Hello Blog Readers,

I realize it’s been sometime since either I, or Jlee have made a post. I speak for myself and not for Jlee, but I have been super busy with personal things, and it’s hard to get around to posting here. Hopefully, I will be resuming posting, albeit light, by next week.

Thanks for being patient, and for reading this blog! And for keeping up the good fight!

- The Young Progressive

When Barack Obama visited France last year a British reporter asked the president whether he believed in American exceptionalism. Mr Obama said he did—“just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.” You may think that an agreeably tactful answer. And yet some conservatives have turned it into a profane text, one that proves Mr Obama’s unfitness for the great office he holds. More than a year after the event they are still banging on about it. In the Washington Post last week Charles Krauthammer wrote the latest of a stream of articles about the Perfidious Reply. With these words, say his detractors, Mr Obama showed his true colours as a man who does not believe genuinely in America’s greatness and is secretly reconciled to its eventual decline.

What is going on? The simplest explanation for this tempest in a teapot is that Mr Obama’s critics will seize on any perceived error. But it may be that those critics need to hear constant reaffirmations of American greatness because of the doubt planted in their own hearts by the country’s present travails.

This would not be the first time American intellectuals have been troubled by the sense of greatness slipping away. Previous episodes have not always coincided with hardship at home or testing foreign wars. Times of ease and plenty can bring on the same longing. In the 1950s, that golden age, Arthur Schlesinger Jr wrote “The Decline of Greatness”, lamenting the departure of great men and the nation’s descent into bland conformity.

This is why the greatness talk is not only divisive and obfuscatory but also sometimes dangerous. One antidote to ennui is war. In a recent history of American foreign policy, “The Icarus Syndrome”, Peter Beinart draws a comparison between the Kennedy administration and that of George W. Bush. Kennedy was ardent for glory and the cold war provided the arena. In the eyes of some American conservatives, the war against al-Qaeda offered a similar opportunity to answer the call of greatness. In both cases, Mr Beinart argues, the desire to do great deeds and not simply what was necessary led to episodes of overreach and disappointment.

America is a great nation, but we are not perfect.  Acknowledging the imperfections is not a sign of weakness.  This kind of rhetoric is the exact same thing the right deployed against liberals and progressives post 9-11.  Those of us who saw the connections between US Foreign Policy and the rise of al Qaeda were called “un-American,” the “blame America first crowd,” etc.  Such fallacious attacks should have no place in the political discourse.  We desperately need to elevate the level of debate in this country to where we can HONESTLY discuss the issues.

Trent Lott

I’ve seen it coming. Most likely you’ve seen it coming. It’s the GOP – Tea Party divide.

In 3 different primaries, we’ve seen establishment GOP candidates get taken out by no-name Tea Pottiers. Utah to Kentucky to Nevada.

In my own humble opinion, this will, in the end, hurt the GOP. I don’t think the American people will elect people with viewpoints so extreme as we’ve seen with Sharon Angle, Rand Paul, and a lot more of the Tea Party candidates. Apparently Former Mississippi Senator Trent Lott agrees:

Former Senate majority leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.), now a D.C. lobbyist, warned that a robust bloc of rabble-rousers spells further Senate dysfunction. “We don’t need a lot of Jim DeMint disciples,” Lott said in an interview. “As soon as they get here, we need to co-opt them.”

But Lott said he’s not expecting a tea-party sweep. “I still have faith in the visceral judgment of the American people,” he said.

 Read the whole article:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/07/17/AR2010071702375.html?hpid=topnews

Jason “J.T.” Ready is taking matters into his own hands, declaring war on “narco-terrorists” and keeping an eye out for illegal immigrants. So far, he says his patrols have only found a few border crossers who were given water and handed over to the Border Patrol. Once, they also found a decaying body in a wash, and alerted authorities.

But local law enforcement are nervous given that Ready’s group is heavily armed and identifies with the National Socialist Movement, an organization that believes only non-Jewish, white heterosexuals should be American citizens and that everyone who isn’t white should leave the country “peacefully or by force.”

“We’re not going to sit around and wait for the government anymore,” Ready said. “This is what our founding fathers did.”

