Rep. Bart Stupak (D-MI) is calling it quits in November. He's had enough of the obscene phone calls from "tea-partiers" over his health care bill shenanigans and won't seek re-election.

Stupak told The Hill newspaper a week before the bill's passage that fighting the measure had been "a living hell" and that obscene calls to his home had forced his wife to unplug the phones.

From the Hill:

“All the phones are unplugged at our house — tired of the obscene calls and threats. She won’t watch TV,” Stupak said during the interview. “People saying they’re going to spit on you and all this. That’s just not fun.” Stupak's wife had reported receiving death threats.

I doubt anyone is sorry to see him go, but it also shouldn't go unnoticed how infantile and crass the anti-choice movement can get. Until they grow up and learn how to behave -- which includes responding with reasoned arguments from their brain instead of taunts and threats from their potty mouths and trigger fingers, no one should be considering them for anything but kindergarten.

In reading tristero's post about his complex feelings about the Obama Presidency, I tried to think of a way to capture the inability of some to rationally consider Obama. Tristero writes:

My friends think Obama is doing a good to excellent job. Sure they don't like this decision, or that cave-in, but on the whole, they think highly of him. [. . . T]he conversation takes its usual course, with my friends excusing Obama and leaping to his defense, and me piling up the things he has done inexcusably wrong [. . .] Which made it all the more startling to me when I found myself on the opposite side the other day. A smart, highly knowledgeable, highly accomplished friend lit into Obama and pulled no punches. [. . .] I couldn't help but disagree but I don't understand exactly why. [. . .] I felt that the very real, very obvious distinctions between Obama and Bush were being minimized.

(Emphasis supplied.) In light of the "better than Bush" argument tristero highlights, I want to try it this way. Consider Bill Clinton. To a progressive, Bill Clinton should not have been a satisfying President. And yet, he was much better than Reagan. But I would not spend a minute defending Clinton by arguing that he was much better than Reagan. More . .

Predictable:

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) – a key architect of upcoming Senate energy legislation – said Wednesday that lawmakers should widen President Obama’s newly announced expansion of offshore oil-and-gas drilling. Graham called the White House plan a “good first step” but added, “there is more that must be done to make this proposal meaningful and the game-changer we all want it to become.”

“Among the areas we still need to address – encouraging states to allow exploration by sharing a portion of the revenue raised from oil and gas drilling, opening even more areas of the Eastern Gulf to exploration, the inclusion of viable drilling sites in the Atlantic and Pacific, and expanding the list of areas we inventory for possible reservoirs of oil and gas,” Graham said.

We are choosing between center right and the extreme right on off shore drilling. For all I know, the center right or extreme right positions are the correct ones here. But it is clear that the progressive position is no longer on the table.

Speaking for me only

Booman just can not accept that he is endorsing triangulation. So he invents a new definition - triangulation is NOT what Barack Obama does, even though it is exactly like triangulation:

I am going to posit that triangulation is a pejorative. It is a political act that is contrary to the interests of principled people on either the right or the left. Its use puts the immediate needs of the president over the needs of his party. It weakens his party and harms the issues for which his party stands. It's possible to argue otherwise. Some might see triangulation as a savvy strategy that is appropriate in certain circumstances (e.g., a Democratic president faced with a Gingrich Congress). But, I believe we are correct to condemn triangulation, provided we are careful to be sure we know what we mean by the term. And we are not careful.

All of this is a prelude to Booman tying himself in knots to explain why Bill Clinton triangulated but Barack Obama is not triangulating. Silly stuff. I'll explain on the flip.

We've had enough of ... triangulation and poll-driven politics. "That's not what we need right now." - Barack Obama, October 2007

NYTimes Editorial:

For years, the debate over offshore drilling for gas and oil has been a war of sound bites between the “drill now, drill everywhere” crowd that dominated the Bush administration and the Republican campaign in 2008, and members of the environmental community who would leave the country’s outer continental shelf untouched.

