Hullabaloo

Tuesday, February 14, 2006

 
Journalistic Venereal Disease

by digby


Glenn has another great post up today in which he throws down the gauntlet to the right wing bloggers like the Old Perfesser who are all quick to require that Democrat purge the party of radicals while they cheer and applaud the eliminationist fascists in their own midst.

Republicans have been playing this game for years. They wildly inflate the importance of fringe, extremist figures and then -- every time one of those individuals makes an intemperate remark or comment that can be wrenched out-of-context and depicted as some sort of demented evil -- they demand that Democrats ritualistically parade before the cameras and either condemn those individuals or be branded as someone who is insufficiently willing to stand up to the extremists "in their party."

I've written dozens of posts on this topic myself and it never fails to amaze me how deeply the right believes in its own righteousness. We on the left are not perfect, but by God, when leftist radicals start talking wistfully about killing Republicans we don't make them into best selling authors and cheer them like rock stars.

But I think there is another dimension to Glenn's observation and one that lets the right wing bloggers off the hook just a little. You can't really hold them responsible for Ann Coulter when the woman is profiled on the cover of TIME magazine and characterized as some sort of kicky, ascerbic comic. The writer of that article said:

"the officialdom of punditry, so full of phonies and dullards, would suffer without her humor and fire."

Here are a few more choice quotes from that article, (gathered by the incomparable Howler:)

CLOUD: Coulter's speech was part right-wing stand-up routine—she called Senator Edward Kennedy "the human dirigible"—and part bloodcurdling agitprop. "Liberals like to scream and howl about McCarthyism," she concluded. "I say, let's give them some. They've had intellectual terror on the campus for years ... It's time for a new McCarthyism." Curtain.

CLOUD: [S]he told me several times that, as she put it in an e-mail, "most of what I say, I say to amuse myself and amuse my friends. I don't spend a lot of time thinking about anything beyond that."

CLOUD: So which is it? Is she a brave warrior or a shallow hack? Or is Ann Coulter that most unlikely of conservative subspecies: a hard-right ironist?

CLOUD: [A]s Coulter herself points out in Is It True What They Say About Ann?, "I think the way to convert people is to make them laugh or to make them enraged ... Even if I could be convinced that if I had gone through 17 on-the-one-hand-on-the-other-hands, I might convince one more liberal out there, I think I'd still write the way I write, because it gives me laughs." Coulter told me that when her editor suggests cutting a line from a column to save space, "I'll ask him, 'But is it funny?' And if he says it's funny, I'll cut an actual fact [instead]."

CLOUD: People say that Jon Stewart has blurred the line between news and humor, but his Daily Show airs on a comedy channel. Coulter goes on actual news programs and deploys so much sarcasm and hyperbole that she sounds more like Dennis Miller than Limbaugh.

CLOUD: One theory about Coulter is that she is less Joe McCarthy and more a right-wing Ali G, acting out a character who utters what the rest of us won't.

Why Coulter is just a female Ali G! Hilarious!

When Eric Alterman had the temerity to call Cloud on this utter swill, the author fell back on journalism's tedious false equivalency crutch:

Eric Alterman calls my piece on Ann Coulter a "moral, professional, and intellectual abomination" as well as, redundantly, a "moral and intellectual scandal." He says Time has "a journalistic venereal disease." This is the left-wing equivalent of an Ann Coulter attack: callous and intended to create as much friction as possible (words I use to describe Coulter in my alleged puff piece). But that's really what my story was about--the kind of take-no-prisoners dialogue that Coulter has helped create and popularize. Now Alterman, it would seem, is trying to out-Coulter Coulter.


[...]

What Alterman wants is for people to ignore Coulter, to pretend as though she doesn't exist and isn't one of the most loved--and hated--figures on the public scene. I would rather engage her, examine her ideas and her popularity, and challenge her. My story does all of those things. It's true that I don't list every single mistake Ann Coulter has ever made, although I do print some new ones. My job was not to fact-check all of Coulter's 1,000 columns, the 1,300-odd pages of her books and the hundreds of TV appearances; it was to profile her. Nonetheless, I do list several Coulter errors and also correct the record on some mistakes by others who have written about her--including Alterman. In his book on the media, Alterman asserts that Coulter said to a Vietnam vet, "People like you caused us to lose that war." She did not. In fact, the vet had just gotten his facts wrong, and Coulter responded sarcastically, "No wonder you guys lost." Harsh words, yes--sort of like saying Time has a venereal disease--but Alterman got the quote wrong.

Yes the phrase "TIME has journalistic venereal disease" (meaning that this rhetoric is passed along through intimate contact) is equivalent to "my only regret is that he [McVeigh]didn't blow up the NY Times building. Right. Exactly the same.

I wrote about this nonsense last spring when the Coulter profile was published:

Ann Coulter is not, as Howie Kurtz asserts today, the equivalent of Michael Moore. Michael Moore is is not advocating the murder of conservatives. He just isn't. For instance, he doesn't say that Eric Rudolph should be killed so that other conservatives will learn that they can be killed too. He doesn't say that he wishes that Tim McVeigh had blown up the Washington Times Bldg. He doesn't say that conservatives routinely commit the capital offense of treason. He certainly doesn't put up pictures of the fucking snoopy dance because one of his political opponents was killed. He doesn't, in other words, issue calls for violence and repression against his political enemies. That is what Ann Coulter does, in the most coarse, vulgar, reprehensible way possible.

Moore says conservatives are liars and they are corrupt and they are wrong. But he is not saying that they should die. There is a distinction. And it's a distinction that Time magazine and Howard Kurtz apparently cannot see.

I have long felt that it was important not to minimize the impact of this sick shit. For years my friends and others in the online communities would say that it was a waste of time to worry about Rush because there are real issues to worry about. Likewise Coulter. Everytime I write something about her there is always someone chastizing me for wasting their time. Yet, here she is, being given the impramatur of a mainstream publication of record in a whitwash of epic proportions. Slowly, slowly the water is heating up.

It's kind of funny that I and others spent last week arguing whether Democrats ought to be encouraging Hollywood to stop selling sex, (which even David Brooks agrees doesn't seem to correlate to any real negative change in the way kids behave.) But, here we have a real problem, a real coarsening of the discourse which has resulted in our politics becoming so polarized and rhetorically violent that it's as if we live on two different planets.

While Ann Coulter makes the cover of Time for writing that liberals have a "preternatural gift for striking a position on the side of treason," her followers actually side with Iraqi insurgents against an American charity worker. At freeperland and elsewhere they laughed and clapped and enjoyed the fruits of the enemy's labor. This is because if you listen to Ann and Rush and Sean and Savage and all the rest of these people you know that there is no greater enemy on the planet than the American liberal. That's what Ann Coulter and her ilk are selling and that is what Time magazine celebrated with their cover girl this week.

Ann Coulter and her violent, racist eliminationist rhetoric is considered funny and mainstream by the Washington post and TIME magazine. Considering that, why should the right wing bloggers believe they have any responsibility to hold themseloves to the standard to which they hold liberals with an outlying provocateur like Ward Churchill? In thier view, and most of the poltiical establishment, Ann Coulter is perfectly respectable.

