How the French teach English

It's a two-year-old article, but still quite interesting. Some of the criticism isn't wholly valid - do you really need to have a knowledge of the history of the language/country you're teaching about (after all, how would we former Spanish students have learned the names of the rivers in Spain and the mountains in South America)? Then again, some probably helps. But it is amazing how much behind the French are in learning English. Well, that's not entirely true. I've found an increasing number of French people who know English - they're just not comfortable speaking what they've learned. The Swedes could scare you with how good their English is, and even the Greeks have gotten damn good (which is really quite amazing considering where they were before). France, however, trudges along not doing so well. The article is fun, and interesting, check it out. Read the rest of this post...

Dean attacks, Gingrich defends, Palin's crazy invocation of euthanasia

Perhaps it's time someone euthanized what's left of the GOP. First Dean:

Former Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean told CNN Sunday that former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin had deliberately made up charges that the Obama administration’s health care bill would lead to euthanasia.

“About euthanasia, they're just totally erroneous. She just made that up,” he said. “Just like the ‘Bridge to Nowhere’ that she supposedly didn't support.

Then Gingrich, who is trying to pump the "euthanasia" thing since that is the GOP talking point of the week. It's almost funny to watch Gingrich try to stretch the logic to include government-mandated euthanasia. Read the rest of this post...

I am an American conservative shithead

Something that's been flying around the Internet - I couldn't figure out who the actual author is.

This morning I was awoken by my alarm clock powered by electricity generated by the public power monopoly regulated by the U.S. Department of Energy.

I then took a shower in the clean water provided by a municipal water utility.

After that, I turned on the TV to one of the FCC-regulated channels to see what the National Weather Service of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration determined the weather was going to be like, using satellites designed, built, and launched by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

I watched this while eating my breakfast of U.S. Department of Agriculture-inspected food and taking the drugs which have been determined as safe by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

At the appropriate time, as regulated by the U.S. Congress and kept accurate by the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the U.S. Naval Observatory, I get into my National Highway Traffic Safety Administration-approved automobile and set out to work on the roads build by the local, state, and federal Departments of Transportation, possibly stopping to purchase additional fuel of a quality level determined by the Environmental Protection Agency, using legal tender issued by the Federal Reserve Bank.

On the way out the door I deposit any mail I have to be sent out via the U.S. Postal Service and drop the kids off at the public school.

After spending another day not being maimed or killed at work thanks to the workplace regulations imposed by the Department of Labor and the Occupational Safety and Health administration, enjoying another two meals which again do not kill me because of the USDA, I drive my NHTSA car back home on the DOT roads, to my house which has not burned down in my absence because of the state and local building codes and Fire Marshal's inspection, and which has not been plundered of all its valuables thanks to the local police department.

And then I log on to the internet -- which was developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Administration -- and post on Freerepublic.com and Fox News forums about how SOCIALISM in medicine is BAD because the government can't do anything right.

Read the rest of this post...

Frank Rich: Is Obama punking us?

As always, it's nearly impossible to excerpt anything from Frank's essays and do them justice. But here goes:

The making of legislative sausage is never pretty. The White House has to give to get. But the cynicism being whipped up among voters is justified. Unlike Hillary Clinton, whose chief presidential campaign strategist unapologetically did double duty as a high-powered corporate flack, Obama promised change we could actually believe in.

His first questionable post-victory step was to assemble an old boys’ club of Robert Rubin protégés and Goldman-Citi alumni as the White House economic team, including a Treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner, who failed in his watchdog role at the New York Fed as Wall Street’s latest bubble first inflated and then burst. The questions about Geithner’s role in adjudicating the subsequent bailouts aren’t going away, and neither is the angry public sense that the fix is still in. We just learned that nine of those bailed-out banks — which in total received $175 billion of taxpayers’ money, but as yet have repaid only $50 billion — are awarding a total of $32.6 billion in bonuses for 2009.

It’s in this context that Obama can’t afford a defeat on health care. A bill will pass in a Democrat-controlled Congress. What matters is what’s in it. The final result will be a CAT scan of those powerful Washington interests he campaigned against, revealing which have been removed from the body politic (or at least reduced) and which continue to metastasize. The Wall Street regulatory reform package Obama pushes through, or doesn’t, may render even more of a verdict on his success in changing the system he sought the White House to reform.

The best political news for the president remains the Republicans. It’s a measure of how out of touch G.O.P. leaders like Mitch McConnell and John Boehner are that they keep trying to scare voters by calling Obama a socialist. They have it backward. The larger fear is that Obama might be just another corporatist, punking voters much as the Republicans do when they claim to be all for the common guy. If anything, the most unexpected — and challenging — event that could rock the White House this August would be if the opposition actually woke up.

