bill on the deficit, as you would expect for a countercyclical program, but his health-care bill actually raises more money than it spends, and reduces the deficit in both its first and second decades. Saying Obama is far more fiscally responsible than Bush may not be saying much, but it does put Republican fury about the deficit in context.

60 Minutes Last Night

Did anyone see the 60 Minutes segment on (New York Magazine's) John Heilemann's and (Time's) Mark Halperin's new book Game Change last night. Finally you have McCain campaign staff admit what a disaster Palin was. Lieberman was a few days away from being the GOP VP, but then they had to make a last minute change and, grasping at straws, picked Palin. My favorite part was how, during debate prep, she couldn't pronounce Biden's name!! She called him "O'Biden"!! That's why, before the debate, she asked "do you mind if I call you Joe?".

What a disaster.

NYC Cavemen

My good friend Syd O turned me on to CrossFit, which I love, and I even tried the caveman diet for a while (which I loved until I got a parasite). So, I'm always interested to read up on others who are interested in living according to our (perceived) evolutionary genetic history. Thus, the NYT has a cool article on some "cavemen" living in Manhattan - eating raw ground beef, fasting to mimic hardship, throwing rocks for exercise, etc. A part of me loves this: the philosophy behind it is plausible, it's manly, and I love unconventional, dedicated people. However, on the other hand, it's got to be insulting to our caveman ancestors to have Manhattan hipsters, opening up the deep freezer to get some Whole Foods ground beef, running across the Brooklyn Bridge in the snow, and then playing catch with rocks in Central Park in order to "mimic" paleo-man. I know very few can live on a farm, chop wood and kill their meat ... but considering the dedication these folks have, living a caveman life in NYC seems like a big charade.

Through the Conservative Looking Glass

Yglesias:

The basic story, as I understand it, is that when terrorists killed thousands of people on in September 2001 that proved that the policies of the Clinton administration failed. Then the antrax attacks were a collective feature of our imagination. Then Richard Reid’s effort to blow up a plane with explosives hidden in his shoe doesn’t count because it failed. And terrorist attacks in Madrid & London prove that Europeans are weak. The deaths of thousands of people in terrorist attacks in Iraq shows that we succeeded in taking the attack to the enemy. And Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s effort to blow up a plane with explosives hidden in his pants is a huge al-Qaeda success.

Thus, looking back over the whole thing we can see that George W Bush’s approach to al-Qaeda was working great, whereas since Obama came in his implemented a “law enforcement” philosophy that’s failed miserably. Right?

Obama's Racial Profiling

Spencer Ackerman's post deserves a full quote.

I took some heat from my friends for standing up for Obama’s Nobel speech in December. It seemed to me like the war stuff in it was a necessary way of preempting churlish domestic media talk that he’s a peacenik in order to get to its eloquent defense of human rights-based multilateralism. There was even this great line about how we honor American ideals “by upholding them not when it’s easy, but when it is hard.” Then came Northwest Flight 253, an attempted terrorist attack that didn’t even succeed. And now Obama is putting into place a de facto system of racial/ethnic/religious profiling at airport security points.

We need to call this what it is: a security risk. If you are one of the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims, a president who spent part of his childhood in Indonesia is sending you the message that you are considered a threat. Not even Michael Chertoff and Mike Hayden think this is defensible. That ought to tell you something profound. al-Qaeda shows every sign of diminishing potency — that is, its ability to attract qualified recruits and have its message resonate among the world’s Muslims — while U.S. military, intelligence and law enforcement capabilities increase. Its strategy — its only strategy — has always been to get the U.S. to overreact, overreach and counterproductively lash out and draw Muslims into al-Qaeda’s corner. Usama bin Laden is really explicit about this.

From this perspective, Matt Duss is wrong and Bill Kristol really is correct: al-Qaeda couldn’t pull off a successful terrorist attack on Flight 253. But it’s getting its victory nevertheless, every time a Pakistani family is pulled out of line on an airport and searched. Kristol doesn’t understand why he’s right, of course, and he’s actually doing al-Qaeda’s work for it here, but it’s nevertheless true. And this is happening not while the hated George W. Bush is president, but during the term of the man who stood up in Cairo to say that America and Islam are not at war. If this sort of dangerous hysteria is what emerges after a failed attack, imagine what will happen if al-Qaeda, God forbid, pulls off something at home.

This is strikingly similar to David Brooks' realistic expectations for our security.

Flashback

When you hear Republicans talking about how surprised and aghast they are at the political process churning its way toward a Heath Care bill, it may be useful to remember the Medicare Part D bill from November 2003. I was there - and I don't remember the GOP too worried about niceties when it came to passing their top legislative priority. . . and, to wit, a big government increasing, unpaidfor, corporate givaway at that!

Read this overview of just the House vote ... talk about unprecedented.

