Catholics approve of Notre Dame's Obama Invite

Did you hear the one about the conservative who got mad that a democrat was pro-choice?

Yeah? Me too. The latest version goes something like. Obama kills babies. Notre Dame wants him to give a commencement address. Therefore Obama will teach Notre Dame how to kill babies during graduation.

A few weeks ago, I was in New York for a friend's birthday. One of the guys there was a Californian who graduated from Notre Dame last year. I asked him how he felt about Obama being invited to speak at Notre Dame and the subsequent conservative apoplexy. He told me that he thought it was awesome, and he that it wasn't the student body who was upset. He seemed embarrassed by the ultra-conservatives using the opportunity to display ungraciousness and grandstanding.

Now the opinion of one Notre Dame grad doesn't tell me that much about the school at large, especially one who went from the haven of American Catholicism to live unemployed on a Greenich Villiage couch. However, the latest polling indicates that most people feel the same way. The conservative histrionics are being ignored. According to a new Pew poll:

In both their awareness and their views of the Notre Dame controversy, Catholics look very much like the public overall. Only about half of Catholics have heard about the controversy and fewer than one-in-five (19%) have heard a lot about it. Among the general population, 48% have heard of the controversy and 16% have heard a lot about it. Overall, about half of Catholics support the decision to invite Obama to deliver the commencement address and receive an honorary degree in spite of his support for abortion rights and embryonic stem cell research. Far fewer (28%) say Notre Dame was wrong to have invited Obama and more than one-in-five Catholics (22%) express no opinion on the matter. Among the population overall, 48% say Notre Dame made the right decision to invite Obama, 25% say it was the wrong decision and 27% express no opinion.

Even among the weekly church-goers, Obama still would get an invite:

Among white, non-Hispanic Catholics, regular Mass attenders are more than three times as likely as those who attend less often to say they have heard a lot about the controversy (35% vs. 10%). However, even among regular Mass attenders, a sizable minority say they have not heard anything at all (32%). Regular church attenders also express much higher levels of disapproval of Obama's visit to Notre Dame. Among white Catholics who attend church at least once a week, a plurality (45%) say it was wrong for Notre Dame to invite Obama, while the majority of less-observant Catholics (56%) take the opposite view, saying Notre Dame was right to invite him.

So unlike the typical conservative reponse, which was something like this:

"Last week the president of the United States perpetrated an assault on human dignity. No statements or press releases will undo what Notre Dame's position in the eyes of the world is in response: 'Doesn't matter,'" wrote Lopez. "We've got THE ONE. So much for the One the school's namesake gave birth to."

"I've been optimistic that the radicalism of this administration on life could be a real catalyst for renewal in many churches. At Notre Dame, the administration there just made a choice. They took a giant step away from their identity as 'Catholic.' They [sic] rather be of this world than the one they supposedly exist to bring people toward."

Regular Catholics fell mostly between "that's a shame" to "so what?"


Subscribe to Pop Civics via RSS.
What is RSS?

Read more...

Douthat Takes Kristol's Column and Does Much Better Job

Bill Kristol's New York Times column was one long Karl Rove wet dream. Remember gems like this one (emphasis mine)?

Palin also made clear that she was eager for the McCain-Palin campaign to be more aggressive in helping the American people understand “who the real Barack Obama is.” Part of who Obama is, she said, has to do with his past associations, such as with the former bomber Bill Ayers. Palin had raised the topic of Ayers Saturday on the campaign trail, and she maintained to me that Obama, who’s minimized his relationship with Ayers, “hasn’t been wholly truthful” about this.

I pointed out that Obama surely had a closer connection to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright than to Ayers — and so, I asked, if Ayers is a legitimate issue, what about Reverend Wright?

She didn’t hesitate: “To tell you the truth, Bill, I don’t know why that association isn’t discussed more, because those were appalling things that that pastor had said about our great country, and to have sat in the pews for 20 years and listened to that — with, I don’t know, a sense of condoning it, I guess, because he didn’t get up and leave — to me, that does say something about character. But, you know, I guess that would be a John McCain call on whether he wants to bring that up.”

Kristol's columns were a fact checker's nightmare and often covered the GOP talking points verbatim, which was usually something stupid about Reverend Wright. Thank goodness they have been relegated back to the Weekly Standard and a monthly WAPO drivel. Tomorrow Ross Douthat debuts as his replacement conservative at the NYT, and his first column, Cheney for President, is really good:

At the very least, a Cheney-Obama contest would have clarified conservatism’s present political predicament. In the wake of two straight drubbings at the polls, much of the American right has comforted itself with the idea that conservatives lost the country primarily because the Bush-era Republican Party spent too much money on social programs. And John McCain’s defeat has been taken as the vindication of this premise.

