Hullabaloo

Monday, December 26, 2005

 
Southern Fried

Atrios links to Novakula's column today in which he discusses Trent Lott's agnizing over whether to seek another term. I think we've all wondered if Katrina would have an impact on the GOP in Mississippi and Alabama and this may be the test. (New Orleans' African American disapora is very likely to result in a stronger Louisiana GOP) I suspect he thinks it's time to cash out. They'll never be a better opportunity.

Atrios also highlights Novak's last line which I also think is the most interesting aspect of the piece:

When George W. stood aside while Trent Lott was tossed out, I wrote on Dec. 23, 2002, that the secret liberal theme behind his defenestration was that "the GOP's Southern base, the bedrock of its national election victories, is an illegitimate legacy from racist Dixiecrats.

Now, three years later, that bedrock may be eroding.

I don't know why he thinks it was secret. That view is right out in the open and it happens to be true. Both the Republicans and Democrats have been talking about the southern strategy for decades. (Perhaps Novak thinks the mass defections from Democrat to Republican in the south directly on the heels of the voting rights act of 1964 was a coincidence?)

In any case, that's not what's interesting. It's that he thinks the "bedrock" of the southern GOP base may be eroding. Personally, I doubt it, at least in any significant sense. However, many of the structural problems conservative writer Christopher Caldwell predicted in his famous contrarian article "the Southern Captivity of the GOP" from 1998 could be coming to fruition.

9/11 obscured them but the problems remain. Here are some excerpts from that article:

The party's 1994 majority came thanks to a gain of nineteen seats in the South. In 1996 Republicans picked up another six seats in the Old Confederacy. But that only makes their repudiation in the rest of the country the more dramatic. The party has been all but obliterated in its historical bastion of New England, where it now holds just four of twenty-three congressional seats. The Democrats, in fact, dominate virtually the entire Northeast. The Republicans lost seats in 1996 all over the upper Midwest -- Michigan, Wisconsin (two seats), Iowa, and Ohio (two seats). Fatally, they lost seats in all the states on the West Coast. Their justifiable optimism about the South aside, in 1996 it became clear that the Democratic Party was acquiring regional strongholds of equal or greater strength.

[...]

The Republican Party is increasingly a party of the South and the mountains. The southernness of its congressional leaders -- Speaker Newt Gingrich, of Georgia; House Majority Leader Dick Armey and House Majority Whip Tom DeLay, of Texas; Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, of Mississippi; Senate Majority Whip Don Nickles, of Oklahoma -- only heightens the identification. There is a big problem with having a southern, as opposed to a midwestern or a California, base. Southern interests diverge from those of the rest of the country, and the southern presence in the Republican Party has passed a "tipping point," at which it began to alienate voters from other regions.

As southern control over the Republican agenda grows, the party alienates even conservative voters in other regions. The prevalence of right-to-work laws in southern states may be depriving Republicans of the socially conservative midwestern trade unionists whom they managed to split in the Reagan years, and sending Reagan Democrats back to their ancestral party in the process. Anti-government sentiment makes little sense in New England, where government, as even those who hate it will concede, is neither remote nor unresponsive.

[...]

Grover Norquist, the president of Americans for Tax Reform, ... and insists that libertarians and moralists can still cohabit. And since Norquist is a key -- if not the key -- adviser to Newt Gingrich, his interpretation can be taken as a semi-official Republican understanding of what's left of Ronald Reagan's electorate. "The Reagan coalition is the Leave Us Alone coalition," Norquist says. "Tax activists want their paychecks left alone. Pro-family people want their kids left alone. Ralph Reed's constituents are not interested in running other people's lives. They don't care what odd people do in San Francisco on Saturday afternoon."

For his part, Reed, formerly the executive director of the Christian Coalition and now a Georgia-based political and public-affairs consultant, thinks the two wings get along as well as ever. Looking at the Republican field for President in 2000, he says, "Traditional supply-siders like Steve Forbes are enthusiastically embracing the social dogma of the party. Lamar Alexander is moving to the right, guys like John Ashcroft are picking up steam, John Kasich is talking about faith in God. I see a holistic message developing." To an extent Reed is right: this is not 1963 or 1964, when the Rockefeller wing and the Goldwater wing fought an intraparty civil war. Yet there is something more troubling going on. Every Republican candidate now has to "make his bones," to prove his good faith by declaring his unequivocal willingness to alienate the "elites" of the country. Describing the Christian right to a reporter last fall, the former Washington congressman Randy Tate, who is now the executive director of the Christian Coalition, said, "They don't just want to be given crumbs off the table and taken for granted." Far from proving Republican tolerance, the rapprochement Reed points to is merely the sound of the Republicans' cosmopolitan wing crying "Uncle."

This southern takeover is part of a natural, if paradoxical, transformation. It parallels the way the Goldwater debacle of 1964 destabilized the Democratic Party -- by sending alienated northern Republican progressives into the Democrats' ranks. These progressives joined with northern urbanites to forge a party that was more to their liking, though it was too liberal for the Democratic Party's stalwart southern conservatives -- and, eventually, too liberal for the nation as a whole. In like fashion, Democratic excesses since the seventies may have destabilized the Republican Party by chasing those southerners into the fold, transforming the Republican Party into a machine that is steadily becoming too conservative for the country.

There has always been tension between the Republicans' constituent wings. What long masked it was the Cold War. The Reaganite party was never a two-part but always a three-part coalition, of social conservatives, economic conservatives, and foreign-policy hawks. The hawks' group was minuscule, but it happened that their passion (anti-communism) was shared by Christians and capitalists alike.

[...]


When the Republicans can no longer promise tax cuts, they're left with only the most abrasive aspects of the Reagan message, kept under wraps throughout the 1980s: the southern morals business. If the Republicans didn't believe in shrinking government, they didn't believe in the freedom that it was supposed to promote -- which made it much harder to argue that their moral agenda was being advanced in the name of live and let live. And what did they have besides the moral agenda?

The Republicans are too conservative: their deference to their southern base is persuading much of the country that their vision is a sour and crabbed one. But they're too liberal, too, as their all-out retreat from shrinking the government indicates. At the same time, the Republicans have passed none of the reforms that ingratiated the party with the "radical middle." The Republicans' biggest problem is not their ideology but their lack of one. Stigmatized as rightists, behaving like leftists, and ultimately standing for nothing, they're in the worst of all possible worlds.

There is messaging "gold" in that article now that it is crystal clear that the Republicans are not the party of small government and it lies here:

If the Republicans didn't believe in shrinking government, they didn't believe in the freedom that it was supposed to promote -- which made it much harder to argue that their moral agenda was being advanced in the name of live and let live.

How can Norquist's "leave us alone" coalition exist in a party that supports the government spying on its citizens and supports intrusion into a family's most difficult medical decisions? How can a "leave us alone" coalition support a president who acts like a king? How can decent people who believe in moral values continue to work hard and support a party that is corrupt to its core?

They can't.

Caldwell concluded with this:

Their party is now directionless, with only two skills to recommend it: first, identifying and prosecuting the excesses of its opponents; second, rigging the campaign-finance system to protect its incumbency long after it has ceased having any ideas that would justify incumbency. The Republican Party is an obsolescent one. It may continue to rule, disguised as a majority by electoral legerdemain. But it will be a long time before the party is again able to rule from a place in Americans' hearts.

They gave up trying to rule from a place in America's heart some time ago and are now ruling from some place in America's gut. Fear (or the fun "horror movie" version of it anyway) is what they use to keep the disparate threads of Norquist's coalition together. I think, however, Bush's misdhandling of Iraq and Katrina -- not to mention the ridiculous overplaying of the terrorist threat --- may have dampened their prospects for a repeat of their successful communist fearmongering of the past.

I think that Caldwell's thesis is proven by the fact that Bush won so narrowly in 2004 and that they were unable to gain any Senate seats outside of deep red territory. They couldn't win any house seats outside of the rigged Texas gerrymander. Bush's popular vote margin came from turnout in the deep south, not because of any gains elsewhere. I ask you, if a Republican incumbent couldn't win big in that election, when we were just three years from a major terrorist attack and deeply engaged in wars in two countries, then what will it take?

They've got the south for the time being. The question for them is if they can legitimately win anywhere else. If Novak is right and they are starting to lose their grip a little bit there then they've reached their high water mark.



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digby 12/26/2005 01:34:00 PM |

 
Jeanne D'Arc needs a new computer.

I can't imagine a blogosphere without Body and Soul, can you?

It's common wisdom that this administration has, from the outset, and right up to the present, made a habit of accusing others of what it is guilty of. I've always thought of that as just an effective technique -- put your opposition on the defense, so that, at best, no one notices what you're doing, and, at worst, people excuse your crimes because the other side supposedly does it too.

But when self-described Christians are choosing to replicate the history of their faith in reverse, casting themselves in the villains' place, while somehow still claiming the innocence of holy victims, it looks more like pathology than political spin. They remind me of Alex in A Clockwork Orange, aroused by Christian iconography, fantasizing himself as a Roman soldier. Then throw in something too twisted for Alex --fantasizing himself, simultaneously, as a martyr.

Sick. Just sick, these Clockwork Christians.

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digby 12/26/2005 12:36:00 PM |

Sunday, December 25, 2005

 
Guest Post


Bush's Head

by Poputonian


James Wolcott’s recent reference to Digby’s blog as “a Paul Revere gallop through the pitched night of the Bush years” reminds me of this passage from Paul Revere's Ride, a 1994 book by the great historian David Hackett Fischer. The passage seems relevant to the recent discussion (triggered by the Kos article in WM) about the role blogs play in political discourse. Fischer sees Revere in relationship to the overall Revolutionary movement and debunks the myth that he was a "just a messenger." He describes Revere as an important cog *in a liberal movement* that was "open and pluralist" and made up of "an alliance of many overlapping groups." Revere was a silversmith by day, but away from his trade he was doing much more for the rebel cause, and it was more than a poetic midnight ride. This has a feel to it, like maybe this is what bloggers did before computers, in a day when everything was closer, within physical reach, and people did their politics face to face.


Paul Revere's Role in the Revolutionary Movement

The structure of Boston's revolutionary movement, and Paul Revere's place within it, were very different from recent secondary accounts. Many historians have suggested that this movement was a tightly organized, hierarchical organization, controlled by Samuel Adams and a few other dominant figures. These same interpretations commonly represent Revere as a minor figure who served his social superiors mainly as a messenger.

A very different pattern emerges from the following comparison of seven groups: the Masonic lodge that met at the Green Dragon Tavern; the Loyal Nine, which was the nucleus of the Sons of Liberty; the North Caucus that met at the Salutation Tavern; the Long Room Club in Dassett Alley; the Boston Committee of Correspondence; the men who are known to have participated in the Boston Tea Party; and Whig leaders on a Tory Enemies List.

A total of 255 men were in one or more of these seven groups. Nobody appeared on all seven lists, or even as many as six. Two men, and only two, were in five groups; they were Joseph Warren and Paul Revere, who were unique in the breadth of their associations.

Other multiple memberships were as follows. Five men (2.0%) appeared in four groups each: Samuel Adams, Nathaniel Barber, Henry Bass, Thomas Chase, and Benjamin Church. Seven men (2.7%) turned up on three lists (James Condy, Moses Grant, Joseph Greenleaf, William Molineux, Edward Proctor, Thomas Urann, and Thomas Young).

Twenty-seven individuals (10.6%) were on two lists (John Adams, Nathaniel Appleton, John Avery, Samuel Barrett, Richard Boynton, John Bradford, Ezekiel Cheever, Adam Collson, Samuel Cooper, Thomas Crafts, Caleb Davis, William Dennie, Joseph Eayrs, William Greenleaf, John Hancock, James Otis, Elias Parkman, Samuel Peck, William Powell, John Pulling, Josiah Quincy, Abiel Ruddock, Elisha Story, James Swan, Henry Welles, Oliver Wendell, and John Winthrop). The great majority, 211 of 255 (82.7%), appeared only on a single list. Altogether, 94.1% were in only one or two groups.

This evidence strongly indicates that the revolutionary movement in Boston was more open and pluralist than scholars have believed. It was not a unitary organization, but a loose alliance of many overlapping groups. That structure gave Paul Revere and Joseph Warren a special importance, which came from the multiplicity and range of their alliances.

None of this is meant to deny the preeminence of other men in different roles. Samuel Adams was especially important in managing the Town Meeting, and the machinery of local government, and was much in the public eye. Otis was among its most impassioned orators. John Adams was the penman of the Revolution. John Hancock was its "milch cow," as a Tory described him. But Revere and Warren moved in more circles than any others. This gave them their special roles as the linchpins of the revolutionary movement -- its communicators, coordinators, and organizers of collective effort in the cause of freedom.

Another list (too long to be included here) survives of 355 Sons of Liberty who met at the Liberty Tree in Dorchester in 1769. Once again, Paul Revere appears on it. There were at least two other Masonic lodges in Boston at various periods before and during the Revolution; Paul Revere is known to have belonged to at least one of them. In addition to the North Caucus, there was also a South Caucus and a Middle Caucus. Paul Revere may or may not have belonged to them as well; some men joined more than one. No definitive lists of members have been found. But it is known that Revere was a member of a committee of five appointed "to wait on the South End caucus and the Caucus in the middle part of town," and that he met with them (Goss, Revere, II, 639). Several Boston taverns were also centers of Whig activity. Revere had connections with at least two of them-Cromwell's Head, and the Bunch of Grapes. The printing office of Benjamin Edes was another favorite rendezvous. In the most graphic description of a gathering there by John Adams, once again Paul Revere was recorded as being present.

In sum, the more we learn about the range and variety of political associations in Boston, the more open, complex and pluralist the revolutionary movement appears, and the more important (and significant) Paul Revere's role becomes. He was not the dominant or controlling figure. Nobody was in that position. The openness and diversity of the movement were the source of his importance. Appendix D, page 301, Paul Revere's Ride, by David Hackett Fischer, New York, 1994.

People will use blogs as they wish, but their important role in directing the actions and messages of a political movement is becoming more and more undeniable. The liberal blogs that I read *usually make their assertions* in an open and pluralist way, not in a top down hierarchical fashion; independent and distributed, yet coordinated and overlapping. This is quite the opposite of our *conservative* adversaries. [I changed rightwing to conservative because the real conservatives hate to be painted with the Bush brush. Tough shit.]


Fischer's description of Revere as a 'linchpin, communicator, coordinator, and organizer of collective effort' seems also seems apropos (heh). It's pure teamwork, where each role is small, even miniscule, but in the aggregate can lead to an essential outcome, which in today’s political environment is the shedding of authoritative conservatism in favor of an open pluralism.


And wouldn't you give just about anything to sit in a place called, Bunch of Grapes? Or how about The Green Dragon Tavern or Cromwell's Head? With luck, maybe someday there will be an establishment called Bush's Head.



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digby 12/25/2005 11:58:00 PM |

Saturday, December 24, 2005

 
Radioactive Muslims

Glenn Greenwald sees through the new "leak" about the government being forced (gosh darn it to heck) to monitor Muslims for nukes. Similar to how the convenient color coded terrorist warnings leading up to the election last year were designed to keep the president's poll numbers from falling, this one is designed to muddy the waters of the NSA spying scandal. After all, if Muslims are suspected of building nuclear devices right in our backyards (God Save Us ALL!) why in the hell are we worried about a little harmless phone tapping?

The Administration’s purported efforts to find radiological activity in Muslim mosques is now supposed to be thrown onto the pile along with its lawless NSA eavesdropping program, so that the whole confusing controversy is aggregated into nothing more than the same tired, irrational terrorist-defending fetish of trying to impede George Bush in his valiant crusade to protect us from The Terrorists. And sure enough, like puppets on cue, the most blindly loyal of the Bush defenders are spitting out exactly this scary tale.

And with the images now darkly dancing around in our heads of Muslims hiding in their mosques in Los Angeles and Queens and Georgia suburbs and maybe in your own backyard, standing over a toxic brew of radiology and TNT ready to zap us all with their mushroom clouds, all of this annoying chatter about FISA and the Fourth Amendment and the NSA is supposed to meekly fade away, drowned to death by nightmares of our children with their hair on fire and glowing in the dark and George Bush trying to save them.

He asks if they will get away with it again. I dunno. At some point you have to wonder if the citizens of the US will tire of playing this little fantasy of being a nation under seige (while they shop til they drop) and want to switch the channel to little "Morning in America."

I heard a stranger in a line at the book store say the other day that he was tired of hearing the president talk about "protecting us" like he's some kind of super hero. It's possible that they've gone to the well with this one too many times. We'll see.

Update: I see that I was unclear. (Eggnog?) This looks like it was leaked because it is the kind of thing that some people will find reasonable. (I doubt that it's any more effective than making grandma take off her slippers at the airport, but whatever.) The point is that the administration likely leaked this themselves for the purpose of obscuring the seriousness of the NSA spy scandal.

If this is true, it is another case of the administration leaking classified information for political purposes. How surprising.



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digby 12/24/2005 12:08:00 PM |

 
Little Red Data Miner

It turns out the Little Red Book Story was a hoax. Thank Goodness. But lest anyone think that this means anything, check this out:

The volume of information harvested from telecommunication data and voice networks, without court-approved warrants, is much larger than the White House has acknowledged, the officials said. It was collected by tapping directly into some of the American telecommunication system's main arteries, they said.

As part of the program approved by President Bush for domestic surveillance without warrants, the N.S.A. has gained the cooperation of American telecommunications companies to obtain backdoor access to streams of domestic and international communications, the officials said.

[...]

"There was a lot of discussion about the switches" in conversations with the court, a Justice Department official said, referring to the gateways through which much of the communications traffic flows. "You're talking about access to such a vast amount of communications, and the question was, How do you minimize something that's on a switch that's carrying such large volumes of traffic? The court was very, very concerned about that."

Since the disclosure last week of the N.S.A.'s domestic surveillance program, President Bush and his senior aides have stressed that his executive order allowing eavesdropping without warrants was limited to the monitoring of international phone and e-mail communications involving people with known links to Al Qaeda.

What has not been publicly acknowledged is that N.S.A. technicians, besides actually eavesdropping on specific conversations, have combed through large volumes of phone and Internet traffic in search of patterns that might point to terrorism suspects. Some officials describe the program as a large data-mining operation.

That's what we all thought. TIA Redux. Which means they have likely been sifting through millions of Americans' communications, with the acquiescence of your friendly neighborhood phone and internet provider, looking for keywords, patterns ... well, we don't know, now do we, because it's all done with no oversight. They could be looking for signs of illicit blow jobs, which is, as we all know, a major threat to the republic.

I would not expect that this mining is quite as sophisticated as we might like. After all, we are surveilling Quakers and PETA because they are terrorist threats so I wouldn't look for the NSA to have some mind boggling, science fiction level capabilities to sort out the person who is discussing current events from the terrorist trying to kill us all.

Oh well. If you don't want to be a suspect, just don't use your phone or computer. Or the US mail. Or an airplane. Or a library. And if you do use those things, just don't say anything that a computer might interpret to be a threat. Is that so hard? Use your heads, people. This is what we have to do to preserve our freedom.




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digby 12/24/2005 09:23:00 AM |

Friday, December 23, 2005

 
Meme of Fours

by digby

Kevin passes the torch of this new meme to me thinking that it will reveal something interesting about me. I doubt that it will, but here goes:


Four jobs you've had in your life: pizza cook, Alaska pipeline worker, medical transcriber, VP of business affairs.

Four movies you could watch over and over: The Godfather, Spinal Tap, When Harry Met Sally, Dr Strangelove.

Four places you've lived: Fairbanks Alaska; Ankara Turkey; Bangkok Thailand; Bay St Louis, Mississippi.

Four TV shows you love to watch: The Daily Show, The Family Guy, Deadwood, Curb Your Enthusiasm.

Four places you've been on vacation: Mykonos, Greece; Chitna Alaska; Pismo Beach California, Avignon, France

Four websites you visit daily: Atrios, Firedoglake, The Sideshow, Alicublog (and gawd knows how many hundreds of others ...)

Four of your favorite foods: sourdough bread, salami, soft cheese, chocolate (and Zocor)

Four places you'd rather be: Amsterdam, Kauai, San Francisco, Lake Como


Peter Daou, the ball is in your court.

Update:
Here it is.


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digby 12/23/2005 01:10:00 PM |

 
Something To Believe In

the digby


Lots of people are discussing this article about Kos in the new Washington Monthly and wondering whether we need more wonkery and less partisanship in the blogosphere.

It seems to me that there is a lot of great accessible policy analysis in the left blogosphere. Max Sawicky notes that that wonkery rises to the occasion when needed, as in the social security debate (and, I would argue, Juan Cole and other foreign policy specialists when Iraq debates have raged.) Specialists abound. There is political wonkery in the form of analysts like Ruy Teixeira at Donkey Rising. Nathan Newman is the go to on labor issues. PZ Myers and Chris Mooney on science. Economists and lawyers abound, Maxspeak, Angry Bear, Balkinization, Talk Left, Scotusblog, the list goes on. TPM Cafe is a salon devoted to wonkery.

And within the wonkosphere there are generalists and specialists, more often the latter, for obvious reasons. Kevin Drum is a generalist wonk. He has many interests that he enjoys exploring with graphs and data. Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias do too. Most blogwonks aren't like that. (You'll notice that all three of those guys are employed by liberal magazines that specialize in popular wonkery.)

These and the many great blogwonks are essential to the left blogosphere. They are a tremendous resource that I (a card carrying partisan crank) treasure and I link to them more often than anyone else. They are often compelling writers who effectively convey complex information to the lay reader and offer excellent analysis. So I'm not sure I see the beef. I rarely find it difficult to get educated on any number of subjects when I need to (which is often.)

Having said that, I disagree that the rest of the blogsphere is a bunch of screaming hysterics who engage in nothing but "agitation" or partisan catcalling. They all discuss politics --- you're not a member of the left blogsphere if you don't --- and they discuss the subject in different ways with analysis, humor, polemic, grassroots activism, criticism and historical perspective. The big blogs like Kos and Atrios have created virtual communities within the larger community for people to gather and talk about the issues of the day. And that, believe it or not, is the essence of politics.

In the Politics Aristotle said:

"That man is much more a political animal than any kind of bee or any herd animal is clear. For, as we assert, nature does nothing in vain, and man alone among the animals has speech....[S]peech serves to reveal the advantageous and the harmful and hence also the just and unjust. For it is peculiar to man as compared to the other animals that he alone has a perception of good and bad and just and unjust and other things of this sort; and partnership in these things is what makes a household and a city."

Politics is way more than wonkery, although wonkery is essential. And the partisan catcalling is a natural part of it, particularly in highly polarized times such as this. It's human, for better or worse. People need to find solidarity and they need to express their fears, frustrations, desires, needs and beliefs. People turn to bloggers and each other to connect the dots and connect to others.

Wonkery is reason. The comaraderie we find among those of our online political tribe is heart. Successful politics requires both. I've often felt that one of the problems with liberalism is that we lost touch with that side of ourselves --- as Ezra has called it, our "inner RFK" --- the part that gets inspired (or angry) because we deeply believe in something.

Our technocratic side is far superior for actual governance, as we've recently been shown in spades. But it is a grave mistake to think that politics is, or ever has been, fueled by a concept like "competence." It's fueled by much bigger concepts like "leadership" and "inspiration" and "committment." We need some of that stuff, badly.

So I say hooray for the wonkosphere and the crankosphere. I know that each side sometimes offends the sensibilities of the other but we should warmly embrace our bretheren no matter what our temperaments incline us to. Robust progressive politics requires both.



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digby 12/23/2005 08:35:00 AM |

Thursday, December 22, 2005

 
He Said/She Said

by digby

Speaking of media malfesance, here's a barn burner of a post by Avedon Carol on the alleged "even-handedness" of the press.

The so-called "objectivity" we are seeing today is very different from what we saw 30 years ago, for the simple reason that when you refuse to acknowledge that one side is telling the truth while the other is lying, that's not objective. Objectively, Bush lied and Gore didn't, but you'd never have known that from the mainstream media's coverage of the 2000 campaign. Objectively, there is no more important thing to do in an election than make sure everyone can vote and then count all the ballots, but you wouldn't have known that, either.

In that regard, I have to give some props to Andrea Mitchell today sitting in for Chris Matthews. She actually did call glassy-eyed Governor Bill Owen of Colorado out on his RNC mandated stream of consiousness blather about "Aldrich Ames - Brooklyn bridge - Jamie Gorelick - known terrorists - protecting America - 9/11 - Clintoncarterdemocrats." She said outright that what he was saying wasn't true.

The problem is that the Republican machine is like the Borg. They only have one brain. Owen did not compute her factual rebuttal; he just repeated his mantra, calmly and cooly, because he doesn't really know what he's saying --- he's just reading from the approved script. He has no idea what's true and what isn't and he doesn't care.

I'd like to welcome Andrea Mitchell into the reality based community. Maybe she'll stay awhile.



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digby 12/22/2005 05:37:00 PM |

 
Down Boy

by digby

Commenter francesangeles spotted this article by Richard Morin, the angry WaPo pollster, from just the other day:

Finally, an explanation for why bar bets sometimes escalate into bar fights: Levels of a "high-octane" form of testosterone soar when men think others don't trust them.

When I saw the picture attached to the article, I realized that I had seen Richard Morin interviewed by Fox's Bill Hemmer yesterday about the president's exciting new poll numbers. I commented to the cat how bizarre it was that the guy appeared to be so happy, almost giddy, about it. (Fleaber agreed that the guy's affect was downright euphoric.) If anyone has footage, let me know.

I think we might be dealing with a straight-up kool-aider.



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digby 12/22/2005 03:37:00 PM |

 
Protect Us

by digby

For a connect-the-Bush-atrocities, with heavy linkage, check out this post at HuffPo by Joshua Bearman. It makes a nice Christmas e-mail for your Republican relatives:

It would be one thing if we were safer. But our modern day Sun King cloaks his seizure of power in so much poll-tested national security language despite that he is not, in fact, protecting us at all. The residents of the three cities Bush cited voted overwhelmingly against him because they rightly sensed that Bush's reckless foreign adventures and lack of a real domestic security policy MAKES US ALL LESS SAFE. It doesn't take much critical analysis to figure out why. Here is a guy who, after September 11, failed to increase funding for nuclear non-proliferation, which the non-partisan commission the President himself appointed called the single greatest threat to our safety. Collecting the world's loose nukes was the first thing on my mind on September 12th, 2001, so I'm a little confused as why it's taken the President four years to catch on.

Then there's Iraq, where Bush has decided to throw away $200+ billion -- money that could have paid for an entire wish list of domestic security programs. Right now, our own military, fueled by Bush's swaggering cowboy routine has become the most effective recruiting tool for anti-American sentiment and insurgents in Iraq. If you find that to be a subjective assessment, here's a joint study by the Israeli and Saudis (!) that quantifies the Iraq Effect. And who doesn't recall Rumsfeld accidentally wondering aloud if the insurgents weren't replacing their numbers faster than our troops could ever kill them?

"To protect us"?

Is that why the 9/11 Commission's report card earlier this month had a single "A" out of 41 categories, while the bottom was filled out with 12 "D"s and 5 "F"s? The President got a "D" on Securing WMD's, the supposed reason we're stirring up the hornets' nest in Iraq. Commission member and former republican governor of Illinois James Thompson said it straight: "Are we crazy? Why aren't our tax dollars being spent to protect our lives?"

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digby 12/22/2005 03:10:00 PM |

 
Repentant Republicans

by digby

Last night I wrote post called "Adults Wanted" and a reader sent me a link to this essay called "Confessions of a Repentant Republican" which is an extremely cogent, precise and lucid critique of the current administration's policies from the perspective of someone who understands the enlightenment principles that undergird our system. He speaks in terms that transcend politics and go far beyond our current partisan obsessions.

Here's an excerpt:

Americans, with broad bipartisan support, have not only embedded our unambiguous rejection of torture into American law (establishing legal constraints which the Bush administration is now determined to dismantle), but have for generations been in the forefront of establishing such standards worldwide through treaties including the Geneva Conventions.

Similarly, previous generations of Americans - left, right, and center - have been unified in the belief that not only is such conduct essential for the safety of our own captured servicemen and women, but that any nation which does not adhere to its own basic values (regardless of any self-proclaimed virtue) would cease to possess the moral prerequisites for genuine success.

Our present need for "the decent respect for the opinions of mankind" is no less compelling than it was for our founders. But the primary need for realigning our actions with our values is not improved public relations. The most compelling need is, for the benefit of our own society, to reaffirm moral constraints upon our actions, individual and collective, without which the character of our nation will be diminished.

Accomplishing this can only be done by reframing the issues in a manner which befits our Judeo-Christian and American values.

This will be contentious. The unifying values implanted by America's founders - values of liberty, non-aggression, and antipathy to authoritarian government; have historically prevailed only despite significant opposition from Americans with less honorable priorities. Indeed, the very eloquence with which Jefferson, Madison, and other founders defended civil liberties and warned repeatedly of the dangers of unrestrained executive power and the pernicious consequences of war and empire is primarily because their views were not universal. Their beliefs in liberty, defended by non-aggressive, anti-imperial foreign policy, and the right of dissent have survived to become the "common ground" of the American civic vision only after bitter and divisive political battles. During such times these cherished principles - now universally claimed (even those whose oppose the substance of their beliefs claim them rhetorically as their own) and taken for granted have not infrequently been severely threatened.

Today the rhetoric of this consensus American vision of liberty and non-aggression remains unscathed. But the substance of the beliefs of our founders (which constitutes the basic common ground of our political compact) is under assault. Certainly no one overtly challenges our commitment to liberty and democracy. Yet we witness proponents of freedom at home and abroad advocating perpetual military occupation, rationalizing permanent detention of American citizens without charges or trial, and those who claim to respect the rule of law remaining silent while administration lawyers concoct methods for the president to evade American legal prohibitions of torture and promote the legal theory that the president has the inherent authority to set aside American law.

This being the web, it's always possible that this person is a Democrat in disguise but I don't think so. His critique hinges on the idea that isolationsim is inherently American, and that is bedrock conservative of the old school, not liberal of the new school.

His critique is something that I had expected more "adult" Republicans to come to by now, to tell you the truth --- the people I think many of us expected were peppered throughout the ruling class and who would step up if the kids got out of hand. Sadly, it seems that most of them are either dying out or have become consumed by the partisan war that saps so much strength from all of us.

I urge you to read his entire essay. Even though he considers himself part of the "anti-war" majority, progressive intellectuals will undoubtedly disagree with some of it. But he lays out the argument around which people of good will who value the basic fundamental principles of our constitutional system might be able to find consensus. I just don't know how many of those people are out there.



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digby 12/22/2005 12:16:00 PM |

 
Public Scorn

by digby

Following up the post below about the White house polling operation, Paul Lukasiak in the comments notices another dimension to this problem that I missed and it's very interesting:

The Post had no problem asking this question as far back as March 2005

17. (IF DECREASED, Q16) Should all U.S. forces in Iraq be withdrawn
immediately, or should they be decreased, but not all withdrawn immediately?

Now, at that time (and to this day) NO Democratic Congressional Leader or Serious Presidential Candidate was advocating "immediate withdrawal" --- this was just the Bush "cut and run" straw man representation of the Democratic position.

The Post does not bother to formulate questions based on proposals advanced by leading Democrats --- there is no question about Murtha's actual proposal (phased redeployment over 6 month period when "practicable with a significant "over the horizon" presence) or withdrawal formulas offered by people like Kerry (withdraw 10,000 american troops for every 30,000 Iraqi troops that are trained.)

Furthermore, the Post is quite comfortable advancing White House straw man arguments using the "some people" method, as in this question asked starting in August...

"18. Some people say the Bush administration should set a deadline for withdrawing U.S. military forces from Iraq in order to avoid further casualties. Others say knowing when the U.S. would pull out would only encourage the anti-government insurgents. Do you yourself think the United States should or should not set a deadline for withdrawing U.S. forces from Iraq?"

This was a truly insidious question --- "some people say" that the presence of US forces only exacerbates and strengthens the insurgency, and that apparently includes the vast majority of Iraqis who want us out. But you don't get that information in the question -- the only "reason" for setting a deadline is "reduction of casualties." (Not to mention the fact that no Democratic leader was saying "set a firm deadline" in August 2005....)

The reality is that the Post doesn't ask about impeachment because asking the question legitimizes the idea of impeachment -- and the Post is too beholden to the White House to permit that to happen.

This cuts to the heart of the matter. When the Washington Post (or others) ask a question, it legitimizes the question. Back in that poll in 1998, just five days after the story broke. The imnpetus for taking it was not that "serious" people were talking impeachment, it was just that "some" people were talking impeachment. And those people, with te exception of the silly George Stephanolopulos, were beltway Republicans.

Matt at MYDD today notes another example of egregious WaPo polling:

From the Washington Post's polling director Richard Morin's online chat yesterday:

New York, N.Y.: When a newspaper like The Post commissions a poll, it gives the result prominent play, usually on the front page. But when a different organization conducts a separate poll, that poll's results are given much less prominent play, and often not mentioned at all. The implicit assumption is, "Our poll is better than theirs." Is this sound journalism?

Richard Morin: See the last answer. It would be unsound journalism to ignore other survey results, particularly if they offer insights your own may lack. But to give them as prominent play? No, and I think it is unreasonable to expect us to

.

The Washington Post put on their front page a story by Richard Morin titled 'Majority of Americans Support Alito Nomination'. A Fox News poll just showed Alito with cratering approval ratings. Morin's story clearly ignores other survey results which present completely different findings, something he just called unsound. It's clear this is not an isolated incident - Chris just documented Morin's failure to live up to standards he sets for himself.

