[h/t Media Matters]

I'm not sure what part of the Goldwater rule faux shrink and Fox News commentator Keith Ablow doesn't understand, but if he can't even get this right, why should anyone trust his analysis?

The Goldwater rule is part of the ethical standards imposed on mental health professionals which constrain them from offering a diagnosis of people who they have not interviewed personally. Ablow can argue that he's dancing around this by speaking in general terms, but it's pretty obvious to me that his terms are anything but general.

First, he pronounces President Obama's push for gun control in the wake of the Newtown tragedy as a "hijack" of the issue in order to advance his "personal desire for gun control."

Ablow then goes on to say that the real problem is "untreated mental illness." While this may be part of the problem, it is not the only problem. Not at all. In fact, there is an assumption that Adam Lanza was mentally ill, but no evidence of that has been put forth, partly because of HIPAA limitations, but also possibly because he was not mentally ill at all. It's irresponsible to place all of the blame on the shoulders of the mentally ill, untreated or otherwise.

Aside from that, let's remember who dismantled mental health services in this country. It wasn't Obama, it was Reagan, and he did a great job of seeing to it they were not part of our shared collective responsibility. President Obama, on the other hand, made sure the Affordable Care Act included mental health treatment as part of the basic requirements all insurance policies must offer. But God forbid Ablow would acknowledge that when it's just simpler to lay it at the feet of the mentally ill.

You'd think a true conservative might be a little concerned about the idea of a national database of people with mental illness. What illnesses will be included? ADHD? Depression? Insomnia? If someone gets treated for PTSD, will they be included? Half the nation would qualify for that.

Keith Ablow, like his pal Glenn Beck, cannot resist drawing a large, grand conspiratorial picture around every single thing this president says or does. After Lou Dobbs sets up the question with the statement that President Obama is defined by having only one solution to every problem (government), Ablow happily complies, saying, "His solution runs psychologically in the direction of disempowering the individual every single time." When questioned by Dobbs about why that would be, Ablow drops the diagnosis, Goldwater rule or no Goldwater rule.

Claiming "the autonomy of others did him no favors as a kid when he was abandoned again and again," Ablow goes on to say that this abandonment led Obama to believe "the collective needs to be empowered and all the better if [Obama is] the center of the collective and the most powerful person."

In other words, all this talk of gun control has nothing to do with the rights of children and innocent individuals to live their lives without having them cut short by some lunatic with an assault rifle. No, really, it's just about how Barack Obama's mother left him with her parents in Hawaii while she earned a living and a PhD.

Perhaps Fox Business should stick to business and leave personal motive analysis to professionals.

The President took a veiled swipe at Willard the other day, saying,

Somebody gave me an education. I wasn't born with a silver spoon in my mouth. Michelle wasn't.

Obama's larger point was that government should help create opportunities for those not born with a trust fund. Willard didn't like that much.

“I’m not going to apologize for my dad and his success in his life,” Romney said on “Fox & Friends.” “He was born poor and he worked his way to become very successful despite the fact that he didn’t have a college degree.”

No one is asking Willard to apologize for his father's success. Indeed, it's precisely people like Romney's father who Obama is saying government should provide opportunities for. And government did. During the Great Depression, George Romney got a job as an aide to a Democratic Senator, then later as a lobbyist.

George Romney also openly opposed "Mr. Conservative" Barry Goldwater in 1964, and did not seek to roll back the New Deal.

The essential question is this: should government endeavor to make society more fair or should it not? Rockefeller Republicans like George Romney thought it should. The modern GOP, which Willard is the standard bearer, does not.

Today, we celebrate the life of a truly great man, who -- armed only with his bravery and powerful words -- brought Jim Crow to its knees. It's also important to remember that the political heirs of those who created and enforced Jim Crow for a century -- Southern conservatives -- are now running the Republican Party. And that's why it's easy to understand why the fiercest opposition to making MLK Day a national holiday was in the GOP.

The last Republican candidate for president opposed it.

"Mr. Conservative" (Barry Goldwater) voted against the holiday.

Ron Paul voted against the bill that created the holiday -- twice.

77 of the 90 nay votes in final bill in the House were cast by Republicans.

18 of the 22 nay votes in the final bill in the Senate were cast by Republicans.

And the Greatest American in the History of America, Ronald "States' Rights" Reagan, only reluctantly signed the bill into law because it arrived on his desk with veto-proof majorities. Before he signed it, he said,

Congress seemed bent on making it a national holiday.

What an inspiring endorsement.

American Conservatives: Wrong About Everything Since 1776.

