No I will not just let it go

If you weren’t one of the people who turned on the radio on March 31, 2004 at noon and had the sense of “Yes! I’m home!”, you can go read something else. Because there is no way you can possibly fathom what the millions (and yes, there were millions) of people who were Air America listeners went through as they watched various permutations of management run something fresh and potentially wondrous into the ground because they couldn’t see past their own noses.

Melina, who knows more about the business of radio than you and I ever will, for reasons it’s up to her to reveal, wrote about the final stake in the rotting heart of Air America yesterday. But there is something else going on that has angry Air Americans, specifically Morning Seditionists, coming out of the woodwork like zombies risen from the grave.

As Melina wrote, Danny Goldberg, who is perhaps the person most responsible for wrecking the programming that Air America offered in the early days, must have been feeling pretty guilty lo these last four years (assuming he has a conscience, which is doubtful), because he posted this laughable screed over at Down with Tyranny. Now, here at B@B, we loves us some DWT, but giving space to this revisionist scumbag has to have grown of nothing but the chumminess of two music industry vets and nothing approaching reality.

95 comments later, insiders from Air America in general and Morning Sedition in particular are starting to tell their stories, and they aren’t pretty. From original producer Jonathan Larsen (now a producer on Countdown with Keith Olbermann, proving beyond a doubt that living well is the best revenge) to the zany Jim Earl (of Sammy the Stem Cell, Morning Remembrance, and Rapture Watch fame), to the anonymous staffers, the people who were there are using Goldberg’s Variations as a springboard to finally, after four years, tell their stories.

WWRL here in New York is showing signs of a revamped drive-time lineup that includes ex-late-AAR-er Jack Rice until 6 PM, followed by, yes, Morning Sedition‘s straight man, Mark Riley, from 6-8, which would be a not-half-bad lineup if the memories of Randi Rhodes, Marty Kaplan, and Sam Seder weren’t still so fresh and raw.

So go read what really happened, then come back and click the audio player in the right-hand sidebar….and listen to the Best Damn Show Ever on Radio as its sounds hopefully haunt Danny Goldberg to madness. Then maybe you’ll understand why, after four years, we’re still angry.

A few (OK, maybe not so few) words about the Edwards debacle

At first I thought I’d just let this sit, because a) the story is finally, mercifully starting to fade in the press, and b) we don’t practice tabloid blogging here. But I was talking to someone the other day about how disappointing Barack Obama has been in so many ways, and I said, “Well, what do I know? Look who I supported in the primaries.”

In August 2007, I received an e-mail from an old friend from the 2004 Dean campaign, informing me that Elizabeth Edwards was doing a book signing in Ridgewood, and they wanted to have a fundraiser for the Edwards campaign beforehand, and did I know anyone who’d be willing to host it. And before I’d even had a chance to think, I’d the reply button and said I’d host it.

Here’s the thing: my house is not at all set up to host something like this. We bought it in 1996, a house where nothing had been done with it at all since 1975. Most of the money we put into it until this year was on structural things — siding, windows, furnace, electrical work, gutters, etc. The cosmetics inside are still a disaster after almost 14 years. I still have a half-unfinished cabinet reface job going in the kitchen, we still have the ugly red carpet from the previous owners of the house, both bathrooms are in desperate need of not just updating, but gutting and replacing, and so on. All this will be taken care of at some point, but the point is that the interior of my house is hardly the kind of place that makes one want to invite in a bunch of strangers plus the wife of a presidential candidate, especially when said wife and said candidate live in the kind of bigass house that now appears they built specifically so they would not have to be together in it.

And so on an August night, cars were lined up all along my block, two volunteers from the Edwards campaign came over and decided how to traffic people around, two dear friends from town who used to have a deli brought a coffee pot, a table, and other things to set up food, and Elizabeth Edwards came to my house. And she was just as nice as can be. She didn’t care one bit about the half-finished reface job or the ugly red carpet or the newel post that needs refinishing. And at the time, as all the cars pulled away, I said, “That may be the single coolest thing I have ever done.” Somewhere in my house, I forget where at the moment, is a photograph of me with Elizabeth Edwards. It’s one of the few photographs ever taken of me in my adult life where I don’t look like a troll.

The book Game Change paints an extremely unflattering picture of Elizabeth Edwards as some kind of shrieking harpy who deserved to have her husband out fucking some flake who believes her baby is the reincarnation of a Buddha. Judith Warner in the New York Times seems relieved that the idea that you can’t be loved if you aren’t thin, young, and botoxed remains intact, going along with the new myth that Elizabeth Edwards was so intolerable that she drove her husband into the arms of another woman.