The Washington Post polling operation has a problem. They are clearly responsive to GOP pressure in their questioning and yet they get angry at what they see as coordinated Democratic pressure. Morin even insulted a member of the public for using a copy and paste e-mail to complain about polling.

Most recently, a psychology professor from Arizona State University sent me the copy-and-paste e-mail, not a word or comma was changed. I only hope his scholarship is more original.

We first laughed about it. Now, four waves into this campaign,we are annoyed. Really, really annoyed.

Some free advice: You do your cause no service by organizing or participating in such a campaign. It is viewed by me and others with the same scorn reserved for junk mail. Perhaps a bit more.

First they laugh and then they get angry. Does he assume that these aren't real people, that they are fakes, paid shills, that they don't believe what they are saying because the language has been cut and pasted? If each e-mail were originally composed would it make a difference? It doesn't seem so. It's the fact that a web-site encouraged average people to complain to the Washington Post about something those people clearly agreed was a problem. Why is that deserving of laughter and annoyance? Did he take the time to think, even once, about the substance of the complaint? If it had been lodged by a high level Republican would he have laughed and then been annoyed?

A parade of operatives and politicians go on television every day spouting robotic talking points ad nauseum and nobody says that they are illegitimate. And nobody does it more effectively than the GOP. Frank Luntz proudly and openly discusses the fact that he tells his GOP clients exactly how to phrase things. Newt Gingrich wrote the book on repeating emotional phrases over and over to paint the opposition in derisive terms.

It's quite obvious that the Republicans have staged a quarter century "campaign" to sway media coverage. Now that they are in power they marshall very heavy hitters to lodge complaints and they go right to the top. John Harris and Len Downie admitted last week that high level Republicans and the White House complain all the time and they go out of their way to allay those complaints.

I*'ll use the same example of how this works that I used in a post last week. I'm sure the same thing happens at the Post:

Russert: Libby called me to complain about something he had seen on MSNBC...

Imus: What did he complain about on MSNBC, do you remember?

Russert: I haven't gone into it,--you know-publicly-cause I just didn't want to get involved with all that viewer complaints, but I do remember it because of his language that he chose and that's why- I actually called Ben Shapiro, the president of NBC news and said I just gave your direct line to this guy named Lewis Scooter Libby, who is upset about something he watched on TV and you may hear from him.

So when a "viewer" from the White House complains it gets referred to the president of NBC News. WaPo editor Len Downie says "We want to make sure people in the [Bush] administration know that our news coverage by White House reporters is separate from what appears in Froomkin's column because it contains opinion."

Yet when readers and viewers from around the country complain via a web campaign, the recipients view their complaints with the "same scorn that is reserved for junk mail, maybe more."

It's quite clear that the mainstream media think that their readers are irrelevant when it comes to political coverage. Perhaps this explains why so many people find the mainstream media increasingly irrelevant.




Update: Here's the link to the Democrats.com post that asked people to contact the major media outlets and ask why they were refusing to ask the question when the Rasmussen and Zogby polls were showing a rather large number of Americans supporting impeachment. I don't know why this should be considered illegitimate --- especially when political editor John Harris uses a friend's enjoyment of Dan Froomkin's column as evidence of Froomkin's liberal bias.



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digby 12/22/2005 09:28:00 AM |

Wednesday, December 21, 2005

 
Madder Still

Jane reports on Richard Morion pollster for the Washington Post actually had the temerity to write this drivel yesterday in an online chat:

Naperville, Ill.: Why haven't you polled on public support for the impeachment of George W. Bush?

Richard Morin: This question makes me mad...

Seattle, Wash.: How come ABC News/Post poll has not yet polled on impeachment?

Richard Morin: Getting madder...

Haymarket, Va.: With all the recent scandals and illegal/unconstitutional actions of the President, why hasn't ABC News / Washington Post polled whether the President should be impeached?

Richard Morin: Madder still...

[...]

[W]e do not ask about impeachment because it is not a serious option or a topic of considered discussion --witness the fact that no member of congressional Democratic leadership or any of the serious Democratic presidential candidates in '08 are calling for Bush's impeachment. When it is or they are, we will ask about it in our polls.

Jane points to this Media Matters report:

A January 1998 Post poll conducted just days after the first revelations of Clinton's relationship with Monica Lewinsky asked the following questions:

"If this affair did happen and if Clinton did not resign, is this something for which Clinton should be impeached, or not?"

"There are also allegations that Clinton himself lied by testifying under oath that he did not have an affair with the woman. If Clinton lied in this way, would you want him to remain in office as president, or would you want him to resign the presidency?"

"If Clinton lied by testifying under oath that he did not have an affair with the woman, and he did not resign, is this something for which Clinton should be impeached, or not?"

Morin was the Post's polling director at the time, and he wrote the January 26, 1998, article reporting the poll results.

I just have to expand on this a little because this is a truly unbelievable example of media bias. In an impeachment story in the Washington Post written the same day as the poll was released, January 26, Ruth Marcus breathlessly reported:

In the whirlwind five days since the story first broke, nothing has been conclusively proven about the truth of the allegations that Clinton had an affair with Lewinsky, urged her to lie about it in an affidavit in the Paula Jones sexual harassment lawsuit, and then lied about it himself under oath when questioned by Jones's lawyers.

But it is a measure of the political and legal explosiveness of the allegations that they immediately provoked discussions of impeachment, a prospect raised the morning the story broke by former presidential adviser George Stephanopoulos and discussed at length on yesterday's TV talk shows.

It was discussed on all the talk shows because useful idiot George Stephanopoulos brought it up five days before and the Republican Borg immediately fanned out across the airwaves and pretended that this sexual affair was a threat to the Republic. And the Washington post ate it up with a spoon, sending out their pollster post-haste to take the public's temperature on this trumped up piece of tabloid garbage.

Today, the same pollster gets mad when people bring up the idea of impeachment in the context of a hugely unpopular president lying about national security. He gets madder still at regular Americans who annoy him with mass e-mails which he obviously considers less legitimate than a gaggle of paid GOP shills marching in lockstep on Press The Meat. This, even though the current polling already shows that 52% of the public believe that Bush deliberately misled the country on Iraq and 56% think that it is very important for congress to question the Bush Adminstration about the way the intelligence was used. (Clinton had a 59% approval rating in that 1998 poll.)

Media Matters asks:

Please explain WHY a question asking if President Bush should be impeached if he lied to the country about war is "biased".

Please also explain how this is consistent with polls the Post ran -- under your direction, I might add -- in 1998 asking whether then-President Clinton should be impeached if he had an affair with Monica Lewinsky. Do you now believe those questions you asked -- and reported on -- throughout 1998 were "biased"? If so, do you believe you and The Post owe Clinton an apology?

Why does The Post think it is appropriate to raise the spectre of impeachment when there is a Democratic president, but not when there is a Republican in office?

Because the beltway press corps has conditioned itself to respond only to Republicans. They've trained themselves not take Democrats seriously, either the rank and file who inconvenience them with e-mails they do not want to read, or the leadership they simply disdain. Unpopularity obligates them to criticize Bush at least mildly, but the relief they feel when his numbers edge up a bit is palpable. They don't seem to know this about themselves.


And although they will likely continue to choose to avert their eyes, impeachment is on the table.



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digby 12/21/2005 06:43:00 PM |

 
Adults Wanted


by digby


Kevin Drum has a whole bunch of good posts up today discussing the right wing reaction to the spying scandal. A more reprehensible group of moral and intellecutual cowards I have never seen.

There are the typical lies and obfuscations to which we've all become accustomed, of course, such as selectively citing passages of Supreme Court opinions that actually came to opposite conclusions and purposefully misconstruing Clinton and Carter's executive orders to imply that they had done the same thing. That's just par for the course.

But there are two things about this that do chap my hide and they are related. The first is that for 40 years --- and certainly for the last 25 since Reagan became president --- we have had to listen to endless blathering about how the Republicans want to "get the government out of your lives." "If someone says 'we're the government and we're here to help you' you should run." Rugged individualist Republicans, taking care of their own, not looking to the state to solve their problems like the betwetting girly men and manly girls on the left.

During the 90's the atmosphere was redolent with militia fevered, anti-government rhetoric that echoed throughout the right wing message infrastructure. Here's a snippet of the zeitgeist of the Gingrich revolution:

My books, such as Circle of Intrigue, Big Sister is Watching You, and Project L.U.C.I.D., tell the absolute truth about the evil powers of intimidation. It documents the crimes and schemes of the black-hooded, jackbooted thugs of the BATF and many other federal Gestapo, alphabet agencies. This hidden elite constitute the true Nazis. In fact, as fascists, they are worse than Nazis. They are "CommuNazis!"

Once upon a time, America had law enforcement of which it could be proud. No more. Today, the BATF, CIA, FBI and other federal bureaucracies continue to drag the good name of law enforcement through the gutter. As my friend, Officer Jack McLamb, recently said in a World of Prophecy interview, "The scum of law enforcement has risen to the top."

"The problem," says McLamb, "is that God is gone from government."

These were extremists, to be sure, but the language on the floor of the congress often echoed this kind of thinking. Tom Delay, for instance, called the EPA the "Gestapo of government ... a bunch of jack-booted thugs.”

They won elections in the west and the south by swaggering around extolling the blessed Bill Of Rights and the need to keep the federal government at arms length because Real Men and Women don't need no Democrat sissy nanny state and her Big Brother taking away their rights.

9/11 changed everything. Suddenly the he-men of WalMart and the NRA leaped into Big Brother's arms and shrieked "save me, save me! Do what ever you have to do, they're trying to kill us all!" They now look to Daddy Government not to discipline the children, but to check under the bed for them every night, reassure them that the boogeyman won't hurt them and then read them a nice bedtime story about spreading freedom and democracy. It turns out that underneath all this swaggering bravado, the Republicans aren't the Daddy party --- they're the baby party.

This article in the Boston Globe from yesterday (via Maha in this terrific post) gets to what I think is the central problem with this country's response after 9/11; the alleged super-hawks who were leading this country wet their pants with fear and behaved like frightened children:

In march of 1933, Franklin Roosevelt, facing the crisis of the Great Depression, said in his inaugural address that ''the only thing we have to fear is fear itself -- nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance."

The fear people felt then was not nameless, unreasoning, nor unjustified, as Roosevelt well knew. In fact, his address went on to say that ''the withered leaves of industrial enterprise lie on every side; farmers find no markets for their produce; the savings of many years in thousands of families are gone . . . Only a foolish optimist can deny the dark realities of the moment."

What Roosevelt meant was that fear can distort judgment and cloud the mind's ability to perceive right turns from wrong turns in the road to safety.

[...]

The Bush administration's predilection to torture was clearly a result of mind-clouding fear caused by the greatest terrorist attack in history on Sept. 11th, 2001. The same can be said of the excesses of the Patriot Act, and, too, the decision to use the National Security Agency to spy on American citizens without benefit of warrant as required by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

The Bush administration has shamelessly used fear to get its way. Both the president and vice president have tried to picture a withdrawal from Iraq as resulting in an Al Qaeda takeover of Iraq, and an Al Qaeda-led Caliphate stretching across the Muslim world. In reality al Qaeda hasn't the remotest chance of taking over Iraq, not with 80 percent of the population either Kurdish or Shi'ite, and a timely end to American occupation might sooner lead to an Iraqi-Sunni disenchantment with foreign terrorists.

Of course, the right has traded on fear for so long that we can hardly remember a time when they didn't. If it isn't the commies, it's the hippies or the ATF or the terrorists. And as Kevin points out they make these ridiculous decisions over and over again because they are essentially afraid of their own shadows:

The fact is, superhawks always claim their programs are vital to American security, and they almost always turn out to be wrong. We didn't need to intern Japanese-Americans during World War II, we didn't need Joe McCarthy's theatrics during the Cold War, and we didn't need COINTELPRO during the Vietnam War. And when the Church Committee outlawed the most egregious of our intelligence abuses in the 70s, guess what happened? The Soviet Union disintegrated a decade later. Turns out we didn't need that stuff after all. America is a lot stronger than its supposed defenders give it credit for.

This idea that we are living in a unique time that calls for special measures is what they always say. (And this current fantasy about the unique threat that proved our oceans couldn't protect us is particularly rich considering they fearmongered a communist threat of total annihilation for decades.) Often cooler heads are able to quell the worst excesses (like the fervent belief that we needed to launch a tactical nuclear war against the commies) and satisfy the right wing's other ongoing paranoid fantasy --- the left as a fifth column --- with silly, wasteful surveillance of animal rights groups or Quakers or former Beatles (along with pernicious surveillance of their partisan opponents.)

They are rhinestone cowboys who are scared to death and don't know how to contain their fear. So they lash out at their domestic political enemies, who they can bluster about and pretend to be tough, while hiding behind the military uniforms of their Big Brother and Preznit Daddy (which is a real stretch when it comes to Junior.)

The fact that they continue to win elections as being the tough guys perhaps says more about our puerile culture than anything else. They lash out like frightened children and too many people see that as courage or resolve.

Violent Islamic fundamentalism is a serious problem, not an existential threat. And it's a difficult problem that requires adults who can keep their heads about them when the terrorists put on their scary show, not big-for-their-age eight year olds staging a temper tantrum.





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digby 12/21/2005 11:52:00 AM |

 
Christmas Morning

Thank you all so much for your kind contributions. I am quite overwhelmed. All I want now for Christmas is well ... Fitzmas. I knew the readers and writers of the left blogosphere were top shelf, super smart, generous and kind. What I didn't realize was how brave you are: you must realize that the NSA Shift Supervisor assigned to this blog is harried beyond belief today tracking all those transactions, some of them from .... overseas. Merry Christmas, NSA supervisor.

Special thanks to the Mensches Who Saved Christmas, my fellow bloggers who linked to my post yesterday and sent readers over here, some of whom said "I've never read your blog, but here's some money anyway, because (fill in the blank) told me I should." Now that's clout. Democrats take heed:

Jane at Firedoglake, Jeralyn at Talk Left, TBOGG, The Cunningrealist, Dave at Seeing the Forest, Kevin at Catch, A Tiny Revolution, Kevin at Lean Left, Fallen Monk and various commenters were kind enough to put out the word on the their blogs and in comment threads throughout the blogosphere. (Perhaps others who I failed to catch as well.) It's the nicest thing anyone's ever done for me. And I mean that.

And thanks especially to Atrios, my blogfather, for using his valuable real estate to exhort readers to send me turkee. There are Democratic candidates out there who envy me today.

Thanks also to Sean-Paul over at the Agonist and Jake and Ellwood's dad, who heard my plaintive cry and bought ads. Kos and Jerome too. Click through, people. It'll be worth your while.

I will be sending you all individual thanks, of course, but there are quite a few of you so it will take a little time. (High class problem, eh?) I will also compile all the great advice and criticism about the site and will take it into account as I contemplate a redesign. Thanks for taking the time to let me know your thoughts and sending me your great graphic ideas. And thanks also to my pal (you know who you are) for insisting that I do this even though I was reluctant.

Finally, many of you requested a snail mail address and here it is:

Digby's Hullabaloo
2801 Ocean Park Blvd.
Box 157
Santa Monica, Ca 90405

Checks can conveniently be made out to Digby's Hullabaloo, as well. I have also been reliably informed that some of the Paypal problems may be related to stale old cookies. A few people have said that they had better luck when they cleared out their cache.


Thanks again for all of your donations and especially your kind words. They mean more to me than you will ever know.


d


Update:

More Mensches Who Saved Christmas:

John at Crooks And Liars

My good friend Peter Daou

Ian at BopNews

Da Man: James Wolcott

The fabulous Julia!

Matt at MYDD

Sadly No

The Moquol

The great Tom Tomorrow

Low and Left

Pastor Dan at Street Prophets

Three Bulls


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digby 12/21/2005 05:30:00 AM |

Tuesday, December 20, 2005

 
Stocking Stuffer Request


While everybody has their credit cards out buying a "secret Santa" moustache mug for their most hated colleague at the office, I wonder if some of you might want to throw a little cash my way while you're at it? For reasons I haven't figured out, this blog is doing miserably at selling blog-ads. Indeed, if it weren't for my friend Michael Shaw at BagNews notes (whose great graphics make any blog look better than it already does) I would have no ads at all today. During the biggest shopping season of the year, no less.

I do not know how others sell blogAds on their blogs. I belong to the
"Advertise Liberally" blog-ad network which is designed to sell across the liberal spectrum. I don't think my problems are because my ads are too expensive. I charge what everybody else charges. There have been some months that I collected a few sheckles and they really came in handy. But now, not so much.

I don't have the kind of regular community that a lot of the more popular bloggers have (although I would argue that my commenters are among the sharpest in the blogosphere) but my traffic is within the top 20 of all liberal blogs, which isn't bad for a solo blogger like myself. I've won awards, even. But one week shy of my third anniversary and I'm back to doing this for free. I may be a raving leftist, but I have to live in this capitalist world.

There is an element of the Bataan death march to daily blogging when you do it for three years running. I write slowly and do a lot of research and reading, so it takes more time than is readily evident. Every minute of it is fun, of course, but it's still ridiculous. In fact it's so much fun that I would never expect to make serious money doing it. Life could not possibly be that sweet. But I can't justify doing this without any compensation at all either. I wish to gawd that I were an eccentric billionaire who blogs psuedonymously in order to see how the little people live. Unfortunately, that is very far from the truth. (Look at it this way. If I were an eccentric billionaire, I could afford to buy my own bandwidth instead of blogging for free on blogspot, right?) No, sad to say, like most people I have those boring financial needs --- for things like shelter and food. And books. And MaxCat Senior in chicken and lamb flavor. In a blogging world where money is to be made, I just can't justify to myself that I would do it for free. I can't justify to my family that I continue turn down work for no other compensation either.

I've never asked for money on this blog before, and I will probably not ask again.(As you can gather, this embarrasses the hell out of me, which is why I'm rambling like a lunatic.) But, if you like what I do and have gotten something out of what I've written these past three years, a couple of bucks in the tip jar (in the left column over there) would be very greatly appreciated.

Oh --- and if you don't have any extra money, you could do me a big favor by just clicking on the ads I run. (I suspect that part of my problem is that I don't get much click through.) So, if you want to support me but you don't have any extra change (which I completely understand) just use my page to check out the ubiquitous blog ads. In fact, go over right now and click on BagNews notes and read what he is saying today. You won't regret it.


And Happy Hollandaise to everyone.



digby

Update: And many, many thanks to the folks who have thrown me a tip already this year, a couple of you more than once. I am very grateful.


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digby 12/20/2005 08:22:00 AM |

Monday, December 19, 2005

 
Crying Wolf

by digby

Can someone please tell the Republicans that even if the NY Times had printed the NSA story next month instead of last week that there would not have been a great swelling of Bush love over the Iraqi elections last week?

The reason the story didn't capture the public's imagination is not because the other one stepped on it; it's because we've heard it all before. The public has lost count of how many of these "milestone elections" have taken place. Each time, we are supposed to have a big group hug and congratulate ourselves for our great generosity. And then each time shit starts blowing up again in Iraq almost immediately.

The American public can hardly keep its attention on its own elections. Getting all excited about Iraqi elections that happen every few months and don't seem to mean anything just isn't going to interest them. The proof is in the pudding. Either the violence stops or it doesn't. Either we get out or we don't. The magic of the purple finger wore off months ago.



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digby 12/19/2005 07:23:00 PM |

 
Countering The Threat

by digby

Glen Greenwald takes the time to rebut Hewitt's ridiculous argument that
United States v. United States District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan et al gives the president the power to wiretap Americans at will, when the case actually does the exact opposite. Apparently, the right blogosphere is chattering about this absurd claim like a bunch of drunken magpies.

I have nothing to add except to point to my post yesterday, when I referenced the same case, to point out again the great irony in the fact that the author of that opinion was Lewis Powell, the man who inspired the Great Republican Political Machine.

Powell was not some bleeding heart liberal. He believed that the nation was under serious threat from the New Left:

William Kunstler, warmly welcomed on campuses and listed in a recent student poll as the "American lawyer most admired," incites audiences as follows:
"You must learn to fight in the streets, to revolt, to shoot guns. We will learn to do all of the things that property owners fear."2 The New Leftists who heed Kunstler's advice increasingly are beginning to act -- not just against military recruiting offices and manufacturers of munitions, but against a variety of businesses: "Since February, 1970, branches (of Bank of America) have been attacked 39 times, 22 times with explosive devices and 17 times with fire bombs or by arsonists." Although New Leftist spokesmen are succeeding in radicalizing thousands of the young, the greater cause for concern is the hostility of respectable liberals and social reformers. It is the sum total of their views and influence which could indeed fatally weaken or destroy the system.

A chilling description of what is being taught on many of our campuses was written by Stewart Alsop:

"Yale, like every other major college, is graduating scores of bright young men who are practitioners of 'the politics of despair.' These young men despise the American political and economic system . . . (their) minds seem to be wholly closed. They live, not by rational discussion, but by mindless slogans." A recent poll of students on 12 representative campuses reported that: "Almost half the students favored socialization of basic U.S. industries."

A visiting professor from England at Rockford College gave a series of lectures entitled "The Ideological War Against Western Society," in which he documents the extent to which members of the intellectual community are waging ideological warfare against the enterprise system and the values of western society. In a foreword to these lectures, famed Dr. Milton Friedman of Chicago warned: "It (is) crystal clear that the foundations of our free society are under wide-ranging and powerful attack -- not by Communist or any other conspiracy but by misguided individuals parroting one another and unwittingly serving ends they would never intentionally promote."

But nonetheless, he still didn't believe that the threat was so overwhelming that you needed to discard the constitution and give the president dictatorial powers. He had another idea:

The overriding first need is for businessmen to recognize that the ultimate issue may be survival -- survival of what we call the free enterprise system, and all that this means for the strength and prosperity of America and the freedom of our people.

The day is long past when the chief executive officer of a major corporation discharges his responsibility by maintaining a satisfactory growth of profits, with due regard to the corporation's public and social responsibilities. If our system is to survive, top management must be equally concerned with protecting and preserving the system itself. This involves far more than an increased emphasis on "public relations" or "governmental affairs" -- two areas in which corporations long have invested substantial sums.

A significant first step by individual corporations could well be the designation of an executive vice president (ranking with other executive VP's) whose responsibility is to counter-on the broadest front-the attack on the enterprise system. The public relations department could be one of the foundations assigned to this executive, but his responsibilities should encompass some of the types of activities referred to subsequently in this memorandum. His budget and staff should be adequate to the task.

But independent and uncoordinated activity by individual corporations, as important as this is, will not be sufficient. Strength lies in organization, in careful long-range planning and implementation, in consistency of action over an indefinite period of years, in the scale of financing available only through joint effort, and in the political power available only through united action and national organizations.

Clearly, they listened and created the most formidable national political machine in this country's history.

And despite his clear antipathy to everything that the left stood for, Powell went on to rule in the above cited case that the president did not have the unilateral power to eavesdrop on American citizens, no matter what "national security" reasons were cited. Guys like him understood that protecting America meant protecting the constitution above all. The Federalist Society? Not so much.



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digby 12/19/2005 05:46:00 PM |

 
The President's Program

by digby


Well now. Bush personally called the publisher and the editor of the NY Times in to the oval Office to get them not to publish the wire tapping story. Here's Jonathan Alter in Newsweek:

I learned this week that on December 6, Bush summoned Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger and executive editor Bill Keller to the Oval Office in a futile attempt to talk them out of running the story. The Times will not comment on the meeting, but one can only imagine the president’s desperation.

The problem was not that the disclosures would compromise national security, as Bush claimed at his press conference. His comparison to the damaging pre-9/11 revelation of Osama bin Laden’s use of a satellite phone, which caused bin Laden to change tactics, is fallacious; any Americans with ties to Muslim extremists—in fact, all American Muslims, period—have long since suspected that the U.S. government might be listening in to their conversations. Bush claimed that “the fact that we are discussing this program is helping the enemy.” But there is simply no evidence, or even reasonable presumption, that this is so. And rather than the leaking being a “shameful act,” it was the work of a patriot inside the government who was trying to stop a presidential power grab.

No, Bush was desperate to keep the Times from running this important story—which the paper had already inexplicably held for a year—because he knew that it would reveal him as a law-breaker. He insists he had “legal authority derived from the Constitution and congressional resolution authorizing force.” But the Constitution explicitly requires the president to obey the law. And the post 9/11 congressional resolution authorizing “all necessary force” in fighting terrorism was made in clear reference to military intervention. It did not scrap the Constitution and allow the president to do whatever he pleased in any area in the name of fighting terrorism.

We know that Cheney was intimately involved with this what with his closed briefings to certain members of congress and all. But this is the first of these scandals that really lands right on Bush's desk. It's his baby. This one's personal.



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digby 12/19/2005 05:31:00 PM |

 
TIA

Check out the handwritten letter from 2003 that Jay Rockefeller just released which completely obliterates the ridiculous defense that members of congress "approved" this action.

He makes it clear that he has very serious reservations about this program and says that since he is not a technician or a lawyer, and is prohibited from speaking with staff, experts or colleagues, he cannot properly evaluate this program.

He evokes Poindexter's TIA.

And he concludes with this:

I am retaining a copy of this communication in a sealed envelope in the secure spaces of the Intelligence Committee to ensure that I have a record of this communication.

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digby 12/19/2005 03:37:00 PM |

 
Efficiency Expert

Atrios and First-Draft have posts up highlighting one of the most egregious explanations for the NSA spying from this morning's briefing by Gonzales and NSA chief General Hayden: they didn't ask congress for permission because they were told by "certain" congressmen that they couldn't get it passed.

Gonzales:...We've had discussions with members of Congress, certain members of Congress, about whether or not we could get an amendment to FISA, and we were advised that that was not likely to be -- that was not something we could likely get, certainly not without jeopardizing the existence of the program, and therefore, killing the program. And that -- and so a decision was made that because we felt that the authorities were there, that we should continue moving forward with this program.

That's not Brownie It's not even Karl Rove. That's the Attorney General of the United States talking.

But there's more:

Q General, when you discussed the emergency powers, you said, agility is critical here. And in the case of the emergency powers, as I understand it, you can go in, do whatever you need to do, and within 72 hours just report it after the fact. And as you say, these may not even last very long at all. What would be the difficulty in setting up a paperwork system in which the logs that you say you have the shift supervisors record are simply sent to a judge after the fact? If the judge says that this is not legitimate, by that time probably your intercept is over, wouldn't that be correct?

GENERAL HAYDEN: What you're talking about now are efficiencies. What you're asking me is, can we do this program as efficiently using the one avenue provided to us by the FISA Act, as opposed to the avenue provided to us by subsequent legislation and the President's authorization.

Our operational judgment, given the threat to the nation that the difference in the operational efficiencies between those two sets of authorities are such that we can provide greater protection for the nation operating under this authorization.

Q But while you're getting an additional efficiency, you're also operating outside of an existing law. If the law would allow you to stay within the law and be slightly less efficient, would that be --

ATTORNEY GENERAL GONZALEZ: I guess I disagree with that characterization. I think that this electronic surveillance is within the law, has been authorized. I mean, that is our position. We're only required to achieve a court order through FISA if we don't have authorization otherwise by the Congress, and we think that that has occurred in this particular case.

Yes, the Bill of Rights is hell on efficiency. We really should do something about that.

They knew they were circumventing the law as written, that the congress would not agree to change it and they used a very dicey theory of presidential infallibility in wartime. They are saying that the president is re-authorizing "his program" every 45 days solely so that shift supervisors don't have to waste time with paperwork.


The original NY Times article said:

Several senior government officials say that when the special operation first began, there were few controls on it and little formal oversight outside the N.S.A. The agency can choose its eavesdropping targets and does not have to seek approval from Justice Department or other Bush administration officials. Some agency officials wanted nothing to do with the program, apparently fearful of participating in an illegal operation, a former senior Bush administration official said. Before the 2004 election, the official said, some N.S.A. personnel worried that the program might come under scrutiny by Congressional or criminal investigators if Senator John Kerry, the Democratic nominee, was elected president.

I find that interesting, don't you?

In mid-2004, concerns about the program expressed by national security officials, government lawyers and a judge prompted the Bush administration to suspend elements of the program and revamp it.

For the first time, the Justice Department audited the N.S.A. program, several officials said. And to provide more guidance, the Justice Department and the agency expanded and refined a checklist to follow in deciding whether probable cause existed to start monitoring someone's communications, several officials said.

Now, what do you suppose these "concerns" were all about?

Here's a hint:

Those involved in the program also said that the N.S.A.'s eavesdroppers might need to start monitoring large batches of numbers all at once, and that it would be impractical to seek permission from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court first, according to the officials.

I would guess that these large batches of numbers were very large indeed. So large that it would be "inefficient" go to the FISA court and seek permission after the fact.

I would further guess that these large batches of numbers include a whole shitload of Americans who have nothing to do with al Qaeda. And since they had to suspend some areas of the program in 2004, I would suspect that those numbers include some people who are of interest to the administration for reasons other than terrorism.

If I were one of those "shift supervisors" (especially if I was one who had worried about John Kerry becoming president) I'd get myself a lawyer.



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digby 12/19/2005 02:19:00 PM |

 
Passion Of The Cowboys

by digby

Will "Brokeback Mountain" play in Plano? In the movie's first weekend in the Dallas suburb where the 2004 Mel Gibson film "The Passion of the Christ" earned some of its biggest grosses, the answer appeared to be yes.

After setting a record for the per-theater average for a dramatic movie in limited openings in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco, critically acclaimed "Brokeback Mountain" faced its next obstacle as Focus Features expanded the so-called gay cowboy movie to strategically selected smaller cities.

The movie, directed by Ang Lee and starring Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal as two ranch hands who develop an enduring emotional bond, "Brokeback Mountain" took in an additional $2.36 million in its first foray outside those three metropolitan cities, rising to No. 8 at the box office, Focus Features estimated Sunday. Its 10-day total is $3.3 million.

The closely watched debut in Plano, Texas, "was a revelation about the accessibility of this movie," said Focus head of distribution Jack Foley. "This is not gay-dependent. Attendance at those theaters indicates the film has the attention of suburban moviegoers."

It was the first time since Disney's animated "Pocahontas" in 1995 that a movie in fewer than 100 theaters cracked the top 10 box office ranking, according to tracking service Nielsen EDI Inc.

Real America watches "Desperate Housewives" and drinks Starbucks and votes Democratic some too. Keep your eye on what people actually do, not what they tell some pollster they think. Popular culture is an excellent window through which you can view how people actually think and live. Right wing evangelical Christians are not a monolith, even in the red states. It's a mistake to assume they are.



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digby 12/19/2005 01:45:00 PM |

 
Checks And Balances

by digby


I'm hearing various pundits discuss how bold-yet-cadid, manly-yet-sensitive the preznit is today after finally going on offense, hitting it out of the park and turning the corner. His numbers are shooting back up and he's on firm ground.

They just love it when he spanks them:

QUESTION: I wonder if you can tell us today, sir, what, if any, limits you believe there are or should be on the powers of a president during wartime.

And if the global war on terror is going to last for decades, as has been forecast, does that mean that we're going to see, therefore, a more or less permanent expansion of the unchecked power of the executive in American society?

BUSH: First of all, I disagree with your assertion of unchecked power.

QUESTION: (OFF-MIKE)

BUSH: Hold on for a second, please.

There is the check of people being sworn to uphold the law, for starters.

There is oversight. We're talking to Congress all the time.

And on this program, to suggest there's unchecked power is not listening to what I'm telling you. I'm telling you, we have briefed the United States Congress on this program a dozen times.

This is an awesome responsibility, to make decisions on behalf of the American people. And I understand that. And we'll continue to work with the Congress, as well as people within our own administration, to constantly monitor a program such as the one I described to you, to make sure that we're protecting the civil liberties of the United States.

To say "unchecked power" basically is ascribing some kind of dictatorial position to the president, which I strongly reject.

QUESTION: (OFF-MIKE)

BUSH: I just described limits on this particular program, and that's what's important for the American people to understand. I am doing what you expect me to do and, at the same time, safeguarding the civil liberties of the country.

He's not actually lashing out at the masochistic media, no matter how much they enjoy it. He's lashing out because this is where his argument is weakest. He's trying to make the case that the congress somehow "approved" this action as a check to executive power.

This is not true. Notifying members of congress in a classified briefing they cannot disclose publicly is not a check. Intelligence committee members cannot give authorization to the president to break the law in the first place And to say that "telling" them what they are going to do and then classifying the information so they cannot reveal it amounts to a check on executive power is to invoke dictatorial powers.

As an exasperated Carl Levin just pointed out, the check on executive power in these circumstances is written into the law. It's called the FISA court. And they have not yet given any reasonable explanation as to why they could not have applied for a review within the 72 hour period they are alotted after initiating the intercepts. They keep saying that they have to move fast and cannot wait and other gibberish about "long term monitoring" none of which adequately explains why they had to break the law.

The only thing we can assume from the information we have is that they didn't want anyone, not even a rubber stamp secret court, to know who they were monitoring. Now why would that be?


The NY Times withheld certain tchnical information about this program in their story last week because of alleged national security concerns. Now that the president has admitted to authorizing it and he and his flunkies have been babbling incoherently about "moving fast" and "long term monitoring" I think it's now imperative that they tell the public the whole story.



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digby 12/19/2005 09:24:00 AM |

Sunday, December 18, 2005

 
Hot Dick On Bush Action

I also want to speak to those of you who did not support my decision to send troops to Iraq: I have heard your disagreement, and I know how deeply it is felt. Yet now there are only two options before our country – victory or defeat. And the need for victory is larger than any president or political party, because the security of our people is in the balance. I do not expect you to support everything I do, but tonight I have a request: Do not give in to despair, and do not give up on this fight for freedom.