We tried running the maverick reformer, the argument goes, and look what it got us. What Americans want is real conservatism, not some crypto-liberal imitation.

“Real conservatism,” in this narrative, means a particular strain of right-wingery: a conservatism of supply-side economics and stress positions, uninterested in social policy and dismissive of libertarian qualms about the national-security state. And Dick Cheney happens to be its diamond-hard distillation. The former vice-president kept his distance from the Bush administration’s attempts at domestic reform, and he had little time for the idealistic, religiously infused side of his boss’s policy agenda. He was for tax cuts at home and pre-emptive warfare overseas; anything else he seemed to disdain as sentimentalism.

Rooted in reality, humble, and thought-provoking, the column represents everything Douthat and his former colleagues at The Atlantic have become known for. I look forward to reading the latest Douthat column every Tuesday.

Subscribe to Pop Civics via RSS.
What is RSS?

Read more...

Texas: These colors don't run. They secede.

Half of Texas republicans want to secede. To which I say, "have at it, hoss."

Subscribe to Pop Civics via RSS.
What is RSS?

Read more...

King Abdullah II of Jordan is Really, Really Hot

I had no idea.

It's the clean-shaven look that has taken him from a six to a nine, I think.





From Wikipedia (emphasis mine):

King Abdullah has many interests. He is known to be adventurous and has a love and passion for sky diving, rally racing, and scuba diving. He actively promotes tourism in Jordan, having acted as a tour guide for Discovery Channel travel host Peter Greenberg in order to produce a show called "Jordan: The Royal Tour". In the program the king notes that since assuming the throne, he is no longer permitted to sky dive.
The king is also an acknowledged fan of the science fiction saga Star Trek. In 1995, while he was still a Prince, he appeared in the Star Trek: Voyager episode "Investigations"

Subscribe to Pop Civics via RSS.
What is RSS?

Read more...

Swine Flu versus Guns

Who didn't see this coming? Michelle Malkin, Wingnut-In-Chief, writes a post on her blog titled:

"Hey, maybe we’ll finally get serious about borders now; Update: 2 swine flu cases confirmed in Kansas; 8 probable in NYC; Update: US declares public health emergency"

A highlight from this gem:

I’ve blogged for years about the spread of contagious diseases from around the world into the U.S. as a result of uncontrolled immigration. We’ve heard for years from reckless open-borders ideologues who continue to insist there’s nothing to worry about. And we’ve heard for years that calling any attention to the dangers of allowing untold numbers of people to pass across our borders and through our other ports of entry without proper medical screening — as required of every legal visitor/immigrant to this country — is RAAAACIST.

9/11 didn’t convince the open-borders zealots to put down their race cards and confront reality.

Maybe the threat of their sons or daughters contracting a deadly virus spread from south of the border to their Manhattan prep schools will.

She spews this without showing how any of the swine flu cases are related to illegal immigration. Insinuating that all people who traveled from Mexico to the US since the new flu was detected must have been illegal immigrants doesn't make any sense. In Malkin's world, people carried disease to the US, therefore they must be entering illegally. Because no US citizen ever got sick on vacation, right?

Subscribe to Pop Civics via RSS.
What is RSS?

Read more...

Marc Thiessen makes a Really Bad Excuse for Torture

Over on The Corner today, Marc Thiessen is being dumb:

Ramesh states in his post regarding the difference between waterboarding done in SERE training that our military undergoes, and the waterboarding used in the enhanced interrogations of KSM and other terrorists: “the trainee's greater confidence he will survive the exercise makes a big difference.”

According to the International Red Cross documents that were recently released, which quote KSM and other detainees describing their interrogations, KSM says he told by his interrogators that he would not die. With the release of the OLC memos, we know why: one of the red lines that, if crossed, would have made the techniques torture under US law was whether the detainees thought they were in danger of death. That is why they were told specifically they would not die. So both the trainee and detainee know they will survive.

These are two very different scenarios.

A) A US soldier volunteers to go to SERE school run by other US soldiers who have a strong reason to want the soldier to survive. So the soldier believes that he or she will survive. Plus, the soldier has a signal to get them to stop if necessary.

B) A foreigner is captured in the Middle East and brought to a prison in the Caribbean. The prisoner is being held by people who do not speak his language and who are actively his enemy. They tell him he's going to survive. Then they torture him. The only way to stop the torture is to answer questions that the person may or may not have the answers to.

