Recently in politics Category

In an industry where few women dare to tread, Alison L. Asti has made a lasting footprint in professional sports in Maryland. As General Counsel and Executive Director of the Maryland Stadium Authority, Alison helped keep the Orioles in Baltimore with the beautiful Camden Yards and assisted in bringing the NFL back to Baltimore.

She spent 17 years at the Maryland Stadium Authority, first as General Counsel and then was appointed as Executive Director in 2004. During her service there, she participated in the lobbying, financing, design and construction of over $1 billion in projects throughout the state. 

Her footprint can be seen in projects such as Comcast Center, Unitas Stadium, Ripken Stadium, Oriole Park at Camden Yards, M & T Bank Stadium, the Baltimore and Ocean City convention centers, and the Hippodrome Theatre.

As an attorney and former President of the MD Bar Association Alison Asti posseses great intellegence, integrity and wisdom. It is my heartfelt belief that she will make an excellent Circuit Court Judge for the citizens of Anne Arundel County and the state of Maryland. I believe this as one who observed her approach and relied on her legal judgement during my time as a member and Chairman of the MD Stadium Authority. 

Health Care Reform ABC news

"Nobody will benefit from dropping the public option except for health insurance companies," said Blumenthal. "The fact that the public option is now on the chopping block is not a reflection of public opinion -- it is a reflection of the power of health insurance lobbyists."

http://new.oberlin.edu/events-activities/commencement/haass-speech-2009remarks.dot for full transcript of his Commencement Address

"I was about to follow up with other questions when Condi cut me off. "You can save your breath, Richard. The president has already made up his mind on Iraq." The way she said it made clear that he had decided to go to war. This was eight months before the March 2003 start of the conflict. I was taken aback by the blunt substance and tone of her answer. Policy had gone much further than I had realized--and feared. I did not argue at that moment, for several reasons. As in previous conversations when I had voiced my views on Iraq, Condi's response made it clear that any more conversation at that point would be a waste of time. It is always important to pick your moments to make an unwelcome case, and this did not appear to be a promising one. I figured as well that there would be additional opportunities to argue my stance, if not with Condi, then with others in a position to make a difference."

A critique on WAMC public radio by Samuel Clayborne said Mr. Haas should have resigned or leaked info to the papers instead of 'doing his job' once he knew there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and the war had been pre-planned.

Fresh Air from WHYY, October 21, 2008 · Nobel laureate Paul Krugman believes that increased public spending -- akin to the efforts of the New Deal during the Great Depression -- is the best way to escape the financial crisis and regain American global leadership. In his Oct. 16 column in The New York Times, Krugman writes, "It's politically fashionable to rant against government spending and demand fiscal responsibility. But right now, increased government spending is just what the doctor ordered, and concerns about the budget deficit should be put on hold." Paul Krugman is a professor of economics and international affairs at Princeton University, and the recipient of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Economics. He has been an op-ed columnist for The New York Times since 1999. His most recent books are The Conscience of a Liberal and The Great Unraveling: Losing Our Way in the New Century.

Excerpt "The Conscience of a Liberal' by Paul Krugman NPR.org, October 9, 2007 ·

A New New Deal

A few months after the 2004 election I was placed under some pressure by journalistic colleagues, who said I should stop spending so much time criticizing the Bush administration and conservatives more generally. "The election settled some things," I was told. In retrospect, however, it's starting to look as if the 2004 election was movement conservatism's last hurrah. Republicans won a stunning victory in the 2002 midterm election by exploiting terrorism to the hilt.

There's every reason to believe that one reason Bush took us to war with Iraq was his desire to perpetuate war psychology combined with his expectation that victory in a splendid little war would be good for his reelection prospects. Indeed, Iraq probably did win Bush the 2004 election, even though the war was already going badly. But the war did go badly -- and that was not an accident. When Bush moved into the White House, movement conservatism finally found itself in control of all the levers of power -- and quickly proved itself unable to govern.

The movement's politicization of everything, the way it values political loyalty above all else, creates a culture of cronyism and corruption that has pervaded everything the Bush administration does, from the failed reconstruction of Iraq to the hapless response to Hurricane Katrina. The multiple failures of the Bush administration are what happens when the government is run by a movement that is dedicated to policies that are against most Americans' interests, and must try to compensate for that inherent weakness through deception, distraction, and the distribution of largesse to its supporters. And the nation's rising contempt for Bush and his administration helped Democrats achieve a stunning victory in the 2006 midterm election. One election does not make a trend.

