People Who Can Afford This Offer From Delta To Travel By Private Jet Owe Obama Big Time-- But Won't Support Him Regardless

Over at TheAroundTheWorldBlog, the contention for years is that Delta is #1, the #1 worst airline in the entire known universe. And in the midst of an excruciating recession and a Republican Party filibuster of an unemployment insurance extension and a concerted move by conservatives of both parties to dismantle Social Security, Delta isn't winning many new friends with their brand new holiday offer:

Hello Mr. Klein,

This holiday season, treat family, friends and yourself to the ultimate gift of luxury and flexibility-- private jet travel.

The 5-hour Fleet Membership Card from Delta Private Jets makes the perfect present, and is now available starting at $27,500 for the light jet category.*

You don't have to travel with your party to use the card, so anyone you choose can enjoy the comfort and freedom of private jet travel. And with Delta Private Jets, you can always count on guaranteed availability, around-the-clock customer service, and the highest standards of operational excellence.

But hurry. The 5-hour Fleet Membership Card is only available through December 31st. Visit DeltaPrivateJets.com or call 1-877-323-JETS (5387) to purchase the 5-hour Jet Card today.

*Pricing includes fuel and taxes, and membership will be valid for 12 months from effective date of agreement.

The other day Ken suggested a picture of an empty bench could well be the emblem of the Obama judiciary. Delta private jets for rich people with extra tax refunds they don't know what to do with could be the emblem of his shockingly corporate "bipartisan" domestic agenda. It's an agenda so straight out of the Bush era that die-hard Obama supporters like NY Congressman Anthony Weiner and former Martin Luther King friend/attorney/speech writer Clarence Jones are coming to the same conclusion Paul Krugman wrote last week: progressives need to look elsewhere for leadership than the White House. Blue America has suggested Bernie Sanders. Jones endorsed the idea of a primary against Obama! First Weiner:

Governing is more than a series of transactions. This is a competition of ideas on how we make the country better."

"Middle class Americans need someone to fight for them. They see this deal as punting on 3rd down-- it seems the President is not seeing the value of being on offense."

"Democrats should welcome the chance to tell the American people what we will fight for. We should be standing up for the middle class and extending unemployment insurance for out-of-work Americans. If Republicans want to add to our deficit and defend the interests of billionaires, make them stand up in Congress and tell that to the public loud and clear."

"Deals come after we fight for ideals-- let's do that first.

Although my pal Roland works in an inner city school and has been telling me that the African-American women in the teachers union there are all sorry they ever supported Obama over Hillary Clinton, most progressives are afraid of African-American reaction if they start responding to Obama in the way they would respond to any other conservative. Perhaps Jones' post will wake a few people up in that regard. Once accused of being an apologist for Obama, Jones is disappointed by his abysmal lack of leadership on just about every issue facing Americans, including on specific ones he campaigned on.

It is not easy to consider challenging the first African-American to be elected as President of the United States. But, regrettably, I believe that the time has come to do this.

It is time for Progressives to stop "whining" and arguing among themselves about whether President Obama will or will not do this or that. Obama is no different than any other President, nominated by his national party. He was elected with the hard work and 24/7 commitment of persons who believed and enlisted in his campaign for "Hope" and "Change."

You don't have to be a rocket scientist nor have a PhD in political science and sociology to see clearly that Obama has abandoned much of the base that elected him. He has done this because he no longer respects, fears or believes those persons who elected him have any alternative, but to accept what he does, whether they like it or not.

It is time for those persons who constituted the "Movement" that enabled Senator Barack Obama to be elected to "break their silence"; to indicate that they no longer will sit on their hands, and only let off verbal steam and ineffective sound and fury, and "hope" for the best.

The answer is blowin' in the wind.

The pursuit of the war in Afghanistan in support of a certifiably corrupt Afghan government and the apparent willingness to retreat from his campaign commitment of no further tax cuts for the rich, his equivocal and foot dragging leadership to end DADT, his TARP for Wall Street, but, equivocal insufficient attention to the unemployment and housing foreclosures of Main Street, suggest that the template of the 1968 challenge to the reelection of President Lyndon Johnson now must be thoughtfully considered for Obama in 2012.

