President Obama today awarded the Medal Of Honor to a soldier for actions during the Vietnam War.

The citation reads in part

“Even though his platoon was ambushed from all sides by a large enemy force, Sabo charged the enemy position, killing several enemy Soldiers. He then assaulted an enemy flanking force, successfully drawing their fire away from friendly Soldiers and ultimately forcing the enemy to retreat. While securing a re-supply of ammunition, an enemy grenade landed nearby. Specialist Sabo picked it up, threw it, and shielded a wounded comrade with his own body — absorbing the brunt of the blast and saving his comrade’s life.

“Although wounded by the grenade blast, Sabo continued to charge the enemy’s bunker. After receiving several serious wounds from automatic weapons fire, he crawled toward the enemy emplacement and, when in position, threw a grenade into the bunker. The resulting explosion silenced the enemy fire, but also ended Specialist Sabo’s life.”

Charging a superior force once would be impressive. Doing so twice even more so. Following that up with braving a field of fire to resupply, taking a grenade for a fellow soldier and then charging AGAIN and taking out an enemy bunker is beyond amazing.

Sabo and his family came to the United States from Austria after World War 2. When he received his draft notice he could have gotten an exemption both because he was married and because he was in college. But he refused to even consider it, saying that he owed his country a debt for all he and his family had been given.

If you want to see what a hero looks like, look no further.

So certainly it is ironic that while caving in to the dangers of speaking out so forcefully on issues of race, our country’s first African-American president has instead chosen the issue of same sex marriage to take a stand that might be controversial, unpopular, and fraught with political danger….

Jeffers supports the President on gay marriage, he just wonders why Obama doesn’t do the same for black issues.

But the deepest concern comes from black pastors, which feel Obama has betrayed his Christian faith. Which is why Obama called the black leaders who had supported him after his announcement. As the New York Times reported:

About two hours after declaring his support for same-sex marriage last week, President Obama gathered eight or so African-American ministers on a conference call to explain himself. He had struggled with the decision, he said, but had come to believe it was the right one.

The ministers, though, were not all as enthusiastic. A vocal few made it clear that the president’s stand on gay marriage might make it difficult for them to support his re-election.

Many black pastors are no longer supporting Obama for election over this, although there are those who are are disagreeing, but still showing support:

The Rev. Emmett C. Burns Jr., a politically influential black minister, held an event Sunday at his Rising Sun Baptist Church in Baltimore, Md., to publicly withdraw support from Obama over his same-sex marriage support, CNN reported. “I love the president, but I cannot support what he has done,” Burns was quoted as saying at the church. He also predicted that Obama’s stance would lead to his defeat in November.

…………………………

Dr. Ken Hutcherson, pastor of Antioch Baptist Church in Redmond, Wash., told The Christian Post last Thursday that he would never vote for someone who believes in same-sex marriage and abortion, “regardless who it is, regardless how white they are, regardless how black they are.”

From NPR:

The Reverend Patrick Wooden, senior pastor of the Upper Room Church of God in Christ, in Raleigh, North Carolina had this to say on the President’s announcement of support of gay marriage:

I am going to do all that I can to influence as many people as possible to think for themselves and allow the God of Christianity and the teachings of Christianity to have more influence in their lives than any person who may be holding any political office, even if that office is the presidency of the United States of America. This particular decision I find appalling, and I could not disagree with the president more on it.

I think these examples are just the tip of the iceberg in the black church. I have friends who are black pastors here in Houston. They make no bones about the fact that black pastors across the country are feeling the same way as Rev. Burns Jr. and Rev. Wooden. I don’t think it helps when the left compares gay marriage to the civil rights movement. This is deeply offensive to those who feel this way in the black church. Fighting for interracial marriage was still about marriage between a man and woman.

Even liberal well known black activist Tavis Smiley disagrees with Pres. Obama on this issue because of his faith.

NewsOne also points out the problems with black women having to choose their pastors over Obama.

It’s not as if black women didn’t know that Obama supported gay marriage already, but there’s a huge difference between believing something and announcing it. Church women are good at overlooking huge flaws in the men they admire, sometimes to their own detriment. But when the man of her dreams draws a clear line in the sand, a woman can be forced to make a decision she would rather not have to make.

Another telling challenge for black women might be the pronouncement of President Obama as “The First Gay President.” Having their man stolen by a homosexual is probably the greatest nightmare of nearly every black woman in America, and I can’t begin to describe how many church-going black women were infuriated by a gay blogger projecting homosexuality onto the president.
…………………………

Black women have been President Obama’s most loyal constituency. Asking these women to abandon the teachings of the pastor and bible that they’ve loved for so many decades could possibly be too much to ask.

We keep hearing poll after poll about Americans support or non support of gay marriage. I’m not buying any of them. I think that there is a deep seated belief in marriage and what it means in this country, even if we do a lousy job at showing it. I think most Americans do not want the definition of marriage, being between a man and a woman, to change. I think most people understand the legal needs of gays in unions, and that is why most support civil unions. They feel it gives the legal protections we expect in a secular society without touching the sacrament of marriage. I wonder if we will ever learn the art of compromise on controversial social issues?

Will blacks who disagree with Obama on gay marriage rush out to vote for Romney? Probably not. But I do think enough will just stay home to soothe their conscience to do damage to Obama.

WASHINGTON – NO IDEOLOGICAL COMPASS and no economic message since before the 2010 midterms has come back to bite Pres. Obama, giving Mitt Romney a strong showing according to multiple polling snapshots of the presidential race today.

A larger stimulus would have been more effective, while illustrating Pres. Obama had a progressive economic plan, with a strong message in 2010 to take on Tea Party austerity at least showing he had a clearly stated economic vision throughout his first term, instead of the series of reactions to Republicans that it has come to represent.

