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Alyssa

‘Parks and Recreation Open Thread: Perfect

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Oct 26, 2012 at 9:01 am

This post discusses plot points from the October 25 episode of Parks and Recreation.

I got to see this episode of Parks and Recreation last week, which gave me a chance to go back and watch “The Master Plan,” the episode where Leslie met Ben when he first arrived in Pawnee as a state auditor. I’d remembered the basics of their inauspicious introduction: Ben arrived just in time to interrupt Leslie’s chance to fight for her department’s budget, and with the ominous news that she might even have to cut jobs. What I’d forgotten was how quickly he found himself compelled to reach out to her, and how well he read Leslie, even when she was angry at him. “Do you want a beer?” he came into her office to ask her. “You look like you could use a beer.”

Almost three seasons later, I cried at my desk watching Ben go down on his knee in the house Leslie thought she’d have to give up to let him pursue his dreams. “What are you doing?” Leslie asked him, overwhelmed. “I’m thinking about my future,” Ben told her. His touching proposal elicited some of the absolute best acting Amy Poehler and Adam Scott have done during Parks and Recreation‘s impressive run, but it was more than Leslie telling Ben ” I need another second, please. I need to remember every little thing about how perfect my life is right now, at this exact moment,” as she glanced around the empty house, that brought me to tears. Leslie and Ben are one of the most unusual couples on television, and they represent an archetype that touches me deeply: a pair where the man consistently makes sacrifices to help the woman in his life achieve everything she’s capable of, and where their relationship doesn’t always call for the woman to make symmetrical sacrifices.

Almost from their first meeting, Ben’s been deeply concerned with Leslie’s happiness. In their second episode together, he paid to keep her prized Freddie Spaghetti concert going even in the face of looming cuts to the department. When the exposure of their relationship threatened Leslie’s campaign for City Council, Ben sacrificed his job so she could keep hers and continue her run unimpeded by scandal. He devoted himself to running her campaign. And now, even with the great, amoral Jennifer telling Ben “There aren’t a lot of people that can manage a campaign. But you, Ben Wyatt, are one of them,” Ben is choosing Leslie.
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Climate Progress

Hillary Clinton On Energy And Foreign Policy: We Need To ‘Address The Very Real Threat Of Climate Change’

By Climate Guest Blogger on Oct 19, 2012 at 11:30 am

by Katie Valentine

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is willing to break the climate silence.

In a speech on energy diplomacy yesterday afternoon at Georgetown University, Clinton talked about the importance of sustainability and climate issues on the international policy agenda.

“We…have an interest in promoting new technologies and sources of energy – especially including renewables – to reduce pollution; to diversify the global energy supply; to create jobs; and to address the very real threat of climate change,” said Clinton.

Clinton said the world is in a state of profound change when it comes to energy, citing the surge in natural gas, the increase in the energy consumption in developing countries, and new drilling technologies that are playing a role in opening up places such as the Arctic and the South China Sea for oil extraction. She lauded improvements and expansions in renewable and traditional energy that have occurred under the Obama administration – gains that many Americans don’t realize, she said.

“Our use of renewable wind and solar power has doubled in the last four years. Our oil and natural gas production is surging. New auto standards will double how far we drive on a gallon of gas, and for the first time, we’ve introduced fuel efficiency standards for heavy trucks, vans and buses, all of which will cut costs. That means we are less reliant on imported energy, which strengthens our global, political and economic standing and the world’s energy marketplace,” she said.

Though using varied energy sources from the U.S. and abroad is important, Clinton said that renewable energy is key to the world’s economic and environmental progress, as well as its security interests.

“The transformation to cleaner energy is central to reducing the world’s carbon emissions and it is the core of a strong 21st century global economy.” she said.

Clinton outlined the work that the State Department has done over the past four years in three areas: energy diplomacy; preventing monopolies and promoting competition; and energy poverty.