I ended this post on the same subject with this comment from the racist website RedState:

Ann Coulter doesn't go on television ranting and raving like the liberals do. Remember Lawrence O'Donnell? Paul Begala? James Carville? Try Maureen Dowd. Ann is nothing like these losers but she does have a sharp wit and biting tongue and knows how to dish it out. These conspiracy theory wingnuts deserve nothing less.

That is the problem with Republicans. They don't know how to go for the throat while the Democrats are pros at aiming for the head.

I hope Ann keeps it up and never gives an inch. She is a strength for us conservatives, not something to be ashamed of.

Here's a cute little quote from that fun little minx's biting tongue:

"Liberals hate America, they hate flagwavers, they hate abortion opponents. They hate all religions except Islam post 9/11. Even Islamic terrorists don't hate America like liberals do; they don't have the energy; if they had that much energy they'd have indoor plumbing by now."

Adorable.


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digby 2/14/2006 03:26:00 PM |

 
He Stands Ready To Assist

by digby


Yesterday McClellan kept saying that the vice president and his staff couldn't get all the facts together because they were concentrating so hard on making sure Whittington was ok. The implication was that Cheney must have been intimately involved, pressing down on an artery or administering CPR for hours since he didn't bother to even call Bush until much later.

MR. McCLELLAN: Well, I think that the first priority was making sure that Harry Whittington, Mr. Whittington was getting the medical care that he needed, and I think that's where everybody's attention should have been focused and was focused when the hunting accident took place. And in terms of here in Washington, there was information that we were continuing to learn about throughout the course of that evening and into early Sunday morning. The initial report that we received was that there had been a hunting accident. We didn't know who all was involved, but a member of his party was involved in that hunting accident. And then additional details continued to come in overnight.

And it's important always to work to make sure you get information out like this as quickly as possible, but it's also important to make sure that the first priority is focused where it should be, and that is making sure that Mr. Whittington has the care that he needs. And the Vice President went to the hospital yesterday to visit him. The Vice President was pleased to see that he was doing well and in good spirits. And the President is, as well.

Today,post heart attack, they are again saying the the Veep is standing by (waiting to be called into the operating room to monitor his vital signs orsomething.)

A statement from Cheney's office said, "The vice president said that he stood ready to assist. Mr. Whittington's spirits were good, but obviously his situation deserves the careful monitoring that his doctors are providing."

The funny thing about all this is that during the long night that Cheney was supposed to have been rolling bandages and mopping Whittington's fevered brow, he was actually "focused" on having his dinner:

She said Cheney stayed “close but cool” while the agents and medical personnel treated Whittington, then took him by ambulance to the hospital. Later, the hunting group sat down for dinner while Whittington was being treated, receiving updates from a family member at the hospital. Armstrong described Cheney's demeanor during dinner as “very worried” about Whittington.

"Man I hope that old bastard doesn't kick. Can you pass the butter?"


I have to say that judging from the cable gasbags today, this is the first scandal I've seen handled by the press like the Lewinsky scandal --- with everyone sitting around breathlessly speculating about what really happened and "what it all means." I suspect it's because it fits a larger narrative, as this diary on Kos, only partly tongue in cheek, shows. In fact, I just heard Bob Shrum say on Hardball that this story is a metaphor for the entire Bush administration: the gang that couldn't shoot straight.


But, seriously. What in the hell are they hiding? What?



Update: Ok. I think something very serious is happening behind the scenes. There is simply no way that a normally functioning white house would let their most powerful propaganda voice say this:

"Would you rather go hunting with Dick Cheney or riding in a car over a bridge with Ted Kennedy?” Limbaugh asked. "At least Cheney takes you to the hospital.”

Is that really where they want to go with this? Yow.



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digby 2/14/2006 01:23:00 PM |

 
Laziness Doesn't Begin To Explain It.

by tristero


Dear Kevin, You're wrong. I was there. I remember.

Laziness doesn't explain why George Stephanopoulos failed to mention on the proceeding Sunday show in February that millions of people in the United States marched the day before to oppose Bush's insane plans for war. Oh he mentioned Europe but not a word about the US marches. That's right, Kevin: Stephanopoulus failed to mention what was almost certainly the largest US demonstration in history the day after it happened. That wasn't laziness. And it's not laziness that the February and March '03 marches been all but eliminated from the official memories of 2002/2003. (Except to bring up ANSWER's involvement in organizing them and dismiss all those millions of mothers, fathers, and kids as green-haired goofballs.)

Kevin, I read somewhere that at least one of the networks began planning a year before the invasion to cover it (I'll try to look it up if you don't believe me). Meanwhile the voices opposed to war - and there were millions - were systematically excluded. Think about it. "Fuck, Saddam. We're taking him out," Bush joked (haha) a year before. It was in no one's interest in the media to include serious dissent to rush to war. Not only on Sunday bloviations, but throughout the week, the token representatives of opposition to Bush that were permitted on the major shows were ridiculed and smeared. Hey remember Scott Ritter, that shrill, hysterical, obnoxious guy who seemed slightly crazed? Laziness doesn't explain why Ritter's personal problems suddenly followed him whenever he confidently asserted that Saddam couldn't possibly have wmd - problems that, while no doubt truly ugly, didn't in any way disqualify his expertise. Remember when a liberal meant Michael Moore and only Michael Moore, a comic filmmaker who voted for Nader? The genuine major voices opposed to war weren't permitted anywhere near an effective microphone, but they were known. When Jessica Mathews of Carnegie Endowment - as sober an American as one could ask for and certainly known within the media - started to make a convincing case on NPR that democracy by invasion was a crazy pipe dream, even that relatively unimportant network was too big. William Kristol personally called up and horned in on her time with ludicrous assertions designed to prevent the conversation from touching upon the substantive issues at stake.

Hey, do you remember the Turkey angle, Kevin? Boy, I do. By that time, I was trying full time to understand why my country had gone insane. In the months before invasion, the press in the US was reporting a "coalition" attack - i.e. US - from Turkey was a done deal. But I smelled a rat. I asked friends for translations of articles overseas, including from Turkey. My, my what a different picture one got of that done deal! We were lied to and laziness doesn't explain that. It couldn't possibly happen given some 95% of the country was opposed to the US invading from Turkey. We were lied to. The press lied to the American people.

That is the truth. Oh yes, the press was, and is lazy. In booking guests on Sunday or reporting the news from Turkey. But that was hardly what uniquely characterized 2002/2003. What happened was that the press became an active collaborator in the single worst decision ever made by a United States president. Ever. A decision my 9 year old daughter will have to endure the consequences of, in ways large and small, every day for the rest of her life.

Laziness excluded anti-war voices on Sunday shows? After what we've all seen of the Bush/Cheney obsession with information control? Laziness? Please, Kevin. You're smarter than that. And you know you're smarter than that, as your half-hearted attempt to make nice all-but-concedes.

Before Bush/Iraq, it may have seemed cleverly political - cute - to take your tack, to not blame the press but ever so gently suggest they are getting bored with the same tired faces. It lets them save face after all and accomplishes the same thing. But after Bush/Iraq, it's gonna take a lot more than kind gentle suggestion to make sure that the US press never, ever deliberately abandons its gadfly role out of fear of retaliation from any presidency whose lust for power and control is well-nigh psychotic. As the current presidency is. And was particularly successful at enforcing in the prelude to disaster... sorry, I meant the war.