Simpson-Bowles did absolutely nothing for Pres. Obama except to show that he was farming his economic plan out to a bipartisan commission. But even then he couldn’t make a decision on the group’s decisions, letting them die a slow death, except with infotainment talking heads who love it. Making matters more confusing, Pres. Obama also floated a grand bargain on entitlement “reform,” yet another reaction to Republicans digging in their heels, which Speaker Boehner promised to do again. Pres. Obama’s populist Kansas speech was met with glorious praise by partisans, but financial word salads and budgetary bromides without force of action mean squat, especially when they’re nakedly political in the first place.

It has all had a cumulative effect and is the single biggest challenge in Obama facing off with Romney, who will not be intimidated on economics, his strong suit, whether you agree with his theories or not.

The poll showed that relatively few voters consider same-sex marriage their top issue amid continued economic uncertainty, and more than half said it would make no difference in their choice for president. But among those who said Mr. Obama’s position would influence their vote, more said they would be less likely to vote for him as a result; in a close race, even a small shift in swing states could be costly. – Obama’s Switch on Same-Sex Marriage Stirs Skepticism

All of the snapshot polling incorporates the gay marriage equality issue, but come November people will be voting on economics, unless an unforeseen national security matter rears up, then it’s Obama’s advantage all the way.

The snapshot in time polling, starting with the New York Times/CBS, should not surprise anyone, though I’m more interested in the USA Today/Gallup poll.

Though an overwhelming 71% rate economic conditions as poor, a 58% majority predict they will be good a year from now. While those surveyed are inclined to say they are worse off financially than a year ago, nearly two-thirds say they think they’ll be better off this time next year.

[...] Since becoming the presumptive Republican nominee, Romney’s favorable-unfavorable rating has jumped to 50%-41%, his best ever and in the same neighborhood as Obama’s 52%-46% standing. The former Massachusetts governor gets stronger ratings than the president when it comes to handling the economy, the issue likely to drive the campaign.

In the poll, 55% say the economy would get better over the next four years if Romney was elected, compared with 46% who say it would improve if Obama was re-elected. Twenty-seven percent say the economy would get worse in a Romney first term, compared with 37% who say that of an Obama second term.

There’s nothing that will convince me the marriage equality statement of Pres. Obama’s last week will factor in with voters who are seriously considering him in the first place. Though it is telling that the Times poll shows such a whopping number of people, 67% to 24% believing it was politically motivated, which points to a character issue about Barack Obama that has been seen throughout his political rise.

Mitt Romney’s character issue on political expediency and convenience, as well as on 1% economic largess, has been documented, as have been his statements proving he’ll say absolutely anything to win and actually has on a number of occasions.

The Obama camp, through Stephanie Cutter, is saying the Times/CBS polling sampling is untrustworthy, though she used the word “biased” when speaking with Chuck Todd on MSNBC.

In the ABC/Wash Post poll, 54% of women approve of his stance, while men weigh in at 37%. Independents are favorable of his stance, 49-43, though some independents are strongly against, but I’d bet they’re also conservatives who hate the notion of marriage equality. Some people will never evolve to the point of accepting it’s a civil rights issue.

In the USA/Gallup poll, understanding we’re talking about a snapshot of today, Republicans have taken the lead in the fight to control Congress, 50%-44%.

Another sign of restlessness with Pres. Obama comes at the very end, revealing the same challenges he had in 2008.

Meanwhile, one in five Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents say they would have preferred a nominee other than Obama, who didn’t face a primary challenge. They include one in four white voters.

That number, 25%, of white Democratic-leaning independents who say they’d prefer another nominee is a problem, because they could choose to stay home, along with the tiny minority of religious conservative African Americans, who oppose his marriage equality stance, even though it doesn’t change DOMA at all.

Women are listening to Mitt Romney on economics, because that’s the issue that will drive most votes.

Throughout Pres. Obama’s first term, he has had no economic message at all, opting instead for a reactionary strategy to Republican proposals, which now is met by Mitt Romney’s relentless repetition that he’s been successful, he has, knows how to create jobs, been there and destroyed some on the way, and Obama doesn’t know what he’s doing, with the success of the auto bailout proving otherwise. Unfortunately, Pres. Obama’s continual rightward shift benefits Republicans across the board.

It’s impossible to over emphasize the damage done by Pres. Obama’s lack of economic message to his own reelection efforts.

However, there’s still no evidence yet Mitt Romney has the political talent to beat an incumbent president, which is a very difficult thing to do.

Mitt Romney is dead wrong on economics, but he’s strong and sure in his messaging, something Pres. Obama has never been. There was another guy who Democrats didn’t think had a prayer to win the presidency and he was a strong and wrong as Romney, winning two terms. George W. Bush endorsed Mitt Romney on Tuesday.


Taylor Marsh, a veteran political analyst and former Huffington Post contributor, is the author of The Hillary Effect, available at Barnes and Noble and on Amazon. Her new-media blog www.taylormarsh.com covers national politics, women and power.

TM NOTE: The Newsweek cover is from Tina Brown’s cutting room floor and is by Oliver Munday, one of the ones that didn’t make the cut, via their Tumblr blog.

But the big question is: has that much really changed when you stand back — like, at 30,000 feet — and put aside partisan talking points and spin? Nate Silver suggests it hasn’t changed all that much (but if could).

“The group had qualified for the general election ballot in 27 states, and had generated concern among Democrats and Republicans alike that it could wreak havoc on a close election between President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney.”

Buzz Feed now seizes on “7 Very Bad Predictions About Americans Elect,” by such big-name pundits as Thomas Friedman, John Heilemann and John Avlon, all of whom enthused about bringing a new kind of digital democracy to American political gridlock.

One small-name pundit thought differently. From this blog (November 26, 2011):

“If you enjoyed how Ralph Nader put George W. Bush into the White House in 2000, you may love what a group called Americans Elect is trying to do in 2012.