An escalation of civilian border watches have taken root in Arizona in recent years, including the Minutemen movement. Various groups patrol the desert on foot, horseback and in airplanes and report suspicious activity to the Border Patrol, and generally, they have not caused problems for law enforcement.

But Ready, a 37-year-old ex-Marine, is different. He and his friends are outfitted with military fatigues, body armor and gas masks, and carry assault rifles. Ready takes offense at the term “neo-Nazi,” but admits he identifies with the National Socialist Movement.

“These are explicit Nazis,” said Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project. “These are people who wear swastikas on their sleeves.”

For more background, the SPLC has a report on Mr. Ready.  Among the highlights:

In 1996, while serving in the Marine Corps as a lance corporal, Ready was court-martialed twice. The first time, after being absent for eight days without authorization, he was convicted of unauthorized absence, failing to follow an order or regulation, and larceny and wrongful appropriation. He was convicted, demoted to private and jailed for three months. Later that year, Ready was court-martialed again for conspiracy, assault, and wrongful solicitation and advice. He was found guilty, spent six months in detention, and was discharged from the Marine Corps for bad conduct.

Beyond the absurdity of these civilian patrols in the first place, obviously, this is not the kind of person we want as an unofficial representative of the US.  And oh, this is most certainly NOT what “our Founding Fathers did.”  What a twisted view of history this guy has.



WOODRUFF: On those tax cuts, they are due to expire at the end of this year. Should they be extended? What should Congress do?

GREENSPAN: I should say they should follow the law and let them lapse.

WOODRUFF: Meaning what happens?

GREENSPAN: Taxes go up. The problem is, unless we start to come to grips with this long-term outlook, we are going to have major problems. I think we misunderstand the momentum of this deficit going forward.

This argument of stimulus versus non-stimulus, in my judgment, is not a critical issue, in one sense. We are going to be doing very well if we can keep the deficit to where we are now projecting it. The notion that we are somehow going to bring it in far more sharply is just utterly, politically unrealistic.

So it is not a question, do you have more stimulus now or do you have basically a significant contraction in the deficit? We are going to have continued expansion in government spending and increasing debt, because there is no evidence that we are closing the debt — the gap between receipts and expenditures yet. And it is going to be very tough to go up against the momentum that is currently going on.

WOODRUFF: So to those interests who say but wait a minute, if you let these taxes go my taxes go up, it is going to depress growth?

GREENSPAN: Yes, it probably will, but I think we have no choice in doing that, because we have to recognize there are no solutions which are optimum. These are choices between bad and worse.

As we have covered previously in this very blog, the Bush tax cuts comprise a sizable chunk of the deficit.  It’s also interesting to note Greenspan’s statement that there are “no solutions which are optimum.”  I think this is another point which ought to be highlighted.  The right is piling on Obama over the deficit (even though he didn’t create it, is actively trying to manage it, and although he did add somewhat to it, his contribution is in no way, shape, or form, as large as his predecessor’s) but I think very few people realize how dire the situation is.  I’m certainly not an economist, although my field of expertise requires some knowledge of economics, I am certainly no expert on the subject.  And it seems that so many people with even less understanding of economics are the ones yelling the loudest.

So, the report card?

Here’s one of the islands on June 25th:

And here’s the same island, from roughly the same vantage point, taken last Wednesday the 7th.

Discovery News Reports:

All three images were first published yesterday by coastal scientist Leonard Bahr on his blog, LACoastPost.Bahr, a former researcher at Louisiana State University, spent 18 years in the governor’s office, advising five administrations on their coastal policy.

“There have been a number of plans over 20 years to save the coast,” he said. “But after Katrina, it morphed into ‘coastal protection,’ which gives me pause.”

The crucial difference is that within the Jindal administration, coastal policy has been cast as a war between man and the sea. Plans have been devised to build massive levees and other earthworks to defend the Mississippi River delta and its marshes from the Gulf of Mexico.

The trouble is, building such ramparts could choke off the marshes by impeding the natural ebb and flow of the tides. Fish and wildlife may not be able to access the fertile estuaries, which they use as breeding ground. And the whole delta is sinking anyway (while sea level rises), making it just a matter of time before the levees are over-topped by a strong storm.”Building what they call ‘the Louisiana wall’ makes sense at first, but the science doesn’t support it,” Bahr said. “The science should be leading this issue, but it isn’t. It never has.”