It's going to take an angry, assertive polis fully prepared to take on the establishment press and hold both its lazy foot AND its sycophantic foot to the fire. And do whatever it takes - even if it leads to resignations and reorganizations - to ensure the American people get the information it must have to govern itself.

Laziness. Yeah, right.

Love,

tristero

{Update: Kevin examines whether ratings tipped the balance in the run up to war}. Why does the name Howard Beale come to mind when I hear this argument? And why do phrases like, "we're talking about war, goddammit not a popularity contest" keep going throught my head? As for blaming Democrats for being boring, that is NOT what happened. That is NOT what makes the run up to war one of American journalism's most shameful period. What happened, what is still happening, is that voices that were right about Iraq in 2002 are still systematically excluded. They were/are not excluded because they are boring, but because they are unwanted. There's a difference.]
tristero 2/14/2006 12:02:00 PM |

 
Cheney's Victim Has Heart Attack.

by tristero

Okay, the official reports - which only a fool would believe are telling us how badly Whittington was shot or what actually happened - are getting less and less funny. Let's just hope he recovers and Cheney's weapons are confiscated.
tristero 2/14/2006 11:25:00 AM |

 
Oooooh Baby

by digby

The Poorman spends Valentine's day with the ladies of Wingnuttia. He knows what they need and gives it to them.


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digby 2/14/2006 10:21:00 AM |

 
A Difficult Public Face

by digby


Via Kevin and Atrios I see that Media Matters has released more data today about the cable news networks' partisan imbalance:

* The balance between Democrats/progressives and Republicans/conservatives was roughly equal during Clinton's second term, with a slight edge toward Republicans/conservatives: 52 percent of the ideologically identifiable guests were from the right, and 48 percent were from the left. But in Bush's first term, Republicans/ conservatives held a dramatic advantage, outnumbering Democrats/progressives by 58 percent to 42 percent. In 2005, the figures were an identical 58 percent to 42 percent.

* Counting only elected officials and administration representatives, Democrats had a small advantage during Clinton's second term: 53 percent to 45 percent. In Bush's first term, however, the Republican advantage was 61 percent to 39 percent -- nearly three times as large.

* In both the Clinton and Bush administrations, conservative journalists were far more likely to appear on the Sunday shows than were progressive journalists. In Clinton's second term, 61 percent of the ideologically identifiable journalists were conservative; in Bush's first term, that figure rose to 69 percent.

* In 1997 and 1998, the shows conducted more solo interviews with Democrats/progressives than with Republicans/conservatives. But in every year since, there have been more solo interviews with Republicans/conservatives.

* The most frequent Sunday show guest during this nine-year period is Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), who has appeared 124 times. Sen. Joseph Biden (D-DE) has been the most frequent guest since 2003.

* In every year examined by the study -- 1997 - 2005 -- more panels tilted right (a greater number of Republicans/conservatives than Democrats/progressives) than tilted left. In some years, there were two, three, or even four times as many righttitled panels as left-tilted panels.

* Congressional opponents of the Iraq war were largely absent from the Sunday shows, particularly during the period just before the war began.

Again, none of this is surprising to those of us who have been watching this stuff from our side of the aisle for the last decade or so.

Kevin and Atrios both focus on the interesting fact that there was a total lack of anti-war voices in the run-up to the war. Kevin says:

Why did the anti-war side get shunned so badly by the talk shows?

I suspect the chart on the right contains the answer. Aside from documenting the insane love affair that Sunday hosts have with John McCain, it shows that eight of the ten most popular Sunday talkers were senators and every single one of them voted for the war resolution. The reason that anti-war senators didn't get much air time was just simple laziness: the talk show bookers kept booking their favorites regardless of what was happening in the outside world and regardless of whether that meant they were shortchanging their viewers. They were on autopilot.

Actually, it was not just laziness at all. We have evidence that this was a conscious decision on the part of the news networks:

While "Donahue" does badly trail both O'Reilly and CNN's Connie Chung in the ratings, those numbers have improved in recent weeks. So much so that the program is the top-rated show on MSNBC, beating even the highly promoted "Hardball With Chris Matthews."

Although Donahue didn't know it at the time, his fate was sealed a number of weeks ago after NBC News executives received the results of a study commissioned to provide guidance on the future of the news channel.

That report--shared with me by an NBC news insider--gives an excruciatingly painful assessment of the channel and its programming. Some of recommendations, such as dropping the "America's News Channel," have already been implemented. But the harshest criticism was leveled at Donahue, whom the authors of the study described as "a tired, left-wing liberal out of touch with the current marketplace."

The study went on to claim that Donahue presented a "difficult public face for NBC in a time of war......He seems to delight in presenting guests who are anti-war, anti-Bush and skeptical of the administration's motives." The report went on to outline a possible nightmare scenario where the show becomes "a home for the liberal antiwar agenda at the same time that our competitors are waving the flag at every opportunity."

And wave it they did. Just as a refresher, let's recall how the networks actually ended up covering the war:

Networks quickly scrambled to give names to their war coverage, with corresponding graphic logos that swooshed and gleamed in 3D colors accompanied by mood-inducing soundtracks. CBS chose "America at War." CNN went with "Strike on Iraq." CNBC was "The Price of War," while NBC and MSNBC both went with "Target: Iraq"—a choice that changed quickly as MSNBC joined Fox in using the Pentagon's own code name for the war—“Operation Iraqi Freedom.” The logos featured fluttering American flags or motifs involving red, white and blue. On Fox, martial drumbeats accompanied regularly scheduled updates. Promo ads for MSNBC featured a photo montage of soldiers accompanied by a piano rendition of “The Star Spangled Banner.” All of the networks peppered their broadcasts with statements such as, "CNN's live coverage of Operation Iraqi Freedom will continue, right after this short break.” Every time this phrase came out of a reporter’s mouth or appeared in the corner of the screen, the stations implicitly endorsed White House claims about the motives for war.

The networks also went to pains to identify with and praise the troops. Fox routinely referred to U.S. troops as "we" and "us" and "our folks." MSNBC featured a recurring segment called "America's Bravest," featuring photographs of soldiers in the field. Regular features on Fox included "The Ultimate Sacrifice," featuring mug shots of fallen U.S. soldiers, and "The Heart of War," offering personal profiles of military personnel.

Much of the coverage looked like a primetime patriotism extravaganza, with inspiring theme music and emotional collages of war photos used liberally at transitions between live reporting and advertising breaks. Bombing raids appeared on the screen as big red fireballs, interspersed with "gun-cam" shots, animated maps, charts and graphics showcasing military maneuvers and weapons technology. Inside the studios, networks provided large, game-board floor maps where ex-generals walked around with pointers, moving around little blue and red jet fighters and tanks.

"Have we made war glamorous?" asked MSNBC anchor Lester Holt during a March 26 exchange with former Navy Seal and professional wrestler turned politician Jesse Ventura, whom it had hired as an expert commentator.

"It reminds me a lot of the Super Bowl," Ventura replied.

Never mind all the dead people and the hundreds of billions of dollars flushed down the toilet.