“The well-financed effort wants a ‘wide-scale draft movement for presidential candidates,’ but it looks more like hammering a ‘broken’ political system and smashing it to smithereens…”

MORE.

Of course the other factor here, is how Mitt Romney is defined by others and himself.

David Fitzsimmons, The Arizona Star

This copyrighted cartoon is licensed to run on TMV. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited.

George Zimmerman had a broken nose, two black eyes and cuts on the back of his head the day after he killed Trayvon Martin, according to a medical report taken by his doctor.

It also emerged on Tuesday that an autopsy showed skin on Trayvon’s knuckles was broken.

The new revelations bolster Zimmerman’s claims that he was being punched and pummeled by the unarmed teen when he opened fire on February 22 in a gated community in Sanford, Florida.

Zimmerman, who is charged with murder in the killing, claims he acted in self-defense and only shot Trayvon when the teen saw the pistol he was carrying and reached for it. It was then, Zimmerman said, he drew the gun himself and pulled the trigger.

On Tuesday, ABC News obtained a medical report from Zimmerman’s family, who examined the neighborhood watch volunteer the day after the shooting. Zimmerman wanted to be checked out so he could be cleared to return to work.

KFTV in Orland also reported on Tuesday that Trayvon had broken skin on his knuckles when his body underwent an autopsy.

The new report contradicts a previous claim by Richard Kurtz, the funeral director who handled the teen’s remains, there was no damage on his knuckles.

Here’s part of the KFTV report which also notes there could be “another explanation” for the state of Martin’s knuckles:

WFTV has confirmed that autopsy results show 17-year-old Trayvon Martin had injuries to his knuckles when he died.

The information could support George Zimmerman’s claim that Martin beat him up before Zimmerman shot and killed him.

The autopsy results come as Zimmerman’s attorney, Mark O’Mara continues to go over other evidence in the case.

O’Mara wouldn’t comment on the autopsy evidence, but WFTV legal analyst Bill Sheaffer said it’s better for the defense than it is for the prosecution.

WFTV has learned that the medical examiner found two injuries on Martin’s body: The fatal gunshot wound and broken skin on his knuckles.

When you compare Trayvon’s non-fatal injury with Zimmerman’s bloody head wounds, the autopsy evidence is better for the defense, Sheaffer said.

“It goes along with Zimmerman’s story that he acted in self-defense, because he was getting beaten up by Trayvon Martin,” Sheaffer said.

The injury to Martin’s knuckle also fits with Zimmerman’s story that before he shot and killed Martin, Martin had broken his nose and knocked him to the ground, slamming his head on the sidewalk.

But Sheaffer said there could be another explanation for Martin’s knuckle injury.

“It could be consistent with Trayvon either trying to get away or defend himself,” Sheaffer said.

This case remains highly emotional on both sides (those who believe Zimmerman and those who side with the Martin family). But, in the end, the court will try and determine the chronology and motivation.

One report suggests the FBI is considering charging Zimmerman with a hate crime:

Federal investigators are considering filing hate crime charges against George Zimmerman for killing Trayvon Martin, a local Florida station reported.

Last month, Zimmerman was charged by the state of Florida with second-degree murder for shooting the unarmed teen in February. He faces a maximum of life in prison without parole if convicted on that charge.

If charged and convicted of a hate crime, the 28-year-old volunteer watchman could face the death penalty, Orlando station WFTV reported.

FBI investigators, working on behalf of the Justice Department, have been talking to witnesses in the Sanford, Fla., gated community where Zimmerman admitted to fatally shooting the 17-year-old on Feb. 26, the station reported.

Ultimately, a U.S. attorney in the region would decide whether to file the hate crime charges.

To get a conviction, federal prosecutors would have to prove that Zimmerman stalked and killed the unarmed teen because he was black.

The future is always a dystopia and the past is always better than this mess we live in right now. That’s if literature has any ability to tell us about ourselves. Stories about the future: Forewarning. Stories about the good ol’ days: Heartening. Somewhere in our collective unconscious we believe there was a golden era of innocence and irresistible quaintness. The present is far from that—so the future has to be worse. Most likely involving robots … emoting and plotting their revenge.

The future scares us and we wish it could be more like it used to be. Therefore we freak out about change and demand tradition because it connects us to this proverbial Garden of Eden in our minds.

This logical glitch is a pestilence in American politics. Conservative politicians in particular pander to this notion; we must go back to the past. There it was better because we were better.

Presumptive presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s punt on same-sex marriage is: “I agree with 3,000 years of history.” To him this means a love-based consensual marriage between one man and one woman; our current interpretation of marriage. Of course plural marriage, like that of Romney’s grandfathers has also been practiced in the last 3,000 years. As were arranged marriages. As were loveless contractual nuptials. Deuteronomy is pretty clear if a woman isn’t a virgin when she gets married she should be killed. It wasn’t until 1993 that North Carolina became the last state to remove the marriage exemption for rape. Regardless, Romney admits to agreeing with 3,000 years of marriage history. His Etch-a-Sketch must be set to history revision.

I personally don’t agree with any history before sewage systems, women’s suffrage or the Loving decision, which struck down anti-miscegenation laws. I also refuse to romanticize any era before the advent of antibiotics.

The GOP’s objection to state-sanctioned monogamous homosexual relationships is, they offer, based on their belief in the Bible. The current crop of Republicans are less into Jesus (who didn’t like rich people or capital punishment) than they are into 1st Century values like stoning misfits in the public square. They’ve chosen gay marriage to condemn as an evil out to kill us all, because for Republicans there actually IS a magic time in the not-so-distant past to be nostalgic for—specifically 2004. Then gay marriage was the perfect catalyst to get people to vote Republican. Hence Dubya’s second term.

