I am kind of behind the curve on this, but today is American Censorship Day, hence the modified banner at the top of the site. I’ll keep it up through tomorrow since I have should have technically posted this at midnight Nov. 16.

In any case, the Protect IP Act sets a dangerous precedent in Internet policing and threatens free speech. I don’t think President Obama would sign it into law, but since it has such wide support from Congress, I suppose it’s possible.

Learn more about it here:

And click here to sign a petition against the bill.

The full text can be found here.

Tell House Speaker John Boehner that the sky is, in fact, blue, and he will invariably say it’s purple if he’s convinced himself that that’s the case. Unless, of course, he’s colorblind. Doubtful. Then again, many of us might be colorblind since some have claimed that Boehner actually isn’t white but a drab shade of orange.

But I digress. Boehner is positively convinced that the GOP’s plan to trim the federal budget and right the economy is the best measure for the nation. A Goldman Sachs report from last month says otherwise.

Here’s a snippet from a recent L.A. Times article:

Spending cuts approved by House Republicans would act as a drag on the U.S. economy, according to a Wall Street analysis that put new pressure on the political debate in Washington.

The report by the investment firm Goldman Sachs said the cuts would reduce the growth in gross domestic product by up to 2 percentage points this year, essentially cutting in half the nation’s projected economic growth for 2011.

The analysis, prepared for the firm’s clients, represents the first independent economic assessment of the congressional budget fight, which could lead to a government shutdown as early as next week.

The Republican plan to slash $61 billion from the budget would cut estimated growth for this year in half.

Ben Bernanke essentially said the same thing.

Ever the stubborn one, Boehner, through a spokesman, said the Goldman Sachs report represented “the same outdated Washington mind-set” as the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 that pumped about $800 billion in federal funds into the economy during the worst recession since the Great Depression. While many experts at the time said the measure did not go far enough — Paul Krugman at the time said

… it’s widely believed that political considerations led to a plan that was weaker and contains more tax cuts than it should have — that Mr. Obama compromised in advance in the hope of gaining broad bipartisan support.

— the influx of new capital into the economy obviously helped to stabilize markets. If the GOP had gotten its way at the time, presumably by cutting taxes for the wealthiest among us, supporting more deregulation and simply allowing the economy to self-correct, there’s no telling how deep the ship would have sunk.

Below is a graph from the AP on the budget deficit (or surplus) since the Reagan years. The budget under Obama’s watch is estimated to begin moving closer toward the center in a few years. Clinton presided over the only surplus in recent memory, after inheriting a deficit from Mr. Trickle Down’s heir apparent, H.W. Bush.

Credit: AP/U.S. budget deficit continues to soar

Symbolic bipartisanship ≠ partisanship or progress.

As a recent New York Times editorial noted:

Mr. Obama’s speech (the State of the Union) offered a welcome contrast to all of the posturing that passes for business in the new Republican-controlled House.

To that posturing, we can add the House’s largely symbolic vote to repeal the historic health care reform bill passed last year and the House’s reckless resolution to roll back domestic spending to 2008 levels.

And also to it, the graphic here, in which members of Congress sit, as if friends everyone, intermingled between Reps and Dems. This, of course, stands in staunch opposition to most if not all previous State of the Union speeches in recent memory. In years past, Congress members would sit on separate ends of the chamber, literally a house divided. Of course, it’s still a house divided, although people like John Boehner would have folks believe the GOP is extending a hand across the aisle:

We had hoped to hear a new commitment to keep his promises to govern from the center, change the tone in Washington, and work with both parties in a bipartisan way to help small businesses create jobs and get our economy moving again. Unfortunately, the President and the Democrats in charge of Congress still aren’t listening to the American people.

Now, if you aren’t a tad offended that politicians, including Obama, make it a regular practice to put words into your mouth, pretending to be omniscient on how you want the government to act, you aren’t paying close enough attention. More importantly, however, members of the GOP have not listened to economic experts, who have said time and again, that we didn’t spend enough in trying to jump start the economy.

