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Obama takes advice offered. The Advocate interview.

Sen. Barack Obama was encouraged at a recent LGBT fund-raiser in NYC to grant more interviews to the LGBT press. It seemed he wouldn't follow the advice when he failed to given an interview to Philadelphia Gay News. But he recently granted an interview to The Advocate, a national LGBT publication.

From the interview:

[The Advocate:] I think the underlying fear of the gay community is that if you get into office, will LGBT folks be last on the priority list?

[Sen. Obama:] I guess my point would be that the fact that I'm raising issues accordant to the LGBT community in a general audience rather than just treating you like a special interest that is sort of off in its own little box -- that, I think, is more indicative of my commitment.

.....

An area that I’m very interested in is making sure that federal benefits are available to same-sex couples who have a civil union. I think as more states sign civil union bills into law the federal government should be helping to usher in a time when there’s full equality in terms of what that means for federal benefits.

The religious right's attacks on mainline Protestantism

Over at dkos, Troutfishing wisely calls our attention to the American rightwing's attacks against mainline Protestantism. These attacks began decades ago, but continue right up until today, including the racist and hypocritical talking points about the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, which the mainstream media mindlessly parrots.

(For some sense of the hypocrisy involved, read this and this about how religious right pastors routinely attack the United States of America and damn it for this or that, and they're called patriots. What is more, Rev. Wright's comments were an echo in biblical language the opinions of the former US ambassador to Iraq.)

Troutfishing highlights the new video Renewal or Ruin? about the perversely named Institute for Religion and Democracy (IRD), a component of American radical conservatism's war against mainline Protestant churches. Learn more about the IRD at www.ird-info.com.

From the post:

Attacks on the National Council Of Churches, smearing that body and liberal Christianity in general, as socialist or crypto-marxist, began as early as the 1950's (and possibly even before then) but the  full-blown right wing war on the historically liberal mainline Christian denominations did not begin until the 1980's...

The new left, the progressive left, needs all its components, all its allies and all its possible strength if the nascent movement is to change America and help lead the world away from reactive politics,  away from endless war and towards hope....

FoxAttacks.com

Following the gripe channel's lies, innuendos, and gimmicks: FoxAttacks.com.

Holding Democratic politicians accountable for practicing transformational politics

New York State Senator Eric Schneiderman has written a great article in The Nation, "Transforming the Liberal Checklist," calling for progressive politicians to "expand their job descriptions" to include transformational politics, not just transactional politics. Transformational politics changes hearts and minds; it moves the voters closer to your position on issues, instead of compromising to move yourself closer to where voters may be.

The article not only highlights the urgent need for progressives to demand evidence of transformational politics from their elected officials (candidate questionnaires don't cut it), but also proposes possible ways to help reframe the issues of reproductive choice, taxation, health care, and gun control.

Reproductive choice: Is it "a duel between 'prochoice' and 'prolife' extremists--or...an issue of basic human freedom for women denied the power to control their own bodies?

Health care: Does it require a "balance between the free market and socialism--or [is it] an essential investment in our most important national resource and a basic right, without which our commitment to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is meaningless?"

I encourage you to read the article for additional insights and ideas from Schneiderman.

As has been repeatedly stressed on this website, relative to many issues--including the four mentioned above--the modern conservative movement owns the debate and is allowed to set the rhetorical context. I.e., through control of the corporate media they set the rules and are allowed to limit all debates' directions and options in their favor even before progressives have opened their mouths or written a word of legislation. Reversing this situation will take time, money, and great effort...just as it took conservatives time (three decades), money, and great effort to create the situation.

(New York State Senator Schneiderman, right, with New York Lt. Governor, David Paterson. From The New York Times.)

"The Rules" will be applied to Obama, too

Orcinus provides an apt reminder that there is a rule beloved by and deeply ingrained into the mainstream media (MSM). The Rule is: Rumors about liberals are true until proved otherwise (i.e., after the damage has already been done). Orcinus uses the term that Digby of Firedoglake coined, "The Clinton Rules," but it is basically a single rule as described above, and it is applied by the MSM to pretty much any liberal leader.

Using the Clinton example, however, Orcinus notes how even in the very last days of the Clinton administration, the MSM was still as a united chorus eagerly giving legitimacy to bullshit. They spread tales of about gifts to Mrs. Clinton and wrecked keyboards in the White House that were later discovered to be patently false.

not only was the gifts story entirely bogus -- which didn't stop the press from avidly circulating it anyway -- but so was the entire "Trashing the White House" story.

