The Dish

Fareed Zakaria puts the screws on the healthcare bill and critiques Obama's role:

Over the past six months—which have correlated with his dramatic drop in the polls—Obama has behaved less like a president and more like a prime minister. He has not outlined a broad vision for the country. He has not embraced the best solutions—from left and right—for the nation's problems. Instead he has behaved as the head of the Democratic Party in Congress, working almost entirely with and through that caucus, slicing and dicing policy proposals to cobble together legislative majorities. He has allowed the great policy program of his presidency to be written and defined by a collection of congressional Democrats, accepting the lopsided bills that emerged and the corruption inherent in the process.

I think that's unfair. Remember the September speech that turned around public opinion? But clearly the sheer amount of governing the president has been doing has eclipsed the selling. I'm sorry but given what he's had to grapple with, I can forgive that kind of lapse, especially since HCR was as good as a done deal Christmas eve. But Fareed's right that the campaigning Obama now needs to be unleashed again. It's a mix.

Steve Benen is doing sterling work trying to knock some sense into the House Dems. Here's his version of the 1993 Kristol memo urging the death of healthcare reform. Only this time, it's a memo for CPR.

Matt Welch points to a few paragraphs from a David Kirkpatrick article arguing there is little evidence that regulating political money lessens corruption. Tim Lee's post from last week, which contends there is no way to limit corporate speech and not limit speech from groups like the ACLU, is also worth pondering. Julian Sanchez sees those who disagree with the ruling as paternalistic:

Why is it that so many people who clearly do think books and magazines and talk radio shows enjoy unambiguous constitutional protection, despite being corporate funded or operated, are simultaneously absolutely sure that paid broadcast spots are in an utterly different category?

If one is above all concerned with exacerbating the translation of economic inequality into political inequality, it seems rather odd.  In effect, it means you only get to use your corporate money to get your agenda on the airwaves if (like GE or Time Warner) you’re big enough to buy them wholesale. But that’s OK, because you can pump money into all those other means of trying to influence voters; it’s just broadcast advertising that’s out. So I’d like to flip the reductio question around and ask: Given that people seem to mostly agree that all this other stuff constitutes protected political speech, why do so many people have such a different attitude about paid ads? 

My hunch is that it has something to do with the imagined audience.

Greenwald responds to his critics on this issue.

"Someone should perhaps inform the Holy Father that, if he wishes folks to take his internet talk seriously, perhaps he should update his blog," – a Gizmodo commenter on the Pope's admonition to spread the Gospel online.

A reader writes:

A quick point about "bailing out the wicked", especially the banks: it's called "reflation". Without reflation, we would have gone down the tubes. You don't worry if you're incidentally saving the assholes when you're already in the water struggling to get the life raft inflated. Now that the banks have proved they will survive and prosper — see Goldman Sachs recent earnings report — Obama seems to be pivoting from hands-off to pay-back and re-regulation.

What exactly is the problem with that game plan?

Oh, yeah, I forgot: BWAAAAAAHH!!!!! 

CNN has a cool new toy.

(Hat tip: Kottke)

Capetown, South Africa, 1.30 pm.

In a sprawling piece on the right-wing backlash against Charles Johnson, Jonathan Dee observes:

Not only can the past never really be erased; it co-exists, in cyberspace, with the present, and an important type of context is destroyed. This is one reason that intellectual inflexibility has become such a hallmark of modern political discourse, and why, so often, no distinction is recognized between hypocrisy and changing your mind.

Ackerman adds:

None of us can ever absorb, process and remember the sheer volume of information that even the worst search engine algorithm can acquire in instants. That’s why those of us who write on the internet have to be hyper-aware of what we’ve said in the past, an ever-pressing challenge as we age. (I have a really terrible memory and always have.) Tagging helps. But if we change our minds or evolve our perspective about certain things, we need to acknowledge it as it happens. Otherwise it looks to a reader — fairly! — like the sort of hypocrisy Times writer Jonathan Dee describes.

I find the pixel-trail one of the benefits of online writing. You really are accountable for your shifts, and you have a constant opportunity to confess or examine them. But what I find odd is how relatively few people seem to have evolved or shifted their political alliances or views over the past ten years I've been blogging. Obviously, I had a severe case of whiplash as the Bush and Cheney administration exploded the debt, jacked up entitlements, embraced torture, bungled two wars, and demonized gays. But the events of recent times, one might imagine, would have affected worldviews all over.

