If Barack Obama came out in favor of motherhood, Republicans would immediately oppose it

This is another day when I’d like to complain about the apparent bumbling of the Obama Administration. So you think maybe you don’t want to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in New York after all, huh? So you might not be able to close Gitmo, huh? What is it that you can do, exactly?

As always, though, the Republicans come through to remind me that there’s something worse out there: Republicans.

President Obama made a little joke during the State of the Union joke the other night when Republicans refused even to applause the tax breaks that were in last year’s stimulus bill. And it was bewildering: Many of those tax cuts went into the stimulus bill in an explicit — but failed — attempt to lure GOP support for the stimulus. Even if they didn’t end up liking the entire stimulus, Republicans always always always love tax cuts. Except when Barack Obama can take some credit for them. Just weird.

But the day after the State of the Union got even weirder. Republicans have spent the last year trying to inspire and harness the “Tea Party” wave which is primarily — but not solely — interested in ensuring that we don’t saddle ourselves with a huge debt to pay for a runaway government. On Thursday, the Senate considered legislation that would curb the deficit by restoring “pay as you go” rules for any new legislation — and every single Republican voted against it.

What. The. Eff?

“Fiscal responsibility” has been the mantra dripping like drool from the lips of every single Republican in Washington for the last 12 months. It’s a newfound commitment to be sure — George W. Bush was the only president to spearhead tax cuts and war at the same time, nevermind the unfunded Medicare drug program — but one could hope that the shock of being out of power had perhaps spurred Republicans to really match their actions to their rhetoric. That would be really admirable, in fact.

Thursday’s vote, though, revealed the Republican Party talk of fiscal responsibility to be a nakedly cynical, a hollow pose, a cudgel to be used against a Democratic president but dropped at the first moment anybody might actually hold them to their words. Or maybe Republicans simply didn’t want to give Dems a victory on anything, even if that victory makes sense from a Republican perspective.

I’ve spent the last year calling Tea Partiers “sore losers” and taking heat for it. That perhaps hasn’t been entirely fair; there are lots of folks who really are concerned about America’s ballooning debt and growing government. But the people who stand to reap the rewards of that discontent — the elected officials of the Republican Party — don’t care enough about their own purported ideals to actually act on them.

Barack Obama is turning out to be a less-than-perfect president, but I’ll still take him over that lot.

JD Salinger is dead. His being overrated, though, is immortal.

I always liked the idea of JD Salinger more than I liked anything that Salinger wrote. Franny and Zooey was ok, I guess, but Catcher in the Rye is massively overrated. Generations of literary hipsters have named their children “Holden” because they saw Catcher’s protagonist as the ideal; an authentic James Dean type, maybe, railing against the phoniness of modern life.

Me: When I got around to reading the book at age 17 — during my year of reading classic novels that were often banned — I simply couldn’t believe what a whiny sonofabitch the kid was. I don’t think it’s because I had the soul of a College Republican; I was reading books like Johnny Got His Gun, Catch-22 and Slaughterhouse Five that year and they were greatly influencing me. I just think that Holden Caufield was a whiny sonofabitch. Which makes me suspicious of all those who idolize him.

Salinger, of course, withdrew from public life after Catcher. The glimpses we got of him over the intervening decades were not flattering; he apparently had a pretty creepy sex life. But there’s something fascinating and inspirational about an artist who produces One Great Work and gives it to the world, then hides himself forevermore. Too bad the reality of JD Salinger could never, ever live up to the hype.

Rest in peace, you old bastard.

DADT: John McCain reminds us why we’re glad Barack Obama is president

As frustrated as Barack Obama can make you, he still has some shining attributes. He’s Not George W. Bush. And he’s Not John McCain. McCain reminds us why that’s a good thing:

In his State of the Union address, President Obama asked Congress to repeal the ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ policy. I am immensely proud of, and thankful for, every American who wears the uniform of our country, especially at a time of war, and I believe it would be a mistake to repeal the policy.

This successful policy has been in effect for over 15 years, and it is well understood and predominantly supported by our military at all levels. We have the best trained, best equipped, and most professional force in the history of our country, and the men and women in uniform are performing heroically in two wars. At a time when our armed forces are fighting and sacrificing on the battlefield, now is not the time to abandon the policy.

Let me repeat what I said last night: The downside to letting gays serve openly in the military is almost entirely hypothetical; opponents are convinced that our macho warriors will be too creeped out by teh gays to fight our wars effectively. It’s an argument that seems more ridiculous when you’re in the midst of two shooting wars: I would’ve killed Osama, but that gay dude was creeping me out! It’s gay panic elevated to the status of law.