Somebody give Richard Cohen a cigarette. (Let's hope he didn't watch this speech in public.)


I have one question for the media. Why is everyone so impressed that Bush is taking responsibility for going into Iraq? Has there ever been any question about that? We know he made the decision. He has made a fetish of taking responsibility for doing it. indeed, we watched him do it in defiance of virtually the whole world and half the country. This is not an admission of a mistake.

Likewise, admitting that there were no WMD is like admitting that the sun came up this morning. It's true, yes, but saying it is not "candor" --- it's stating the obvious.

Saying that the intelligence was wrong is not taking responsibility for getting it wrong. We know it was wrong.

These are cheap rhetorical tricks and they fall for it every single time. Some GOP hack hands them a sheet talking up the president's newfound "candor" and they all gobble it up like hungry little baby birds.



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digby 12/18/2005 06:44:00 PM |

 
Clear And Present Danger

by digby


The president says he is operating within the law because his appointed lawyers have interpreted the law to say that he has. He says that the US does not torture and he believes it. He believes it because his lawyers have told him that torture is defined as pain equal to that experienced by organ failure or death. Therefore, waterboarding, which only replicates the experience of drowning is not torture. Being shackled in unusual positions for long periods of time subject to extreme heat and cold likewise is not torture. One could argue that pulling someone's fingernails out as is shown in the film "Syriana" is not torture.

Spying on Americans is likewise legal because the president's lawyers have said that he has the authority under the constitution to spy on Americans during wartime. In fact, they have said the executive has the authority to do anything he feels is necessary during wartime, a war which he has sole authority to wage, a war which he alone defines and which has no set definition of victory.

You might think that this redefinition of what constitutes war applies only to the GWOT. But redefining war and victory also applies to the more conventional invasion and occupation of Iraq as well, which Bush also defines as a "different kind of war."

Here's how he put it in his interview with Jim Lehrer:

PRESIDENT BUSH: Well, I think that this is a different kind of a war. I mean, in World War II we think of the USS Missouri and Japan-- We surrender. However, if you think about World War II, there was still a mission to be accomplished, that Harry Truman saw through, which is to help an enemy become a democracy. We achieved a, by kicking Saddam Hussein out, you know, a milestone. But there's still work to help this country develop its own democracy and there's no question there's difficulties because of the past history and the fact that he starved an infrastructure and the reconstruction efforts have been uneven.

But victory is, against a guy like Zarqawi, is bringing him to justice. Victory is denying safe haven to al-Qaida, and victory is marginalizing those who would destroy democracy.

He compares Iraq to WWII and even discusses the surrender on the USS Missouri, which everyone in the world accepted as the end of the war. When Harry Truman went on to "accomplish the rest of the mission," he didn't do it under the auspices of the country still being at war because it wasn't. Bush has always liked this analogy, however, going back to his famous strut on another aircraft carrier when he declared "Mission Accomplished." Unfortunately, his advisors forgot to tell him that in Germany there was no insurgency, although for months Condi and Rummy were spreading lies about the Werewolf "dead-enders" in Germany, so maybe that's what they were telling him too.

In any case, the ridiculous WWII analogy should have been put on the shelf a long time ago. Yet Bush evidently continues to believes that he is saving the world from the existential threat of the Axis powers. And in his usual incoherent fashion, while seeing himself as Harry Truman he also says that "victory" in this war, which is a "different kinda war," will be won when we bring a guy like Zarqawi to justice. Or deny a safe haven to al-Qaeda. Or "marginalize those who would destroy democracy." Victory may even depend upon how the Iraqi people 'feel." In other words, we will have achieved victory when he says we have achieved victory.

Keep in mind that we are not talking about the Big Boogeyman, terrorism, here. We are talking about Iraq, a country in the middle east that we invaded and are occupying. We could just as easily be the Romans or the Turks or the British. There's nothing "different" about it. But even in Iraq we don't know what constitutes victory or defeat. Therefore, we could, theoretically, always be at war.

This is the most troubling aspect of the Yoo Doctrine. It is offensive enough that he contends that the president has completely unfettered powers during wartime. But the fact that he also believes that the president can "make war" at his discretion, define war in any way he chooses, consider "victory" to be any one or all of a thousand of unknown conditions that we may or may not be able to discern, is the truly unique factor here. And the fact that the administration is applying this vague definition of war and victory even to a conventional war like Iraq is very dangerous. It gives imperial powers forever to any president who simply says we are "at war."

It's probably important to draw some distinctions here between a legal theorist like John Yoo and Ted "Arkansas Project" Olsen, both of whom have promulgated this theory of unfettered executive power for years. In Yoo's case I have no reason to believe that this is a purely political view; he is certainly a Republican, but his belief is philosophical and academic. I would be surprised if he would come out against these powers in the hands of a Democrat. (I could be wrong.) Ted Olsen, on the other hand, is nothing more than a cheap GOP operative who will change his tune on a dime when the presidency changes parties.

Events of the last couple of days show that for most of the Republican party this is purely a political game that they will support as long as the president is a Republican. (See: Kosovo) Judging from John McCain's dodging of the question this morning, I assume that if he or any other Republican president will continue with this doctrine. He may not like torture, but he didn't seem too troubled by spying on Americans --- or the idea that the president has unfettered powers during wartime. (If anything, he looked a little bit excited by the prospect.)

There can be no doubt about where this is going. This administration has asserted a doctrine of unfettered executive power in "wartime" that will not confine itself to "suspected terrorists" as we understand them. Everything we know about human nature --- and particularly about the nature of this modern Republican party --- says that these powers will be used for domestic political purposes. That they felt they had to do this (even though they can monitor anyone they choose immediately as long as they make an application for a FISA review within 72 hours) can only raise suspicions that this is what they were doing. Coming on the heels of the pentagon spying story, you have to have overdosed on kool-aid not to wonder why they refuse to show the secret FISA court who they are monitoring. (Somebody needs to shake loose that list of NSA intercepts of American citizens John Bolton requested.)

The architect of the modern Republican Political Infrastructure, Justice Lewis Powell, said in an earlier case:

National security cases ... often reflect a convergence of First and Fourth Amendment values not present in cases of 'ordinary' crime. Though the investigative duty of the executive may be stronger in such cases, so also is there greater jeopardy to constitutionally protected speech. 'Historically the struggle for freedom of speech and press in England was bound up with the issue of the scope of the search and seizure power. History abundantly documents the tendency of Government—however benevolent and benign its motives—to view with suspicion those who most fervently dispute its policies. Fourth Amendment protections become the more necessary when the targets of official surveillance may be those suspected of unorthodoxy in their political beliefs. The danger to political dissent is acute where the Government attempts to act under so vague a concept as the power to protect 'domestic security.' Given the difficulty of defining the domestic security interest, the danger of abuse in acting to protect that interest becomes apparent. Senator Hart addressed this dilemma in the floor debate on § 2511(3):

"'As I read it—and this is my fear—we are saying that the President, on his motion, could declare—name your favorite poison—draft dodgers, Black Muslims, the Ku Klux Klan, or civil rights activists to be a clear and present danger to the structure or existence of the Government."

The administration may even be fooling itself that it needs all this "wartime" power to "protect America." But the real purpose of a government spying on its own citizens is only really about one thing --- political power. If there's anything we know about the modern Republican party it's that everything that can be done to feed the machine will be done. They are the very definition of why the founders created this ridiculously byzantine system of checks and balances --- to keep people like Ted Olsen and Karl Rove from turning this country into the tyranny like the one from which we had just freed ourselves.



Has Christopher "I heart Orwell" Hitchens weighed in on this yet? I'll be anxious to hear him try to defend this new front in the fight against Oceania.



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digby 12/18/2005 05:30:00 PM |

 
Spiking The News

Jane notes that aside from the NY Times and the NSA spying issue there were quite a few other examples of the press withholding stories before the election. I can think of a couple more that she didn't mention.

First there was the fact that 60 Minutes never showed the Niger uranium story (which they had bumped for the ill-fated National Guard expose.) They have never shown it to this day even though it has turned out to be much more relevant than the Dan Rather fiasco. And the NY Times wouldn't run the story about the suspicious bulge in Bush's jacket even though there was credible, scientific evidence that he was wearing some sort of ususual device on his back during the presidential debates (not to mention the incontrovertible evidence that we could see it with our own eyes.)

Karl Rove had blamed Bush's loss in the 2000 race on the DWI story in the final days of the campaign and complained bitterly that the press had conspired to sandbag them. (It was nonsense, of course, because the story had come from a local FOX affiliate in Maine, but no matter.)We know that the press has often bent over backwards for the Republicans since the early 90's to prove they are not politically biased. And after 9/11 they bent over backwards to prove they are not soft or unpatriotic. Withholding this story was a natural result of all those pressures.

The media need to stop rationalizing their behavior and recognise that they have, in many small and large ways, capitulated to GOP pressure for some time now and they lost their perspective. I am sympathetic to how difficult it must be to deal with the Republicans. They are aggressive, hostile and relentless. But it's gone way too far. The havoc they wreaked on domestic politicsin the 90's was bad enough. We survived a partisan impeachment circus and a dubious presidential election, but it weakened our system.

Now we are talking about national security and very serious constitutional issues. The president is openly admitting that he did things that were illegal --- and he and his supporters are asserting a defense that the president has no obligation to follow the law in wartime.

The press simply has to step up. This is serious shit; it's not about ancient land deals in Arkansas or lying about infidelity. This isn't about "sending a message." It's real and its dangerous. This democracy is dying the death of a thousand cuts and in this world of too much information, over stimulation and endless distractions we must depend upon the press to wake up and start telling the American people what they know. The president is asserting a new interpretation of the constitution and unless this country makes it very, very clear that we will not stand for it, we are in deep trouble. This won't happen unless the media does its job and tells the country the truth:

The president broke the law, admitted it and says that he will continue to do so. He did this because he believes that the president has the right to break any law he chooses in his capacity as commander in chief.

Does that sound like America?



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digby 12/18/2005 10:37:00 AM |

 
TV Guide

In case you missed it, John Amato of Crooks and Liars will be on CNN's
About the Story" again today at 1-2 p.m. ET.



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digby 12/18/2005 08:16:00 AM |

Saturday, December 17, 2005

 
Bush's Bitches

Democrats on the committee said the panel issued 1,052 subpoenas to probe alleged misconduct by the Clinton administration and the Democratic Party between 1997 and 2002, at a cost of more than $35 million. By contrast, the committee under Davis has issued three subpoenas to the Bush administration, two to the Energy Department over nuclear waste disposal at Yucca Mountain, and one last week to the Defense Department over Katrina documents.

Some experts on Congress say that the legislative branch has shed much of its oversight authority because of a combination of aggressive actions by the Bush administration, acquiescence by congressional leaders, and political demands that keep lawmakers out of Washington more than before.

Yah think?

People say the Democrats are spineless, but they are nothing to the invertebrate GOP congress who have willingly abdicated their constitutional duty to enhance the power of the president and the Republican Machine. No pride, no integrity, no standards.


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digby 12/17/2005 11:43:00 PM |

 
The Larger Truth

by digby

ReddHedd at firedoglake highlights this passage in the WaPo story about the NY Times' NSA story:

The paper offered no explanation to its readers about what had changed in the past year to warrant publication. It also did not disclose that the information is included in a forthcoming book, "State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration," written by James Risen, the lead reporter on yesterday's story. The book will be published in mid-January, according to its publisher, Simon & Schuster.

It was the following that I found truly interesting however:

The decision to withhold the article caused some friction within the Times' Washington bureau, according to people close to the paper. Some reporters and editors in New York and in the bureau, including Risen and co-writer Eric Lichtblau, had pushed for earlier publication, according to these people. One described the story's path to publication as difficult, with much discussion about whether it could have been published earlier.

As it happens, this very same thing happened a few months ago --- at the Washington Post. Only the reporter wasn't lobbying to report the news. In fact, he tried very hard to persuade his editor to hold back the news until his book came out.

Guess who:

Downie was insistent that the paper be adequately prepared for the death of Deep Throat --- whoever he was. During the past year he'd pressed Woodward to tell him the name, arguing that the current editor should know the identity of our source. Woodward had resisted.

[...]

In March Bradlee told Woodward that Downie was right; the time had come to tell the current post editor who Deep Throat was; then appropriate plans could be made to cover Felt's death. Woodward, an assistant managing editor at the paper, consented uneasily.

[...]

Woodward told Downie that the book should come out several weeks after Felt's death, and that the Post could run a pre-publication excerpt and break the news at that time.

In retrospect it was a ridiculously haphazard plan, given the excitement that would inevitably and imediately follow Felt's death without a confirmation or denial from Woodward and myself. Too much speculation was already focused on Felt.

[...]

[Downie] was adamant that the Post make the disclosure immediately after receiving the news of Felt's death. First of all, it might leak, and he didn't want to get scooped. Second, now that he knew Deep Throat's identity for certain, he could not foresee allowing an obituary of Felt to appear in the Post that did not include this rather vital news. The Post, Woodward, Bradlee, myself --- and now Downie --- would be criticized severely if Felt's identity as Deep Throat was withheld for more than a few hours after he died.

Among other considerations, it would appear that the delay was related to a commercial proposition --- the marketing of a book --- and Downie declared that he would have no part in that. He would not hold news, "and this would be news," he said. Period. Frankly, he said, he could not comprehend how Woodward could consider any delay. "You have always said that the identity of Deep Throat would be disclosed upon his death," he said, implying strongly, and perhaps in this instance correctly, that Woodward was losing touch with the daily flow of news.

("Watergate's Last Chapter" Carl Bernstein, Vanity Fair October, 2005,

No kidding. As we all learned a few weeks ago, Woodward does not particularly care about whether something is news or not.

I don't know all the facts about the NY Times, obviously; by all accounts the reason for withholding the story was because the paper capitulated to administration arguments about national security. But it looks bad. Tony Blankley used the impending book release to deride the story on Mclaughlin.

Franklin Foer and the Columbia Journalism Review seem to agree with the John Harris contention that the blogosphere's criticism of the mainstream media is a partisan crusade on both sides. It simply isn't. The left blogosphere doesn't complain that the media is too conservative or Republican. We see it as being cowardly in the face of Republican thuggishness and that's something else entirely. And it's not just editors like John Harris or Tim Russert kow towing to Republican complaints or the reporters adherence to the ridiculous conventions of "he said/she said." Those are just the obvious. The more insidious type of cowardice is that which takes scurrillous Republican tips and runs with them under the guise of "it's out there" or that simply lets them stick without bothering to put resources to debunking them. It's derisively giggling on Imus at the puerile bitchiness of GOP talking points like "earth tones" and "flip-flop" like a bunch of teen-age Heathers. It's mainstreaming rightwing hatemongers by putting Ann Coulter on the cover of Newsweek and giving Rush Limbaugh a slot on election night coverage.

This isn't about policy or partisanship. It's about a press corps that takes the easier path and capitulates to the aggressive, hostile (and sometimes seductive) Republican machine or gets so lost in their arcane standards of objectivity and journalistic ethics that the truth no longer matters.

The Bernstein article goes on to describe a ridiculous tug of war that ensued when Vanity Fair broke the Felt story a few months later and Woodward insisted that the paper not confirm the story. He believed they couldn't be sure that Felt really wanted to be released from the confidentiality agreement because he was old and couldn't be relied upon to know his own mind. He argued that it would be dishonorable to confirm it even if the whole damned world already knew about it. Keeping the secret had become a singular virtue so important that it superceded all journalistic values.

Bernstein agreed at first and then was persuaded otherwise. He wrote:

In our conviction to uphold one fundamental principle (protecting our sources) we risked violating another --- loyalty to the larger truth --- and offense that would damage the reputation of all involved: The Post, felt ourselves.

It's that --- the loyalty to the larger truth --- that we are looking for.



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digby 12/17/2005 10:53:00 PM |

 
Timely

As far as I'm concerned, this tears it. Josh Marshall says

It turns out that FISA specifically empowers the Attorney General or his designee to start wiretapping on an emergency basis even without a warrant so long as a retroactive application is made for one "as soon as practicable, but not more than 72 hours after the Attorney General authorizes such surveillance." (see specific citation, here).

"Timliness" was stated over and over again yesterday by administration apologists as the reason that they could not take the time to apply to the FISA cout for permission. That is obviously crap. They simply do not want to have to apply for permission from FISA.

As far as I'm concerned there is only one reason for that. They do not want FISA (who has only been known to deny permission one time since its inception) to find out who they are surveilling.

Wanna guess why?

Maybe we should ask John Bolton.



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digby 12/17/2005 10:15:00 PM |

 
Mao Was An Islamofascist

by digby

This is the problem with a surveillance society --- and makes me nervous as hell. I research this kind of stuff all the time. Can anybody explain why a student who has traveled abroad should be visited by the FBI because he requests "The Little Red Book" from the library?

A senior at UMass Dartmouth was visited by federal agents two months ago, after he requested a copy of Mao Tse-Tung's tome on Communism called "The Little Red Book."
Two history professors at UMass Dartmouth, Brian Glyn Williams and Robert Pontbriand, said the student told them he requested the book through the UMass Dartmouth library's interlibrary loan program.

The student, who was completing a research paper on Communism for Professor Pontbriand's class on fascism and totalitarianism, filled out a form for the request, leaving his name, address, phone number and Social Security number. He was later visited at his parents' home in New Bedford by two agents of the Department of Homeland Security, the professors said.

The professors said the student was told by the agents that the book is on a "watch list," and that his background, which included significant time abroad, triggered them to investigate the student further.

"I tell my students to go to the direct source, and so he asked for the official Peking version of the book," Professor Pontbriand said. "Apparently, the Department of Homeland Security is monitoring inter-library loans, because that's what triggered the visit, as I understand it."

Although The Standard-Times knows the name of the student, he is not coming forward because he fears repercussions should his name become public. He has not spoken to The Standard-Times.

The professors had been asked to comment on a report that President Bush had authorized the National Security Agency to spy on as many as 500 people at any given time since 2002 in this country.The eavesdropping was apparently done without warrants.

The Little Red Book, is a collection of quotations and speech excerpts from Chinese leader Mao Tse-Tung. In the 1950s and '60s, during the Cultural Revolution in China, it was required reading. Although there are abridged versions available, the student asked for a version translated directly from the original book.

The student told Professor Pontbriand and Dr. Williams that the Homeland Security agents told him the book was on a "watch list." They brought the book with them, but did not leave it with the student, the professors said.

I keep hearing that there have been no abuses of the system, that the governemnt would never spy on people who don't deserve it. But can there be any good reason why, in the name of protecting the country from terrorism, that Mao's "Little Red Book" would be considered worthy of monitoring? Unless the Justice Department is using the Patriot Act to monitor citizens for Chi-Com sympathizing (which is entirely possible) I can only assume that a terrorist somewhere read the book and quoted from it, so reading it is considered a sign of terrorist activity.

If that's the case, then I would assume that reading any revolutionary, historical or political tract that a terrorist has been known to read makes one a terrorist suspect. That's an extremely broad brush and the only way that anyone could ensure that he or she is not going to come into the cross hairs of the government would be to not read any of those books, not criticize the government, not study terrorism, marxism, or even the American and French revolutions since a terrorist somewhere may have read about those things too.

And, in typical Bushian blowback this will result in less understanding of terrorism:

Dr. Williams said he had been planning to offer a course on terrorism next semester, but is reconsidering, because it might put his students at risk.

Update: Rick Perlstein reminds me that there is one powerful American political movement that studies Mao quite closely:

In Before the Storm, p. 396 and 31, I quote from "How To Win An Election" by Barry Goldwater's campaign manager Steve Shadegg, who cites Mao Tse-tung's "valuable book on the tactics of infiltration" as an inspiration for one of his specific organizing tactics for getting Barry elected. He quotes Mao: "Give me just two or three men in a village, and I will take the village."

He also notes:

Paul Weyrich wrote, Cultural Conservatism, Theory and Practice:
"Perhaps the model for Cultural Conservatism as a political force is Chairman Mao in reverse. His theory for taking over China was to capture the countryside; isolated the cities would fall. If we think of America outside Washington as the countryside and "Inside the Beltway" as the city, his theory is right."

Perhaps the NSA heard something dicey at one of Grover Norquist's Wednesday meeting that prompted them to follow-up on anyone reading "The Little Red Book."

Grover, after all, is the connection between the movement conservatives and the Taliban.


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digby 12/17/2005 09:08:00 AM |

Friday, December 16, 2005

 
If The President Does It It's Not Illegal

by digby

Oh for Gawd's sakes. Tom Brokaw is on Matthews boo-hooing that this NSA story stepped on Junior's wonderful Iraq triumph. He explains that when you are at war you need to do things that are difficult and believes that most people in the country will agree that the administration needed to spy on Americans after 9/11. He agrees with analyst Roger Cressy (who I used to think was sane) that once the "window" of a possible impending attack closed they should have gone up to the hill and sought permission to keep spying on Americans with no judicial oversight. (I haven't heard about this "window" before. Tom and Roger both seem to have a fantasy that the administration would not simply say that the "window" remains open as long as evil exists in the world.)

Look, the problem here, again, is not one of just spying on Americans, as repulsively totalitarian as that is. It's that the administration adopted John Yoo's theory of presidential infallibility. But, of course, it wasn't really John Yoo's theory at all; it was Dick Cheney's muse, Richard Nixon who said, "when the President does it, that means it's not illegal."

This was not some off the cuff statement. It was based upon a serious constitutional theory --- that the congress or the judiciary (and by inference the laws they promulgate and interpret) have no authority over an equal branch of government. The president, in the pursuit of his duties as president, is not subject to the laws. Citizens can offer their judgment of his performance every four years at the ballot box.

After the election, George W. Bush said this:

The Post: ...Why hasn't anyone been held accountable, either through firings or demotions, for what some people see as mistakes or misjudgments?

THE PRESIDENT: Well, we had an accountability moment, and that's called the 2004 election.

He, like Nixon, believes that the president has only one "accountability moment" while he is president. His re-election. Beyond that, he has been given a blank check. And that includes breaking the law since if the president does it, it's not illegal, the president being the executive branch which is not subject to any other branch of govenrment.

John Yoo, the former deputy attorney general who wrote many of the opinion undergirding these findings (on torture as well as spying) explains that the congress has no right to abridge the president's warmaking powers. Its only constitutional remedy to a war with which they disagree is to deny funding; they can leave the troops on the field with no food or bullets.

I suspect that there are many more of these instances out there in which the administration has simply ignored the law. They believe that the constitution explicitly authorizes them to do so.


After 9/11 these people went crazy and convinced themselves that the country was in such mortal, exitential danger that this theory of imperial presidential perogative was a necessity. They say they are doing it to protect the citizens of this country. But one thing that American conservatives used to understand was that our system of government was forged by people who understood that too much power invested in one place is dangerous and that sometimes the people needed to be protected from their own government. That's fundamental to our laborious process of checks and balances and a free press. (Indeed, it was that principle on which they based their absolutist stand on the second amendment.)

Now we hear conservative commentators like Ronald Kessler, who was just interviewed (alone) on FoxNews, opining that the president did nothing illegal and was completely within his rights to spy on Americans. There is no longer any question that the government would ever abuse its power by, for instance, spying on Americans for political purposes and even if it did, we're fighting for our lives and we have to accept these infringements for our own safety. I'm quite sure he'll agree that a President Howard Dean should be given the same level of trust, aren't you?

I think the president said it best:

"If this were a dictatorship we'd have it a lot easier. Just so long as I'm the dictator."




Update:

A commenter to Larry Johnson's post over at TPM (reminding us that John Bolton was involved in some doing about NSA intercepts and American citizens) gives a nice historical view of the Yoo Doctrine:

Re: Spying on Americans and John Bolton (5.00 / 2) (#31)
by JamesW on Dec 16, 2005 -- 06:23:50 PM EST

The second part of the Yoo Doctrine is critical: it's the President, not Congress, who decides whether the country is at war or not.

In an extreme Tory argument, Yoo can just about argue that this was English 18th-century doctrine, but since Parliament rigorously controlled the purse-strings, it surely wasn't practice after 1688. [Yoo does make this argument --- ed] I doubt if English Whigs like Fox accepted the theory either, let alone American rebels.

Where Yoo surely parts company with any sane constitutional thinking since the Roman Republic is the extension that the monarch/president gets to decide what counts as a war. For George III, George Washington, Lincoln. Woodrow Wilson and FDR, war is an organised conflict between societies or social groups. Police actions against pirates, slavers, and terrorists are not war. By treating the rhetorical "war on terror", infinitely redefinable, as a real war with war's legal consequences, the Bush administration has entered the 1984 terrain of totalitarianism.

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digby 12/16/2005 02:08:00 PM |

 
Making Rove Happy

by digby


Murray Waas has a very interesting article up today that reveals that the Plame smear happened concurrently with another smear job against Francis Townsend. It's pretty clear that the cabal around Cheney has been operating as a shadow government within the White house agitating for its own policies from the beginning. (And Scooter Libby is a real piece 'o work.)

The senior staff in the Office of the Vice President adamantly opposed Townsend's appointment. The staff included two of Cheney's closest aides: Libby, then the chief of staff and national security adviser to the vice president; and David Addington, who at the time was Cheney's counsel but who has since succeeded Libby as chief of staff.

Among other things, Libby and Addington believed that Townsend would bring a more traditional approach to combating terrorism, and feared she would not sign on to, indeed might even oppose, the OVP's policy of advocating the use of aggressive and controversial tools against terror suspects. One of those techniques is known as "extraordinary rendition," in which terror suspects are taken to foreign countries, where they can be interrogated without the same legal and human-rights protections afforded to those in U.S. custody, including the protection from torture.

Libby's opposition to Townsend was so intense that he asked at least two other people in the White House to obtain her personnel records. These records showed that she had been turned down for two lesser positions in the Bush administration because of her political leanings, according to accounts provided by current and former administration officials. Libby also spoke about leaking the material to journalists or key staffers or members on Capitol Hill, to possibly undercut Townsend, according to the same accounts.

I am going to take a great speculative leap here and suggest that Rove helped Libby with the Wilson smear at least partially as a way to smooth things over after he was ordered to support Townsend. Maybe that's what led him to take that walk down the hall and tell Scoot that he'd gotten the job done with Novak.

After all, "Official A" not only mentioned that he had spoken with Novak --- he told Libby that Novak was going to write a story about it.


Libby: Junior must have blown a gasket on that Novak column about Townsend. You're slipping old man.

(High fives Addington)

Rove: Hey, you owe me one, dude. I got him to run with the Wilson thing.

Libby: Awesome!

(high fives all around.)

There have been reports that Rove was seriously pissed that he got caught up in one of Cheney's little bag jobs without having all the facts (for instance that Plame was a NOC.)


According to Waas, Novak and Rove corroborate each others' version of events in the Plame matter. Novak happened to be pursuing this story on Townsend and Plame came up at the end of the conversation:

The papers on Frances Townsend that Rove had on his desk on July 9 appear to have corroborated Rove's and Novak's accounts to prosecutors that the principal focus of their conversation was Townsend's appointment. But on the issue of Valerie Plame, prosecutors have been unable to determine whether in fact Novak was the one who first broached the subject, and whether Rove simply confirmed something that Novak already knew. Sources close to the investigation say this uncertainty is one of the foremost reasons Fitzgerald has not decided yet whether to bring criminal charges against Rove.

I'm not sure why that's relevant, actually, unless Fitz has been trying to nail Rove on a conspiracy charge. As far as I know (and contrary to an earlier Waas story) Rove apparently admitted the Novak conversation from the beginning. His problems stem from his strangely vague recollection of where he got the information and repeatedly lying about the Cooper conversation, doling out the truth only in dribs and drabs as he was absolutely forced to do so.

I wouldn't necessarily be able to prove it in a court of law, but it's obvious to anyone who's followed this story that there was a concerted effort to out Plame. This story today actually serves more as supplemental proof that the White house is a cauldron of intrigue and double dealing, a place in which it's perfectly believable that outing a CIA agent for political purposes or because of interagency pique is common practice. That's the type of people we are dealing with. But then we knew that.

But there is a little tid-bit in this article that I find very, very interesting:

Novak indicated to Rove that he was still going to write a column that would be critical of Townsend. But according to an account that Novak later provided of his conversation with Rove, he also signaled to Rove that Wilson and Plame would be the subject of one of his columns. "I think that you are going to be unhappy with something that I write," he said to Rove, "and I think you are very much going to like something that I am about to write."

On July 10, Novak's column appeared in newspapers across the country, with a headline suggested by Novak's syndicate: "Bush Sets Himself Up for Another Embarrassment."

The column referred to Townsend as another potential "enemy within." Novak opined that Townsend would likely prove disloyal to Bush, because she had been "an intimate adviser of Janet Reno as the Clinton administration's attorney general," and he pointedly noted that earlier in her career, "Townsend's boss and patron ... was [then-U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York] Jo Ann Harris, whose orientation was liberal Democratic."

Four days later, on July 14, Novak wrote his now-famous column on Plame, in which he outed her as an "agency operative."

According to the article, Rove had not been in favor of her appointment originally, but he'd been tasked by Bush to defend her in the press and by all accounts he followed orders and did that. If Novak's statement is true, then the column that Novak thought Rove was going to be unhappy about was the Townsend article. That means that Novak knew that the column about Wilson was going to make Rove happy.

In order to understand why this is significant, you have to go back and look at the column in which Novak outs Plame. It quite mildly states that the Vice President didn't send Wilson (which Wilson had never claimed) but it is not particularly critical of Wilson --- the man with whom both Rove and Libby are reported to have been obsessed. In fact, it is surprisingly complimentary:

Wilson's mission was created after an early 2002 report by the Italian intelligence service about attempted uranium purchases from Niger, derived from forged documents prepared by what the CIA calls a "con man." This misinformation, peddled by Italian journalists, spread through the U.S. government. The White House, State Department and Pentagon, and not just Vice President Dick Cheney, asked the CIA to look into it.

That's where Joe Wilson came in. His first public notice had come in 1991 after 15 years as a Foreign Service officer when, as U.S. charge in Baghdad, he risked his life to shelter in the embassy some 800 Americans from Saddam Hussein's wrath. My partner Rowland Evans reported from the Iraqi capital in our column that Wilson showed "the stuff of heroism." President George H.W. Bush the next year named him ambassador to Gabon, and President Bill Clinton put him in charge of African affairs at the National Security Council until his retirement in 1998.

Wilson never worked for the CIA, but his wife, Valerie Plame, is an Agency operative on weapons of mass destruction. Two senior administration officials told me Wilson's wife suggested sending him to Niger to investigate the Italian report. The CIA says its counter-proliferation officials selected Wilson and asked his wife to contact him. "I will not answer any question about my wife," Wilson told me.

If Novak told Rove that he would be happy with that column there can be only one reason ---- Plame. And you can see why. After all, Rove has admitted to coordinating a campaign to circulate the information about Plame after Novak's column was published.


Newsweek reported:

Wilson told NEWSWEEK that in the days after the Novak story appeared, he got calls from several well-connected Washington reporters. One was NBC correspondent Andrea Mitchell. She told NEWSWEEK that she said to Wilson: "I heard in the White House that people were touting the Novak column and that that was the real story." The next day Wilson got a call from Chris Matthews, host of the MSNBC show "Hardball."? According to a source close to Wilson, Matthews said, "?I just got off the phone with Karl Rove, who said your wife was fair game.Â" (Matthews told NEWSWEEK: "I am not going to talk about off-the-record conversations."?)

You can certainly see why Rove would be "happy" that Novak had taken the bait. It gave them the hook they needed to really go after Wilson. They were running a double game with Tenet publicly falling on his sword to calm down the yellowcake story while they were prodding the press throughout to taint Wilson as a henpecked loser who needed his wife to give him something to do.

In the end the case against Rove does appear to turn on his rolling disclosures to the prosecutor about Cooper. We pretty much knew that. But the more you hear about how this all came about the more you see what a devious, paranoid atmosphere pervades this White House. I think perhaps the country would be far better off if they were all getting blow jobs from interns instead of expending all this energy plotting against their rivals and enemies, both perceived and real.



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digby 12/16/2005 10:45:00 AM |

Thursday, December 15, 2005

 
Ain't She Sweet

by digby

Here's a beautiful woman, brimming with ambition, warmth and joie de vivre:

Irreverent humanitarian Anna Benson is not just another pretty face; she is a woman to be seen and heard. With countless magazine layouts hitting the stands, she balances her time between photo shoots, interviews, and charitable endeavors.

Anna will be featured on VH1’s highest rated show, the Fabulous Life, this summer. She has been featured in several publications, including FHM, Sports Illustrated, and The New Yorker. Her sharp wit and bold assertions make her a New York Post Page 6 and US Weekly favorite. And most recently, Anna has discovered a new hobby: Texas Hold’em. After a crash course on the game and only thirty days of practice, Anna competed in the 2005 World Series of Poker. Anna The Gold Digger Benson outlasted more than half the field of experienced poker players. WPT Champion Tuan Le acquiesced that, “Anna has a natural instinct for the game; I think she will develop into a great poker player.”

But this pretty poker diva donates more than mere good looks. Her namesake charity, Benson’s Battalion, is a nonprofit organization devoted to fighting terrorism in local communities. Founded in October of 2001 with her husband, New York Mets pitcher Kris Benson, the Battalion has assisted numerous police departments, fire departments, and Emergency Medical Services through funding for equipment, supplies, and education. The Battalion was created in response to September 11, 2001. After donating $50,000.00 to the United Way, Anna and Kris still wanted to do more, and the Battalion allows them to stay actively involved in the protection of their communities. Senator Melissa Hart honored Benson’s Battalion in congress in the early part of 2004.