And now? Now in the wake of the unremarkable ending to Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell (which funny enough is no longer talked about), gay rights doesn’t have the same bite. In 2005 the Supreme Court made sodomy legal in all 50 states and since then there have been absolutely no reports of anyone turning into a pillar of salt. But Republicans who pride themselves on being traditional and firmly planted in the past regardless of folly—are going to try and chum the water with something as anemic as spousal privilege.

Last week President Obama said he supported gays being allowed to marry. This was the right thing to do. But it wasn’t the radical thing to do—it’s popular. Most Americans agree that homosexuals should be able to be married. According to a recent Gallup poll 51 percent of Americans agree with President Obama on this issue.

Will gay marriage corrode the foundation of this country? When gay marriage becomes the norm (which it will eventually) we probably won’t even notice. We’ll get the same amount of wedding invites only all of these will be legal. You’ll know the same amount of gays you know now. Our children will have the same likelihood of being homosexual as they do now. Very few American’s lives will change. It’s just a minority—a persecuted, ostracized, demonized minority—of Americans whose lives will improve with the option for full-legal rights as a married couple.

That’s if the past is actually prologue … instead of paradise.

© Copyright 2012 TinaDupuy.com, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. Tina Dupuy is an award-winning writer and the managing editor of Crooks and Liars. Tina can be reached at tinadupuy@yahoo.com. Her column is licensed to run on TMV in full.

Christopher Weyant, The Hill

This copyrighted cartoon was licensed to run on TMV. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited.

David Fitzsimmons, The Arizona Star

America’s 2012 Presidential election has now officially entered its “English Class” stage. On Election Day they’ll get a pop quiz to see how well the national voting class learned the teachers’ definitions. Top grade goes to the teacher whose definition was learned.

In this game, presumptive Republican Presidential nominee Mitt Romney better get cracking.

Defining opponents is an art that goes back many years. Think Republican Thomas E. Dewey (defined as a stiff, out of touch, reactionary bore by incumbent Democratic President Harry Truman), GOPer Barry Goldwater (defined as a scary war monger with an itchy nuclear finger button by LBJ), Democrat George McGovern (defined by President Richard Nixon as an extremist not representing the Silent Majority) and Democrat Michael Dukakis (defined by the late Lee Atwater but partly by himself, when he rode helmeted in that tank and DID look like Snoopy.)

But nowhere is defining more important than in advertising, where corporations invest millions to create images that mentally instantly define companies. McDonald’s didn’t create Ronald McDonald to look like a member of Congress — no matter what you think. They created him to bond with the kiddies and bond with the kiddies’ parents’ money.

Team Obama is trying to define Romney as a dorky out of touch corporate raider, a tool of talk show culture and Tea Party style Republicans and a flip-flopper who’ll take any position to win votes. He’s being portrayed as political Silly Putty that could be squeezed into doing the bidding of his party’s most extreme elements, and who’d set the clock back to the Bush or maybe even Herbert Hoover era. Team Romney seeks to paint Obama as a hapless liberal ideologue in over his head, whose clueless, ineffective policies reflect a lifetime of ignorance of business, the economy, and job creation.

Romney’s key problem is that he and his super PAC spent so much time and money ripping apart other Republicans during the primaries that he hasn’t laid out a comprehensive case for himself or solidified his own image for voters in terms of precisely who he is as a politician and as a man. Instead, he’s giving late night comedians tons of material.

New York Times reporter Timothy Egan calls it Romney’s “weasel problem,” which, he writes, is Romney’s “continued inability to honestly face up to his own life story and those inconvenient truths that interfere with the ideas of the vocal right-wing of the party whose standard he will soon bear. On multiple occasions over the last year, Romney has shown a tendency to dodge, weave, parse or deny in such a way that it outweighs the original offense. It’s his weasel problem, a real character flaw.”

Indeed, many analysts now suggest that when President Barack Obama recently came out in support for same sex marriage after quick-mouthed Vice President Joe Biden seemingly accelerated a planned timetable, it was partially because the Dems wanted to ensure Obama’s contrast with Romney was clear. But Obama took a political hit: the CBS/New York Times poll found 67 percent felt Obama’s announcement was for political reasons.

Romney’s method of handling negative publicity is defining him more than all the brutally partisan ads from Camp Obama can do. Nixon never lived down his “I am not a crook” comment. Bill Clinton’s image was forever tarnished by his lying “I did not have sexual relations with that woman” comment. And former Sen. John Edwards’ long-denied affair with Rielle Hunter while he portrayed a loving husband campaigning with his dying wife Elizabeth, while using big bucks from donors to support his girlfriend, gives Edwards enough character flaws to supply the entire Congress.

Even a can of baked beans at Safeway doesn’t accept Romney’s explanation that he can’t recall a high school incident reported by the Washington Post –and sourced by five former classmates — which involved a bully — Romney — forcibly clipping an apparently gay student’s hair. Romney should have simply apologized and, as some suggest, said that when he was a kid he did some really dumb things.

A lot of adults did really dumb things as kids. And adults as adults do dumb things, too. In fact, in listening to all the partisans spinning and delivering tiresome and predictable talking points on ideological cable shows, it seems as if both parties have answered the request of that famous song: “Send in the Clowns.”

Copyright 2012 Joe Gandelman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Daryl Cagle, MSNBC.com

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And here we have a classic RPT classic case of Team Obama trying to dismiss and a poll that they don’t like…and talk about methodology. The Politico:

The Obama campaign is criticizing today’s New York Times/CBS News poll, which suggests that Mitt Romney is leading among female voters and that two-thirds of voters think Obama supported same-sex marriage “for political reasons.”

Forty-six percent of the 615 surveyed said the would vote for Mitt Romney, against 43 percent for the president. 46 percent of women also said they would vote for Romney, versus 44 for the president.