And, as Mike Konczal pointed out yesterday, Obama's policy thrust seems less about being forced to compromise with big bad Republicans-- who are still in the minority in both Houses of Congress-- as it is about an Administration conservative gameplan laid out very clearly over time by Peter Orszag, "the best barometer for what the Obama administration is currently doing in terms of the economy and budget." Yesterday Krugman tried again, practically begging Obama-- for his own sake, the sake of the Democratic Party and, most important, the sake of the American people-- especially the ones who elected him president, to Let's Not Make A Deal.

Back in 2001, former President George W. Bush pulled a fast one. He wanted to enact an irresponsible tax cut, largely for the benefit of the wealthiest Americans. But there were Senate rules in place designed to prevent that kind of irresponsibility. So Mr. Bush evaded the rules by making the tax cut temporary, with the whole thing scheduled to expire on the last day of 2010.

The plan, of course, was to come back later and make the thing permanent, never mind the impact on the deficit. But that never happened. And so here we are, with 2010 almost over and nothing resolved.

Democrats have tried to push a compromise: let tax cuts for the wealthy expire, but extend tax cuts for the middle class. Republicans, however, are having none of it. They have been filibustering Democratic attempts to separate tax cuts that mainly benefit a tiny group of wealthy Americans from those that mainly help the middle class. It’s all or nothing, they say: all the Bush tax cuts must be extended. What should Democrats do?

The answer is that they should just say no. If G.O.P. intransigence means that taxes rise at the end of this month, so be it.

Think about the logic of the situation. Right now, the Republicans see themselves as successful blackmailers, holding a clear upper hand. President Obama, they believe, wouldn’t dare preside over a broad tax increase while the economy is depressed. And they therefore believe that he will give in to their demands.

But while raising taxes when unemployment is high is a bad thing, there are worse things. And a cold, hard look at the consequences of giving in to the G.O.P. now suggests that saying no, and letting the Bush tax cuts expire on schedule, is the lesser of two evils.

Bear in mind that Republicans want to make those tax cuts permanent. They might agree to a two- or three-year extension-- but only because they believe that this would set up the conditions for a permanent extension later. And they may well be right: if tax-cut blackmail works now, why shouldn’t it work again later?

America, however, cannot afford to make those cuts permanent. We’re talking about almost $4 trillion in lost revenue just over the next decade; over the next 75 years, the revenue loss would be more than three times the entire projected Social Security shortfall. So giving in to Republican demands would mean risking a major fiscal crisis-- a crisis that could be resolved only by making savage cuts in federal spending.

And we’re not talking about government programs nobody cares about: the only way to cut spending enough to pay for the Bush tax cuts in the long run would be to dismantle large parts of Social Security and Medicare.

...[I]f Democrats give in to the blackmailers now, they’ll just face more demands in the future. As long as Republicans believe that Mr. Obama will do anything to avoid short-term pain, they’ll have every incentive to keep taking hostages. If the president will endanger America’s fiscal future to avoid a tax increase, what will he give to avoid a government shutdown?

So Mr. Obama should draw a line in the sand, right here, right now. If Republicans hold out, and taxes go up, he should tell the nation the truth, and denounce the blackmail attempt for what it is.

Yes, letting taxes go up would be politically risky. But giving in would be risky, too-- especially for a president whom voters are starting to write off as a man too timid to take a stand. Now is the time for him to prove them wrong.

And the guys who can use their tax cuts for the Delta private jets? They all hate Obama anyway and have no intention of voting for him unless Palin is the only alternative. So who will vote for Obama? The people he's betraying on a daily basis? He shouldn't count on it because he's going to wind up as a one-termer just like Steve Driehaus did-- and for the same reasons-- and not as a one-termer who took a hit for doing the right thing for America, one termer for doing the bidding of the Big Business interests who financed his political career.

"In a thousand years we'll all be dead, and all that will matter will be our record of truth and beauty"

Peter, Paul and Mary, singing Bob Dylan's "Blown' in the Wind" in 1966, pass the truth-and-beauty test with flying colors. Corny as it sounds, they really will go on singing forever.

by Ken

As we have both had frequent occasion to mention, Howie and I go back a long ways -- specifically, to the ninth grade, when as it happened we had an English teacher who i think it's fair to say changed both our lives.

