Hilary Rosen’s put-down of Ann Romney has operated in a remarkably generous manner for all sides of the dispute. For Republicans, the incident has been galvanizing, sympathetically raising the profile of Mitt Romney’s strongest validator, and reviving familiar arguments about liberal condescension toward traditional family structures. For Team Obama, the lightning fast denunciations of Rosen were an opportunity to claim solidarity with non professional married females who have lagged in their enthusiasm for the president in most surveys; and to simultaneously highlight the wealth gap between the Romneys and those same non professional marrieds.
Even for Hilary Rosen, while her 33rd visit to the White House has been indefinitely postponed, she is now another previously interchangeable DC consultant whose business will thrive from the glow of 15 minutes of fame.
So, spare the ritualistic outrage over the Rosen comment, and the dissection of whether she was an aberration or just speaking out of school, long enough to consider the following: an election that seemed destined to be about job growth and consumer confidence is taking on broader dimensions.
Read the rest of… Artur Davis: The Culture War Begins
By John Y. Brown III, on Tue Apr 24, 2012 at 12:00 PM ET
I heard the most inspirational and insightful quotation the other day and have been trying to recall it specifically. It’s called “Our Deepest Fear” and goes something like this.
Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate or will fail.
We may fail, we may be inadequate, or even a loser.
But that’s not the important point. Not by a long shot.
Something else–another point that is eluding me at the moment–is an even more important point. And it’s very inspirational too.
Oh yeah, it says we’ll succeed even if we fail.
Why?
Because to simply believe in yourself is …. while not technically “success” per se…. it is something we can all do that is positive and makes success more likely over time.
We should do this daily. And if we want to tell others, that’s probably OK too. But tell ourselves for sure. In the mirror each morning.
Most of all don’t fear failure because….it’s just wrong to. It’s wrong. Don’t even think about it. OK?
It’s not even important to know why you shouldn’t fear failure. Just know that you shouldn’t –and I remember that part of the message in the quote very clearly.
(If you have to know, email me and I’ll try to find out the answer. But for now please just go with it. This is the best I can do and I’m on sort of a roll now…and I do remember the last part verbatim.”
Main point: Don’t fail–or fear failure –because you are really afraid of success. That’s the absolute worst. Just terrible. Don’t do it.
And one last thing: The capacity we have for fearing failure because of fearing success even more—which is really true for a lot of people. really. I’m serious. Well, that fear is a powerful force beyond all measure.
I mean we have the ability to overcome that fear because of a powerful force beyond all measure. That’s inside of us or something.
OK, I didn’t remember the last part verbatim.
But you get the general idea, right?
Isn’t it great? Just what I needed this morning. And if you’ve read this far, probably what you needed too.
Don’t thank me. Just “pay it forward.” Share this with a friend. That’s thanks enough for me.
By Jason Atkinson, on Tue Apr 24, 2012 at 8:30 AM ET
Contributing RP Jason Atkinson was recently featured in an article in the Portland Mercury entitled “Bikepartisan Politics.” Enjoy this excerpt:
HERE ARE FIVE simple reasons why Jason Atkinson is more badass than you liberal dweebs: He’s an Oregon state senator. He’s a Republican. He’s a bike racer. He shaves his legs, which shows a profound sense of masculine confidence. And he once got shot by a gun while repairing a friend’s bike (there was a loaded gun in the saddlebag).
Now he’s (tentatively) back on two wheels after that 2008 accident—but even when he’s been kept off the roads, the Southern Oregon legislator has never quailed from a fight for bike rights statewide.
Senator Atkinson jumped into the absurd 2007 debate over requiring extra brakes on fixed gears and, more recently, tried to boost bike funding from its measly one percent of the state transportation budget.
MERCURY: How does bike advocacy jibe with your Republican ideals?