The minimal time that Anna has left is dedicated to managing her husband’s career, raising her three children, and contributing countless hours to several local charities, such as The American Red Cross, The Salvation Army, and St. Barnabas Hospital, where she has presided over “Presents for Patients” for the past four years. However, it is The Children’s Hospital that remains particularly close to Anna’s heart because it allows her to bring joy to children who have otherwise experienced so much pain. This love for children inspires Anna’s newest endeavors, including lobbying for children’s rights on Capitol Hill. She is a true humanitarian with a heart of gold and is always trying to make life better for society.

She's as beautiful on the inside as she is on the outside. Here are some of her humanitarian writings:

I honestly have to tell you…I hate your fucking guts. Forget about how un-American you are, how politically retarded you are, or how fat you look while slobbering your political garbage all over everyone, mainly, I despise you for the fact that you make money off of influencing the young minds of America to be Bush-haters.

You are a pariah to our nation…a fat kid that got beat up by the jocks at school, and this has formulated your hatred of America. If I didn’t know any better, I would thing George W. himself went to school with you and kicked the shit out of your pie-hole everyday for being such a candy-ass. If you are so passionate about politics, use some of your blood-making money to make it a better place instead of making movies that only benefit your fat-ass fanny-pack. No one likes to see Hollywood try to engage our minds with their ridiculous and one-sided political rants during award ceremonies. Your “movies” are just a façade for your own political agenda, which, by the way, is fucking warped.

You are a selfish, pathetic excuse for an American, and you can take your big fat ass over to Iraq and get your pig head cut off and stuck on a pig pole. Then, you can have your equally as fat wife make a documentary about how loudly you squealed while terrorists were cutting through all the blubber and chins to get that 40 pound head off of you. I dare you to go to Iraq and diarrhea all over our soldiers; they would love to strip you naked in the streets and leave you so that the terrorists can pick you up and dispose of you the way terrorists do. If you believe that Iraq and Al-Queda were not together, go over there and see for yourself.

Perhaps someone should ask for her thoughts on how the coarsening of the culture affects children the next time she testifies before congress. She's an expert.




Link care of Tom Watson via James Wolcott.



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digby 12/15/2005 06:24:00 PM |

 
Tom Delay and Charlie Manson

by digby

Matthews mentioned the fact on his show today that Nixon got in trouble for saying that Charles Manson was guilty while he was still on trial. It's true. It was a big brouhaha because it used to be considered very inappropriate for a president to weigh in on the guilt or innocence of a defendent because of the possibility he might taint the Jury Pool.

As most of you know, Rick Perlstein is currently writing a book about Nixon's America. He tipped me to this fascinating little blast from the past. As he was exhorting the nation to respect the judicial system, here's what Nixon said:

I noted, for example, the coverage of the Charles Manson case when I was in Los Angeles, front page every day in the papers. It usually got a couple of minutes in the evening news. Here is a man who was guilty, directly or indirectly, of eight murders without reason.

Here is a man, yet, who, as far as the coverage was concerned, appeared to be rather a glamorous figure, a glamorous figure to the young people whom he had brought into his operations and, also, another thing that was noted was the fact that two lawyers in the case--two lawyers who were, as anyone who could read any of the stories could tell, who were guilty of the most outrageous, contemptuous action in the courtroom and who were ordered to jail overnight by the judge--seem to be more the oppressed, and the judge seemed to be the villain.

The response was fierce. Here's Ron Zeigler trying to spin his way out of it:

"The President, in his remarks to you in this room earlier, was, of course, referring to the focus of attention and the dramatics that are oftentimes put on various criminal acts, alleged criminal acts.

"Quite obviously, the President in his remarks regarding the trial now underway was referring to allegations that had been raised and are now in a court of law.

"If you take the President's remarks in the context of what he was saying, there is no attempt to impute liability to any accused. The gist of his statement was just the contrary.

"I think when he concluded his statement in reference to the system, in concluding his remarks to you, he made it very clear that it is important that in our system, as it does exist, that individuals have the right of fair trial, although, apparently, many of you understood it to mean something other than as the President intended it in his total remarks, to suggest that he was referring to something other than the obvious, and that is the fact that he was referring to the allegations against Mr. Manson and the others on trial in Los Angeles."

You can see why the Republicans later decided to simply go ahead and make a robot the press secretary.

Yesterday, Bush said he unequivocally believed that Tom Delay was innocent. Now one could make a case that a president should always go with a presumption of innocence. But he didn't do that with Duke Cunningham who he said should be condemned if he did the things he is accused of. When asked about DeLay, Bush's jaw just clenches and he says outright that he thinks he's is innocent.

Here's the tape at Crooks and Liars You have to see how he looked when he said it to appreciate how bizarre it was. He looks as though he's just been goosed with an electric cattle prod. (I think perhaps the best explanation for Bush's inappropriate jury tampering is that old Hot Tub Tom has some fond memories (and pictures) of Junior during his pre-Jesus years.)

Of course, the conservative base has intensely rallied around Delay from the beginning:

Morton Blackwell, Republican National Committee member from Virginia and a member of ACU's board, said Republicans are being told support for Mr. DeLay is mandatory if they want future support from conservatives.

"Conservative leaders across the country are working now to make sure that any politician who hopes to have conservative support in the future had better be in the forefront as we attack those who attack Tom DeLay," he said.

And then we all know that the christian right has, for reasons that are unclear, decided that a man named "the hammer" is a quasi-religious figure. Karl is desperate to keep the conservative evangelicals in the republican column, so supporting this criminal, power mad thug could also be seen as a small battle in the War on Christmas.

Still, it is a little bit unusual for a president to utter such unequivocal support for someone under indictment and in the crosshairs of a very serious justice department probe. But then if he didn't he wouldn't have any friends or supporters at all, would he. Remember this presidential pal and criminal defendent?

Soon heading to trial, the former Enron CEO implores -- before a wealthy crowd -- company employees to "stand up" for him.

While most people accused of corporate crimes keep a low profile before going to trial, former Enron CEO Kenneth Lay defended himself in the court of public opinion on Dec. 13 at a luncheon in Houston. Lay portrayed himself as a martyr persecuted by overzealous federal prosecutors more intent on getting a conviction than seeking the truth. He said prosecutors were engaged in a "wave of terror," intimidating potential witnesses who could clear his name and prove that Enron "was a real company, a substantial company, an honest company."

Lay pointed the finger of blame at Andrew Fastow, Enron's former chief financial officer, who pleaded guilty to conspiracy and securities fraud last year. Fastow is expected to testify against Lay and two other former Enron executives, Jeffrey Skilling and Richard Causey, when the three are tried together for various corporate crimes next month. Lay said he was guilty only of being "too trusting" of Fastow. He said it was the "stench" of Fastow's misconduct that led the investing public to lose confidence in Enron.

UNUSUAL VENUE. And Enron's fall? Lay argued that it was "public hysteria" that doomed the company rather than its business fundamentals. "Enron's bankruptcy was caused by liquidity problems, not by solvency problems. The company's on- and off-balance-sheet assets exceeded its liabilities by billions of dollars," he said. Indeed, he claimed that Enron would still be a going concern if investors hadn't panicked.

Lay chose to argue his case before the Houston Forum, a well-heeled group that engages prominent speakers like Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.) and former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. It certainly was an unusual venue. Others charged with corporate crimes like, Tyco's (TYC ) Dennis Koslowski and ImClone's (IMCL ) Samuel Waksal, stood stoically behind their lawyers in public and couldn't be brought to utter even "no comment."

Says Houston attorney, David Berg, who defends white-collar criminals and follows the Enron case: "I'd never let a client make a speech like that because his words can and will be used against him."

"AGAINST THE WALL." It reminded Berg of Skilling's testimony during congressional hearings in 2002: "It's the ultimate in hubris for these guys to spout off like that," Berg says, adding that for Lay to deliver his speech before a wealthy crowd in a ballroom at an expensive hotel didn't help him, either.

Lay's attorney Mike Ramsey says the speech wasn't intended to influence jurors, which have already been selected, since the people attending the luncheon "are too smart to get on a jury that's going to last six months." Rather, Ramsey says, "Our backs are against the wall" in getting witnesses to help with Lay's defense. "We're trying to get Enron employees to speak out."

I guess down there in texas juries like being called stupid. Interesting defense tactic.

Bush doesn't defend Lay, of course. He just denies that he ever knew him. The bubble gets smaller and smaller.



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digby 12/15/2005 02:55:00 PM |

Wednesday, December 14, 2005

 
Losing His Woody

ReddHedd at Firedoglake noticed something in the Novak story this morning that I missed. It says:

Woodward, a Washington Post editor, recently disclosed that he, too, had been told by an administration figure about Plame's secret identity -- probably, he said, by the same source who told Novak.

ReddHedd explains:

This passage was a little mystical for me, so I confirmed with Rob Christenson that, indeed, that was what was intended, and was told that "Novak made the comment in his speech -- referring to earlier remarks by Woodward."

I haven't heard that before either. If that's true, we can assume that the prosecutor had already spoken with Woodward's source since it's clear that Novak named his sources. And if that's so then it's clear that this source (who Novak described as "not a partisan gunslinger") was not forthcoming with the prosecutor.

I have thought that it was possible that Woodward could have actually heard this as gossip if it came from Armitage at the end of a conversation. But if this source (whether Armitage or someone else) told more than one reporter, then that's obviously ridiculous. Woodward and Novak have both simply refused to admit that they were spun like tops.

Woodward has behaved as if Fitzgerald was a Ken Starr zealot trying to frame innocent administration officials and dig willy nilly into reporters' address books so they could charge whistleblowers with a crime. Now, I don't know where he got that impression, but it certainly wasn't from prosecution leaks. Other reporters had testified under the waivers and none of them had complained that the prosecutor was out of line in his questioning. Woodward was one of the very few, even among the press and the strong defenders of the reporter's privilege in the Miller/Cooper case, who seemed to think that Fitzgerald personally was some sort of zealot.

Therefore, Woodward must have been talking to people who thought it was in their best interest to give that impression to good old Bob, the faithful transcriber. People who had something to gain by making Bob Woodward think that Fitzgerald was out of control. People who knew that Bob Woodward was writing the official history of the White house during this period.

And Bob dutifully believed those people. He believed they were just gossiping, not leaking. And he believed that Fitzgerald was a junkyard dog going way beyond his mandate seeking any reason he could to indict members of the administration and jailing reporters for refusing to spill every secret they hold.

Woodward now says that he was very surprised that the prosecutor wasn't searching madly for any possible crime with which he could charge the administration. In fact, he was quite professional and respected the reporters' privilege, keeping narrowly to the area of questions they'd agreed to discuss. One can only hope that Woodward has had his eyes opened a little bit about how he has been played for a fool by this administration (although I doubt it.)

Novak is just mad that the administration didn't shut down this silly investigation. He knew what was going on from the get. Woodward actually seems to have thought his sources always tell him the truth.



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digby 12/14/2005 10:41:00 AM |

 
Breaking News

by digby

CNN is reporting live at a motor vehicle accident in Los Angeles. Fire trucks and ambulences are on the scene. The whole nation must be riveted.

In other breaking national news, a reservoir broke in Lesterville, Missouri. One home was flooded and five people are in the hospital. So far the Dam is holding.

Oh, and the terrorists are still trying to take over the world.

Gotta go. The governor of Missouri is speaking live.



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digby 12/14/2005 10:13:00 AM |

 
Run For Your Lives!

by digby

I don't know why he's never told us this before, but the president just said that the terrorists are trying to expell the US from the middle east so that they can establish an Islamic Empire that stretches from Spain to Indonesia! And then they want to use Iraq as a base from which to launch attacks against America!

The terrorists are trying to take over the world!

If ever there was a time for the 101st Fighting Keyboarders to suit up and g-o, it is now. The American way of life is at stake.

(Alternatively, you could just keep buying cheap useless shit. That's another good way to sacrifice.)



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digby 12/14/2005 08:29:00 AM |

 
Ask Junior

by digby

Newspaper columnist Robert Novak is still not naming his source in the Valerie Plame affair, but he says he is pretty sure the name is no mystery to President Bush.

"I'm confident the president knows who the source is," Novak told a luncheon audience at the John Locke Foundation in Raleigh on Tuesday. "I'd be amazed if he doesn't."

"So I say, 'Don't bug me. Don't bug Bob Woodward. Bug the president as to whether he should reveal who the source is.' "

[...]

Novak said his role in the Plame affair "snowballed out of proportion" as a result of a "campaign by the left."

But he also blamed "extremely bad management of the issue by the White House. Once you give an issue to a special prosecutor, you lose control of it."

And here I thought the president believed that they would never know who it was because reporters always protect leakers.

I also wonder exactly how Novak's role in the Plame affair snowballed out of proportion because of a campaign by the left. Last I heard, Novak was the preferred wingnut Karl Rove used to out a CIA agent for revenge so that he could "get it out there" and then circulate the story all over town. Was his "role" actually less significant than that? What does Bob think worked the best for "the left's" non-existent campaign ---all the non-existent Democratic congressional hearings or the non-existent non-stop coverage by the liberal cable networks? I know the lefty blogs are very, very heavy duty political players and all, but as I recall they were the only form of "media" that cared about this story for more than five minutes. IIRC, the guy who really kicked things off was a senior administration official who told the washington post that the outing was done purely for revenge. Unless he or she is a lefty plant, the "campaign" really took off from there.

Once again, it's comforting to see that right wing victimology hasn't been diminished by its enormous power.



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digby 12/14/2005 07:48:00 AM |

Tuesday, December 13, 2005

 
Deep Throat

by digby

Something has gone terribly wrong at the Washington Post. And I'm not just talking about pauvre tinkerbell.

Get a load of Cohen:

To read George Packer's "The Assassin's Gate" is to be reminded that the Iraq war is not the product of oil avarice, or CIA evil, but of a surfeit of altruism, a naive compulsion to do good. That entire collection of neo- and retro-conservatives -- George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and particularly Paul Wolfowitz -- made war not for oil or for empire but to end the horror of Saddam Hussein and, yes, reorder the Middle East.

They were inept. They were duplicitous. They were awesomely incompetent, and, in the case of Bush, they were monumentally ignorant and incurious, but they did not give a damn for oil or empire. This is why so many liberals, myself included, originally supported the war. It engaged us emotionally. It seemed . . . well, right -- a just cause.

It would be nice if Hollywood understood that. It would be nice if those who agree with Hollywood -- who think, as Gaghan does, that this is a brave, speaking-truth-to-power movie when it's really just an outdated cliche -- could release their fervid grip on old-left bromides about Big Oil, Big Business, Big Government and the inherent evil of George Bush, and come up with something new and relevant. I say that because something new and relevant is desperately needed. Neoconservatism crashed and burned in Iraq, but liberalism never even showed up. The left's criticism of the war from the very start was too often a porridge of inanities about oil or empire or Halliburton -- or isolationism by another name. It was childish and ultimately ineffective. The war came and Bush was reelected. How's that for a clean whiff?

I detect a whiff of something, that's for sure. And it's definitely the good shit.

I suppose you could call Bush an idealist. That whole smoking gun in a mushroom cloud thing was quite the inspiration. It's right up there with "ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country."

How about this for a new and relevant liberal argument: anyone who supported the war was a fool or an asshole because it was patently obvious by 2002 that this country was in the hands of an insane megalomaniacal Republican machine and the braindead sycophantic mediawhores who gratefully dined on their droppings. Anyone with half a brain knew that it wasn't a good idea to give a blank check to crazed power mad freaks to start invading, torturing and killing at their discretion. Most of the world agreed. Not complicated. Not idealistic. Plain. Fucking. Common. Sense.


Clearly, Cohen is the model for a "good" liberal at the Washington Post these days. He doesn't upset the White House or Patrrick Ruffini one little bit.

November 24, 2000:

"Given the present bitterness, given the angry irresponsible charges being hurled by both camps, the nation will be in dire need of a conciliator, a likable guy who will make things better and not worse. That man is not Al Gore. That man is George W. Bush."

What a good boy. He just loves him some Junior.


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digby 12/13/2005 09:14:00 PM |

 
Spinning Fitz

by digby


Last night it looked as though Jim VandeHei had broken the Plame case wide open when he said on Hardball that Stephen Hadley had told Rove about Plame. Today, the WaPo is backtracking, saying that VandeHei meant Libby, not Rove. VandeHei wrote last October:

White House adviser Karl Rove told the grand jury in the CIA leak case that I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, may have told him that CIA operative Valerie Plame worked for the intelligence agency before her identity was revealed, a source familiar with Rove's account said yesterday.

In a talk that took place in the days before Plame's CIA employment was revealed in 2003, Rove and Libby discussed conversations they had had with reporters in which Plame and her marriage to Iraq war critic Joseph C. Wilson IV were raised, the source said. Rove told the grand jury the talk was confined to information the two men heard from reporters, the source said.

This is very likely to be the "official A" conversation mentioned in the Libby indictment:

On or about July 10 or July 11, 2003, LIBBY spoke to a senior official in the White House (“Official A”) who advised LIBBY of a conversation Official A had earlier that week with columnist Robert Novak in which Wilson’s wife was discussed as a CIA employee involved in Wilson’s trip. LIBBY was advised by Official A that Novak would be writing a story about Wilson’s wife.

(Assuming he isn't covering for a sourse who told him Hadley was Rove's original source) VandeHei's comment yesterday indicates that he thinks it makes sense that Rove "learned" about Plame in the very same conversation in which he told Libby he'd confirmed Plame's CIA status to Bob Novak. I think that's ridiculous and I suspect that this is one of the bizarre Rovian explanations that keeps Rove in Fitz's sites.

I was trying to explain how we got to this point to a friend who had lost the threads of this story and so I wrote a little primer, as I understand it. I thought that some readers might find it useful:

The Rove version of events seems to be that Rove heard about Plame from "someone outside the white house" whose identity he can't remember. Although he lied about it to the FBI, he admitted to the Grand Jury that he confirmed that Plame was CIA to Bob Novak and that Novak told him that he was going to write a story about it. But he also said that it wasn't until July 10th or 11th, when he happened to be chattering in the office to Libby about this Novak call, that he really learned about Plame. He then spoke to Matt Cooper (on the morning of the 11th) spilled the beans about Plame, shot off an e-mail to Hadley saying that he "didn't take the bait" --- and then forgot all about that Cooper conversation and the e-mail.

He didn't remember talking to Cooper when, just a week after the conversation, all hell broke loose in Washington when Novak's column came out and it was revealed that Plame was an NOC.

He didn't remember when he was asked to search for any documentation about Wilson and he didn't find that e-mail to Hadley either.

He didn't remember the conversation with Cooper when the FBI talked to him and he didn't remember it when he first testified before the Grand Jury.

It wasn't until the following spring when Viveca Novak "pushed back" Bob Luskin, revealing that she knew Rove was Cooper's source and Luskin then fortuitously "found" the missing e-mail, that Rove apparently remembered the conversation.

Oddly, throughout this time he apparently did remember the Novak confirmation. And it would seem (although we don't know this) that he remembered the Libby conversation from the beginning while completely forgetting he talked to Cooper or wrote an e-mail to Hadley on the very same day.

After the miracle e-mail appears, Rove testifies to the GJ in October of 2004 about his conversation with Cooper. He has no reason to worry about what Cooper might say because even though he issued a "waiver", Cooper is refusing to testify and he and TIME are fighting all attempts to get them to cooperate.

At this point, it appears that all anyone knows is "gossip" that Cooper and Rove spoke. Rove says the Plame matter was a passing reference in a conversation about welfare reform.

But TIME, surprisingly, gives up the notes the next summer when the Supreme Court refuses to take the appeal and Cooper's lawyer finds a way to get Rove to release Cooper from his promise on the day he is slated to go to jail. Unfortunately for Rove, Cooper testifies (and his notes confirm) that Rove never mentioned welfare reform and spoke at greater length and in much greater detail about Plame than he had testified to earlier.

Again,it seems that Rove has not been completely forthcoming with the prosecutor.

Fitzgerald apparently did not buy the convenient Hadley e-mail memory restoration business. (He may have been convinced that other aspects of Rove's story don't add up either.) He was ready to indict. It is supposedly at this point that Luskin comes forward with yet another piece of previously undisclosed information --- reporter Viveca Novak is the one who set him on the trail of the Hadley e-mail back in the first part of 2004, long before Karl could have known that Cooper was on the hot seat. How this is supposed to exonerate Rove, we still don't know.

According to VandeHei, Luskin says that this conversation took place in January of 2004 and Luskin told Rove about it before he went before the grand jury:

One possible explanation of why the date is so important is that Luskin could contend it would have been foolish for Rove to try to cover up his role when he knew -- because of Novak's disclosure to Luskin -- that a number of people knew he had talked to Cooper and that it probably would soon become public.

The "why would he do something so stupid" defense rarely works and Luskin knows it. If this is his story he just threw the Hail Mary to the wrong end zone. In fact, the story is so absurd that VandeHei's the only one who's reporting it.

The conventional wisdom is that Luskin claimed that he started the e-mail search after he talked to Viveca Novak in either March or May, prompting Rove to go before the grand jury in October to say the e-mail jogged his memory and he now remembered the whole thing. We all assume that this is a crappy defense because it wouldn't have taken between March and October (or May and October) to locate this e-mail. (But as Jeralyn points out, it's possible that Luskin turned this e-mail over and offered up Rove's recantation earlier than October and that Fitzgerald just didn't call him to testify before then for unknown reasons.)

I don't know how relevant it is but there seems to be a discrepancy between what Luskin and Viveca Novak told Fitzgerald. According to Novak, Fitzgerald spoke to her informally for a couple of hours on Novemnber 10th. She says that she couldn't remember when she spoke with Luskin but it was most likely May. We know that he then put Robert Luskin himself under oath on December 2, 2005. (By all acouunts, it is highly unusual to put a suspect's lawyer under oath.) Fitz then called Novak and requested she come in again to testify under oath this time. She says that she discovered by that time that that she had also spoken with Luskin in March but she still doesn't know when she spilled the beans about Rove and Cooper.

I'm sure there are missing elements in what we know of Rove's story, but this is the gist of what we know:

He lied to the FBI about being Novak's source. He says he has forgotton important conversations and when he belatedly does remember them, he remembers them very differently than others do. He only "finds" important documents months after they are subpoenaed and when they can be used to bolster his evolving explanations. At the final hour, just as he is about to be indicted, his lawyer comes forward with yet more undisclosed information.

Time after time, Rove has played Fitzgerald for a chump, doling out bits of information only as he has to as if he were playing the Washington spin game instead of dealing with a federal prosecutor. But unlike the credulous DC press corps, who seem to have trouble keeping this story straight in their minds, Fitzgerald has a cadre of prosecutors and FBI agents, as well as a memory like a steel trap, that is keeping track of all this. Rove can't spin his way out of this.



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digby 12/13/2005 10:31:00 AM |

Monday, December 12, 2005

 
Bada Bing

by digby


The reporter editor who raises questions about the appropriateness of Dan Froomkin's column is John Harris --- the same guy featured in this interview:

Paul McLeary: You covered the Clinton presidency for the Washington Post from 1995 to 2001, and during that contentious second term, what was your general take on the mood of the press corps in response to Clinton and his policies?

John F. Harris: The mood of the press corps was oftentimes kind of sour -- sour in both directions. People tend to forget, for understandable reasons because the Lewinsky scandal was such a sensational affair, that 1997 was in its own way a very sullen, snippy, disagreeable year in the relationship between the White House and the press. Most news organizations -- the Washington Post included -- were devoting lots of resources, lots of coverage, to the campaign fund-raising scandal which grew out of the '96 campaign, and there were a lot of very tantalizing leads in those initial controversies. In the end they didn't seem to lead anyplace all that great.But there were tons of questions raised that certainly, to my mind, merited aggressive coverage.

Now who exactly, was asking all those "questions" do you suppose? And who, exactly, is giving John Harris and the rest of the Washington Post a hard time about Dan Froomkin today? If you guess that it's Republicans, you'd undoubtedly be right.

Here's a fun example of how this works:

Russert: Libby called me to complain about something he had seen on MSNBC...

Imus: What did he complain about on MSNBC, do you remember?

Russert: I haven't gone into it,--you know-publicly-cause I just didn't want to get involved with all that viewer complaints, but I do remember it because of his language that he chose and that's why- I actually called Ben Shapiro, the president of NBC news and said I just gave your direct line to this guy named Lewis Scooter Libby, who is upset about something he watched on TV and you may hear from him.

I understand that the press comes under tremendous pressure when they write negative things about the administration. Their access dries up. They are frozen out of the scoops. Their bosses are called and they are asked to explain themselves. The other day when all the news outlets were gleefully reporting that Bush had come back up in the polls a bit, I could understand that the reporters were tremendously relieved to get the Republican attack dogs off their backs with a little good news for their boy.

That's how things work. We get that. But please don't blow smoke up our asses about "credibility" ok? We know what's going on. The Republicans operate like the Sopranos. And they're just as dumb. If the media would report this crap up front, we could put an end to this nonsense.


Update: Harris shakes out his lace cuff, takes a long whiff of snuff and puts Froomkin in his slaggardly, bloggy place.

Fine. Fuck it. Change the name if it bothers the "real" white house reporters so much. Call it The Whorehouse Report. It amounts to the same thing.


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digby 12/12/2005 03:13:00 PM |

 
Novakula Rises

Via Kos, I see that Bob Novak is reporting that Republicans are begging Katherine Harris to drop out of the Florida senate race. Wasn't that the issue that old Bob and James Carville were bantering about when Novak lost it on the air?

ED HENRY: katherine harris went onto the house of representatives. now she wants to move over to the united states senate. today she got the news that the speaker of the florida house won't challenge her for the republican nomination. she is blaming unnamed newspapers for tarnishing her image by doctoring her makeup with photo shop. that computer program. bob, have you been investigating this story?

BOB NOVAK: no, but i've had the same experience that she did. a lot of my trouble in the world is they've doctored my makeup and the colorized me in a lot of newspapers on my picture. i sympathize with her.

HENRY: who did it?

NOVAK: i can't tell you.

JAMES CARVILL: yeah, the two happiest people in america today about this decision is bill nelson and jay leno. i mean --

HENRY: bill nelson the democratic senator.

CARVILLE: and jay leno. they're going to go nuts over this. they're messing with my makeup. you don't know who it is. i mean, let's say this. she's going to be good for the humor circuit and the speech circuit. she's good for a lot. i think that nelson, it's no secret the white house wanted the speaker to run. i suspect the nelson people are feeling pretty good here today.

NOVAK: a couple of points here. the first place, don't be too sure she's going to lose. all the establishment's against her. i've seen these republican -- anti-establishment candidates do pretty well. ronald reagan, i guarantee you the establishment wasn't for him. we just elected a senator from oklahoma, senator tom colebert, everybody in the establishment was against him. she might get elected. [CROSS TALK]

NOVAK: let me finish what i'm going to say, james. i know you hate to hear me

CARVILLE: he's got to show she is right wingers he's got backbone. show them you're tough.

NOVAK: i think that's bullshit and i hate that. just let it go.

I don't know that this has anything to do with anything. I just thought it would be fun to relive the moment when Novak was forced to go back into his coffin for the duration.



Transcript via Wonkette.


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digby 12/12/2005 02:50:00 PM |

 
Closure

I have turned off all the cable news stations for the rest of the day. Watching the macabre death watch of Stanley Williams gives me the same sick feeling in my gut that seeing those videos of hostages in Iraq does. The endless slide show of pictures of the guy while a little clock in the corner counts down the hours until he will be killed is beyond my ken. I just don't see how this helps anything. Life without parole sounds like civilized justice to me. This state sanctioned cold-blooded execution stuff is something else entirely.

In other news, Mexico just outlawed the death penalty, leaving the United States among the following countries that allow it:


* Afghanistan
* Antigua and Barbuda
* Bahamas
* Bahrain
* Bangladesh
* Barbados
* Belarus
* Belize
* Botswana
* Burundi
* Cameroon
* Chad
* China (People's Republic)
* Comoros
* Congo (Democratic Republic)
* Cuba
* Dominica
* Egypt
* Equatorial Guinea
* Eritrea
* Ethiopia
* Gabon
* Ghana
* Guatemala
* Guinea
* Guyana
* India
* Indonesia
* Iran
* Iraq
* Jamaica
* Japan
* Jordan
* Kazakhstan
* Korea, North
* Korea, South
* Kuwait
* Kyrgyzstan
* Laos
* Lebanon
* Lesotho
* Liberia
* Libya
* Malawi
* Malaysia
* Mongolia
* Nigeria
* Oman
* Pakistan
* Palestinian Authority
* Philippines
* Qatar
* Rwanda
* St. Kitts and Nevis
* St. Lucia
* St. Vincent and the Grenadines
* Saudi Arabia
* Sierra Leone
* Singapore
* Somalia
* Sudan
* Swaziland
* Syria
* Taiwan
* Tajikistan
* Tanzania
* Thailand
* Trinidad and Tobago
* Uganda
* United Arab Emirates
* United States
* Uzbekistan
* Vietnam
* Yemen
* Zambia
* Zimbabwe


Interesting company, isn't it? With the exception of Belize, Guatamala and some Caribbean islands we are the only country in North America, South America or Europe to have the death penalty.

Can someone explain to me again about how we are defending western civilization against the barbarians. I don't think I quite understand it.


Update: Guyana is in S. America and Belarus is in Eastern Europe. My bad. Point stays the same.


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digby 12/12/2005 02:45:00 PM |

 
Push Back

by digby

Is it really true that it's ethical for one journalist to reveal a colleague's confidential source to a third source?

I'm in desperate need of an emergency panel on blogger ethics because I'm confused. David Corn says that Viveca Novak screwed up by not telling her editors that Luskin was using a conversation she'd never mentioned to anyone as a get out of jail card for Karl Rove. That sounds right to me. She really should have told her editors. This was a big story and had they known about Luskin's reaction perhaps they would have pursued the story differently and gotten the truth out to the public.

But Corn also says that she did nothing wrong when she told Luskin that Rove being Matt Cooper's source was all over TIME magazine, which I really don't understand at all. Novak herself admits that it was a mistake:

Toward the end of one of our meetings, I remember Luskin looking at me and saying something to the effect of "Karl doesn't have a Cooper problem. He was not a source for Matt." I responded instinctively, thinking he was trying to spin me, and said something like, "Are you sure about that? That's not what I hear around TIME." He looked surprised and very serious. "There's nothing in the phone logs," he said. In the course of the investigation, the logs of all Rove's calls around the July 2003 time period--when two stories, including Matt's, were published mentioning that Plame was Wilson's wife--had been combed, and Luskin was telling me there were no references to Matt. (Cooper called via the White House switchboard, which may be why there is no record.)

I was taken aback that he seemed so surprised. I had been pushing back against what I thought was his attempt to lead me astray. I hadn't believed that I was disclosing anything he didn't already know. Maybe this was a feint. Maybe his client was lying to him. But at any rate, I immediately felt uncomfortable. I hadn't intended to tip Luskin off to anything. I was supposed to be the information gatherer. It's true that reporters and sources often trade information, but that's not what this was about. If I could have a do-over, I would have kept my mouth shut; since I didn't, I wish I had told my bureau chief about the exchange. Luskin walked me to my car and said something like, "Thank you. This is important."

She says she was uncomfortable. She hadn't intended to "tip Luskin off." If she had a do-over, she would have kept her mouth shut. Yet Corn insists that she did nothing wrong.

Although Corn expends a great deal of energy lighting up the straw man, I haven't seen anyone accusing her of being a right wing operative. It's not her politics that are at issue. It's her ethics. "Pushing back" shouldn't include exposing her colleague Matt Cooper's source to a third party. She ended up becoming part of the story and the investigation because of that. It's a major screw up that shines yet another bright light on the curious ethical habits of the DC establishment.

Apparently others at TIME magazine, not just Cooper and his editors, knew that Karl Rove was personally blabbing to the press that Plame was CIA. (Half of Washington seems to have known it.) Viveca Novak knew and blabbed it to Karl Rove's lawyer over drinks at Cafe Deluxe, Lawrence O'Donnell knew and kept it secret for months because he didn't want to be subpoenaed and God knows how many other people knew it and passed it on to other privileged insiders or kept it to themselves for selfish reasons. Can't reporters like Corn understand why we poor hapless rubes out here in the hinterlands (not to mention the Justice department) find their shrieking for the last year and half about the sanctity of the confidential source just a little bit self-serving?

I've never quarrelled with Matt Cooper taking his promise to keep Karl Rove's name confidential all the way to the Supreme Court. (I wondered about Judith Miller being entitled to the reporter's privilege when it was clear that she had not written a story and had not been assigned one, however.) I understand that reporters need to keep their sources identities secret at times. What I don't understand is the practice of going back to powerful sources who lie to you again and again and granting them anonymity so that they can spread scurrilous stories without having to take responsibility for them. I don't understand why it's ok for a reporter to spill the name of a colleague's confidential source over drinks at Cafe Deluxe or why the public should accept that a newsroom and friends and cocktail party guests should know the names of these confidential sources, but the people (even "the people" as represented by the government) should not. I don't know why a reporter can keep important information on ice for months and years because they want to break the news in a book long after it has any relevance. It seems to me that the Beltway press corps wants it both ways. They don't want to be forced to tell the law or the public who their confidential sources are but they reserve for themselves the pleasure of blabbing it to their friends, other sources and each other.

