Originally published at Centerblue.org. You can comment here or there.

The blogosphere is on fire because of the recent brief submitted by Obama’s DOJ in response to a lawsuit, Smelt v. United States, seeking to overturn the federal Defense of Marriage Act that states marriage to be only between a man and a woman. The fires are being stoked by Americablog, which in my opinion twists what’s going on in the brief out of context for people who are not well-versed in the legal arguments being made. I’m not happy that Obama is defending DoMA, but let’s have a rational discussion about what’s really going on.

1) The President and Executive Branch have a duty to execute and defend the laws passed by Congress.

(A Republican) Congress passed DoMA in 1996, and Bill Clinton signed it lest he imperil his re-election. As such, it became the federal law of the land. The President and DoJ are required to uphold and defend those laws. It’s true that Americablog cites a couple of situations where the Executive Branch has declined to defend a law in the books. I have not had time to look up those cases to see what happened, so I will cede the point that it’s not 100% mandatory for the Executive Branch to defend every law in court. Nevertheless, it happens 99.9% of the time, including in situations that the Executive would prefer not to defend but does so because of its duty to execute the laws or because of some other policy reason.

2) Obama had two choices: do what’s done 99.9% of the time, or create a firestorm he’d rather push to Congress in repealing DoMA.

Obama had to make a choice: was this the time, the place and the manner in which to push for the repeal of DoMA? Had he done so, would it have been effective? Obama has indicated that he wants Congress to take the lead on issues like Don’t Ask Don’t Tell (and perhaps by extension DoMA). We may not like it, but it’s simply politically smart to have the legislature that passed the law, un-make it. Neither he nor I have forgotten how badly Bill Clinton got burned when he tried to end the ban on gays in the military without having the assent of Congress. It bombed terribly. Obama the politican does not want a similar bomb to explode in his face.

Don’t like that Obama is a politician and acts out of self-interest? Who do you think he is..Jesus Christ? By insisting that such measures come out of Congress he covers his ass, and also ensures that he doesn’t end up weak and ineffectual like Clinton became when he was forced to sign the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell “compromise.” That’s politics, folks. Can he push Congress to repeal DODT or DoMA? Absolutely, and he should, and we should pressure him to do so. But this lawsuit was not that time.

So, assuming he had reason not to put a stake in the ground, he had no other choice but to defend the law in the books. And when you go to court to defend your position, you are required to do so vigorously regardless of what you privately think of the argument. You don’t go in there half-assed, with a little wink and a nod and hoping everyone understands.

3) The brief did NOT liken gay marriage to incest or pederasty.

Here’s the passage that has Aravosis and other people so outraged:

The courts have followed this principle, moreover, in relation to the validity of marriages performed in other States. Both the First and Second Restatements of Conflict of Laws recognize that State courts may refuse to give effect to a marriage, or to certain incidents of a marriage, that contravene the forum State’s policy. See Restatement (First) of Conflict of Laws § 134; Restatement (Second) of Conflict of Laws § 284.5 And the courts have widely held that certain marriages performed elsewhere need not be given effect, because they conflicted with the public policy of the forum. See, e.g., Catalano v. Catalano, 170 A.2d 726, 728-29 (Conn. 1961) (marriage of uncle to niece, “though valid in Italy under its laws, was not valid in Connecticut because it contravened the public policy of th[at] state”); Wilkins v. Zelichowski, 140 A.2d 65, 67-68 (N.J. 1958) (marriage of 16-year-old female held invalid in New Jersey, regardless of validity in Indiana where performed, in light of N.J. policy reflected in statute permitting adult female to secure annulment of her underage marriage); In re Mortenson’s Estate, 316 P.2d 1106 (Ariz. 1957) (marriage of first cousins held invalid in Arizona, though lawfully performed in New Mexico, given Arizona policy reflected in statute declaring such marriages “prohibited and void”).

OK, so let me explain something that Aravosis doesn’t. When you argue a case in court, you’re looking to make a point. When you try to make that point, you cast about for other cases that also make that point. Often times, you won’t find a case that is exactly (or even anywhere near) the same in terms of the facts, so you have to look for cases with dissimilar facts but which argue for the same conclusion. You do this in hopes of persuading the judge that the conclusion that happened in the other cases should be applied to your case too, even if the facts aren’t similar. This is totally standard procedure, and so is doing a quick summation of the different facts in the other cases for the benefit of the court.

This paragraph in the brief is re-stating a well known and rock solid tenet of “conflict of laws” (an area of law that dictates, roughly speaking, what happens when laws between states conflict.) The well known maxim is that a state is usually required to accept the rulings and laws of a sister state, EXCEPT when the sister state’s laws run counter to the current state’s public policy. So just to give a theoretical example, if one state allowed polygamy and a polygamous couple went to another state and tried to have their marriage recognized there, that state would not have to uphold the marriage if it provided evidence that polygamy runs counter to the public policy there.

The point being made in the paragraph is just as in the hypothetical: one state need not recognize another state’s marriage if it believes the marriage to violate public policy, with the underlying assumption that there are states out there that do in fact believe same sex marriage violates their public policy (strong evidence of which would be the various state level anti-marriage amendments and laws that have been passed).

In trying to back up the point, the brief cites other marriage-related cases. They probably couldn’t find other examples of same sex marriages in the books to cite as evidence since they’re a new thing. So they cast about for what they could find–and they came up with an incest case and a pederasty case with totally different facts but which argued the same conclusion: that State A can refuse recognition of State B’s marriages.