JASON ATKINSON: I fell in love with bicycles when I was a kid, long before I knew what Republicans or Democrats were. I was lucky in that I had a modest amount of talent in racing bikes, which took me all over the world to race. When I got into politics, I didn’t see bikes as a partisan thing at all. I’ve been very supportive of everything from velodromes for economic development to jumping into the middle of the fixie debate a few years ago. I think people don’t really understand what bicycle culture is.
What do your colleagues get wrong about bike culture?
Well, like, when we got around to doing the fixie bill, no one knew what a fixie was. I don’t think a lot of folks have a full grasp of the health benefits of biking. I’m not going to pick on my fellow politicians on either side of the aisle. If you ride a bike, you get it. If you don’t, you usually don’t.
By John Y. Brown III, on Mon Apr 23, 2012 at 12:00 PM ET
Leave trail of bread crumbs
I used to love the message of this song as a young man. It seemed inspired.
I thought I even tried admirably to break on through to the other side. But after awhile I quit trying. And even forgot I ever tried.
Then one day I woke up on the “other side” and have no idea how I got there. It just happened. And now all I want to do is get back to where I started from.
Even if I have to break through something to get there. But I don’t know how to get back.
And Jim Morrison isn’t around to tell us how “get back to the other side.”
By Jason Atkinson, on Fri Apr 20, 2012 at 2:00 PM ET
A great article from Oregon Live on contributing RP Jason Atkinson, and his decision to take a hiatus from politics:
Wearing rubber boots and faded jeans, Jason Atkinson shows off a bridge he built based on a Leonardo da Vinci drawing. Then there’s the horse he’s caring for that’s blind in one eye, a chicken he trained to sit and be petted, an extensive collection of racing bicycles and a YouTube video he made about fly-fishing on the Owyhee River.
And that’s just the first 15 minutes. He’s a classic never-sit-still Type A, with a cell phone that rarely quits beeping and a dozen jobs on the to-do list at his farm in the hills of southern Oregon.
For all that, Atkinson is about to “push the pause button,” as he puts it, on perhaps the most defining part of his life. After 14 years in the Oregon Legislature, including a run for governor in 2006, Atkinson is stepping out of politics and into an unpredictable future.
“I wasn’t at peace,” he says about his decision not to run for re-election this year. Under growing financial pressure at home, he also endured attacks from his own caucus for siding with the environmental lobby and became increasingly unhappy with his own party’s gamesmanship. It was time, he says, to take a break and, like thousands of other Oregonians, look for a better-paying job.
Under different circumstances, Atkinson, 42, would be entering the prime of his political career — an experienced, tested campaigner whose increasingly centrist views offer the kind of statewide appeal Republicans need to win. The fact that he’s heading for the exit ramp speaks volumes about not only his experience in Salem but also about the state of the party he says all but ostracized him.
By John Y. Brown III, on Fri Apr 20, 2012 at 12:00 PM ET
Want to know how honest you really are?
Do you pride yourself as being someone who would never cheat?
Someone who when a game is being played doesn’t blur the rules in order to do better?
And tell yourself you would never make an exception?
And are proud of the example you’ve set for your children in this area?
Me, too.
But last night I backslid. I made that exception and did cheat and tried to conceal it.
I was playing Marco Polo in the pool last night with my daughter and her friend. And squinted to see where they were (several times) after going over 5 minutes as “IT” and hearing non-stop giggling and scraping my elbow and later knee on the side of the pool.
I have no regrets about how I handled this and am calling this the “Marco Polo Exception.”
Yes, the president was guilty of hyperbole: although it is unusual for the Court to declare laws unconstitutional (once or twice a year on average), it is not unprecedented, as the president said.
Still, that doesn’t mean a senator should call the President of the United States “stupid.” While microblogging encourages impulsive bursts of misplaced candor/emotion, Grassley could have easily – in 140 characters – noted that the president had exaggerated, or questioned the president’s decision to take on the Court.
I will be interested to see if Grassley notes any of Mitt Romney’s serial exaggerations and distortions, which Dana Milbank nicely sums up in yesterday’s piece “The Facts vs. Mitt Romney.”
