Broadcasting News

My full post out of the first day of the America's Future Now! conference in DC is below. But I wanted to highlight Howard Dean's strong push for a public option, which I wrapped into the story:

During a lunchtime press conference, Howard Dean, recent past chair of the DNC and a doctor, said that it's more important to have a public plan than a bipartisan plan. "Bipartisan," he said, "is not an end in and of itself."

He said that Republicans haven't helped Obama with the stimulus package nor do they seem poised to offer an assist with approving his nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the nation's highest court.

"If they're in there to shill for the insurance companies, I think we should do it with 51 votes," Dean said, suggesting that it be accomplished via budget reconciliation.

Dean added: "The American people voted for real change. They knew exactly what he was proposing when he was on the campaign trail."

(JENNIFER SKALKA)

Geithner told China yesterday that the Obama Administration was committed to bringing down the US deficit.
Really?

Barack Obama will quadruple the deficit this year.

Geithner also told China that Team Obama wants to bring down the deficit next year from 12.9% of GDP this year to 3% of GDP next year (a near impossibility)...
Or, in other words, back into Bush territory.

In response, China told Geithner to show them some numbers!
Bloomberg reported, via Bizblogger:

In an interview with Bloomberg Television May 21, Geithner said the administration?"s goal is to cut the budget shortfall to 3 percent of gross domestic product or smaller. That would be down from a projected 12.9 percent this year.

Seventeen of 23 Chinese economists polled in connection with Geithner?"s visit said holdings of Treasuries are a ?Sgreat risk? for the nation?"s economy, according to a Chinese state media report yesterday. Still, the majority argued against quickly cutting them, the Beijing-based Global Times reported.

Geithner, 47, needs to show how the U.S. can prevent the value of China?"s investment from being eroded by a weaker dollar or by the inflation that might be stoked by the stimulus money being pumped into the U.S. economy, according to Yu.

?SIt will be helpful if Geithner can show us some arithmetic,? he said.

...The Treasury released a transcript May 30 of a briefing Geithner gave last week at the Foreign Press Center in Washington. In it, he said he will stress with Chinese officials that he?"s intent on maintaining the dollar?"s strength.

?SI will, of course, make it clear that we are committed to a strong dollar, that we are committed to bringing our fiscal deficits down over the medium term to a sustainable place, to a sustainable level,? Geithner said in the briefing May 27. ?SWe believe in a strong dollar. A strong dollar is in the U.S. interest.?

This doesn't sound good at all.
No wonder China is concerned.

The US has lost 16,000 jobs each day since Obama signed the Spendulus Bill and sunk the US economy further into debt.

In another nearly orgasmic tribute to The One, in its Arts section The New York Times published a May 30 story buoyantly jubilant over the fact that Obama's face "rules the web." The story is in glee over how the Obammessiah's portrait fills the web and that some folks are even making a bit of cash off the deal.

To my mind, though, the amusing thing about the piece is that, if read closely, it appears that only schlocky Obama art can bring any sales for any serious artistic efforts are going unsold. I don?"t know what that says about Obama art aficionados, but there you have it. Obama schlock rules.

The first Obamanist cum arteeste the piece reveals to us is one Mimi Torchia Boothby of Seattle who was so inspired by The One that she painted a "contemplative, sun-splashed portrait" of Obama that she is now selling on the web. And she was excited that a whole 24 takers was dredged up.

Sadly, there is no sense of proportion about this whole phenomenon and there just is no real effort to place this phenomenon in any historical perspective. Obama is ranked with John F. Kennedy in the excitement for his portrait but, there is no sense that the Times understands that Kennedy's portrait didn't become ubiquitous until his assassination. Yes there were many portraits of him just after he got elected, but his assassination spurred that displaying of his image a lot more than his mere election. On the other hand, Obama's portrait is everywhere despite his relative lack of accomplishment as president.

There is no discussion of other presidents that enjoyed popularity in portraiture. George Washington was hugely popular for generations of Americans including those first American voters of the late 1700s. Just about every American had a portrait of Washington somewhere. Abraham Lincoln was also everywhere in his day and after and was one of the most photographed president's of his era and on into the next. Teddy Roosevelt was the people's president and found great popularity as a subject of portraits. Original images of Teddy are still easy to find on ebay or in antique stores. In his turn, Franklin Roosevelt's image became popular everywhere, as well. But does the Times talk of any of this? Nope.