The DC press corps has no idea how they look to the rest of the country after more than a decade of running with GOP trumped up scandals, pimping for impeachment, trivializing the effects of an unorthodox presidential election in 2000, and then saluting smartly and following Dick Cheney over the cliff on Iraq. We liberals never thought of the press as particularly partisan. We thought of it as competent or incompetent. But for a lot of reasons, for the last 15 years the DC press corps have far too often aligned themselves with a manipulative GOP political establishment to the point where it's been hard to see where one ends and the other begins. It's not a matter of political preference. It's insiderism. And when you become an insider in a corrupt system, for money, access, fame, fun whatever ... you become corrupt yourself.

I'm not surprised that the WaPo staffers don't like links to bloggers and others on the WaPo site. We are very critical. And I'm sure that we are often unfair and often flat wrong. But it would behoove these guys to stop consoling themselves with the notion that they "must be doing something right" if both sides are mad at them, and take a good look at the nature of these complaints. The right has spent the last quarter century in an organized campaign to work the refs and push the dialog to the right. The complaints coming from the left are the result of pent-up frustration at the tabloidization, the celebrity chasing, the insiderism. We have no organized campaign and we don't see the media as being politically biased. We see it as abdicating its duty to sort out the important from the trivial and connect the dots in these confusing times that are ruled by spin, PR and marketing on all sides.

This country cannot survive without proper journalism. Blogs can't do it. We need newspapers and news broadcasters who keep foremost in their minds the fact that they are indispensible to a functioning democracy. For the last fifteen years Washington politics have been covered as if they are high school with money. The DC press corps needs to reacquaint themselves with the idea that their purpose is not to have drinks with powerful insiders so they can keep their confidences. Their job is to have drinks with powerful insiders so they can get to the truth and write about it.


Update: Firedoglake has more on the WaPo ombudsman letter linked above that discusses the dissatisfaction of the staffers about linking and Dan Froomkin. Jane sets the story straight as only she can.

Crooks and Liars weighs in too.

Update II:

Thank you Dan Froomkin:

There is undeniably a certain irreverence to the column. But I do not advocate policy, liberal or otherwise. My agenda, such as it is, is accountability and transparency. I believe that the president of the United States, no matter what his party, should be subject to the most intense journalistic scrutiny imaginable. And he should be able to easily withstand that scrutiny. I was prepared to take the same approach with John Kerry, had he become president.

This column’s advocacy is in defense of the public’s right to know what its leader is doing and why. To that end, it calls attention to times when reasonable, important questions are ducked; when disingenuous talking points are substituted for honest explanations; and when the president won’t confront his critics -- or their criticisms -- head on.

The journalists who cover Washington and the White House should be holding the president accountable. When they do, I bear witness to their work. And the answer is for more of them to do so -- not for me to be dismissed as highly opinionated and liberal because I do.

Update: For those who don't understand why it is wrong to reveal Cooper's source to the source's lawyer, it's called the law of unintended consequences, which I think this story illustrates quite well. She had no way of knowing how blurting that information out would affect the story, or the case, but she does now. The rule of thumb is that if you know the name of your colleague's source, keep your mouth shut. Period. She could have "pushed back" in any number of ways that didn't include revealing Rove's name. It was careless and cavalier and she's paying for it (and the proverbial cover-up) now.


UpdateII: More here

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digby 12/12/2005 10:17:00 AM |

Sunday, December 11, 2005

 
Father Knows Best

Aside from being a bad son (like his hero, Junior Bush) and publicly disrespecting his much more accomplished father, Chris Wallace is an idiot. Via Americablog:

Asked about DNC chair Howard Dean's recent prediction that the U.S. would lose the war in Iraq, Wallace told Carr:

"We are in a war. We do have 150,000-plus American soldiers over there. I mean, it's Tokyo Rose, for God sakes, going on radio saying we can't win the war."

I guess he's unaware of Tokyo Rose's story (which is typical because he's a rightwing moron):

Iva Ikuko Toguri is the woman who was tried as Tokyo Rose. She is a first-generation Japanese-American who happened to be visiting a sick relative in Japan in 1941. When war was declared between Japan and the U.S., Toguri was trapped in Japan and pressured by Japanese military police to renounce her American citizenship. She refused. Instead, she learned Japanese and took two jobs to support herself while she sought a way to return home.

One of her jobs was as a typist for Radio Tokyo. There she met American and Australian prisoners of war who were being forced to broadcast radio propaganda. Toguri scavenged black-market food, medicine, and supplies for these POWs. When Radio Tokyo wanted a female voice for their propaganda shows, the POWs selected Toguri. She was one of many female, English-speaking voices on Radio Tokyo, and she took the radio name of "Orphan Ann." Her POW friends wrote her scripts and tried to sneak in pro-American messages whenever possible.

After the war, several reporters went to Japan to find and interview the infamous Tokyo Rose, offering a large cash payment for an interview. A woman at Radio Tokyo pointed the reporters to Iva Toguri, and Toguri, thinking that she and her new husband, Felipe d'Aquino, could use the money, agreed to be interviewed. She even signed a contract stating that she was the infamous Tokyo Rose. A reporter gave the interview notes to U.S. Army Counter Intelligence, and in 1945, the U.S. arrested and imprisoned Toguri in Japan. She was released in 1946, but was arrested again in 1948, and taken to the U.S. to be tried for treason.

Her trial was considered the most expensive in American history at that time. The U.S. government stacked the deck against Toguri and her meager defense, and the judge later admitted he was prejudiced against her from the start. Toguri was found guilty of only one of the eight treason charges -- "That she did speak into a microphone concerning the loss of ships." She was sentenced to 10 years in prison and fined $10,000. Because she was a model prisoner, Toguri was released early in 1956, although she was served with a deportation order which took two years to fight.

In 1976, the TV news show 60 Minutes told the Tokyo Rose story from Toguri's point of view. This led to a full pardon for Toguri from President Gerald Ford in 1977.

Chris should have listened to his father. He might have learned something.


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digby 12/11/2005 05:30:00 PM |

 
CRS* Disease

by digby


In the spring of '04, responding to to Karl Rove's lawyer Robert Luskin saying out of the blue over drinks one night, "Karl doesn't have a Cooper problem. He was not a source for Matt," Viveca Novak just happened to let it slip that it was all over TIME magazine that Karl Rove was the leaker. Luskin said "thank you. This is important."

She didn't tell her editors or the public during the entire time a first amendment challenge was being waged against her magazine all the way to the Supreme Court. She said nothing as her colleague Cooper faced jail time up until the last possible moment, not even when Rove's lawyer essentially AGAIN, more than a year after she told him otherwise, said those magic words --- this time to the Wall Street Journal ("If Matt Cooper's going to jail, it's not for Karl Rove.")

She didn't tell her editors or the public when Luskin informed her that she was going to be called by the prosecutor nor did she tell them when she hired a lawyer and gave the prosecutor a statement. It was only when she was actually called to give a deposition under oath that she decided that she needed to reveal that Luskin had proferred her as Rove's alibi.

She made no notes of her numerous conversations with Luskin even though she claims that she was working on the Rove story. And she can't remember when the conversations specifically took place. Apparently, she didn't think it was important to make a note of it, even though she was allegedly working on the story at the time.

She wishes she could have a do-over. She says she would do it differently. Like, for instance, she wouldn't go around revealing Matt Cooper's sources. Cuz, it's like mortifying. Totally.

Most amazingly, after she had already talked to the prosecutor for the first time and still not told her editors of her own involvement (or had told them that day) she wrote her story about about Bob Woodward:

But he said nothing then or in the months that followed as Fitzgerald launched his investigation and all Washington was consumed by a debate over spies and secrets and sources. Woodward kept what he knew secret even from Post executive editor Leonard Downie Jr. But as the case heated up this fall and Woodward joined in the reporting, "I learned something more" about the leak, he told TIME, which prompted him to finally tell Downie of his 2003 conversation.

[...]

Challenged on his public statements as well as his private conduct, Woodward explained that he had "hunkered down" out of fear of being subpoenaed at a time when reporters like Miller and TIME's Matthew Cooper were being jailed or threatened with jail unless they revealed their sources. Elsewhere in the newsroom, Post colleagues were none too happy. On an internal chat board, columnist Jonathan Yardley argued that "this is the logical and perhaps inevitable outcome when an institution permits an individual to become larger than the institution itself."

I can guess what the internal TIME chat board will be saying tomorrow: "Oh, and fuck you very much Viv. Your glass house needs cleaning."

She continued:

It was a rough week all around. The White House confronted another twist that could only prolong a politically damaging case. Fitzgerald confirmed that he would be presenting evidence to a new grand jury. Other possible targets had to be worried that there is still an aggressive investigation going on with the possibility of further indictments to come. And Fitzgerald, a tireless prosecutor with a reputation for thoroughness, had to wonder, after two years and millions of dollars and countless hours of hunting, what else is out there that he missed.

Yes, Fitzgerald was being uncharacteristically sloppy. Clearly, he should have rendered the entire press corps to Gitmo and injected them with sodium pentathol. After all, nobody in Washington takes any notes or has any conscious memory of any conversations they ever have, so there really isn't any other way to get the facts.

Truthfully, I suspect that Fitzgerald was as sadly mistaken about how the media functions in this country as the public was. We all thought that journalists were chomping at the bit to reveal news and when they got a tip they worked hard to find a way to report it. In Viveca Novak's case, had she just shared what she knew with her editors, for instance, they might have put it together with other information they had from other reporters and maybe found a way to publish a story.

I suppose we were all led astray by "All The President's Men" (ironically) which showed journalists using anonymously sourced information as a tip to pursue stories further or confirmation of facts they already knew, not as social currency or exclusive information for a book to be published long after the information means anything. Our bad. Apparently, it's fine for reporters to "gossip" freely among their fellow insiders about their sacred anonymous sources, but a federal crime to tell the public about it. We rubes are supposed to uncritically read their dispatches and buy their books so they can be well paid --- and leave the democracy business to our betters.



*Can't Remember Shit




Update: In retrospect, TIME should have pulled that story she wrote on Woodward or reported immediately that she had been called to testify. It looks bad. She was writing that story on November 18th and she knew she was even more implicated than Woodward. She told her editor on Sunday the 20th so perhaps they couldn't pull it back by that point. I'm surprised she wasn't fired on the spot, to tell you the truth. Her behavior is more egregious than Miller's.

(And once again, why in the hell did Woodward pick her to talk to?)

Update II: James Wolcott calls for another panel on blogger ethics



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digby 12/11/2005 12:28:00 PM |

 
Who's Wanking Now

In case anyone still wonder why the cheese eating surrender monkeys and the ungrateful bastards we liberated from Hitler didn't join in our war party, here's the reason:

More than a year before President Bush declared in his 2003 State of the Union speech that Iraq had tried to buy nuclear weapons material in Africa, the French spy service began repeatedly warning the CIA in secret communications that there was no evidence to support the allegation.

The previously undisclosed exchanges between the U.S. and the French, described in interviews last week by the retired chief of the French counterintelligence service and a former CIA official, came on separate occasions in 2001 and 2002.

The French conclusions were reached after extensive on-the-ground investigations in Niger and other former French colonies, where the uranium mines are controlled by French companies, said Alain Chouet, the French former official. He said the French investigated at the CIA's request.

Chouet's account was "at odds with our understanding of the issue," a U.S. government official said. The U.S. official declined to elaborate and spoke only on condition that neither he nor his agency be named.

However, the essence of Chouet's account — that the French repeatedly investigated the Niger claim, found no evidence to support it, and warned the CIA — was extensively corroborated by the former CIA official and a current French government official, who both spoke on condition of anonymity.

The repeated warnings from France's Direction Generale de la Securite Exterieure did not prevent the Bush administration from making the case aggressively that Saddam Hussein was seeking nuclear weapons materials.

It was not the first time a foreign government tried to warn U.S. officials off of dubious prewar intelligence.

In the notorious "Curveball" case, an Iraqi who defected to Germany claimed to have knowledge of Iraqi biological weapons. Bush and other U.S. officials repeatedly cited Curveball's claims even as German intelligence officials argued that he was unstable and might be a fabricator.

And remember, even our closest ally in the coalition of the willing was saying this at the time:

C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime's record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.

Let's hear again about how every foreign government agreed with our assessment that Iraq had WMD.


Oh, and not that it matters, but let's also remember what Karl Rove was telling Time magazine in July of 2003 about this:

"not only the genesis of the trip is flawed an[d] suspect but so is the report. he [Rove] implied strongly there's still plenty to implicate iraqi interest in acquiring uranium fro[m] Niger ... "

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digby 12/11/2005 10:29:00 AM |

Saturday, December 10, 2005

 
R.I.P. R.P.

by digby


If you would like to have a surreal experience akin to the effects of downing ten shots of cheap tequila, tune in to FoxNews as they eulogize Richard Pryor. Apparently he invented dirty words. (It's going to come as a helluva surprise to Lenny Bruce --- not to mention Redd Foxx.) He rejected the comedy of the good comedian, Bill Cosby, and went down the "wrong path" that led us to where we are today with all this R rated badness. One of the commentators said that when he went on TV in the mid 70's he "wasn't ready for prime time." (Actually, prime time wasn't ready for him.) Another said that "every black comic owes him something."

(Is it possible that right wingers are all actually zombies who died sometime before the 60's and have been walking among us as the undead ever since then? I just don't know what else can explain their terminal cultural obtuseness.)

I saw Richard Pryor in concert in 1974 at the Circle Star Theatre in San Carlos, California. I just realized that he was only 34 years old at the time. (Of course, I was only 18, so everyone seemed pretty old to me then.) He was on the cusp of achieving huge mainstream fame that year from his album "That Nigger's Crazy."

I'd never seen anything like Pryor before. It was more than comedy, and it sure as hell was more than "R" rated. It was cultural observation so universal and so penetrating that I saw the world differently from that night on. He didn't just talk about race, although he talked about it a lot and in the most bracing, uncompromising terms possible. He also talked about men and women, age, relationships, family, politics and culture so hilariously that my jaw literally ached the next day. He was rude, profane and sexist. But there was also this undercurrent of vulnerability and melancholy running beneath the comedy that exposed a canny understanding of human foible. His personal angst seemed to me to be almost uncomfortably plain.

I looked around me in that theatre that night, in which I and my little friend Kathy were among a fair minority of whites, and I realized that we were all laughing uproariously together at this shocking, dirty, racially charged stuff. As someone who grew up in a racist household (and had always had a visceral reaction against it) it was an enormous, overwhelming relief. I understood Richard Pryor, the African Americans in the audience understood Richard Pryor and Richard Pryor and the African Americans understood me. He was right up front, saying it all clearly and without restraint. He wasn't being polite and pretending that race wasn't an issue. And it didn't matter. Nobody, not one person, in that audience was angry. In fact, not one person in that audience was anything but doubled over in paroxysms of hysterical laughter. He had our number, all of us, the whole flawed species.

He's been sick a long time and so it's no surprise that he died a a sadly early death. I've been missing him for quite a while. If you haven't ever had a chance to see him in concert when he was in his prime, check it out on DVD. Maybe it won't be funny or salient to people today, I don't know. At the time, it was a revelation.



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digby 12/10/2005 01:42:00 PM |

 
Who's In Disarray?

by digby

In its relentless quest to abdicate global leadership and assume the role of rogue nation, the Bush administration is making a complete ass of itself in the global warming talks:

In a sign of its growing isolation on climate issues, the Bush administration had come under sharp criticism for walking out of informal discussions on finding new ways to reduce emissions under the United Nations' 1992 treaty on climate change.

The walkout, by Harlan L. Watson, the chief American negotiator here, came Friday, shortly after midnight, on what was to have been the last day of the talks, during which the administration has been repeatedly assailed by the leaders of other wealthy industrialized nations for refusing to negotiate to advance the goals of that treaty, and in which former President Bill Clinton chided both sides for lack of flexibility.

At a closed session of about 50 delegates, Dr. Watson objected to the proposed title of a statement calling for long-term international cooperation to carry out the 1992 climate treaty, participants said. He then got up from the table and departed.

Environmentalists here called his actions the capstone of two weeks of American efforts to prevent any fresh initiatives from being discussed. "This shows just how willing the U.S. administration is to walk away from a healthy planet and its responsibilities to its own people," said Jennifer Morgan, director of the climate change project at the World Wildlife Fund.

In the end, though, some adjustments of wording - including a shift from "mechanisms" to the softer word "opportunities" in one statement - ended the dispute.

Hey, I like breathing dirt and I assume that everyone else in the world likes breathing dirt too. Good for us.

But that's not all. This is downright absurd:

In his Friday speech, Clinton blasted the Bush administration’s opposition as “flat wrong.”

But the speech almost didn’t happen.

The contretemps started late Thursday afternoon, when the Associated Press ran a story saying that Clinton had been added at the last minute to the gathering’s speaking schedule at the request of conference organizers. According to the source, barely minutes after the news leaked, conference organizers called Clinton aides and told them that Bush-administration officials were displeased.

“The organizers said the Bush people were threatening to pull out of the deal,” the source said. After some deliberation between Clinton and his aides, Clinton decided he wouldn’t speak, added the source: “President Clinton immediately said, ‘There’s no way that I’m gonna let petty politics get in the way of the deal. So I’m not gonna come.’ That’s the message [the Clinton people] sent back to the organizers.”

But the organizers of the conference didn’t want to accept a Bush-administration dictum. They asked Clinton that he go ahead with the speech. “The organizers decided to call the administration’s bluff,” the source said. “They said, ‘We’re gonna push [the Bush people] back on this.’”

Several hours went by, and at the Clinton Foundation’s holiday party on Thursday night, the former president and his aides still thought they weren’t going to Montreal. “The staff that was supposed to go with him had canceled their travel plans,” the source said.

At around 8:30 p.m., organizers called Clinton aides and said that they’d successfully called the bluff of Bush officials, adding that Bush’s aides had backed off and indicated that Clinton’s appearance wouldn’t in fact have adverse diplomatic consequences.

Karl had a bad week. You can always tell.



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digby 12/10/2005 09:15:00 AM |

Friday, December 09, 2005

 
So, Like, Totally Funny

by digby


Via Wolcott I see that the spokesmodel of Open Robe Media, Atlas Shrugged, has a hilarious picture of Howard Dean up photoshopped as Hitler. But it's ok because it's totally funny:

Hey guys, its a joke. Helllllllllllllllllllllo, its F-U-N-N-Y (even if Dean's remarks were far from funny, futile maybe, treasonous maybe, stupid for sure, humorous - not). Actually, the pic is hysterical. I never said he was Hitler, never even called him a Nazi. A clown for sure. That's a clown pic - this is a clown pic too. Conversely, when the left calls Bush Hitler, they are dead serious. You can not compare the two. The above picture is hysterical. You clowns are as bad as the one in the picture. Sheesh.

Smart as a whip.




Update: For some real fun, read the comments. This one, I thought, was particularly insightful:

The country is driven by Cindy Sheehan. We republicans haven't got a chance....until election day. You dheminnocrats are sure simple minded. You make up the news and then believe it. Then, you take a phony poll and declare victory. The only thing missing is reality.

But don't worry, when the train of life is leaving you behind at the station of stupidity, I'll fart in your general direction.

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digby 12/09/2005 01:50:00 PM |

 
Pandamonium

by digby

I can't stand this baby panda anymore. He is so cute it is almost painful to watch. He's so cute I want to kill him. It's just too much.


You can watch him live on the PandaCam at Animal Planet --- if you dare.

Oh man, the San Diego Zoo has a cub too.


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digby 12/09/2005 12:58:00 PM |

 
Just Don't Call Them Special Interests

A Washington truism: Conservatives do meetings better than liberals. They get more done. They coordinate better. When it’s time to rally around John Roberts or Samuel Alito (or torpedo Harriet Miers), they know how to make it happen. Here’s a look at the conservative insider roundtables:

The Wednesday Meeting

HOST: Grover Norquist, Americans for Tax Reform.

LOCATION: Americans for Tax Reform office, 20th and L streets, downtown DC.

TIME: Wednesdays, 10 am sharp.

SETUP: Norquist, flanked by invited guests, presides over a large conference table. Others sit in auditorium chairs.

FOOD: Delicious bagels, not-very-delicious coffee.

PHILOSOPHY: Leave-us-alone conservative crowd: Big government is bad; taxes are bad; liberal bureaucracy is bad.

PARTICIPANTS: 80 to 100 people, including elected officials looking for donations, Hill aides, state officeholders seeking tax-fighting help, even representatives of free-market think tanks in Europe and Asia.

KARL FACTOR: White House deputy chief of staff Karl Rove has attended many meetings, including a “buck up the troops” visit before election 2004. Rove sends White House aide Tim Goeglein to take flak when he’s not there.

MEDIA: Conservative and some mainstream media attend with the proviso that the session is off the record.

CLAIM TO FAME: Seeded the 1994 Gingrich revolution. In time Newt’s informal policy shop became the connection between grasstops conservative activists and official Washington. The meeting helps the White House discern the mood of the movement.

NOTABLE GUESTS: Past speakers include Christopher Hitchens, Ralph Nader.

The Arlington Group

HOST: Donald Wildmon, American Family Association.

LOCATION: Family Research Council conference room in DC. Formerly based in the condo of Sandy Rios of Concerned Women for America.

TIME: Every-other-month sessions last up to several days.

SETUP: Conference tables arranged in a square allow participants to look each other in the eye.

FOOD: Sandwiches, chips, and drinks.

PHILOSOPHY: Savvy Christian political action.

PARTICIPANTS: 30 to 45 social-conservative leaders, ranging from Focus on the Family’s James Dobson to the National Association of Evangelicals’ Reverend Ted Haggard, ex-presidential candidate Gary Bauer, influential South Florida pastor D. James Kennedy.

KARL FACTOR: He has briefed the meeting—and listened to complaints—several times via telephone.

MEDIA: None, though details often leak to New York Times conservative-movement chronicler David Kirkpatrick.

CLAIM TO FAME: Conservatives frustrated at the pace of social-conservative legislation convened the group in 2003, and it was instrumental in garnering grassroots support for the Federal Marriage Amendment.

NOTABLE GUESTS: Reporters would love to know.

The Weyrich Meetings: Lunches, Family Forum, and Stanton Group

HOST: Paul Weyrich and staff, Free Congress Foundation; Bob Thompson, Coalitions for America.

LOCATION: Free Congress Foundation, 717 Second Street, Northeast.

TIME: Wednesday Weyrich lunches; biweekly Family Forum meetings; every other Friday for the Stanton Group.

SETUP: Varies.

FOOD: Family Forum serves doughnuts; Weyrich lunches are catered; the Stanton Group offers box lunches.

PHILOSOPHY: American conservatism, broadly construed.

PARTICIPANTS: 20 to 25 social-conservative activists, Hill staffers, and occasionally administration officials.

KARL FACTOR: Rove has attended several meetings.

MEDIA: None.

CLAIM TO FAME: First established in 1979, the Weyrich meetings helped bridge the gaps between the Washington GOP establishment and conservatives backing Ronald Reagan. Coalitions for America, a group linked to Weyrich, coordinates all three meetings.

NOTABLE GUESTS: George W. Bush attended during his father’s presidency.

The Monday Meeting

HOST: PR executive Mallory Factor and hedge-fund director James Higgins; affiliate of the Free Enterprise Fund.

LOCATION: Grand Hyatt, 42nd Street, New York.

TIME: One Monday a month.

SETUP: Chairs face a dais at the front of the room. Factor uses an egg timer to keep things moving.

FOOD: Water.

PHILOSOPHY: Free markets, free minds, but uncertain about cultural issues.

PARTICIPANTS: 200 guests, ten invited speakers.

KARL FACTOR: He hasn’t visited yet, but several allies have.

MEDIA: Conservative writers and a few others attend with the proviso that sessions are off the record.

CLAIM TO FAME: A participant says, “If you’re a conservative and you want to tap into New York money, you have to go there.” Potential 2008 Republican candidates Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum, and Sam Brownback have already stopped by.

NOTABLE GUESTS: Fernando Ferrer, onetime Democratic New York mayoral candidate, once spoke on taxes.

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digby 12/09/2005 12:36:00 PM |

 
Campaign Troops

by digby

Via Dan Froomkin, I see that Fox News (of all places) is following this story of Bush making political speeches before military audiences:

... lately the president has been saying more than just "hello" to troops. Twice last month in speeches to military audiences, the president attacked Democrats and fired back at their accusations that pre-war intelligence was manipulated by his administration.

"It is irresponsible for Democrats to now claim we misled them and the American people," Bush said.

On Nov. 11 at the Army Depot in Tobyhanna, Pa., Bush told the audience of servicemen and women that some Democrats who voted to authorize the use of force against Iraq have attempted to rewrite the past.

"The national interest is too important for politicians to throw out false charges," he added.

The attacks against critics at military settings may have put troops in the awkward position of undermining their own regulations. A Department of Defense directive doesn't allow service members in uniform to attend "partisan political events."

Questions have been raised about the military's attendance at events where Bush says something like "they spoke the truth then, they're speaking politics now." Several members of the military told FOX News that Bush is inviting the troops to take sides in a partisan debate in his speeches.

"This is a very bad sign," said retired Marine Gen. Joseph Hoar, who led Central Command in the early 1990s and is an administration critic. "This is the sort of thing that you find in other countries where the military and political, certain political parties are aligned."

Bush often appeared with troops in his 2004 campaign. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., endorsed him before hundreds of cheering soldiers.

"Where you have our uniformed members being put in a position where it looks like they're rooting for one side or another is very disconcerting," said Greg Noone, a former Navy lawyer.

Presidents have generally avoided such military settings due to the chance for attacks from opponents.

"They could be divisive," said Stephen Hess, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution. "And as commander-in-chief, he represents all the people as does the military defend all the people."

I wrote about this a few days ago. It's not only the president, of course, who is doing this. The VP spoke before the troops this week as well. It's done for the specific purpose of giving the impression that the military backs the administration politically. It's inappropriate to give speech after speech before these captive audiences in the first place, but to take pot shots at the political opposition is really beyond the pale. There are Democrats among the troops, but they are not allowed to give their political opinion in this situation (by booing, for instance) the way a regular citizen could (theoretically, at least.)

And, as Stephen Hess points out, when Bush dons his Commander in Chief hat he's no longer supposed to be partisan. In that capacity, he's supposed to represent all the people. The military is always supposed to represent all the people.

Meanwhile, Dan Bartlet proves once again that the White House believes that they can speak gibberish and everyone will just let it slide:

"They're the ones who are defending our freedom," said White House Communications Director Dan Bartlett. "They should be able to listen to the debate, they should be able to hear both sides."

I'll be looking forward to seeing John Kerry and John Murtha addressing the troops every couple of days. After all, they should be able to hear both sides.



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digby 12/09/2005 10:49:00 AM |

 
Thanks Bill

by digby

I'm not religious but I've always loved Christmas --- the food, the lights, the tree, the music, the whole thing. Now the right wing pricks have gone and made it a cause in their goddamned culture war and I can't enjoy it anymore. One sniff of fruitcake and a picture of Bill O'Reilly enters my mind. I'm instantly nauseated.

Everywhere I go, even here in the very heart of godless secular humanism, the People's Republic of Santa Monica, there are carolers on the sidewalk (singing songs like "Oh Holy Night" no less) "Merry Christmas" is written on store windows, decorated trees and twinkling lights are all over the place. And all I can think is "what in the hell are these wingnuts going on about? Christmas is everywhere! Are they nuts???" And then the pure, simple, childlike enjoyment I usually feel for the holiday just slips away.

I resent the hell out of these wingnut bastards turning Christmas into a political football. Is nothing sacred to these people?

Update: Oh, and please tell me again how secularists are declaring war on Christmas:

Many American "megachurches", huge Christian ministries with thousands-strong congregations, have horrified traditionalists by closing on Christmas Day.

Sunday services on Dec 25 are being cancelled because clergy fear attendance will be poor. Worshippers are instead being encouraged to spend the day with their families.

[...]

Willow Creek Community Church in Illinois, one of the six largest US churches with a weekend attendance of nearly 22,000, is among those closing its doors.

"At first glance it does sound contrarian," the Rev. Gene Appel, its senior pastor, said. "We don't see it as not having church on Christmas. We see it as decentralising the church on Christmas: hundreds of thousands of experiences going on around Christmas trees.

"The best way to honour Jesus's birth is for families to have a more personal experience on that day."

Christmas Sunday services were not the most effective use of staff and volunteers, a spokesman said.

Other megachurches closing on Christmas Day are in Kentucky, Texas, Georgia and Michigan.

"We feel that Christmas is definitely a time that should be spent with family,"said Kris McNeil of Michigan's Mars Hill Bible Church.

Cindy Willison, a spokesman for the evangelical Southland Christian Church, near Chicago, said at least 500 volunteers were needed, plus staff, to run Sunday services for the estimated 8,000 worshippers. Many volunteers appreciated the chance to spend Christmas with their families.

The closures contrast starkly with Roman Catholic parishes, which see some of their largest congregations at Christmas, and Protestant ministries, such as the Episcopal, Methodist and Lutheran churches, where Sunday services are hardly ever cancelled.

The number of megachurches in America, defined as non-Catholic congregations of at least 2,000 people, has soared from 10 in 1970 to an estimated 800 today.

Many function like corporations, running businesses such as publishing houses.

I didn't know that the Christmas tree actually functioned as an alter, but I'm not surprised. This is America and that's where the presents are.

I'm awfully impressed by the piety of the conservative evangelicals who attend these churches and lord their superior religiosity over the mainline churches.

Update II: I missed this Atrios post yesterday making essntially the same point.


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digby 12/09/2005 08:19:00 AM |

Thursday, December 08, 2005

 
The System Worked

by digby

Kevin Drum is asking some questions about what happened on that flight in Miami yesterday. It all sounds a little "screwy" to me too, but not just because the witness accounts sound as if the marshalls may have overreacted. There's something else screwy about this.

The marshalls were obviously persuaded that it was quite possible that this man had a bomb in his carry on bag. And apparently, the marshalls went through the plane after the fact, looking for accomplices, pointing guns at the passengers and knocking cell phones out of their hands ostensibly because they thought they might contain guns.

Now I know that the marshalls are taught to shoot first and ask questions later and all that, so no lectures please. But I still find it amazing that after all this time, they automatically assume that a group of people could get a bomb and "cell phone guns" through the gate security in a US airport. Goes to show you how useful all that boarding gate crap really is, doesn't it?

My favorite comment on this matter is Monica Crowley this morning saying that the good thing about all this is that "the system worked."



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digby 12/08/2005 05:25:00 PM |

 
Foxocities

by digby

In the latest installment of the "Democrats are in Disarray" show, Fred Barnes just did a reverse triple axel that would make Michelle Kwan weep. After going on and on about how the Democrats are all over the map, they don't know what they are doing, they are rudderless and lacking in ideas, he said that Nancy Pelosi has got the democrats voting in "lock-step" which is empowering the (apparently useless) GOP moderates. (Then he pouted and stomped his tiny foot in frustration.)

I assume that everyone can see the problem with Barnes' statement, even if he is so unaware of his own illogic that he makes both of these statements in the same breath.

The best moment today, however, was watching these rich, privileged, middle aged fucks sit around chuckling at the prospect of Stanley Williams asking for clemency. I don't know what it is these Republican assholes find so amusing about executions but they can't seem to contain their mirth when someone suggests the possibility of redemption.

These are the same people complaining about a war on Christianity.



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digby 12/08/2005 03:46:00 PM |

 
SOS

by digby

Glenn Greenwald at Unclaimed Territory heard Howard Dean's shocking shocking comparison between Iraq and Vietnam and was led to do a rather unusual thing. He went back and read what our leaders were saying during Vietnam and compared it to what they are saying to today. What he found was quite interesting.

Howard Dean, unsurprisingly, is not full of shit after all.



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digby 12/08/2005 03:35:00 PM |

 
Great Game

by digby

I had meant to review "Syriana" when I saw it over the Thanksgiving week-end, but with one thing and another, I let it slide. Now I see that the reviews are coming in fast and furious and I'm left in the dirt. Typical.

I'm not going to bore anyone with a synopsis, because anyone who is reading this can go to the web-site and see the trailer and read all about it right now. (God I love these internets.)

I happened to have loved "Traffic" (written by the same screenwriter Stephen Gaghan, who also directed "Syriana") so this frenetic, multi-tentacled, highly textured plot line was right up my alley. I like thrillers that I can't figure out until the end and which require me to go back and review the entire movie in my mind, seeing certain scenes through the prism of the climax and understanding them entirely differently than I did the first time. And I especially like it when a film's confusing plot is almost a character of the story, as this one is.

On a cinematic level it is not as polished or interesting as "Traffic" which had the brilliant Steven Soderberg at the helm. He used light and color to differentiate the varying threads of the plot to keep things straight in the audience's mind. This film is less dazzlingly directed, so the complicated plot becomes more challenging. Nonetheless, I found it gripping from start to finish mainly because it is about something that we here in the blogosphere have been talking about since the war began and it asks a question that everyone's asking (why are we in Iraq?) without ever bringing Iraq up at all.

The film observes various American and middle east actors running about with idealistic, nihilistic, greedy and personal agendas, bumping into each other sometimes at random and at others by design. But the single most important player is oil (which in real life, for reasons that are mystifying, is widely considered to be a tin-foil hat, loony-left explanation, even among liberals.) I don't normally consider myself a cynic, but on this topic, it's very hard not to be. In the final analysis, this really is a modern version of the Great Game. When we ask ourselves "why are we in Iraq?" it makes more sense to refine the question and ask whether we would be in Iraq if it weren't for oil. I think it's fairly obvious that we would not be. Terrorism, in the grand scheme of things, is not an existential threat no matter how hard the warbloggers wank. Invading Iraq was actually counter-productive to the threat of Islamic fundamentalism and may end up creating another Islamic state. Even the Bush administration knew that this was not an adequate rationale for invading Iraq so they pimped the WMD threat.