And yet I perceive not a jot of a change in, say, Glenn Reynolds or Mickey Kaus, two of my early blogging peers whose worldviews remain unaltered. Ditto the vast majority of neocons who seem to have found all their setbacks more proof of their original ideas. On the left, one finds the same kind of rigidity – how has Moulitsas evolved over the years – or Greenwald? I hoped the web would find a way to loosen writers up, jostle them a little out of their patterns of thought. But, for the most part, I was wrong, wasn't I? The same idiocy that counts all political adjustments to new facts or new circumstances as "flip-flopping" also penalizes those who dare to change their mind in the face of a changing world online.

Tant pis.

Timothy Kincaid sums up Friday's proceedings. Dr. Greg Herek, an expert in sexual orientation gave testimony:

Neilson, the Pro-8 attorney, sought to attack the fixed nature of orientation. To prove that sexual orientation is mutable, they pointed out all of the gay people who used to be heterosexually married. (While that might work well in a high-school debate class, I doubt anyone really believes that this proves that gays can become straight).

Herek did agree that women’s sexuality can be fluid and change over time. But he pointed out that the much-touted studies that showed mutation in orientation of women was between the “bisexual” and the “no identity” categories and reflected change in labeling, not attraction.

Neilson pointed out that many of those who identify as gay have had heterosexual intercourse. (Shocking!! Surely, oh surely no gay folk here have ever had heterosexual intercourse at some point in their life!! Meh.)

Next the discussion revolved around the ex-gay studies. First was Dr. Spitzer’s sad little telephone survey. Then Freud’s 1935 letter. But he didn’t want to talk about Exodus, it seems.

The defense calls its first witness today. Live-tweets here.

A reader writes:

I am still thinking over the interview with Susan Clancy. I was sexually abused over a number of years. At first I did not know it was wrong. I was told it was punishment and, for a time, I accepted that. Over time I realized more and more that what was happening was wrong. As this realization increased so did the trauma (for lack of a better word). At that point I was not only a victim but, because of my acquiescing to abuse when it began, I felt that I bore some blame.

To say that there is no trauma is to define trauma as only being the psychological effect at the time of the act. From my experience it is more progressive.

As time progressed and I matured as a human the trauma was slowly revealed or uncovered. It became as oppressive as any trauma suffered by an adult who was fully aware of the wrongness of rape as it happened. Long before the abuse ended I suffered from nightmares and oppressive fear. Those continue 40 years later.

In short, it seems that Clancy is making a narrow definition of trauma, basically a semantic argument, the focus of her book. I fail to see how that helps me and other survivors of sexual abuse.

Another writes:

I experienced childhood sexual abuse (at the hands of a stepfather, until age 7) and two separate, unrelated traumas (being trapped in a burning building at age 5 and an attempted stranger-kidnapping at age 9). I was raised by a Christianist mother who prayed for me instead of getting me a counselor when the results of the latter two traumas showed themselves (night terrors, irrational fears, flashbacks); thus, it was only when I got a secular therapist at age 18 that I really experienced healing and resolution of these things.

I can say without hesitation that the latter two experiences were more traumatic, in that I never had nightmares, flashbacks, etc., related to the molestation.

However, the sexual abuse was far more insidious and difficult to heal from.  It messed with my mind and made me feel guilty, because while I never wanted to be molested, I did enjoy the attention, the feeling that I was special, and the physical closeness and affection that were part of it.  It was confusing beyond anything I can make words describe.  I never blamed myself for getting stuck in the fire or for the pervert who tried to get me into his car.  I blamed myself for decades for getting molested and, to a very small degree, still have my doubts.  My abuser is only marginally more intelligent than the Forest Gump character.  If he could tell that, in some ways, I enjoyed at least aspects of it, like being hugged and paid attention to, doesn't that make me partially responsible?  No, of course not, says my rational, adult self.  The child inside is still, at times, confused.

I read the Salon piece, and I can definitely see where someone who was sexually abused but did NOT grow up in a Christianist religion, with all its inherent guilt-producing nonsense, would find the whole thing confusing but not an especially big deal.  The guilt-production mechanism installed by my early childhood religious training was by far my biggest obstacle in healing.