Arguing by analogy is not the same thing as arguing from belief or from current facts. The DOJ brief is NOT saying same sex marriages are like incest or pederasty. They’re just other cases that argue, by analogy, for the same conclusion being sought by the brief.

4) Much of the rest of the brief points cited by Americablog re-state existing law.

Americablog takes great exception that the brief argues that gay marriage should not be treated the same as race for equal protection arguments. But for decades the law has been clear that there are three standards of increasingly strict review–and that only race, national origin and religious affiliation receive the highest protection standard under the Equal Protection Clause (which is to say most laws regarding these classes will simply be struck down). Even sex discrimination isn’t treated as strictly as race, and gets an “intermediate” level of scrutiny/protection. Everything else has always been on the lowest tier, requiring merely that a law have some “rational basis” to avoid being struck.

That the brief argued that this lowest basis should be used for DoMA is standard practice when arguing Equal Protection cases. Arguing that homosexuality should join race at the top of the Equal Protection pyramid is a losing argument that probably wouldn’t fly even in front of a liberal court, and this brief was certainly not the right time to make that argument.

Yes, it’s disappointing that the brief would argue that same sex marriage shouldn’t be considered a fundamental right (a better argument for marriage equality advocates than equal protection). Yes it’s sad that the brief would regurgitate old arguments about equal protection and public policy. But if DoJ was going to have to defend the law, it could really do so only on those three grounds.

5) The brief does not re-state key anti-gay arguments made in such cases by the Bush Administration.

The Washington Post pointed out that the brief upheld the validity of same sex marriages performed in states that permit them, unlike Bush’s arguments that same sex marriage is never valid. The brief also did not use the incendiary argument that kids raised in heterosexual married households are better off than those in gay households.

It’s a relatively small point, but key in my opinion to my belief that the brief is dryly stating legalese instead of trying to damage the gay marriage cause.

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Conclusion

I know everything above is wordy and dense, so here’s the summary:

We have a right to be angry and disappointed that Obama’s administration would put its name anywhere near supporting DoMA. Obama has not done enough on behalf of gay issues, for repealing DADT and DoMA and he should be taken to task for that. He has been a disappointment on civil rights issues generally.

But let’s not fan the flames of anger and turn them into hatred by finding malice where there is none.

a) Obama and the Executive Branch are doing what’s done 99.9% of the time in defending a law passed by Congress and signed by another President.

b) Obama had a choice, to be that 0.1% of the time and take a stand in what was likely to be a losing cause by refusing to weigh in on DoMA, or to support the law. Whether we agree with it or not, Obama decided that this was not the time or the place, nor did he have the means or the will or the political capital or what have you, to dictate an end to DoMA on his own. Call him a coward or a political pragmatist, but he is on the record as wanting Congress to take the lead on these issues.

c) OBAMA DID NOT EQUATE GAY MARRIAGE WITH INCEST OR PEDERASTY. The brief made an argument by analogy with other cases, to prove a point using cases that had dissimilar facts but came to the same conclusion wanted by the writer. This happens ALL THE TIME in legal arguments, it is standard practice and says nothing about the writer’s personal beliefs about the case.

d) If you decide to argue a case, you can’t do it half assed. You have to do so zealously. In so doing, the brief employed the standard equal protection, fundamental rights, and public policy arguments that always come up in these marriage cases. We may not like the other side of these arguments, but they are what they are.

What do we do?

I’m not trying to completely exonerate Obama here. We need to apply the nails to his nuts and start pushing hard for him to start coming through on DoMA and DoDT. He’s had a lot on his plate with the economy, but his silence on these issues is increasingly unacceptable–and the brief only inflames the splinter in the gay community’s mind about it all. He’s on the record as wanting repeal of these laws. Fine. Let’s ride his ass to get on the phone with Congress and GET IT DONE NOW. I’m confident that if DoMA is repealed and someone somehow sues on that basis, that his administration will take the other side of this argument and defend the repeal.

But let’s not mistake this brief for a President who would actively seek to write us out of the Constitution like the last one attempted. Wanting “cover” for his political ass may be cowardly or the sign of a man who prefers consensus, but it’s an entirely different animal from someone who actively hates us and wants to bow to the Radical Right.

Let’s be angry because he has not done enough to keep his promises yet and has forced himself into an embarrassing corner by having to argue this case. Let’s not pillory him for something he hasn’t done.

He’s not out to destroy us. He (and Congress) just need a good hard push.

UPDATE: DOJ spokesperson makes statement about Obama’s stance on DoMA:

As it generally does with existing statutes, the Justice Department is defending the law on the books in court. The president has said he wants to see a legislative repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act because it prevents LGBT couples from being granted equal rights and benefits. However, until Congress passes legislation repealing the law, the administration will continue to defend the statute when it is challenged in the justice system.

Spokesman also points to standard Executive Branch policy:

Executive Branch agencies will enforce federal statutes unless they are clearly unconstitutional and the Department of Justice will defend statutes against constitutional attack whenever reasonable arguments can be made in their defense.

Originally published at Centerblue.org. You can comment here or there.

This is probably the best, most intellectual article on politics I have read in years. It not only goes into Obama’s values and agenda, but also defines the core moral value differences between progressives and conservatives–and why the latter feel so threatened by the current economic crisis.

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The Obama Code

By George Lakoff

Berkeley, CA. February 24, 2009.