Atrios has posted an interview with ex-CIA agent Robert Baer, on whom the George Clooney character was based, that is quite interesting. Here's another interview from Baer on Chris Matthews that I think speaks to my point:

MATTHEWS: What‘s the future look like?

BAER: I‘ll tell you what the Saudis are doing. They are building a fence to keep the chaos in Iraq from moving south, and so are the Jordanians. They‘ve put out contracts.

MATTHEWS: If you had to choose now between Americans forces staying in that country for two more years or getting out now, what is better?

BAER: Chris, the problem is oil. Muslims sit on 70 percent of oil. We cannot afford to see Saudi Arabia destabilized. We‘re going to have to keep troops in the area. I don‘t know where you are going to keep them, on the border, in the rear bases, but we cannot let the chaos in Iraq spread.

MATTHEWS: It would?

BAER: Absolutely. Look at the bombings in Jordan. That came directly from Iraq.

MATTHEWS: You say we have to stay, but when can we come home, ever?

The vice president today sounded like we‘re never really coming home.

That we have to fight for American influence in that part of the world.

BAER: We have to come home one day, it‘s $5 billion a day. We‘re going to run out of money. And we‘re going to run out of soldiers and run out of tolerance from the American people.

We have to find a way to remain the policemen of the Gulf and however you do that, leave that up to the military. But we cannot keep our troops as they are deployed now in Iraq forever.

I would suggest that what Baer says is worth considering as we contemplate what the meaning of "withdrawal" or "victory" or "bringing home the troops" really means. I think that we are going to be in the middle east for a long, long time, the only question is on what terms.

The powers that be in the US (and the United Kingdom of British Petroleum) believe they must control this region's valuable resource. Indeed, some of the big thinkers like Zbigniew Brzezinski (in "The Grand Chessboard") and the PNAC nuts believe that the US must control "Eurasia" or risk being shut out of the future. There is nothing new under the sun and the pursuit of precious necessary resources that belong to others has been going on forever.

Oil is certainly not the only reason we are in this mess. It is, perhaps, the fundamental reason we are in this mess. And it's the reason that this mess isn't going to be solved by either bringing the boys home or creating a "democracy" in the middle east. We may leave Iraq as an occupying force due to a lack of domestic support, or we might be chased from the region by violent events. But if we have any illusions that the United States is not going to be deeply involved in the middle east for the forseeable future, we need to wake up. Sadly, whether we know it or not, by our blind and profligate actions the American people lend credence to the insane ramblings of that miniskirted harpy, Ann Coulter:

"Why not go to war just for oil? We need oil."

Why not, indeed? I wonder what would happen if the question was posed just that starkly? At this point, the Great Game players, the oil companies and the politicians who dance to their tune are unwilling to put it that way. They work to keep citizens in the dark about what is at stake, encouraging them to guzzle cheap gasoline at a fantastic pace while droning out messianic statements about good and evil and spreading freedom.

Syriana's "confusing" plot speaks to that. It's conveys the sense of drugged vagueness we all feel when we try to unravel the motivations behind these actions. There are a thousand different reasons why we could be doing what we are doing, but nobody knows for sure what is the real one.

There is only one character in the film who holds all the disparate threads in his hands --- the James Baker (Christopher Plummer) character who walks freely among the politicians, the oil companies, the ruling sheiks, the spooks and the regional puppets. He is the Grand Master of the Great Game. He ensures that none of the players know what the others are doing, each kept in the dark, flailing about with everything from torture to idealism to pragmatic everyday power politics without ever knowing that they are being manipulated by greater forces.

I suppose that we could prosaically assume that he represents a worldly reality like The Carlyle Group (or in an earlier time, The Trilateral Commission.) But I think he simply symbolises Power and Arrogance. He is fundamentally anti-democratic, amoral and relentless in his quest for more of what he is made of. He is America's id, perfectly represented as an elderly Texan with his steely talons dug deeply into every consequential player in the New Great Game.

The only character who sees through the subterfuge is the ex-CIA agent, abandoned by his country, whose life of dirty deeds on behalf of The Company prepares him alone to understand his role and dig his way out. That is the most out-of-sync Hollywood moment in an otherwise completely cynical film. (But then, it's George Clooney who can't help but be seen as a hero.) In reality, there can be no such neat denouement. The claws would turn deadly if he were to do what he does.

I've read a number of reviews in which the writer finds this movie a simple-minded portrayal of evil corporate masters holding the puppet strings of great nations and vast empires. It's the same complaint about the slogan "No blood for oil", as if those who see our presence in the mideast in such terms are silly dupes and fools. But I would submit that it is the jaded sophisticates who are missing the point. "Syriana", for all its "confusion" really does get to the heart of the matter and forces you to deal with the one simple fact that nobody wants to accept. This planet really is running out of oil --- and we are entering an era in which our nation is going to be asserting our power to get it.

Rather than finding "Syriana's" plot confounding, by the end I thought its multiple plotlines led to a bracing clarity: Oil. I don't know that it's all that important to understand anything else and if America sees this movie and comes away with that understanding then I think it succeeds as both a film and a political statement.



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digby 12/08/2005 08:22:00 AM |

Wednesday, December 07, 2005

 
Desperate

Atrios has a post up this morning about Mel Gibson the holocaust denier. If the California Republican Party has its way, it could soon be Governor Mel Gibson, the holocaust denier:

With segments of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's political base rising in revolt, directors of the California Republican Party have demanded a private meeting with the governor to complain about the hiring of a Democratic operative as his chief of staff.

The request comes as Schwarzenegger faces a sustained wave of opposition from both moderate and conservative Republicans over the choice of Susan P. Kennedy. Before serving as a state public utility commissioner, Kennedy was Cabinet secretary to former Gov. Gray Davis. She also was an abortion-rights activist and former Democratic Party executive.

In appointing Kennedy last week, the governor praised her as an effective administrator who could "implement my vision" and work cooperatively with Democrats who control the Legislature.

But Republican operatives said grass-roots volunteers are so disturbed by the appointment that they are threatening to abandon Schwarzenegger during his re-election bid next year. Others said Schwarzenegger is risking a nasty fight that could cause the party to rescind its endorsement during February's convention in San Jose.

There is even a movement to draft Mel Gibson, the actor and director, to run against Schwarzenegger in the Republican primary next year -- in part because the success of Gibson's movie, "The Passion of the Christ," could help his chances among religious conservatives. Raised in Australia, Gibson was born in New York and is a U.S. citizen. He has not expressed an interest in elected politics.

"We need to have a good backup," said Mike Spence, president of the California Republican Assembly, a grass-roots organization that is separate from the state party. Spence's group has already set up a Web site, melgibsonforgovernor.com. "He seems to be more consistent with the Republican message than the governor does."

Gibson could not be reached, and his spokesman, who was traveling Tuesday, did not return an e-mail and call for comment.

Let's hope that the old saw "as California goes, so goes the nation" holds true. The Republican party in this state has become a sad, pathetic joke. And it was a power house not so long ago. After all, it sent two favorite sons to the white house in the last 35 years. (And, once again, I'd like to apologise for that. We'll try not to let it happen again.)



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digby 12/07/2005 08:51:00 AM |

Tuesday, December 06, 2005

 
Moral Foundations

by digby

I see that Senator Lieberman is concerned about partisanship poisoning the atmosphere in Washington and he has some stern words for Democrats who insist on criticizing the president.

"It's time for Democrats who distrust President Bush to acknowledge he'll be commander-in-chief for three more years. We undermine the president's credibility at our nation's peril."

For instance he really hates it when Democrats say things like this:

After much reflection, my feelings of disappointment and anger have not dissipated, except now these feelings have gone beyond my personal dismay to a larger, graver sense of loss for our country, a reckoning of the damage that the president's conduct has done to the proud legacy of his presidency and, ultimately, an accounting of the impact of his actions on our democracy and its moral foundations.

The implications for our country are so serious that I feel a responsibility to my constituents in Connecticut, as well as to my conscience, to voice my concerns forthrightly and publicly. And I can think of no more appropriate place to do that than on this great Senate floor.

[...]

The president's intentional and consistent statements, more deeply,may also undercut the trust that the American people have in his word. Under the Constitution, as presidential scholar Newsted (ph) has noted, the president's ultimate source of authority, particularly his moral authority, is the power to persuade, to mobilize public opinion, to build consensus behind a common agenda. And at this, the president has been extraordinarily effective.

But that power hinges on the president's support among the American people and their faith and confidence in his motivations and agenda, yes; but also in his word.

As Teddy Roosevelt once explained, "My power vanishes into thin air the instant that my fellow citizens, who are straight and honest, cease to believe that I represent them and fight for what is straight and honest. That is all the strength that I have," Roosevelt said.

Sadly, with his deception, the president may have weakened the great power and strength that he possesses, of which President Roosevelt spoke.

I know this is a concern that may of my colleagues share, which is to say that the president has hurt his credibility and therefore perhaps his chances of moving his policy agenda forward.

[...]



That's what I believe presidential scholar James David Barber (ph) in his book "The Presidential Character" was getting at when he wrote that the public demands quote, "a sense of legitimacy from and in the presidency. There is more to this than dignity -- more than propriety. The president is expected to personify our betterness in an inspiring way; to express in what he does and is, not just what he says, a moral idealism which in much of the public mind is the very opposite of politics."

Just as the American people are demanding of their leaders, though, they are also fundamentally fair and forgiving, which is why I was so hopeful the president could begin to repair the damage done with his address to the nation on the 17th. But like so many others, I came away feeling that for reasons that are thoroughly human, he missed a great opportunity that night. He failed to clearly articulate to the American people that he recognized how significant and consequential his wrongdoing was and how badly he felt about it.

Lieberman thinks that speeches like that are wrong --- that Democrats should not go before the senate and speak about how the president has failed the nation, been dishonest, misled the people and undermined the nation's moral authority. Unless, of course, there's a blow job involved in which case Lieberman himself would feel compelled to lead the stampede to condemn and chastise him publicly.

But then, that was an issue of prime importance, unlike lying the country into a useless war of faux masculine vanity in which we are becoming a pariah nation known for torture, kidnapping, and disappearance. As long as Bush keeps his codpiece zipped and doesn't let anybody see him playing Grand Theft Auto, he's got Joementum on his side.

Putz.



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digby 12/06/2005 04:46:00 PM |

 
Vote For The Good Guys

by digby

I'm not sure what to make of this, but this blog seems to be nominated for a Weblog Award for "the best of the top 250 blogs" (I'm losing badly to that upstart whippersnapper, Jane Hamsher.) I had thought these were conservative awards, but apparently not. Anyway, there are a bunch of really good liberal bloggers nominated in various categories and you can vote once a day (!!?)

Check it out.

Update:

If you really love me, you'll want to stuff your little stocking with some postage stamps or ornaments and shirts with a Digby snowman on them. I'm not kidding. Apparently you can now design your own stamps and Bo Zartz has done up a "holiday blog homage" featuring various liberal bloggers. (And naturally Jane Hamsher gets to be the angel.)They're all fun, but I particularly like the one that says "Merry Fitzmas" which is guaranteed to piss off Bill O'Reilly six ways to Kwaanza.



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digby 12/06/2005 03:20:00 PM |

 
Aggrieved Conservatives

by digby

I have hesitated to link to Rick Perlstein's Princeton speech, published here on Huffington Post, because he makes a very kind statement about me in it, and I sound like I'm tooting my own horn by posting about it. But, I decided to post about it anyway, because what he says is so important for people to understand: Republican intellectuals like to promote themselves as the party of Goldwater the principled conservative and Reagan the optimistic conservative, but they are actually the party of Richard Nixon, the aggrieved conservative. Their penchant for secrecy, their disdain for democratic processes, their lawless political tactics and their belief that might makes right are best understood by looking at them in that light.

The modern Republican party set about ruthlessly building a political machine while wearing the mantle of principle and morality after Nixon's fall. A machine is all they really are, but they persist in this fiction that they have a deep intellectual philosophy -- "the party of ideas" and all that. I assume that many of them believe this. But any person of ideas is only welcome as long as he or she is useful, after which he is thrown on the ever increasing pile of liberal traitors.

Here's one example of a conservative intellectual (one of the fathers of the neoconservative movement, Irving Kristol) making the Straussian argument that religion is necessary to keep the masses in line, but unnecessary for the highly educated mandarins who actually run things:

Because of Strauss' teachings, Kristol continued, "There are in Washington today dozens of people who are married with children and religiously observant. Do they have faith? Who knows? They just believe that it is good to go to church or synagogue. Whether you believe or not is not the issue -- that's between you and God -- whether you are a member of a community that holds certain truths sacred, that is the issue." Neoconservatives are "pro-religion even though they themselves may not be believers."

This noble hypocrisy on the part of intellectuals is required in order to encourage religious belief in ordinary people who would otherwise succumb to nihilism without it. In other words, Kristol believes that religion, which may well be a fiction, is necessary to keep the little people in line. This line of thinking has led him and other neoconservative intellectuals to attack Darwinian evolution because they fear it undermines religious belief.

(The author of this companion article writes, "ironically, today many modern conservatives fervently agree with Karl Marx that religion is "the opium of the people"; they add a heartfelt, 'Thank God!'")

I'm sure that the DC Neocon elites feel very secure that they are the ones running things. But as with so many other intellectual conceits of the conservative movement, it is awfully convenient that their "ideas" track with the needs of a Repubublican political machine. Here's how the man who identified the evangelical community as an untapped voting block, Paul Weyrich, saw it:

"We are no longer working to preserve the status quo. We are radicals, working to overturn the present power structure of the country," he declared. Weyrich describes his views as "Maoist. I believe you have to control the countryside, and the capital will eventually fall." (David Brock, "Blinded by The Right" p.54)

I would submit that the Neos like Kristol and Podhoretz are just beltway pundit fodder for the Nixonian political machine. They think they are the mandarins but they are dupes too, of another sort, lending a phony intellectual heft to a movement that isn't intellectual at all. Nixon would have hated them. Weyrich is his man. (Until he isn't.)

I urge you to read Perlstein's speech and description of what it was like to go into the belly of the beast and talk about this among the faithful. He's got more guts than I do. Clearly he understands them better than they understand themselves:

The response to my address was, understandably, defensive. My co-panelist Stan Evans retorted that my invocation of Richard Nixon was inappropriate because Nixon had never been a genuine conservative. He added: "I didn't like Nixon until Watergate." I responded: "Thanks for making my point."

Everyone understands, I assume, that Bush, Delay, Norquist and Reed too, are morphing into liberals as we speak.


Update: I couldn't, for thel ife of me remember where I had recently seen this Kristol article, so I Googled it. thanks to a reader, I was reminded that it was in this great post by James Wolcot.



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digby 12/06/2005 11:44:00 AM |

 
Nation Building

by digby

I was only half listening a minute ago as NBC's Jim Meceda in Bagdad was describing how a woman was stripped and tortured and then taken to Abu Ghraib and terribly abused. I turned quickly to see who this latest person was who had come forward to accuse the US of inhumane treatment --- only to find that it was a witness testifying at Saddam's trial. Wow.

Until the past two years I never would have made that assumption, never, even though I'm quite aware of all the nasty things we've done around the world over the years, including My Lai. But when you read things like this, it's natural to assume that any news of torture, Abu Ghraib etc. are reports of US behavior. These days, sadly, it usually is:

ABC News, citing unidentified current and former CIA agents, reported Monday night that 11 "high value" Al Qaeda terrorists had been held at a former Soviet air base in Eastern Europe and were spirited to a site in North Africa just before Ms. Rice's arrival in Europe.

Of the 12 high value targets housed by the CIA, only one did not require water boarding [what the CIA describes as "an enhanced interrogation technique"] before he talked. Ramzi bin al-Shibh broke down in tears after he was walked past the cell of Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the operational planner for Sept. 11. Visibly shaken, he started to cry and became as cooperative as if he had been tied down to a water board, sources said.

The problem for the US has been that, along with the disclosure of the existence of the "secret prisons," there have been several high-profile cases that have highlighted US mistakes, such as US agents grabbing the wrong person, wrongly imprisoned subjects of rendition alleging they had been tortured in the countries where they had been taken, and allegations that the CIA lied to a European ally about a rendition.

The Washington Post reported Sunday on the case of Khaled Masri, a German citizen who had been the subject of a rendition and then wrongfully imprisoned for five months. When the US ambassador to Germany finally told the German interior minister about the mistake, the Post reports that he asked the German government not to disclose that it had been told about the US mistake, even if Mr. Masri went public with what happened to him. Apparently US officials feared exposure of the rendition program, and also possible legal action.

The Post reports that the Masri case shows how pressure on the CIA to apprehend Al Qaeda members after 9/11 led to an unknown number of detentions based on slim or faulty evidence, and just how hard it is to correct these mistakes in a system "built and operated in secret."

One [US] official said about three dozen names fall in that category [those mistakenly detained]; others believe it is fewer. The list includes several people whose identities were offered by Al Qaeda figures during CIA interrogations, officials said. One turned out to be an innocent college professor who had given the Al Qaeda member a bad grade, one official said.

"They picked up the wrong people, who had no information. In many, many cases there was only some vague association" with terrorism, one CIA officer said.

And there have been many other innocent people who have been rendered to countries and tortured, sent to Guantanamo or were wrongly imprisoned in Iraq since we began this practice. And the practice has led to more innocent people being imprisoned and tortured because those who are tortured tend to say anything they think you want to hear to make it stop. It builds on itself.

Saddam used this practice to terrorize the population to keep it in line. That is the only rational (if evil) purpose for such practices. I can't figure out why in the hell we are doing it.



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digby 12/06/2005 10:04:00 AM |

 
Addressing The Legion

by digby

Watching these mini Nuremberg rallies with the president, and now the vice-president, using the troops to make political points I'm uncomfortably reminded that going back to Rome (and probably earlier) the point of having the troops assembled before the leadership was to make it clear that the military backed the leadership against all comers. Today this is slightly more subtly accomplished, but the motivation is the same. It is shamelessly done not just to convey the point that the military will follow the orders of the administration (which it is constitutionally required to do) but that it also politically backs the administration against its critics. These are political speeches done for the purpose of answering political critics.

If I didn't know better and were to watch the majority of speeches from afar for the last six months, I would assume that the United States is a military dictatorship, so many uniforms have been present. Even the speech that Bush gave the other day on the economy featured a bunch of people dressed in the same clothes in the standard tableau behind him.

This is becoming a bit disturbing. The administration is giving the appearance of having control of the military in an inappropriate political way and they are doing it more and more. My only consolation is that, if press reports are true, the military brass does not seem to be as enthralled by Republican leadership as they once were. A badly conceived and executed war by fanatics will do that to you.



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digby 12/06/2005 08:51:00 AM |

Monday, December 05, 2005

 
Orwell's Dog

by digby

President Bush is disturbed by the U.S. military's practice of paying Iraqi papers to run articles emphasizing positive developments in the country and will end the program if it violates the principles of a free media, a senior aide said Sunday.

"He's very troubled by it" and has asked Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to look into the pay-to-print program, national security adviser Stephen Hadley said.

That's because he had ordered that all the unfriendly press operations in Iraq be bombed.

Christopher Hitchens is shocked, simply shocked to find out that we are doing this.

This time, someone really does have to be fired. The revelation that Defense Department money, not even authorized by Congress for the purpose, has been outsourced to private interests and then used to plant stories in the Iraqi press is much more of a disgrace and a scandal than anyone seems so far to have said.

[...]

... sometimes a whole new line is crossed and "propaganda" corrupts the whole process by becoming a covert operation against one's "own" side. The worst violation so far has been the spreading of a falsified story about the death of Pat Tillman in Afghanistan. Not only was he slain by "friendly fire" instead of by the foe—which is a tragedy in far more ways than just as a setback for recruitment—but the family and friends of this all-American hero were purposely deceived about what had really happened. It would be trivial to add that they were also pointlessly deceived (how long do the geniuses at DoD imagine that such a thing can be kept quiet?) except that it greatly added to the callousness of the thing, and except that this same pointlessness and moral idiocy are now apparent in the "good news" scandal in Iraq.

[...]

[J]ust picture the scene for a moment. An Iraqi family living in, say, Anbar Province, picks its way down the stoop to collect the newly delivered newspaper. This everyday operation is hazardous, but less so than going down to the corner to pick it up, because there are mad people around who do not believe that anything should be in print, save the Quran, not to mention nasty local potentates who do not like to read criticism of themselves. Further, the streets are often dark and littered with risky debris. The lead story, however, reports that all is well in the Anbar region; indeed, things are going so well that there is even a slight chance that they will one day get better. Who is supposed to be fooled by this? The immediate target is, one supposes, the long-suffering people of Iraq. But over time, the printing and dissemination of cheery reportage must have been intended to be picked up and replayed back into the American electorate. If done from state coffers, that is probably not even legal.

It is, anyway, not so much a matter of fooling people as of insulting them. The prostitute journalist is a familiar and well-understood figure in the Middle East, and Saddam Hussein's regime made lavish use of the buyability of the regional press. Now we, too, have hired that clapped-out old floozy, Miss Rosie Scenario, and sent her whoring through the streets. If there was one single thing that gave a certain grandeur to the change of regime in Baghdad, it was the reopening of the free press (with the Communist Party's paper the first one back on the streets just after the statue fell) and the profusion of satellite dishes, radio stations, and TV programs. There were some crass exceptions—Paul Bremer's decision to close Muqtada Sadr's paper being one of the stupidest and most calamitous decisions—but in general it was something to be proud of. Now any fool is entitled to say that a free Iraqi paper is a mouthpiece, and any killer is licensed to allege that a free Iraqi reporter is a mercenary. A fine day's work. Someone should be fired for it.

For a guy who models himself on George Orwell he sure is a naive little thing, isn't he? Where has he been?

The Bush administration doesn't just believe this will work in Iraq. They think they can bullshit the American people into believing they are better off economically than they really are, too. Their entire agenda boils down to convincing the American people that they can believe them or they can believe their lying eyes. They've been doing this from the beginning and it worked for a while after 9/11 when Bush was riding around like country on his white charger and the press was holding his codpiece. It doesn't seem to be working anymore.




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digby 12/05/2005 02:06:00 PM |

 
The '05 Campaign

by digby

Atrios wonders why Bush is doing the happy talk thing about the economy when it won't make anyone change his or her mind about it:

There are things which make sense in the context of a first term, a presidential campaign, a major policy to sell, or if there is an heir apparent (like Gore in 2000). But basically either people are happy with the economy or not and no speechifying by Bush is going to change their minds

I thought the same thing and then realized that he was just repeating his stump speech, slightly updated. (He even had the usual applause lines --- tort reform! YEAHHHHHHHHH!) I should have known what was going on when he mentioned "his opponent" in a speech a couple of weeks ago.

Bush is running for president again. It's really the only thing he knows how to do successfully. (And even then, only 50% of the time.) This time he's running against himself --- Bush the 35% loser.

Talk about the lesser of two evils.



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digby 12/05/2005 11:34:00 AM |

Sunday, December 04, 2005

 
She Initiated It

by digby

A lot of bloggers have written today about the rape case in Oregon in which a young woman was found guilty of falsely reporting the rape based upon a judge's impression that the "boys" were more credible and because the accuser allegedly didn't act properly traumatized according to a detective and two friends. (Kevin Hayden has more here.)

I'm quite sure that rape is falsely reported from time to time. It only stands to reason that it would happen. However, this judge was apparently not relying on the kind of evidence that could have supported the charge -- like testimony from a "co-conspirator" or a friend to whom she confessed to making it up, a blackmail attempt, stalking, a fight, nothing that concrete.

Despite what he describes as inconsistencies on both sides, he must have believed this in order to find her guilty:

The three men testified Thursday that the acts were consensual and at the girl's initiation.

How likely is that? Here in the real world, how often does it happen that a 17 year old girl initiates group sex with a bunch of her boyfriend's pals?

Again, I'm sure it happens. But this "porno star" defense is more common that you think and it works even in the face of documentary evidence. Here's a similar story that played out along similar lines, although it was tried as a rape case:

The jury announced Monday that it was "hopelessly deadlocked" on all 24 counts.

Defense attorneys and a middle-aged male juror told CNN that 11 jurors voted "not guilty" on the first four counts -- two counts of rape by intoxication and two counts of oral copulation by intoxication.

The alleged rape was videotaped by Haidl July 5, 2002, during a party at the home of his father, Don Haidl, a top-ranking sheriff's official in Corona del Mar.

Prosecutors relied on the tape as the most critical piece of evidence, telling jurors throughout the trial that all of the crimes can be seen on tape.

The prosecution doesn't feel it overestimated the impact the tape had with the jury, Orange County District Attorney Tony Rackauckas said Tuesday.

"It's very clear what's happening on the tape," Rackauckas said. The alleged victim is "unconscious, she's flopping around, out of control, being manipulated by these three individuals."

But, Haidl's attorney Peter Scalisi said "science and medicine backs" the defense's contention that Jane Doe was conscious during the incident.

A neurologist hired by the defense testified that in reviewing the tape, he found her to be alert and with the presence of mind to say "no," and yet she said "yes," Scalisi said in an appearance with Rackauckas on CNN.

During the trial, defense attorneys portrayed Doe as a promiscuous, aspiring porn star who agreed to be videotaped.

Scalisi called the depiction "very fair" because that's the way "she truly is."

I don't remember where I saw the footage, but I saw it, (with the body parts made hazy.) It was obvious that the poor girl was unconscious. She was like a rag doll, only making rare muffled sounds. And the criminals who were assaulting and humiliating her were laughing through the whole thing. I don't care if she'd made a thousand porno movies, in this one she was clearly not capable of consenting. It was one of the most disturbing videos I've ever seen.

But there were people on that jury who were able to look at that footage and be convinced that she was consenting--- evidently persuaded by her sexual history that even though she was clearly unconscious when the men inserted a lit cigarette, a pool cue and a Snapple bottle into her orifices, that somehow she wanted what was happening.(The case was retried and the punks were found guilty.)

I don't know all the particulars in this case in Oregon, but I think it's probably a good rule of thumb that when the defendant is a 17 year old girl accused of not only falsely reporting a rape but enticing her accused rapists into group sex, and there is no proof that she did all this other than the word of the boys and a vague observation that she didn't "act right" then the burden of proof has not been met.

The lesson here for young girls is, don't bother reporting a gang rape if you know the rapists. A good many people will believe that you are a sexually depraved black widow spider who lured the poor young fellas into your web and then tried to "kill" them with a false charge.



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digby 12/04/2005 05:18:00 PM |

 
Kipmas Is Coming

by digby

Everyone needs to go and over to The Poorman and vote for the Soggy Biscuit award for the year's best circle jerk and the Purple Teardrop with Clutched Pearls cluster award for wounded feelings. The competition is very tough this year, vote early and vote often.

Also, seriously, throw some money to the gang at Wampum so that they can sponsor another great Koufax awards this year. It's great fun and helps build the liberal blog community by introducing us to new blogs and overlooked posts. I'm the incredibly lucky recipient of two of those babies and am ridiculously proud of the achievement.



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digby 12/04/2005 02:35:00 PM |

 
Credibility Gap

by digby

A few people have e-mailed me today to tip me to this story in the NY Times about the NSC pollster who wrote the first draft of the president's "victory" speech last week.

I try not to do this too much because, well, it's stupid, but I can't help but point out that I've been harping on this for months, as my regular readers know. In fact, I wrote about it again the day before Bush's speech last week when I heard him say "We wanna WIN" at that press conference at the border. I am not in the least bit surprised that the speech originated with this fellow: they are desperate to believe that he's right and all they have to do is sell victory to get their poll numbers back up.

This advisor, Peter Feaver and a partner Christopher Gelpi produced a study that purports to prove that Vietnam wasn't "lost" because of mounting casualties; it was because the American people became convinced we were losing when the political leadership became irresolute. I'm not qualified to comment on the data which I haven't seen anyway, except to say as someone who was there at the time that this is bullshit. The problem was the "credibility gap." Ordinary citizens just didn't believe a word the government said about the war after a certain point because it had been pumping the country full of horseshit happy talk for years. Nobody knew what the truth was, except that the war just seemed to go on and on forever, kids were dying in great numbers with no real progress and no real purpose.

Mr Feaver seems to believe that the country still trusts George W. Bush. But they have to be delusionary to believe they could sell a war on a "grave and gathering danger" of "a smoking gun in the shape of a mushroom cloud" and then think that they could maintain their credibility when it turns out that there was actually --- nothing. They shot the moon and lost.

In that respect, Iraq is quite different from Vietnam. Vietnam wasn't based on one big huge lie, but a succession of lies over a long period that only came into focus over time. Iraq was sold as a dramatic necessity in a big, brash marketing campaign with slogans and theme songs in a very short period of time for specific and memorable reasons that still echo loudly just two years later.

THE PRESIDENT: This is a guy who was asked to declare his weapons, said he didn't have any. This is a person who we have proven to the world is deceiving everybody -- I mean, he's a master at it. He's a master of deception. As I said yesterday, he'll probably try it again. He'll probably try to lie his way out of compliance or deceive or put out some false statement. You know, if he wanted to disarm, he would have disarmed. We know what a disarmed regime looks like.
I heard somebody say the other day, well, how about a beefed-up inspection regime. Well, the role of inspectors is to sit there and verify whether or not he's disarmed, not to play hide-and-seek in a country the size of California. If Saddam Hussein was interested in peace and interested in complying with the U.N. Security Council resolutions, he would have disarmed. And, yet, for 12 years, plus 90 days, he has tried to avoid disarmament by lying and deceiving.

Yes, John, last question, then we've got to go swear the man in.

Q Sir, if the Security Council doesn't go along with you, what happens then?

THE PRESIDENT: I have said that if Saddam Hussein does not disarm, we will lead a coalition to disarm him. And I mean it.

You can't convince the country that we are winning against all evidence to the contrary once you have been proven an ass on that scale. The game was up for Bush as soon as people fully realized that the WMD threat didn't exist. Either Bush was a liar or an idiot. Unfortunately, it didn't happen until after the last election.



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digby 12/04/2005 01:08:00 PM |

 
Cakewalk

by digby

General Dempsey also said a key part of the training for the Iraqi forces involves how to operate in a democratic society. He said the troops and police need to develop loyalty to the government, rather than local tribes, militias or ethnic groups. They are also taught respect for human rights, and they are educated about the need to avoid corruption, which experts say is widespread in Iraqi society. In that regard, General Dempsey says the newly trained troops are doing better than the government ministries that are supposed to be supporting them. "They are taking an honest shot at corruption, and our intervention into these ministries in significant numbers I think is helping in that regard. But, you know, there are some bad habits that have to be overcome here," he said.

Oh sure, some people may carp that it's difficult to "train" the Iraqis in human rights when you legalize torture, cover up systemic prisoner abuse, contractor shootings and innumerable cases of innocent people being caught up in sweeps and imprisoned and harshly interrogated for months with no due process. And some bedwetters will complain that by buying off the press and installing friendly politicans and negotiating sweetheart deals for oil that we are actually embedding corruption in the new government before it's even formed.

But this is war, right? We can't pussy foot around. We have to win. We have to use these harsh wartime methods so we can stand down and the Iraqis can stand up. Which they will do just as soon as we train them to believe in loyalty to the government and human rights and honest politics.

Why is it that everyone keeps saying that Bush's strategy won't work?



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digby 12/04/2005 11:57:00 AM |

Saturday, December 03, 2005

 
Alito Night Music

by digby

Samuel Alito is a real piece 'o work:

From TChris at Talk Left:

If a police officer doesn’t know why a suspect is fleeing, it’s reasonable for the officer to shoot the suspect to death and ask questions later. As you pause to consider the absurdity of that proposition, ask yourself why a government lawyer would consider it reasonable for an officer to shoot and kill an unarmed teenager who had just stolen $10 in a burglary. And then ask whether a lawyer who expressed that belief should serve on the Supreme Court.

As an assistant to the Solicitor General, Judge Alito weighed in on a case involving an officer who was investigating a possible burglary. The officer heard a door slam, then went to the backyard where he “shined his flashlight on a youth who appeared to be unarmed and who was trying to climb a six-foot-high chain link fence to escape.” The officer “seized” the kid by shooting him in the head.

"I think the shooting [in this case] can be justified as reasonable," Alito wrote in a 1984 memo to Justice Department officials. Because the officer could not know for sure why a suspect was fleeing, the courts should not set a rule forbidding the use of deadly force, he said. "I do not think the Constitution provides an answer to the officer's dilemma," Alito advised.

When in doubt, blow their brains out. That's the kind of thoughtful, deliberate analysis we need on the Supreme Court.

When the case was decided, we had a majority of non-psychos on the court:

The 4th Amendment forbids "unreasonable searches and seizures" by the government, and the high court said that killing an unarmed suspect who was subject to arrest amounted to an "unreasonable seizure."

"It is not better that all felony suspects die than that they escape," wrote Justice Byron White for a 6-3 majority in Tennessee vs. Garner. "Where the suspect poses no immediate threat to the officer and no threat to others, the harm resulting from failing to apprehend him does not justify the use of deadly force to do so."

Said White: "A police officer may not seize an unarmed, nondangerous suspect by shooting him dead."

The burglar who stole $10.00 was only 15 years old.




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digby 12/03/2005 02:32:00 PM |

 
Keep Up Your Campaigning Chops


One of my readers sent this in and I thought I'd pass it along so that anyone so inclined could do a little phone banking for a good Democrat here in California.