I’m not sure why it’s become so necessary to take Elizabeth Edwards down. I don’t think any of us ever bought that she was a saint. What she was for those of us who are middle-aged and not beauties is a high-profile exception to the rule that once you are older and no longer beautiful, and not resorting to false means in an ultimately futile attempt to look young, you are worthless. And that’s why the viciousness of the very same media that dismissed her husband as a lying, cheating scumbag (which we now know he is) turning so equally viciously on her strikes me as piling on.

As always in such cases, we rely on Kate Harding as a rare voice of sanity:

A Public Policy Polling survey taken after “Game Change” came out found Elizabeth Edwards’ popularity at 46 percent, a 12-point drop since May. (Small consolation: Hubby’s now at a record-breaking low of 15 percent.) So now, just as she’s finally getting free of that philandering son of a millworker (and, after the tequila shots are digested, facing single motherhood and a fatal illness at age 60), she’s also dealing with an unprecedented hit to her own reputation. It just seems so unfair. Tracy Clark-Flory wrote of the Edwardses’ split yesterday, “She’s better than this absurdly tawdry scandal, and it isn’t hers to endure.” But it has been hers to endure for ages now, and the final insult is the latest buzz — that actually, maybe she isn’t better than all this.

Maybe she is and maybe she isn’t — how would most of us ever know? Books like “Game Change” and “The Politician,” regardless of their accuracy, remind us that the public faces of politicians and their families can be worlds away from the private ones, and our opinions about who’s fit to lead the country are often based at least as much on carefully manipulated emotions as facts. It’s entirely possible that the image of Saint Elizabeth was nothing but the smartest, most effective P.R. move the Edwards campaign ever pulled off. But I find it hard to believe it was all an illusion — they can take away her reputation as a gentle stoic, but not the intelligence or demonstrated fortitude or public grace upon which her compelling persona was built. And while I’m still irritated that people are trashing her even as her soon-to-be-ex-husband’s list of confessed and alleged misdeeds grows ever longer and more headsmackable — a sex tape, are you kidding me, John Edwards? — maybe losing a pedestal you’ve been forced to stand on for years can ultimately be as liberating as losing an endlessly thoughtless and embarrassing spouse. You can’t be an acknowledged saint and a living human being at the same time, after all. So maybe all of this — the separation and the wave of public criticism — will clear the way for Elizabeth Edwards to be more fully herself, whatever that really means. I’m pretty sure I’d still like to have a beer with her.

I don’t know why we as a society so cruelly judge women whose husbands are cheaters. Perhaps it’s the way we insulate ourselves against the uncomfortable notion that our own husbands could cheat too. If we can somehow make it HER fault, then we can avoid HER mistakes and inoculate ourselves. WE won’t be controlling. WE will get botox and somehow find two hours to spend at the gym every day. WE will never gain weight. WE will never look old. WE have control.

Except that we don’t.

I think one of the reasons that Hillary Clinton took such crap when her husband cheated on her so publicly is because if we could blame it on some idea that she too is a harpy, a castrating bitch, it means she “deserved” to have her husband cheat on her. And if we can paint these high-profile women as deserving of being treated like crap by her husbands, there’s something we can do to prevent it in our own lives. There ARE things we can do, of course, but they have to do with attention and caring and affection, not botox and Pilates.

Look, we’re all guilty of taking our marriages for granted at times. And when we do, that’s what opens the door for someone else who’s willing to pay attention to step in. It takes work to make a marriage work; it doesn’t just happen. And one would hope that for those of us not in the public eye, if there’s something we need that we’re not getting, we trust our spouses enough to ask for it. But I don’t know if high profile public marriages work the same way. It’s like being the wife of a professional athlete (see also: Tiger Woods). It’s almost as if cheating goes with the package and you’re tacitly signing on to look the other way when it happens. But when you marry a law student, you don’t necessarily know that he’s going to run for President. So neither Elizabeth Edwards nor Hillary Clinton signed onto that bargain the way Elin Nordegren could have realized she was doing.

What bothers me most about l’affaire Edwards, and what sticks in my craw most, is how John Edwards bounded into a breakout session at Yearly Kos 2007 and the first words out of his mouth were “I just talked to Elizabeth, and she’s doing great” — and the room erupted in cheers and applause. And he knew then it was a sham. And then I think about Elizabeth Edwards, standing on the stair landing in my house, talking about “John’s vision for a better America” — the vision that at that time neither Barack Obama nor Hillary Clinton was addressing, and I think “She knew even then, and she continued to campaign for him.” And then I’m tempted to feel betrayed by her too, until I remember further how fast she was talking, as if she was in some kind of a race — a race against time, a race against her illness, a race against the reckoning of the wreckage of her marriage that she knew she would inevitably have to face.