As President Obama prepares to address a joint session of Congress, what can we expect to hear?

The pundits will stress the nuts-and-bolts policy issues: the banking system, education, energy, health care. But beyond policy, there will be a vision of America—a moral vision and a view of unity that the pundits often miss.

What they miss is the Obama Code. For the sake of unity, the President tends to express his moral vision indirectly. Like other self-aware and highly articulate speakers, he connects with his audience using what cognitive scientists call the “cognitive unconscious.” Speaking naturally, he lets his deepest ideas simply structure what he is saying. If you follow him, the deep ideas are communicated unconsciously and automatically. The Code is his most effective way to bring the country together around fundamental American values.

For supporters of the President, it is crucial to understand the Code in order to talk overtly about the old values our new president is communicating. It is necessary because tens of millions of Americans—both conservatives and progressives—don’t yet perceive the vital sea change that Obama is bringing about.

The word “code” can refer to a system of either communication or morality. President Obama has integrated the two. The Obama Code is both moral and linguistic at once. The President is using his enormous skills as a communicator to express a moral system. As he has said, budgets are moral documents. His economic program is tied to his moral system and is discussed in the Code, as are just about all of his other policies.

Behind the Obama Code are seven crucial intellectual moves that I believe are historically, practically, and cognitively appropriate, as well as politically astute. They are not all obvious, and jointly they may seem mysterious. That is why it is worth sorting them out one-by-one.

1. Values Over Programs

The first move is to distinguish programs from the value systems they represent. Every policy has a material aspect—the nuts and bolts of how it works— plus a typically implicit cognitive aspect that represents the values and ideas behind the nuts and bolts. The President knows the difference. He understands that those who see themselves as “progressive” or “conservative” all too often define those words in terms of programs rather than values. Even the programs championed by progressives may not fit what the President sees as the fundamental values of the country. He is seeking to align the programs of his administration with those values.

The potential pushback will come not just from conservatives who do not share his values, but just as much from progressives who make the mistake of thinking that programs are values and that progressivism is defined by a list of programs. When some of those programs are cut as economically secondary or as unessential, their defenders will inevitably see this as a conservative move rather than a move within an overall moral vision they share with the President.

This separation between values and programs lies behind the president’s pledge to cut programs that don’t serve those values and support those that do — no matter whether they are proposed by Republicans or Democrats. The President’s idealistic question is, what policies serve what values? — not what political interests?

2. Progressive Values are American Values

President Obama’s second intellectual move concerns what the fundamental American values are. In Moral Politics, I described what I found to be the implicit, often unconscious, value systems behind progressive and conservative thought. Progressive thought rests, first, on the value of empathy —- putting oneself in other people’s shoes, seeing the world through their eyes, and therefore caring about them. The second principle is acting on that care, taking responsibility both for oneself and others, social as well as individual responsibility. The third is acting to make oneself, the country, and the world better—what Obama has called an “ethic of excellence” toward creating “a more perfect union” politically.

Historian Lynn Hunt, in Inventing Human Rights, has shown that those values, beginning with empathy, lie historically behind the human rights expressed in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Obama, in various interviews and speeches, has provided the logical link. Empathy is not mere sympathy. Putting oneself in the shoes of others brings with it the responsibility to act on that empathy—to be “our brother’s keeper and our sister’s keeper”—and to act to improve ourselves, our country, and the world.

The logic is simple: Empathy is why we have the values of freedom, fairness, and equality — for everyone, not just for certain individuals. If we put ourselves in the shoes of others, we will want them to be free and treated fairly. Empathy with all leads to equality: no one should be treated worse than anyone else. Empathy leads us to democracy: to avoid being subject indefinitely to the whims of an oppressive and unfair ruler, we need to be able to choose who governs us and we need a government of laws.

Obama has consistently maintained that what I, in my writings, have called “progressive” values are fundamental American values. From his perspective, he is not a progressive; he is just an American. That is a crucial intellectual move.

Those empathy-based moral values are the opposite of the conservative focus on individual responsibility without social responsibility. They make it intolerable to tolerate a president who is The Decider—who gets to decide without caring about or listening to anybody. Empathy-based values are opposed to the pure self-interest of a laissez-faire “free market,” which assumes that greed is good and that seeking self-interest will magically maximize everyone’s interests. They oppose a purely self-interested view of America in foreign policy. Obama’s foreign policy is empathy-based, concerned with people as well as states—with poverty, education, disease, water, the rights of women and children, ethnic cleansing, and so on around the world.

How are such values expressed? Take a look at the inaugural speech. Empathy: “the kindness to take in a stranger when the levees break, the selflessness of workers who would rather cut their hours than see a friend lose their job, the firefighter’s courage to storm a stairway filled with smoke, but also a parent’s willingness to nurture a child…” Responsibility to ourselves and others: “We have duties to ourselves, the nation, and the world.” The ethic of excellence: “there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of character, than giving our all to a difficult task.” They define our democracy: “This is the meaning of our liberty and our creed.”

The same values apply to foreign policy: “To the people of poor nations, we pledge to work alongside you to make your farms flourish and make clean waters flow; to nourish starved bodies and feed hungry minds.” And to religion as well: By quoting language like “our brother’s keeper,” he is communicating that mere individual responsibility will not get you into Heaven, that social responsibility and making the world better is required.

