Is Obama Screwing the Netroots?

Posted by bmaz, Firedoglake at 4:02 PM on November 19, 2008.

When I was first sworn into the bar, I had the good fortune of being mentored by an experienced and wise senior partner. One of the first things that he taught me in dealing with other parties was to be aware of the long arm-short arm syndrome. This is where a person has a long arm for taking, and a short arm for giving.

When it comes to the netroots, Barack Obama has the long arm-short arm syndrome. He has taken much from us in terms of support, voice, momentum, money, footwork and energy. Obama has given little, if anything, in return to the netroots. Unless you count disdain and scorn. And pokes in the eye with a blunt stick.

Obesity is on the rise and Type 2 diabetes cases nearly doubled in the last 10 years. For the first time in decades, the life expectancy of children born in this century is actually lower than their parents. What's the number one culprit in this crisis? Food. Meanwhile, food safety is spotty. The U.S. lacks a comprehensive "farm to table" food inspection process. That's why the Centers for Disease Control estimates there are 76 million cases of food borne illness each year!

What we eat is making us sick! To find out why -- and what we can do about it -- join food scientist Marion Nestle this Friday on Meet the Bloggers. Nestle is the author of What to Eat and a professor in the Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health Department at New York University. We'll also chat with filmmaker Catherine Gund, director of the upcoming documentary What's On Your Plate?, along with the two young subjects of her film, 7th graders Sadie Hope-Gund and Safiyahi Riddle. Then blogger Kerry Trueman (Huffington Post, Eating Liberally) shares some not-particularly-appetizing information about the traditional holiday turkey, and we'll visit our local farmers' market to learn why we should eat locally and seasonally.

The next episode of Meet the Bloggers will be available beginning Friday, November 21.  Check out some of the articles below and fight the food policies that have failed us with your knife and fork!

• What to Eat -- Marion Nestle
  
• Time to Mothball the Butterball -- Kerry Trueman, The Huffington Post
• Finding the Best, Local Food Near You Just Got Easier -- Tara Lohan, AlterNet
  
• Dear Mr. Next President -- Food, Food, Food -- Michael Pollan, The New York Times
  
• Diabetes Rate Doubles Over Past 10 Years in the U.S. -- Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
  

Tamara Howard and her husband were forced to fight both her cancer and her insurance company simultaneously, ultimately losing to both.

Joe Lieberman having to hang out with Lindsey Graham was punishment enough.

In the fight for the Employee Free Choice Act, a bill in Congress that would give workers the free choice to form unions, we've seen some crazy hyperbole from greedy CEOs and their front groups who oppose free choice for workers.

Anti-free choice groups have thrown around tired union mob stereotypes, including actors from the Sopranos, bad "24"-style parodies, and photoshopped pictures in GOP election mail.

But next time anyone asks about "union intimidation," tell them to watch out for Home Depot founder and ex-CEO Bernie Marcus.

Thomas Frank in the WSJ this morning has the Home Depot Founder saying any CEO that doesn't contribute to Republicans opposed to Employee Free Choice "should be shot."

The question before senate Democrats today wasn't whether or not to seek revenge on Joe Lieberman.

The question was whether or not to strengthen the hand of one of the fiercest proponents of Bush-McCain foreign and homeland security policy.

Ask yourself this: will it be easier or harder for us to repair the damage we've inflicted on our reputation around the world with Joe Lieberman in charge of one of the key national security committees? What happens when he uses that committee to highlight phantom threats to the homeland emanating from places like Iraq? Do you think this is a sign that Democrats are serious about withdrawing from Iraq, or a signal that they too plan to stay the course?

Senate Democrats were right about one thing. This was a pragmatic issue. The problem is that by misunderstanding the situation they face, they made the wrong pragmatic decision.

And because of that, it will be even harder to achieve the change that we need.

A question in the aftermath of Chairman Lieberman's heroic return to the welcoming arms of the Senate Democratic club: Should we be surprised?

No, really, this is a serious question.

With its congressional majority, the Democratic Party has refused to seriously try to end the war, to stop the bailout and to stop the trampling of civil liberties, just to name a few off the top of my head. In fact, with their votes, they have aggressively worked to start and continue the war, pass the bailout and destroy our constitutional rights to privacy. So, are we really surprised that they have rewarded Joe Lieberman with a chairmanship that he can use to investigate the president he said poses a danger to America?

Here's Scott McClellan, author of What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception, at the 2008 Miami Book Fair.

