Like we don’t know already!

This country’s politics are clearly in a state of rapid, dramatic transition. A transition to exactly what is far from clear. The way I see it, we may resume our rapid descent into the abyss of fascism so ruthlessly engineered by Nixon, Reagan and the two Bushes.To be sure, that is a very likely future for America, post-Obama. However, instead, we may build upon and “professionalize” the liberal, widely popular movements that rallied behind Obama in ’08 and restore the messy, far from perfect, but nonetheless liberal democracy that was America before the modern rightwing proceeded to wreck the country and discard our values.

Really, we don’t have a choice. Many of us have already forgotten what it was like under Bush, when an American government hellbent on establishing fascism by any means necessary was in power. But I haven’t. Murders, torture, a country left permanently undefended from perils both manmade and natural, arbitrary imprisonment, censorship, stolen elections, joblessness, thievery, greed, hypocrisy and lawlessness enshrined as moral values, increased poverty and ill health.

Republican Party = party of obstruction to efforts at actual governance, with varying levels of skill and shamelessness. But all are, to borrow an observation from Garrison Keillor,  “above average” at it. Something about brain chemistry, I suspect.

The Senate’s passage Tuesday of the economic recovery package followed a now-familiar 30 year pattern. The Democratic President Barack Obama, like Bill Clinton before him in 1993, faced a monolithic wall of GOP opposition to his economic program. But Republicans Ronald Reagan in 1981 and George W. Bush 20 years later enjoyed substantial Democratic support for their dangerously irresponsible and regressive tax cuts that as predicted drained the federal treasury. Now as then, for Republicans the road to economic stimulus is a one-way street.

This is why two is not enough. To borrow from another good writer: “We can do better.”

She’s put out a call for others to join her in making some changes in the base of the Oklahoma Democratic Party.

On December 11, 2008, at 5:30pm, we will have a brief meeting in Oklahoma City at the upstairs conference room of Java Daves, 10 NE 10th (just west of the Broadway Extension on 10th St). It is time to stand up for our Democratic values. It is time to move this party in a new direction.

We invite you to join us and continue to work for change. Channel your hope, because WE KNOW what can be accomplished when people come together united by a common goal! Email me at crich1254 -at- yahoo -dot- com [altered for privacy] for more information and to RSVP for Dec. 11th.

And, yes, I know that if you are a conservative Republican, you are just cool about Oklahoma not voting for Obama and being the regressive joke of an America that is moving on and upward with or without us. We get it, really; you don’t have to explain it to us again here.

Inhofe back to business. The Oklahoma Gazette reports that Inhofe is going to focus his time and energy on dismantling the 527s that he thinks did him dirty in his recent reelection campaign. He won by a considerable margin, but no matter, he’s on the warpath. I’m sure this new mission he’s taken on will do lots of good things for the people of Oklahoma.

Little Axe Case remembered. In 1981, Americans United for the Separation of Church and State came to the aid of two Little Axe, OK, families who were being attacked for their objections to denominational prayers in the local school. Oklahoma City minister, and blogger at Mainstream Baptists, Dr. Bruce Prescott, interviewed one of the victims on his radio program, and AU picked it up on their site, and prominent science blogger and atheist PZ Myers noted it at Pharyngula as well. Both posts generated lots of comments.

And therein I learned that Joann Bell, the longtime director of the Oklahoma ACLU was one of those Little Axe women who fought the school board and the whole town. I’d heard about the Little Axe story, even saw it detailed in a documentary, but never realized that it was that Joann Bell that was involved.

Keeping it wild. In the Gazette I also see news that The Nature Conservancy of Oklahoma is initiating a new project in OKC and Tulsa to get more young professionals and families involved in their work to save wilderness areas.

Waiting for justice. A documentary has been made about the survivors of the Tulsa Race Riot (thought to be the worst racist massacre in U.S. history in which a successful black community was destroyed) and their desire for reparations Before They Die. I’m not sure when this film was released, but it’s been shown in Tulsa, and recently in New York City. If it hasn’t been shown publicly in OKC, it should be.