3. Biconceptualism and the New Bipartisanship

The third crucial idea behind the Obama Code is biconceptualism, the knowledge that a great many people who identify themselves ideologically as conservatives, or politically as Republicans or Independents, share those fundamental American values — at least on certain issues. Most “conservatives” are not thoroughgoing movement conservatives, but are what I have called “partial progressives” sharing Obama’s American values on many issues. Where such folks agree with him on values, Obama tries, and will continue to try, to work with them on those issues if not others. And, he assumes, correctly believe, that the more they come to think in terms of those American values, the less they will think in terms of opposing conservative values.

Biconceptualism lay behind his invitation to Rick Warren to speak at the inaugural. Warren is a biconceptual, like many younger evangelicals. He shares Obama’s views of the environment, poverty, health, and social responsibility, though he is otherwise a conservative. Biconceptualism is behind his “courting” of Republican members of Congress. The idea is not to accept conservative moral views, but to find those issues where individual Republicans already share what he sees as fundamentally American values. He has “reached across the aisle” to Richard Luger on nuclear proliferation, but not on economics.

Biconceptualism is central to Obama’s attempts to achieve unity —a unity based on his understanding of American values. The current economic failure gives him an opening to speak about the economy in terms of those ideals: caring about all, prosperity for all, responsibility for all by all, and good jobs for all who want to work.

I think Obama is correct about biconceptualism of this sort — at least where the overwhelming proportion of Americans is concerned. When the President spoke at the Lincoln Day dinner recently about sensible Midwestern Republicans, he meant biconceptual Republicans, who are progressive and/or pragmatic on many issues.

But hardcore movement conservatives tend to be more ideological and less biconceptual than their constituents. In the recent stimulus vote, the hardcore movement conservatives kept party discipline (except for three Senate votes) by threatening to run opposition candidates against anyone who broke ranks. They were able to enforce this because the conservative message machine is strong in their districts and there is no nationwide progressive message machine operating in those districts. The effectiveness of the conservative message machine led to Obama making a rare mistake in communication, the mistake of saying out loud in Florida not to think of Rush Limbaugh, thus violating the first rule of framing and giving Rush Limbaugh even greater power.

Biconceptual, partly progressive, Republicans do exist in Congress, and the president is not going to give up on them. But as long as the conservative message machine can activate its values virtually unopposed in conservative districts, movement conservatives can continue to pressure biconceptual Republicans and keep them from voting their conscience on many issues. This is why a nationwide progressive message machine needs to be organized if the president is to achieve unity through biconceptualism.

4. Protection and Empowerment

The fourth idea behind the Obama Code is the President’s understanding of government—“not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works.” This depends on what “works” means. The word sounds purely pragmatic, but it is moral in operation.

The idea is that government has twin moral missions: protection and empowerment. Protection includes not just military and police protection, but protections for the environment, consumers, workers, pensioners, disaster victims, and investors.

Empowerment is what his stimulus package is about: it includes education and other forms of infrastructure—roads, bridges, communications, energy supply, the banking system and stock market. The moral mission of government is simple: no one can earn a living in America or live an American life without protection and empowerment by the government. The stimulus package is basically an empowerment package. Taxes are what you pay for living in America, rather than in Congo or Bangladesh. And the more money you make from government protection and empowerment, the more you owe in return. Progressive taxation is a matter of moral accounting. Tax cuts for the middle class mean that the middle class hasn’t been getting as much as it has been contributing to the nation’s productivity for many years.

This view of government meshes with our national ideal of equality. There needs to be moral equality: equal protection and equal empowerment. We all deserve health care protection, retirement protection, worker protection, employment protection, protection of our civil liberties, and investment protection. Protection and empowerment. That’s what “works” means—“whether it helps families find jobs at a decent wage, care they can afford, a retirement that is dignified.”

5. Morality and Economics Fit Together

Crises are times of opportunity. Budgets are moral statements. President Obama has put these ideas together. His economic program is a moral program and conversely. Why the quartet of leading economic issues—education, energy, health, banking? Because they are at the heart of government’s moral mission of protection and empowerment, and correspondingly, they are what is needed to act on empathy, social and personal responsibility, and making the future better. The economic crisis is also an opportunity. It requires him to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on the right things to do.

6. Systemic Causation and Systemic Risk

Conservatives tend to think in terms of direct causation. The overwhelming moral value of individual, not social, responsibility requires that causation be local and direct. For each individual to be entirely responsible for the consequences of his or her actions, those actions must be the direct causes of those consequences. If systemic causation is real, then the most fundamental of conservative moral—and economic—values is fallacious.

Global ecology and global economics are prime examples of systemic causation. Global warming is fundamentally a system phenomenon. That is why the very idea threatens conservative thinking. And the global economic collapse is also systemic in nature. That is at the heart of the death of the conservative principle of the laissez-faire free market, where individual short-term self-interest was supposed to be natural, moral, and the best for everybody. The reality of systemic causation has left conservatism without any real ideas to address global warming and the global economic crisis.

With systemic causation goes systemic risk. The old rational actor model taught in economics and political science ignored systemic risk. Risk was seen as local and governed by direct causation, that is, buy short-term individual decisions. The investment banks acted on their own short-term risk, based on short-term assumptions, for example, that housing prices would continue to rise or that bundles of mortgages once secure for the short term would continue to be “secure” and could be traded as “securities.”

