The Republic of T.

[Source.]

An Australian blogger has laid out an ambitious first-term agenda for the Obama administration.

Four major pieces of pro-gay legislation should be passed within Obama’s first term.
First will be the Matthew Shepard Hate Crime Act and the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) which will protect gays from hate crimes and discrimination in the workplace for the first time at a federal level. With a Democratic majority in both houses, transgendered protections removed from ENDA before the election will most likely be reinserted.

Later should come bills to repeal the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy responsible for the sacking of over twelve thousand gay military personnel over the last 15 years, and the Defense of Marriage Act that bans any kind of recognition of same-sex couples at a federal level.

Well, yeah. I’d go along with all of the above. However, beyond using the bully pulpit of the presidency to oppose discrimination and support equality, there’s little the president can do on any of the above until or unless Congress sends passes a hate crimes bill, ENDA, a repeal of DOMA. 

That doesn’t mean there can’t be some changes made right away, tho’.

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It’s been a week, and — well, I’m more convinced than ever that, no, we didn’t.

We’re going to have a new president, and one who’s light years more gay friendly than Dubya. OK. It doesn’t take much to be more gay-friendly than Dubya, but that’s beside the point.

The point is, we’re going to have a friend in the White House. Wanna Work for him? The The Gay & Lesbian Leadership Institute is looking for people who do.

The Gay & Lesbian Leadership Institute is leading a community-wide effort to identify strong LGBT candidates to serve in the Obama administration.  

The Presidential Appointments Project serves as the talent bank for openly LGBT professionals seeking appointed positions in the next presidential administration.  If you’ve ever considered working for the federal government, now is the time to start thinking about whether you have what it takes to work for the president to help change our country.  

While Barack Obama will lay out a broad agenda to move the country forward, his staff will actually undertake the hard work of implementation.  Appointed officials have the power to set or influence the policies of the many federal departments and administrative agencies that make up the executive branch of government. 

The Project will ensure that qualified, committed and talented members of the LGBT community have a fair shot at being appointed to important federal positions.

For more answers to common questions about the Presidential Appointments Project, read our FAQ.

I thought about it, but I’m pretty sure working in the White House or for the administration is rather all-consuming. Especially given the mess that the current administration is leaving behind. (Like drunken frat boys who figured their gonna lose the security deposit anyway and said “Fuck it. Let throw one last kegger!”)

That mess will take at least one term to clean up, and I expect Obama will be a two term president. I’d like to see a bit more of my kids before their in high school and going off to college. So, I’ll take a pass.

But if you apply, and get a job, all I ask is that you get m a tour of the White House, and a couple of minutes to meet the President and/or First Lady.

So, Obama and Bush are scheduled to meet.

US President George W Bush has said he and Barack Obama will discuss issues such as the global financial crisis and the war in Iraq “early next week”.

In a speech at the White House, Mr Bush congratulated the president-elect and said he would make every effort to ensure a smooth handover on 20 January.

Mr Obama was elected the first black US president on Tuesday with a resounding win over Republican rival John McCain.

Meanwhile, Rahm Emanuel has accepted the post of Mr Obama’s chief-of-staff.

I would love to be a fly on the wall for that meeting. Bush is notoriously insecure around people who may be smarter than him — like the reporter who asked the French president a question in French (instead of “talkin’ American”, I guess), or the Irish reporter who dared probe beyond his trite homilies about “freedom” and “values”, but actually holding him accountable for a few things.

This is a man who literally can not think of a single mistake he’s made, and doesn’t own anybody an explanation.

I can only imagine how he’ll handle meeting Obama, who is as popular as Bush is unpopular, and then some. In 2004, Bush won 286 electoral votes, 50.7% of the popular vote, and carried 31 states. In 2000, he won 271 electoral votes, 47.9% of the popular vote, and carried 30 states. By Contrast, Obama won 364 electoral votes, 52.5% of the popular vote (in an election that saw record turnout, and possibly the highest rate in 100 years), and carried 28 states, but — notably — won several states that Bush carried in 2004, and was competitive in states that should have been Republican strongholds.