But the principle issue for the Obama campaign is the motivation behind his support for same-sex marriage: 67 percent of those polled said he made his decision “for political reasons,” against just 24 percent who said he did so because he thinks it is right.

“The methodology was significantly biased,” Stephanie Cutter, Obama’s deputy campaign manager, said on MSNBC this morning. “It is a biased sample.”

This is so blatant an example of how partisans respond to some polls. It’s as if they were reading TMV posts (which they aren’t). But Chuck Todd — who is about as professional an analyst as you’ll find — also has some doubts:

Daily Rundown host Chuck Todd has also noted that the poll doesn’t provide enough data, because it surveys the same group surveryed in an earlier poll, and with a smaller sample size. And the first CBS/NYT poll from April was — as the Obama campaign has stressed — something of an outlier, being the only poll other than a Fox News poll that put Romney ahead of Obama.

“[G]iven that this poll was a “call-back survey” — with the respondents first interviewed back in April — it feels like we need more poll data to make sense of all the events of the past two weeks,” Todd wrote on MSNBC’s First Read. (NBC and the Wall Street Journal will be out with their own poll within the next ten days).

But I repeat:

If the poll had shown lopsidded, stunningly high approval for Obama on the same sex marriage issue, do you think the Obama campaign would be complaining about the methodology and trying to get people to ignore it?

“I’m for Mitt Romney,” Bush told ABC News this morning as the doors of an elevator closed on him, after he gave a speech on human rights a block from his old home — the White House.

Bush’s endorsement isn’t a surprise, given that Romney is virtually the Republican Party’s nominee. But the 43rd president has been absent from the 2012 campaign and hasn’t made any public comments showing his support for Romney.

Romney did get the formal backing of Bush’s parents, President George H.W. Bush and Barbara Bush, in March.
People who worked in the Bush administration say they doubt the former president will be campaigning for Romney this year. Even in his post-presidential life, Bush still gets a lot of the blame for the poor economy, according to polls, though he has become more popular since leaving office.

ABC News gives us this link to other “lackluster” endorsements for Romney. And the lack of GOP excitement over Romney is quite evident.

“This recession has been more brutal, the job losses steeper, politics seems nastier, Congress is more gridlocked than ever, some folks in the financial sector have been less than model citizens,” Barack Obama tells the class of ’12 at Barnard College.

The words sound realistic, but are we all in the 1998 movie, “The Truman Show,” in which Jim Carrey does not realize his life is not authentic but a 24/7 TV series managed and manipulated by others behind the scenes?

“We’ve become bored,” says the Godlike Producer, “with watching actors give us phony emotions. We are tired of pyrotechnics and special effects. While the world he inhabits is, in some respects, counterfeit, there’s nothing fake about Truman himself. No scripts, no cue cards. It isn’t always Shakespeare, but it’s genuine.”

Genuine, but under the control of forces with ulterior motives.

How much of today’s media world is “real” or just a production of the Obama and Romney campaigns with the contrivance of fake journalism machinery? Are we all watching a giant collaboration to persuade us this stuff is really happening?

Topic A now is gay marriage, which arose from Joe Biden’s Meet the Press “slip,” escalated into the President’s endorsement and ends now (perhaps) with Andrew Sullivan’s ode to Obama.

Topic B, Wall Street arrogance, is working its way through the machinery.

MORE.

Nearly everyone knows by now that “The Scream” — Edvard Munch’s iconic doodle of modern angst — broke auction records earlier this month when it sold for a few dollars shy of $120 million. In the weeks since, I’ve been thinking more and more about that sale and what it means.

I should confess right up front that I like both “The Scream” and the Norwegian artist from whose tortured mind it sprang more than a century ago. It’s probably not Munch’s greatest work. (That honor could go to “Jealousy” or “The Storm” or “Evening on Karl Johan Street” or any of a half-dozen others.) It’s not even a finely executed work of art by any standard. But who can forget it?

Still, $120 million represents a pretty hefty pile of American cabbage even for an unforgettable work of art, especially during a borderline depression. What else can you buy for $120 million these days? How about 120 vintage mansions at a million dollars a pop… or 3000 years of tuition at an elite American university… or 200,000 42″ flat-screen TVs… or a million hours of psychotherapy… or 10 million medium pizzas, each with two toppings of your choice… or (if you’re really conscientious) 60 million meals for poor people? You get the point.

The kicker is that the $120 million Scream wasn’t even the original that so many of us remember so vividly from our art history classes. In fact, it’s not even a painting. Munch created four versions of his most famous work, one of which was a crudely scrawled pastel imitation of the tempera original (which was pretty crude-looking to begin with). This pastel knock-off is the version that fetched the record sum at Sotheby’s earlier this month. (For that matter, the world’s priciest painting of all time, sold to the Persian Gulf mini-nation of Qatar last year for around $250 million, was simply one of five versions of Cezanne’s “Card Players.”)

Why would otherwise sane people pay a literal fortune for a second-rate copy of “The Scream”? It’s certainly not for the beauty of the image, the quality of the craftsmanship or the need to contemplate a profound expression of the human spirit (you could open an art book for the same experience). It’s not even for the chance to display such a famous image in your home and be the envy of your friends. Nobody would be reckless enough to leave a $120 million investment on the wall where burglars could snatch it, fire could consume it, or the cleaning lady could spray it with Endust.

So why would they buy it? For the bragging rights. For the investment value. Because they can.

For better or worse, the business of serious art collecting has always been the province of the economic elite. Why for better? Because only the elite can afford to lavish such extravagant sums on our struggling artists (especially after those artists are safely dead). From the Medicis to Henry Clay Frick to the faceless Japanese, Arab and American industrialists who keep smashing each other’s bidding records today, the super-rich have essentially run the art business since the dawn of the Renaissance. The more munificent plutocratic benefactors endow great museums or open their collections to the public, a favor for which the public should be decently grateful. By contrast, workers’ societies tend to favor public murals and propaganda posters.