I would think that it's obvious that the person being tortured is much less likely to believe they will survive in scenario B. And how anyone could think that the two situations would play out the same psychologically is beyond me.

And to make the claim that:

both the trainee and detainee know they will survive.


is idiotic. Know? Know? The detainee doesn't know anything for certain. He's in the middle of being fucking tortured.

Subscribe to Pop Civics via RSS.
What is RSS?

Read more...

Pirates, Pirates, and Pirates

I know, I know. Pirates are so last week. But before there were conservative pirates, before there were Somali pirates, even before there was Johnny Depp's Keith Richards pirate, there was Tim Curry and the wonders of Muppet Treasure Island.




Subscribe to Pop Civics via RSS.
What is RSS?

Read more...

A Conservative Who is 100% Right About Torture Investigation

Ramesh Ponnuru is 100%, absolutely right. Posted at The Corner:

Based on my reading, the leading argument against prosecutions is that it would be imprudent, divisive, poisonous, etc., and therefore an abuse of prosecutorial discretion. I don't know if that argument will or should carry the day. It seems to me to be an important but decidedly second-order consideration.


Surely the primary question is whether laws were broken; and if there is serious reason to believe that they were, then shouldn't there be a presumption in favor of investigation? An argument against prosecution that appears to concede that laws may have been broken, or treats the question as an afterthought, seems to me to be unlikely to prevail. The people who strongly oppose investigation and prosecution would be on stronger ground, it seems to me, making the argument that it is simply outlandish and absurd to think that policymakers violated the law. Can that argument be made?

Emphasis mine.

I tend to agree with Ponnuru much more often than other NRO contributors. That shouldn't be too shocking, as he's much closer to my own age and so we share some generational perspectives on issues. Oh, and he's from Prairie Village, KS and I went to the University of Kansas. He's more of the super pro-life, but less hate-filled, type that I grew up knowing very well.

Subscribe to Pop Civics via RSS.
What is RSS?

Read more...

Michael Steele Jumps the Shark with Rev. Wright Video

The RNC recently released this video, which is such a bizzaro mash-up of right wing talking points and plain lies that it would bring a tear to the eye of Glenn Beck's producer :



Rev Wright? Check! Weird teleprompter joke? Check! Insinuating that Obama hates the troops? Check!

Doesn't mention that the report was requested by the previous administration, or that it is in response to actual concerns that another Oklahoma City might happen. Timothy McVeigh was a veteran, but simply being worried that our servicemen might be targeted should be an outrage. An outrage, I say!

The fact that this is what the RNC is choosing to spend it's time and energy on these days is telling. The country is the middle of a debate about investigating terrorism and worried about the economy., but the big story on rnc.com is Janet Napolitano and the DHS report? Pathetic. The RNC is still producing videos about something that was released last week that no one is paying attention to? This can't be a good sign.

For more on the reality of the DHS report versus right wing lies, via Think Progress

Michael Steele video after the jump.




Subscribe to Pop Civics via RSS.
What is RSS?

Read more...

Two Roads Diverging Ahead

TWO roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth


In the distance I car hear it-a great clunking, churring, whuring sound, a great grinder of justice, rusty and covered in iron, beginning to turn again. A great hybernation, the longest pause, is over now. "Justice in springtime?" it asks us. The torture question will not be ignored any longer. The time has come for the reckoning.

We waited through a panic, the war, the incompetence, the longest election we've ever seen, waited until inauguration, allowed several months for the courts to work and the president to catch his breath, but now it the moment.

We will either go down one path or the other. It can't be both.


Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.



We know how way leads on to way, and we will never be back here. We will always, from henceforth, be a nation that held people accountable for torute or we will be a nation that did not.

You can't unpardon Richard Nixon. You can't prosecute for Iran-Contra. We will never get another chance to get this right.

Both roads are appealing. One has a messy justice, acquired in the midst of chaos and division. President Obama and democratic leadership stumble, but the cumulative strength of the rule of law pushes everyone under. The other is one where torture has been banned, but that is only true as long as we can trust the people in charge and could change after any election. There are political consequences for not doing anything, but we don't know what that will be. More government energy and time are spent on the agenda.

The choice is daunting, and it seems like the consequences are bigger than what we can truly gain either way. Big enough to break something. Which means we're standing on moral ground that we have never been to before, and we're all here together.


I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.