The systemic nature of ecological and economic causation and risk have resulted in the twin disasters of global warming and global economic breakdown. Both must be dealt with on a systematic, global, long-term basis. Regulating risk is global and long-term, and so what are required are world-wide institutions that carry out that regulation in systematic way and that monitor causation and risk systemically, not just locally.

President Obama understands this, though much of the country does not. Part of his challenge will be to formulate policies that carry out these ideas and to communicate these ideas as well as possible to the public.

7. Contested Concepts and Patriotic Language

As President, Barack Obama must speak in patriotic language. But all patriot language in this country is “contested.” Every major patriotic term has a core meaning that we all understand the same way. But that common core meaning is very limited in its application. Most uses of patriotic language are extended from the core on the basis of either conservative or progressive values to produce meanings that are often opposite from each other.

I’ve written a whole book, Whose Freedom?, on the word “freedom” as used by conservatives and progressives. In his second inaugural, George W. Bush used “freedom,” “free,” and “liberty” over and over—first, with its common meaning, then shifting to its conservative meaning: defending “freedom” as including domestic spying, torture and rendition, denial of habeus corpus, invading a country that posed no threat to us, a “free market” based on greed and short-term profits for the wealthy, denying sex education and access to women’s health facilities, denying health care to the poor, and leading to the killing and maiming of innocent civilians in Iraq by the hundreds of thousands, all in the name of “freedom.” It was anything but a progressive’s view of freedom—and anything but the view intended in the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution.

For forty years, from the late 1960’s through 2008, conservatives managed, through their extensive message machine, to reframe much of our political discourse to fit their worldview. President Obama is reclaiming our patriotic language after decades of conservative dominance, to fit what he has correctly seen as the ideals behind the founding of our country.

“Freedom” will no longer mean what George W. Bush meant by it. Guantanamo will be closed, torture outlawed, the market regulated. Obama’s inaugural address was filled with framings of patriotic concepts to fit those ideals. Not just the concept of freedom, but also equality, prosperity, unity, security, interests, challenges, courage, purpose, loyalty, patriotism, virtue, character, and grace. Look at these words in his inaugural address and you will see how Obama has situated their meaning within his view of fundamental American values: empathy, social and well as personal responsibility, improving yourself and your country. We can expect further reclaiming of patriotic language throughout his administration.

All this is what “change” means. In his policy proposals the President is trying to align his administration’s policies with the fundamental values of the Framers of our Constitution. In seeking “bipartisan” support, he is looking beyond political affiliations to those who share those values on particular issues. In his economic policy, he is realigning our economy with the moral missions of government: protection and empowerment for all.

It’s Us, Not Just Him

The president is the best political communicator of our age. He has the bully pulpit. He gets media attention from the press. His website is running a permanent campaign, Organizing for Obama, run by his campaign manager David Plouffe. It seeks issue-by-issue support from his huge mailing list. There are plenty of progressive blogs. MoveOn.org now has over five million members. And yet that is nowhere near enough.

The conservative message machine is huge and still going. There are dozens of conservative think tanks, many with very large communications budgets. The conservative leadership institutes are continuing to turn out thousands of trained conservative spokespeople every year. The conservative apparatus for language creation is still functioning. Conservative talking points are still going out to their network of spokespeople, who still being booked on tv and radio around the country. About 80% of the talking heads on tv are conservatives. Rush Limbaugh and Fox News are as strong as ever. There are now progressive voices on MSNBC, Comedy Central, and Air America, but they are still overwhelmed by Right’s enormous megaphone. Republicans in Congress can count on overwhelming message support in their home districts and homes states. That is one reason why they were able to stonewall on the President’s stimulus package. They had no serious media competition at home pounding out the Obama vision day after day.

Such national, day-by-day media competition is necessary. Democrats need to build it. Democratic think tanks are strong on policy and programs, but weak on values and vision. Without the moral arguments based on the Obama values and vision, the policymakers most likely be unable to regularly address both independent voters and the Limbaugh-FoxNews audiences in conservative Republican strongholds.

The president and his administration cannot build such a communication system, nor can the Democrats in Congress. The DNC does not have the resources. It will be up to supporters of the Obama values, not just supporters on the issues, to put such a system in place. Despite all the organizing strength of Obama supporters, no such organizing effort is now going on. If none is put together, the movement conservatives will face few challenges of fundamental values in their home constituencies and will be able to go on stonewalling with impunity. That will make the president’s vision that much harder to carry out.

Summary

The Obama Code is based on seven deep, insightful, and subtle intellectual moves. What President Obama has been attempting in his speeches is a return to the original frames of the Framers, reconstituting what it means to be an American, to be patriotic, to be a citizen and to share in both the sacrifices and the glories of our country. In seeking “bipartisan” support, he is looking beyond political affiliations to those who share those values on particular issues. In his economic plan, he is attempting to realign our economy with the moral missions of government: protection and empowerment for all.

The president hasn’t fooled the radical ideological conservatives in Congress. They know progressive values when they see them — and they see them in their own colleagues and constituents too often for comfort. The radical conservatives are aware that this economic crisis threatens not only their political support, but the very underpinnings of conservative ideology itself. Nonetheless, their brains have not been changed by facts. Movement conservatives are not fading away. They think their conservative values are the real American values. They still have their message machine and they are going to make the most of it. The ratings for Fox News and Rush Limbaugh are rising. Without a countervailing communications system on the Democratic side, they can create a lot of trouble, not just for the president, not just for the nation, but on a global scale, for the environmental and economic future of the world.