I'm looking for people who can use their free cellphone minutes for
an hour this weekend to help elect a Democrat to Congress from my
district. We're making phone calls to remind people to vote in the
special election this coming Tuesday, December 6. You can do the
whole thing from your home, using a cellphone and an Internet
connection. Here's what you do.

Write to ca48@easyco.com and say that you want to do "virtual
phonebanking for Steve Young." You'll be sent a user ID, password,
and a URL. Go to that URL and log in, and you'll see two scripts (one
for live people and one for messages) and a list of 50 Democrats to
call.

It takes very little time since some of the numbers are disconnected
and others are just voicemail. It's unlikely you'll get more than 1
or 2 live people.

The main points to get across are:

1) There's a special election this coming Tuesday and your vote is
crucial!
2) There's a terrific Democrat in the race and he can win if you
vote.
3) There are over 100,000 Democrats in our district and if just half
of them vote we can send a Democrat to Congress.
4) Please send Bush a message -- vote on Tuesday for Steve Young.

Check out his web-site, here. He's a good guy.



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digby 12/03/2005 10:11:00 AM |

 
As The Army Stands Down, The Contractors Will Stand Up

Crooks and Liars is featuring a story today about yet more murdering contractors. Bookmark it for your burgeoning "why America is becoming a rogue nation" file.

Has anyone bothered to ask whether withdrawal of the military would mean withdrawal of contractors? Somehow, I doubt it. Our private army that answers to no one but its owners so it doesn't have to deal with all these messy old fashioned "laws" and "regulations" is going to be in Iraq for a long, long time.

I have little doubt that Rummy and Cheney have realized that it's a little more expensive since you have to pay the soldiers more than a hundred grand a year, but they're worth it. They're not hung up on all this honor and tradition crap. They know how to get the job done. But they aren't really mercenaries because they only torture, abuse and kill for America. They are patriots. Plus, we pay really well. So that's good.



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digby 12/03/2005 08:45:00 AM |

 
Thinking Outside The Box

by digby

I was reading this incisive post on corruption at the Poorman and had a revolutionary idea. The Editors:

Imagine that. Elect gangsters, get gangsterism. Look, it’s a great thing that DeLay and Abramoff & Co. are getting in a bit of legal trouble now, but don’t pretend that this is some example of the system working and the balance being restored, because it isn’t. The worst case scenario for these guys is to spend a few years in a the nicest prison on Earth, followed by a career as an absurdly well-compensated and influential lobbyist, and kickbacks galore for you and yours. You can get a few years in prison for downloading mp3’s on the internets, and your chances of getting a trashbag full of cash and a cake job when you come out the other end are very, very, very slim. And a decade or so of federal legislation is arguably worth even more than kelis_milkshake.mp3. Justice for these people, and for us, would be massive jail sentences for everyone involved, a mass nullification of nearly every piece of legislation and every judicial appointment since 1994 (at least), and the guilty parties and their bagmen paying us restitution with interest. That would make things right. Lots of luck. Whatever slap on the wrist these guys get, we got taken.

This is another one of those un-unshittable beds, I’m afraid, so it makes a lot more sense to concentrate on not shitting it in the future. Step one, obviously, is to get rid of the crooks, or, as they are known in polite company, “the Republicans”. But as long as the system is what it is - as long as you can gainfully set up a blatantly corrupt political machine like DeLay’s, and make money hand-over-fist for years in exchange for a possible plea bargain down the road - this kind of behavior is going to continue. While it may be a little hard to imagine the Democrats (or the Greens, or the International Society of Con Men and Embezzling Liars) ever being able to top the standard set by these current Republicans, I’m sure they’d be willing to give it the old college try. Because if they won’t, someone else will.

Since I see little hope that the system is going to be reformed, it occurs to me that we liberals should just hire ourselves some lobbyists. Really. We spend many, many millions on political campaigns that get us zilch. Nada. We should just raise funds to buy congressmen yachts or send them to Australia on vacation or hire their wives at 5 grand a month to survey what congressmen like for dinner. These guys go cheap when you really think about it. They'll do pretty much anything you want for a golfing trip. We'd actually save money just by buying them all French commodes. In exchange we get them to vote for national health care and legal gay marriage and a $15.00 minimum wage.

I think we should consider it. At this rate, it's going to be 2100 before we ever get a chance to renact any true progressive legislation the old fashioned way, if then. It's time we in the reality based community faced the music. If you want something done in our government, you have to pay top dollar for it.



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digby 12/03/2005 08:06:00 AM |

Friday, December 02, 2005

 
Heckuva Job

by digby


I can't believe what I'm seeing. CNN is reporting yet another propaganda boondoggle --- FEMA's "Recovery Channel" in New Orleans. One segment even features a military officer talking about all the good work that FEMA is doing rebuilding the schools. CNN investigated and found out the school in question was really two hours away from new orleans and that virtually all the schools in new orleans are in shambles.

My favorite part was the story about how "our Commander In Chief lent a hand" in the rebuilding.

Apparently, when FEMA realized that CNN was asking questions about this taxpayer funded propaganda operation, they issued a statement saying that they were going to revamp the whole thing and remove all editorial content.

The question now is what department of the Bush administration isn't using tax dollars to promote the President and the Republican party's political agenda?


Update: Here's the transcript

PHILLIPS: Chances are you've never heard of it, but Recovery TV is spreading the word about this year's devastating hurricanes and the federal government's response. And whether you think it warrants cheers or jeers, you're paying the bills.

Here's CNN's Tom Foreman.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

TOM FOREMAN, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Far from the cleanup, the debris and the angry public meetings.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I need some answers.

FOREMAN: Seventy miles from Washington in the Maryland countryside, it's show time for FEMA.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: In times of crisis, the best help is often just a source of reliable information.

FOREMAN: This is the "Recovery Channel," produced by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and airing around the clock via satellite and the Internet.

DIANNA GEE, RECOVERY CHANNEL ANCHOR: It could be the best day and the worst day. The day you finally get to go back to your storm- damaged home.

FOREMAN: FEMA conceived the channel years ago to spread important information after disasters. Following Katrina, it was on in shelters, a plain display about rebuilding, financial aid, help and more. But now, with FEMA accusing the mainstream media of failing to provide enough of that info, the "Recovery Channel" has undergone a makeover.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Stay with us. Together, we can build a bright future.

FOREMAN: And at the Annenberg School of Communication, Professor Joe Turow says it's turned into propaganda.

JOE TUROW, ANNENBERG SCHOOL OF COMMUNICATION: Most of the information was really not the specific kind of factual information one might think, but rather feature and fluff pieces that seemed designed to aggrandize FEMA, and actually the Bush administration, too.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I just want to thank FEMA for all they've done for us.

FOREMAN: Certainly, the channel conveys no public frustration with FEMA. When the channel was airing this,

JAMILAH FRASER, RECOVERY CHANNEL ANCHOR: The massive effort to clean up Louisiana is still topping our coverage. And to speed up this process, our commander in chief steps in with some additional assistance.

FOREMAN: CNN was airing this: UNIDENTIFIED MALE: What's wrong with you, Uncle Sam? You drunk? Huh? What you doing with our tax money? Come on, you need to go to rehab, brother.

FOREMAN: Consider this "Focus On Education" report.

FRASER: But one New Orleans school refused to let the doors of education close on them. They just rolled in the wheels of knowledge.

FOREMAN: This segment, this week was about FEMA bringing trailers to a school where a tree destroyed several classrooms.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: And all of us without FEMA would not be able to be standing here today.

FOREMAN: But this school is not in New Orleans. It's two hours north and there was no information about more than 100 devastated schools actually in the city, where by the way, almost 8,000 school employees have just been told they've officially lost their jobs.

FRASER: Good information for good decisions.

FOREMAN: Another concern. The FEMA logo appears often, but much of the language on the channel suggests it is independent of the very government agency that is running it.

FRASER: Today our lead story is FEMA's top priority: Housing. A two-week extension for those evacuees in hotels. That's what FEMA is saying today.

FOREMAN: Critics on Capitol Hill have repeatedly suggested the administration is misusing public funds for domestic propaganda. Senator Frank Lautenberg is one of them and he watched the channel at our request.

SEN. FRANK LAUTENBERG (D), NEW JERSEY: The way this is being done, it's a fakery. And it shouldn't -- it should be identified as a government product.

FOREMAN: When we contacted FEMA, a spokesperson defended the channel, but after reviewing the questions CNN raised, sent this statement: The agency, it says, is taking immediate measures to ensure that all programming is unmistakably labeled as an official FEMA resource. And it's eliminating any editorial content.

They just can't help themselves.



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digby 12/02/2005 12:39:00 PM |

 
Political Grease Monkeys

by digby

If a partisan impeachment, unprecedented recall elections, bogus voter roll purges, uncheckable voting machines and Supreme Court chosen presidents didn't convince you that the Republicans are trying to undermine the fundamental electoral processes of our Democratic system, this one should lay any questions you have to rest:

Justice Department lawyers concluded that the landmark Texas congressional redistricting plan spearheaded by Rep. Tom DeLay (R) violated the Voting Rights Act, according to a previously undisclosed memo obtained by The Washington Post. But senior officials overruled them and approved the plan.

[...]

The 73-page memo, dated Dec. 12, 2003, has been kept under tight wraps for two years. Lawyers who worked on the case were subjected to an unusual gag rule. The memo was provided to The Post by a person connected to the case who is critical of the adopted redistricting map. Such recommendation memos, while not binding, historically carry great weight within the Justice Department.

[...]

The Texas case provides another example of conflict between political appointees and many of the division's career employees. In a separate case, The Post reported last month that a team was overruled when it recommended rejecting a controversial Georgia voter-identification program that was later struck down as unconstitutional by a court.

Mark Posner, a longtime Justice Department lawyer who now teaches law at American University, said it was "highly unusual" for political appointees to overrule a unanimous finding such as the one in the Texas case.

"In this kind of situation, where everybody agrees at least on the staff level . . . that is a very, very strong case," Posner said. "The fact that everybody agreed that there were reductions in minority voting strength, and that they were significant, raises a lot of questions as to why it was" approved, he said.

There have been many reports of career civil service employees leaving the government because of this behavior. If the Republicans' corruption and greed manages to lose them the congress, (and hopefully the presidency) there is going to have to be a massive investigation into who has replaced these employees to make sure that a permanent patronage machine hasn't been put in place in the Federal Government. That is, of course, what they wanted to do, but it's likely that they haven't had enough time to fully implement it.


If, on the other hand, they are not brought low by their corruption and ineptitude in the very near future, we may not get another chance to fix this. The best news I've heard all week is this NY Times article in which it's shown that the Justice Department is finally taking a close look at the crooked K Street Project:

Investigators are said to be especially interested in how Tony C. Rudy, a former deputy chief of staff to Representative Tom DeLay of Texas, and Neil G. Volz, a former chief of staff to Representative Bob Ney of Ohio, obtained lobbying positions with big firms on K Street.

The hiring pattern is "very much a part of" what prosecutors are focusing on, a person involved in the case said. Another participant confirmed that investigators were trying to determine whether aides conducted "job negotiations with Jack Abramoff" while they were in a position to help him on Capitol Hill.

Prosecutors are trying to establish that "it's not just a ticket to a ballgame, it's major jobs" that exchanged hands, the participant in the case said. Also under examination are payments to lobbyists and lawmakers' wives, including Mr. Rudy's wife, Lisa Rudy, whose firm, Liberty Consulting, worked in consultation with Mr. Abramoff, people involved in case said.

What began as an inquiry into Mr. Scanlon and Mr. Abramoff's lobbying has widened to a corruption investigation centering mainly on Republican lawmakers who came to power as part of the conservative revolution of the 1990's. At least six members of Congress are in the scope of the inquiry, with an additional 12 or so former aides being examined to determine whether they gave Mr. Abramoff legislative help in exchange for campaign donations, lavish trips and gifts.

It may be difficult for prosecutors to translate certain elements of the case into indictments. Bribery, corruption and conspiracy cases are notoriously difficult to prove. But the potential dimensions are enormous, and the investigation, at a time of turmoil for the Bush administration, threatens to add a new knot of problems for the party heading into the elections next year.

Let's hope so. The K Street project is the heart of the big money and ihnfluence machine that built the party since the 1990's.


Update:

Here's Steny Hoyer's statement on the redistricting issue.



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digby 12/02/2005 10:49:00 AM |

 
"Land-grabbing Yids"

by digby

I've written before about the possibility of an impending implosion in the Christian Right. You don't put behind thousands of years of sectarian competition just because Paul Weyrich needs a voting block. One of the oddest marriages of convenience in this block has always been the fundamentalist armagedonists and the right wing Jews, seeing as the gleeful worldenders view the destruction of the Jews as a requirement for the rapture. But it's been a convenient political alliance among certain Republicans so that's been overlooked.

But guess what. When the "yids" don't behave, here's what you get on Tim LaHaye's web site. From Max Blumenthal:

The Christian right sure gets its panties in a bunch when Jews act without their permission. Recently, a speech by the ADL's Abe Foxman denouncing the Christian right's theocratic agenda provoked a Gangland-style threat from James Dobson minion Tom Minnery -- "If you keep bullying your friends, pretty soon you won't have any." Then, in response to Ariel Sharon's Gaza pullout and subsequent formation of a new, centrist party, Tim LaHaye's Left Behind Prophecy Group leapt into the fracas with some good, old-fashioned anti-Semitic slurs.

In an article entitled "Will the Goyim Win?" published on the official site of best-selling author Tim LaHaye (who also operates an annual Holy Land tour for evangelicals), "Christian journalist" Stan Goodenough takes Israel and the Sharon government to task for trading land for peace. In breathless prose, Goodenough bemoans the Israelis' supposed surrender of "the cradle of their nationhood, the burial places of their national patriarchs and heroes."

Then, he proceeds to pile it on:

But do you know what, Jews of Israel - and those Jews still in exile who so fervently support this way? You may think that in so acquiescing, you are setting a glowing example to the nations of the world.

But as far as these nations are concerned, the last thing they will want to do is emulate you. All you are doing is proving them right in their long-held belief that you are illegitimate, land grabbing, not-to-be-trusted Yids. And, as far as the Muslim world is concerned, your actions only confirm their view of you as a dhimmi nation, fit only to be ruled over by, and subdued under, Islam.

Ah yes, more of that sophisticated right wing geopolitical strategy. Chest thump and bellow your way to "victory." (I don't know what happened to them in the schoolyard, but it stunted their intellectual growth.)

And apparently if the Israelis don't follow their edict to blow themselves up for Jesus, they will be seen as "land-grabbing yids" and lily livered cowards too. That was a short trip from A to B wasn't it?


Get ready for more of this as various Christian sects come in to conflict as well. It's only a matter of time before they start fighting among themselves.



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digby 12/02/2005 10:16:00 AM |

 
Leftist Scandalmongers

by digby

A fascinating Ron Reagan and Monica Crowley show today in which the topic is how the Democrats are failing everyone on Iraq because they are spineless and unfocused and in disarray and can't speak with one voice and have no leadership. I can't get enough of blaming Democrats for the mess the Republicans have made.

But, this is a doozy. I just heard David Limbaugh say the following in response to Arianna Huffington saying that there needs to be a bi-partisan Truman Commission to sort out how much of the 200 billion we've spent has been lost to graft and corruption:

"I just wish the left would stop focusing on all these scandals."

They. Are. The. Most. Shameless. Unself-aware. Obtuse. People. On. The. Planet.



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digby 12/02/2005 09:24:00 AM |

 
Babes In Arms

by digby

I can't remember who it was, but somebody involved with the Open Robe Media project (thanks TBOGG) said that the reason they went with them is because Republicans know how to run a business. Heh. Kevin at Catch has all the latest on their troubles and links (via Juan Cole) to an impressive professional liberal news portal run by Robert Sheer. They must have kept their expensive launch party under wraps.



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digby 12/02/2005 08:01:00 AM |

Thursday, December 01, 2005

 
Friends With Benefits

by digby

This Lincoln Group story is amazing. I have nothing to add to the substance that Laura Rozen and Billmon haven't already covered with great insight. Psyops is one of Rummy's favorite little hobbies. It's no surprise that he's been using it in every way he can get away with.

But I am interested in the fact that General Pace is on the record being against it saying "I would be concerned about anything that would be detrimental to the proper growth of democracy." This is the second time in two days that Pace is playing the straight arrow to Rummy's sleaze. Bob Fertik sent me an e-mail pointing out something interesting that I overlooked in that Pace-Rummy public disagreement the other day.


Here's the whole passage (and the video at C&L):

QUESTION: Sir, taking on his question a bit -- and I can give you actual examples from coalition forces who talked to me when I was over there about excesses of the Interior Ministry, the Ministry of Defense; and that is in dealing with prisoners or in arresting people and how they're treated after they're arrested -- what are the obligations and what are the rights of U.S. military over there in dealing with that?

Obviously, Iraq is a sovereign country now, but the United States is responsible for training and expects to turn over the security mission to them.

So, what is the U.S. obligation in addressing that, preventing that, and what can we do? And what are we doing?

RUMSFELD: That's a fair question. I'll start and, Pete, you may want to finish. But we are working very hard to train and equip the Iraqi security forces. So is NATO. So are some neighboring countries.

There are a lot of people involved in this, dozens of countries trying to help train these Iraqi forces. Any instance of inhumane behavior is obviously worrisome and harmful to them when that occurs. Iraq knows, of certain knowledge, that they need the support of the international community. And a good way to lose it is to make a practice of something that is inconsistent with the values of the international community.

RUMSFELD: And I think they know that.

He doesn't even know what he's saying, does he?

Now, you know, I can't go any farther in talking about it. Obviously, the United States does not have a responsibility when a sovereign country engages in something that they disapprove of. However, we do have a responsibility to say so and to make sure that the training is proper and to work with the sovereign officials so that they understand the damage that can be done to them in the event some of these allegations prove to be true.

QUESTION: And, General Pace, what guidance do you have for your military commanders over there as to what to do if -- like when General Horst found this Interior Ministry jail?

PACE: It is absolutely responsibility of every U.S. service member if they see inhumane treatment being conducted, to intervene, to stop it. As an example of how to do it if you don't see it happening, but you're told about it, is exactly what happened a couple of weeks ago. There was a report from an Iraqi to a U.S. commander that there was a possibility of inhumane treatment in a particular facility. That U.S. commander got together with his Iraqi counterparts. They went together to the facility, found what they found, reported it to the Iraqi government, and the Iraqi government has taken ownership of that problem and is investigating it.

So they did exactly what they should have done.

RUMSFELD: I don't think you mean they have an obligation to physically stop it, it's to report it.

PACE: If they are physically present when inhumane treatment is taking place, sir, they have an obligation to try to stop it.

QUESTION: Let me follow up. To what extent do you think these allegations of abuses by the Iraqi security forces, particularly some of the complaints and allegations from Sunni Iraqis that the largely Shia security forces are engaged in abuses, to what extent do you think that's an indicator that the Iraqi military, Iraqi security forces are not yet ready to assume control of the country?

RUMSFELD: Oh, I don't think it is. I mean, you're going to have allegations back and forth.

We were deeply concerned that there could be conflict among the various elements in that country after the end of major combat operations, and there hasn't been, and that's a good thing.

RUMSFELD: First of all, what we're doing is we're prejudging these remarks and allegations and reports. And I just can't do that. And what's going to happen is the Iraqi government is going to be formed after the December 15th election -- two weeks, whatever -- and it will be seated by the 31st of December...

QUESTION: So your sense is that these abuses are not a widespread problem that threaten the...

RUMSFELD: My sense is I don't know. And it's obviously something that one has to be attentive to. It's obviously something that General Casey and his troops are attentive to and have to be concerned about.

I am not going to be judging it from 4,000 miles away -- how many miles away?

Rummy quite clearly wants to deal with "reports" of "allegations back and forth" that can be "investigated" and then "more reports" can be issued saying that it was a bunch of "bad apples." Why mess with success?

He doesn't want American forces doing anything to stop abuses --- because he wants the Iraqis to do this dirty work. Why, if we play our cards right, we will have another friendly country willing to accept our illegal renditions and torture them for us! Maybe they'll even house a secret CIA prison or two. This nation building makes friends with benefits.

But, unlike that drooling sycophant Richard Myers, who slobbered all over Rummy like he was Elvis, Pace doesn't seem to be following the script. What's up with that?


Update: One other thing about the "blowback" aspect of the planted stories business. It's quite obvious that it's a Republican PR job because it's the same M.O. they used in the Clinton scandals. They planted lies or rumors in the much looser foreign tabloid press, who would then print it so that Drudge could link it and Cokie would report it because "it's out there." This "blowback" is just standard GOP psyops.



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digby 12/01/2005 06:31:00 PM |

 
Tear Down That Wall

by digby

Here's a provocative post on immigration by Brad Plumer: The Case for Open Borders. Click through to all the links and you will find some very informative data. (I especially recommend this article by Daniel Drezner.) It's not a plan I'm necessarily endorsing, but it's a different way of looking at things. With problems this complicated and politically treacherous we need to be open to fresh thinking if only to question whether some of our assumptions are still valid.



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digby 12/01/2005 06:28:00 PM |

 
Memory Hole

by digby

Jane is reporting that Rove's lawyer Luskin told Fitzgerald that "inveterate gossip" Viveca Novak told him that Rove was Matt Cooper's source, which sent him and Karl rummaging frantically through the e-mails to refresh Karl's sketchy memory. Apparently, it took them five months to find it, but whatever.

If Novak confesses that she did this, it certainly gives the lie to all this high minded posturing we've heard from all the journalists about their do or die committment to their promises of confidentiality. This little scenario requires that Cooper or his editor blabbed to Novak who then blabbed to Rove's lawyer! Oh Lord, bless the majesty of the First Amendment that guarantees Freedom of the Press and Anonymous Juicy Gossip.

I actually find it hard to believe that she really told Luskin this. I'm going to withhold judgment until she writes her story. (Check out Jeralyn for the explanation of the legal ramifications of Novak telling Luskin.)

I think that the NIH should be looking into something else right away, however. There seems to be some sort of terrible medical condition that's taking over Washington. Libby didn't remember Cheney telling him that Plame was CIA. Rove didn't remember telling Cooper. Woodward's source is reported to have forgotten that he told Woodward. Miller forgot that Libby told her and couldn't remember why she wrote down the name Plame. Pincus couldn't remember Woodward telling him about Plame. Woodward can't remember if he mentioned Plame to Libby. Mitchell doesn't remember what she had for lunch.

And of the people who could have looked through their notes or checked their phone logs or even rattled their memory once the shit hit the fan --- and it hit the fan within days or a week of hearing about all this --- none of them did. Here we had this huge brouhaha, with Joe Wilson talking about frog-marching and claiming that the administration had outed his wife to punish him, and none of these officials and journalists remembered that they had spoken to one another about the very subject that was under discussion. It was only years later when confronted with documentary proof, jail time or someone coming forward that they decided to search their records or think back, and in most cases it was just too late.

These are elite journalists and the highest government officials. And they all seem to have some sort of serious memory defect. This explains a lot about what has gone wrong in our political system.

What do you think? Lead? Mercury? Huffing Glue?




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digby 12/01/2005 02:30:00 PM |

Wednesday, November 30, 2005

 
"Cultural Discomfort"

by digby


The New Republic and The LA Times this week both feature articles about the Minutemen of Herndon, Virginia. The TNR piece is framed as a cautionary tale for liberals who think that the Minutemen are out of the mainstream:

Bill explains that he "slid into the Minutemen" because he was disturbed by the way his neighborhood was changing, and the other Minutemen standing with him nod in agreement. "Dormitory-style homes" have popped up on their streets, Bill says, and the residents come and go at strange hours. Their neighbors' children are intimidated and no longer like to play outside, in part because "we've got about 17 cars coming and going from our neighbors' houses." Matt, another Minuteman who lives in nearby Manassas, claims that the police have busted prostitution rings operating out of nearby properties. Bill doesn't want his name printed, he tells me, because he worries about retaliation from the local Hispanic gang, MS-13. Pointing to the cluster of day-laborers across the street, he explains to me that the Herndon 7-11 is "a social gathering place, too." Taplin has publicly objected to a regulated day-laborer site set to open in Herndon on December 19--proposed in order to combat the trespassing, litter, and nuisance complaints that have arisen in conjunction with the informal 7-11 site--because he worries that even a regulated locale wouldn't change "their behaviors." Even on the coldest mornings, more than 50 workers often convene at the 7-11, and Bill judges that sometimes only 10 or 20 get hired. "When," he asks me, "is it ever a good thing for 40 men to hang out together?"

These anxieties may be overblown, in some cases borderline racist; but they are not, unfortunately, outside the mainstream. In Mount Pleasant, the predominantly Hispanic, rapidly gentrifying Washington neighborhood where I live, complaints have begun to surface about the groups of men that congregate on stoops or outside of convenience stores at night. Those who have complained call it loitering, but one Hispanic resident told the Post that when the men gather outdoors, "[t]hey're having coffee; they talk about issues. ... It's part of our community." For the neighborhood's Hispanic population, this practice is a cultural tradition; for its newer batch of hip, ostensibly liberal urbanites, it is disturbing, and too closely resembles something American law designates a crime.

These are people who would never admit they share anything in common with the Herndon Minutemen. But like it or not, the Minutemen are acting on anxieties many Americans share--anxieties about the challenge of enforcing the law in towns that are swelling in size due to immigration; anxieties about the challenge of integrating and accommodating an immigrant culture. Border states like California have been grappling with these issues for years, in court battles about day-laborer sites and debates over concepts like bilingual education. Often in these conflicts those who have presented cultural, as opposed to legal, objections to uncontrolled immigration are condemned as xenophobic or racist. But as my Mount Pleasant neighbors have shown, it can be tricky to disentangle legal from cultural discomfort.

Not really. People legally assembling in public is not criminal and this "cultural discomfort" is simple xenophobia. And just as xenophobes (and their close cousins, racists) did in the past, they couch their "cultural discomfort" in narrow interpretations of the law and property rights.

Notice that the neighborhood in question is a Hispanic neighborhood being gentrified. These complaints are coming from yuppies moving into neighborhoods where their "culture" isn't dominant. Who's the immigrant, anyway?

Rick Perlstein reminded me of this passage from Thomas Geoghegan's wonderful book "The Secret Lives of Citizens:"

It was Massey, again, who pointed it out to me. "Why in Chicago," he asked, "is there no anti-immigrant movement as there is in California?"

Because the white ethnics here have their own, uh, "mexicans," to protect. White European immigrants. The Romanians, Russians ... but above all, Poles. From Poland. Many Poles. Tens of thousands. So how can the whites here complain about the latinos? We've got our own illegals to hide.

That kind of clarifies things a little, doesn't it? The eastern Europeans are often highly skilled tradesmen, not day laborers like the Mexicans, who really do take high paying jobs away from citizens. It's a major issue in Europe and would be here too except for the fact that in the cities where large numbers of Poles and Russians overstay their visas and live here illegally, they are in the bosom of their well assimilated ethnic group. "Illegal immigration" is a much more complicated issue than it seems in our multi-ethnic culture.

The LA Times tells a similar story of Herndon and the Minutemen but had the added feature of the residents complaining about their property values being lowered while George Bush and the Republicans are catering to the Hispanic vote at their expense.

The retired social studies teacher said she got involved because houses in her neighborhood had become packed immigrant dormitories. She suspects that most tenants in the rooming houses, including the one next door, are illegal. She deals with roosters crowing and men urinating in the yard, loud parties and empty beer cans dumped outside. She fears it's driving down the value of her house.

"I'm angry," said the 60-year-old widow. She said the fight against illegal immigration was deeply personal and broadly political.

"George Bush is in it for the Hispanic vote, and we're on the receiving end," she said. "That's not fair. Before, everybody looked out for everybody else; no one locked doors," she said of her neighborhood. "Now we all have security systems."

Jeff Talley, 45, an airplane maintenance worker who lives across the street from Bonieskie, also joined the Minuteman chapter. "When you start messing with the value of people's houses, people get really upset," he said.

As Talley sees it, illegal immigrants take jobs from Americans  whom it would cost companies more to employ and that will have long-term effects on American society.

"There's a disappearing middle class," said Talley, a Republican. "George Bush is a huge disappointment to this country. The Republican Party used to be for ordinary people, but no more."

This is an old, old populist rant. The Republican moneyed elites are against the little guy --- and it's because of the immigrants.

The TNR article goes on to explain:

Our national debate on immigration tends to focus on economic issues, namely job loss, and scrupulously to avoid the kind of cultural anxieties that the Herndon Minutemen, the residents of Mount Pleasant, and Bill O'Reilly are bringing to the fore. After all, anxieties about how immigration will affect national culture seem like more of a European thing, springing from a deep-seated and distinctly un-American nativism and yielding byproducts like the headscarf dispute and Jean-Marie Le Pen. But on this side of the Atlantic, little Le Pens are beginning to flourish.

[...]

Only a few years ago, the European political establishment largely ignored concerns about an immigration wave overwhelmingly originating from one region--only to be stunned as fanatics rose to prominence by championing an issue that mainstream politicians had refused to touch. To prevent the same thing from happening here, liberals will have to recognize that immigration, often considered a "conservative" topic, is now a potent political issue. Concern is no longer confined to California, Arizona, and Texas; nor is it confined to Republicans. Liberals will need to make an affirmative case for immigration as a concept--but also concede that our current system is deeply flawed. They will have to acknowledge that many Americans have legitimate worries about immigration--but that there are better ways to approach the issue than skulking around day laborer sites with a camera. Wherever they come down on the issue, and whatever they propose, liberals will have to acknowledge that immigration is not a fringe concern. And telling the Minutemen to "go home" isn't going to make it go away.

Ok. But let's not bullshit ourselves while we are making our political argument about how to deal with this issue. This is not a uniquely European problem, for crying out loud. It's as American as McDonald's apple pie. We've been doing this shit for centuries --- and we do it to Mexicans pretty regularly because we share a border and there are always handy illegals to kick around when necessary. This is not new. It's a symptom of economic insecurity.

And the problem for these Minutemen and those liberal hipsters is not "cultural discomfort." There's are other, older, better words. Xenophobia. Nativism. Racism. The dark underbelly of populism.

I agree that this is a potent issue right now for reasons I set forth earlier. But please, no soft-peddling the reasons, at least in our own minds. No creating nice little code words for confused working class whites who are looking for easy scapegoats or narrow-minded urbanites to excuse their "discomfort" with law abiding people who are doing nothing more than legally assembling in public. Let's call a Mexican a Mexican and go from there.

I wrote a post some time back called Populism Tango, wherein I discussed the dangers in jumping into populism. It's a perfectly good, and often correct, political philosophy. But it does have this ugly tendency to scapegoat immigrants, blacks and ethnic minorities. In that post I quoted Democratic strategist Mudcat Saunders who has a lot of advice about how to attract those elusive white males:

"Bubba doesn'?t call them illegal immigrants. He calls them illegal aliens. If the Democrats put illegal aliens in their bait can, we're going to come home with a bunch of white males in the boat."

Why would that work?

[W]hat he is suggesting is a tried and true method to get rural white males to sign on to a political party. Bashing immigrants and elites at the same time has a long pedigree and it is the most efficient way to bag some of those pick-up truck guys who are voting against their economic self-interest....And that's because what you are really doing is playing to their prejudices and validating their tribal instinct that the reason for their economic problems is really the same reason for the cultural problems they already believe they have --- Aliens taking over Real America --- whether liberals, immigrants, blacks, commies, whoever.

That's a problem for us because no matter how tempting it might be to go and grab those Virginians who are so disenchanted with George Bush and promise to close the borders and solve their problems: nobody has yet figured out how (short of an economic catastrophe so huge that people will disregard everything else) we can keep a coalition of liberals, workers, urbanites, racial minorities and nativist immigrant bashers in the same tent.

Blaming the "culturally discomfitting" Mexicans during one of these periods of economic insecurity is a temptation for political strategists, I have no doubt. But today, it's playing with fire. There is a reason why Karl Rove has been handling this issue with kid gloves. It's not just the agriculture lobby, which could be persuaded to keep its powder dry for a period of time until the frenzy dies down (as it always does.) No, this time, there is a huge voter block at stake. They saw what happened in California when Pete Wilson let his id run free in an earlier period of economic insecurity and he ran ads saying "they just keep coming." He destroyed the Republican party in this state.

Demographics show that the Hispanic vote is essential for future majorities. Ruy Teixiera reported last August:

As two recent reports document, the Hispanic population of the United States continues to increase rapidly, especially in areas that we now think of as "solid red." The Pew Hispanic Center report describes and analyzes the extraordinary growth of the Hispanic population in six southern states, Arkansas, Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee, down to the county level. The Census report shows that Texas has now become a majority-minority state (joining New Mexico, California and Hawaii), primarily due to its burgeoning Hispanic population.

[...]

In this survey just completed, Hispanics had swung back to the Democrats with a vengeance, giving them a 32-point margin in a generic race for Congress (61 to 29 percent). The Republican vote today is 10 points below what Bush achieved just six months earlier. These voters are deeply dissatisfied with the Bush economy and Iraq war; they are socially tolerant and internationalist; they align with a Democratic Party that respects Hispanics and diversity, that uses government to help families, reduce poverty and create opportunity, and that will bring major change in education and health care. This is even truer for the growing younger population under 30, including Gen Y voters, who support the Democrats by a remarkable 46 points (70 to 24 percent).