Martin Wolf's Exchange : The political genius of supply-side economics

slacktivist: Credit scoring and unemployment

CONELRAD Adjacent: Barry Goldwater's Mothers for Moral America

Sensen No Sen: Land of greatly diminished opportunity

The Reality-Based Community: The party of Lincoln vs the party of Jeff Davis

The Faithful Progressive: And to think the Republicans wanted to give up on the auto industry

I write about the need for journalists and bloggers and even average working class families to read books about the history of our country. Doing research for our new book, Over the Cliff, I was reminded of how long the conservative movement took to finally hatch their plans to treat the working class of America as one big cash register so Big Business could reap whirlwind profits, leaving most families to scurry along, begging for scraps.

That was what Barry Goldwater and his ideologues began after McCarthy and his reign of terror. Then Grover Norquist and his ilk built upon that foundation of oligarchy their ruinous ideology. I'm hearing naive stuff like progressives shouldn't vote in the 2010 or even in the 2012 elections floating around so we can teach those bad Democrats a really, really important lesson. Who cares if Michele Bachmann and Darryl Issa get subpoena power and Mitt Romney destroys whatever is left of the country? Do you?

Here's the crazy WND's fearless leader and conman Joseph Farrah calling his troops to arms.

Heck, by 2016, those same Democrats will realize that we mean business. Some of the comments I read seem like they are coming from people who were playing with their toy Tonka trucks in a sandbox during the 2000 election. Do we have to remind people of what happened when a third party was involved in the 2000 election, yet again? And what lesson would the Democrats take from being out of power until 2016? I know you know it.

And if we look at a little recent history on our economy then we'll all agree with Paul Krugman when he says:

Now, the guys who got it all wrong are winning the political argument, in large part because the Obama administration went for half-measures, and is now being punished for a weak economy — which people like me predicted would happen.

But never forget that as far as the facts go, the Keynesians won this, hands down.

What do you know? Krugman and his graphs tell the story. Facts are very important, but not in the Conservative universe. It took them over fifty years for them to control the media and to develop a totally insane version of America where the rich get richer and the poor go to hell.

David and I cover the long journey the Conservative movement has taken in Over the Cliff. Please support the liberal blogosphere and grab yourself a great summer read too!

[H/t Heather]

In his defense of Rand Paul yesterday, the normally admirable Dave Weigel offered the following quote, by way of suggesting the unfortunate fate that had befallen Paul in his devastating entanglement with Rachel Maddow:

"As a result of National Review’s above-the-fray philosophizing," wrote Edwards, "and Barry Goldwater’s vote, on constitutional grounds, against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the albatross of racism was hung around the neck of American conservatism and remained there for decades and even to the present."

This, like so much conservative and libertarian mythologizing, is a large load of bunk.

Conservatives have been associated with racism and white supremacy since at least the days of Dred Scot and John J. Calhoun. It was Southern conservatives who defended slavery, who led the South into secession and civil war and ruin, and who led the resistance to Reconstruction that overturned the verdict of the war and produced a century of Jim Crow and segregation that followed. It was conservatives who authored Plessy v. Ferguson, and it was conservatives who successfully led the fight to prevent Congress from ever passing an anti-lynching law. It was racist Southern conservatives who opposed the civil-rights movement at every turn -- well before Barry Goldwater ever tipped his vote in 1964.

But this kind of mythologizing serves a useful function: By idealizing the actual role of right-wing ideologies in history, it severs them from the historical realities they produced. Trotted out here, it lets us pretend that somehow the racist outcome of Rand Paul's ideology -- he at least told Rachel he wouldn't force private business to not discriminate racially -- are simply an accidental byproduct of his intellectually rigorous and consistent approach. As Blue Texan says, that's pretty pathetic.

Bruce Bartlett, a non-libertarian conservative, sagely observes:

As we know from history, the free market did not lead to a breakdown of segregation. Indeed, it got much worse, not just because it was enforced by law but because it was mandated by self-reinforcing societal pressure. Any store owner in the South who chose to serve blacks would certainly have lost far more business among whites than he gained. There is no reason to believe that this system wouldn't have perpetuated itself absent outside pressure for change.

In short, the libertarian philosophy of Rand Paul and the Supreme Court of the 1880s and 1890s gave us almost 100 years of segregation, white supremacy, lynchings, chain gangs, the KKK, and discrimination of African Americans for no other reason except their skin color. The gains made by the former slaves in the years after the Civil War were completely reversed once the Supreme Court effectively prevented the federal government from protecting them. Thus we have a perfect test of the libertarian philosophy and an indisputable conclusion: it didn't work. Freedom did not lead to a decline in racism; it only got worse.