In that summer of 2007, when I longed for another true progressive candidate like Howard Dean, and Barack Obama hadn’t yet started with the kind of progressive rhetoric we’d see later (the kind he abandoned immediately upon taking office), and Hillary Clinton was at Yearly Kos saying “Lobbyists are Americans too”, John Edwards was the closest thing we had at that point.

And what I remember most about that August evening is how gracious Elizabeth Edwards was and how she didn’t even seem to notice the ratty carpet and the grubby, loose newel post and the half-finished reface job in the kitchen.

So Long Air America Radio…

There was a time when I listened to AAR all day. The early programming was that good, and with the exception of the grating Randi Rhodes who I sometimes couldn’t take, it was my touchstone of sanity at a dark time in American politics. At some point I realized that I was keeping the radio on all day as I went through my schedule, often stopping to write things down and look them up, always feeling like there was some small ray of hope in what had become a real national nightmare.

For AAR, still considered fledgling, its been a rough go of investors and owners who wanted to see a profit in a business that is guaranteed to not show a profit for years. The lack of patience that each management team has shown was uniquely American, causing the loss of its best shows, tinkering all the time rather than allowing momentum to grow, and missing chances to build on the incredible well of talent that had been assembled from the beginning. Someone was sleeping in Broadcasting 101, unless this was just another corporate fuck, with the attitude of ‘how much can we get out of this sucker?’ and leave the drained carcass to die. The teams that came and went certainly talked a good game aboutAAR being more than just a station; yeah, really, “a movement!!” but the problem is bigger than just that; Americans want their profit and their big screen TV yesterday. We haven’t yet lined up our Rupert Murdoch, willing to lose billions of dollars in service to a message. The visionary part of that for theneocon very rich is the long run, where an administration like Bushco actually pays them and their friends back tenfold in contracts and breaks. Im not so sure that the very rich liberals are that tied in to the military complex or visionary enough in the same sort of cut throat take over the world vision.

The day that Ronald Reagan did away with the fairness doctrine which protected our airwaves from the likes of the sort of big business machine that has come to rule them, was the day that this all began. The airwaves belong to the American people and the push of capitalism to take over and privatize everything is uniquely …um…neocon. Privatization with regulations cut, and batty uncle Ronny saying “why do we need regulations? Old Mr Floyd from the hardware store down the street is perfectly willing to police himself…? Right?” Of course, the legacy of that deregulation has come to fruition now in the Supreme Court ruling that corporations have seemingly endless rights…forget it, we’re fucked…

So long AAR; it went into reruns last Thursday and no one even noticed. The New York Times had a piece the other day about how liberal radio has to be more business-like and in these troubling financial times it was a bad business proposition,yada, yada, yada….
OK, was anyone gonna get rich on this? They were fools if they thought so. The new corporate model of a quick payout doesn’t work in this medium, and trying to force that made the thing messy and embarrassing by the end, with the likes of the well hated, smarmy, Mark Green and his infomercials and continual failed bids at being a political player…”hey, wanna go on a cruise?”…yuck!

AAR was a mad experiment cast by the minds that brought us the likes of the Daily Show, it had a different tone, and it expected more of the audience than to just sit back and absorb the lies; the early Air America challenged us to think, reason, and take control of our lives using the tool of truth. The entire weekday lineup was challenging and at a time where the government was spewing lies at us, echoed by the main stream media news outlets, so, it followed that this programming would take all the more time to find its audience and create the foundation upon which to grow. We sounded like conspiracy theorists beforeAAR came along and we had Al Franken fact checking everything thoroughly…to the point that no matter what anyone said about him and how ne presented things, they coulldnt say that what he said wasnt true. This was a revelation for me; you could hate Al and his persona, you could say “youre gonna believe that guy?” but you couldnt ever say that his facts were incorrect.
It did find an audience, in that the numbers were growing with the kind of fans that are loyal and long-term. The problem was to maintain an already screwed up business situation and for that they brought in the wrong person.

Danny Goldberg, CEO/investor/good friend of Don Imus, and a music industry “big shot”, seemed to think that with Don’s input he could program a radio station like he was rearranging the songs on a record or the members of a band. Coming into a situation midstream must have been difficult for him, and the pressure of the board and stockholders was an issue but really, what was needed was a firm hand in assuring everyone that tinkering too much would dislodge the invaluable hardcore fans in the service of passing numbers. According to Goldberg, he turned himself inside out fighting The Man, saving RachelMaddow from obscurity, and if not for the stockholders and capitalism in general, he was going to save radio from itself.
This guy thought that his gut could somehow turn AAR into a profitable business, way ahead of schedule, and on top of that he would tinker with a lineup with steadily growing numbers to try to create a magic that he knew nothing about. If he thought he could show a profit at that point and presented himself in that light, he was full of shit. No programming, much less a new station which is building an audience could be profitable in that amount of time. In a way it was folly to put a non-radio guy in that job in the first place, but perhaps that was the only way that the investors could hear what they wanted to; that this thing wasn’t going to hemorrhage money for 4 or 5 years at least. Goldberg quickly ushered in the beginning of the end of AAR and as much as I understand that he viewed this as production pre-release, he was unprepared for what would happen when he messed with what was a good lineup. His claims that he was hired to raise money fall on deaf ears here, because he clearly was rearranging the lineup more than he was out raising money. This was not the job for him.