The country is experiencing economic and social insecurity and as has always happened in the past at such times, the focus turns to immigration (illegal and legal) as a cause. But this time that same immigrant group (that has always been here, by the way) is a huge, growing voting block and a big prize for the political party that recognizes and respects it. People like Mudcat Saunders think that you can scapegoat the "illegal aliens" without any spillover into the large legal Hispanic community. But as we saw in that gentrifying neighborhood in Virginia, it isn't really about illegals per se. And California proved that if you go too far with the "illegal alien" business you lose the Hispanic population altogether.

Democrats can look to the future and find a populist message that doesn't cater to white fear and tendencies to scapegoat minorities. And we can add the Hispanic community permanently into our coalition, denying Karl Rove his most coveted goal. Or we can take the easy way out and catch a few Bubbas until the economy turns around, at which point they'll go right back home to the party that really knows how to feed their worst instincts on regular basis --- the Republicans.

And then of course, there's this: if we succumb to the temptation to re-marry the twin pillars of populism for the umpteenth time, economic resentment and nativism, we will not only continue to lose elections we will lose our souls as well.


Update: Alice in the comments points out that Herndon, the home of the militiamen in the two articles quoted above, voted decisively for Tim Kaine in the last election. It's not a mainstream as the authors would have people believe.


Update II: Greg at The Talent Show offers up some thoughtful advice on how to handle this.


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digby 11/30/2005 02:38:00 PM |

Tuesday, November 29, 2005

 
Nice Tries

by digby



Josh Marshall is collecting "nice tries," which are the brownnosing, he said/she said statements by the media implying that all this nasty corruption business is a bi-partisan matter.

It's obvious that the "culture of corruption" charge is scaring the GOP because they've clearly put the hammer down on the media to portray the looming scandal tsunami as something "everybody does." This, of course, is utter bullshit. As Marshall says, it comes from the proximity to power and the Democrats are way out of that game.

All DC reporters know about the K Street Project:

[B]eginning with the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994, and accelerating in 2001, when George W. Bush became president, the GOP has made a determined effort to undermine the bipartisan complexion of K Street. And Santorum's Tuesday meetings are a crucial part of that effort. Every week, the lobbyists present pass around a list of the jobs available and discuss whom to support. Santorum's responsibility is to make sure each one is filled by a loyal Republican--a senator's chief of staff, for instance, or a top White House aide, or another lobbyist whose reliability has been demonstrated. After Santorum settles on a candidate, the lobbyists present make sure it is known whom the Republican leadership favors. "The underlying theme was [to] place Republicans in key positions on K Street. Everybody taking part was a Republican and understood that was the purpose of what we were doing," says Rod Chandler, a retired congressman and lobbyist who has participated in the Santorum meetings. "It's been a very successful effort."

If today's GOP leaders put as much energy into shaping K Street as their predecessors did into selecting judges and executive-branch nominees, it's because lobbying jobs have become the foundation of a powerful new force in Washington politics: a Republican political machine. Like the urban Democratic machines of yore, this one is built upon patronage, contracts, and one-party rule. But unlike legendary Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley, who rewarded party functionaries with jobs in the municipal bureaucracy, the GOP is building its machine outside government, among Washington's thousands of trade associations and corporate offices, their tens of thousands of employees, and the hundreds of millions of dollars in political money at their disposal.

Political machines are not unprecedented. Patrick Fitzgerald is dismantling both a Republican and Democratic one in Chicago as we speak. We've seen "heckuva-job-Brownies" before. We've seen politicians and business work together to rip off the taxpayers and cheat the little guy many times. We've seen greedy politicians before. But this current national GOP machine is unique in its blatant, in-your-face arrogance and the swiftness with which it descended into utter, all-out corruption such that even a Republican run Justice department cannnot ignore it.

As the Abramoff scandal unfolds, it's important to remember that Jack Abramoff is not just another lobbyist or even just another Republican. He and Grover Norquist and Ralph Reed all ran the college Republicans during the Reagan years. He is a "movement conservative" of the innermost circle of movement conservatives. This is not a fluke. It's endemic to the modern Republican party.

As for Marshall's collection, I would suggest that he check out the first 15 minutes of Hardball today. Tweety could hardly stop talking about how corruption is totally non-partisan in any way. Tony Blankley at least had the good graces to say that if he were a Democratic operative he'd be wearing a bib --- to catch the drool.

However, my winner of the day is from Wolf Blitzer's 'The Situation Room" today in which Bruce Morton went all the way back to the 70's Wilbur Wayne Hays and his mistress-on -the-payroll-who-couldn't-take-dictation, Elizabeth Ray, to demonstrate how corrupt the Democrats were. (The only corrupt Republicans mentioned in the piece were Cunningham and ... Gingrich, who it was claimed had to leave office in part because of his crooked book deal, which isn't actually true.)

The kicker was a poll showing that 63 percent of the public consider most Democratic representatives are honest compared to 57 percent who think that most Republican representatives are honest. Morton said that means it's a tie.



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digby 11/29/2005 03:27:00 PM |

 
Dancing With The Mediawhores

by digby

In case anyone missed this funny, revealing piece on Mike Isikoff by John Amato of Crooks and Liars, check it out.

Woodward called Isikoff a Junkyard Dog reporter. But I don't think that's right. He's more of an Upskirt Dog. You know the kind.



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digby 11/29/2005 03:08:00 PM |

 
Victory Strategy

by digby



Here's Bush today:

I'm giving a speech tomorrow that outlines the progress we're making in training Iraqis to provide security for their country. And we will make decisions about troop levels based upon the capacity of the Iraqis to take the fight to the enemy.

And I will make decisions on the level of troops, based upon the recommendations by the commanders on the ground. If they tell me we need more troops, we'll provide more troops. If they tell me we've got a sufficient level of troop, that'll be the level of troops. If they tell me that the Iraqis are ready to take more and more responsibility and that we'll be able to bring some Americans home, I will do that. It's their recommendation.

Secondly, we want to win. The whole objective is to achieve a victory against the terrorists. The terrorists have made it very clear that Iraq is the central front on the war on terror. See, they want us to leave before we've achieved our mission. You know why? Because they want a safe haven. They want to be able to plot and plan attacks.

This country must never forget the lessons of September the 11th, 2001. And a victory in Iraq will deny the terrorists their stated goal.

Finally, a democracy in Iraq, which is now emerging, will serve as a fantastic example for reformers and others. And as democracy takes hold in the broader Middle East, we can say we have done our duty and laid the foundation of peace for generations to come.

We should listen to what Bush is actually saying here because he lays it all out. Notice that he has to predicate everything on the idea that we are winning. (In the press conference he said it very emphatically: "secondly .... we wanna WIN) He deeply believes, for both political and ideological reasons, that winning is the only thing that matters.

Last night I heard Newt Gingrich throwing around the phrase "surrender to the terrorists" on O'Reilly. His successor as Speaker of the house, Dennis Hastert wrote earlier:

Murtha and the Democrats ''want us to retreat. They want us to wave the white flag of surrender to the terrorists of the world." And he said, ''We must not cower like European nations who are now fighting terrorists on their soil."

This is significant because Rove long ago convinced Bush that he can continue in Iraq as long as the American people think we are "winning." It tracks with his own belief in the bandwagon effect and it's backed up by some academics who have advised the White House that "staying the course" is possible as long as they handle the PR effectively.

In shaping their message, White House officials have drawn on the work of Duke University political scientists Peter D. Feaver and Christopher F. Gelpi, who have examined public opinion on Iraq and previous conflicts. Feaver, who served on the staff of the National Security Council in the early years of the Clinton administration, joined the Bush NSC staff about a month ago as special adviser for strategic planning and institutional reform.

Feaver and Gelpi categorized people on the basis of two questions: "Was the decision to go to war in Iraq right or wrong?" and "Can the United States ultimately win?" In their analysis, the key issue now is how people feel about the prospect of winning. They concluded that many of the questions asked in public opinion polls -- such as whether going to war was worth it and whether casualties are at an unacceptable level -- are far less relevant now in gauging public tolerance or patience for the road ahead than the question of whether people believe the war is winnable.

"The most important single factor in determining public support for a war is the perception that the mission will succeed," Gelpi said in an interview yesterday.

I suspect that Gingrich and Hastert's "surrender" talk is aimed at Bush as much as the Democrats, to keep him from going soft, but it's also setting the stage for the inevitable "who lost Iraq" argument down the line. Guys like Gingrich want to clearly be on the "never give up, never give in" team after the smoke has cleared so they can pretend they are brave warriors worthy of leadership. I think Bush actually believes this crapola, however. It fits his schoolboy vision of the way the world works.

Here's Bush in 2003:

The terrorists have a strategic goal. They want us to leave Iraq before our work is done. They want to shake the will of the civilized world. In the past, the terrorists have cited the examples of Beirut and Somalia, claiming that if you inflict harm on Americans, we will run from a challenge. In this, they are mistaken.

It's one of their more ridiculous beliefs and yet it is the foundation of neocon thinking about how to deal with terrorism. They honestly think that if we stay in Iraq that we will prove to the terrorists that we are tough ... and then they will not be able to attack us anymore. As unbelievable as it is, this simple-minded psychological diagnosis of the problem is one of the main reasons why we are stuck in this quagmire.

But Bush doesn't stop with that simple delusion. He also believes that he has been called to this battle by something much more important than the mere will of the American people. As Seymour Hersh writes in this week's New Yorker:

Current and former military and intelligence officials have told me that the President remains convinced that it is his personal mission to bring democracy to Iraq, and that he is impervious to political pressure, even from fellow Republicans. They also say that he disparages any information that conflicts with his view of how the war is proceeding.

Bush’s closest advisers have long been aware of the religious nature of his policy commitments. In recent interviews, one former senior official, who served in Bush’s first term, spoke extensively about the connection between the President’s religious faith and his view of the war in Iraq. After the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the former official said, he was told that Bush felt that “God put me here” to deal with the war on terror. The President’s belief was fortified by the Republican sweep in the 2002 congressional elections; Bush saw the victory as a purposeful message from God that “he’s the man,” the former official said. Publicly, Bush depicted his reëlection as a referendum on the war; privately, he spoke of it as another manifestation of divine purpose.

The former senior official said that after the election he made a lengthy inspection visit to Iraq and reported his findings to Bush in the White House: “I said to the President, ‘We’re not winning the war.’ And he asked, ‘Are we losing?’ I said, ‘Not yet.’ ” The President, he said, “appeared displeased” with that answer.

“I tried to tell him,” the former senior official said. “And he couldn’t hear it.”

According to this report in the NY Daily News, Bush doesn't trust his advisors anymore. (Not even his wife, after all she failed him on the Miers debacle.) He's going to stick with the simple script that has him being chosen by God to lead this battle against evil. Hardliners are going to manipulate him with that by doing what Gingrich did last night --- characterizing a withdrawal as "surrendering to the terrorists."

What he is going to do is what many in the military have long wanted to do, which is revert to a greater reliance on air power. If anyone is succumbing to political pressure it's the wild-eyed Rummy whose management of the war has turned out to be a cock-up of epic proportions. We're going back to our tried and true: Bombing the shit out of anything that moves. From Hersh:

A key element of the drawdown plans, not mentioned in the President’s public statements, is that the departing American troops will be replaced by American airpower. Quick, deadly strikes by U.S. warplanes are seen as a way to improve dramatically the combat capability of even the weakest Iraqi combat units. The danger, military experts have told me, is that, while the number of American casualties would decrease as ground troops are withdrawn, the over-all level of violence and the number of Iraqi fatalities would increase unless there are stringent controls over who bombs what.

Now that's the nice, clean, surgical kind of war the American people like. No American casualties and fun pictures of buildings going "kaboom!" And it takes the pressure off of our near-broken Army. The Air Force may have problems with Iraqis using their air power to play out old grudges against non-combatants, but the American people can be successfully snowed on that one. The Iraqis will be standing up and we'll just be enforcing the conditions of our glorious victory.

“We’re not planning to diminish the war,” Patrick Clawson, the deputy director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, told me. Clawson’s views often mirror the thinking of the men and women around Vice-President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. “We just want to change the mix of the forces doing the fighting—Iraqi infantry with American support and greater use of airpower. The rule now is to commit Iraqi forces into combat only in places where they are sure to win. The pace of commitment, and withdrawal, depends on their success in the battlefield.”

That is what we call "winning." And we will keep plenty of troops on the ground and planes in the air for years to come to ensure that the war stays "won."



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digby 11/29/2005 02:00:00 PM |

 
Call 911

by digby

PACE: It is absolutely responsibility of every U.S. service member if they see inhumane treatment being conducted, to intervene, to stop it. As an example of how to do it if you don't see it happening, but you're told about it, is exactly what happened a couple of weeks ago. There was a report from an Iraqi to a U.S. commander that there was a possibility of inhumane treatment in a particular facility. That U.S. commander got together with his Iraqi counterparts. They went together to the facility, found what they found, reported it to the Iraqi government, and the Iraqi government has taken ownership of that problem and is investigating it.

So they did exactly what they should have done.

RUMSFELD: I don't think you mean they have an obligation to physically stop it, it's to report it.

PACE: If they are physically present when inhumane treatment is taking place, sir, they have an obligation to try to stop it.

Does anyone have any further doubts about how out torture regime happened?



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digby 11/29/2005 01:08:00 PM |

 
Luskin's Friendly Chat

by digby

Since Luskin supposedly unveiled some sort of exciting eleventh hour evidence that gave Fitzgerald so much pause I wondered if maybe Viveca Novak had been called to provide exculpatory evidence for Rove. (I would have thought that Fitzgerald would have moved a little quicker with that thrilling new angle, however, if it could have closed this investigation.)

The Washington Post article today says Novak and Luskin are personal friends and:

Unlike Cooper, Viveca Novak is not seeking to protect a confidential source and was not subpoenaed to testify.

Jane thinks that this is total crap and that Viveca Novak is being called for reasons other than Luskin's 11th hour pause giving "evidence":

If Luskin is dragging in Viveca Novak to substantiate something he said, then it seems likely Fitzgerald has some piece of evidence her testimony is intended to counter. Something within the timeframe must indicate that Rover wasn't being completely honest with either the FBI or the grand jury, and they hope to prove that if Luskin was out there selling his own client's special brand of bs then Fitzgerald should buy it, too.

Luskin has a history of playing reporters. He may very well be playing VandeHei here too (although VandeHei does report that another source says this Novak testimony has nothing to do with all this Luskin fluffing.)

The article says Novak will write a piece about her deposition, so we will soon find out what this is all about.

But this brings up a question I've long wondered about. Why in the hell did Rove hire Luskin in the first place? The article Jane references in the link above (from The New Republic) describes Luskin this way:

[S]coring Rove was a coup. Luskin is an unlikely choice for a Republican, let alone Rove. In fact, during the 1990s, a wide swath of the conservative movement spent a good chunk of its time trying to destroy his reputation. For the last ten years, Luskin has served as the in-house prosecutor for the Laborers' International Union, where he has been charged with fighting corruption. The right was miffed that the Clinton administration let the Laborers clean house on their own rather than under the tutelage of the Justice Department, as was done with the Teamsters. One gadfly conservative organization, the National Legal and Policy Center (NLPC), turned discrediting Luskin into its own personal crusade. They produced a highly unflattering 13-page report that set off a cascade of critical stories and editorials in the conservative press. Under the headline "Luskin's Ties to the New England/Patriarca Crime Family," the report documented a fishy episode wherein Luskin was forced to return $245,000 in legal fees that he received from a client named Stephen A. Saccoccia, who was sentenced to 660 years in prison for laundering South American drug-cartel and mob money. A U.S. attorney, accusing Luskin of "willful blindness," reasoned that, when Luskin started getting paid with solid gold bars (he ultimately received 45 of them, worth $505,125) and wire transfers from Swiss bank accounts, he should have known the payments were from illicit sources, especially since his client's crimes involved gold bars and wire transfers from Swiss bank accounts.

Many of the other anti-Luskin criticisms concerned alleged conflicts of interest stemming from his defense of several clients wrapped up in Clinton-related scandals. Luskin soon became a target of The Washington Times, Investor's Business Daily, The Weekly Standard, National Review, and The American Spectator, each arguing a version of the NLPC line that he was ethically unsuited for his job at the Laborers' Union.

But, by the end of the '90s, Luskin had established himself as a top-tier defense attorney. He abandoned his boutique law firm for the gilded hallways of Patton Boggs. Still, big-name Washington lawyers say he's not really part of the small clique of attorneys that seem to pop up during every investigation--people like Jacob Stein, Abbe Lowell, Plato Cacheris, Robert Bennett, and Reid Weingarten. "Let's just say that I haven't been in a case where he represented anyone," sniffs a member of Washington's legal royalty.

These political cases require very specialized legal experience. That's why clients usually hire from the small pool of attoprneys who know how to feed the beast, protect their client's reputation to the degree possible) and deal with special prosecutors who operate under different rules and restraints than the usual US Attorney. I've never understood why Rove, the man who said he wanted to "get" Wilson purely because he was a Democrat, hired this guy.

Any thoughts?



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digby 11/29/2005 07:56:00 AM |

 
Better Stop Sobbin' Now

by digby


The Duke-stir has been a prick for years. He said that the liberal leaders of congress should be lined up and shot. He calls for the death penalty for drug dealers and then cries at his son's sentencing hearing for possession of 400 lbs of marijuana and asks for mercy because his son has a good heart. Here's how the conservative San Diego Tribune editorial board described him back in 1998:

Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham, R-Escondido, responded to a heckler at a San Diego forum on prostate cancer by gesturing toward him with his finger and declaring, “(expletive) you.” During his remarks at the weekend event, the congressman also described a rectal procedure he had received as “just not natural, unless maybe you’re Barney Frank,” a reference to the openly gay lawmaker from Massachusetts.

Cunningham later apologized, saying his actions were inappropriate for a member of Congress. He certainly got that right.

But this was not the first time Cunningham let his temper get the better of him.

In 1995, Capitol Hill police had to break up a scuffle between the San Diego County lawmaker and Rep. James Moran, D-Va. A year earlier, Cunningham challenged Rep. David Obey, D-Wis., to a physical confrontation on the House floor. On another occasion, he used the degrading term “homos” to describe gays in the armed forces.

As a four-term veteran of the House, Cunningham has exerted constructive leadership on important military and education issues. But his reputation for vulgar conduct — a reputation he seems intent on reinforcing at regular intervals, despite his own repeated apologies — is an embarrassment to San Diego.

And it turns out he was a thief, too. What a big surprise, what with him being such a great guy and all.

Cunningham is a typical loud mouthed bully who fairly represents the (large) angry white male faction of the Republican party. Like Limbaugh the criminal drug addict and DeLay the thieving crook, they think they are immune from laws they seek to inflict on the rest of the American people.

Good riddance.



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digby 11/29/2005 07:31:00 AM |

Sunday, November 27, 2005

 
Clean Break

by digby


Mickey Kaus has been flogging his "scoop" about Libby calling up Russert to complain about Chris Matthews using the allegedly anti-semitic term "neocon." We would only know this for sure if Russert would reveal his conversation with Libby and he won't because he isn't a journalist, he's a talk show host. Just as Jay Leno wouldn't want to upset Jessica Simpson, Russert doesn't want to upset the White House.

Kaus brings up something interesting, however, to explain Libby's bone deep hatred for Wilson. (We know what Rove's reason was --- "he's a Democrat.") He writes:

What Wilson quote is most likely to have angered Libby? I'd nominate the following excerpt (again, via Maguire) from a discussion by Wilson at the Education for Peace in Iraq Center on June 14, 2003, about a month before Libby's call to Russert:

I think there are a number of issues at play; there's a number of competing agendas. One is the remaking of the map of the Middle East for Israeli security, and my fear is that when it becomes increasingly apparent that this was all done to make Sharon's life easier and that American soldiers are dying in order to make Sharon's life--enable Sharon to impose his terms upon the Palestinians that people will wonder why it is American boys and girls are dying for Israel and that will undercut a strategic relationship and a moral obligation that we've had towards Israel for 55 years. I think it's a terribly flawed strategy. [Emphasis added. Audio here at 13:33]

Kaus notes that there is no way of knowing if Libby had heard about this talk when he went over the edge on Wilson, but it's possible.

It reminds me that Wilson has long held that the administration's Iraq policy could most simply be explained by the "Clean Break" document which was written for the Netanyahu government in 1997. It's interesting to note how many of the current players were involved in that document:

Following is a report prepared by The Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies’ "Study Group on a New Israeli Strategy Toward 2000." The main substantive ideas in this paper emerge from a discussion in which prominent opinion makers, including Richard Perle, James Colbert, Charles Fairbanks, Jr., Douglas Feith, Robert Loewenberg, David Wurmser, and Meyrav Wurmser participated. The report, entitled "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm," is the framework for a series of follow-up reports on strategy.

If you haven't read that document, you should. It's amazing.



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digby 11/27/2005 05:49:00 PM |

 
Mexamerica

It's clear that Bush is going to try to change the subject with a big push on the immigration issue. This article in TIME discusses the various pressures on both parties.

Having spent a good part of my almost 50 years in California, I have observed that the immigration issue is usually a sign of a weak economy or some other form of discontent. It's been around forever and rears its head every once in a while as people perceive a "crisis" and then it goes underground again.

It is not a partisan issue; many Democrats are very exercised about Mexican immigrants overrunning the borders and allegedly taking away jobs from Americans or at least holding wages below what they would otherwise be. On the other side are liberals who see a subtle and no so subtle racism in the border debate and feel that all this talk of cultural dissonence is a false construct. There are conflicting values of economics and human rights involved and it's confusing.

The Republican have a different set of divisive issues. TIME characterizes Bush's dilemma this way:

So far, he has not been able to bridge his party's business leaders, who need a steady supply of workers willing to do hard labor, and its cultural conservatives, who fear that something essential about the American character is vanishing under the crosscurrents of multilingualism and demographic change and ethnic pluralism.

This is clearly going to be an issue. Even up in Ohio, which I didn't know until recently has been a mexican migrant crop picking destination forever, is having a fit about illegal immigration and all the alleged problems associated with it.

My feeling is that this time we are dealing with displaced fear and frustrating impotence. The terrorist boogeyman has been fully internalized and people are afraid. But it is an ephemeral and distant enemy. Another brown hoarde is conveniently available. I think my theory is borne out by the right's increasing emphasis on the Mexican border being a national security threat and the sudden seriousness of Pat Buchanan's "fence" concept:

This latest fence proposal comes from an organization called Let Freedom Ring, and its WeNeedaFence.com project. It's funded by Dr. John Templeton, a generous supporter of a range of conservative causes.

Colin Hanna, the group's president, says we shouldn't be messing around with the flimsy and partial fences we've built so far. What's needed is a serious border fence, one modeled after what the Israelis are building on the West Bank.

What Hanna has in mind is a barrier consisting of a "pyramid" of rolls of barbed wire piled 6 to 8 feet high. Alongside it would run a deep ditch, followed by a fence, a security road, another fence, another ditch, and then another wire pyramid. Cameras and motion detectors would monitor the fence to create a formidable barrier 40 to 50 yards wide. The cost: $2 million to $4 million a mile, or $4 billion to $8 billion in total.

Hanna says his proposal is entirely consistent with President Bush's emerging proposal to legalize some illegal immigrants through a temporary guest-worker program. In fact, he says, it will complement it. Unless more illegal migrants can be kept out after Bush's guest-worker program is established, more will keep coming in. ''The fence is the sine qua non of immigration reform," Hanna argues. "If you don't have a secure border, all the rest is whistling in the wind.''

To promote his ideas, his group has lobbied on Capitol Hill and aired two television spots in the Washington area. One cites statistics of North Koreans and Iraqis crossing the Mexican border, and includes a clip of a plane crashing into the World Trade Center.

I'm also hearing a lot about rapes, animal mutilation and kidnapping along the border.

I understand the strong negative feelings that many Democratic populists have about illegal immigration. Disdaining the cheap immigrant labor the wealthy thrive on is an understandable populist impulse. I do hope, however, that Democrats give some long and serious thought to the underlying racist implications of some of this on the right ---- and understand the dangers of getting into bed with people whose real agenda has nothing to do with economics:

...the great migration north continues. Some 1.5 million are apprehended every year on our southern border breaking into the United States. Of the perhaps 500,000 who make it, one-third head for Mexifornia, where their claims on Medicaid, schools, courts, prisons, and welfare have tipped the Golden State toward bankruptcy and induced millions of native-born Americans to flee in the great exodus to Nevada, Idaho, Arizona, and Colorado. Ten years after NAFTA, Mexico's leading export to America is still--Mexicans. America is becoming Mexamerica.

Source: Where The Right Went Wrong, by Pat Buchanan, p.166 Sep 1, 2004

Mexifornia? How silly. The word "California" is spanish. So are "Los Angeles" and "San Francisco" and "Las Vegas" and "Santa Fe" and "San Antonio." This country has always been Mexamerica. Perhaps Pat doesn't know this being from Washington DC, but those of us from the border states don't find this "alien culture" alien at all. It's always been here. And, yes, there are plenty of people who have always hated it --- the same way that some white southerners are intimately familiar with black culture and hate it at the same time. But contrary to what Pat and some of the other "American culture" hysterics are trying to promote, this isn't new. It's been literally going on for centuries. And we've been having these panics about it every so often for centuries too.

We can argue about the degree of the immigration problem and about solutions. But we should remember that populism isn't only a leftwing ideology. It swings both ways as Pat Buchanan's racist right wing populism shows. Sadly, it's been most successful when it combined both elements. I hope that liberals don't find it "useful" to subtly play to some of these sentiments no matter how tempting it might be. We should be very thoughtful about this.

Update: Kevin Drum discusses the policy implications of the immigration debate. Sadly, I don't think this debate is really about policy. It's about the boogeyman.



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digby 11/27/2005 12:39:00 PM |

 
It Ain't Over Rover

by digby

How odd. A new reporter is being subpoenaed in the Fitzgerald investigation and the press is actually reporting details about it. Shocking breach of DC etiquette, what what?

A second Time magazine reporter has been asked to testify in the
CIA leak case, this time about her discussions with Karl Rove's attorney, a sign that prosecutors are still exploring charges against the White House aide.

Viveca Novak, a reporter in Time's Washington bureau, is cooperating with Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald, who is investigating the leak of CIA operative Valerie Plame's identity in 2003, the magazine reported in its Dec. 5 issue.

Novak specifically has been asked to testify under oath about conversations she had with Rove attorney Robert Luskin starting in May 2004, the magazine reported.

Novak, part of a team tracking the CIA case for Time, has written or contributed to articles quoting Luskin that characterized the nature of what was said between Rove and Matthew Cooper, the first Time reporter who testified in the case in July.

Luskin has talked a lot of trash from the get. It will be very interesting if his big mouth gets his client in trouble.

There is nothing about this on the TIME web-site but if the AP got it, I expect there will be. And I expect that Viveca Novak will write a story after her testimony. They seem to be catching on to the fact that while they may be inhibited from divulging the names of their anonymous sources, they have an obligation to find a way to report the substance of what they tell them. TIME's Matt Cooper set the standard for how a responsible journalist deals with this sticky wicket (even if his publisher was very mealy mouthed.) It can be done.



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digby 11/27/2005 11:48:00 AM |

 
Clean Up The Mess

by digby


I've always thought that in order to really put a monkeywrench into the modern GOP's political machine it was important to take out prime movers Rove, Delay, Reed and Norquist. The CIA leak scandal has wounded (perhaps mortally) Karl Rove. Ronnie Earle has weakened Delay in preparation for the coup de grace Abramoff scandal that may just take down him, Reed, Norquist and a bunch of others in short shrift.

It doesn't mean that the machine will be irreparably broken, but it won't work as smoothly as it did with the original parts. Those men have unique gifts that they honed over a long period of time to create a very efficient political mechanism. It may not be that any one of them going down would make the difference, but all of them going down at virtually the same time certainly does.

They do not look good. Here's the latest on Grover:

The knives are falling all around him, but Grover Norquist -- antitax crusader, Republican lobbyist, and Weston native -- insists they won't fall on him.

A Norquist friend and former colleague, Jack Abramoff, is under criminal investigation for his lobbying activities, some of which involved the same Native American tribe on Norquist's client roster. The noose on Abramoff appeared to have tightened Monday when his former business partner, Michael Scanlon, agreed to cooperate with prosecutors after pleading guilty to one count of conspiracy to bribe public officials and to defraud Indian tribes.

At a breakfast meeting with reporters the next morning, Norquist behaved as if this was all nuisance background noise, as he mostly held forth on the state of the ongoing war between the political left and right.

Finally, when pressed on the investigations, he was curt and unapologetic. ''We worked with the Choctaw Indians. We did a book, and I was hoping to do more outreach with Native Americans," said Norquist, the president of Americans for Tax Reform. ''Jack, I'm sure he advised the Choctaws. But the Choctaws worked with ATR and they're happy with ATR."

Last year, a Senate committee investigating allegations that Abramoff defrauded Indian tribes obtained e-mail traffic from ATR, but Norquist says he had not been contacted by government prosecutors in the Abramoff case. Now the conservative activist is on the warpath against Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, who is leading the Senate investigation.

After ATR turned over its e-mails, Norquist charged, McCain tried to ''steal our donor list."

''He subpoenaed our donor records and we said no," Norquist said. ''He took a shot at me and it didn't work and it embarrassed him."

Norquist then accused McCain and Senator Byron L. Dorgan, a North Dakota Democrat, of discrimination by targeting lobbyists who worked for Native American tribes. Abramoff and his partners collected $82 million in fees from Indian tribes and their casinos over four years.

''The implication is that it's money laundering to raise money from Native Americans, and spend it," Norquist said.

. . . And senator's camp fires back

An early favorite in the 2008 presidential race, McCain is in a delicate position with political conservatives, who have held a grudge against him since he ran in 2000 against George W. Bush.

While McCain has been trying to smooth ruffled feathers on the right, his investigation into the Abramoff scandal, which he has called ''a complex and tangled web . . . a story alarming in its depth and breadth of potential wrongdoing," reinforces the bad blood with Norquist and his political allies. Apparently, McCain could not care less.

When we asked the senator's staff for a comment on Norquist's fusillade against McCain, his chief of staff, Mark Salter, had a lot to say. ''In Norquist's world, the truth is for suckers. And it's as pointless to respond to him as it would be to respond to some street-corner schizophrenic," Salter responded.

''There is nothing remotely accurate about his recollection of the committee's dealings with him," he added. ''Nor, obviously, is his charge of discrimination credible, considering that it is made against someone who has a long and well-known record of respect for the tribes by someone who excuses ripping them off."

Grover's natural instinct is to viciously counter-attack. It's what he does. McCain is having none of it and with a weakened political machine, McCain has much less to fear by ignoring them.

I do not want John McCain to be the next president. But I think that he might be if he keeps this up. His greatest appeal to crossover Dems and independents is that he isn't afraid of these assholes like Grover Norquist and Tom DeLay. When you hear George Will sniffing about the "criminalization of politics" over bribery scandals and leaking of classified information, when you see a guy like John Warner embarrasingly attempt to dance on the head of a pin as he did this morning on Press The Meat, defending the indefensible, McCain looks damned good. Even to regular Democrats whose fondest wish is to see these arrogant scumbags have to eat their words.

These scandals are dealing a major blow to the corrupt GOP political machine, which is an unalloyed good thing. But it would be a shame if John McCain were the one who benefitted from it. He's long cast himself as a crusading reformer and the time is ripe for one of those. The Dems ought not let themselves be left in the lurch on that message. Instead of the smarmy "together, we can do better," we ought to be shouting "once again, the Democratic party is called on to do the patriotic thing and clean up the mess the corrupt Republican party has made with its free lunch policies and taxpayer rip-offs."

If we don't say it, McCain will win on personality alone.



Update: I do agree that McCain will have a hard time getting past the Christian Right in the primaries, but I fear that a whole lot of independents (and some Democrats) will make up for it. If the machine is weakened, it will be more difficult for it to shut him down in states with open primaries and even those that aren't. I personally know Democrats who will register as Republicans to vote for him in the primary. Hardcore Dems like me will never vote for such a conservative politician, but to many people in this country, he is a very attractive candidate. I think he is, by far, our biggest political threat.

Update II: Laura Rozen discusses this NY Times article taking the temperature of the country on the Bush administration (decidely cold, frigid even) and the malaise among her Republican relatives. So far they can't think of a single soul to vote for, McCain being seen a disloyal to the party.

My relatives, on the other hand, are warming to the flyboy. It's a military thing. He served. He understands. He will beat the terrorists. Suddenly, Junior and Unka Dick's lack of military service is meaningful.

Oh, and John Kerry is still a lying, lily livered coward, just like all the Democrats who want to offer therapy to the French terrorists.


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digby 11/27/2005 10:35:00 AM |

 
VI Day!!!!

by digby


Yea! President Bush has finally achieved consensus for his Iraq pull-out plan. It wasn't easy. Joseph Biden has tacitly admitted that the Bush administration has been right all along in its insistence that we pull out large numbers of troops in 2006.

As you know, Democrats have long been insisting that the US stay in Iraq indefinitely. It was only through the wise counsel and patient persuasion of Dick Cheney and George W. Bush that they were convinced that a timed withdrawal was the best way to go.

While it's great news that the Iraq war is over and done with (and the liberals can finally stop obsessing over it) it's going to take some work to get them to stop lobbying for more tax cuts and destroying social security. When are they going to get some responsibility and recognize that there is no free lunch?

At least the Bush administration finally got the liberals to let the poor Katrina victims keep a roof over their heads until after Christmas. Jeez, what Scrooges.




Update: The really neat thing about this is that Rove has decided that Joe Biden should be the 2008 Democratic nominee. Feel the magic.



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digby 11/27/2005 07:37:00 AM |