His name was Mr. Fulmer (well, Chet Fulmer, but Mr. Fulmer to us), and already I think he would be cross with me for saying "I think" -- twice now -- when I'm not really thinking. (Well, I was pretty close to thinking the first time, and the second time was for, you know, comical effect.) He was tough about that, and rarely let it pass. Which might make him sound severe, though he wasn't really. He spoke in a beautiful, commanding baritone voice, and was warm and funny and tolerant, but tolerant only up to a point. He wasn't very tolerant of insensitivity or willful stupidity. I wonder what he would make of Glenn Beck.

The thing is, it mattered to him that we didn't use the word "think" carelessly, because it really mattered to him that we did think. It was news to all of us that we didn't. We all resisted at first, until we started to get a glimmer of what he was talking about.

It was the dawn of the '60s, and so perhaps not a surprising time to be exalting "truth and beauty." The clip of Peter, Paul and Mary singing "If I Had a Hammer" I posted the morning after Mary died dates from 1963.

But I assure you that, at least in the Brooklyn of that time, truth and beauty were not standard preoccupations. Howie had grown up in the area, while I had just moved from Milwaukee and before that Baltimore. Let the record show that truth and beauty hadn't been standard preoccupations in any of the places I'd lived before either.

It was crucial that truth and beauty were linked, and perhaps I should be referring to them jointly as truth-and-beauty. Truth by itself is a fine thing, but it has a tendency by itself to overwhelm; beauty by itself is a lovely thing but has more than a tendency to obscure and trivialize. However, leaven truth with beauty and temper beauty with truth, and they make a terrific team.

It's not always possible, of course. There are, alas, all too many truths under the sun that are simply too onerous to allow for leavening with beauty. There's no way to beautify the horror of Abu Ghraib, for example. I think Mr. Fulmer would have wanted us to understand that our souls need the consolation of beauty, but that an honest soul can't be consoled without coming to grips with the horror of the truth. When officials were confronted with the horror of Abu Ghraib, mostly they either looked the other way, or pretended they hadn't seen anything, or made up fairy stories (like pretending that the behavior on display was an aberration, which it clearly wasn't -- though it would still have been pretty horrifying if it had been). Of course nobody accused people like George Bush and Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld of having clean souls. Those are souls that must be built up of layer upon layer of scar tissue.

I was touched by the comment our friend Balakirev added to my "farewell to Mary" post: "Damn. You know, I kind of hoped they'd go on living and singing forever." I sensibly resisted the temptation with some cheeseball affirmation that they will indeed go on singing forever, because I understood full well what he meant.

And yet it's true. I watched the 1963 clip of "If I Had a Hammer" a bunch of times, and also the reunion-concert clip of "Puff, the Magic Dragon" I posted on New Year's Eve. Each time I teared up at the final stanza of "If I Had a Hammer," with its formidable wielding of "the hammer of justice" and "the bell of freedom" and "the song about love between my brothers and my sisters," a combination worthy of Mr. Fulmer's truth-and-beauty. I was in tears most of the way through "Puff," a haunting song that in its gentle, beautiful way asks the listener to reflect on the complexity of the concept of youthful innocence.

In the late-ish performance of "Puff" preserved in our clip, Peter -- the song's co-writer with Lenny Lipton -- manages to expand the opening stanza into an extended riff on the widespread assumption that the song contained hidden drug references, a subject that apparently still bothers him, and I sympathize. Wouldn't you think there's quite enough content in the song for adults as well as children to deal with without going looking for extraneous nonsense?

But then, probably neither Peter nor Lenny imagined they would one day hear "Puff" transformed into "Puff, the Magic N----r," to the juvenile-delinquent adolescent delight of the racist core of Today's Republican Party, which bubbled to the surface last year (as I wrote about in that New Year's Eve post). Now it appears they hardly bother to conceal it, and among Democrats only former President Jimmy Carter seems to have the sense and courage to object on the record.

Still, if you go back to the real "Puff," its power and beauty, and its challenge to the imaginations of children and adults, are still all there. I have a feeling they'll still be there in a thousand years.

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Mary Travers (1936-2009)

Peter, Paul and Mary sing Lee Hays and Pete Seeger's
progressive anthem "If I Had a Hammer."