The downside to the current policy is obvious and tangible: We’ve lost a number of military professionals — including linguists — whose skills are needed in the War on Terror. And a number of warriors have come out of the closet, post-combat, in recent years. They served valoriously — and being forced into the closet during their service had nothing to do with it. Continuation of the policy isn’t just rooted in bigotry; it covers for it as well.

Ah well. We may not get universal health care or bank reforms or a sufficient pullback from our wars in the Middle East. Maybe the best we can expect from a Democratic president is that he not be a Republican. Some days, that’s enough.

Three things I liked – and didn’t like – about Obama’s State of the Union speech

I'm looking at the man in the mirror!

What a weird, weird State of the Union speech. Most of these speeches start with some variation of “the State of the Union is strong!” and ends with a series of crescendoing applause lines to get everybody — everybody! — clapping for the president. Instead, President Obama rushed past the State of the Union line and at the end wound down with the quietest and most solemn version of the “USA!” chant that’s ever been heard. So the overall structure of the speech was … unexpected.

Here’s three things I liked about the speech, and three things I didn’t like.

• I LIKED THE REMINDER OF WHY THE DEFICIT GREW UNDER OBAMA’S WATCH: Because without pumping a lot of money into the system, a lot more people would be out of work and a lot more businesses closed. There are plenty of free-market folks who have somewhat reluctantly admitted this is the case. Has the stimulus transformed our economy into a utopia? No, but it could’ve been worse. The point is that the money wasn’t borrowed and spent merely to go on a big government spending spree, but to plug the drain that the economy was swirling down into. Whether people buy that or not — and I guess they don’t — is another matter.

• I DON’T LIKE REDUCING THE DEFICIT AT THE MARGINS: After the economy improves, we’re going to free federal spending for three years — except for “national security, Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.” The only problem is: The stuff off the table is most of the budget. Long-term (and that long-term isn’t really so far away) we’re going to have to align our expectations of government with our willingness to pay for it. That will be a painful process. It’ll be an even more painful process if the government hands out all the tax-break goodies we heard about tonight. But a president who chided his audience to tell “hard truths” avoided telling that hard truth on Wednesday night.

• I LIKED THE CHALLENGE TO REPUBLICANS ON ENERGY: Obama was right: Even if you don’t believe in climate change, there are national security and global competitiveness reasons to get on board the clean energy bandwagon. The party of free markets and business should be spearheading the charge to get America ready  for the new energy economy. Stop being so bull-necked and start making money!

• I DIDN’T LIKE THE PASSIVE VOICE ON HEALTH REFORM: “Please take another look” isn’t quite the same thing as “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” It was almost meek — a sign, I think, that the president is ready to cash in his chips but doesn’t really want to look like he’s cashing in his chips.

• I LIKED THE PROMISE TO (FINALLY) REPEAL ‘DON’T ASK DON’T TELL’: The downside to letting gays serve openly in the military is almost entirely hypothetical; opponents are convinced (essentially) that our macho warriors will be too creeped out by teh gays to fight our wars effectively. It’s an argument that seems more ridiculous when you’re in the midst of two shooting wars. The downside to the current policy is obvious and tangible: We’ve lost a number of military professionals — including linguists — whose skills are needed in the War on Terror. And a number of warriors have come out of the closet, post-combat, in recent years. They served valoriously. Continuation of the policy isn’t just rooted in bigotry; it covers for it as well. It’s time to end the ban.

• I DIDN’T LIKE THAT THE DADT MENTION WAS CONFINED TO A SINGLE SENTENCE IN THE SPEECH: I didn’t expect President Obama to linger on the issue; but it’s going to be one of those watershed culture war moments. Speeding by it won’t change that, so you might as well explain yourself a little bit, Mr. President.

There were other things I liked and didn’t like. From a political perspective, President Obama could’ve scored some brownie points with the GOP by namechecking John McCain on earmark reform and George W. Bush on fighting HIV in Africa. I didn’t like Joe Biden’s creepy mugging in the background. I don’t like that Obama talked a little bit too much about himself at the end — it was self-deprecation that seemed self-aggrandizing. And so on and so forth.

Truth is: I’m not really sure this matters. We know the president can give a speech. The real work he does in pursuit of the goals he talked about tonight is what is going to matter. And we’re still waiting to see how effectively he can do that. In that sense, tomorrow matters much more than today.

I won’t be live-blogging the State of the Union Address

Everybody else will. And that’s fine. But I think I’d like to hear the whole thing and have a whole reaction rather than offer a running sentence-by-sentence war of attrition against my fellow bloggers. I’ll weigh in later tonight.

UPDATE: Here’s the full text.