[President Obama's] new strategy — the result of more than a year of work by Interior Secretary Ken Salazar — also confronts an essential political reality: the Senate will insist on offshore drilling as part of a broader bill, expected after Easter, addressing climate change and other energy-related problems. Mr. Obama is trying to anticipate and shape that discussion by identifying areas that he thinks can responsibly be opened for exploration while quarantining others.

(Emphasis supplied.) Only a blind devotee can deny this is triangulation. Whether it is a good idea or not, it is obviously triangulation.

Speaking for me only

From the President's remarks on his historic new off shore drilling policy:

There will be those who strongly disagree with this decision, including those who say we should not open any new areas to drilling. [. . .] On the other side, there are going to be some who argue that we don’t go nearly far enough [. . .] So the answer is not drilling everywhere all the time. But the answer is not, also, for us to ignore the fact that we are going to need vital energy sources to maintain our economic growth and our security. Ultimately, we need to move beyond the tired debates of the left and the right, between business leaders and environmentalists, between those who would claim drilling is a cure all and those who would claim it has no place. Because this issue is just too important to allow our progress to languish while we fight the same old battles over and over again.

(Emphasis supplied.) Compare this to President Bill Clinton's statement on welfare reform:

If the president has already effectively given Republicans what they wanted on energy, what will he get in return? A Hill staffer I know emails with an alternative look at the same dynamic, suggesting President Obama is playing a game we've seen before.:

Obama preempts the other side's most resonant arguments, which forces them to come up with more and more extreme claims in order to differentiate themselves. In the end, he occupies the reasonable middle ground and his opponents are Palinized. [. . . T]he policy is a tailored, measured version of what the Republicans have urged [. . .] Republicans are sort of forced to twist and parse, and even to oppose things they have long supported, just because the Administration hasn't gone far enough.

[MORE . . .]

Ok, it is a rhetorical question, as the public option fight is clearly over. Don't believe me? Here is how Chris Bowers puts it:

With the health reform fight over, it is time on Open Left to turn out attention to other matters.

Just a few weeks ago, there was a fair amount of talk about Harry Reid promising a vote on the public option in a few months. Obviously, no one is taking that "promise" seriously. That said, I think this idea is a nonstarter:

A wise president works with what he's got and doesn't add more burden than the beast can bear. That's different from triangulation. Triangulation is passing your opponent's agenda on your terms and then taking credit for it. Obama is passing his agenda on the terms the system will bear. - New Progressives

Meanwhile, back at the White House:

When you actually look at the bill itself, it incorporates all sorts of Republican ideas - President Obama on the health bills

The New Progressives, our modern day New Democrats -- incorporating GOP ideas and loving it.

Speaking for me only

To the New Progressives, nothing:

For me, 'progressive' means 'committed to progress' which may be incremental or sweeping, but which doesn't get bogged down in ideological roadblocks.

This of course leads to the question - what is "progress?" And do issues have anything to do with that? At the end of the day, this campaign to drain issues and ideology from progressivism is self defeating. Better to just call yourself a "Democrat" and stop with the "progressive" part. In fact, there is a model they can use - the Democratic Leadership Council. They were not into "ideological roadblocks" either.

Of course, like there were New Democrats, there could be New Progressives.

Speaking for me only

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When you actually look at the bill itself, it incorporates all sorts of Republican ideas - President Obama on the health bills

Digby quotes the Guttmacher Institute:

Abortion: Insurance Coverage Now an Endangered Species [. . .] the complex, politicized arrangements the legislation necessitates militate heavily against the likelihood that [. . .] plans [covering abortions] will be purchased—or even offered.

Paradoxically, the Guttmacher Institute asserts that "taken together, a number of other provisions in this sweeping measure constitute a clear and significant step forward for the reproductive health of America’s women and men." This sounds good. How does it work? The essence is this: