OBAMA'S CORE BELIEFS

Does he have any? From Richard Cohen in the Washington Post finally asks questions conservatives have been asking for approximately two years now:

Who is this guy? What are his core beliefs? The president himself is no help on this score. When it comes to his own image, he has a tin ear....

Mr. Cohen gets specific in his essay:

For instance, it's not clear that Obama is appalled by China's appalling human rights record. He seems hardly stirred about continued repression in Russia. He treats the Israelis and their various enemies as pests of equal moral standing. The president seems to stand foursquare for nothing much.

Even some not on right are learning that BHO is an empty suit.

Voter remorse will likely continue to increase. May it increase so much that the November 2010 election shoves every Democrat out the doors of Capitol Hill.

WEEKEND FUNNY

I love baseball! I come by that love of baseball naturally, I suppose. My father, born in 1911 and denizen of sandlot baseball, was actually offered a job as pitcher for the New York Yankees by a pro-ball scout way back when. Dad turned down the offer as he was such a homebody and the part-time caregiver for his own father.

Anyway, when I saw the video below over at Right Truth, I knew that I just had to post it:


For the record, the original classic poem "Casey at the Bat" by Ernest Lawrence Thayer:

The Outlook wasn't brilliant for the Mudville nine that day:
The score stood four to two, with but one inning more to play.
And then when Cooney died at first, and Barrows did the same,
A sickly silence fell upon the patrons of the game.

A straggling few got up to go in deep despair. The rest
Clung to that hope which springs eternal in the human breast;
They thought, if only Casey could get but a whack at that -
We'd put up even money, now, with Casey at the bat.

But Flynn preceded Casey, as did also Jimmy Blake,
And the former was a lulu and the latter was a cake;
So upon that stricken multitude grim melancholy sat,
For there seemed but little chance of Casey's getting to the bat.

But Flynn let drive a single, to the wonderment of all,
And Blake, the much despis-ed, tore the cover off the ball;
And when the dust had lifted, and the men saw what had occurred,
There was Jimmy safe at second and Flynn a-hugging third.

Then from 5,000 throats and more there rose a lusty yell;
It rumbled through the valley, it rattled in the dell;
It knocked upon the mountain and recoiled upon the flat,
For Casey, mighty Casey, was advancing to the bat.

There was ease in Casey's manner as he stepped into his place;
There was pride in Casey's bearing and a smile on Casey's face.
And when, responding to the cheers, he lightly doffed his hat,
No stranger in the crowd could doubt 'twas Casey at the bat.

Ten thousand eyes were on him as he rubbed his hands with dirt;
Five thousand tongues applauded when he wiped them on his shirt.
Then while the writhing pitcher ground the ball into his hip,
Defiance gleamed in Casey's eye, a sneer curled Casey's lip.

And now the leather-covered sphere came hurtling through the air,
And Casey stood a-watching it in haughty grandeur there.
Close by the sturdy batsman the ball unheeded sped-
"That ain't my style," said Casey. "Strike one," the umpire said.

From the benches, black with people, there went up a muffled roar,
Like the beating of the storm-waves on a stern and distant shore.
"Kill him! Kill the umpire!" shouted someone on the stand;
And its likely they'd a-killed him had not Casey raised his hand.

With a smile of Christian charity great Casey's visage shone;
He stilled the rising tumult; he bade the game go on;
He signaled to the pitcher, and once more the spheroid flew;
But Casey still ignored it, and the umpire said, "Strike two."

"Fraud!" cried the maddened thousands, and echo answered fraud;
But one scornful look from Casey and the audience was awed.
They saw his face grow stern and cold, they saw his muscles strain,
And they knew that Casey wouldn't let that ball go by again.

The sneer is gone from Casey's lip, his teeth are clenched in hate;
He pounds with cruel violence his bat upon the plate.
And now the pitcher holds the ball, and now he lets it go,
And now the air is shattered by the force of Casey's blow.