George Lakoff is Goldman Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science and Linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley. He is the author of The Political Mind and Don’t Think of an Elephant!

Originally published at Centerblue.org. You can comment here or there.

Want to better understand the economic crisis that is engulfing the world? Watch this very amusing 11 minute video that very simply and effectively explains why we’re all in the hole we’re in.

The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.

Originally published at Centerblue.org. You can comment here or there.

Obama’s stimulus plan is ambitious, but it won’t be enough to get us out of the economic cesspool we’re in. It only addresses one of three areas of concern that absolutely have to be addressed in order for the economy to recover:

1) Nationalize the banks. Heaven forbid Americans should talk about nationalization! But the bottom line is that the major American banks are insolvent, and nobody wants to admit it. They’re carrying trillions of dollars in bad assets on their books, far more than we could ever throw money at through TARP. These banks made huge mistakes, and now they have to pay. If we keep propping up these zombie dead banks we’ll repeat Japan’s mistakes and stagnate for over a decade, because they’ll be in no condition to get credit flowing again. The government must take over these banks, wipe out every last shareholder, make the bondholders the owners of remaining assets, wipe the balance sheet clean, and ultimately re-privatize them. It has been done before, in Sweden in the ’90’s, to great effect. According to economist Nouriel Roubini the re-privatization could take place in as little as six months. We don’t even need to look to Sweden, we did something similar with Indymac recently–the FDIC took it over and recently re-sold it to private investors. Obama is obfuscating when he says we’re not like Sweden because we have thousands of banks–it’s the few huge banks at the top that are having the most trouble. Stop dithering, Obama–and just get it done!

2) Stop the foreclosures. The economy won’t improve until you stanch the bleeding at the source: people being tossed out of their houses by the millions. Obama recently revealed a foreclosure plan that would provide aid to some homeowners, which raised a huge hue and cry that financially responsible people will be subsidizing the houses of people who took out more mortgage than they could afford. It’s a fair argument–but let’s save the moral hazard arguments for BEFORE the crisis occurs, not DURING it when the rest of us are being shellacked in the stock market and elsewhere because of others’ bad housing choices. But there’s a better way to do this than just giving out money to homeowners: make them declare bankruptcy, and give bankruptcy judges the power to modify existing mortgages down to current market value rather than the ridiculous prices of a couple of years ago–thus letting people stay in their more affordable homes. So instead of people subsidizing others through taxes, they’ll subsidize them through house equity–because if your neighbor’s $450,000 house value just got knocked down by a judge to $100,000 and is later sold at that price, guess what your house is going to be worth. People and the banks can scream and shout and throw tantrums about these adjustments, but the bottom line is that houses were never worth the outrageous prices, and the quicker we bring them in line with their true value the sooner the economy will recover. Painful medicine, folks…

3) Stimulus. Only after these steps are taken can the stimulus plan really work and let the economy gain traction. It will provide jobs that people can use to stay in homes they can afford, bought with credit available from revitalized banks.

Failure to do this is like trying to do cardiac resuscitation on a dead patient–you may get a blip or two in response to the shock, but the corpse goes right back to its lifeless state as soon as the stimulus ends. That’s what’s in store for the economy, and Obama’s presidency, unless he gets it right.

I still have faith that he can.

Originally published at Centerblue.org. You can comment here or there.

Steven Pearlstein’s recent searing criticism of ignorant Republicans (and a few Democrats) debating the stimulus bill is so good that it can only be posted in its entirety:

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Wanted: Personal Economic Trainers. Apply at Capitol.

By Steven Pearlstein
Friday, February 6, 2009; D01

As long as we’re about to spend gazillions to stimulate the economy, I’d like to suggest we throw in another $53.5 million for a cause dear to all business journalists: economic literacy. And what better place to start than right here in Washington.

My modest proposal is that lawmakers be authorized to hire personal economic trainers over the coming year to sit by their sides as they fashion the government’s response to the economic crisis and prevent them from uttering the kind of nonsense that has characterized the debate over the stimulus bill during the last two weeks.

At a minimum, we’d be creating jobs for 535 unemployed PhDs. And if we improved government economic policy by a mere 1 percent of the trillions of dollars we’re dealing with, it would pay for itself many times over.

Let’s review some of the more silly arguments about the stimulus bill, starting with the notion that “only” 75 percent of the money can be spent in the next two years, and the rest is therefore “wasted.”

As any economist will tell you, the economy tends to be forward-looking and emotional. So if businesses and households can see immediate benefits from a program while knowing that a bit more stimulus is on the way, they are likely to feel more confident that the recovery will be sustained. That confidence, in turn, will make them more likely to take the risk of buying big-ticket items now and investing in stocks or future ventures.

Moreover, much of the money that can’t be spent right away is for capital improvements such as building and maintaining schools, roads, bridges and sewer systems, or replacing equipment — stuff we’d have to do eventually. So another way to think of this kind of spending is that we’ve simply moved it up to a time, to a point when doing it has important economic benefits and when the price will be less.

Equally specious is the oft-heard complaint that even some of the immediate spending is not stimulative.

“This is not a stimulus plan, it’s a spending plan,” Nebraska’s freshman senator, Mike Johanns (R), said Wednesday in a maiden floor speech full of budget-balancing orthodoxy that would have made Herbert Hoover proud. The stimulus bill, he declared, “won’t create the promised jobs. It won’t activate our economy.”