Emptywheel had more analysis of McClellan's revelations earlier this year.

www.apfn.org 

From Alex Thurston:

The website Icasualties.org now reports that over 1,000 coalition soldiers have died in Afghanistan. (I am having trouble locating precise figures on NATO casualties in Afghanistan and icasualty's estimate may be high. Wikipedia puts the number at 940.)

That, and Derrick Crowe's recent post at Brave New Films on why "We Cannot Afford to Escalate in Afghanistan," have me thinking about all the reasons why we cannot afford to escalate this war.

Financially, Derrick points out, the costs of sustaining each soldier in Afghanistan exceed those of financing each soldier in Iraq. Here at home, we've already got our backs against the wall. We have mounting economic problems. Ahead of us is a daunting energy transition that will require tremendous effort and imagination from the American people. Can we afford to escalate in Afghanistan, even when Secretary Gates and top British commanders now believe negotiating with the Taliban represents the most likely path toward ending the war?

From FAIR:

Fair Use infringement and talk-radio vitriol meet in a report (Bay City News, 11/13/08) on hate-jock Michael Savage's latest charming escapades:

Conservative radio talkshow host Michael Savage has been sued in federal court in San Francisco by a liberal film group for making an allegedly baseless demand that YouTube Inc. take down one of its videos.

The video by Brave New Films was entitled Savage Hates Muslims and criticized an October 29, 2007, broadcast in which Savage...comments that Muslims should "take [their] religion and shove it up [their] behind" and should be deported....

YouTube did take down the video and temporarily disabled the entire YouTube channel of Brave New Films, according to the group. Brave New Films claims in the lawsuit that the take-down notice for the Savage Hates Muslims video was baseless because the excerpts were used for political commentary and thus protected by the legal doctrine of fair use.

Indeed, Robert Greenwald's Brave New Films also "claims the radio network and Savage engaged in 'knowing misrepresentation' because" just this July, one judge "dismissed a copyright infringement claim Savage filed against the Washington, D.C., based Council on American-Islamic Relations for using four minutes of excerpts from Savage's broadcast."

See the FAIR magazine Extra!: "Fair Use It or Lose It: Copyright Owners' Threats Erode Free Expression" (5-6/06) by Marjorie Heins

The failure to stop Proposition 8, California’s anti-gay marriage legislation, was a sad and sobering moment.

Sad as it furthered this nation's attempt at parceling out and denying certain freedoms of citizenship.

It was sobering because it happened during a historic election.

On the same night the nation elected its first African American president -- for the first time in 40 years it rid itself of Republican rule, embraced the idea of change and said no to dirty and divisive politics as well as war- and fear-mongering ideologues -- California stripped gays of their marital rights.

I just want to reiterate a very, very simple that I've made over and over again. It's a point that is really important to make before the vote on whether Joe Lieberman remains chairman of the committee whose main mission is to investigate the executive branch.

Joe Lieberman has made clear he thinks Barack Obama is a socialist who is a danger to the United States as president. Therefore, putting any personal animosity against Joe Lieberman aside, it's clear that giving Joe Lieberman subpoena power on a committee whose mission is investigating the executive branch of the supposed socialist who supposedly is a danger to the United States doesn't seem like a very good idea.

In fact, if anyone remembers the interchanges between Dan Burton and the Clinton administration, it seems like denying Lieberman that subpoena power is quite literally the only way to guarantee the "bipartisanship," "comity," "reconciliation" and whatever other synonyms the David Broders and Unity '08-ers and self-ordained "centrists" in Washington, D.C. purport to love.

They said it was all in their heads, but after all these years a federal report finally admits that Gulf War Illness is real.

Remembering the dead but sparing them the bad news at www.michaelmoore.com

During an interview on "60 Minutes" Sunday night, President-elect Barack Obama said he plans to close the US military prison at Guantanamo Bay and rebuild the nation's moral stature. Last week, the Associated Press reported Obama advisers are crafting a plan that would put some Guantanamo Bay prisoners in front of a new court system designed to handle so-called "national security" cases.

Watch part 2 of this segment here.

From The NY Times Sunday Magazine's Virginia Heffernan:

During the presidential election, YouTube turned from a hectic mosaic of weird video clips to a first-stop source for political everything. Every gotcha moment, spoof, pundit’s musing, TV clip, campaign speech, formal ad and handmade polemic cropped up there. Star posters like Brave New Films, Barely Political and Talking Points Memo TV emerged; they cranked out parody and propaganda much faster than the campaigns themselves. Was YouTube just a new place to envision an election that would have gone the same way without it? Or does the unpredictable new form of online video carry its own ideology — a new message to go with a new medium?