Still, the incursion of today’s überwealth into the art world has produced some strange and unsettling trends…

Sticker shock. Of the 40 most expensive paintings of all time, all 40 were sold since 1987 — fittingly enough, as the Nouveau Gilded Age was taking shape under the smiling eyes of Ronald Reagan. And yes, the prices have been adjusted for inflation. The highest inflation-adjusted price previously paid for a work of art was $35 million for Leonardo da Vinci’s portrait of Ginevra de’ Benci back in 1967. (Not on the “top 40″ list, as you probably surmised.)

The disappearance of great art from public view. Yes, we can still pay our respects to the Mona Lisa and thousands of other great works in museums around the globe. But the tendency now is for mega-rich buyers to squirrel away their prizes and effectively make them vanish. Case in point: Back in 1990, Japanese paper manufacturing tycoon Ryoei Saito bought van Gogh’s beloved “Portrait of Dr. Gachet” for the then-record sum of $82.5 million ($146.5 million in 2012 dollars). The elderly Saito loved the painting so much that he expressed a desire to have it cremated with him when he shuffled off this mortal coil. Though the painting survived Saito’s demise in 1996, its current whereabouts are unknown. Saito’s recklessly whimsical desire raises a disturbing point: does the owner of a world-class work of art have the right to destroy it, the way a home buyer can tear down a historic house? Can he paint a mustache on it or cut it down to a more compact size if that’s what he wants? It’s his private property, after all. Entrusting great art to private collectors entails a great deal of trust.

A bias toward trendy, overhyped modern artists. Yes, painters of genius like Cezanne, Monet and van Gogh have fetched top dollar; that much is fitting and proper. I’ll even give the clever, overrated Picasso a pass as a groundbreaker of consequence. (He accounts for 10 of the top 40 priciest paintings.) But would you have guessed that the #2 and #3 spots belong to Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning? That’s right: in 2006, show-biz potentate David Geffen managed to unload a pair of their inscrutable daubings for $140 million and $137.5 million, respectively. Other “top 40″ artists include Francis Bacon, Jasper Johns, Mark Rothko and, of course, that ubiquitous poseur Andy Warhol. (His “Eight Elvises” sold for $100 million in 2008.)

The irrelevance of scarcity and merit. Are the Pollocks, de Koonings and Warhols of the art world really worth so much more than Leonardo? Of course not. And Leonardo has the advantage of scarcity on his side: his output includes only 15 indisputable paintings, some of which were abandoned in the early stages, while others (like The Last Supper) happen to be attached to walls. So why the outrageous sums for Leonardo’s latter-day inferiors? Demand, for one. The overpriced contemporary artists are sexier than Leonardo (in the loosest sense of the word; Warhol wasn’t exactly Don Juan). They’re sexy in the sense that they emit sparks of danger and in-your-face irreverence. And of course, sex appeal routinely outsells nobility or beauty in today’s free market.

The artificial inflation of reputations. A critical issue, and one that partly explains the absence of so many Old Masters from the “top 40″ list. Modern artists, like Hollywood celebrities and professional athletes, benefit from a vast, pervasive and free publicity machine that keeps their names in the public eye and inflates their value. When Angelina Jolie’s pillow-lipped face appears on half the magazine covers we see at the supermarket checkout counter, we assume that she’s worth something. No matter that we can’t remember more than one or two of her actual performances; the media continually tell us that she’s a commodity.

The same law holds true for modern artists. They generally don’t make the cover of People magazine, but their names achieve a similar currency within the smaller and tighter art community. Notable art critics and other tastemakers fawn over their works and interpret them for the rest of us. Galleries display their canvases reverently for all to see. Adoring art professors coo over them. Moneyed connoisseurs gab about them at fashionable parties. When a collector pays $140 million for a Jackson Pollock splatterfest, he’s essentially paying for the ultimate designer label in modern American art. Meanwhile, countless artists of superior talent languish in obscurity. They never made the right connections at arty New York soirees.

The influence of contextual pricing. Sounds like an arcane principle borrowed from an economics textbook, but it’s really a simple matter of habit: we become accustomed to paying much larger sums for some types of goods than for other types of goods. For example, I think nothing of spending $150 for a single night in a serviceable hotel, yet I balk at paying $12 for a tempting jar of lime-ginger preserves that could give me pleasure for the better part of a year. Why? Because I know that far too many decent hotel rooms fetch $200 or more a night, while I can enjoy a comparable jar of preserves (though maybe not lime-ginger) for $7 or so. We’ve grown accustomed to hotel rooms, restaurant liquor, college tuition, theater tickets and works of art being grossly overpriced… so we tend not to protest when we have to pay up. Maybe we should protest.

The widening gap between the super-rich and everyone else. Today’s outrageous wealth disparities account for much of the outlandish pricing. After all, we live in a society where Donald Trump commands $1.5 million for a one-hour speaking engagement while the wretches who write for online “content farms” earn $5 an article. Of course the Donald Trumps and their colleagues within the top .001 percent can part with $100 million plus for a work of art; that princely sum represents a few months’ income for their crowd.

In short, the billionaires rule the art world, as they rule over so much else today, from sports to banking to entertainment to politics. No surprise there. We have to appreciate the irony of struggling, perspiring, emotionally and financially tormented artists posthumously earning millions while feeding the egos of billionaires with money to burn. It might be a little more surprising that those billionaires actually take an interest in art. I suppose that’s a good sign, though of course they’ve forever lifted notable art beyond the budgets of petty-bourgeois players like you and me.