As Jane Hamsher states, the real message of today’s vote, from the 32 Democratic Senators who gave Lieberman a pass, and, yes, President-elect Obama, who whipped the vote:

This is about telling you that you mean nothing. That democracy is a nice word, but it should never threaten the entitlement of the most exclusive club in the world.

No matter what Joe Lieberman does, the people who are protecting him hate you much more than they hate him.

We just continue to fight for accountability and progressive values to make their way to the top.

• We will give you an ice cream cone. However, no sprinkles. And when you eat your ice cream cone, wishing you had sprinkles for it, maybe you’ll think about what you’ve done.
• You are no longer allowed to hang your coat in the Democratic Caucus cloakroom. You must hang your coat on a hook which we have had installed next to the cloakroom for your convenience.
• Your parking space has been moved two rows back. We think the extra 19 steps each morning will give you a lot of time to reflect on your actions.
• Your committee meetings and hearings will now be aired only on CSPAN3 — the MTV2 of CSPANs.
• The next time you go on Hannity’s show on Fox News and proclaim that President Obama is a terrorist-sympathizing, baby-eating, grandma-raper, we reserve the right to be quoted by the Washington Post saying that although you are a very good guy and a close personal friend, that your comments were probably not fully accurate. So THERE.

Actually, Turncoat Joe’s punishment was not nearly as harsh as that. Seriously.

I didn’t vote for Al Gore in 2000 and Joe Lieberman, Al’s stupendously stupid VP pick, is why. He was a whiny sanctimonious prick then, and he’s gotten worse every year since. His political assholery is becoming the stuff of legend. Only now, after being rejected by the Connecticut Democratic Party in 2006, he has an “I” next to his name. But he caucuses with the Democrats in the Senate, and, because in the last Congress they needed him in the caucus to maintain majority, he was given a plum chair of an important committee, Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs.

That means subpoena power.

But he did zilch with that power between 2006 and 2008, despite the Katrina debacle, porous ports, multiple instances of corruption and irregularities in the executive branch, all which should have been investigated by his committee. His counterpart in the House, Henry Waxman, was busy as a beaver, and exposed plenty. But without an ally on the Senate side, nothing much but “sternly worded letters” could come of it all.

So now, after a long campaign season in which Independent Joe Lieberman who caucuses with the Democrats was joined at the hip with Republican presidential nominee John McCain, saying McCain loved his country and Obama did not, now there is a grassroots fueled effort to strip Turncoat Joe of his chair at Homeland Security.

And, what do you know! Suddenly, leading that committee is of utmost urgency to Joe Lieberman. Wonder why that is?

Yet, amazingly, many high-level Democrats are willing to let bygones be bygones and let Lieberman keep the chair, where, it is suspected, he will suddenly find a reason to call his committee to work investigating the new Obama administration. Just as Democratic Senators who should have known better, like Barbara Boxer, went to Conn. to campaign for Joe despite the state party’s distaste for him, now they are letting their “friendship” get in the way of political reality and necessity.

The netroots is calling for accountability for How-Low-Can-He-Go Joe, and have set up several tools to persuade the Senate Democratic Steering Committee to give the chair to someone more deserving and trustworthy.

The Dems no longer need Joe for majority status, and based on his recent voting record, he is not even a “progressive vote” on “everything but the war” any more. He is a vile, bitter, corrupt man. I’d kick him out of the caucus completely, but that’s not what’s being asked. He can leave and caucus with the Republicans if he wants — what’s in it for him? He won’t have any leadership role on any committee and no avenue to re-election.

Call the members of the Steering Committee and tell them: Joe Lieberman must GO!

The great blog Down With Tyranny regularly has insightful posts about Oklahoma politics, with some of the best rants against Inhofe for years now, and was a good source of info about the Andrew Rice campaign. Today, a look at what the hell happened in Oklahoma last Tuesday. Leading in to the piece is a photo from the Dust Bowl which still epitomizes Oklahoma’s seemingly hopeless situation.