Oh, somewhere in this favored land the sun is shining bright;
The band is playing somewhere, and somewhere hearts are light,
And somewhere men are laughing, and somewhere children shout;
But there is no joy in Mudville - mighty Casey has struck out.

Read more about the 1888 poem HERE.

Obamacare, this week's name of the game

Obamacare, or the triumph of Obama/Democrat's health reform bill in the House is the name of the game this week. (Especially after Liverpool's loss to MU).

The whole process is interesting to follow. Not for its 'heroic' moment for Democrats. Not for the contents, which I am still learning about. Well, I like that there is finally an attempt to fix the problems in the US health care, including the market failures associated with it. But, like Greg Mankiw wrote, we still need to understand the trade-offs of each policy choice.

For professional purpose, I have been trying to follow the issue, read here and here. Oh, by the way, the blog is my new playground -- a nerdier version than this Cafe.

I was entertained by how the politics are played in Washington. Not because it's beautiful. On the contrary, we've seen the good, bad and ugly side of Washington politics. Where ideas, idealism and ideology meet pragmatism, negotiations and bargaining.

Also on what I considered as 'the cattenaccio of politics' played by Obama. He distanced himself from the micromanagement, orchestrating the Democrats in both chambers of Congress to get bogged down with the nitty-gritty details. When Mass. senate seat went to Republican Scott Brown, eliminating Democrat's supermajority, they changed the tactics. House voted for an earlier Senate version, so they don't need another round of vote from the Senate. Big kudos to Nancy Pelosi who led a successful army of arm-twisting, nail-pulling efforts, making sure the bill was passed.

Now, compare that to the Pansus drama...

Sure, some friends argued it was all about ideology. It was the triumph of government over market and big corporations. Well, fine if you think that way. But for all the pro-government enthusiasts, two things are missing from Obamacare: a government-run commercial insurance and single-payer system.

Ah, and of course some DPR members failed to get the story right. This guy screamed Obama's Asia-Australia trip delay was a sign of diplomatic failure. Our government (SBY, that is), failed to convince the US that Indonesia is safe. Well, what can we expect?

On Obama's visit

Visitors of this cafe might remember, I wasn't very thrilled by Obama when he was first elected (as channeled by the guys here in Warung Sebelah). But I shared many observers' view that he's much better than Bush.

Now, with Indonesia's rising role in international fora (e.g. G20) as well as its impressive economic achievement (e.g. upgrades by Fitch, Moody's, S&P), I think the Obama factor has become even more important than before. Yes, there's an ongoing change in the geopolitics in the area with China's leadership esp. as the locomotive of the so-called regional production network. But issues like currency talk, global economy rebalancing with US and China will be around for quite a while. Add the tension between China and Japan on ASEAN+3 or ASEAN+6 to it, we would all see that Indonesia should really take these other countries very seriously. And that includes giving proper respect to their leaders, including that of the US, namely Obama.

But why am I bringing this up? And why here in the cafe rather than there in the boring and pretentiously serious Exegesis? Well maybe because I'm sick of this die-hard Americo-phobia displayed by many elements in the community, e.g. HTI and some other religious-based groups. Ah yes, some lazy students too plus narrow-minded media. So I'm saying this with the usual cafe angst.

And I post here so as the other baristas will chip in :D

Why Obama must take on Wall Street : R. Reich

A larger explanation, I am afraid, is the grip Wall Street has over the American political process. The Street is where the money is and money buys campaign commercials on television. Wall Street firms and executives have been uniquely generous to both parties, emerging as one of the largest benefactors of the Democrats. Between November 2008 and November 2009, Wall Street doled out $42m to lawmakers, mostly to members of the House and Senate banking committees and House and Senate leaders. In the first three quarters of 2009, the industry spent $344m on lobbying - making the Street one of the major powerhouses in the nation's capital…

