Peter Krupa

What really attracted me to Obama during the campaign was common sense. He said he wasn’t an ideologue. He said there was stuff to do, and by golly, he was going to do that stuff, and get it done, and he would do so bipartisanly. It didn’t work out so well.

For the first year, I thought he was crazy. Principled, but crazy. It looked like he’d brought the proverbial knife to a gun fight, like he was playing chess on a rugby pitch, like he was quoting Shakespeare when all anyone really wanted was fart jokes.

If I were him, I would have dropped the gloves a long time ago and started nut-punching. The Republicans have been so incredibly destructive over the last few years that it almost seemed like a moral imperative to destroy them back. But now there’s this hour-long video of Obama wading into a meeting of Republican lawmakers, taking their questions, and absolutely devastating them the way only a former law professor can:

After watching this video, I’m starting to think that I underestimated Obama, severely. He wasn’t just mouthing talking points when he boosted bipartisanship in the campaign. The man was stone-cold serious. Bipartisanship really is his philosophy of governance, and (like it or not) he’s demonstrated that repeatedly by including Republican proposals in legislation passed by Democrats.

By fielding their questions clearly and firmly, Obama managed to reveal the Republicans for the nincompoop, hypocrite obstructionists that they really are, while at the same time inviting them to join him in moving the country forward. This was a display of not only incredible political savvy, but profound intellect. After watching this, I really think there’s a chance that Obama will turn out to be one of the great, historically-important presidents of the United States of America.

I also think Republicans will never, ever again let themselves be filmed asking Obama questions.

I’ve been thinking for some time now that the greatest hypocrisy of fiscal conservatives is coupling a fundamentalist opposition to new social spending with ferocious support for the American Military Welfare State. Glenn Greenwald has a great post on the topic. I found this graphic to be enlightening.

Here’s the problem with current standards in American politics: In order to think you’re competent enough to run for state-wide or national office, you kind of have to be an arrogant, overly-self-confident, extroverted prick. Which, if you think about it, almost exactly describes a womanizer.

There are therefore two ways to avoid losing an entire class of political Golden Boys to sex scandals:

1. Stop pretending that arrogant, overly-self-confident, extroverted pricks don’t cheat on their wives.
2. Start electing women for basically everything.

There is, of course, a third course of action, which is: Don’t do anything and just enjoy the goddamn shit out of the whole thing. Which is what I chose to do.

From No More Mister Nice Blog:

I don’t know if yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling is really going to lead to the apocalypse predicted by so many, or if the corporate influence on American politics is already at its absolute maximum and this is merely going to alter the number of tools in the fat cats’ political influence toolkit. (The ruling is awful, yet I lean toward the latter view — it seems to me that corporations have found a way to have as much political influence as possible already.)

But I find myself having the same naive reaction to the notion of “corporate personhood” that I’ve always had when it’s come up: If corporations are persons in the eyes of the law, why has no one pursued the argument that we can do to corporations what we routinely do to persons, namely imprison and execute them?

What with health care reform failing, banking regulatory reform a joke, 10% unemployment, climate change unchecked, everyone getting fat on government-subsidized corn products, and two messy wars still ongoing, you’d think things couldn’t get much worse for the ol’ U.S. of A. You would be wrong.

The Supreme Court just overturned a century of precedent and ruled that corporations have the same first amendment rights as people. They can now spend as much as they want on political campaigns.

It’s over, folks.

With now only 59 votes in the Senate, Democrats may not be able to pass health care reform. Tonight’s Senate vote in Massachusetts is a ridiculous coda to an absurdly difficult battle, and frankly, I don’t think we learned anything.

Americans still haven’t fully grasped the fact that their health care system is an international punchline. A majority of them cling to worn-out Reagan-era orthodoxy about tax cuts and Big Government. Meantime, the last decade – arguably the climax of that orthodoxy – saw negative private sector job growth and no increase in middle class wages.

Nobody seems to get it. You can present as many facts as you want. It doesn’t matter. The talking heads and their mouth-breathing minions continue to shout the same talking points, like the more you repeat something – anything – the truer it gets.

This vote was sad for me personally because it means I might not ever be able to afford living in the United States again. Since I do mainly freelance and contract work, I have to pay for my own health care. This is doable when one is young and single, but not so much when one is married with a kid.

America is supposed to be the land of opportunity, but I’m not feeling it right now.

There’s a really interesting book excerpt in the New York Times Magazine on the globalization of western-style mental illness. Most fascinating is the observation that mental illness is not constant across time and space. Different cultures have different kinds of mental illness, as do different periods of history.