Howard Zinn RIP

I was fresh out of college when my “cool” uncle lent me a copy of Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States. I was young and impressionable — and blown away. This was a history unlike any I’d ever read before, one in which the Founding Fathers were villains, capitalism was a hugely destructive force and freedom wasn’t really always on the march.

Zinn’s conservative critics like to lambast him for his politicized reading of history, but the truth — which I first really learned from reading Zinn — is that history is almost always politicized, and not just by those dreary leftists. In Texas, such a large textbook market that it often sets the standards that the rest of the nation lives by, there are efforts underway to portray Sen. Joe McCarthy as a hero and America as a “Christian nation.” This is the kind of stuff your kids will be taught if a few officials there have their way. And no doubt, the Texans believe their interpretation of history is the correct one.

There are many inarguable facts about American history; what they mean, though, is always and forever up for grabs.  If I had my way, the Texas version of history and the Howard Zinn version would be taught alongside each other in our country’s high schools, to give our students an appreciation for the mythmaking of America — because that mythmaking has, in fact, helped us become a better nation; we were forced to live up to the standards we proclaimed — as well as an understanding that we Americans are not always right, not always victorious, not always well-intentioned. Our history is much more complicated than either the Texans or Howard Zinn would have you believe; I think the arc of progress has been more to America’s credit than Zinn would ever admit. I’m nonetheless grateful to Zinn for opening my eyes to the idea that the story we’re so often told isn’t the only way to understand it.

Rest in peace.

The feminist backlash against the iPad?

Maybe Steve Jobs isn’t so smart. As commenter Jo notes below, the iPad name is … not that cool:

But apparently their entire R&D department, at least the division responsible for naming said product, is completely in the Dark Ages (or possibly the Third Grade) of “No Girls Allowed”. Seriously. ONE woman in those rooms would have said “Don’t name it that”.

Stupid, Apple. Very very stupid.

NPR’s All Tech Considered blog has much the same take, along with a cute Photoshop job:

I’m assuming there were no women on the naming team at Apple. Because, hey, when women hear or read the word pad, we think Kotex and cramps. I wouldn’t mind the name so much if I could buy one at my local CVS.

If your product causes women around the country to immediately question whether women were part of the development process, you might have a problem on your hands. I can’t decide if this is better or worse than the Droid phone advertisements implicitly promising to give you a huge penis.

UPDATE: Via The Clog, we see that this problem was anticipated awhile ago — back with Mad TV was on the air:

UPDATE 2: One of the Twitter trending topics at this hour (5 pm on the East Coast) is #iTampon. Clearly this is all in my head.

The iPad: Sounds like a big deal. But is it?

Image courtesy NYT.

So the Apple tablet has been introduced. And they’re calling it the iPad. So far, though, it sounds like … a tablet. Which is fine and dandy. But the only thing that appears extraordinary about it is that Apple is getting around to making a tablet. Here’s the New York Times’ description of Steve Jobs’ presentation:

The iPad works in both landscape and portrait mode, like the iPhone. It has a virtual keyboard, access to photo collections, direct access to iTunes’ surfeit of content.

“It’s awesome to watch TV shows and movies,” Mr. Jobs says. “It’s so much more intimate than a laptop and it’s so much more capable than a smartphone with its gorgeous screen.”

Substitute the word “smaller” for “intimate” and “bigger” for “capable” and you really get what we’ve got here: A mid-sized device that does … what your other devices already do. And indeed, the Times blogger just updated with this:

As he demonstrates the tablet’s calendar, I’m thinking that we have yet to see any significant differences between the iPad and the iPod Touch, other than its size.

Right. But you can fit the Touch in your pocket.

UPDATE: Apparently Jobs hasn’t discussed pricing yet, but the word is that the iPad will cost $750. So: I can get a machine that duplicates all the functions I already have on the $100 phone in my pocket and spend $750 for a tablet. Or I can keep the phone and spend $250 on an e-reader, which is the main function I wanted from a tablet anyway. I think a Kindle or a Nook is closer to being in my purchasing future than Jobs’ new Giant iPod Touch.

UPDATE 2: Or I can buy one of the new Microsoft Tablets. I’m still not seeing the iPad delivering anything that the HP tablet won’t. And the HP tablet will almost certainly be cheaper. We’ll have to wait and see.

UPDATE 3: Live by the hype, die by the letdown:

Within minutes of Apple CEO Steve Jobs unveiling the new tablet device at a media conference in San Fransicso, Apple’s stock had shed more than $5 (U.S.) – or about 2.5 per cent – to just above $200 a share on the Nasdaq Stock Market.

UPDATE 4: Jobs is introducing the iBooks app. Given Apple’s reputation for blocking apps that conflict with its business, my question is: Will I still be able to use the Kindle App on my iPhone? If not, I’m going to be pissed.