Nature as Heaven: nasty, brutish, short

(via Syd O) Great op-ed by Douthat the other week - doing what columnists should do: get deep beneath the surface, not simply spout punditry. Although I don't think that any perceived "Hollywood pantheism" is particularly dangerous, Douthat is right on his critiques.

The question is whether Nature actually deserves a religious response. Traditional theism has to wrestle with the problem of evil: if God is good, why does he allow suffering and death? But Nature is suffering and death. Its harmonies require violence. Its “circle of life” is really a cycle of mortality. And the human societies that hew closest to the natural order aren’t the shining Edens of James Cameron’s fond imaginings. They’re places where existence tends to be nasty, brutish and short.

Gold, Women, & Sheep

Colbert and Stewart and a few others have noticed Fox News' and other conservative commentator's obsession with gold. You see, when people get scared or nervous, the price of gold goes up because it's a finite precious metal. Well, guess which fearmongers are also spokesman for gold (both on their shows AND on infomercials)? That's right: Glenn Beck, Bill O'Reilly, Linda Ingraham, etc. Selling fear, and making money off gold.

Of course, the Colbert Report does an impeccable job pointing out the hypocrisy. Check the video.

Lieberman: "One More Minute Please?"; Franken: "Nope, We've Had Enough of Your Solipsism"

Check this video out. Thank you, Al Franken, for standing up to my arch-nemesis.

Real Heros of Health Reform

I'll quote Ezra in full here:

Right on the heels of Joe Lieberman trying to kill the bill because it had a Medicare buy-in proposal, Howard Dean is exhorting Democrats to kill the bill because it doesn't have a Medicare buy-in proposal. Sigh.

So let this serve as an encomium to Ron Wyden, Tom Harkin, Chuck Schumer, Sherrod Brown, Chris Dodd and Jay Rockefeller, among many others. All of these senators could have been the 60th vote. All of them had issues they believe in and worked for. Chris Dodd built and passed a bill. Sherrod Brown whipped up liberal support for the public option. Chuck Schumer spent countless hours devising compromises and searching for new paths forward. Ron Wyden spent years crafting the Healthy Americans Act, getting a CBO score, pulling together co-sponsors, speaking to activists and industry groups and other legislators. Jay Rockefeller has spent decades on this issue and wasn't even invited into the Gang of Six process.

But you know what? They're all still there. Because in the end, this isn't about them, and though their states and their pet issues might benefit if they tried to make it about them, the process, and thus the result, would be endangered. I've said before that the remarkable thing isn't that Joe Lieberman acts the way he does but that so few join him. The legislative process is given a bad name by the showboats and grandstanders, but the only reason it functions at all is because the vast majority of the participants keep their role in perspective.

If this bill passes, it will not be because Lieberman was pacified. It will be because senators such as Rockefeller, Wyden, Schumer, Harkin, Brown and Dodd swallowed their pride and their passion and allowed him to be pacified. They are the heroes here, and beneath it all, their quiet determination made them the key players.

Spineless, Spiteful Joe Lieberman on how to Bite the Hand that Feeds You

Jon Cohn who, along with Ezra Klein, has been my health care go-to journalist has an excellent post describing why Joe Lieberman is acting selfishly. And it's a crying shame that a U.S. Senator - who seemingly believes in health care reform - would blatantly lie and draw an ever-moving line in the sand simply to annoy the real Democrats who have reached out to him.

there’s no evidence Lieberman believes any of these arguments against reform, and a great deal of evidence that he does not. Lieberman, by all appearances, seems to share the belief of essentially all Democrats and many non-Democrats that health care reform is a moral imperative. And his discomfort with a modest Medicare buy-in seems altogether contrived, given that he endorsed the idea of a Medicare buy-in during the 2000 presidential campaign and defended it as recently as three months ago.

To put it bluntly, the idea that Lieberman now finds the very same proposal a grave threat to the public good is simply not credible. And while I understand the rules of strategic gamesmanship, somebody who took health care reform seriously--somebody who genuinely cared about ending the misfortune that visits people without affordable medical care--simply would not have made such a strong stand, over such a tiny issue, at such a pivotal time.

The proof, I think, is in the actions of Lieberman’s adversaries. Sherrod Brown supports the public option just as passionately as Lieberman opposes it. The same goes for Jay Rockefeller. But Brown and Rockefeller have already made a series of huge concessions, because those concessions were necessary to move a bill through Congress. Last night, both men signaled they were prepared to make one last concession--to give up on the idea of a public plan altogether--because that’s what it will take to pass the law.

Brown and Rockefeller, in other words, acted to promote the greater good. I can believe some of their adversaries are doing the same. I find it hard to believe Lieberman is among them.

Redneck Christmas

"I went to church and cried. Then I got back to work."

(via Syd O) MUST READ: Enviro writer and founder of 350.org posts on the Copenhagen conference over at Climate Progress.