He's right. I'm less afraid of not getting a deal on health care than I am of those who want any deal at any cost in order to be able to say that at least they got one. Read the rest of this post...

Winning must be more than simply "saying no"

Grey Matter notes, correctly, that David Frum is one of the few conservatives out there making a rational argument about the health care reform debate:

Unlike the many kooks on his side, David Frum has at least thought a bit farther than the nose on his face:

What would it mean to “win” the healthcare fight?

For some, the answer is obvious: beat back the president’s proposals, defeat the House bill, stand back and wait for 1994 to repeat itself.

The problem is that if we do that… we’ll still have the present healthcare system.

Many on the right aren't viewing the current health care debate as an opportunity to fix something that is broken, but rather they're viewing it more as just another in a series of partisan opportunities to hopefully make Obama and the Dems look bad. That's it, to gain political points, period.

But as Frum says, even if his side "wins" this one, we'll still have the same broken system that needs fixing. However, by once again stalling with the needed remedies (first in 1994) means the problems will grow increasingly more massive in size, to the point where whenever we get around to addressing health care reform again, the cures could be so outlandishly expensive at that point that any constructive fix will be out of the question.

We saw the same thing with the stimulus debate - an outright denial by the Republicans that a problem even existed with the economy. Other than terrorism, what issue did the Bush administration try to solve, or fix, or make better for America? Anything that couldn't be deregulated was considered activism, and therefore off limits. At some point, conservatives have to stand for more than simply dismantling government, and standing in the way of much-needed reform.

It's one thing to say you disagree with Obama's plan to reform health care, it's another entirely to defend the present system. That's what the GOP mob is doing. It's yet another "Amurika moment" for them, in which national pride threatens to set us back even further as a nation. And we wonder how great nations in the past perished. Perhaps because they were a bit too hung up on how great they were, rather than on how great they could be. Read the rest of this post...

White House saying gay ban will be lifted next spring?

I don't believe it for a minute, and I suspect more than a few people in Obamaland are going to freak when they hear about this. But that's what Joe Solmonese, the head of the Human Rights Campaign, seems to be claiming in a new interview. That Obama has a secret plan to lift the ban on gays and lesbians serving in the military, and that the ban is going to be lifted next spring.

They [the Obama administration] see the overturning of don't ask, don't tell along that spectrum as something that will likely happen next spring.

Sure. Right before the congressional elections. Lets all mark our calendars now.

It's apparently such a secret plan that the lead gay group working on repealing the ban, the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, doesn't seem to even be aware of it - at least that's the sense I got from SLDN's recent op ed they wrote for our other blog, AMERICAblog gay. SLDN sure doesn't give off a "the ban is going to be lifted in 8 months!" kind of vibe. And if anyone would know, it's them.

Aside from the ban, HRC's Solmonese lists the gay issues Obama is being helpful on:

[T]his administration has worked side by side with us to get the hate crimes bill on his desk. They are laying groundwork on everything from expanding the federal government's nondiscrimination policy to cover transgender employees to ending the ban on HIV-positive people coming into the country.

They're helping on hate crimes? That's news. And it flat out contradicts everything we've heard from people actually working on the hate crimes bill. Then there's including transgender people in the federal government non-discrimination policy. That's great. It wasn't one of our Obama's promises to the community, and it wasn't one of the community's top priorities (i.e., ENDA, DADT and DOMA), but it's still a positive thing. And finally, he mentions lifting the ban on HIV-positive travelers. There's been a lot of foot-dragging on that too in the past eight months. And, it still isn't one of the top three promises - passing ENDA, and repealing DADT and DOMA.

I am not knocking the importance of the hate crimes bill, the transgender language and the travel ban. I am knocking the notion that acting on those issues, while ignoring ENDA, DADT and DOMA, is acceptable "progress." It most certainly is not.

Then we learn that the Obama administration is busy educating the military and Congress about DADT:

The administration is building a case in the military leadership and Congress and the rank-and-file members of the military.

Really? They're building a case with the military leadership and the rank-and-file members of the military? Exactly how are they doing that? We've seen no indication that any case is being made to anyone. In fact, military leaders and spokesmen have repeatedly said that nothing at all has been happening on Don't Ask Don't Tell, or have outright appeared to distance themselves from the president on this issue. Then there is the administration's decision to change their promise to "repeal" Don't Ask Don't Tell to a promise to "change" it in a sensible manner. No one ever talked about changing the rule banning blacks from white swimming pools, and drinking fountains, in a sensible manner. And no one in the Obama administration talked about it with reference to DADT, that is until after they were elected.

With all of that, we're now to believe that suddenly there's a massive education campaign taking place? A campaign that includes educating members of Congress? Really? Do tell us more, because I simply don't believe it. If such a campaign were taking place, someone other than the head of HRC would be aware of it.

Look, I like Joe Solmonese, and I've been an ardent defender of HRC, but this next paragraph is pretty indefensible:

SOLMONESE: I don't see [the Obama administration] dragging their feet. But where the LGBT community is feeling frustration is that the road map and timetable have not been made as clear to them. Sometimes there is simply the need for reassurance from the president. I've seen a great deal less frustration since the president spoke on June 29 [the Stonewall anniversary] and recommitted to [our] issues. And the president signed the memo expanding the nondiscrimination policy for federal employees and calling on Congress to give him a bill extending healthcare benefits to domestic partners. It's probably as frustrating to him and his administration that things are not moving as quickly as we would like.

People are feeling better since the cocktail party? I'm sure the 300 "good gays" who were invited to the party, and not blacklisted, are feeling just peachy after getting a chance to sip champagne at the big house, but what indications are there that the gay community at large is now somehow more satisfied with the Obama administration's action on its gay rights promises? I just don't see it.

And the notion that Obama is probably just as frustrated as us with the lack of action is preposterous. The president of the United States is not the Queen of England, waving his hand at parades - an important figurehead, to be sure, but now just a shadow of things past without any real power. He's the leader of the free world. Reiterating White House talking points about how powerless President Obama is to influence legislation is not helpful to our cause, nor does it build confidence in this president at a time when his influence seems to be waning on other issues as well.

Finally, Joe says that he has, or is aware of, a very clear road map as to how Obama is going to achieve all of his top promises to our community:

But I also have a very clear road map and a plan of how this is going to get done.

Again, that's great. But Joe is the only person I've heard of who is aware of any plan or roadmap for how Obama, when Obama, even if Obama is going to act on any of his promises on ENDA, DOMA or DADT. At some point, these kind of "trust me" assertions simply do not ring true, and yes, do sound like an effort to carry water, curry favor, with an administration that isn't acting in the best interests of our community. The time for cocktail diplomacy is over. Read the rest of this post...

Are the Republicans inciting actual violence against Obama?

They did it before, during the campaign. It got so bad that the Secret Service had to start investigating Sarah Palin rallies. Now the Republicans are doing it again. The Republicans are stirring up what remains of their base - the craziest, angriest, most extremist elements of the far right - and they're trying to convince them that the big bad black man is trying to turn their country into Nazi Germany. Those aren't just fighting words, as this guest points out on Rachel Maddow's show, they're words that can incite extremists to violence.

And if the Democrats had any experience in actually fighting back - had any desire to do so - they'd perhaps pick up on this theme and run with it. The media would probably be quite interested in the question of whether the Republicans are inciting violence against their political opponents, including President Obama. And it would be a great way to move the coverage from "anger explodes over Dem health care plan" to "have the Republicans gone too far?"

Or how about just running TV ads showing Obama and Hitler and asking: "Is this the kind of talk you voted for?"

Read the rest of this post...

Sunday Talk Shows Open Thread

There's an eclectic array of guests on the shows today. We'll be getting some national security. It was a big week in that arena between Bill Clinton in North Korea and the death of the Taliban leader in Pakistan. We'll be getting some health care. Dr. Dean will be debating Newt. And, we'll be getting some politics.

But, the big buzz for all the Villagers is whether George bests David again. That's what's really important for this crowd.

The full slate is after the break.

Here's the lineup:

ABC's "This Week" — Former national Democratic Party chairman Howard Dean; former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, R-Ga.

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CBS' "Face the Nation" — National Security Adviser James Jones; Sens. Carl Levin, D-Mich., and Lindsey Graham, R-S.C.

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NBC's "Meet the Press" — Jones; New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg; Cory Booker, mayor of Newark, N.J.

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CNN's "State of the Union" — Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations; Sens. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., and John Cornyn, R-Texas; Republican pollster Bill McInturff; Democratic pollster Peter Hart; Linda Douglass, communications director for the White House's Health Reform Office; Ed Gillespie, former Bush White House counselor.

"Fox News Sunday" _ Jones; Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.; Maj. Gen. Carla Hawley-Bowland, commanding general of Walter Reed Army Medical Center and the U.S. Army's North Atlantic Regional Medical Command.

Read the rest of this post...