UPDATE 5: Looks like I was wrong on pricing. $499 plus the base model — and progressively more expensive if you want more data storage, 3G wireless or a “keyboard” dock that lets the thing function as a minidesktop computer. I think for my purposes — which includes finances — I’m money ahead if I keep my iPhone and get a Kindle or Nook. But next time I’m looking to buy a laptop computer, the iPad plus a keyboard dock might do me. We’ll see; it’ll be 60 days before it ships — and knowing Apple, only 120 days before a better, cheaper Version 2.0 is introduced. I’ll wait.

But sometimes I’m just a goddamned contrarian.

UPDATE 6: Here’s Apple’s video. Which brings out the goddamned contrarian in me even more. I know it’s marketing, but it’s done with all the fervor of Tom Cruise pitching Scientology. Just a little creepy.

That’s said, it’s good to remember how astounding the technology is, relative to what computers could do five, 10 or 15 years ago. You can carry around the sum of human knowledge and entertainment around in a light, booksized device? We are living in the future.

Anti-ACORN filmmaker James O’Keefe is arrested by the FBI

Holy cow:

Alleging a plot to wiretap Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu’s office in the Hale Boggs Federal Building in downtown New Orleans, the FBI arrested four people Monday, including James O’Keefe, a conservative filmmaker whose undercover videos at ACORN field offices severely damaged the advocacy group’s credibility.

Also arrested were Joseph Basel, Stan Dai and Robert Flanagan, all 24. Flanagan is the son of William Flanagan, who is the acting U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Louisiana, the office confirmed. All four were charged with entering federal property under false pretenses with the intent of committing a felony.

According to the FBI affidavit, Flanagan and Basel entered the federal building at 500 Poydras Street about 11 a.m. Monday, dressed as telephone company employees, wearing jeans,  fluorescent green vests, tool belts, and hard hats. When they arrived at Landrieu’s 10th floor office, O’Keefe was already in the office and had told a staffer he was waiting for someone to arrive.

When Flanagan and Basel entered the office, they told the staffer they were there to fix phone problems. At that time, the staffer, referred to only as Witness 1 in the affadavit, observed O’Keefe positioning his cell phone in his hand to videotape the operation. O’Keefe later admitted to agents that he recorded the event.

After being asked, the staffer gave Basel access to the main phone at the reception desk. The staffer told investigators that Basel manipulated the handset. He also tried to call the main office phone using his cell phone, and said the main line wasn’t working. Flanagan did the same.

They then told the staffer they needed to perform repair work on the main phone system and asked where the telephone closet was located. The staffer showed the men to the main General Services Administration office on the 10th floor, and both went in. There, a GSA employee asked for the men’s credentials, after which they stated they left them in their vehicle.

The U.S. Marshal’s Service apprehended all four men shortly thereafter.

O’Keefe’s prank investigations of ACORN seemed smarmy, at best, a Borat-like attempt to take advantage of most people’s desire to be polite and accomodating and turning it into an overblown “exposé.” But it didn’t, to me, cross any fundamental lines of behavior.

Invading and trying to bug a U.S. senator? Pretty creepy. Possibly illegal. And just plain stupid.

Apple’s Kindle-killing tablet announcement: Will tomorrow be the awesomest day of all time?

Will the Apple tablet help us reach technological nirvana?

Does the picture at your right actually depict the new Apple tablet? Mashable says it might. But until tomorrow — when Apple may or may not (but probably will) unveil its new tablet — this is the best we’ve got.

There’s been so much hype and hope in recent weeks that I’ve got to expect that anything Apple unveils — or doesn’t unveil — would, in the normal universe of things, be a bit of a letdown. After all, what’s an Apple tablet going to do that you can’t already do (smaller) on an iPhone? We’ve already got mobile computing, we’ve already got e-readers and we’ve already  got access to a universe of entertainment and information in machines small enough to fit into our pockets and man purses. Unless Apple does something really amazing with its tablet — something I can’t imagine and that hasn’t been leaked in the pre-reporting — then the tablet can’t possibly be as revolutionary as the iPhone has been. It’ll just be … bigger. And more expensive.

Don’t get me wrong: I’ll probably want a tablet of some sort sooner rather than later. And my tendency in technology is to always go with Apple products. But the picture above doesn’t even look as cool as the HP Tablet that Steve Balmer showed off earlier this month. The HP Tablet will almost certainly be cheaper than Apple’s product, too. If Apple can’t beat Microsoft on features, design or price, what exactly will it have left?

We’re less than a day away from me maybe having to eat my words. But I doubt it.