Yesterday Goldberg wrote what I’m sure he thinks is the definitive obit of AAR at Down With Tyranny , (and then much more in comments,) alot of pap about how he struggled under the finger of the money people, and how they stopped him from raising funds because of their feelings of asking for funds being unseemly…huh?…He said that maybe he was an asshole sometimes…he had such a hard time…etc…feel sorry for him?…No! He walked out of there with a big payout at a time when the station was foundering, and was one person who did OK in the situation; he didn’t take a bath the way others did and he took his payout while others, like talent whodidnt come into this rich, were owed money. Its not our problem that he accepted a job for less money than he normally makes; he did OK for doing not much that was helpful andalot that was destructive.

What I know from the inside and as the spawn of a radio family, is that you don’t treat people, much less the working talent, like shit, especially in their last weeks. Goldberg might have made the mistake of his life by trying to “saveAAR” instead of staying in the music business “where he belongs,” but during his time at AAR he certainly tried to cut a bold swath of change, relegating the same Maddow that he supposedly saved from obscurity, FROM the 9AM-noon slot in the fantastic Unfiltered show, TO the dead 5AM slot. He then set about deconstructing Morning Sedition, which was one of the best shows on radio, period. He didn’t likeMaron and he didn’t get the comedy. He didn’t make a secret of that either, and to say that it was purely a business decision forced on him by the stockholders and other bosses is disingenuous at best.

Goldberg knows the truth, and regardless of the depths of his depression, which may have had him playing solitaire on his computer for hours on end in his office, rather than raising funds or whatever it was that he was supposed to be doing, he isn’t going to be able to escape what happened and his part in it. Tying himself to the coat tails ofMaddow is not going to change history either; sorry. The advice of Don Imus was wrong; Goldberg had no talent in programming and tinkering, and every move he made was to render the programming into a more and more dumbed down,happy, format. It did whatAAR had never done, which was to pander to the audience. By the time he had alienated the base, what was left?

The Mark Riley Show was what Goldberg wanted, and it was junk….totally junk. It reminded me of the Whoopie Goldberg Feel Good Show, which was not what the base was tuning in for. Riley was a pawn in all of that, and his show was painful to listen to. What could he follow up that sort of brilliance with? The Riley Show was what Goldberg thought was good radio. Regardless of the corporate structure or the financial situation, this guy came into a tanking situation and instead of trying to shore up what was there and growing he decided to scramble it all up and put the best talent either out of a job or in the boondocks. Even with star power, had any been there beyond those with a strong following, it would have been starting over. I havealot of trouble with Goldbergs’s line about firing Maron to save Maddow. I just don’t think that’s true at all…and I am sure that Rachel is not thanking Goldberg for her great career.

Rachel had star power when she started Unfiltered, and continued to be herself on the same intense level straight through to Olbermann regardless of and in spite of Goldberg. The first thing he did was to cancel her show!! Those who got put at 5AM or on Sundays were those with contracts still in effect as opposed to those who’s contracts were up.

What became of those talented players? Check out Maron’s fantastic WTF Podcast and of course the Rachel Maddow show, which is a must watch every night of the week on MSNBC. I am assuming that Maddow’s radio show is no longer available anywhere.
For background on that one particularly brilliant show and its comedy bits, check out Sedition Radio for which we owe PJ Sauter a huge debt of gratitude. The rest is out there if you look for it: Unfiltered, Sam Seder, Janeane Garafolo, even Al and Randi who had their ups and downs, but still are sorely missed around here… Lizz Winstead deserves a shout for putting alot of it together; Its over for good.

AAR as it was in the beginning, brought me laughter, joy, relief, and a kind of deep misery at its loss, that I couldn’t have expected. I always though that this was so much more than a radio station and should be funded by a Rupert Murdoch type of deep pocket investor, but for whatever reasons it was set up wrong, by the wrong business folks and that doomed it from the start. Its all about the money in the end, and the money wasn’t there…but it should have been, considering how much money is out there in liberal land. Showing a growing audience of loyal listeners and tapping those listeners for funding would surely have gone further towards interesting investors than dismantling what they had back to zero.