Twilight, the movie, comes out this week. It is based upon the bestselling novel by Stephenie Meyer, and, like the book, is said by many to be the "next Harry Potter," meaning it is the first young-reader book series to come close to the astronomical sales of J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series. (Meyer still has a lot of catching up to do, having sold "just" 17 million books worldwide, compared to Rowling's 400 million.)

While both sets of books deal with children and their adventures with the supernatural, that is where the similarities end.

Potter is aimed at a slightly younger demographic (9 to 12) and is loved by boys and girls alike; Twilight appeals mostly to older girls (14 to 19) and their sexually frustrated mothers.

The most startling difference between Twilight and Potter, however, is not dempgraphical; it is ideological. Put simply, Rowling and Potter live on the left; Meyer and Edward dwell on the right.

The tension surrounding tomorrow's secret ballot vote to determine Lieberman's fate in the Democratic caucus continues to build.  Late last week, Senators Sanders and Leahy publicly called for Lieberman's ouster from the Homeland Security committee.  Then Rachel Maddow challenged Lieberman to appear on her show to defend his partisan politics and poor committee leadership.  And today, Senators Carper and Dorgan came forward to claim Lieberman should be punished for actively campaigning against Barack Obama and other Democrats throughout the election, an amazing twist considering Carper was Lieberman's Delaware campaign chairman when he ran for president in 2004.  

All of this comes on the heels of our Lieberman Must Go campaign, in which over 1,700 people have already called their Senators and asked them to take away Lieberman's gavel tomorrow.  Forget the myth about needing Lieberman for a 60-seat filibuster proof majority -- or check out Mark Karlin's post at Buzzflash if you need that myth debunked.  Instead, think about what would happen if Lieberman were to remain chair of the Homeland Security committee.  All of his ugly smears of President-elect Obama would go unpunished.  All of his hawkish views of Iraq and Iran would go unchecked.  And all of his ineptitude when it comes to investigating the Bush administration for Hurricane Katrina or war profiteers would go unnoticed, as he sets his subpoena power sites on Obama. 

It's not to late to call your Senators and tell them Lieberman Must Go.

During Obama's first post-election interview on Sunday night, the President-elect told 60 Minutes that he would close the Guantanamo Bay prison facility and ban torture in order to "regain America's moral stature in the world."  Hopefully, these are steps Obama will take on his first day in office, and by putting a stop to unconstitutional military commissions, Obama can signal the end of eight years of human rights violations under the Bush administration.

You can help ensure Obama makes good on his promises to close Gitmo by signing the petition from the ACLU and Brave New Foundation.  Watch more of Obama's 60 Minutes interview here.

From HuffPo:

Fox news blowhard Bill O'Reilly stopped by "The Daily Show" Thursday for the first time since the election and stayed two segments. In the first Jon Stewart comforted him about his pre-election fears over Barack Obama, even giving him a stuffed animal to snuggle.

Later, talking about the secular revolution in America, O'Reilly told Stewart, "If you go to Alabama, you're going to be killed... they'll stone you to death." The argument turned to the traditions of America, with Stewart arguing the next step is gay marriage, which O'Reilly called, "your Greenwich Village opinion." O'Reilly then denied there was diversity in the Village to a jaw-dropped Stewart and insisted America is a center-right country.

The reason America invaded Iraq is not because Bush is a moron and Cheney a fascist.  The reason America gets into wars like Vietnam and Iraq, the reason why we spend $1.2 trillion per year on defense, the reason why we have 177 bases in foreign countries yet claim we are not imperialist, the reason why we have intervened militarily in more countries than any nation in world history, the reason external threats consistently are heightened and exaggerated is because of BIPARTISAN support for the national security state, supported, of course, by lobbyists from hundreds of defense-related companies who make a lot of money hyping threats and the glories of weapons systems which often don't work and/or bear little relevance to real threats and the politicians they support. 

Hillary and Bill Clinton are charter members of this bipartisan coalition supporting the national security state.

In Bill Clinton's first year in office, he gave the Pentagon $30 billion more than they asked for.  They surround themselves and agree with architects of this coalition, such as Madeleine Albright and Richard Holbrooke---both of whom not only actively supported the Iraq war but actively lobbied for the surge Joe Lieberman and John McCain loved so much.