But I digress. Here’s the melting pot Congress at its symbolic best:

Credit: The New York Times/Photograph by Stephen Crowley; Graphic by Thomas Jackson, Derek Willis and Matthew Ericson

I don’t think you’ll find New York Times columnists complimenting CNN’s reporting very often, but one exception came yesterday with Thomas Friedman’s piece, titled “Too Good To Check,” in which Friedman lauds Anderson Cooper’s recent efforts in unveiling a patent untruth circulating in conservative circles about the alleged cost of President Obama’s recent trip to India and elsewhere overseas. Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann, radio host Michael Savage, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and others (I’m sure there are others. Although I have not listened to Mark Levin lately [Can't tolerate his nasally snarl], he surely hopped on the bandwagon like his like-minded-bash-the-Obama-administration-at-any-cost brethren) all claimed that the administration was spending some $200 million per day on the trip.

Here is Friedman quoting Bachman, who appeared on Cooper’s show:

I think we know that just within a day or so the president of the United States will be taking a trip over to India that is expected to cost the taxpayers $200 million a day. He’s taking 2,000 people with him. He’ll be renting over 870 rooms in India, and these are five-star hotel rooms at the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel. This is the kind of over-the-top spending.

Here is the Anderson Cooper video, in which he asks Bachmann what specifically she would like to cut in federal spending now that her party controls the House.

In the absence of any answers, she proceeds to immediately and ludicrously lampoon Obama’s “over the top” spending. The only sparse answer she gives as to how the Republicans would account for some $700 billion in lost revenue if the Bush tax cuts were extended is to suggest that Medicare eligibility levels may be too high. Cooper asked for three; he got one … half answer. Here is one exchange:

COOPER: But extending the Bush tax cuts will mean, in order to offset the costs of extending the Bush tax cuts, you have to come up with $700 billion dollars just in spending cuts alone just to offset that cost. If you acknowledge that that is true, what are three things you would cut immediately to help offset those costs?

BACHMANN: Well, it’s always considered a cost when people are allowed to keep their own money. I don’t think that it’s a cost when people get to keep their own money. Right now, the current tax policy is, in my mind, it’s actually too high. The taxes right now. If we don’t extend these tax cuts, for instance, in my district in Minnesota, we’ll see 1.6 … 1.2 billion dollars taken out of the pockets of my constituents and taken out of my local community, where it will be spent, instead, 1.2 additional dollars will be sent to Washington D.C. sucked into that hole.

Here, of course, Bachmann missed the point and dodged the question altogether. The federal government has to have money to continue to offer such services as Social Security and Medicare. The “cost” to which Cooper was referring was the cost the federal government incurs in continuing to offer services, not the cost to locals, and Bachmann failed miserably, and predictably, from the Palin mode.

But back to Friedman, who picks up Obama’s trip to India in his column:

The next night, Cooper explained that he felt compelled to trace that story back to its source, since someone had used his show to circulate it. His research, he said, found that it had originated from a quote by “an alleged Indian provincial official,” from the Indian state of Maharashtra, “reported by India’s Press Trust, their equivalent of our A.P. or Reuters. I say ‘alleged,’ provincial official,” Cooper added, “because we have no idea who this person is, no name was given.”

It is hard to get any more flimsy than a senior unnamed Indian official from Maharashtra talking about the cost of an Asian trip by the American president.

“It was an anonymous quote,” said Cooper. “Some reporter in India wrote this article with this figure in it. No proof was given; no follow-up reporting was done. Now you’d think if a member of Congress was going to use this figure as a fact, she would want to be pretty darn sure it was accurate, right? But there hasn’t been any follow-up reporting on this Indian story. The Indian article was picked up by The Drudge Report and other sites online, and it quickly made its way into conservative talk radio.”