What of the Fairness Doctrine? These are our airwaves and just because Rush Limbaugh is a huge corporate force barreling through all sense and reason, doesn’t mean that this outlet shouldn’t be regulated by the government so that one corporation can exert too much influence on people because of money…um…oh yeah…never mind; corporations are now individuals with rights. As it stands our free airwaves are being used to misinform the people of this country, leaving the Fairness Doctrine as perhaps the most important political issue to address because of the way it touches all other issues; voting on issues that you have been lied to about comes to mind.

It was an idea and a dream, and much like Obama not being a corporatist or Edwards telling even the most basic truth, its all gone now. Rush andO’Reilly can breathe a sign of relief because there is really only Sirius Left, for those who have the subscription money; Internet radio shows for those who can afford the Internet …the rabble will never hear a bit of truth. Maybe its when things are really bad and there is no hope left, that some sort of movement will begin that will rise up and again give voice to the progressive agenda. Heaven knows we’re out here in Internet-land shouting into the black hole and hoping someone hears. But there is too much noise, and we need more than just one Rachel Maddow to move this thing forward.

Its kind of sad to let those dreams go. But somewhere out there in podcasts or blogtalkradio format the message still lives, and in that there is hope, even if its sketchy….
godspeed to our kids, that’s all I can say…this is a very different country than any of us could have imagined.

c/p RIP Coco

(UPDATE: From the comments, former Morning Sedition producer and current producer of WTF Brendan McDonald (who was there at the time) debunks Danny Goldberg’s Variations.

The State of the Onion

(By American Zen‘s Mike Flannigan, on loan from Ari.)

As far as disappointments, I wasn’t terribly disappointed because I didn’t expect that much. – Howard Zinn (1922-2010)

Amid the shuffle of the drinking games, live-blogging and partisan yelling on both sides of the Great Ideological Divide was the largely ignored news of the death of legendary historian Howard Zinn. As it turned out, it proved to be the most newsworthy event of January 27, 2010, much more interesting and worthy of comment than the president’s first State of the Union Address, James “Bond” O’Keefe and his Ritz Brother cohorts or anything else.

No, it was Howard Zinn, who could’ve easily suffered the same fate as Aldous Huxley, who had the colossal misfortune to die the same day JFK was assassinated

In a way, Zinn’s passing from a heart attack in California the day our new president would give his first SOTU Address was something that only a historian could fully appreciate. One of the very last things Zinn had written was a thumbnail impression of President Obama for The Nation‘s latest edition, “Obama at One.”

Respect for copyright infringement alone prevents me from quoting Mr. Zinn in full because, as was his usual style, his thoughts and feelings on the administration mirror my own and that of all liberals and progressives who choose not to go gently into that good night and keep their eyes closed.

But Zinn flatly said with the world weariness permitted only by the very jaded and the very old that he was not disappointed by Obama because he, like I and so many of us, did not have any great expectations. No matter what President Obama does or doesn’t do, we should all be grateful that in 2008 we did not show the enormous disconnect from fact that installed George W. Bush in the White House twice in a row.

Yet from the very beginning, when Mr. Obama first announced his presidential campaign early in February 2007 in Chicago Springfield, it was obvious to many of us that this fresh faced, articulate sophomore senator would not become the next JFK. In fact, as he learned more and more about high level politicking over the next 21 months, we saw a moderate Democrat who was becoming more and more a moderate Republican, just a few shades to the left of Joe Lieberman.

What few populist messages and promises he’d made during his campaign he’d immediately began reneging on from January 20, 2009 on. And last night Barack Obama sounded not as if he was delivering his first SOTU Address but as if he was running for president again. Only it sounded like a rehash of the 2008 campaign, not a preemptive one for 2012. It almost sounded as if, to Obama, 2009 and the official and unofficial Republican guttersniping that accompanied it never happened.

What did we hear? Calls for bipartisanship that one would expect an intelligent man to know would go unheeded beginning with Bob McDonnell’s rebuttal, one that consisted of the usual GOP lies and propaganda. Obama feigned empathy with the American middle class’s plight gleaned through carefully weeded letters sent to his desk. He hated the second round of bailouts yet signed off on them, anyway.

He’s freezing spending for three years except for his inherited wars (one of which he’d ramped up much like Nixon ramped up Vietnam) and, presumably, the outsourcing orgy at the State Department, Pentagon and even NASA. Every economist from Paul Krugman on down had even before the address denounced this tactic as the worst possible thing a President can do during a deep recession.