Energy Diplomacy

Clinton brought up the State Department’s work dealing with drilling for oil in the Arctic – an issue she called a “potential environmental catastrophe.”  She said protecting the Arctic’s ecosystem while setting ground rules to avoid conflict over the area’s oil resources is a critical part of the department’s work.

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Election

Conservatives Respond To Clinton’s Libya Comments With Sexist Attacks

By Annie-Rose Strasser on Oct 16, 2012 at 3:30 pm

This morning ThinkProgress reported on the sexist tweet by a Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin in response to Sec. of State Hillary Clinton’s admission of responsibility for the attacks in Libya. Making a reference to Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky, Rubin wrote:

But she was not alone in making a gendered assessment of Clinton’s decision to take the blame. Other conservatives joined in, either sexualizing the situation, pointing to Clinton’s physical appearance, or citing the fact that she is a woman as a way of mocking her:

Rush Limbaugh, who has perhaps the longest and most sordid history of sexist claims against powerful women, piled on to the gendered criticism of Hillary Clinton, calling her a “doormat.” Listen:

Election

Washington Post Columnist Launches Sexist Diatribe Against Hillary Clinton On Twitter

By Judd Legum on Oct 16, 2012 at 12:29 am

Tonight, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton took responsibility for the tragic death of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans in Libya. Clinton told CNN: “I take responsibility. I’m in charge of the State Department’s 60,000-plus people all over the world, 275 posts.”

In response, Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin took to Twitter with a series of sexist, personal attacks against Clinton:

 

 

She then attacked Clinton for moving to Arkansas after her graduation from Yale law school:

 

 

In response to Obama adviser David Axelrod, she said Obama was trying to “hide behind her skirt”:

 

 

The right-wing, including Mitt Romney, began politicizing the tragedy in Benghazi almost immediately after the attack.

This is not the first time the Washington Post has been involved in over-the-top insults directed at Hillary Clinton. In 2009, columnist Dana Milbank suggested that Hillary Clinton should drink “Mad Bitch Beer” in a video featured on the Post’s website. Milbank, along with fellow columnist Chris Cillizza, later apologized. The Post’s Executive Editor, Marcus Brauchli, called the segment a “serious lapse in judgment.”

In October, the Washington Post ombudsman said Rubin did “damage to The Post and the credibility that keeps it afloat” with an inappropriate tweet, calling Rubin’s conduct on Twitter “a huge disappointment.”

Disclosure: The author worked for the Hillary Clinton campaign during the 2008 presidential primary

Alyssa

Burmese Democracy Activists Took Lessons From ‘The West Wing’

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Sep 20, 2012 at 12:07 pm

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, in a recent speech about Burma’s democracy movement, noted that a leader in the struggle once told her that the country’s activists were educating themselves about the way democratic governments work by watching The West Wing:

All of which got me thinking: what lessons are the political shows we’re airing now teaching people about democracy, American or otherwise?

1. Yelling safeguards the health of the political culture (The Newsroom): America may be the greatest country in the world thanks to an intern Will McAvoy shouted down in the season premiere of Aaron Sorkin’s latest and hired in the finale. But stupid is universal, as is the need to speak truth to it. Hopefully other free journalists in newly-minted democracies will spend their time hollering at actual people in power instead of beauty queens.

2. Niceness and integrity can win the day if you work very, very hard, and your opponent is a transparent idiot (Parks and Recreation): If we want to export democracy, can we mail a lot of Parks and Rec DVDs overseas? Leslie Knope may handle sister city delegations poorly—Viva Mayor Walter Gunderson!—but if she can take down the Man From Sweetums (or Glee‘s Burt Hummel can beat Sue Sylvester’s dirty campaign), maybe upstanding candidates fighting against the tide in corrupted elections everywhere can have a chance.