Later, Friedman notes:

Cooper then added: “Again, no one really seemed to care to check the facts. For security reasons, the White House doesn’t comment on logistics of presidential trips, but they have made an exception this time. He then quoted Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, as saying, “I am not going to go into how much it costs to protect the president, [but this trip] is comparable to when President Clinton and when President Bush traveled abroad. This trip doesn’t cost $200 million a day.” Geoff Morrell, the Pentagon press secretary, said: “I will take the liberty this time of dismissing as absolutely absurd, this notion that somehow we were deploying 10 percent of the Navy and some 34 ships and an aircraft carrier in support of the president’s trip to Asia. That’s just comical. Nothing close to that is being done.”

The fringe right’s tactic here, as Bachmann, Savage and others use without fail, is to dodge substantive talk on specific reform with dodgy figures from even dodgier sources to blast Obama at all costs, never mind fact-checking any of their claims. Savage has even made analogies between Obama and the Red Army Faction, saying that while the RAF was a violent, left-wing movement, Obama was seeking to induce a nonviolent socialist revolution in America. For however untrue that may be, that kind of talk makes Savage and the gang look like raving lunatics. Some on the right, as Friedman notes, even called Obama’s trip a “vacation.” All the while, they proceed to make sweeping suggestions on how we must cut spending and rein in the government but offer barely anything in the way of substantive solutions. As I have said before, in the absence of intelligent ideas in political discourse, nothing is left but desperate and emotionally-charged ranting.

Friedman concludes by noting that

When widely followed public figures feel free to say anything, without any fact-checking, we have a problem. It becomes impossible for a democracy to think intelligently about big issues — deficit reduction, health care, taxes, energy/climate — let alone act on them. Facts, opinions and fabrications just blend together.

While I agree with him wholeheartedly, we can’t forget how these people became “widely followed” public figures: the public put them there, which is an unfortunate truth that seems to say less about the figures themselves (They just ride the wave to the bank) and more about the people, who, by and large, don’t know what is best for them or how to think critically about important issues. The best we can hope for, as he says, is that more people will learn not to swallow everything they hear on radio and television without doing their own fact-checking. But given that most people only watch or listen to commentators that reinforce, rather than challenge, their own views, I can’t be sure such a noble exercise will gain widespread popularity.

In light of President Obama’s announcement tonight that, at last, combat operations in Iraq are over, it will be interesting going forward to see what, if any, insurgent uprisings or attacks will occur against Iraqi security forces now that the U.S. presence inside the nation have been severely pared back. Some have already occurred after the much ballyhooed drawback from a couple weeks ago.

Credit: Charles Rex Arbogast/Associated Press

Here’s a snippet from Obama’s speech tonight:

Ending this war is not only in Iraq’s interest – it is in our own. The United States has paid a huge price to put the future of Iraq in the hands of its people. We have sent our young men and women to make enormous sacrifices in Iraq, and spent vast resources abroad at a time of tight budgets at home. We have persevered because of a belief we share with the Iraqi people – a belief that out of the ashes of war, a new beginning could be born in this cradle of civilization. Through this remarkable chapter in the history of the United States and Iraq, we have met our responsibility. Now, it is time to turn the page.

A New York Times editorial tonight framed the moment thusly:

Mr. Obama graciously said it was time to put disagreements over Iraq behind us, but it is important not to forget how much damage Mr. Bush caused by misleading Americans about exotic weapons, about American troops being greeted with open arms, about creating a model democracy in Baghdad.

That is why it was so important that Mr. Obama candidly said the United States is not free of this conflict; American troops will see more bloodshed. We hope he follows through on his vow to work with Iraq’s government after the withdrawal of combat troops.

There was no victory to declare last night, and Mr. Obama was right not to try. If victory was ever possible in this war, it has not been won, and America still faces the daunting challenges of the other war, in Afghanistan.

Any declaration of victory was fleeting because terms for what that might look like were never established. In some respects, I am with Christopher Hitchens in believing that we had the right to invade because of Saddam Hussein’s gross negligence for human life and solidarity. He was a monster; we can’t escape that point. But I think the false pretext (the presence of WMDs) under which we were led to believe that the war was a valuable endeavor is the gravest point on this issue. And however bat-crazy insane a national leader may be, I don’t believe it’s America’s job to police and/or jettison every one of them. For, there are many. Thankfully, less than in prior generations, but still many.

We can still count this as a historic day. Any time we can break free of one less entanglement as a nation is a good day in my view. Now, I would hope focus continues to hone sharply onto where it should have lied all along. That is, on Afghanistan or Pakistan or wherever bin Laden may be hidin’.

[Caption: Credit: Charles Rex Arbogast/Associated Press; Steve Baskis, 24, who lost his sight as a United States Army specialist serving in Iraq, listened to Mr. Obama's address at his home in Glen Ellyn, Ill.]

Thursday was a bad day for Rep. Joe L. Barton.

We can see the game clearly. Was Barton sorry for being sorry? Or sorry for being sorry, sorry?

Barton, who on Thursday said the federally mandated edict on BP to create a $20 million escrow account to financially support those affected by its pitiless oil spill in the Gulf was a “shakedown,” apologized to BP for the administrations’ actions against the British company. When pressed, he then apologized for the apology.

Here is Barton to the House Energy and Commerce Committee:

I’m ashamed of what happened in the White House yesterday. I think it is a tragedy of the first proportion that a private corporation can be subjected to what I would characterize as a shakedown — in this case a $20 billion shakedown.

A tragedy indeed. A monumental tragedy, in fact, if you are financially backed by the very industry you are defending. According to an Associated Press report:

“I’m ashamed of what happened in the White House” on Wednesday, said Barton, who has received at least $100,470 in political contributions from oil and gas interests since the beginning of 2009, the second-highest amount among all the committee members.

Mr. Barton, in his statement, apologized “for using the term ‘shakedown’ ” to describe the $20 billion escrow account that BP and the White House announced Wednesday. He also retracted the apology to BP and said the company “should bear the full financial responsibility for the accident on their lease in the Gulf of Mexico” on April 20 and “fully compensate those families and businesses that have been hurt.”

Empty rhetoric and driven, most likely, by the criticism he faced. Again, The Times:

Of the five Gulf Coast states, Mr. Barton’s Texas is the only one whose beaches, fisheries and tourist haunts are not threatened by oil spewing from BP’s ruined well. Republican lawmakers from Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida quickly disavowed Mr. Barton’s apology to BP, and one was the first to call for stripping Mr. Barton of his committee seat.

Actually, if a politician issues an opinion on a certain issue, however against the grain, why redact it, if only for political expediency? Stand by your convictions, Mr. Barton. If you are in bed and bequeathed to Big Oil, say so. At least, then, you would go down as an honest person. If you care not one wit for our environment, but everything for the cash and equity provided by companies like BP,  say so. At least, then, you would skirt the charge of hypocrisy and salvage a very minute shred of your dignity. As it stands, there’s not much left.

Credit: Charles Ommanney / Getty Images

This excellent Newsweek article tells the story of a president actually acting as commander in chief and head of the Pentagon, rather than as a lackey to it, in the weeks and months leading up to the White House’s decision to send some 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan.

Obama’s novel approach to the Pentagon —  I say, “novel” because no president in the last 50 years or so has commandeered such a firm stance with the military — included not allowing military officials to get us committed to an lengthy, or worse, amaranthine, occupation in Afghanistan.

The first of 10 “AFPAK” meetings came on Sept. 13, when the president gathered 16 advisers in the Situation Room in the basement of the White House. This was to be the most methodical national-security decision in a generation. Deputy national-security adviser Tom Donilon had commissioned research that backed up an astonishing historical truth: neither the Vietnam War nor the Iraq War featured any key meetings where all the issues and assumptions were discussed by policymakers. In both cases the United States was sucked into war inch by inch.

The Obama administration was determined to change that. “For the past eight years, whatever the military asked for, they got,” Obama explained later. “My job was to slow things down.” The president had something precious in modern crisis management: time. “I had to put up with the ‘dithering’ arguments from Dick Cheney or others,” Obama said. “But as long as I wasn’t shaken by the political chatter, I had the time to work through all these issues and ask a bunch of tough questions and force people to sharpen their pencils until we arrived at the best possible solution.”

One participant in these meetings described Obama as “clear-eyed, hardheaded, and demanding,” and this is what I have always respected about the man. He’s calculating, not a cowboy. He’s leading, and not in Bush’s phony, and flatly wrong, “I’m the decider,” way (For, we know how tragically uncritical Bush was of his own military officials).

… Obama was perfectly aware of the box he was now in. He could defer entirely to his generals, as President Bush had done, which he considered an abdication of responsibility. Or he could overrule them, which would weaken their effectiveness, with negative consequences for soldiers in the field, relations with allies, and the president’s own political position. There had to be a third way, he figured.

In the meantime it was important to remind the brass who was in charge. Inside the National Security Council, advisers considered what happened next historic, a presidential dressing-down unlike any in the United States in more than half a century. In the first week of October, Gates and Mullen were summoned to the Oval Office, where the president told them that he was “exceedingly unhappy” with the Pentagon’s conduct (Regarding the McChrystal leaks). He said the leaks and positioning in advance of a decision were “disrespectful of the process” and “damaging to the men and women in uniform and to the country.” In a cold fury Obama said he wanted to know “here and now” if the Pentagon would be on board with any presidential decision and could faithfully implement it.

And at the conclusion of the article:

On Sunday, Nov. 29, having made his decision, the president decided to hold a final Oval Office meeting with the Pentagon brass and commanders in the region who would carry out his orders. He wanted to put it directly to the military: Gates, Mullen, Cartwright, Petraeus, and national-security adviser Jim Jones, without any of the others. Obama asked Biden to come back early from Thanksgiving in Nantucket to join him for the meeting.

As they walked along the portico toward the Oval Office, Biden asked if the new policy of beginning a significant withdrawal in 2011 was a direct presidential order that couldn’t be countermanded by the military. Obama said yes. The president didn’t need the reminder. Obama had already learned something about leaving no room for ambiguity with the military. He would often summarize his own meetings in a purposeful, clear style by saying, “Let me tell you where I am,” before enumerating points (“One, two, three”) and finishing with, “And that’s my order.”

Inside the Oval Office, Obama asked Petraeus, “David, tell me now. I want you to be honest with me. You can do this in 18 months?”

“Sir, I’m confident we can train and hand over to the ANA [Afghan National Army] in that time frame,” Petraeus replied.

“Good. No problem,” the president said. “If you can’t do the things you say you can in 18 months, then no one is going to suggest we stay, right?”

“Yes, sir, in agreement,” Petraeus said.

“Yes, sir,” Mullen said.

The president was crisp but informal. “Bob, you have any problems?” he asked Gates, who said he was fine with it.

The president then encapsulated the new policy: in quickly, out quickly, focus on Al Qaeda, and build the Afghan Army. “I’m not asking you to change what you believe, but if you don’t agree with me that we can execute this, say so now,” he said. No one said anything.

“Tell me now,” Obama repeated.

“Fully support, sir,” Mullen said.

“Ditto,” Petraeus said.

In my own criticisms of the Tea Party movement, I was made well aware that supporters don’t take kindly to the term, “tea bagger,” which I used more than a year or so ago, and loosely, in my correspondence with some of the movement’s followers.

President Obama has apparently learned this lesson as well. As reported by this article:

Reading through Jonathan Alter’s new book on President Obama’s first year, “The Promise: President Obama, Year One,” Tapper comes across a November 30, 2009 interview in which Obama declared that the unanimous vote of House Republicans against the stimulus bills “set the tenor for the whole year … That helped to create the tea-baggers and empowered that whole wing of the Republican Party to where it now controls the agenda for the Republicans.”

Never one to hide her ill-gotten feelings on all matters of the Democrat Party or of progressives, Michelle Malkin chimed in thusly:

Really. How many more selective civility police lectures can we take from this vulgarity-clogged White House?

And as Ian Lazaran with Conservatives4Palin (Yes, you read that right) said:

Obama may be the most thin-skinned President we’ve ever had. It’ll be funny to see him apologize for his crude, offensive, and juvenile language when this book officially comes out.