"Well, I've got a hammer,
And I've got a bell,
And I've got a song to sing,
All over this land.
It's the hammer of justice,
It's the bell of freedom,
It's the song about love between my brothers and my sisters,
All over this land."

"I was raised to believe that everybody has a responsibility to their community, and I use the word very loosely. It’s a big community. If I get recognized in the middle of the Sinai Desert, I have a big community.”

-- Mary Travers, to the New York Times in 1999
(quoted in William Grimes's NYT obituary)

Paul Stookey, Mary Travers, and Peter Yarrow

A "PUFF" REMINDER

We kicked off the new year with Peter, Paul and Mary singing Peter and Lenny Lipton's "Puff, the Magic Dragon."

Also, thanks to my friend Paul for passing along this amazing photo of PPM. -- Ken


UPDATE: Stirring NY Times Obituary

I grew up listening to Peter, Paul and Mary, and their music was part of the aural fabric of social change that swept America in the 1960s. Mary died yesterday (leukemia) in Connecticut, and today's Times puts her in context, especially for younger people who might not be familiar with her music. -- Howie

Ms. Travers brought a powerful voice and an unfeigned urgency to music that resonated with mainstream listeners. With her straight blond hair and willowy figure and two bearded guitar players by her side, she looked exactly like what she was, a Greenwich Villager directly from the clubs and the coffeehouses that nourished the folk-music revival.

“She was obviously the sex appeal of that group, and that group was the sex appeal of the movement,” said Elijah Wald, a folk-blues musician and a historian of popular music.

Ms. Travers’s voice blended seamlessly with those of her colleagues, Peter Yarrow and Paul Stookey, to create a rich three-part harmony that propelled the group to the top of the pop charts. Their first album, “Peter, Paul and Mary,” which featured the hit singles “Lemon Tree” and “If I Had a Hammer,” reached No. 1 shortly after its release in March 1962 and stayed there for seven weeks, eventually selling more than two million copies.

...Their sound may have been commercial and safe, but early on their politics were somewhat risky for a group courting a mass audience. Like Mr. Yarrow and Mr. Stookey, Ms. Travers was outspoken in her support for the civil-rights and antiwar movements, in sharp contrast to clean-cut folk groups like the Kingston Trio, which avoided making political statements.

Peter, Paul and Mary went on to perform at the 1963 March on Washington and joined the voting-rights marches from Selma to Montgomery, Ala., in 1965.

Over the years they performed frequently at political rallies and demonstrations in the United States and abroad. After the group disbanded, in 1970, Ms. Travers continued to perform at political events around the world as she pursued a solo career.

“They made folk music not just palatable but accessible to a mass audience,” David Hajdu, the author of “Positively Fourth Street,” a book about Mr. Dylan, Joan Baez and their circle, said in an interview. Ms. Travers, he added, was crucial to the group’s image, which had a lot to do with its appeal. “She had a kind of sexual confidence combined with intelligence, edginess and social consciousness-- a potent combination,” he said. “If you look at clips of their performances, the camera fixates on her. The act was all about Mary.”

Mr. Yarrow, in a statement on Wednesday, described Ms. Travers’s singing style as an expression of her character: “honest and completely authentic.”

Mr. Stookey, in an accompanying statement, wrote that “her charisma was a barely contained nervous energy-- occasionally (and then only privately) revealed as stage fright.”

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Is there another way to say "Happy New Year"?

Peter, Paul and Mary (or, to be technical, Paul, Mary and Peter) -- a bunch of years later. Note that Peter, the co-writer of "Puff," has always been touchy about those rumors that the lyrics contained hidden drug references. And now this!

Ever since Noah told us the appalling story about Republicans wetting their pants over some sad soul's transformation of "Puff the Magic Dragon" into a racist giggle, I've been trying to think, What do you say to, or about, people capable of doing such a thing? Or, worse, to people who think it's funny?

I haven't come up with anything. Maybe this is one of those things where either you get it or you don't. So let's just say, Thanks, Peter, and (co-writer) Lenny, and, oh yes, Paul and Mary too!

By way of an encore, though unfortunately in audio-only form, here's the original:



Happy New Year, everyone, from everyone here at DWT! -- Ken

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