If we require any consolation, we always can open our art books or visit the local museum. Better yet, we can buy the works of talented, little-known artists whose works grace the walls of local galleries and coffee-houses. We even can buy ourselves a nice reproduction of “The Scream” for considerably less than $120 million. It’ll be Munch’s original version, too — not his shoddy pastel knock-off. And we won’t have to live in fear that the cleaning lady might spray it with Endust.

First, when he asks his thousands of respondents to estimate the real division of wealth in the US, and then to propose an ideal distribution, we Americans confirm our sentimental attachment to a polite tilt of privilege. We cherish our mythic legacy of quasi-egalitarian social democracy, with no extreme concentrations of wealth or poverty. But what our answers really confirm is our delusion about the economy we live in now. The top 20 percent of the people in fact own 84 percent of the goods, and the bottom 40 percent of us, barely floating on a sea of debt, own less than half of one percent of the wealth of the nation. We live across roughly double the rich-poor gap measured in Germany, Japan and Denmark. By the standard “Gini coefficient” of wealth inequality, the US ranks with Turkestan and Tunisia, just a tad more equal than Chad and Sri Lanka.

The second key question in Ariely’s survey is even simpler; the answer is a slam dunk. Respondents were shown two pie charts — one with the actual American shares of wealth, in which 60 percent of the population nearly disappears with less than 5 percent ownership altogether; in the alternative, modeled on Sweden, the top 20 percent owns 36 percent of the wealth (almost double its claim by sheer numbers) and the bottom 20 percent owns 11 percent (about half its numerical share). In Dan Ariely’s study (with Michael Norton of the Harvard Business School), 92 percent of us Americans want to live Swedish-style instead. Women (93 percent in favor of the Swedish model) are a ever so slightly more egalitarian than men (90 percent for Sweden). But the results come out very nearly the same — Republicans and Democrats, richer and poorer, NPR listeners and readers of Forbes Magazine.

Among the most interesting things Ariely describes in the interview is why this happens. Ariely has done significant work around anchoring, the cognitive bias that explains the common human tendency to rely too heavily, or “anchor,” on one trait or piece of information when making decisions.

Ariely seems to suggest (@7:15) that politicians act as anchors for our understanding of income inequality and taxation, education and healthcare, and the size and role of government. Politicians want passion, not reason, and those passions act to move our voting patterns away from our own expressed interests and values.

Still, he’s ultimately optimistic:

It might take a generation. That might be a reasonable time scale. The current generation that is running things might not be the right one. It might be that the generation that went to college during the financial crisis is the right generation — even if a lot of them are out of work. They’re thinking about what to do. They don’t have the Princeton-to-Wall Street path. They’re thinking of other things they might do with their lives, and because they don’t necessarily have jobs they are open to following their passions. My understanding is that volunteering is up. People are trying all kinds of things. There’s an increasing interest in graduate degrees — education is always counter-cyclical to the economy. This is a generation that saw the breakage of some ideologies of perfect capitalism, ready to revise their thinking. And they might be the right people to envision a new approach.

Listen up.

G. Dubya Bush assuring residents of The Big Easy that
nothing bad actually happened in Katrina, and even
if it did, everything would be hunky dory. The square
was lit by emergency generators : virtually the only
electricity IN New Orleans that night…

I wrote this to the Eugene Register-Guard in 2003:

Saddam Hussein was evil, but we had no lawful right to depose him. These are our American values.

Letters in the Editor’s Mailbag

June 19, 2003

A question of war crimes

After 80 days, it’s time Americans confronted a grave question: If no weapons of mass destruction are found, then members of the Bush administration are guilty of war crimes.

The U.S.-sponsored United Nations Charter, Chapter 1, Article 2, states: “The Organization is based on the principle of the sovereign equality of all its members.” And “All Members shall settle their international disputes by peaceful means in such a manner that international peace and security, and justice, are not endangered.”

Saddam Hussein was evil, but we had no lawful right to depose him. These are our American values.

In the 1945 Nuremberg Trials, there were four counts, and one, if not two, are applicable here. Count one: conspiracy to wage aggressive war, and count two: waging aggressive war, or “crimes against peace.” When it was argued that the court had no jurisdiction, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, lead prosecutor, rejoined, “The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant and so devastating that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored because it cannot survive their being repeated.”

Remember that in the near year of spin leading up to this war the term “regime change” was never used until 48 hours before the war began: because such a war would have been unlawful.

If war crimes have been committed (thousands are dead), those who screamed about the “rule of law” in 1999 better step up to the plate, else there is no such “rule.”

HART WILLIAMS

Well, at least one court now backs me up. Interestingly, not much comment in the American press. One short page on Google yesterday and one long page and another short overflow story on the next (and that’s when you turn off the redundancy filter):

Bush Convicted of War Crimes in Absentia

by Yvonne Ridley
The Foreign Policy Journal
May 12, 2012

Kuala Lumpur — It’s official; George W Bush is a war criminal.

In what is the first ever conviction of its kind anywhere in the world, the former US President and seven key members of his administration were yesterday (Fri) found guilty of war crimes.

Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and their legal advisers Alberto Gonzales, David Addington, William Haynes, Jay Bybee and John Yoo were tried in absentia in Malaysia.

The trial held in Kuala Lumpur heard harrowing witness accounts from victims of torture who suffered at the hands of US soldiers and contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan.

They included testimony from British man Moazzam Begg, an ex-Guantanamo detainee and Iraqi woman Jameelah Abbas Hameedi who was tortured in the notorious Abu Ghraib prison….

Interestingly enough, the Nuremberg Trials at the end of WWII (“watch the great movie “Judgment at Nuremberg” with Spencer Tracy and Burt Lancaster for a bit of the flavor) were cited by the court. Thus far, it’s Yvonne Ridley’s story, her having done the best job of early reporting, having seemingly read a good portion of the transcripts.

