In a few hours President Obama will deliver his third State of the Union address.  An incisive thought:

The one thing America does not need to hear tonight is that we are a great people who need only remember all those glorious things we have in common, etc. etc., wha-dee-doo-dah. We are not a great people. Not in the way we treat ourselves in our politics, anyway. We are frightened. We lash out. We kick the country as though it were a lawnmower that won't start. In 2010, just as the president and his administration managed to lift their heads above the brim of the ditch in which their predeceesors had dumped the country, We, The People elected the most retrograde, brick-stupid, poo-flinging monkeyhouse of a House of Representatives in the history of the Republic.

Charles P Pierce The State of the Union Is Angry Esquire 24 Jan 12

Hard to argue with.  This speech will set the frame for the remainder of Obama's first term and the posture Democrats adopt for the vital upcoming election.  How's he doing?

The Republican party is in crisis, as has been evident for the bulk of this nomination race, but now its chickens have come home to roost.  The Tea Party experiment, already causing second thoughts and ruction among establishment and legislative Republicans, and their sponsors, was being assiduously ignored as the well-oiled Romney coronation rolled ever on while a clown-car of unlikely aspirants came and went, to the mortification of the electorate and the evident relief of party elders.  

However one rarely sees such a lengthy, cautious, well-funded campaign collapse in a single evening as Romney's did at Thursday's debate; a performance undermining with prevarication and dissembling the narrative his handlers had so carefully crafted for him over previous months.  

It was clearly his worst performance in several seasons of campaigning and at that moment it proved catastrophic.  Every pre-existing doubt about his candidacy was exacerbated by his weaselling over his tax returns; he plainly can't be trusted, the gold standard of a presidential candidacy in either party.  And it changed the course of the campaign going forward.  He seemed damaged goods even before Gingrich cleaned his clock tonight.

So Newton Leroy Gingrich, the "bad boy" of Nineties conservatism, swoops in, channelling working-class, Right-wing angst, to deliver a crushing blow to the only credible argument Romney had; the slender one of electability from the guy who lost to the guy who lost to Obama.

Clearly the "base" would prefer going down in flames with Gingrich than slitting their wrists in a warm bath with Romney.

>I need to read your thoughts. I love election season.

The strategy and the narrative. The funny and the crisis management.

The debates and the drama.

The comments on the Moose.

Talk to me dude.  

I understand some #OWS folks made it a point to protest this appearance and in that protest decided to call this President Hitler.  SMDH!

I'm not going to talk about that.  Nope.  Instead let's listen to the dulcet tones of Barack Obama

Is this the Bill Clinton playing the sax moment for his four more years movement?

 

My parents sent me to Catholic grade school, catechism and the whole nine yards.  My mother was Catholic but she was also a Democrat, pro women's rights.  She dragged us to church but she was not on board with a lot of the Church's ways.  My dad was Presbyterian and never went to church.  He didn't buy into much of the rah rah business.  But, Catholic school was where we went.

(Posted at SexGenderBody)

It's ironic, given that US corporate interests (including one R Murdoch) are complaining about SOPA and how tomorrow/today's internet blackout is an 'abuse of power', that it's just emerged through the ongoing Leveson Enquiry, that the world's third largest media conglomerate, News Corp, through one of its prestigious titles, The Times of London, hacked the identity of a prize winning blogger and - apparently without revealing this to the courts - fought a privacy case against him to out his real identity and silence his blog.

The blogger in question was Nightjack, a police officer who blogged so brilliantly about the realities of police work that he won the prestigious Orwell Prize in 2009. A few months later, the anonymous blogger was outed by the Times as Richard Horton. As a result he was reprimanded by his police employers, and his blog was deleted. (The copy above has been retrieved by someone else).

The case caused an outcry in 2009, not only because a valuable voice was lost, by it caused a landmark ruling in the British High Court that a blogger had no "reasonable expectation" to anonymity because "blogging is essentially a public rather than a private activity".

At the time the Times had argued it had deduced Horton's identity from the material.  But in his written statement today at the Leveson inquiry, the Times Editor James Harding admitted.

"There was an incident where the newsroom was concerned that a reporter had gained unauthorised access to an email account. When it was brought to my attention, the journalist faced disciplinary action. The reporter believed he was seeking to gain information in the public interest but we took the view he had fallen short of what was expected of a Times journalist. He was issued with a formal written warning for professional misconduct."