Johanns was too busy yesterday to explain this radical departure from standard theory and practice. Where does the senator think the $800 billion will go? Down a rabbit hole? Even if the entire sum were to be stolen by federal employees and spent entirely on fast cars, fancy homes, gambling junkets and fancy clothes, it would still be an $800 billion increase in the demand for goods and services — a pretty good working definition for economic stimulus. The only question is whether spending it on other things would create more long-term value, which it almost certainly would.

Meanwhile, Nebraska’s other senator, Ben Nelson (D), was heading up a centrist group that was determined to cut $100 billion from the stimulus bill. Among his targets: $1.1 billion for health-care research into what is cost-effective and what is not. An aide explained that, in the senator’s opinion, there is “some spending that was more stimulative than other kinds of spending.”

Oh really? I’m sure they’d love to have a presentation on that at the next meeting of the American Economic Association. Maybe the senator could use that opportunity to explain why a dollar spent by the government, or government contractor, to hire doctors, statisticians and software programmers is less stimulative than a dollar spent on hiring civil engineers and bulldozer operators and guys waving orange flags to build highways, which is what the senator says he prefers.

And then there is Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), complaining in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal that of the 3 million jobs that the stimulus package might create or save, one in five will be government jobs, as if there is something inherently inferior or unsatisfactory about that. (Note to Coburn’s political director: One in five workers in Oklahoma is employed by government.)

In the next day’s Journal, Coburn won additional support for his theory that public-sector employment and output is less worthy than private-sector output from columnist Daniel Henninger. Henninger weighed in with his own list of horror stories from the stimulus bill, including $325 million for trail repair and remediation of abandoned mines on federal lands, $6 billion to reduce the carbon footprint of federal buildings and — get this! — $462 million to equip, construct and repair labs at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“What is most striking is how much ’stimulus’ money is being spent on the government’s own infrastructure,” wrote Henninger. “This bill isn’t economic stimulus. It’s self-stimulus.”

Actually, what’s striking is that supposedly intelligent people are horrified at the thought that, during a deep recession, government might try to help the economy by buying up-to-date equipment for the people who protect us from epidemics and infectious diseases, by hiring people to repair environmental damage on federal lands and by contracting with private companies to make federal buildings more energy-efficient.

What really irks so many Republicans, of course, is that all the stimulus money isn’t being used to cut individual and business taxes, their cure-all for economic ailments, even though all the credible evidence is that tax cuts are only about half as stimulative as direct government spending.

Many, including John McCain, lined up this week to support a proposal to make the sales tax and interest payments on any new car purchased over the next two years tax-deductible, along with a $15,000 tax credit on a home purchase. These tax credits make for great sound-bites and are music to the ears of politically active car salesmen and real estate brokers. Most economists, however, have warned that such credits will have limited impact at a time when house prices are still falling sharply and consumers are worried about their jobs and their shrinking retirement accounts. Even worse, they wind up wasting a lot of money because they give windfalls to millions of people who would have bought cars and houses anyway.

What adds insults to injury, however, is that many of the senators who supported these tax breaks then turned around and opposed as “boondoggles” much more cost-effective proposals to stimulate auto and housing sales, such as having the government replace its current fleet of cars with hybrids or giving money to local housing authorities to buy up foreclosed properties for use as low-income rental housing.

Personal economic trainers would confirm all this. Until they’re on board, however, here’s a little crib sheet on stimulus economics:

Spending is stimulus, no matter what it’s for and who does it. The best spending is that which creates jobs and economic activity now, has big payoffs later and disappears from future budgets.

Originally published at Centerblue.org. You can comment here or there.

“The United States will not torture. The orders that I signed today should send an unmistakable signal that our actions in defense of liberty will be as just as our cause and we, the people, will uphold our fundamental values as vigilantly as we protect our security.”

President Obama, on closing Guantanamo Bay Prison

It’s about damn time. I hope these words are chiseled in stone on a monument someday, so that people remember what America really stands for despite the stain of the last eight years.

Originally published at Centerblue.org. You can comment here or there.

Germany’s Sueddeutsche Zeitung under a headline of “The Failure:” “He confused stubbornness with principles. America has become intolerant and it will take a long time to repair that damage.”

Canada’s Toronto Star: “Goodbye to the worst president ever. Bush was an unmitigated disaster, failing on the big issues from the invasion of Iraq to global warming, Hurricane Katrina and the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.”

Sunday Times in London: “Bush leaves a country and an economy in tatters.”

Britain’s Daily Mail: “He leaves the world facing its biggest crisis since the Depression, the Middle East in flames and U.S. standing at an all-time low. How will history judge George W.? Have we, perhaps, to quote his own mangled malapropisms, ‘misunderestimated’ him? On the plus side, after 9/11 he achieved what became his number one priority: to prevent his country suffering further attack on its own soil. Al Qaeda has been hugely weakened.”

The Scottish Daily Record: “America is now hated in many parts of the world. Bush leaves a legacy of wars and the world economy in meltdown. He has been dismissed as a buffoon and a war-monger, a man who made the world a more dangerous place while sending it to the brink of economic collapse.”

The Economist: “He leaves as one of the least popular and most divisive presidents in American history. Bush has presided over the most catastrophic collapse in America’s reputation since World War Two.”

The Sydney Morning Herald: “Farewell to a flawed and unpopular commander-in-chief” [who had a] “singular lack of curiosity in international matters.”