This is a rhetorical game with very real stakes. It is a game Rand Paul knows well, and obviously plays well -- because it's a game his father, Ron Paul has mastered over his several decades in Congress: camouflaging real extremism with a pleasant facade of mellow libertarian reasonableness.

Indeed, this whole fight is over a facet of Rand Paul's ideology that is nearly identical to his father's. As Josh Marshall observes:

I fear though that that's not the whole story with Paul -- father or son. The truth is that there's a long and hard to explain history of both Pauls being associated with a lot of people who are avowed or crypto-racists. There's the well-known story of Ron Paul's early 1990s era newsletter which was rife with racist and homophobic commentary. Paul later distanced himself from the newsletter, claiming that items written under his name were penned by a ghost-writer and that he wasn't familiar with what had appeared there. And then there was the case back in December in which Rand's Senate campaign spokesman Chris Hightower had to resign because of racist posts on his Myspace page. Looked at in broad terms you've got a couple of guys who apparently aren't racist in any way but happen to stumble their way into close associations with racists with an astonishing frequency. It's almost like a painful race version of that classic Onion headline: "Why Do All These Homosexuals Keep Sucking My ----." There is of course the fact that Ron Paul became the darling of numerous skinhead and white supremacist groups -- but that's in a very different category because you're not responsible for who supports you but what you yourself support.

Recall, if you will, the contents of those Ron Paul newsletters:

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Mike Vanderboegh, the Alabama tea party-militia man who advocated the breaking of windows which the Washington Post has reported has already taken place is on a roll.

Some of the vandalism appears to have been instigated by an Alabama blogger, Mike Vanderboegh, who encouraged his readers to throw bricks at the windows of Democratic headquarters across the country. Vanderboegh, a former leader of the Alabama Constitutional Militia who is headlining an open-carry gun rally in Northern Virginia next month, issued a call to the modern "Sons of Liberty" on his libertarian political blog to break windows nationwide to display opposition to health-care reform.

A vandal threw a brick into the glass doors at the Monroe County Democratic Committee's headquarters in Rochester overnight Saturday, attaching a note that quoted Barry Goldwater: "Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice."

Vanderboegh continues his violent tendencies by saying that gun owners have been bullied around long enough and the inevitable conclusion now because of the passing of HCR is that there will be more violence and more Waco-like events in the future during an interview with Alan Colmes.

See, he's just trying to spare a bloody end for Nancy Pelosi. This is scary stuff, folks.

Think Progress:

VANDERBOEGH: I am telling you we are motivated to break windows, we feel a deadly threat from the Federal government and the orders that the Democrat party has given us. [...]

COLMES: You’re telling people to break the windows of Democratic headquarters. You’re telling people to commit acts of vandalism. You’re supporting breaking the law.

VANDERBOEGH: May I tell you my personal motive for doing this? I’m trying to save the lives of Nancy Pelosi, and every one of these people who do not understand the unintended consequences of their actions. [...] Because they are not paying attention to the million of people across this deepening divide that politics no longer avails them. [...] We refuse to participate in the system, and we refuse to pay the fines, and we refuse arrest. Now where do you suppose that’s going but a thousand little Waco’s.

The Patriot movement that started during the Clinton years has had a revival with the tender loving care that FOX News gave them when they created the Tea Party movement. Now they don't have to hide in the shadows or behind closed doors. Mark my words.

As the temperature rises in the east,

The spread of violence will increase.

It looks like the vote is coming down finally. Ezra Klein is saying the vote should come down at 9:00 pm Eastern/6:00 pm Pacific. You can watch the streaming video of the vote on C-Span. I'm totally exhausted and let's face it---the whole country is exhausted. Obama gave a good speech yesterday and hit the republicans as he should. You can read the entire transcript here.

In what the New York Times called "an extraordinary session," President Obama began his speech by quoting Abraham Lincoln. "I am not bound to win, but I'm bound to be true," he said. "I'm not bound to succeed, but I'm bound to live up to what light I have."

"You have a chance to make good on the promises you made," Obama told the House members. "This is one of those moments. This is one of those times where you can honestly say to yourself: 'Doggone it, this is exactly why I came here. This is why I got into politics. This is why I got into public service. This is why I made these sacrifices.'" Washington Post media columnist Howard Kurtz described Obama's address as "the most emotional speech I've ever seen him give."

I agree with Digby though. These "mission accomplished" speeches are a bit much.

Can I just say once again how much I hate these little "Mission Accomplished" press conferences? I realize that it's human to want to celebrate the (apparent) end of a hard fought battle and that they all loved to be stroked by each other in public, but it's unseemly.