Let me say that again: Spending for unspecified social programs will be cut or suspended while companies like Halliburton, Blackwater and other war profiteers will continue as business as usual. Meanwhile, Section 6 of the TARP bill drawn up by the Bush White House gives dictatorial powers to the Treasury Secretary (another Wall Street insider only with better hair) that allows him to buy up another $700 billion in toxic assets without any transparency or oversight whatsoever.

So what’s changed? Reading Zinn’s extended blurb on Obama’s first year, one sees that his wearied cynicism and almost complete lack of expectations was justified, especially when we match it up to Mr. Obama’s maiden address. As in 2008, Mr. Obama promised transparency and bipartisanship in our government yet the facts speak for themselves. No government can afford as much transparency as the people would like, especially a nation as large and as active in its foreign policy as the United States.

Looking Through a Glass Onion

Let’s face facts: The president even admitted last night, after taking some token jabs at the previous administration (without, notably, mentioning the B word) that he wasn’t interested in litigating the past. This pretty much puts the kibosh on any hopes on an Obama-era Justice Department trying Bush, Cheney and their gang for subverting the Constitution. If we have any hope for justice for the massive criminal enterprise of the Bush-Cheney junta, much of which we’re still unaware, we will have to look to Europe. The Hague, our nation turns its blackened eyes to you.

Far from transparency, we’re seeing the same old same old and one has to painstakingly peel back the onion to see what is at the middle of it all. But the onion is made out of glass and is brittle. Anyone who’s ever tried to get anything through the gutted FOIA has, more often than not, gotten documents even more heavily redacted than anything pried from the Bush administration.

And the glass onion is far from transparent. Witness what we’ve been hearing from the citizen media and even the legitimate press about back room deals cut between Rahm Emanuel and Billy Tauzin’s buddies in Big Pharma. Look at the compromised position that Obama started out regarding health care, a signature issue on which he has, very unwisely, staked much of his political capital. Again, I give you Professor Zinn:

On domestic policy, traditionally Democratic presidents are more reformist, closer to the labor movement, more willing to pass legislation on behalf of ordinary people–and that’s been true of Obama. But Democratic reforms have also been limited, cautious. Obama’s no exception. On healthcare, for example, he starts out with a compromise, and when you start out with a compromise, you end with a compromise of a compromise, which is where we are now.

At this stage, this “compromise of a compromise” is taking on the guise of an original photostat being photocopied thousands of times over until it becomes a mere blurred document that is undecipherable, a palimpsest of any actual reform. Now Obama’s former colleagues in the Senate have produced a bill, due to his inaction and laissez faire attitude, that has become so reviled in the House and across the country that the lower chamber has all but guaranteed that it will, Scott Brown or no Scott Brown, not pass.

And the real reason for the massive HMO giveaway, this latest bailout, never came close to being divulged by our transparent President: namely that the big HMO’s got hit hard by engaging on risky derivatives speculation on Wall Street and need to come up with about 40,000,000 new captive paying customers to make up the shortfall. The Senate version of the health care bill, as we all know too well, is very firm about a mandate, will use two bylaws in the tax code to enforce “noncompliance” yet does nothing in the way of limiting health care costs or provide a public option. These were not mere oversights.

Even more disturbing is the mantra we’re hearing about how “progressive” our own health care system is here in Massachusetts. Literally 24 hours after the bill was signed into law by Mitt Romney in December of 2006, premiums skyrocketed by as much as 75-100%, with stiff penalties being imposed for “noncompliance”. There’s no public option to speak of and Mass Health, which formerly was for welfare recipients, hardly offers rates through major insurers that are competitive with job-provided health plans. In many cases, the Commonwealth’s alternative is even more expensive.

And how are people supposed to be able to afford mandated health insurance when they’re not working? Even with the ARRA, which reduces COBRA costs to the uninsured by 65%, insurance is out of reach if you’re making $200 a week or less on unemployment. No one should have to choose between food and health care yet that is precisely what Mitt Romney, and Barack Obama, are forcing us to do. Using our system of “health care reform” as a template is one of the most disastrous ones to use. If that’s the best Congress and the President can do, they might as well just let the health care industry write their own legislation the way we let the credit card companies write the bankruptcy bill in the 90s.

What Can Brown Do to You?

The only thing about this White House that’s transparent is the spin regarding Obama’s newly populist tone in the wake of the Brown-Coakley debacle here in the Bay State. Anyone out there who thinks the SOTU Address would’ve read exactly the way it was last night had Brown not won deserves the Senate health care bill inflicted on their life.