This article has more about NBC's directives in the run up to the war. Disgusting.


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digby 2/14/2006 09:06:00 AM |

 
The Times Gets Off One Of Its Knees

by tristero

The NY Times coverage of "intelligent design" creationism is improving somewhat from the days when Jodi Wilgoren (who has since changed her name to Rudoren) cheerfully fellated Christian Reconstructionists - the folks behind "intelligent design" - as they, along with other wackos, pursued the Wedge Strategy to inflict their racist, theocratic trash on the rest of us.

Today, Neela Banerjee and Anne Berryman turn in a good article on church celebrations of Darwin's 197th birthday:

The event, called Evolution Sunday, is an outgrowth of the Clergy Letter Project, started by academics and ministers in Wisconsin in early 2005 as a response to efforts, most notably in Dover, Pa., to discredit the teaching of evolutionary theory in public schools.

"There was a growing need to demonstrate that the loud, shrill voices of fundamentalists claiming that Christians had to choose between modern science and religion were presenting a false dichotomy," said Michael Zimmerman, dean of the College of Letters and Sciences at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh and the major organizer of the letter project.

Mr. Zimmerman said more than 10,000 ministers had signed the letter, which states, in part, that the theory of evolution is "a foundational scientific truth." To reject it, the letter continues, "is to deliberately embrace scientific ignorance and transmit such ignorance to our children."

"We believe that among God's good gifts are human minds capable of critical thought and that the failure to fully employ this gift is a rejection of the will of our Creator," the letter says.

There are nuances in the descriptions a scientist might quibble over, but the article's approach is quite reasonable.

And this morning, Rudoren herself has a mediocre article on the rapid collapse of "intelligent design", mere mediocrity being quite an improvement for her. Rudoren does a pretty good job summarizing how quickly "intelligent design" is collapsing:

A majority of members on the Board of Education of Ohio, the first state to single out evolution for "critical analysis" in science classes more than three years ago, are expected on Tuesday to challenge a model biology lesson plan they consider an excuse to teach the tenets of the disputed theory of intelligent design.

A reversal in Ohio would be the most significant in a series of developments signaling a sea change across the country against intelligent design — which posits that life is too complex to be explained by evolution alone — since a federal judge's ruling in December that teaching the theory in the public schools of Dover, Pa., was unconstitutional.

A small rural school district in California last month quickly scuttled plans for a philosophy elective on intelligent design after being challenged by lawyers involved in the Pennsylvania case. Also last month, an Indiana lawmaker who said in November that he would introduce legislation to mandate teaching of intelligent design instead offered a watered-down bill requiring only "accuracy in textbooks." And just last week, two Democrats in Wisconsin proposed a ban on schools' teaching intelligent design as science, the first such proposal in the country.

Unfortunately, Rudoren wastes space, and the reader's time, passing on a stupid quote from the Christian Reconstructionist beard group, the Discovery Institute, without correction or comment. This is just one of several faux-balance quotes that maintain the fraud that there actually is a legitimate controversy over "intelligent design."

Still, it's something of an improvement from her Grand Canyon days.
tristero 2/14/2006 02:03:00 AM |

Monday, February 13, 2006

 
If It Ain't Broke

by digby

Three former associates of Jack Abramoff said Monday that the now-disgraced lobbyist frequently told them during his lobbying work he had strong ties to the White House through presidential confidant Karl Rove.

The White House said Monday that Rove remembers meeting Abramoff at a 1990s political meeting and considered the lobbyist a "casual acquaintance" since President Bush took office in 2001.

[...]

Abramoff was a $100,000 fundraiser for Bush and lobbying records obtained by the AP show his lobbying team logged nearly 200 meetings with the administration during its first 10 months in office on behalf of one of his clients, the Northern Mariana Islands.

The contacts between Abramoff's team and the administration included meetings with Attorney General John Ashcroft and policy advisers to Vice President Dick Cheney, the AP reported last year.

Abramoff's former assistant, Susan Ralston, went to work for Rove in 2001. Abramoff's legal team declined comment Monday night.

[...]

Asked about the three former Abramoff associates' account, the White House said Rove shared a common past with Abramoff as leaders of a young Republicans group decades ago.

"Mr. Rove remembers they had met at a political event in the 1990s," White House spokeswoman Erin Healy said. "Since then, he would describe him as a casual acquaintance."

I can't quite put my finger on it, but that reminds me of something. Darn it. I hate when that happens.

Oh well. In other news, I see that Kennyboy Lay's trial proceeds apace.

Oh right:

When Governor Bush—now President Bush—decided to run for the governor's spot, [there was] a little difficult situation—I'd worked very closely with Ann Richards also, the four years she was governor. But I was very close to George W. and had a lot of respect for him, had watched him over the years, particularly with reference to dealing with his father when his father was in the White House and some of the things he did to work for his father, and so did support him."

—Interview with Enron Chairman Kenneth Lay for Frontline's 2001 documentary, "Blackout: What Caused the Power Crisis in California? And Who's Profiting?"

[...]

"I got to know Ken Lay when he was the head of the—what they call the Governor's Business Council in Texas. He was a supporter of Ann Richards in my run in 1994 ... And she had named him the head of the Governor's Business Council. And I decided to leave him in place, just for the sake of continuity. And that's when I first got to know Ken. …"

—President George W. Bush, answering reporters' questions in the Oval Office Jan. 10.

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digby 2/13/2006 10:29:00 PM |

 
What A Shame

by digby

I didn't have a dog in the Hackett Brown fight, but I can't help but be disappointed that Hackett is checking out. That man has the shinin' and we have precious little of that in Democratic circles. I have to think that the powers that be may have failed to comprehend that some people have to be dealt with differently than your average pol. That's why they call them "authentic" and it's important to handle them like the thoroughbreds they are. They are always high maintenance, like most stars, but they are very, very useful in projecting an appealing national image for the party. Ask the best bet to be the Republican nominee in 2008: John McCain.



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digby 2/13/2006 10:28:00 PM |

 
Dispatches From The Fever Swamp

by digby


Jason Zengerle over at the Plank gives Mickey Kaus props for being wrong and then discusses every Joementum Democrat's favorite new theme: the "fever swamp" of the liberal blogosphere. He quotes Kaus:

Much of Democratic politics seems to now consist of embracing and fanning similarly comforting, but ultimately deceptive, liberal memes. Enron has fatally damaged Bush, Abu Ghraib has fatally damaged Bush, Katrina has fatally damaged Bush, Abramoff has fatally damaged Bush, the Plame investigation will fatally damage Bush--you can catch the latest allegedly devastating issue every day on Huffington Post or Daily Kos (and frequently in the NYT).

And then adds:

I'd add a few other suspects to that last. But I think Kaus is on to something here. The drip-drip-drip of scandals and screw-ups should, collectively, take a toll on the Bush administration. But liberal bloggers have too often viewed and hyped each individual scandal as a silver bullet; and when that bullet misses--picking off, say, Scooter Libby instead of Karl Rove--they inevitably experience a letdown, and simply move onto the next supposed silver bullet, failing to capitalize on what, were it not for their unrealistically inflated expectations, would have been considered a significant scandal.