Can You Guess Which State Was The Most Reactionary In This Year’s Elections? Hint: Think Rodgers and Hammerstein

But the state least connected to the American mainstream and most politically isolated on Tuesday was poor, sad, reactionary Oklahoma, which gave almost 66% of it’s vote, the most of any state, to McCain. While analysts are working on a post-mortem, or autopsy, on McCain’s no longer twitching campaign, Oklahomans must be wondering what’s wrong with the rest of America.

Daily Kos’s most famous and beloved Okie diaries, droogie6655321, riffed off Thomas Frank’s 2005 examination of Kansas politics, with What’s the Matter with Oklahoma?

What I’m not interested in is sweeping generalities about Oklahomans. If you want to call us all ignorant, misinformed, racist or backward, I suggest you do it an upcoming open thread and not here. As unfathomable as it may seem to us, there is a reason why Oklahomans choose Republicans over Democrats, and I want to know why.

Droogie’s question generated 988 comments and was followed by Sooner Kos discussion threads here and here

The traditional media weighed in on the anomaly which is Oklahoma. The New York Times:

Where Tuesday’s Tide Was All Republican

“Oklahoma Democrats, with very few exceptions, are the old-line white Southern Democrats,” said David Ray, another political scientist at the university. “They don’t like liberals or liberalism.”

Indeed, the state has a political landscape closely resembling that of the old solidly Democratic South, especially in its southeastern corner, known as Little Dixie, where many Southerners settled after the Civil War. When conservatives of the Old South began abandoning the party decades ago, Oklahoma’s Democrats lagged behind the historical trend. Further, the state has relatively small black and Hispanic populations, and so the Democrats did not absorb as many new voters from those groups as in the states of the old Confederacy.

These days Oklahoma Democrats dread running for local office in presidential election years, for fear of being associated with liberal nominees at the top of the ticket.

“Being liberal in Oklahoma, with the exception of a few legislative districts, will not get you elected,” said State Representative Joe Dorman, a conservative Democrat.

[...]

But Mr. Gaddie said that perhaps the most important factor in Mr. McCain’s strong showing here was religion. An Edison/Mitofsky exit poll found that more than half of Oklahoma voters identified themselves as evangelical Christians and that a heavy majority of them had voted for Mr. McCain.

Mr. Gaddie, himself a pollster as well as a college professor, said: “A question we always ask in our polls is ‘How often do you attend church services?’ If a Democrat is not going to vote for a Democrat, they are a frequent church attender.”

Another advantage for Mr. McCain was that the state’s economy, based mostly on the oil and gas industry, has been buffered somewhat from the national economic slowdown. Unemployment remains low, the housing market stable.

For all of that, the Democratic Party is far from dead in Oklahoma, especially in the state’s southeastern section, where, despite the social conservatism, many people still talk about the New Deal and revere Franklin D. Roosevelt.

and Washington Post also remarked on the Oklahoma phenom.

As Much of Nation Went Blue, Okla. Applied Extra Coat of Red

Exit polls found that more than half of Oklahoma voters identified themselves as white, evangelical or born-again Christians. Of those, a heavy majority went for McCain.

State Republican Chairman Gary Jones said it was “not so much an issue of race,” but rather of conservative Oklahomans voting against someone known as “the most liberal member of the Senate.”

Jones said the conservative positions of McCain’s running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, helped motivate Oklahoma voters.

One thing all these analysts seem to agree on is that Oklahoma not being so hard hit by the economic downturn played a part in the election results. We just aren’t hurting as bad as Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida, North Carolina, et. al.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that. But in Oklahoma, the pain wasn’t great enough to trump the other ideology (“family values”) and/or misconceptions about Obama as elsewhere in the nation.

If Obama does a good job as president, which I expect him to do, perhaps Oklahomans will at least drop the latter rationale for not voting for him when he runs for re-election in 2012.