However, he failed to mention that the article - written by media correspondent Patrick Foster - was still published, and Horton's privacy case fought successfully by the Times through the courts.

Not only does this connect the hacking scandal beyond the now closed News of the World and The Sun to Murdoch's broadsheet titles, it is also yet another example of egregious corporate double standards. While in the witness box today Harding  had the temerity to complain that any kind or regulation would chill 'free speech'.

"We don't want a country in which the government, the state, regulates the papers ... we don't want to be in a position where the prime minister decides what goes in newspapers," he said.

He added that if the outcome of the inquiry was a "Leveson act", even one just offering a statutory backstop to an independent press regulator, it would be unworkable.

"The concern is that a Leveson act would give a mechanism to politicians to loom over future coverage," of politics, Harding said, and start introducing amendments to this legislation "and that would have a chilling effect on the press".

This from an editor who was responsible outing a celebrated blogger through hacking and then hounding him to the point of silence

This is a timely reminder that the threats to free speech don't just come from governments but from corporations too, something I've begun to explore in  the first chapter of my book (illustrated by Kossack Eric Lewis) Bad Press: Fall of the House of Murdoch (warning - long quote below the fold but I'm only abusing my own copyright)

The left has abdicated the discourse of freedom.  Or, at least, unsuccessfully contested it.  Recently, someone I know in another context began to argue the Beckian line (if Glenn merits an "-ian") with me that there has been a century long degradation of freedom in the U.S.  Plenty of progressive commentators have pointed out that the right in this country no longer wants to return to some mythically blissful fantasy of 1950s America, but to the 1890s...when we were more free?  Really?

First off, when I think about freedom, I think about it's negative and positive functions.  I value freedom from oppression.  My great-grandfather, as a Jewish orphan, was forcibly conscripted into the Czar's cavalry.  After 15 years he got out, married, had two children and then figured out he had better get his young family out of Belarus in the Russian Empire.  On the other side of my family, a great uncle who stayed in Berlin likely went up a smokestack in Dachau.  The only thing we know definitively is that I bear an uncanny resemblance to him.  The last solid information we have on him was from when he was in his mid twenties.  Boy am I glad neither side of my family decided to stick around and see how things were going to turn out.  I've also been in a position to participate in the impediment of movement and of the flow of resources in an un-free population in my military service in Israel.  We can debate whether the restrictions I helped implement are justified or not, or who is at fault.  But regardless, I understand the desire for negative freedom, the freedom from less than benevolent authorities.  I get that very well.

But I also think about freedom in its positive sense.  There are public school classrooms in Detroit that don't have reliable heating.  How free is a child to learn when he or she is freezing.  What about the freedom to receive healthcare?  How free is someone if he or she has asthma and no place to turn?  How free is someone who is hungry?  What about freedom and equality of opportunity?  Aren't these part of the American political project?  Aren't these freedoms part of what makes us historically significant?

Then there is the fact that I consider my freedom as directly linked to the society in which I live.  I don't want to be free, I want US to be free.  A feudal lord might have had extensive freedom.  But he was not a member of a free society.  100 years ago in this country, white Protestant men who came from economically established families may indeed have been more free than they are today.  But everyone else, the vast majority of us, were significantly less free, in both negative and positive senses.  

WE have never been more free.  And WE are not yet sufficiently free.  The right has a program to increase our negative freedom in ways that will enhance the positive freedom only of those who already enjoy economic benefits.  The rest of us will be left to overcrowded, under-equipped classrooms and emergency rooms and told to find our own bootstraps.  

No thanks.  We want more freedom than that.  With MLK day approaching, and on this his actual birthday, we need to re-learn King's insight that freedom isn't just about who sits where on a bus.  

Unless we have equality of opportunity in this country, we are not free.  If we believe that progressive policies will increase freedom, as I most certainly do, then we must not cede the mantle of "the cause of liberty" and of "the love of freedom" to those whose polices will make us decidedly less free.

Mitt Romney has called his win tonight in almost-hometown New Hampshire an "historic night." Congratulations on being another Harvard-educated old dude to win the New Hampshire primary. You're right, it's historic.