There are, however, deeper forces undermining the political tactics movement conservatives have used since Ronald Reagan ran for governor of California. Crucially, the American electorate is, to put it bluntly, becoming less white. Republican strategists try to draw a distinction between African Americans and the Hispanic and Asian voters who play a gradually growing role in elections -- but as the debate over immigration showed, that's not a distinction the white backlash voters the modern GOP depends on are prepared to make. A less crude factor is the progressive shift in Americans' attitudes: Polling suggests that the electorate has moved significantly to the left on domestic issues since the 1990s, and race is a diminishing force in a nation that is, truly, becoming steadily less racist. Movement conservatism still has money on its side, but that has never been enough in itself. Anything can happen in the 2008 election, but it looks like a reasonable guess that by 2009 America will have a Democratic president and a solidly Democratic Congress.

Moreover, this new majority, if it emerges, will be much more ideologically cohesive than the Democratic majority of Bill Clinton's first two years, which was an uneasy alliance between Northern liberals and conservative Southerners. The question is, what should the new majority do? My answer is that it should, for the nation's sake, pursue an unabashedly liberal program of expanding the social safety net and reducing inequality -- a new New Deal. The starting point for that program, the twenty-first-century equivalent of Social Security, should be universal health care, something every other advanced country already has.

Before we can talk about how to get there, however, it's helpful to take a good look at where we've been. That look -- the story of the arc of modern American history -- is the subject of the next eight chapters.

Excerpted from The Conscience of a Liberal (c) Copyright 2007 by Paul Krugman. Reprinted with permission by W. W. Norton.

Krugman's book and a podcast of the interview on Fresh Air at NPR.org are available at the link above. Purchasing the book from NPR will support programming.

Huffington Post - Jeffrey Feldman's blog

An expert on speeches and messaging, Dr. Jeffrey Feldman is the editor-in-chief of the influential political blog Frameshop. He is the author of Framing the Debate: Famous Presidential Speeches and How Progressives Can Use Them to Change the Conversation (And Win Elections) and Outright Barbarous: How The Violent Language of the Right Poisons American Democracy. Dr. Feldman has been featured on Bill Moyers Journal, and is a frequent political analyst on CBC Newsworld, Air America, and Nova M. He lives and teaches in New York City.

http://www.recordonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20081009/NEWS/810090334/-1/rss01

When lawmakers in Albany cut $427 million from the state budget this summer, an unlikely group of New Yorkers took a hit.Reduced payments to blind war veterans accounted for roughly $233,000 of savings.

Budget cutters left the blind vets' with monthly annuity payments of $88.42, down from $94.06. New York's roughly 4,500 blind veterans received the news in a late-September letter from James D. McDonough Jr., director of the state's Division of Veterans' Affairs.

"The 6 percent cut in the blind annuity was a specific line item reduction approved by state lawmakers," the division said in a statement. "The Division of Veterans' Affairs has no discretion in implementing this reduction."

Many of the 161 blind veterans who live in Orange, Sullivan and Ulster counties have decried the move. Veterans said the small cut won't hurt their wallets much; they'll go on without the five bucks. It's the principle that bothers them, especially during the tenure of Gov. David Paterson, who is legally blind....

For its part, Paterson's office said the cut is an unfortunate effect of the national and statewide economic crisis.

"The governor recognizes the critical needs of our veterans who have served our nation with such valor," a spokesman for Paterson said. "Unfortunately, despite our best intentions, the national fiscal crisis continues to take a toll on every area of state spending and will require more across-the-board reductions to ensure a balanced state budget."

Paterson has called lawmakers back to Albany on Nov. 18 for another round of cuts.

My neighbors were discussing the stock market crash of September 16. One said "that only affects the big people who have stocks". I don't think so. My electric bill, fuel bill, food bill, clothing bill are all higher than last year.

from Plato, Republic, Book 4

"our aim in founding the State was not the disproportionate happiness of any one class, but the greatest happiness of the whole; we thought that in a State which is ordered with a view to the good of the whole we should be most likely to find Justice, and in the ill-ordered State injustice: and, having found them, we might then decide which of the two is the happier."

Sometimes politics has the uncanny effect of mirroring the national psyche even when nobody intended to do that. This is perfectly illustrated by the rousing effect that Gov. Sarah Palin had on the Republican convention in Minneapolis this week. On the surface, she outdoes former Vice President Dan Quayle as an unlikely choice, given her negligent parochial expertise in the complex affairs of governing. Her state of Alaska has less than 700,000 residents, which reduces the job of governor to the scale of running one-tenth of New York City. By comparison, Rudy Giuliani is a towering international figure. Palin's pluck has been admired, and her forthrightness, but her real appeal goes deeper.