By the by, if the tea party folks are going to insist on referring to the President as “Barack Hussein Obama,” than isn’t it also appropriate to refer to Gov. Jindal as Piyush Amrit Jindal?

But I digress.

The GOP doesn’t care about science.  This is merely the latest example.  It’s stuff that sounds good in theory to a layperson, but never works out in the end.  Sorry Gov. Jindal, your plan didn’t work, but thanks for wasting tax payer money, even though scientists told you not to.  Brilliant!

Barber was beaten in a landslide by his opponent, Martha Roby  I can’t help but laugh a little…ok, a lot.  Not only were the videos blasphemously inaccurate to the Found Fathers’ ideals, it saddens me to see that the level of the political discourse in this country has fallen to a level where simply dressing someone up in a costume of the Founding Fathers somehow qualifies as a cogent argument.

Judge Napolitano

I must admit, this came as a huge surprise..

In an interview with Ralph Nader on C-Span this weekend, Napolitano said Bush and Vice President Cheney “should have been indicted” for torture:

NADER: What’s the sanction for President Bush and Vice President Cheney? [...]

NAPOLITANO: They should have been indicted. They absolutely should have been indicted for torturing, for spying, for arresting without warrants. I’d like to say they should be indicted for lying but believe it or not, unless you’re under oath, lying is not a crime. At least not an indictable crime. It’s a moral crime.

NADER: So you think George W. Bush and Dick Cheney should even though they’ve left office, they haven’t escaped the criminal laws, they should be indicted and prosecuted?

NAPOLITANO: The evidence in this book and in others, our colleague the great Vincent Bugliosi has amassed an incredible amount of evidence. The purpose of this book was not to amass that evidence but I do discuss it, is overwhelming when you compare it to the level of evidence required for a normal indictment that George W. Bush as President and Dick Cheney as Vice President participated in criminal conspiracies to violate the federal law and the guaranteed civil liberties of hundreds, maybe thousands of human beings. [THINKPROGRESS]

Wow. Kudos to the Judge for finally saying something right!

Read on:

When Thomas Shaw gets worked up, he twists in his chair and kneads his hand. Or he paces about in his tube socks grumbling, “They’re trying to destroy us,” and “The whole thing is a giant scam.” And Shaw, the founder of a medical device maker called Retractable Technologies, spends a lot of time being agitated.

One of the topics that gets him most riled up these days is bloodstream infections. And with good reason–while most people rarely think about them, these are the most dangerous of the hospital-acquired bugs that afflict one in ten patients in the United States. Their spread has helped to make contact with our health care system the fifth leading cause of death in this country.

A few years ago, Shaw, an engineer by training, decided he wanted to do something to help solve this problem and quickly homed in on the mechanics of needle-less IV catheters. Rather than using needles to inject drugs into IV systems, most hospitals have moved to a new design, which involves screwing the threaded tip of a needle-less syringe into a specially designed port. The problem is that if the tip brushes against a nurse’s scrubs, or a counter, or the railing of a hospital bed, it can pick up bacteria. And the rugged threaded surface makes it difficult to get rid of the germs once they’re there. Often, the bacteria go straight into the patients’ bloodstream–which explains why, according to some studies, the rate of bloodstream infections is three times higher with needle-less systems than with their needle-based counterparts.

After months of trial and error, Shaw hit on the idea of surrounding the tip of the syringe with six petal-like flanges, which could flare open to make way for the catheter port. Unlike some of the solutions floated by big medical device makers, such as coating the ports with silver, Shaw’s innovation added only a few pennies to the cost of production. And it seemed to be remarkably effective: a 2007 clinical study funded by Shaw’s company and conducted by the independent SGS Laboratories found the device prevented germs from being transferred to catheters nearly 100 percent of the time.

Given these facts, you might expect that hospitals would be lining up to buy Shaw’s product. But that is not the case, even though his company is offering to match whatever price medical facilities are paying for their current, infection-prone IV catheter syringes.

In summary: The Dutch offer was made before the leak was discovered. The EPA declined the deal (it had nothing to do with the Jones act.  We discovered the leak and the offer was reiterated.

Another right wing talking point bites the dust.