It was noteworthy, after all the exit poll numbers had been crunched, that the Go Along To Get Along 2010 Obama suddenly once again became the 2008 populist Obama. One exit poll after another proved the Brown victory was not a referendum on health care (because of our bright, shining example of health care “reform”) but one on the Democrats’ inability to connect with the voters (primarily independents). An unofficial 17% unemployment rate and an economy heavily dependent on Chinese loans that are about to become nonexistent were the reasons why Scott Brown was catapulted from Beacon to Capitol Hill.

Had Coakley and her presumably dependable vote on the health care bill carried the day, you can bet even that this “post-partisan” President would’ve been able to give the GOP the finger last night after saving the mythical 60 seat, filibuster-proof majority.

But last night, all we heard was the same delusional pap we heard throughout 2008. “Let’s all work together and think of the people and not our personal political fortunes.” “The people are tired of partisanship.”

True enough but simply asking a plainly insane political faction that’s even more corrupt than the Democrats is not going to end the gridlock that Scott Brown promised last year. Professor Zinn was right not to entertain high expectations of this administration and we should all follow his example and begin looking up and down the left side of the aisle for an alternative in 2012.

Yes, Pat Buchanan is a racist. So is most of the Republican leadership.

Digby:

Pat Buchanan said on Hardball today that Barack Obama is Ashley Wilkes. Cynthia Tucker was sitting next to him. I would say that was the most hamhanded statement of the day if it weren’t for the fact that the Republican response to the state of the union address is being held in the hall where Jefferson Davis was inaugurated.

Republicans: They’ll just never be happy until they can restore the Confederacy. You think that giving a response to the first Black president from Jefferson Davis’ inaugural site was purely coincidental? Remember, these people are expert at dogwhistling their frothing minions.

So now we know who contributed last night’s "You Lie!" moment

It’s none other than Supreme Court Justice Sammy the Stem Cell Alito:

OK, so he didn’t shout it out. He didn’t have to. But as John Aravosis notes:

Highly inappropriate for Alito to do this. You’ll notice the Sup Ct doesn’t even clap when the president enters. They are not supposed to respond to anything, lest it show bias.

Forget about yet another empty speech, listen to a real American patriot who left us today

I guess Howard Zinn couldn’t bear to hang around long enough to listen to Barack Obama spout a bunch of crap which he has no intention of fighting for either.

Howard Zinn, 1922-2010:

We should take his advice.

(JP is liveblogging the SOTU. I had to get to work this morning for a 7 AM teleconference and had to go to a schmooze-with-the-managers event tonight. I’m going to bed.)

Open Letter to Paul Shirley

Dear Paul:

First of all, thank you for single-handedly lowering the intelligence and compassion quotient of one of the greatest nations on earth with your last screed for ESPN. Many have tried and all have failed and that includes other mighty conservative luminaries such as Rush Limbaugh, Michelle Malkin, Ann Coulter, Melanie Morgan, Sean Hannity, etc. And still, America had stubbornly retained its literacy and basic liberal bleeding heart goodliness.

Secondly, as you prepare to join tens of millions of other Americans on the unemployment line, in the future please refrain from straying anywhere near anything that can be perverted as a writing implement to express your thoughts. I mean, of course, pens, pencils, computer keyboards, lumps of coal, magnetic poetry, Bic lighters, your own feces smeared against a white wall, et. al. It’s really for your own protection.

Thirdly, please refrain in the future from trying to lecture any nation about its own history no matter how poor they are. As it is, you are no more knowledgeable and hardly more human than Neal “Mighty Whitey” Boortz and other right wing psychopaths when he inveighed on the evils of the poor darkies of New Orleans who had the unmitigated gall and the effrontery to embarrass our fictitious president with their deaths and displacements as he licked cake frosting off his thumb and strummed a guitar.

Sure, in our country being indigent is a crime regardless of the economic winds of change but Haiti does have special, extenuating circumstances. For instance, several succeeding presidential administrations of both parties propping up dictators like the Poppa Doc and Baby Doc so we could continue those splendiferous, plunderous trade policies that have kept Haitians in the most crippling poverty in the western hemisphere.

I know, I know, there is absolutely no excuse for being poor even after a 7.0 earthquake, even if it’s the worst your nation has weathered in 270 years, completely flattens your home, your neighborhood, your city and the Presidential palace, airport, most of the hospitals and the UN headquarters. Appearances still must be kept up to imperialistic western airheads like you who was paid more money to shoot (and usually miss) one basket than most Haitians make in a decade.

But except for the occasional nurse’s aide and Wyclef Jean CD bought by white bred psychopaths such as yourself, Haiti remained until January 12th the Land That the Rest of the World Forgot (like Myanmar or Tibet or North Dakota). And when the world forgets you exist, you just don’t give a shit so you haven’t a problem building a house out of plywood or cardboard or eating dirt. It’s self esteem that’s the issue here, Paul, so you can be forgiven for becoming, against all reasonable odds and expectations, an even more vicious prick than Rush Limbaugh and Pat Robertson combined.