France’s Le Monde: “It’s hard to find a historian who won’t say that Bush was the most catastrophic leader the U.S. has ever known. One success: since September 11, 2001, there was no attack on U.S. soil. But this sits alongside an interminable list of failures, starting with the war in Iraq.”

Germany’s Die Zeit: “Bush brought great misery to the world with his ‘friend-or-foe’ mentality.”

Germany’s Stern magazine: “Bush led the world’s most powerful nation to ruin. He lied to the world, tortured in the name of freedom and caused lasting damage to America’s standing.”

Austria’s Wiener Zeitung: “The United States was once the symbol of justice in the world but that has been damaged by Bush. A web of manipulation has cost America $900 billion and the lives of 4,000 soldiers — along with at least 500,000 Iraqis.”

Warsaw’s daily Dziennik: “It was empty rhetoric.”

Originally published at Centerblue.org. You can comment here or there.

“It’s sad to say, but we really went nowhere for almost ten years, after you extract the boost provided by the housing and mortgage boom. It’s almost a lost economic decade.” –Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s Economy.com, and an informal adviser to John McCain’s campaign.

That epitaph is as good as any for describing the eight-year nightmare called the Bush Administration, as we finally count down the seconds where we see him board a plane, turn around and wave good-bye one last time. The Bush years witnessed, like no other in recent memory, a strong America brought to its knees by corrupt ideology, economic incompetence, and the complete destruction of its image around the world. That’s what happens when you run this nation like a third-world despotic regime.

From pre-emptive invasion to torture, from “Mission Accomplished” to “heck of a job, Brownie,” from foisting an “ownership society” of McMansions on janitors to de-regulating a corrupt Wall Street to oblivion, from gutting environmental laws to ignoring global warming, from hundreds of billions in surplus to trillions in debt, from tax cuts for those who need it least to 500,000+ monthly job losses–in every single issue of importance to this nation and its people, George W. Bush and the years over which he presided will go down in history as the worst EVER to afflict our Republic.

It has been a profile in arrogance from a leader who could sincerely see no wrong in anything he did–a harsh lesson on the limits of a hyper empire that saw the post 9/11 world in harsh tones of black and white, good and evil, you’re either with us or against us. It has been an exercise in humiliation, as we have witnessed the destruction of America’s economic might and the consequent destruction of wealth all over the world as a result of our own government-pimped profligacy, our deluded belief that we could have it all without sacrifice–guns, butter, 25% of the world’s oil, an SUV in every garage.

No president since Herbert Hoover has left his successor with so many profoundly difficult problems to solve. Yet in spite of Bush’s incompetence he hands Obama an opportunity. If he plays his cards right Obama will have carte blanche to fix much of what ails America, providing jobs to renew our decaying infrastructure, fix our schools, upgrade our broadband capabilities to compete with the rest of the world, and eliminate our energy dependence on countries that despise us. The tab will be enormously expensive, and there is no guarantee of success–but it will be a down payment on an investment that will yield many times itself in future dividends if done right. That’s a much better use of money than handing it over to a financial industry that’s more like a black hole that swallows up every dollar, never to be seen again.

As the Age of Obama dawns amidst great hope and uncertainty, the world is happy to throw a huge collective shoe at Bush’s rear end as his plane’s door shuts behind him. Good riddance, and never may we see your face again.

If anyone subscribed to my new website with an RSS feed, please re-add it. I decided to discontinue using Feedburner given problems with that service and its imminent disappearance into Google.

On the topic of feeds, I can't get images from my posts to show in the feed....anyone have any pointers?

Well I guess it's about time I reveal the project I've been working on for the last few weeks (which is part of why I've been so quiet!)

Welcome to Eco Village Green, a stylish magazine-blog dedicated to sensibly going green.

I decided to focus my blogging on this topic for a few reasons. First, because the more targeted the niche the easier it is to get readers. My niche for centerblue was essentially politics, environment/global warming, economics, technology, real estate, etc. etc. etc....basically a wal-mart approach that ends up serving relatively few people. Green living is a much more focused subject.

Second, it is the area around which I want to continue my efforts. Last year I became involved on the board of an environmental non profit as well as being appointed to advise Arlington County on matters of the environment and energy. This website is a natural progression from those efforts.

Third, I wont make any bones about it--while the primary purpose of the site is to inform, a secondary purpose is to make money. There are many ways to do that. By becoming an authority on the subject you can eventually seek out writing or speaking opportunities. You can sell ad space on the site. You can review or recommend products and be compensated for it (I would only recommend products I sincerely believed were good, not just anything so as to get paid). You can write e-books on the subject and sell them through the website.

I won't just rely on Google searches either. I've learned how to do Pay Per Click advertising on Google (the ads that appear along the right side when you search there) and will be using that as well.

As a side note on the subject of blogging--I've been reading lately of some people saying that blogging is dead, but I disagree. I think the medium is simply changing. Whereas before you had websites and you had blogs, you're now seeing a merging of the two. Eco Village Green does just that--it looks like a flashy magazine website, but its updates are being powered entirely through a blog. I simply tell Wordpress where I want my blog entries to appear on the front page, I add photography, and presto--you have a blog that looks like a website.

Will this business idea succeed? Who knows! But it's a hot topic and a great one, and I won't know unless I try. In this economy, with nothing certain, I feel compelled to follow every avenue...especially in a topic I enjoy.

If the notions of green and natural living, eco sustainability, energy conservation and the like interest you, take a look at the website and let me know what you think. I would highly appreciate your feedback.