3. If niceness fails, kitchen sink disposals handle human ears nicely (Boss): Mayor Tom Kane is a Chicago strongman, a reminder that elections can become formalities when you couple machines with a lack of term limits. He’s a useful warning that sometimes the strength of democracy is its inefficiency, and the desire the bulldoze through the process for the sake of getting things done can be an awfully dangerous compulsion, one you can’t indulge once and walk away from.

4. If you’re a sucker for demagoguery, sometimes you get the jerks you deserve (Homeland): William Walden (Jamey Sheridan), the vice president Nicholas Brody almost assassinated in the finale of the first season of Showtime’s Homeland is a blowhard, but an effective one. He’s very good at talking tough about the threat of terrorism, and he’s rising towards the presidency on the strength of his pedantic oratory. And he’s a warning about following the person who makes you feel best, rather than the person who has the best to offer you.

5. Even the lead of the free world can be a sentimental idiot (1600 Penn): This horrendously awful sitcom from Jon Lovett, who used to write speeches for President Obama, starts airing on NBC in January. On a meta level, it’s a reminder that the people behind democratically elected leaders aren’t always visionaries who are upholding the highest ideals of their political systems. And the show itself, about a President who can’t resist indulging his dumb, frat-boy son, is a cautionary tale against seeing the people who represent the people as avatars of the ideals we invest in them.

Security

Fox News’s ‘Civil Rights Activist’ Calls Top Clinton Aide A ‘Muslim Brotherhood Operative’

By Ben Armbruster on Sep 19, 2012 at 3:35 pm

David Horowitz

David Horowitz’s anti-Muslim rhetoric has been well-docmented as he is featured prominently in CAP’s report last year on the Islamophobia network in the United States. So it’s no surprise then that on Fox News today Horowitz pushed the right-wing conspiracy theory that Huma Abedin, top aide to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, is a Muslim Brotherhood plant.

Fox Host Megyn Kelly referred to Horowitz as a “civil rights activist” and asked what he thought of the police questioning of the man behind the anti-Islam film that caused recent protests in the Middle East. “This is one of the most disgraceful moments in the history of the American presidency,” Horowitz said (the filmmaker, Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, answered police questions voluntarily). Horowitz then brought up Abedin:

HOROWITZ: An American ambassador has been raped and tortured and murdered and the White House is focusing on or the Justice Department is focusing on a filmmaker. And you have to ask yourself, isn’t it not the fact that the chief adviser on Muslim affairs for Hillary Clinton, our Secretary of State is a Muslim Brotherhood operative and the Obama administration has turned over Egypt to the Muslim Brotherhood which is a Nazi organization –

At this point, Kelly interrupted Horowitz, not to say he was wrong about Abedin but only to say “there are questions” as to whether she is a Muslim Brotherhood plant. Watch the clip:

No, Huma Abedin is not part of a Muslim Brotherhood plot to take over the U.S. government and no, David Horowitz is not a civil rights activist.

Security

Clinton: Libya Attacks By A ‘Savage Group,’ Not Libyan Government Or Its People

By Ben Armbruster on Sep 12, 2012 at 11:25 am

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton this morning condemned attacks in Benghazi, Libya at the American consulate that ended up killing U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and 3 of his deputies. The mob reacted to an anti-Islam YouTube clip that also sparked violence in Cairo yesterday. The attacks should “shock the conscience of people of all faiths around the world,” she said.

Clinton stressed that the attack should not be representative of the Libyan government, or the Libyan people:

CLINTON: We must be clear-eyed even in our grief. This was an attack by a small and savage group, not the people or government of Libya. Everywhere Chris and his team went in Libya, in a country scared by war and tyranny, they were hailed as friends and partners. And when the attack came yesterday, Libyans stood and fought to defend our post. Some were wounded. Some Libyans carried Chris’s body to the hospital and they helped rescue and lead other Americans to safety. Last night when I spoke with the President of Libya, he strongly condemned the violence and pledged every effort to protect our people and pursue those responsible.