By John Y. Brown III, on Thu Apr 19, 2012 at 10:30 AM ET
Spy Parents
It’s not a movie. That’s Spy Kids. Spy parents is when a parent puts monitoring software on their child’s computer to monitor the websites visited.
I did this to my son when he was about 12 years old. As I looked over the first weeks batch of websites visited, I was pleased to see there were no “inappropriate” websites visited.
Just a lot of kid stuff with an unusually high number of political websites visited. However, upon closer examination, I noticed almost all the political websites were republican-leaning.
I didn’t know what to do.
Was my son a “Closet Republican?”
Was this the kind of thing I should talk to my child about alone or shouldI involve a counselor?
Was 7 conservative-leaning websites visited (coupled with a Google search for Glenn Beck) in a two weeks period grounds for an intervention?
Should I explain that some of my closest friends are republican and that this is nothing to be ashamed of?
In fact, there were groups and fundraising activities for people who eventually make conservativism a “life choice” —even though many Democrats don’t believe it is really a “choice?”
Read the rest of… John Y. Brown, III: Honoring My Son’s Choices
When Barack Obama is not being re-cast as a principled defender of progressive values, his defenders in the press try another sleight-of-hand, defining him as a pragmatist desperately seeking responsible Republicans with whom to cut deals. Enter Paul Krugman’s latest column, “The Gullible Center”,which is a warmed over attack on Paul Ryan’s “extremism” (the ninth from the New York Times editorial pages in seven days, but who’s counting) and a mildly more original jab at moderates who allegedly lavish the undeserved label on seriousness on Ryan’s budget cutting, while missing the genuine article in President Obama.
A few observations about Krugman’s revisionism. First, I’m not exactly a Ryan devotee for a variety of reasons: marginal tax rate reductions are overstated in Ryan’s model as a tool of economic growth; at the same time, his plan leaves too little room for additional investments in worker retraining, infrastructure, and education (it is particularly worrisome that he would leave Washington with fewer resources to incentivize the wholesale reforms on education that have to be effected at the state level) and it slices out too many elements of the safety net without doing a rigorous accounting of what has and hasn’t worked. Budgeting, Ryan style, is much too vulnerable to the criticism that it is a theory of emasculated government and an ideological tool rather than a blueprint for expanded prosperity.
But the notion that President Obama is the misunderstood centrist in the budget wars? It’s a fantasy; to paraphrase Krugman’s closing jab at moderates, a naked conceit that has not much substance. Obama’s current budget repeats his minimalist approach to entitlements from last year—a series of mini-measures on cost reduction for Medicare, no rethinking whatsoever of how to restore Social Security to a safety net rather than a substantial net windfall for its beneficiaries. While Ryan has at least traded future structural realignments in Medicare for a safe haven for current beneficiaries, Obama resists countering Ryan, by defending the status quo while outlining an alternative of what a sustainable future looks like. To the contrary, Obama’s budgetary approach to Medicare and for that matter Obamacare mimics conservatives when they load all manner of unrealistic growth assumptions on top of their tax cut proposals: Obama’s version of fanciful thinking is the cost-cutting from comparative efficiency techniques that may or not survive congressional review, and that may or may not be scalable.
Read the rest of… Artur Davis: The “Obama is a Moderate” Fantasy
Hilary Rosen’s put-down of Ann Romney has operated in a remarkably generous manner for all sides of the dispute. For Republicans, the incident has been galvanizing, sympathetically raising the profile of Mitt Romney’s strongest validator, and reviving familiar arguments about liberal condescension toward traditional family structures. For Team Obama, the lightning fast denunciations of Rosen were an opportunity to claim solidarity with non professional married females who have lagged in their enthusiasm for the president in most surveys; and to simultaneously highlight the wealth gap between the Romneys and those same non professional marrieds.
Even for Hilary Rosen, while her 33rd visit to the White House has been indefinitely postponed, she is now another previously interchangeable DC consultant whose business will thrive from the glow of 15 minutes of fame.
