Filibustering democrats bad, Filibustering republicans good!

NPR's Daniel Schoor on why the filibuster is good:

With 55 Senate seats held by the GOP, that should be no problem. But apparently there is a problem. As demonstrated in the spirited fight in the Foreign Relations Committee over Mr. Bolton, the Democrats seem united; the Republicans do not. Senator Frist must be aware that opinion polls reflect a general lack of enthusiasm for abolishing the filibuster.

Daniel Schoor now:

On occasion the frustrated majority has threatened to invoke what is called the nuclear option: a change in Senate rules that would require only a simple majority to overcome a filibuster. And so why don't the Democrats do it? Why do they leave themselves at the mercy of a minority? Until now the majority has been reluctant to end a venerable practice that it may want when it becomes a minority. But now the stakes for the nation are too high. A single senator has too much power to obstruct. A handful of senators can bog down the whole legislative process. It is time to restore majority rule as intended by our Constitution

I wonder what accounted for his change in heart?

Daniel Ellsberg – another lefty who never has to say he’s sorry.

One of the reasons I love listening to my local NPR affiliate is because every so often they trot out some long forgotten iconic lefty dinosaur and serenade them with love and beatifications.

WNYC’s On the Media resurrected the decrepit anti-Vietnam hero Daniel Ellsberg this weekend to lecture us on the hopelessness of Afghanistan and why we have to surrender there as well .... just praying that some “courageous” DOD functionary will leak the goods to seal Afghanistan’s fate.

For those of who don’t know the whole story, Ellsberg’s claim to fame is that in 1971 he leaked a top secret Rand Corporation assessment of the war in Vietnam to the Washington Post and NY Times. He was later tried on charges relating to espionage but the case ended in a mistrial, due in part to revelations that his shrinks office had been broken into by Nixon’s plumbers.

Ellsberg has spend the past 35 years milking his 15 minutes of fame for all its worth. While a minor player in the Vietnam saga, he portrays himself as one of the vanguard members in the anti-war effort, without whom we’d still be fighting there today. That’s not unusual. Some people who get accustomed to the limelight are unwilling to go quietly into the night and do whatever they have to stay in front of the cameras. They become comfortable with the narrative they construct about themselves and repeat it so often they come to believe it. Think of Lauren Conrad. But the public grows tired of hearing the same story time after time so Ellsberg had to get creative with his message and his audience.

He befriended Jim Jones, and spent time preaching the gospel of why America sucks at the People’s Temple a few short years before the bloodletting in Guyana. Ellsberg claimed that UN Ambassador Andrew Young told him that Martin Luther King jr had actually been assassinated by the FBI. So willing to sacrifice his reputation to get back into the limelight, Ellsberg actually wrote and signed an affidavit to this effect and submitted it to lawyer and crackpot extraordinaire Mark Lane (bosom buddy and legal consul to Jim Jones). He, along with hundreds of other useful idiots, signed a declaration calling for a investigation into the Soviet shoot down of Korean Airlines flight 007 after some shit head at The Nation Magazine alleged that the civilian airliner was actually a USAF reconnaissance flight and the passengers were sacrificed by Reagan to stoke anti-Soviet sentiment. Not to be out done, he also believes that “hardliners” within the Chairmen of the Joint Chief’s along with the CIA had JFK killed.

More recently Ellsberg has tried to maintain his relevance by hopping on board the 9/11 truth movement and by calling on “patriots” in the DOD to reveal any information about a potential military strike on Iran.

Ellsburg self righteous desperation to remain relevant has led him down a path that would assure, if he were a conservative, that no self respecting person would have anything to do with him … most definitely not one of the beautiful people over at NPR. The shameful allegations, relationships and outright lies, bordering on blood libel, should have guaranteed his relegation to the darker corners of American political life.

But like so many on the left who swim the waters of dark conspiracy, being a good left means never having to say you are sorry.

NPR's On the Media

NPR's on the Media is one of those cosmopolitan "smarter than thou" media watchdog shows on NPR. Its host, Bob Garfield, is a fairly reliable lefty .... sort of a walking stereotype of media bias and East Coast intelligencia.

This week Garfield was putting in work on another one of the administration’s obaminations (cute pun huh) debunking not only the birthers (more on that another day) but taking on some of those dastardly right wing radio hosts on the latest right wing lie concerning the health care debate.

BOB GARFIELD: Chief among those 10,000 issues is health care reform. But if Gibbs somehow believed the gravity of that matter guaranteed honest debate, he was sadly mistaken. It too was mired this week in a trumped up controversy over a nonexistent provision in the White House plan. Here on Fred Thompson’s radio show is supposed health care expert, Betsy McCaughey.