But the widening gulf between Wall Street and Main Street - a big bail-out for the former, unemployment checks for the latter; high profits and giant bonuses for the former, job and wage losses for the latter; buoyant expectations of the former, deep anxiety and cynicism by the latter; ever fancier estates for denizens of the former, mortgage foreclosures for the rest - is dangerous. Americans went ballistic early last summer when AIG executives got big bonuses after taxpayers had bailed them out. They will not be happy when Wall Street hands out billions in bonuses very soon. Angry populism lurks just beneath the surface of two-party politics in America. Just listen to Sarah Palin or her counterparts on American talk radio and yell television. Over the long term, the political stakes in reforming Wall Street are as high as the economic.

http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/01/14/why_obama_must_take_on_wall_street/?ref
And Krugman

Krugman, Paul

Consider what has happened so far: The U.S. economy is still grappling with the consequences of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression; trillions of dollars of potential income have been lost; the lives of millions have been damaged, in some cases irreparably, by mass unemployment; millions more have seen their savings wiped out; hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, will lose essential health care because of the combination of job losses and draconian cutbacks by cash-strapped state governments.

And this disaster was entirely self-inflicted. This isn’t like the stagflation of the 1970s, which had a lot to do with soaring oil prices, which were, in turn, the result of political instability in the Middle East. This time we’re in trouble entirely thanks to the dysfunctional nature of our own financial system. Everyone understands this — everyone, it seems, except the financiers themselves.

Obama and the paranoid style in educational politics

“American politics has often been an arena for angry minds.” So opened a classic 1964 essay of the renowned American historian, Richard Hofstadter, in which he analyzed a style of politics which is remarkably evocative of what has passed for political discourse these last two months. Consider how Hofstadter’s pithy characterization of this political style – “[a] sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy” — so aptly fits the sort of behavior we have seen on display in town halls, on Fox TV “news” shows and on blogs from the right. What term better describes the conjuring of “death panels” out of thin air, the waving of photos of Obama defaced to resemble Hitler, than that which graces the title of Hofstadter’s essay, the “paranoid style?”
After weeks of the paranoid style in health care politics, it is now in full bloom in the realm of educational politics as well. Obama, we are told, has set out to indoctrinate American school children with his socialist doctrine through a planned address to American school children next week. The Cato Institute blog has outstripped its usual prodigious output with nearly hourly condemnations of Obama’s planned speech and the lesson plans produced by the USDoE for the event. Its torrent of criticism culminated most recently [at least at this hour] with the charge of an Obama “cult of personality,” a term of art that arose to describe the murderous rule of Stalin.* The Amen chorus at the National Review blog, led by Jonah Goldberg of Liberal Fascism fame, all agree with Cato on the existence of a dangerous Obama “cult of personality.”¶ Fox News commentator Monica Crowley decries Obama’s words urging students to stay in school and work hard as “Orwellian,” proclaiming that “this is what Chairman Mao did.” World Net Daily’s Bob Unruh compares the Obama speech on the importance of education to Hitler Youth. For the second time in two days, American Enterprise Institute house educational expert Rick Hess denounces the proposed Obama message of personal responsibility, this time as “groupthink.” Hess approvingly quotes Charles Murray of Bell Curve fame, that “if George W. Bush had proposed to make a national speech to schoolchildren, complete with lesson plans, isn’t ‘creepy’ a word that would have come to mind?” Little does it matter to Murray and Hess that George W. Bush [and his father] not 0nly proposed, but actually delivered such speeches. Florida GOP Chairman Jim Greer opines that he is “absolutely appalled that taxpayer dollars are being used to spread President Obama’s socialist ideology.” And for good measure, Michelle Malkin throws in a shot at “zealous teacher unions.” It appears that someone forget to tell both the Obama DoE and us that teacher unions were the instrumentalities of Obama’s socialist propaganda.
This is surreal beyond all belief, in a way that makes the descriptor “paranoid” an inadequate understatement. Obama is so much of a socialist that in the real world he could not bring himself to propose the modestly social democratic single payer system of health care insurance, a form of which exists in every other Western democracy, and he has been hinting of his willingness to abandon the “public option” in his proposals for health care reform. Get a grip, boys and girls.
___________________________________________________
* Republican State Senator Steve Russell of Oklahoma makes the reference to a “cult of personality” explicit for the historically illiterate: “This is something you’d expect to see in North Korea or in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.”
¶ “The quintessential liberal fascist,” Jonah Goldberg informed us in his book by that name, “is not an SS storm trooper. It is a female grade school teacher with an education degree from Brown or Swarthmore.”