Finally, one might think that a thoughtful piece on the widespread appearance of Obama's portrait might include some words of caution, some perspective, or some effort to look deeper into the matter. But, I guess that is far too introspective for the Times, sadly. No effort was made to make this piece a serious treatment of the matter.

What does it say, for instance, about people so taken by this man even though he has yet to actually achieve any major effort (shy of getting elected, no mean feat, to be sure), has not faced any significant challenge or emergency, and has yet to be proven to have succeeded in his goals?

But, let?"s not worry about reality, shall we? Unfortunately, it's all about the slavish sycophancy for The One as opposed to any serious treatment of the subject.

Sigh.

by Amanda Marcotte

Because fuckheads who don’t know what they’re talking about are beginning to blather about how they think they know better than actual doctors about the realities of late term abortion, I thought I’d put up a video that we made explaining the facts.

RH Reality Check: Late Term Abortions from RH Reality Check on Vimeo.

It’s interesting that Republicans have used the occasion of a new Supreme Court nomination to denounce the quality of empathy.  You know, the quality that genuinely decent and brave people like Dr. George Tiller had in spades, while moral cowards like Megan McArdle suffer a massive deficit.

Rewatching that, I feel particularly weird about the line I wrote about how using late term abortion as a political football is dangerous.  In my head, I was thinking about the women who need to have safe abortion available for dangerous pregnancies.  Now I realize that it’s also dangerous in terms of riling people up so they commit hate crimes.

James A. Dorn, vice president for academic affairs:

After 20 years China has made substantial economic progress, but the ghosts of Tiananmen are restless and will continue to be so until the Goddess of Liberty is restored.

The Chinese Communist Party's "Human Rights Action Plan" (2009-10) addresses several human rights abuses, but it fails to establish a well-defined boundary between the individual and the state that protects rights to life, liberty, and property. Until China limits the power of the CCP and allows people to exercise their natural rights, there will be corruption, and the goal of "social harmony" will be elusive. The lesson of Tiananmen is that the principle of nonintervention (wu wei) is superior to the heavy hand of the state as a way to bring about true harmony.

by Mark Silva

On the eve of President Barack Obama's address to the Muslim world from Cairo, where he will deliver an appeal for mutual understanding, the Arab world has heard from another voice: A recorded audio-tape attributed to Osama bin Laden, fugitive leader of al Qaeda, accusing Obama of fomenting "hatred'' with military action in Pakistan.

The purported broadcast of bin Laden's words, aired by the Arab-language Al Jazeera satellite television station as Obama was arriving in Saudi Arabia today, stood as a stark reminder of the hurdles that the United States still faces throughout the region.

While the president is intent on "resetting''' U.S. relations with the Muslim world in his planned televised address from the campus of Cairo University in Egypt, some of the long-elusive sponsors of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist assaults against the United States remain at large and refocused on overturning the governments of Pakistan and Afghanistan.

"I don't think it's surprising that al Qaeda would want to shift attention away from the president's historic efforts ... to reach out and have an open dialogue with the Muslim world,'' Robert Gibbs, Obama's press secretary, said as the president was holding private meetings with the king of Saudi Arabia.

Bin Laden, son of a Saudi family that gained enormous wealth in construction and built the royal palaces of the late King Saud, became involved in the militant Jihadist movement in Afghanistan after the Soviet Union invaded that nation. After returning to Saudi Arabia, he was confined to house arrest, and left the country in the early 1990s - his Saudi citizenship publicly revoked in 1994.

If Obama's mission in the Middle East has a clear purpose, the administration maintains, so does the timing of al Qaeda's message.

The tape's broadcast follows comments from al-Qaeda's second- in-command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, urging Egyptians to shun Obama and contending that the "torturers of Egypt" and "slaves of America'' had invited the American leader to speak in Cairo.

The administration has attempted to draw a contrast between an al Qaeda in hiding and an American leader taking a high-profile stance with his appeal to the Muslim world.

"You have, you know, the leader of the free world speaking from one of the great cities in the world, and you have, you know, bin Laden speaking from an undisclosed... location,'' said Philip J. Crowley, assistant secretary of state for public affairs. "That speaks volumes in terms of the contrast.''