Instead of telling each other how wonderful they all are, perhaps they could spend time time explaining why the bill is important and thanking the American people for their forbearance. They can give each other big smooches and hearty pats on the back when the cameras stop rolling.

If the President had started out the process as forcefully as he has been lobbying now, the bill would have been finished before the dog days of last summer. Glenn Greenwald's take here is understandable. He wants the bill to pass too, but with tepid support and is miffed at the politics of it all.

As liberals, we have fought hard for what we believe in, but building a powerful liberal/progressive coalition in Congress is going to take time. And we need a strong ground game to go along with them. Many of us are somewhat disappointed in the final bill, but it does have some important changes that have been discussed endlessly already and I won't rehash them all now.

Remember, conservatives have been actively building their movement since Barry Goldwater and then it continued with the rise of Jack Abramoff, Grover Norquist and Ralph Reed. Having the backing of billions of dollars from overzealous corporations and wealthy families that the left doesn't have access to has been a major obstacle for progressive change and will continue to be one. And we know all about the right wing noise machine that is allowed to permeate our airwaves while traditional journalism goes out of business, which will slowly turn all news into opinions.

The liberal blogosphere is still in its infancy. Kudos to the many interest groups that have been fighting the good fight for decades, but I think bloggers can build "Movement Progressivism " better in the long run because it encompasses all of our special interests and combines them.

Atrios writes:

Both on substance and politics, better to pass it than not. It does not do the important work of sowing the seeds of the insurance industry's destruction, leaving the skimmers in place, and only takes baby steps towards moving them to the regulated public utility model. It also doesn't get rid of their anti-trust exemption, leaving the effective monopolies in place.

This leaves us open to continued abuses by the industry and fails to do the most important cost-cutting measure, cutting out the paper pushers who serve no useful purpose in the economy. But there is good in the bill, too, and one has to be a bit Hopey that over time demands by the public will make the bad and unpopular stuff less bad and less unpopular.

As it pertains to the politics of it all, the President needs this bill to pass. If it does then I believe the MSM will hail it as a great achievement on his part.

I'll have a lot more on this after I get some much needed rest.

In light of John McCain’s appearance before the NAACP’s national convention, Bruce Bartlett makes the case in a WSJ op-ed that McCain should argue that the Republican Party, all appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, is the party of civil rights. (If this sounds familiar, Bartlett wrote a book on this subject, called “Wrong on Race.”)

Everyone knows this, but it’s worth repeating: the Republican Party is the party of Abraham Lincoln and was established in 1854 to block the expansion of slavery. The Democratic Party was the party of slavery. […]

After the war, it was the Republican Party that rammed through the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments to the Constitution over Democratic opposition…. Historically speaking, the Republican Party has a far better record on race than the Democrats. Sen. McCain should not be shy about saying so.

This comes less than two weeks after the National Black Republican Association put up billboards in Florida and South Carolina saying the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was a Republican (a claim which is demonstrably ridiculous).

Now, we’ve been down this road before, but if the right sincerely intends to push this argument again this election year, we might as well go to the trouble of pointing out how foolish — and frankly, intellectually lazy — this entire tack really is.

The inescapable fact is, the Republican Party of the 19th century bears no resemblance to, and has no bearing on, the modern-day Republican Party. The problem isn’t that Bartlett’s history is wrong; it’s that his history is irrelevant and badly misses the point.

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Back in 1963, Barry Goldwater and John F. Kennedy were seriously mulling the idea of chartering a campaign plane and traveling around the country together, debating actual issues and letting the electorate decide who would be the better candidate based on actual policy differences. Tonight on MSNBC, in light of the news that McCain and Obama would perhaps be open to holding moderator-free town-hall debates, Tim Russert wonders whether an election based not on petty, manufactured "character gaps," but on actual substantive differences is possible. Can you even begin to imagine that level of civility in today's political culture?

Download | play Download | play

"The tone of the campaign is going to be very interesting to me. Both men have said publicly that they really want to elevate the discussion. This discussion back and forth about having joint town meetings throughout the summer brought me back to 1963 when John Kennedy and Barry Goldwater had all but agreed to fly around the country in the same plane, have town meetings - robust differences - and then shake hands, go back on the plane and go to the next city. I always wondered aloud, 'would that ever be possible in 2008?' And McCain and Obama seem to be suggesting it may be do-able. And if they both hold true to try close down these 527s, these so-called independent groups, could we have a real debate about Iraq, and about health care, and about taxes where people take pride in their position, and openly acknowledge it's different than the other candidates, and then say to the voters, 'you decide which one of us should be Preisdent.' That would be pretty interesting to cover."

Indeed, it would, Tim. Indeed, it would.