Playing not to lose

After receiving a thumping in Massachusetts at the hands of a state senator known for little more than owning a truck and having once been naked in a major women's magazine (a man who, I might add, has already angered Glenn Beck in the two days since his election), the Democrats are now tripping over themselves to back down on the health care legislation that they've spent the better part of the last year working on, and openly quivering in fear because, as Sen. Barbara Boxer of California put it, "every state is now in play."

And that is precisely why they will lose in November.

Anyone who thinks it's politically expedient to, as Sen. Mary Landrieu of Louisiana put it, "go back to the drawing board" on the signature legislation that the Democrats have fought and clawed for over the past year is absolutely out of his or her mind. Yes, there are voters who vociferously oppose the health care bill. There were even some of those in Massachusetts, but that isn't why the Democrats lost there. The Democrats lost in Massachusetts because: (a) their candidate ran an absolutely pathetic excuse for a campaign (Curt Schilling a Yankees fan, really? And, hey, if you can't spell the name of the state correctly in your own campaign ads, you don't deserve to win) and (b) President Obama hasn't delivered on the change or the leadership that he promised. Instead of embracing the mandate the American people gave to a progressive agenda, he went straight to the first page of the Democrat playbook, which reads in big, bold letters: "MOVE TO THE CENTER."

There have been a lot of mistakes made by the Democrats over the past year but, for the most part, they all fall under the same umbrella of "playing not to lose, instead of playing to win." Anyone who's ever been a competitive athlete knows that you have to be aggressive to be successful in sports, and that holds true just about everywhere else as well. It's no coincidence that the first of Stephen Covey's "7 Habits of Highly Effective People" is being proactive. While the Republicans have controlled the debate on health care by recklessly floating falsehoods like "death panels" and government takeovers and holding up for political reasons a bill that would save the American taxpayers a trillion dollars over the next couple of decades, the Democrats have fallen back on their heels, defending themselves against baseless attacks when they should be on the offensive about the lack of cooperation from the other side. You can't be reactive in politics and get anything done, especially right now. Period.

If the Democrats back down now on health care reform, not only will they fall in November (and, really, if you're so worried about losing your job that you can't effectively do your job, then you're probably not cut out for that particular line of work), but it will effectively put the nail in the coffin of the progressive agenda. If we give up on health care reform now, it won't be taken up later, it will die, and so will climate change legislation, and equal rights, and serious financial regulation, etc. Mary Landrieu is dead wrong that we can wait until tomorrow -- there is no tomorrow. In the words of Langston Hughes, "a dream deferred is a dream denied."

So, just for once, let's make like Republicans and play to win.

UPDATE:

In a humbling loss, an opportunity to lead

Once again, Democrats have put up a needless roadblock on the path to effective governance, this time by bungling what should have been an easy victory in liberal Massachusetts and managing to lose both a priceless heirloom (the seat that Ted Kennedy had held for 47 years) and the crucial filibuster-breaking 60th vote in the Senate.

There are no doubt a lot of conclusions to be drawn from this shocking turn of events, but the prevalent argument that lawmakers should stop and consider what voters are saying about health care reform doesn't hold much water for me. Even if it's true -- and it very well may be -- that Republican wins in New Jersey, Virginia and now Massachusetts are indicators that the public is skittish about the President's signature legislation, I'm not sure how much bearing that should have on whether or not Congress passes it. This is a representative democracy, after all, and, as Wikipedia puts it, our elected officials are "charged with the responsibility of acting in the people's interest, but not as their proxy representatives." If lawmakers are going to be nothing more than slaves to the latest polling data, we might as well replace them with referendums, and we've seen how well that's worked out for California.

It's a fundamental assumption of American politics that the people aren't always right and, just as holding elections serves as a check on the power of our officials, so should the authority vested in them serve as a check on ours. The suggestion that legislators should bend their decisions to the will of a fickle public strikes me as a kind of character-less politics we might do best to avoid. I would much prefer that my congressperson vote based on a careful study of the issue than on what's more likely to get him or her re-elected.

All of which is to say that if Congress ultimately decides to let health care reform die in the wake of Scott Brown's victory, it should be because the men and women we've entrusted with our futures truly believe that the overhaul is not in the best interest of the American people, and not because they like the views from their offices. This is a seminal opportunity for our leaders to stand by their values in the face of adversity. Let's hope they surprise us.

Mike Huckabee is an ass

"Some of us fail to understand that our First Amendment right to speak and assemble is meaningless without our Second Amendment right to bear arms, we don't make the connection."

This is a shockingly idiotic statement. Does Mike Huckabee really want to give every dissident group free access to weapons? Or just the ones that he likes? And can we stop for a moment and imagine how many more innocent people would have been killed in Iran if thousands of scared protesters had been firing guns indiscriminately in the streets? Talk about a massacre. How about at Kent State in 1970? Or in Birmingham in 1963? Is he really suggesting that Gandhi would have benefited from an assault rifle?

While civil war (and, indeed, violence) may become necessary in the course of human events, it should be a last resort, not a first. Regardless of how you interpret the second amendment, what Mike Huckabee is advocating for isn't democracy, it's anarchy, and it's an irresponsible position for a former United States governor to take. Maybe he's just ratcheting up the crazy for the Fox News crowd, or competing with Sarah Palin for wingnut of the week, but for some reason, I expected more of the Huckster (must have been those sweet Chuck Norris ads...)