But whichever way we go, we have reached the point where we will decide. The time for action is upon us. The writers and the readers and the typers and the posters, the picketers, the soldiers, and the voters look at each others in recognition that there is a great moment happening. Until now, we could pretend that it was avoidable. But now we are looking at the two different futures laid out before us, and we see the truth now. We can't pretend nothing happened. It is not active to investigate and passive to "just look forward" We must make an active choice, right or wrong, investigate or ignore, either way. The are two course of action in front of us, and both are ugly.

We've acknowledged that it's wrong, but what are we going to do about it?


Subscribe to Pop Civics via RSS.
What is RSS?

Read more...

Cloris Leachman is California Representative Jane Harman

I mean, let's be honest. Leachman's Dancing with the Stars experience is perfect practice to portray someone who might have sold out the country but who still has a fabulous sense of style.

Subscribe to Pop Civics via RSS.
What is RSS?

Read more...

CFO of Freddie Mac Commits Suicide

Shouldn't someone talk to Senator Grassley for comment?

Read more...

Clinton to Mike Pence: STFU

Everyone's talking about Hillary's comment about Dick Cheney, but I think this clip put up by TPM is more interesting. Hillary wipes the floor with Mike Pence (Idiot-IN). Of course, that's not hard to do, as he likes to show his ignorance often.

Subscribe to Pop Civics via RSS.
What is RSS?

Read more...

A Must Read: Young Voters, the GOP, and Race

A key Republican blindspot:

Universities across the United States today boast more diverse student bodies than in decades prior and students in those institutions are far more likely to interact with people of other races and cultures than previous generations. A party that appears to be uninterested in the concerns of (or votes of) African-Americans or Hispanics does not only risk forfeiting a growing segment of the population (and educated population) as a whole. But as white students attend schools and universities with more diverse student populations, the needs and concerns of the African-American and Hispanic communities will not be the abstract concerns of a group of citizens with which they have little contact; quite the contrary, a generation more accustomed to a multicultural America will be likely to find a racially homogenous party to be out of touch. So long as the Republican Party appears inattentive to the needs and desires of minority communities, the Republican Party can be almost certain to retain its minority party status. -Kristin Soltis

The entire post from The Next Right is a must read.

Subscribe to Pop Civics via RSS.
What is RSS?

Read more...

Giant Gay Repellant Umbrella

A Gaythering Storm from Jane Lynch

Read more...

Scott Johnson, Teabaggers, and the Least Private Joke Ever

Why did it seem as if Fox News and the rest of the conservatariat woke up on April 16th mad as hell to learn what "Teabagging" meant, and how come they didn't know before?

Is it a sign that the conservative movement is greatly out of touch, or is it a mean, nasty joke that liberals use to mock the hardworking men and women exercising their first amendment right?

It's like Sarah Palin invited America to a "Hot Mom Ball" and then got mad when everyone called it a "MILF Party."

Scott Johnson at Powerline is insulted:

The star hosts of CNN and MSNBC news shows have notoriously derided the tea party demonstrations around the country with reference to the practice of teabagging (which I had never heard of before they brought it up). As John noted, both networks' "journalists" used the rallies as an occasion for childish sexual innuendoes -- in the case of MSNBC, the same obscene teabag "joke" was repeated 51 times in a 13-minute segment.

He also seems to think it has something to do with La Gays.

There is something funny going on here, if not exactly where Cooper, Maddow and Sullivan find it. Cooper is widely reputed to be homosexual. Maddow and Sullivan are of course public homosexuals. It is funny in an ironic sort of way that these folks choose to disparage the tea party protesters from somewhere inside the homosexual subculture. Why not just call the protesters girly boys and let everyone in on the joke? Or would that spoil the fun?

Of course, it doesn't.

I learned the definition of "teabagging" at a party when I was eighteen or nineteen. I know, I was a total nerd. A friend of mine was passed out on the couch, and another friend, who like to spend every party naked, drunkenly rubbed his balls on my other friends sleeping face. When he woke up, he was none the wiser. But everyone at the party thought it was a hoot that he got teabagged while passed out. We were such rebels, weren't we?

It's been referenced in pop culture on Sex and the City, and it has been widely advised that conservatives familiarize themselves with Urban Dictionary. Regardless of the appropriateness of giggling, it would have happened anyway. This term is entirely too widely known, too funny of a mental image, and had been used for too long preceding April 15th. (For example, the first instance on Daily Kos of the term "teabagging" be used as a tag was March 25, giving conservatives at least three weeks to figure out what was going on.)