She is the reverse of Barack Obama, in essence his shadow, deriding his idealism and turning negativity into a cause for pride. In psychological terms the shadow is that part of the psyche that hides out of sight, countering our aspirations, virtue, and vision with qualities we are ashamed to face: anger, fear, revenge, violence, selfishness, and suspicion of "the other." For millions of Americans, Obama triggers those feelings, but they don't want to express them. He is calling for us to reach for our higher selves, and frankly, that stirs up hidden reactions of an unsavory kind. (Just to be perfectly clear, I am not making a verbal play out of the fact that Sen. Obama is black. The shadow is a metaphor widely in use before his arrival on the scene.) I recognize that psychological analysis of politics is usually not welcome by the public, but I believe such a perspective can be helpful here to understand Palin's message. In her acceptance speech Gov. Palin sent a rousing call to those who want to celebrate their resistance to change and a higher vision

Look at what she stands for:

• Small town values -- a nostaligic return to simpler times disguises a denial of America's global role, a return to petty, small-minded parochialism.
• Ignorance of world affairs -- a repudiation of the need to repair America's image abroad.
• Family values -- a code for walling out anybody who makes a claim for social justice. Such strangers, being outside the family, don't need to be needed.
• Rigid stands on guns and abortion -- a scornful repudiation that these issues can be negotiated with those who disagree.
• Patriotism -- the usual fallback in a failed war.
• "Reform" -- an italicized term, since in addition to cleaning out corruption and excessive spending, one also throws out anyone who doesn't fit your ideology.

Palin reinforces the overall message of the reactionary right, which has been in play since 1980, that social justice is liberal-radical, that minorities and immigrants, being different from "us" pure American types, can be ignored, that progressivism takes too much effort and globalism is a foreign threat. The radical right marches under the banners of "I'm all right, Jack," and "Why change? Everything's OK as it is." The irony, of course, is that Gov. Palin is a woman and a reactionary at the same time. She can add mom to apple pie on her resume, while blithely reversing forty years of feminist progress. The irony is superficial; there are millions of women who stand on the side of conservatism, however obviously they are voting against their own good. The Republicans have won multiple national elections by raising shadow issues based on fear, rejection, hostility to change, and narrow-mindedness

Obama's call for higher ideals in politics can't be seen in a vacuum. The shadow is real; it was bound to respond. Not just conservatives possess a shadow -- we all do. So what comes next is a contest between the two forces of progress and inertia. Will the shadow win again, or has its furtive appeal become exhausted? No one can predict. The best thing about Gov. Palin is that she brought this conflict to light, which makes the upcoming debate honest. It would be a shame to elect another Reagan, whose smiling persona was a stalking horse for the reactionary forces that have brought us to the demoralized state we are in. We deserve to see what we are getting, without disguise.

http://www.chopra.com/node/1064?q=print/node/1064

This analysis by Deepok Chopra explains why I felt strange when I listened to Palin's speech at the RNC. Part of me liked it, there is an attraction in criticizing others. Socrates in "The Republic" tells how people cannnot resist looking into a pit with decomposiing bodies in it, even tho they knew it was horrible.

from Plato, Republic, Book 4

"Well, I said, there is a story which I remember to have heard, and in which I put faith. The story is, that Leontius, the son of Aglaion, coming up one day from the Piraeus, under the north wall on the outside, observed some dead bodies lying on the ground at the place of execution. He felt a desire to see them, and also a dread and abhorrence of them; for a time he struggled and covered his eyes, but at length the desire got the better of him; and forcing them open, he ran up to the dead bodies, saying, Look, ye wretches, take your fill of the fair sight.

I have heard the story myself, he said.

The moral of the tale is, that anger at times goes to war with desire, as though they were two distinct things.

Yes; that is the meaning, he said.

And are there not many other cases in which we observe that when a man's desires violently prevail over his reason, he reviles himself, and is angry at the violence within him, and that in this struggle, which is like the struggle of factions in a State, his spirit is on the side of his reason; -- but for the passionate or spirited element to take part with the desires when reason that she should not be opposed, is a sort of thing which thing which I believe that you never observed occurring in yourself, nor, as I should imagine, in any one else?"

from Plato, Republic, Book 4

"our aim in founding the State was not the disproportionate happiness of any one class, but the greatest happiness of the whole; we thought that in a State which is ordered with a view to the good of the whole we should be most likely to find Justice, and in the ill-ordered State injustice: and, having found them, we might then decide which of the two is the happier."

by DR. CARL GUSTAV JUNG

"The psychological rule says that when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside as fate. That is to say, when the individual

remains undivided and does not become conscious of his inner opposite, the world must perforce act out the conflict and be torn into opposing halves."

John McCain Gets BarackRoll'd.flvAT

Very funny video spoof.