That is a very interesting observation and it makes me quite proud to be part of the liberal blogosphere. It means we are doing our jobs. The president's approval rating is stuck at around 40% and I think it's pretty clear that it isn't the reporting in the mainstream media or by the "reasonable" Democrats at the New Republican that brought that about. If left up to them the Republicans would be coasting to another easy re-election.

I don't say this because I think that liberal blogs are taking over the world and have changed the face of politics as we know it. I say it because I know that without us there would have been virtually no critical voices during the long period between 2001 and the presidential primary campaign during 2003. We were it. The media were overt, enthusiastic Bush boosters for well over two years and created an environment in which Democratic dissent (never welcome) was non-existent to the average American viewer. In fact, it took Bush's approval rating falling to below 40% before they would admit that he was in trouble.

I believe that if it had not been for the constant underground drumbeat from the fever swamps over the past five years, when the incompetence, malfeasance and corruption finally hit critical mass last summer with the bad news from Iraq, oil prices and Katrina, Bush would not have sunk as precipitously as he did and stayed there. It literally took two catasprophes of epic proportions to break the media from its narrative of Bush's powerful leadership. And this after two extremely close elections ---- and the lack of any WMD in Iraq.

Kevin Drum and Atrios both have featured posts today highlighting new data about about the dearth of liberal voices in the mainstream media. From Paul Waldman's article in the Washington Monthly:

This ideological imbalance isn't only evident in the "official" sources that are interviewed: the elected officials, candidates, and administration officials who make up most of the shows' guests. It is even clearer in the roundtable discussions with featured journalists, [where] it has been a frequent practice for a roundtable to consist of a right-wing columnist or two supposedly "balanced" by journalists from major newspapers.

....The consequence of all this is that in every year since 1997, conservative journalists have dramatically outnumbered liberal journalists, in some years by two-to-one or more. Why would the producers of the shows believe that a William Safire (56 appearances since 1997) or Bob Novak (37 appearances) is somehow "balanced" by a Gwen Ifill (27) or Dan Balz (22)? It suggests that some may have internalized the conservative critique of the media, which assumes that daily journalists are "liberal" almost by definition, and thus can provide a counterpoint to highly partisan conservative pundits.

Yes, it does suggest that. We in the fever swamps have observed this phenomenon for many years so it comes as no surprise to us. The liberal point of view has pretty much disappeared from the mainstream discourse. And yet, if one were to poll the grassroots, one would find that their views are not out of the mainstream at all. Indeed, on many more issues than not, we are in line with the vast majority of Americans.

And as much as we are unsurprised to see that the statistics bear out our observations that liberals aren't represented on news programs, neither are we surprised that right wing talk radio, right wing publishing and right wing cable news dominate the media and that we have nothing like it on our side. This is why we shake our heads in wonder when David Brooks says there are more "nuts" on our side or that we insist upon "Stalinist" discipline. (Ask Bruce Bartlett about Stalinist discipline.)

Rush Limbaugh gets paid 25 million dollars a year to say things like this:

OK, folks, I think I got enough information here to tell you about the contents of this fax that I got. Brace yourselves. This fax contains information that I have just been told will appear in a newsletter to Morgan Stanley sales personnel this afternoon.... What it is is a bit of news which says...there's a Washington consulting firm that has scheduled the release of a report that will appear, it will be published, that claims that Vince Foster was murdered in an apartment owned by Hillary Clinton, and the body was then taken to Fort Marcy Park.

This is, of course, the same Rush Limbaugh who interviews the Vice President on his show.

And while it is true that the producers of news programs may have internalized the "liberal" media meme and therefore book journalists who are required to be as objective as possible to spar with overt Republlican partisans, the greater problem is that the journalists themselves internalize the criticism and go out of their way to avoid being called liberal. This also explains journalists' somewhat overheated hostility to liberal bloggers: they have a target to prove to conservatives that they aren't liberals after all.

I actually think this is a good thing. We bloggers can take it. We're openly partisan and extremely aggressive. We aren't right wingers so we don't have their natural gift for organized top-down character assassination, but we have our own methods and we are learning. The mainstream media are, for the first time in memory, being pulled by both sides of the ideological spectrum. And maybe, just maybe, we might just save them in spite of themselves.

I have written before about this and made it clear that I do not wish to destroy the mainstream media. I do not believe that this country can do without a credible press. But after waiting in vain for more than a decade for the press to shake off its torpor and exert its perogatives as the fourth estate, I reluctantly came to the conclusion that our (and their) only hope was to join the fray and pull as hard as we can on the opposite end of the rope.

I see that the press does not know what to make of this. And I see that many Joementum Democrats don't get it either. They remain convinced that the country will wake up one day and see that our arguments are superior. They are wrong. This political era will be remembered for its brutal partisanship and sophisticated media manipulation in a 50/50 political environment. Democrats have been at a huge disadvantage because of the Republican message infrastructure and the strange servility of the mainstream press. So, we are pushing back with the one tough, aggressive partisan communication tool we have: the blogosphere.

The mainstream press is going to have to get used to us because we aren't going anywhere. I suspect they are actually somewhat relieved that somebody on our side has stepped up to take the slings and arrows of the vast right wing conspiracy and provide them with some cover. (No need to thank us. Just report the truth.)

Joementum Dems, on the other hand, need to recognize that we are in a partisan time and that requires a partisan strategy. We are going to hit them hard every time they repeat Republican talking points and otherwise enable the opposition to dominate the media discourse. There is no more room for bipartisan gestures that only benefit the GOP side of the equation. David Gergen said yesterday on This Weak that Republicans are much better at message than Democrats but they aren't so good at governing. Nobody knows this better than those of in the grassroots who have been forced to watch this trainwreck from the sidelines for more than a decade. It's why Bush is at 39% today and yet there is no guarantee that Democrats will win in the fall or any sense in the media that the Republican Party has failed. We cannot afford any more Democratic complicity with Republican memes and we are going to work against those who do it.

It's a new day. We angry denizens of the fever swamps have emerged from the slime to fight back. We couldn't wait any longer for the professionals to get the job done. At the rate they're going we'd be extinct within the decade.


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digby 2/13/2006 11:30:00 AM |

 
Do The Hustle

by digby


Scottie is making things much worse than they already were. He keeps saying that it took all that time to "gather the facts" and that their priority was to "help the victim." I guess we're supposed to believe that Cheney was so busy monitoring the man's vital signs that he couldn't pick up as phone and tell anybody what happened until the following morning.


Apparently, it took 12 hours to inform even McClellan that Cheney was the shooter. Both Card and Rove were involved very early. And Big Dick himself is said to have spoken to Armstrong about releasing it to her local paper, contrary to what she already said. A rather crude and bizarre press strategy for this group wouldn't you say? Why?


McClellan said that he knew about the shooting the evening it happened but didn't know until the next morning that it was Cheney. Asssuming he's telling the truth, I think it's fair to assume that they spent about 12 hours deciding whether Cheney or "someone else" actually fired the gun. I can't think of any other (believable) reason they would have waited --- unless there's even more to this story than we already know.


And how about that little bit about the deputy down in Texas who was told to back off asking any questions by the Secret Service? What's up with that?

developing super duper hardlike....