by Leo Casey
From Edwize.com

BHO Caught In Another Narcissistic Moment

(hat tip to Atlas Shrugs)



Pamela cites a story from American Thinker:

...Sergeant Crowley, the sole class act in this trio, helps the handicapped Professor Gates down the stairs, while Barack Obama, heedless of the infirmities of his friend and fellow victim of self-defined racial profiling, strides ahead on his own. So who is compassionate? And who is so self-involved and arrogant that he is oblivious?...

BHO is all about himself.

Stimulus plan is too limited : Greider

Obama's Economic Plan Is Not Going to Save Us
By William Greider, The Nation
Posted on January 22, 2009, Printed on January 22, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/121027/

The nation's fast-darkening circumstances define the essential dilemma of Barack Obama's presidency. His instinct is to govern by consensus, in the moderate middle ground of politics. Yet dire events are pushing the new president toward solutions more fundamental than those he had intended. The longer he resists taking more forceful action, the more likely it is that he will be overwhelmed by the gathering adversities.

Three large obstacles are blocking Obama's path. The first is one of scale: his nearly $800 billion recovery package sounds huge, but it is perhaps two or three times too small to produce a turnaround. The second is that the financial system--still dysfunctional despite the bailouts--requires much more than fiscal stimulus and bailout: the government must nationalize and supervise the banks to ensure that they carry out the lending and investing needed for recovery. This means liquidating some famous nameplates--led by Citigroup--that are spiraling toward insolvency. The third is that the crisis is global: the US economy cannot return to normal unless the unbalanced world trading system is simultaneously reformed. Globalization has vastly undermined US productive strength, as trade deficits have led the nation into deepening debtor dependence.
Read the entire post at the site: http://www.alternet.org/story/121027/

Obama stimulus and Republican Earmarks

The Obama Stimulus
We first need to recognize that this is a Bush/Republican recession. And, it is the worst recession since 1945 when everything slowed down at the end of W.W.II. That’s quite a record.
In response, the Obama administration proposes a massive stimulus. This is the correct remedy. It is basic Keynesianism.
Now the Republican Senators ( who significantly caused this mess along with Larry Summers and others), want more money spent on tax breaks for the wealthy. Does that sound familiar?
After preaching about No ear marks, they are demanding the biggest ear mark of all; a major tax break for big business. There is every reason to be skeptical. Recall that we gave the finance industry 350 Billion to unfreeze the credit market and instead they spent it on themselves.
The perils of using tax breaks as a stimulus, or as a major part of the stimulus, are explained well by Howard Gleckman of the Tax Policy Center here:
http://taxvox.taxpolicycenter.org/blog/_archives/2009/1/5/4047116.html

See this by Paul Krugman:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/09/opinion/09krugman.html?_r=1&th&emc=th


So, the Republicans, after creating this mess, see tax cuts for the rich as the way out of this mess. Time for some street politics. See the articles below.

NCLB : a diminished view of school reform

Dear President-Elect Obama,
As one of the millions of Americans thrilled by your historic victory, I am heartened by your pledge to pay long-overdue attention to improving – and adequately funding – America’s schools.

Your comments on reforming the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) have been especially welcome. As you know, the misguided use of “high-stakes” testing under this law has brought numerous unintended consequences. Not least of these is a teaching-to-the-test mentality that has impoverished the educational experience of the children it was intended to help. For poor and minority students, children with special needs, and English language learners (ELLs), the school curriculum now consists largely of mind-numbing drills in the two tested subjects, reading and math. As a result, millions are being deprived of opportunities to learn critical thinking skills, develop talents in music and art, become physically fit, and excel in science and social studies.