The Tea Party crowd represents an illogical, anachronistic and sheepish antagonism toward something; although, as of yet, we haven’t been given a clear answer as to what that something might be, and we have less notions of any proposed solutions. Thus, the message is: We rail against increased taxes (Which, in reality, would only affect those making 250K a year or more) and government spending, yet we can offer no solutions other than pouring anti-government rhetoric down your collective throats. And the ignorant masses who actually stand to gain the most from this administration’s efforts, who know no better, align with the other side, which, it’s no secret, is far removed from having the poor and middle class’ interests at heart.

But enough.

I’ve shredded the “Don’t Tread On Me” crowd and their arguments before, so I’m done for now.

Really the only response needed toward the Tea Party crowd and this wellspring of irrational, anti-government vitriol is a good measure of ridicule, and on that, I’ll stake my ground.

In the wake of the historic vote Sunday to secure health care for 30 million more Americans, the Republican response, by and large, and has been vitriolic and retaliatory.

Only two days after the vote and seven minutes after President Obama signed the bill into law, 13 attorney generals across the country, 12 Republicans and 1 Democrat have sued the federal government claiming the act is unconstitutional. According to the lawsuit:

The Constitution nowhere authorizes the United States to mandate, either directly or under threat of penalty, that all citizens and legal residents have qualifying health care coverage.

Legal experts say it has little chance of succeeding because, under the Constitution, federal laws trump state laws.

In Washington, members of the Republican party are calling for repeal legislation to undo the bill:

Already, three of the GOP’s most prominent conservative voices, Reps. Steve King (R-Iowa) and Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), as well as Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.), are introducing legislation to repeal the bill, even though the party is nowhere near to having the votes necessary to pass a repeal bill.

On top of that, some of the Republican party’s likely 2012 contenders have weighed in on the matter. Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin yesterday called the health care vote a “clarion call and a spur to action” and endorsed the repeal of the “dangerous portions of Obamacare.” Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, also called for the bill to be repealed, in spite of the comparisons often made between the Democrats’ health care plan and Romney’s Massachusetts health care plan.

While in my current state of residence, Rep. Paul Broun, who is apparently still dreaming of 19th century Southern glory, bafflingly on March 19 equated health reform to the Civil War. As Media Matters notes,

Rep. Paul Broun (R-GA) is a fanatical opponent of health care reform, who has suggested that President Obama might “declare martial law” and rule as a dictator. In recent days, the right-wing congressman has made Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) the target of his fury, calling her arrogant, ignorant, and incompetent. Last night on the House floor, Broun continued his streak of combative statements by comparing health care reform to the American Civil War, which he called “The Great War of Yankee Aggression.”

And from the horse’s mouth:

If ObamaCare passes, that free insurance card that’s in people’s pockets is gonna be as worthless as a Confederate dollar after the War Between The States — the Great War of Yankee Aggression.

Not to be undone and ever telling us that we should all be praying and quivering in a dark corner about the government’s transgressions, Republican House Leader John Boehner of Ohio’s fightin’ 8th, in response to a scathing crowd heckling lawmakers at the Capitol had this to say: The offensive comments were:

… reprehensible and should not have happened.

Nevertheless, frenzied crowd, your irrational outcries are justified:

But let’s not let a few isolated incidents get in the way of the fact that millions of Americans are scared to death.

Indeed, Boehner, as the House Republican Leader, has been one of the most vocal lawmakers on the bill. Says Boehner in this animated speech,

We have failed to listen to America , and we have failed to reflect the will of our constituents, and when we fail to reflect that will, we fail ourselves, and we fail our country.

To groans from fellow House members, Boehner continued with this diatribe:

Look at this bill. Ask yourself: Do you really believe that if you like the health plan that you have, that you can keep it? No you can’t. In this economy [jeers and gavel], you can’t say that. In this economy, with this unemployment, with our desperate needs for jobs and economic growth, is this really the time to raise taxes, to create bureaucracies and burden every job creator in our land?