It is a sad day, my friends, when old Lenin Era Pravda now online in the XXIth century with a new direction and mission does a MUCH more credible reporting job than the US press and most of the blogosphere. Here are links to four parts of the transcript — such as it is — of the findings of the court with a suggestion that the story has been hacked at least once in the notes to one of the interior parts:

Part 1:
http://english.pravda.ru/world/americas/09-05-2012/121063-accusations_war_crimes-0/

Part II:
http://english.pravda.ru/world/americas/10-05-2012/121082-united_states_torture-0/

Part III
http://english.pravda.ru/world/americas/12-05-2012/121089-us_torture-0/

Part IV
http://english.pravda.ru/world/americas/13-05-2012/121099-usa_dock_four-0/

Here is the citation of our own hypocrisy in staining the national character before the whole world (who were watching):

The charge against the accused here is very similar to the charge for which the Nazi war criminals were convicted at the Nuremberg trials: “the charge of conscious participation in a nation-wide governmentally organized system of cruelty and injustice, in violation of the laws of war and humanity, and perpetrated in the name of law by … authority”: Alstotter case.

This is because after 9/11, all the pronouncements from the top made a conscious decision to set aside international rules constraining such treatment. A combination of factors account for this: fear, ideology and almost visceral disdain for international rules and norms. There are others who have also committed war crimes but those that have been charged are the key players. Against them there is overwhelming evidence and they bear direct responsibility for war crimes.

That is how it ends. You owe it to yourself to go and read the English translation put up in full by good ol’ Pravda. Time was, citing Pravda was a guarantee that you was at least a pinko, if not an outright commie. Boy times sure change.

George W. Bush, Agent of Al Q.A.E.D.A. is a post you should read

But what I said then was true. It remains true and as this story gains traction, every force in serpentine media and slithery supplication will attempt to convince you that our good nation did NOT commit War Crimes. These are the same bastards who maintained that no US soldier had ever or would ever do anything bad in our invasion and toppling of the regime of that guy who was responsible for Nine-Lebben.

Oh wait.

You see: we Americans are REALLY GOOD at ignoring important problems we find inconvenient. Slavery. Segregation. Child labor. Sweat shops. Women’s rights — promised them during the Civil War by politicians as part of expanding suffrage. Women’s actual rights, and not just the right to vote. Hispanic rights. Minority rights. Disabled access. The right not to be sexually harassed in the workplace. Gays and gay rights and no rights for “illegal aliens” who force sweatshop owners to fire all their American workers and employ the dirt-poor illegals to work for much lower wages, with zero rights.

Kind of like that slave labor in China that builds our computers and our i-Phones® and all the rest of the Wal-Marted, Four Bank and Four Oil Company America.

We are REAL good at it.

The  (graven) Image Makers at work

We Americans have never met a problem so big that we couldn’t all agree that it wasn’t actually there, and, therefore, nothing needs be done, nor talkin’ about that bothersome … thing. WHAT thing?

My point.

But the Bushies have PROVEN that you can be lied to with a straight face and will buy ANY crap they want to shove a feeding tube down your throat and ladle into your poor stomach.

Only next time, the country they topple and install their “approved” government after writing its “pillage and loot” constitution won’t be in the Middle East.

It’ll be in the Middle West.

Remember when I said “Saddam Hussein was evil, but we had no lawful right to depose him. These are our American values”? Well, here’s a piece of news for yas:  ”American values” are now whatever we SAY they are. So  …

What is the blogosphere rambling on about?

Romney v. Obama blah blah blah, and it’s only the Fourteenth of Freaking May. Democracy in America is ill-served by this obfuscatory persiflage masquerading as journalism. It is not journalism: it is sycophantism and infantilism and paroxysm. But it is NOT journalism, which, in its finest flower doesn’t merely report the news (with hefty chunks of gossip and hot air speculation thrown in to pad out the segment), but finds the IMPORTANT news and goes after it like a terrier after a rat.

Sure: One of these days we’re going to have to face up to the crimes of the past thirty years. That is guaranteed.

But not today.

That is guaranteed, as well.

Genuine; not PhotoShopped.

Courage.

====================

Kudos to Thom Hartmann for having the cojones to write about this on TruthOut and mention it on his program today(?).

====================

A writer, published author, novelist, literary critic and political observer for a quarter of a quarter-century more than a quarter-century, Hart Williams has lived in the American West for his entire life. Having grown up in Wyoming, Kansas and New Mexico, a survivor of Texas and a veteran of Hollywood, Mr. Williams currently lives in Oregon, along with an astonishing amount of pollen. He has a lively blog His Vorpal Sword. This is cross-posted from his blog

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IDAHO CLOSED PRIMARY

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Idaho Primary: Why The GOP Closed Its Ballot (By Samantha Wright, Boise State Public Radio) Grant says there was never a Democratic mandate to cross over and vote for someone in the GOP primary. But he does say, in local races, a tiny fraction of Democrats have done this. “And in many areas those races are decided in the Republican Primary. So there are folks, I’m sure there are folks now, folks that are good Democrats that have registered as Republicans so they can vote in those local races.”… That could be a challenge for the 37 percent of Idahoans who label themselves Independent, according to a 2011 Public Policy Survey by Boise State University.

WISCONSIN RECALL
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Americans Elect vote deadline hours away (Jonathan Tilove, The Times-Picayune) “Yes, the deadline is 11:59:59 tonight,” Americans Elect spokesman Ileana Wachtel said in an email this morning, referring to the requirement that, in order to compete in the Americans Elect voting a candidate must first gain 1,000 clicks from supporters in each of 10 states. The leading declared candidate, by a mile, is former Louisiana Gov. Buddy Roemer, but as of today he had only 5,618 clicks, and the most from any single state is 583 from California.

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