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digby 2/13/2006 09:48:00 AM |

 
Sourpuss

the digby

The Republicans really hate this shooting story. Hate it. The future ex Mrs Rush Limbaugh looks like she just sucked a lemon as she reported that Cheney went postal over the week-end. It isn't easy being a gargantuan right wing gasbag's girlfriend and having to pretend that you are unbiased. Sometimes it's impossible. She appeared to be barely able to keep her disgust in check contemplating what the comedians are going to say tonight.

So get your jokes on, moonbats. Let's torture us some wingnuts.


Just to get you started, here are the Top Ten Cheney Excuses For Shooting that Guy, courtesy DallasDem at Kos.

Update:

Then again, they aren't really quick enough to know a joke when they see one. I wrote this yesterday and Hilzoy over at Obsidion Wings did a fine riff on it last night. Sadly, it was a little bit too subtle for the folks apparently. I won't say it...



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digby 2/13/2006 08:45:00 AM |

 
Cheney's Law

by tristero

Always blame the victim:

"This all happened pretty quickly," Ms. Armstrong said in a telephone interview from her ranch. Mr. Whittington, she said, "did not announce — which would be protocol — 'Hey, it's me, I'm coming up,' " she said.

"He didn't do what he was supposed to do," she added, referring to Mr. Whittington. "So when a bird flushed and the vice president swung in to shoot it, Harry was where the bird was."

Mr. Whittington was "sprayed — peppered, is what we call it — on his right side, on part of his face, neck, shoulder and rib cage," she said, noting that she, too, had been sprayed on her leg in a hunting accident.

"A shotgun sprays a bunch of little bitty pellets; it's not a bullet involved,"

Must news reporters always exaggerate and say Vice President Cheney "shot" someone? That's just not true!

It's not as if he actually fired a big bad bullet. Just little bitty pellets. Couldn't harm a fly. And, good heavens, Harry wasn't even "sprayed" with little bitty pellets. He was just peppered. You ever pepper steak tartare? Oh, dear, that wasn't in good taste, was it? Tee hee!

Now run along like a good little girl and don't you dare go talking to anyone else who was there. Just do what you're supposed to do, write what I said, and you won't get hurt. Like Harry.

Besides, my child, it was his own fault, now, wasn't it?
tristero 2/13/2006 01:09:00 AM |

Sunday, February 12, 2006

 
Bad Jack

by digby

The Democratic Daily has a scoop. Here's a taste:

There was a good Jack and a bad Jack. Most people today only know the bad Jack. I didn’t know that man at all. The Jack I knew was funny engaging and after hours he was decent and true to his beliefs. Apparently he had some misguided impression of how to influence government.

There is something terribly wrong with our nation's capital.


Here's a little more about "the bad Jack."



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digby 2/12/2006 09:34:00 PM |

 
Edgy New Media

by digby


It was awfully good to see Jim Brady finally come forth with the scholarly, meditative disquisition about the effects of blogging on modern media for which we've all been waiting. We were in desperate need of some lucid, unimpassioned analysis of what happened in the Deborah Howell affair.

My career as a nitwitted, emasculated fascist began the afternoon of Jan. 19 when, as executive editor of the Post's Web site, washingtonpost.com, I closed down the comments area of one of our many blogs, one called post.blog. Created primarily to announce new features on the Web site, the blog had become ground zero for angry readers complaining about a column by Post ombudsman Deborah Howell on the newspaper's coverage of the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal. If I had let them, they would have obliterated any semblance of civil, genuine discussion.

As it was, things got pretty ugly, and it's worth figuring out why. In her Jan. 15 column, Howell erred in saying that Abramoff gave campaign donations to Democrats as well as Republicans. In fact, Abramoff directed clients to give to members of both parties, but he had donated his own personal funds only to Republicans.

Howell's inadvertent error prompted a handful of bloggers to urge their readers to go to post.blog to vent their discontent, and in the subsequent four days we received more than a thousand comments in our public forum. Only, the word "comments" doesn't convey the obscene, vituperative tone of a lot of the postings, which were the sort of things you might find carved on the door of a public toilet stall. About a hundred of them had to be removed for violating the Post site's standards, which don't allow profanity or personal attacks.

To my dismay, matters only got worse on Jan. 19 after Howell posted a clarification on washingtonpost.com. Instead of mollifying angry readers, the clarification prompted more than 400 additional comments over the next five hours, many of them so crude as to be unprintable in a family newspaper. Soon the number of comments that violated our standards of Web civility overwhelmed our ability to get rid of them; only then did we decide to shut down comments on the blog.

So was I suppressing free speech? Protecting the Bush administration? That's what you'd think, judging by the swift and acid reaction to my move. They couldn't get to post.blog, but they sure let me have it elsewhere in the blogosphere. I was honored as "Wanker of the Day" on one left-wing blog. Another site dissected my biography in order to prove that I was part of The Post's vast right-wing conspiracy.

It's so refreshing, isn't it, to see real journalism in action instead of the snide, snippy attitude displayed so often by sophomoric bloggers?

Now contrast that dry piece of expository writing with this wild, insane drivel written by one of the bloggers Brady so justifiably takes to task in his article: (From Alternet, naturally.)

When Washington Post ombudsman Deborah Howell published the false claim on Jan. 15 that Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff gave money to Democrats, the paper got a loud, swift and public lesson in the new realities of online interactivity and instant accountability. It was like watching a woolly mammoth being hauled shrieking and dripping with ice-age detritus into the 21stt century.

This lesson came in large part from the blogosphere, in the form of comments made on the newspaper's website and in posts made to political weblogs, such as DailyKos, Eschaton, and my own blog, Firedoglake. The collective daily readership of the largest political blogs now runs in the millions. We are news and politics junkies, instantly able to recite the last six jobs of Senate staffers and the names of reporters who cover every beat. We follow politics in real time and have zero tolerance for the kind of sloppy mistake Howell made. Hundreds of us swarmed to the site and immediately made our feelings known.

The paper's insistence on remaining silent in the wake of this was a clear indication that management did not understand that the days of one-way "we speak, you listen" information flow are over. It is no longer possible for a newspaper to simply publish erroneous information and then stonewall critics as they wait for everything to blow over.

Mercy! Can't someone put a muzzle on that crazy shrew? Can she not control her acid tongue and name calling even for a minute to explain her position? Apparently not. (Wooly Mammoths!!!? My God. Has she no decency? )

Unlike the wise, level-headed analysis you see in the first piece, here we have a writer who is so angry and hysterical she can't even begin to explain her position.

In these two pieces we have seen the contrast: crazed, hysterical demagoguery based purely on one's personal, emotional reaction to a story vs a sober, rational explanation of the events at hand. This is what separates "journalism" from "blogging." Perhaps someone would like to invite Mr Brady to the next blogger ethics panel to show us how it's done.



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digby 2/12/2006 03:57:00 PM |

 
Irresponsible

by tristero

Jeebus. Cheney shot someone. Let's hope the victim fully recovers. Meanwhile, TalkLeft discusses the legal issues.

Regardless, obviously Cheney just can't be trusted with the responsiblity of handling firearms. For God's sakes, confiscate the sumbitch's guns. Now. Before he kills someone.
tristero 2/12/2006 03:16:00 PM |

 
Find Me A Watermelon Immediately

by digby

We've got some ballistic tests to do. This doesn't pass the smell test:

The shooting was first reported by the Corpus Christi Caller-Times. The vice president's office did not disclose the accident until nearly 24 hours after it happened.