And to Democrats and Independents who think that Sen. Obama, if the nominee, will somehow not have The Rule applied to him, too, Orcinus gives us the words of

Stanley Fish [who] quite adroitly observed:

Electability (a concept invoked often) is a code word that masks the fact that the result of such reasoning is to cede the political power to the ranters. Carolyn Kay...makes the point when she observes that if you vote against Clinton because you fear the virulence of her most vocal enemies, “you have allowed the right-wing hatemongers to decide who our candidate will be.” Underlying this surrender of the franchise to those least qualified to exercise it is the complaint (rarely overtly stated) that the Clintons have had the bad taste to undergo the assassination of their characters in public and have thereby made us its unwilling spectators.

Orcinus's conclusion puts Fish's observation in the Obama context:

Moreover, the Clinton Rules are a systemic problem, not a personal one. People today forget that when he was elected in 1992, Bill Clinton's campaign was all about finding a "new vision" and a fresh, bipartisan approach to politics, "reaching across the aisle" and forging the same kind of alliances that Barack Obama likes to tout now. He entered office full of hope that he could work with conservatives and liberals alike to get things done -- essentially the same kind of politics Obama is now touted by the George Wills of the Beltway for representing.

Well, we all saw how that worked out, didn't we?

Don't worry: If Obama is in fact the nominee, you can bet your bottom dollar that the Clinton Rules will be applied to him as well. We've already seen the germ of this with the "cult of Obama" nonsense, which has already morphed into the "Obama equals Hitler" meme.

Trust me, it's just the beginning.

Trust Orcinus, it is just beginning. And it will become, without a doubt, very, very ugly.

The news decides what's news . . . often badly

Attempting to cut through the "end is nigh"-sounding melodramatics about rare but tragic occurrences and voyeuristic salaciousness of celebrity lives "news" comprising most of American "journalism," Steve Salerno in his article "Journalist-Bites-Reality!," points out how poorly the media understands the basic concepts of what is and isn't proper reporting--often because they fail to understand probability.

*The current employment rate is 95.3%.
*Out of 300 million Americans, roughly 299.999954 million were not murdered today.
*Day after day, some 35,000 commercial flights traverse our skies without incident.
*The vast majority of college students who got drunk last weekend did not rape anyone, or kill themselves or anyone else in a DUI or hazing incident. On Monday, they got up and went to class, bleary-eyed but otherwise okay.

It is not being a Pollyanna to state such facts, because they are facts. Next time you watch the news, keep in mind that what you’re most often seeing is trivia framed as Truth.

Saucy blogging when you can't afford anything else

From Vanessa Grigoriadis's article about Gawker.com, published in New York Magazine.

[Blogging] has lent itself...perfectly to capturing the current ethos of young New York, which is overwhelmingly tipped toward anger, envy, and resentment at those who control the culture and apartments. “New York is a city for the rich by the rich, and all of us work at the mercy of rich people and their projects,” says Choire Sicha, Gawker’s top editor (he currently employs a staff of five full-time writers). “If you work at any publication in this town, you work for a millionaire or billionaire. In some ways, that’s functional, and it works as a feudal society. But what’s happened now, related to that, is that culture has dried up and blown away....”
.....
Youthful anxiety and generational angst about having been completely cheated out of ownership of Manhattan, and only sporadically gaining it in Brooklyn and Queens, has fostered a bloodlust for the heads of the douchebags who stole the city. It’s that old story of haves and have-nots, rewritten once again.

Freedom of speech under assault - Fuck you very much, the FCC

(Hat-tip to One Good Move.) From The New York Times:

At the height of his bardic powers, Allen Ginsberg could terrify the authorities with the mere utterance of the syllable “om” as he led street throngs of citizens protesting the Vietnam War. Ginsberg reigned as the raucous poet of American hippiedom and as a literary pioneer whose freewheeling masterwork “Howl” prevailed against government censorship in a landmark obscenity trial 50 years ago.

It is with a queasy feeling of history in retreat that poetry lovers discover that WBAI, long the radio flagship of cocky resistance to government excess, decided last week that it couldn’t risk a 50th anniversary broadcast of the late poet’s recording of “Howl.” The station retreated out of fear that the Federal Communications Commission would levy large obscenity fines that might bankrupt the small-budget station.

Courtesy of Monty Python's Flying Circus's Eric Idle: The song, "So Fuck You All Very Much" (Listen here; extended version here.)

Military bans access to ThinkProgress

ThinkProgress banned by US military. Of course, Fox News is still accessible.

Did Craig really do anything wrong?

Finally, somebody points out that really Sen. Larry Craig didn't do anything demonstrably illegal.