It was inevitable, and would have had the same results if the protests had involved any of the following:

protesting using bones, ho-hos, fluffers, ginger, figs, paddles, Rick Santorum, and many other objects.

Just as the notion of pirates will always have a pop culture draw that changes the politics of the moment, so will all serious political demonstrations whose name conjure up a sex act. I'm going to go ahead and give a comprehensive example. Let's say you wanted to protest high import taxes, or something similar. And let's say you decide that the great symbol will be the fig. So you want to have protesters bring figs to the protest. Well, that might seem perfectly sweet and nice to you. But there will be a large segment of the population that will immediately conjure up the image of someone being figged, or figging. And it would be over. The protests would be nicknamed 'figgings,' and the people that know the term will not have any control over it, it would be done. Case closed. And when you hear giggle after giggle after giggle for a month, you'll figure out that maybe you oughta look up what figging is.

And anyone and everyone who already are familiar with the term will be unable to take you seriously. It's that simple.

Really, what is more powerful in this world? A joke funny enough to keep a seventh grade boy rolling in the aisles, or a political protest message. Yup, there's something my mother taught me. Things that make a seventh grade boy laugh are both terrible and powerful. Humor will always win. If it's funny enough to be a Will Ferrell joke, some protesters aren't going to be the ones to control it.

And it's not up to the world to protect you. Conservatives planning the event had the responsibility to take good care of the protesters they pull into their little revolution. You are not responsible to know every slang term used in America, but you can at least check your short list. We knew John McCain didn't understand the google, but that shouldn't extend to the entire conservative movement.

So not know it before the events or close to the events was unnacceptable. And whining about it after countless references to it just seems sad. Andrew Sullivan, Keith Olbermann, Rachel Maddow, David Shuster, and Anderson Cooper were allowed to discuss a protest however they want. They were not serving as news anchors, and it is not their responsibility to sugar coat the pop culture already surrounding the term and the protests. The joke was already so wide spread and so ingrained into the nature of the protest that it was acknowledging what everyone else already knew. Everyone except the conservatives, apparently.

If this continues to be a problem, as it seems the 2M4M phenomenon indicates that it will be, may I make a suggestion?

Dan Savage's archives and podcasts are quite good, as is Mistress Matisse's blog.

And I encourage politicians and activists on both sides to follow the initiative of SNL's version of Hillary Clinton:

"And don't refer to me as a flurge. I Googled what it stands for and I do not like it."


Subscribe to Pop Civics via RSS.
What is RSS?

Read more...

Today's Teabagging at Independence Hall: Pirates, Freepers, Pat Toomey, Steve Lonegan, and more!

As promised, I went out to today's Teabagging at Independence Hall to see what the Philly Teabaggers have to offer when it's not raining.

I'm going to split the photos up into the broad themes that were there: socialism, pirates, speakers, etc.

First up, Pirates were much, much more popular at this Teabagging than they were at the last one:















People in Colonial Garb:







Beware of the coming onslaught of Socialism:









Secession and Sovereignty:





Just plain offensive:













Conservative Speakers and Media:



Pat Toomey, a former congressmen and current senate candidate, speaking to a crowd waving signs about Obama being a Usurper and Ending the Fed. Classy.



Pat Toomey was introduced by William Web, listed in the program as a "FreeRepublic.com Representative" who gave out several shout-outs to his fellow freepers.



Joey Vento, of Geno's "English Only" Cheesesteaks. Philly people, eat at Pat's.



Steve Lonegan, gubernatorial candidate in New Jersey.



Pajamas Media represents.



Scott Wheeler, of Townhall.com.

Reaction to the DHS report about right-wing extremism:






Campaign '08 Leftovers:



Joe the Drummer, who did in fact play the drums.




From Elizabeth Hasselbeck's campaign t-shirt line.



Of course there were also the Ron Paul Revolution, the End the Fed people, the generic bailout and tax sign-holders, the Don't Tread on Me flag wavers, and the people wearing the American Flag and/or the Constitution as clothing.

Subscribe to Pop Civics via RSS.
What is RSS?

Read more...

Pat Toomey at Philly Teabagging Tomorrow

David Fredosso of National Review posted that Pat Toomey will be speaking at a teabagging at Independence Hall in Philly tomorrow at 12:30.

Pat Toomey + Teabaggers = General Election Nightmare

So I fully support this, of course. I'll have photos posted tomorrow when I get back.


Subscribe to Pop Civics via RSS.
What is RSS?

Read more...

A Teabagging in Love Park

Read more...