Here’s the full speech:

If I may interpose, Boehner and others just say the keyword “taxes” and never elaborate. Boehner, for instance, did so in this pre-vote health care bill renunciation:

What they never get around to saying is that the taxes imposed by the bill will affect families who earn $250,000 or more ($200,000 for individuals) per year, which as nearly all readers of this site know, does not affect them. Yet, Republicans want to make the case, to the unlearned public, that the mean, bad old Democrats want to take everything for which they have worked so hard. Unless I have an exceeding rich friend of whom I’m not aware, I don’t know that I’ve ever personally had a conversation with someone who makes that much per year. So, diametrically opposite to the claims made by Republicans in their desperate attempts to disparage health care reform at any (theoretical) cost, you probably don’t even know someone who makes $200,000 per year, much less $250,000.

Finally, even some Republicans are not happy with how their fellow party members are reacting to the health care bill. Here is a blogger who appears frustrated over fellow Republicans’ negative response to a seemingly positive reform like health care:

Republicans are shouting and spitting like a bunch of fucking hyenas as they clamor for face time in the media. They’re filling our inboxes, vandalizing our social networking profiles and polluting the airwaves with venomous messages rebuking the Obama Administration over health care. HEALTH CARE! My fellow Republicans are tearing this nation apart over providing medical care for those less fortunate. Not bank bailouts, war, or wasteful pork spending— Health care. Really?

The behavior among elected Republicans and the dimwitted TV pundits who are whipping America into an absolute frenzy is the worst thing about this bill and has led me to question my long-standing affiliation with the Republican Party. For a moment, I thought it was me; that maybe I had changed and lost touch with Republicanism. So, in seeking to refresh my recollection of what this party stands for, I logged onto the GOP home page.

What I found was as pathetic as it was cartoonish. A complete embarrassment. The site opens to a fiery red screen with Nancy Pelosi, fists and teeth clenched in a fit of rage against a backdrop of flames, with the words “Fire Pelosi” in bold letters emblazoned on the screen. This buffoonery doesn’t torch Nancy Pelosi—it’s Theodore Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower and Abraham Lincoln who are torched by the flames of dissent and hatred that now embody this once-great party.

Going deeper in the site only serves to highlight the confusion within the GOP. It lists the accomplishments of the Republican Party since its inception and its own core values of today. It proudly claims responsibility for freeing the slaves, establishing Howard University and outlawing the Ku Klux Klan. It touts Republican leadership in writing the 19th Amendment, passing two civil rights acts and ending racial segregation in Little Rock. The list spans two centuries of achievements such as these and others that today seem more in alignment with the Democratic Party, like establishing Yellowstone National Park, building the federal highway system and authoring welfare reform.

This is the party I belong to.

But the current “platform”—if you can call it that—lists only six ideals. The power of the individual, voluntary giving, limited government, low taxes, less regulation and national strength. That’s what it says, but what it practices is hate, because hate sells when the chips are down. (italics mine)

According to this tongue-in-cheek billboard

Credit: Bob Collins / Minnesota Public Radio

along Interstate 35 near Wyoming, Minn., we apparently are supposed to be tired of the new Obama administration in preference to the former administration, which waged an illegal war and, meanwhile, doubled the national debt between Jan. 20, 2001 ($5,727,776,738,304.64) and Jan. 20, 2009 ($10,626,877,048,913.08). Here’s a search tool to get those numbers. Bush, of course, served between 2001-2008, and the Republican Party controlled both the House and the Senate from 2001-2006.

So, are we collectively pining for The Decider to be back in the office? A new Gallup poll says no, and proof is borne out from data collected from the Americas, Europe, Africa and Asia, although the latter is, not surprisingly, less approving. Globally, 51 percent of the world approves of the work of the current administration in 2009, up from 34 percent in 2008. Here is the global graph plus the charts from four main regions of the world:

Credit: Gallup

Credit: Gallup

Credit: Gallup

Credit: Gallup

Credit: Gallup