BETSY McCAUGHEY: One of the most shocking things I found in this bill, and there were many, is on page 425, where the Congress would make it mandatory, absolutely require, that every five years, people in Medicare have a required counseling session that will tell them how to end their life sooner.

BOB GARFIELD: Whoa! The Feds culling the population of those burdensome elderly? That is shocking — also, utterly untrue. The bill would simply allow seniors who do wish for professional advice on end of life issues, from will writing to hospice care, to get the government to pick up the tab.Yet, the euthanasia canard was parroted by House Republican Leader John Boehner and at least referenced by FOX News, CNN, The New York Post, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post.

Unfortunately for "Bob" he should have waited a week to run with this story ... it seems that those dastardly right wingers may have been onto something:

We knew it would come to this when Oregon insisted on passing its assisted-suicide laws. It doesn’t take much for assisted suicide to go from a humane option to a cost-saving device, especially when the state pays for the medical care. One patient in Oregon got a letter that made this all too clear, when in the same letter rejecting her request for life-extending chemotherapy, Oregon offered her “physician-aid-in-dying”. In other words, Oregon offered their customer a heapin’ helping of death:

NPR on Wishfull Thinking

With Obama’s poll numbers beginning to fall in line with the popularity of his specific policies and the continuing recession and high unemployment being hung around his administrations neck, the 2010 mid-terms may turn out to be less than kind.

Democrats giddy with possibilities only six months ago now confront a perilous 2010 landscape signaled by troublesome signs of President Barack Obama’s political mortality, the plunging popularity of many governors and rising disquiet among many vulnerable House Democrats.

The issue advantage has shifted as well, with Democrats facing the brunt of criticism about the pace of stimulus package spending, anxiety over rising unemployment rates and widespread uneasiness over the twin pillars of Obama’s legislative agenda: his cap-and-trade approach to climate change and the emerging health care bill.

Leave it NPR to ignore this and hope that the current advantage holds for another 18 months.

And while 15 months is a long way away, what CQ has to say is good news for the Democrats. The "in" party usually suffers losses in the midterm elections -- 2002 (GOP gains) and 1998 (Dem gains) being rare exceptions. Their verdict for 2010: Democrats "appear secure" in the House majority they won in 2006 and added to in '08.

But I suppose no one they know voted for Nixon.

Tea Part Parting Shots

Now that the media "elites" over at NPR and the Colombia Journalism review (whose director Victor Navasky I am currently writing an post on) are coming in to bayonet the wounded (or what they see as the wounded), I am reminded of something I read from Jonah Goldberg the other day. His whole post is worth the read, but this was the best.

3. These protests are unpatriotic astroturfing by plutocrats.

So much for "dissent is the highest form of patriotism"!

I find it sort of amazing that when groups like ANSWER, a Mos Eisley cantina of America-hating nut cases, take to the streets it's a full-flowering of democracy in action. When ACORN pays their ragamuffins to protest, or when Rainbow/PUSH shakes down businesses through racial extortion, it's the sort of direct democratic action Thomas Paine dreamed of. And when labor unions pay people to protest, it's populist. But when a bunch of independent Americans, talk-show hosts, and email campaigners organize hundreds of protests around the country, it's astroturfing.

Good stuff.

V-GWB Day

I am sure that everyone here just looveess NPR, right? The running joke with my father is that NPR (91.5 in Chicago) is on the far left of the dial for a reason. And as sure of our collective love for NPR as I am, I am equally sure that we all thought their 2008 election coverage was fair and balanced.

That’s why this blog entry from NPR’s former Ombudsman Jeffrey Dvorkin shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone, but the over the topness of it still made me crack a smile.

When President Obama was finally sworn in, every one in the cinema literally went crazy! One woman just in front of us was weeping and collapsed and had to be carried out.

We cried too and felt as close as we could to the event. We thought of all the people we knew in the US, and all of us who lived through the Bush years. It's not an accurate comparison, but as a recovering historian, I couldn't avoid the thought: is this how people in Europe might have felt at the Liberation in 1945?

Yes, after all, comparing an era in which nearly 100 million people died, another 100 million spend the next 50 years as slaves under the thumb of the Soviet Union and several ethnic and religious minorities were the victims of various acts of attempted genocide is certainly an apt parallel between the 8 years that George W Bush was the president.

There might be something to it …. after all vast swaths of Europe were subjected to tyranny, many more barely dodging the covert Soviet postwar expansion, and a wave of famine did sweep over the continent, so ironically Dvorkin might not be completely off the mark here.

It might behoove us all to remember that Dvorkin is the same pussy who refused to republish the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons asking if NPR would “post racist or anti-Semitic cartoons on its Web site in the name of free speech” and that those who wanted NPR to post the cartoons “want NPR to use the cartoon as a weapon against radical Islam”.