One of the things we like to do here is message and write strategy. Mitt is busy annointing himself as the GOP nominee for a pretty important job--the GOP's "Chosen One" to defeat a guy a plurality of conservative Republicans believe isn't an American citizen. Undoubtedly, though, he will actually be forced to go toe-to-toe with the current leader of the free world: President Barack Obama. Forgive the foreshadowing, but if you don't mind, we've scripted a bit of what that might sound like:

Greetings Moose. Let me first wish all of you, and all of yours, Happy Thanksgiving/Christmas/Hanukkah/Kwanza/Festivus/New Year/Birthday (I'm sure I've missed several) and the best of wishes for many more. 2011 was an interesting year for my family...both the highs and the lows will mark it as a memorable one.

I am beyond excited to be here in 2012...not only because even numbered years are my friend, but because we get to work to see Obama to another term. Thus far, it seems to me that the Republicans vying to be his opponent are helping further our cause more than anyone or anything else.  Have you ever seen such a circus??

Despite the boost that Obama and the Democrats have gotten from the Republican antics of late, we WILL have to fight to see that Obama is a two term President.

It was during the 2008 battle to see a Democrat elected to the Presidency that most of us met...and I hope to find many 'old-timers' resurfacing to take up the fight again.  

I want to see Old Moose and New Moose (and Lurker Moose!) engaged in the battle. I want to hear about 'feet on the ground', phone banking, door knocking, yard signs, and bumperstickers. I want to hear about donations and voter registration drives. I want to hear about the discussions held around the family dinner table. I want to hear what Moose feel is worth fighting for...and what is worth fighting against.

We have less than a year before we find ourselves in the voting booth again...I want to be pulling the lever (er, touching the screen?) with the confidence that I did everything possible to see an Obama victory.

I want us ALL to have that confidence.

And I want every step...every action...every frustration...every happy moment...and, ultimately, the joy of victory...to be shared here.

Any takers?

So, the National Religious Campaign Against Torture is hosting a Day of Action: It's Time to Close a Symbol of Torture in Washington, D.C., with a rally at Lafayette Square at noon, a Human Chain from the White House to Congress at 1:00, and an interfaith service at 3:00.  If it's possible for you to make it there, please put it on your engagement calendar.

In support of that, the Peace and Social Concerns Committee of my Quaker meeting will be hosting a candlelight vigil at the San Francisco Federal Building at 7th and Mission at 5:30.  (Same date: January 11).  Readers from the Bay Area are entreated to attend.

I am also, personally, learning more by reading Alfred McCoy's A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror.  At only 30 pages in, it is bone chilling, and clearly a text every citizen has a responsibility to familiarize her/himself with.  I learned of this book through Andrea Giovannoni's essay on torture from a Catholic perspective in Voices of Feminist Liberation, of which I am a co-editor.

Please use the comments to talk about related events in your neighborhood, ruminate on the issues, and, of course, go off topic.

I've been too busy to develop any meaningful resolutions. Not that I'm particularly good at sticking to them anyway. So this year, I'm going to steal some from Woody Guthrie's New Years Rulin's.

Many of these seem doable (reprint after the jump).  What are your New Year's resolutions, and if you don't play that game let us know what you think the most important news story of the year was? Arab Spring? Japanese earthquake/tsunami? Debt ceiling fiasco? Lots to choose from. Or how about the most under covered story of the year?

America was founded in part by a bunch of Christians whose kids couldn't celebrate Christmas in school Back Home and who were also fleeing from all the gay people in the military. While all that may not have worked out so well for them in the long run, they brought with them the tradition of Christmas and for this we thank them.

Today we celebrate the birth of a child who grew up to argue that people should be nice to each other. We remember our forefolks' hope that lengthening days would bring relief and new life. We stop to look around us, perhaps, and note that our own lives are more full of joy than we might have realized. We weigh our struggles against those of our fellows, our neighbors, our distant kin and people far away.

For all of us this day is sometime in our life a hard day, where we are the ones who need an open face and a warm embrace. All of us on this day will find ourselves at some point the one to offer that face, that hug, that hand.

Whether this is your year to nestle in the glow of family and friends, or to sit quietly alone, know that you are loved. You are part of a family that stretches around the world and into the depths of time. Where there is love there is hope, where there is hope there is joy to be found.

I wish you all the Very Merriest Christmas and all the best for a prosperous and peaceful New Year.