For ELLs in particular, educational options have been narrowed by the high-stakes use of standardized tests in a language these children have yet to master. Despite widespread agreement that such assessments are neither valid nor reliable, they are nevertheless being used to make major decisions about students’ promotion and graduation, teachers’ pay and career prospects, and even school restructuring.

One perverse result has been to eliminate or marginalize proven pedagogies like bilingual education, which is now available to only 13% of ELLs, down from 37% in 1992. Such programs have been replaced, in many cases, with approaches that have no scientific support and essentially amount to intensive preparation to fill in the bubbles on English-language tests. It’s no accident that, under NCLB, the achievement gap is growing in most states between ELLs and their English-proficient peers.

In short, American schools are far more unequal today than they were seven years ago, when NCLB was enacted. Which is ironic, considering that the law was sold as a way to overcome “the soft bigotry of low expectations” and enhance the achievement of “all students.”

The problem, in my view, is that NCLB represents a diminished vision of civil rights. Rather than tackle the structural inequities among our schools; rather than ensure adequate funding for K-12 education; and rather than address social, health, and economic conditions that impair children’s readiness to learn, the sponsors of NCLB sought to do education reform on the cheap. It was much easier to establish an arbitrary and punitive accountability system, which placed blame for underachievement on schools and educators alone, than to hold all policymakers and stakeholders accountable. It was politically convenient to mandate a simplistic panacea – reliance on standardized tests as the instrument of reform – instead of providing serious support for building schools’ capacity to serve children whose needs have been neglected.

Clearly, the nation is far from a consensus on how to reauthorize the next version of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. In the outgoing Congress, both Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, were so divided among themselves that they were unable to move forward on reforming NCLB. Indeed, I think it’s fair to say that the differences are bipartisan.

While this situation will certainly complicate your leadership in the area of school reform, it could also offer some advantages. Precisely because the traditional ideological divisions play a limited role here, you are in a position to organize a broad, civil, and inclusive discussion on how to make American schools the best in the world – not just for the privileged but for the children who most need our help.

My organization, which consists of educators, parents, students, and advocates in 36 states who are dedicated to improving schools for English language learners, will be pleased to help support your efforts in any way we can. Please feel free to call on us as needed.

Sincerely,
James Crawford, President
Institute for Language and Education Policy
P.O. Box 5960
Takoma Park, MD 20913
bilingualed@starpower.net
www.elladvocates.org

Fox "News" attacks Obama

No surprise that FOX has been at it again: smearing, distorting, attacking Obama. What is infuriating and requires IMMEDIATE ACTION is that so many in the media have been catching the FOX virus and spreading it. By way of a cure, we bring you the next installment in our highly successful FOX Attacks series. Together, we have battled them effectively, halted their fake debates, and put pressure on Bill O'Reilly for his attacks on homeless vets. And so far, over 6 million people have seen FOX Attacks.


http://bravenewfilms.org/watch/15163302/32376?utm_source=rgemail
Watch the video, send it to your friends, and then demand the media stop spreading the FOX virus. Let them know they can't keep parroting FOX's smears against Barack Obama without hearing from us. Sign the petition, and we'll make sure the heads of all the mainstream media's news divisions see it. You can even express your outrage visually by including your picture.

Sign the petition: http://bravenewfilms.org/watch/15163302/32376?utm_source=rgemail

A special thanks to all of you who contributed to the tickers for this film. Your contributions made this video possible. You turned this into a collaborative filmmaking process, declaring our collective outrage over FOX's propaganda. If you didn't get the chance to contribute this time around, you can put your message to Murdoch in the next FOX Attacks film for a contribution of $199. Space is very limited though, we can only include 25 messages.

Contribute: https://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/552/p/10040/paywhatyouwantcredits

Of course, Obama isn't the only Democratic nominee that FOX and their ilk have gone after in this Presidential race. Chris Matthews, once a Roger Ailes hire, has been demonizing Hillary Clinton every chance he gets. Our friends at Media Matters have more on how Matthews is modeling himself after Bill O'Reilly.

Yours,
Robert Greenwald
and the Brave New Team

Barak Obama in Oakland, California

The Democratic Party Debate : the war