Source: [Wonkette]

Ron Artest is my new favorite singer, maybe

I have no idea if this is real or not, but I'd like to believe that it is.



Source: [Deadspin]

Comcast to put its crappy TV on the Internet

Do we really need more ways to watch The Closer?

Apparently so, as "Comcast and Time Warner Inc. will work together on a nationwide trial, set to begin this month, that will provide new and recent episodes from top TNT and TBS series over the Web to 5,000 of the operator's cable TV customers." (Comcast rival, Time Warner Cable, which was split off from its parent company in March, also has plans to pursue similar trials.)

The model, which the companies have ominously dubbed "TV Everywhere," will initially provide full episodes of TBS and TNT shows "only to customers who subscribe to both cable TV and broadband services, over only a Comcast-provided Internet connection through a subscriber's cable modem, and via only the Comcast.net or Fancast.com portals." If the trial is successful, more cable programmers will presumably join in and those restrictions will be loosened, though it will continue to be a subscription-based service.

Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes is confident about the potential of "TV Everywhere" to compete with the "a la carte, ad-supported" content offered by Hulu.com (itself a joint Venture by NBC Universal, Fox and Disney), which has enjoyed a rapid rise to popularity since its launch in March of 2008. Said Bewkes, “If you advocate show-by-show [distribution], that will blow up the model. You'll end up paying more because you won't have the ability to have niche networks, you won't have the ability for ad support.”

The truth of that statement remains to be seen but, frankly, whichever model emerges victorious, the real losers will be the American public. I was all for Hulu (ad-supported digital democracy, hooray!) until it released those obnoxiously self-mocking commercials (watch here and here) suggesting that its content providers were aliens seeking world domination through the gradual softening of human brains. While the tone was jocular, the message had an unshakable ring of truth -- the more that innovative technologies are used to peddle the same tired, mindless content to an even broader audience, the more we become victims of a corporate culture that increasingly devalues the human cost of its actions.

Nevermind the fact that the United States ranks a dismal 15th internationally in broadband access, according to a recent Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development report, now we're supposed to pay for the opportunity to turn the Internet into a television? Are we really so hell-bent on our own destruction that we're willing to pay to have reruns streamed to our laptops?

Don't answer that -- I have a feeling that I don't want to know.

Source: [Multichannel News via Free Press]

Sarah Palin blows this joint

In what has to be the most bizarrely delusional move since Michael Jackson accepted the "Artist of the Millennium" award at the 2002 VMAs, Sarah Palin just announced that she is resigning as governor of Alaska, presumably so that she can get started on her 2012 presidential bid.

Considering that (soon-to-be-former) Gov. Palin is one of the most polarizing figures in American politics, this seems a bit like Hulk Hogan leaving pro wrestling to train for the Olympics, but I guess I shouldn't complain, being a Democrat and all. Still, if I have to listen to her babble about her foreign relations bonafides (Russia is "right over the border") and how David Letterman is mouth-raping her children for the next three years, I might seriously consider moving somewhere beyond the reach of cable news, like Mars.

Maybe she's on to something after all...

Source: [CNN]

Thanks for all the memories, Alaska:

Diving in the shallow end: Thoughts on the Twitter revolution

Three weeks ago, I would have told you that Twitter, the latest craze to sweep the Internet like some sort of digital swine flu, was not only one of the dumber innovations to emerge out of the past decade (right up there with the Snuggie), but also quite possibly a serious threat to civilization. All of this in spite of the fact that I had never written or even read a "tweet" (the 140-character messages with which Twitterers communicate).

Then the Iranian uprising happened, and protesters used social networking tools like Twitter and Facebook to subvert government repression, communicating with each other and sharing gut-wrenching accounts of the brutality on the streets with the rest of the world. Suddenly, it was as if Twitter could serve a purpose other than broadcasting one's egotism and superficiality into the ether.

Admittedly, that purpose is limited. As Fareed Zakaria suggested, Twitter isn't necessarily a "game changer" in Iran -- while it certainly helped draw international attention to the protests, any real change will likely have to come from the top down, and it's not as if the government won't find a way to restrict this new technology as it has the old ones. Furthermore, with the attention span of the media-consuming world dulled by the constant barrage of information coming from the TV and the world wide web, it's easy to forget that the crisis in Iran is still in full swing, as new stories (Mark Sanford's sexy love letters, Michael Jackson's tragic-if-unsurprising death, Bernie Madoff's sentencing and a military coup in Honduras) muscle onto center stage. Still, let us not forget the lessons of Birmingham, Kent State and even Tiananmen Square about the power of the media to help affect political change.

As someone who has now sent a full 18 tweets into the world, I feel qualified to state the obvious -- that Twitter is neither good nor evil in and of itself. It's just a program that let you share a little bit of information with a lot of people very quickly. In the wrong hands, that can be a dangerous proposition, but I fully believe that social networking can also be used to foster intelligent, articulate debate if people simply choose to use it that way. And it's not as if we have much choice -- like it or not, Twitter isn't going away, and we can't shape the future from a cynical distance.