Not only that, but Obama won an election that was largely a referendum on Bush, the Republican party, and their leadership. I wonder if Bush heard, in the White House, the cheers and honking horns as the city celebrated the impending end of his administration. For that matter I wonder if he’s gotten wind of the jubilant reactions all over the world. If he did, it would be easy to think that he wouldn’t care about it, but the anxiety just beneath the surface of his aloof exterior, if psychiatrist Justin Frank is right, wouldn’t be able to ignore it.

…I came to the conclusion that his entire life, from early on, has been dedicated to managing, through evasion—to managing his anxiety. That he was an overwhelmingly anxious person who built up layers and layers of different ways to protect himself from anxiety.

…There are lots of different ways of managing anxiety, and, there are several of them that have come out since he stopped drinking. But, of course, the first way to manage anxiety is through alcohol. But, by being a born-again Christian, he can also manage anxiety by being connected to God, by feeling that he’ll be saved in any kind of a rapture, by feeling that he’s always on the side of the Good.

There are lots of different ways of managing anxiety, and, there are several of them that have come out since he stopped drinking. But, of course, the first way to manage anxiety is through alcohol. But, by being a born-again Christian, he can also manage anxiety by being connected to God, by feeling that he’ll be saved in any kind of a rapture, by feeling that he’s always on the side of the Good.

Another way to manage anxiety is to make other people anxious, so he can project his anxiety into the rest of us. So we can experience the kind of anxiety—and the rest of the world does, in lots of ways, experience the kinds of anxiety that he must have felt as a child. Another way of managing anxiety is to simplify things; to divide the world, his own inner world, into good and bad, into black and white. And, we certainly see that in his Second Inaugural address today, where he talks about, the world is divided in half in terms of good and evil. So, it’s another way to manage anxiety.

Another way to manage anxiety is to be cruel to other people, by making them anxious, and by gratifying your own sense of power to compensate for feeling helpless.

And, finally, there is another way to manage anxiety, which is to become detached from the consequences of your behavior. Something that I call malign indifference, which is a repudiation, really, of the damage that you’ve done, and not taking responsibility for it.

That his policies or political philosophy are being blamed for the current financial crisis, his war in Iraq about as unpopular as he is, and his foreign policy aims unachieved has got to get under his skin, given his fear of being wrong. (There’s that anxiety thing again.)

Managing his anxiety is one reason presidential briefings have been so simple. USA Today reports on August 25 that Bush’s foreign policy briefings were, until very recently, presented to him with “snappy headlines” and simplistic perspectives leaving “little room for doubt or nuance.” No wonder it was so simple to invade Iraq.

Bush himself said that he doesn’t do nuance. The truth is, he can’t. Evading anxiety over all these years - whether with alcohol, religion, or exercise - has compromised his ability to think. Instead, Bush relies on daily routines. His bicycling routine is rigidly adhered to; but thinking-and a mechanism to facilitate it-are nonexistent.

The Financial Times of London had a headline on August 25 saying that the “US Army looks to leave Iraq” despite Bush himself saying things to the contrary. His rigidity of thought is not motivated by stubbornness, or by a fear of being wrong. It is safer for Bush to hold onto an idea that has served him in the past than to try a new one that might not work. His need for consistency leads to swift and vigorous responses to any threats that may challenge it.

Then there’s Obama himself; a man not from the kind of privileged background that Bush enjoyed, who nonetheless attended Harvard Law School (his father also went to Harvard), and went on to become president of the Harvard Law review. And he’s more beloved than Bush was even at the height of his popularity, mainly because the country and the world is counting on him to lead the way out of the disasters of Bush’s rule. Though a young man, Obama’s success story probably reminds Bush of his failure to live up to Poppy Bush’s legend.

Justin A. Frank, M.D.: … I think what he does is he turns everybody who disagrees with him into his father. It doesn’t matter whether it’s actually the concrete representation of his father, like Baker, or the voters who vote against staying in Iraq. We have become his father. We are the people he is now defying. He will turn everybody, any authority, anybody who disagrees with him, into a father figure who he’d have to defy.