OK, folks, I think I got enough information here to tell you about the contents of this fax that I got. Brace yourselves. This fax contains information that I have just been told will appear in a newsletter to Morgan Stanley sales personnel this afternoon... What it is is a bit of news which says... there's a Washington consulting firm that has scheduled the release of a report that will appear, it will be published, that claims that this shooting took place in an apartment owned by Lynn Cheney, and the body was then taken to the ranch.

This needs to be looked into. And if it's determined to be an accident it needs to be looked into again. And again.



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digby 2/12/2006 03:10:00 PM |

 
Fallen Statues

by digby


Way back in November of 2000, people were chattering online about government overreach, specifically the rubber stamp FISA court:

"Franz Kafka would have judged this to wild to fictionalize. But for us - it's real"

---

"As quietly as possible (although it sometimes breaks out into the open, usually with the sound of gunfire and the death of innocents), a "shadow government" has been set up all around us my friend. It's foundation is not the constitution, but Executive Orders, Presidential Procalamations, Secret Acts, and Emergency Powers.

It has all the tools to be an absolute tyranny and those behind it (on both sides of the aisle) who crave power and their form of "governance" continue to move towards it while we are distracted by so many other goings on."

---

"The article strives to make it clear that the targets of the Kafka Kourt are foreign nationals, but then it also reveals that once a "target" is "approved" all of his or her contacts are also investigated.

[...]

Outlandish? Yes. But then, so is this whole Kafka Kourt outlandish."

---

"This is one of those ideas that has a valid purpose behind it, but is wide open to terrible abuse. And there's no way to check to see if it is abused.

Like all things that don't have the light of day shining on them, you can be sure that it is being twisted to suit the purposes of those who hold the power."

---

"The targets need not be under suspicion of committing a crime, but may be investigated when probable cause results solely from their associations or status: for example, belonging to, or aiding and abetting organizations deemed to pose a threat to U.S. national security.

This was discussed previously on FreeRepublic along with a Justice Department list of organizations to target. I saved it but unfortunately have lost it.. there were a lot of pro-life and pro-2nd Amendment groups on the list if I recall correctly. One group they targeted was a pro-life organization run by Catholic priests!"

Yes, that was from a Free Republic thread. It would appear that 9/11 changed the liberty loving, bill of rights supporting, self-sufficient freepers into a gaggle of snivelling little babies who were so traumatized by the terrorists that they now think this jack-booted FISA court is too much oversight and the president actually has the power to spy on any damned citizen he wants to. (Or they are partisan robots, you be the judge.)

I got that link from a great post by Glenn Greenwald about the new authoritarian cult conservatives (reminding me of my own little bon mot: "Conservative" is a magic word that applies to those who are in other conservatives' good graces. Until they aren't. At which point they are liberals.")

He writes:

Now, in order to be considered a "liberal," only one thing is required – a failure to pledge blind loyalty to George W. Bush. The minute one criticizes him is the minute that one becomes a "liberal," regardless of the ground on which the criticism is based. And the more one criticizes him, by definition, the more "liberal" one is. Whether one is a "liberal" -- or, for that matter, a "conservative" -- is now no longer a function of one’s actual political views, but is a function purely of one’s personal loyalty to George Bush.

I think the cult of Bush is actually representative of something else. A few months ago Rick Perlstein gave a talk about Barry Goldwater at a gathering of conservative intellectuals on the subject of The Conservative Movement: Its Past, Present and Future. To a room filled with the biggest thinkers on the right he said:

As an unabashed ideological liberal in the depths of the age of Clintonian triangulation, I found the recollections of the risks you all took for a cause absolutely inspiring.

In a sense, I considered you political role models.

The name that came up over and over in my interviews with these veterans of Young Americans for Freedom was "Richard Nixon." They came to the 1960 Republican National Convention determined to draft Barry Goldwater for vice president. They left after making a breathtaking ad hoc run at drafting Goldwater for president instead, and taking down the presumptive nominee as an unprincipled sellout.

Richard Nixon once instructed a new staffer, Richard Whalen, "Flexibility is the first principle of politics." The conservative movement has understood itself to be the people who unflaggingly answered back to Nixon: "Principle rises above politics." That's a quote from Alf Regnery, in a profile of him this fall in the Washington Post. In the same article, David Keene related his answer to someone who criticized the ACU for attacking congressional spending, because Republicans were the ones in charge of it: "Well, that's too bad." The man here to my right, Lee Edwards, got the money quote: "What we have here is the principled conservatives vs. the pragmatic conservatives."

[...]

What to make of the fact that some of the names who pioneered this anti-Nixonian movement of principle showed up in the dankest recesses of the Nixon administration? People like Douglas Caddy, of course, the co-founder of the effort to draft Goldwater for vice-president in 1960 and YAF's first president, who was the man the White House called on to represent the Watergate burglars in 1972. And people like the guy inaugurated as YAF's chair in the 1965 with those stirring words about truth: Tom Charles Huston--who, as the author of the first extra-legal espionage and sabotage plan in the Nixon White House, can fairly be called an architect of Watergate.

It is a thread one finds throughout the annals of the Nixon presidency. The notion that what they were doing was moral, the eggs that need be broken in the act of redeeming a crumbling West. Jeb Magruder told the Senate Watergate Committee: "Although I was aware they were illegal we had become somewhat inured to using some activities that would help us in accomplishing what we thought was a cause." That message came straight from the top. "Just remember you're doing the right thing," the president told Bob Haldeman on Easter Sunday, 1973. "That's what I used to think when I killed some innocent children in Hanoi." Then he briefed him on how to suborn perjury from an aide concerning the blackmailing of the Watergate burglars.

I would argue that the lawlessness of the Reagan administration was similarly couched in moral terms. Yes, the congress may have explicitly prohibited the president from aiding the Nicaraguan contras, but helping the contras was an act of redeeming a crumbling west (saving the world from communism), so more eggs had to be broken. I don't think I need to point out the huge fluffy omelette this administration is cooking up --- to redeem the crumbling...well, you know the drill.

So, it isn't precisely a cult of George W. Bush. It's a cult of Republican power. We know this because when a Democratic president last sat in the oval office, there was non-stop hysteria about presidential power and overreach. Every possible tool to emasculate the executive branch was brought ot bear, including the nuclear option, impeachment. Now we are told that the "Presidency" is virtually infallible. The only difference between now and then is that a Republican is the executive instead of a Democrat.

This must be a function of psychology more than ideology. David Gergen said this morning on This Weak, that the Republicans are much better at "messaging" than the Democrats, but that they aren't good at governing. This is true. They win by selling a fantasy of freedom and riches ---- and govern as despots. You can see from the examples cited above that there is no real conservative ideology. If they can jettison their most cherished ideals (small government, balanced budgets, checks and balances, states' rights, individual liberty etc.) whenever a Republican holds office, it is quite clear that what they care about is the power, not the "message" on which they ran.