The friendship between our countries borne out of shared struggle will not be another casualty of this attack. A free and stable Libya is still in America’s interest and security. And we will not turn our back on that.

Watch the clip:

Indeed, a recent Gallup poll found that “U.S. support for the Libyan revolution may have generated an almost unprecedented level of goodwill toward the U.S. In 2012, 54% of Libyans approve of U.S. leadership — among the highest approval Gallup has ever recorded in the Middle East and North Africa region, outside of Israel.”

Security

Clinton Praises Republicans Who Stood Up Against Bachmann’s Islamophobic Allegations

By Ali Gharib on Jul 30, 2012 at 5:35 pm

During a speech today at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace marking the release of a report about religious freedom around the world, Secretary of State HIllary Clinton took a moment to deal with religious freedom a little closer to home. Specifically, she touched obliquely on accusations made about a top staffer in her office by Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN).

In a letter to the State Department demanding an investigation into alleged Muslim Brotherhood infiltration, Bachmann suggested Clinton aide Huma Abedin is tied to Muslim Bortherhood and exercising influence on what Bachmann said were “actions recently that have been enormously favorable to the Muslim Brotherhood and its interests.”

In a thinly veiled reference, Clinton lauded those Republicans who stood up to Bachmann’s bogus and Islamophobic allegations:

Leaders have to be active in stepping in and sending messages about protecting the diversity within their countries. … We did see some of that in our own country. We saw Republicans stepping up and standing up against the kind of assaults that really have no place in our politics.

Watch the clip:

Among those Republicans were Sen. John McCain (AZ), Sen. Scott Brown (MA), Sen. Marco Rubio (FL), House Speaker John Boehner (OH) and Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (WI). The Republican Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee Rep. Mike Rogers (MI) went from supporting Bachmann, who sits on his committee, to disavowing her witch-hunt. Sensenbrenner, in particular, called out Bachmann’s Islamophobic allegations as “wrong ” and an affront on religious liberty:

Religion is a personal issue to every one of the people who lives in the United States, whether you practice a faith, how you practice a faith, whether you don’t practice a faith, whether you say you’re a member of a faith but don’t practice it, it’s none of the government’s business. And this is the whole issue of religious freedom.

However, some Republicans have come out and supported Bachmann’s allegations. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) also defended Bachmann’s charges. An adviser to GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney, John Bolton, voiced support for Bachmann’s allegations on a radio show hosted by the progenitor of her conspiracy theories, notorious Islamophobe Frank Gaffney. Former presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich, who also acts a as a surrogate for Romney, defended Bachmann, too, even writing a long Politico opinion piece today.

NEWS FLASH

Top Clinton Aide Threatened After Bachmann Allegations | The New York Post reports Sunday that Huma Abedin, a top aide to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, was placed under security by authorities after an “unspecified threat.” The source of the threat is not clear — he was “described as a Muslim man” — but the Post linked the incident to widely-repudiated allegations made by Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) tying Abedin to the Muslim Brotherhood and suggesting her nefarious influence on the U.S. government. New York police and the State Department reportedly questioned the man, who was not charged, according to the Post. (HT: Laura Rozen)

By Ali Gharib on Jul 22, 2012 at 12:04 pm

NEWS FLASH

Bachmann Runs Away From CNN’s Questions About Her Islamophobic Witch-Hunt | After Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) took to the Senate floor to repudiate Rep. Michele Bachmann’s (R-MN) Islamophobic attack on a top aide to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, CNN’s Dana Bash tried to chase down the Congresswoman to ask her about it. But Bachmann high-tailed it out of the Capitol Building hallway where Bash tried to confront her, speaking rapidly and denying Bash’s attempts to ask more questions. Bash said that when Members of Congress say they will get back to you, they usually do. But in this case, Bachmann hasn’t reached out to Bash. Watch the video of Bachmann dodging Bash’s questions:

By Ali Gharib on Jul 19, 2012 at 9:25 am

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