Instead of getting shit canned as you were from so many NBA and European ball clubs (those damned liberal Europeans!), Haiti ought to be glad that you singled them out for notice and gave them a good old fashioned avuncular “Fuck You” with a giant, cybernetic foam finger. If nothing else, that will give them the strength to carry on and remove rubble off their loved ones’ rotting corpses as the putrefaction fills the streets of Port-au-Prince.

Your humble and obedient servant,
Jurassicpork

I’m sure this won’t affect Bill O’Reilly’s desire to kidnap and waterboard Nancy Pelosi one bit

If you don’t know what the title of this post refers to, here you go:

During a recent stop of the Bold & Fresh Tour with fellow Fox News personality Glenn Beck, right-wing talker Bill O’Reilly couldn’t help but to spin a hypothetical.

In his fantasy world where Obama hires him as a presidential adviser, O’Reilly explained the first thing he’d do is lavishly decorate his office. Thing two would be having the CIA director kidnap top Democrats and “waterboard” Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA).

He was, of course, “joking” during the Jan. 23 appearance. The audience roared with laughter, even as O’Reilly had cautioned, “Don’t tell anyone I said this, please.”

Yes, because advocating abduction and torture of a public official, especially a female one, is such a laff riot. Ladies and gentlemen, meet your teabaggers.

I’m not sure what O’Reilly would get out of this, other than the boner he clearly gets when images of violence against women dance in his sick little cranium, but if he thinks waterboarding would somehow get her to “confess” something, he’s wrong about that too:

Well, it’s official now: John Kiriakou, the former CIA operative who affirmed claims that waterboarding quickly unloosed the tongues of hard-core terrorists, says he didn’t know what he was talking about.

Kiriakou, a 15-year veteran of the agency’s intelligence analysis and operations directorates, electrified the hand-wringing national debate over torture in December 2007 when he told ABC’s Brian Ross and Richard Esposito in a much ballyhooed, exclusive interview that senior al Qaeda commando Abu Zubaydah cracked after only one application of the face cloth and water.

[snip]

Now comes John Kiriakou, again, with a wholly different story. On the next-to-last page of a new memoir, The Reluctant Spy: My Secret Life in the CIA’s War on Terror (written with Michael Ruby), Kiriakou now rather off handedly admits that he basically made it all up.

“What I told Brian Ross in late 2007 was wrong on a couple counts,” he writes. “I suggested that Abu Zubaydah had lasted only thirty or thirty-five seconds during his waterboarding before he begged his interrogators to stop; after that, I said he opened up and gave the agency actionable intelligence.”

But never mind, he says now.

“I wasn’t there when the interrogation took place; instead, I relied on what I’d heard and read inside the agency at the time.”

Kiriakou needn’t worry about his so-called reputation being marred with the wingnuts, though. Because for them, even if there is a one percent possibility that something could be true, in an alternate universe, every sixteenth leap year on February 29th, in the snow, both ways, uphill, it means it is a certainty.

Preview of Obama speech tonight: "Yes, I Am A Wuss."

When you are a Democratic president, admitting mistakes is something you do in a one-on-one interview, NOT when speaking to a joint session of Congress in which Republican members have been known already to scream at you and call you a liar when you give a speech:

When Mr. Obama presents his first State of the Union address on Wednesday evening, aides said he would accept responsibility, though not necessarily blame, for failing to deliver swiftly on some of the changes he promised a year ago. But he will not, aides said, accede to criticism that his priorities are out of step with the nation’s.

As Mr. Obama navigates a crossroads of his presidency, a moment when he signals what lessons he has drawn from his first year in office, the public posture of the White House is that any shortcomings are the result of failing to explain effectively what they were doing — and why. He will acknowledge making mistakes in pursuit of his agenda, aides said, but will not toss the agenda overboard in search of a more popular one.

What agenda? The one he ran on — the one about withdrawing from Iraq, getting Afghanistan done, closing Gitmo, ending Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, shoring up our job base, and universal health care? Or the one since he took office, about leaving us in Iraq, escalating Afghanistan, keeping DADT and DOMA in perpetuity, bank bailouts, FDIC turning into another hedge fund, and health care “reform” which consists entirely of a mandate to buy overpriced insurance from for-profit companies who aren’t required to actually pay claims?

The other day Obama said he’s rather be a good one-term president than a mediocre two-term one. I’m starting to get the impression that if he could find a way to pack up and go home tomorrow, he’d do it in a heartbeat. At which point I have to ask, “What did you THINK the job was going to be like?”