BuzzFlash: And why? What’s his basic psychological beef with his father?

Justin A. Frank, M.D.: It would be nice to be able to reduce it to one thing. But there is one thing that is very clear, which is that his father was, as Bush was growing up, a superhero. He was an all-American baseball star. George W. Bush was “a jockstrap carrier,” or a cheerleader. His father was a war hero, and George W. Bush was a coward who avoided everything that involved responsibility. His father was a family man devoted to his family, and George W. Bush was a hard-drinking kid who was afraid of being responsible.

His father was all the things that Bush was not. He was a big, powerful man in Bush’s eyes — that’s the first thing. When Bush arrived at Andover, for instance, the prep school that he went to, his father’s pictures were all over the wall as having been a hero there twenty-five years earlier. The pictures are still up. So it was very hard to live up to him. The best way to deal with that is to either carve your own path, or to constantly undermine your father. One of the things that he did was, though, he became very loyal to his father, and in 1988, helped manage his campaign for President against Dukakis.

Plus he bested McCain and the Republicans at Bush’s bailout meeting.

Of course, chances are that Bush will behave himself. And even if he doesn’t Obama, with his legendary cool demeanor, will no doubt handle it well.

Still, I’d love to be a fly on the wall for that one.

Sometimes the most pointed — or preposterous — comes from unexpected sources. This time, it’s The Onion providing the former and the Wall Street Journal serving up the latter.

The best satire comes wrapped around a grain of discomforting truth. Daniel De Groot unwrapped one in a headline from The Onion that should give Democrats something to think about. Read his post for more on that.

The jaw-dropper, though, comes from the Wall Street Journal, (hat-tip to Steve Benen at Political Animal) where they’ve apparently learned well (or not so well) something Rick pointed out earler: Conservatism never fails; it is only failed.

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It’s been a long, long time coming
But I know, a change is gonna come.
Oh, yes it will.

Sam Cooke, “A Change is Gonna Come”

At 11:01 p.m. last night, after the polls closed in California, I just had to call someone. I’d spent the night at the National Public Radio headquarters with a bunch of other bloggers, live-blogging the election results. I called home and spoke briefly to my husband, then found myself walking aimlessly down a hallway. I stopped in a reception area, looked at the night sky from the second story window, and though how strange it was that the world — my world had changed so dramatically — yet the sky looked just the same.

And I thought about the people who didn’t live to see what happened that night, and the people who never thought they would — but did.

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It’s been a long time coming…

And so the night begins. I’m off to NPR, where I’ll be joining a bunch of other political bloggers to cover the election results into the night.

With any luck it won’t be a long night. The popular vote graphic on their site is encouraging.

I’ll put it this way. If Virgina, Florida and Pennsylvania report for Obama before the Metro stops running, I’m going home. Same if Ohio, Florida, and Virginia report for Obama; or if Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida report for Obama; or some combination of the three.

In the meantime, we wait. I and write two different posts for tomorrow, and wait to see which one I publish.

OK. Not that we didn’t already know this, but they have none.

Leaving no potential avenue of attack unexplored, the Republican National Committee has decided to bash Barack Obama over his October visit to see his ailing grandmother in Hawaii.

Of course the visit itself is not being criticized, but rather the way the campaign paid for the nominee’s unscheduled detour. On Monday afternoon, the RNC blasted out a complaint from the California Republican Party charging that “Obama for America violated federal law by converting its campaign funds to Senator Obama’s personal use” for the trip. That proposed issue for the FEC to investigate is one of five violations alleged by California Republicans in their complaint (which you can read in its entirety here).

“Senator Obama recently traveled to Hawaii to visit his sick grandmother. This was the right thing for any grandson to do — at his own expense — but it was not travel that his campaign may fund,” said California Republican Chairman Ron Nehring in a statement Monday.

And then there’s the question of class…

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I just dare you to watch this and not feel something.

He didn’t say it in so many words, but I’m willing to bet that Charles Alexander has thought to himself at some point, “I never thought I’d live to see the day…”

To understand the reason for his emotions about this election, you have to understand the context.

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