If there is a manifestation of insanity peculiar to the west in the 20th-21st century, I wonder if it might be the phenomenon of public, apparently random shootings. Wikipedia has a list of all known school shootings around the world. Most took place in the west and appear to have started in the 1960s. Likewise, workplace shootings started in the 1980s in the west, which is how the expression “going postal” entered the vernacular.

I think authorities usually write these incidents off as “copycat” shootings – people imitating each other. But that just begs the question: How large a role does imitation plays in the manifestation of mental illness?

And why do the mental illnesses of so many westerners get expressed through random violence?

From the New York Times:

… as the administration moves to increase oversight within [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] , the documents show how officials — some still in key positions — used their role as overseers to cover up evidence of mistreatment, deflect scrutiny by the news media or prepare exculpatory public statements after gathering facts that pointed to substandard care or abuse.

As one man lay dying of head injuries suffered in a New Jersey immigration jail in 2007, for example, a spokesman for the federal agency told The Times that he could learn nothing about the case from government authorities. In fact, the records show, the spokesman had alerted those officials to the reporter’s inquiry, and they conferred at length about sending the man back to Africa to avoid embarrassing publicity.

The Supreme Court is poised to strike down restrictions on corporate campaign money that have been in place since Watergate. The case - Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission – appears to hinge on freedom of expression and whether corporations and other non-breathing entities deserve the same first amendment rights as people.

At stake is the way in which democracy is conducted in the United States. Allowing corporations to aim multi-million-dollar negative advertising cannons at any candidates who displease them will fundamentally change the rules of the game.

Bill Moyers did an excellent show on this case back in September, in which he interviewed lawyers for both sides. There is, indeed, a solid legal argument to be made in favor of the first amendment, and free speech veteran Floyd Abrams makes it well to Bill Moyers.

But free speech does come with limits. Trevor Potter, the other side of the coin, argues that corporations are entities designed to care about one thing: Making money. And they’re very good at it, which is fine. Real people, however, care about a lot of things – religion, education, foreign policy, criminal justice. It does not benefit society to give so much license to immensely wealthy, artificial entities whose interests are by definition so narrow.

Apparently the case had been brought on some rather narrow grounds, but last year the Supremes sent it back for re-argument, which, as I understand it, is a good indication that they’re about to drop some sort of constitutional bombshell. Whatever happens, the New York Times reports that a combination of court rulings and FEC gridlock mean that campaign finance restrictions have already been worn down to a nub.

Get ready for a fun election year.

I find it deeply disturbing that members of a mainstream American political movement are arguing that the 5th Amendment should be suspended when dealing with certain kinds of criminals. Says some knucklehead over at National Review’s Corner blog:

A terrorist like Abdulmutallab is not a common criminal who should be told he has the “right to remain silent.” He is an enemy combatant, who tried to commit an act of war against the United States of America. He possesses vital intelligence about the terrorist network that deployed him to attack America, and may be planning still more attacks. The Obama administration has a responsibility to make him give up that information. Treating him like a criminal is an abdication of that responsibility, and puts our nation at risk.

Noted conservative luminary Sarah Palin also stated that:

It simply makes no sense to treat an al Qaeda-trained operative willing to die in the course of massacring hundreds of people as a common criminal. Reports indicate that Abdulmutallab stated there were many more like him in Yemen but that he stopped talking once he was read his Miranda rights. President Obama’s advisers lamely claim Abdulmutallab might be willing to agree to a plea bargain – pretty doubtful you can cut a deal with a suicide bomber.

Lest you assume these opinions are limited to the right wing’s intellectual elite, small-town newspaper publisher and Browntown City, Minnesota, Councilman Chuck Warner had this to say:

“…perhaps action should be taken to reverse the decision to charge the alleged bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, in a civilian court, rather than a military tribunal. His is an act of war against this nation. It is asinine to give these terrorists the benefits reserved for American citizens.

The time has come to remove the silk gloves and treat international terrorists for what they are.

I laughed when Bush declared war on an abstraction. Now it’s not so funny. It appears people believe we are at war, and that therefore our enemies in the War on Terror (even suspected enemies) do not have rights under the U.S. Constitution.

This is quite the slippery slope. What about the War on Drugs? Can the U.S. government suspend habeas corpus for drug traffickers, just because the executive has declared “war”? What about the soon-to-be-announced War on Irresponsible Journalism? War on Sexual Predators?

I’m being facetious, but only slightly. Spooked by a few ounces of explosives that threatened a couple hundred lives, a large segment of American society is willing – clamoring, even – to tear at our most fundamental civil rights. I take this as an early warning sign that the United States is one major terrorist event away from becoming a very ugly, very dark place.