Today I read that Bob Barr, a man who made his bones by calling for Clinton's impeachment even before the Lewinsky scandal broke, is now being booed by a room full of arch-conservatives for suggesting that the president saying "trust me" is not adequate. We know very well that if the president were a Democrat, everyone in that room would not find it adequate.

Perlstein ended his speech with this:

For the stations of the cross of a conservatism in power include not merely Sharon, Connecticut, but Saipan, Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands; not merely Mont Pelerin, but the competing Indian casinos whose money was laundered by conservative groups on Jack Abramoff's behalf. Barry Goldwater ran against Lyndon Johnson's ties to Bobby Baker. Now Republicans have made Bobby Baker their majority leader. His K Street Project is a lineal descendant of the attitudes and actions that constituted Watergate: Richard Nixon calling for the heads of Democratic donors and howling, "We have all this power and we're not using it." The American Conservative Union has made defending him to the death a point of conservative honor.

Ask yourself, What would Barry Goldwater say?

I believe now that Goldwaterism was nothing more than public relations and the "conservative movement" that sprang from his failed presidential campaign was nothing more than an elaborate con job. Throughout all the years that they decried Stalinism, it wasn't an idealistic belief in human rights and democracy that drove them. It was quite the opposite, in fact. It was envy. All that control over other people. The huge police and military apparatus. The forced conformity. The only thing they genuinely hated about the Soviet Union was its economic philosophy. The totalitarian system, not so much. When you read about the "conservative movement" you find over and over again that the anti-communists immersed themselves in Stalinism and modeled their organizational style on it, often quite openly admiring its efficient application of power. And as we know, one of totalitarianism's most obvious features is the cult of personality that always grows up within it.

The modern Republicans do show all the hallmarks of an authoritarian cult. But I believe that the metaphorical statue of George W. Bush will be toppled very shortly after he leaves office after an "election" based on a message of "reform." They must restore the fantasy. His statue will be replaced, of course, with another infallible leader. That's how it works.









The Princeton Symposium is now available online. Check out the whole line-up of thinkers on the Right. Perlstein really went into the belly of the beast.


Update: Kevin coincidentally finds a very nice illustration of what I'm talking about.
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digby 2/12/2006 08:29:00 AM |

Saturday, February 11, 2006

 
Educational Week-end

by digby


I am going to be out most of the day so I want to leave you all with some good reading from around the blogosphere:

This article by Arthur Silber about the inevitability of action in Iran is spot on. We are not dealing with rational actors. And he's not talking about the Iranians.

This post by Pastordan at Street Prophets about heresy in the Evangelical church is quite instructive. As usual the media gets it wrong.

Eric at Wampum answers my question about how the Democrats should answer the Republicans on national security with a fascinating reminder that there are still sharks in the blue water.

Jonathan Schwarz at A Tiny Revolution informs us of other things that Al Qaeda forgets.

Bill at Liberal Oasis tells the opposition party how to be an opposition party.

Gavin at Sadly No! writes about how it might happen here.

Gary Farber discusses datamining.

Assparrot (apparently still hungover) holds a "Digby nailed it ..." contest.

Oh, and in case you have been in a coma for the last four decades, this article in the Washington Post may help you understand that you are not crazy for noticing that all the racists are now Republicans.



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digby 2/11/2006 06:49:00 PM |

 
Wet Dreams

by digby

Uhm, would anybody care to speculate about why William Donohue, president of the Catholic league is so obsessed with incest and sodomy? Yesterday he said:

DONOHUE: Well, look, there are people in Hollywood, not all of them, but there are some people who are nothing more than harlots. They will do anything for the buck. They wouldn't care. If you asked them to sodomize their own mother in a movie, they would do so, and they would do it with a smile on their face. You know, it's such a cop-out to talk about freedom of expression.

My he has quite an imagination doesn't he? Don't blame Hollywood. I don't think they've been making any movies featuring such scenes. I don't even think the porno industry has been making movies featuring such scenes. That lovely image came right out of that sick fuck's twisted subconscious.

(In case you didn't catch the show, Donohue was talking about Muslim intolerance, by the way.)

Apparently, he just can't stop thinking about it:

After all, 15-year-olds, they go to abortionists. They get their babies killed without parental consent. The new Puritans [those criticizing The Passion of the Christ] don't seem to worry about that. They like gay sex. They like [the film] The Dreamers, a brother and sister who bathe together and stuff like that. The same people in The New York Times who say this movie, I don't think it's not really right for kids, they have no problems when it comes to sodomy. It's smoking they don't like and Catholicism. [MSNBC, Scarborough Country, 2/25/04]

Mothers, brothers, sisters. (What, no dear old Dad?) Yeah, it's Hollywood that's got a problem.



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digby 2/11/2006 06:43:00 AM |

 
Literary Terrorism

Guest post by Thumb

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President George W. Bush disclosed new details on Thursday of a thwarted al Qaeda plot to use shoe bombs to hijack a plane and fly it into a Los Angeles building, as he sought to justify his tactics in fighting terrorism.

With critics questioning the legality of his authorization of a domestic spying program, Bush used newly declassified details of a previously revealed plot to show that the threat of terrorism has not abated.

"America remains at risk, so we must remain vigilant," Bush said.

He said that in early 2002 the United States and its allies disrupted a plot to use bombs hidden in shoes to breach the cockpit door of an airplane and fly it into the tallest building in Los Angeles.

But he got the name of the building wrong, saying the "intended target was Liberty Tower." He meant Library Tower, now the US Bank Tower, that at 1,017 feet (310 metres) high is the tallest building in the United States west of the Mississippi River.

It seems Bush wasn't the only one confused by the name of the tower. This shocking leaked NSA intercept of two of the shoe-bombers shows even the terrorists were confused:

AQ#1: Have you received our target yet?

AQ#2: Yes. The Literary tower in Los Angeles.

#1: The Literary Tower?

#2: Yes. You know, the really tall one.

#1: Fool, you mean the LIBERTY Tower, not the...

#2: No no no, the Literary Tower, I remember specifically. That's the big one. With all their books.

#1: Their books?? Who cares about the infidel's books? The plan is to strike down their liberty. That makes our target the Liberty Tower, not the Literary tower. Are you sure we're talking about the same tower? Do you have a map? We are talking about Los Angeles, aren't we?

[paper shuffling]

#2: Um... uh... I can't figure this out. Oh, who cares what it's called. It's the tallest one. How many tallest buildings can there be in Los Angeles, anyway?

#1: Three? Four?

#2: ...Well, it doesn't matter. Any one of them will do. Do you have the information on our weapons?

#1: Yes, I am told we will hide high explosives in our shoes, and then...

#2: Uh, say that again? It sounded like you said "high explosives" and "shoes."

#1: Yes. Explosives. In our shoes. We'll use them to gain access to the cockpit...

#2: Uh, Mohammed?

#1: Yes Mohammed?

#2: Something, um, doesn't sound right. Are you quite sure...

#1: Of course I'm sure. It says right here [sounds of more paper shuffling] that we are to use high explosives to gain access to the cockpit, where we then threaten to blow up the rest of plane if they don't fly it into the Liberty...

#2: Literary...

#1: Liberty, Literary... I don't... [sighs] Look, just tell the pilot "The tall one." I'm quite sure they'll know which building you're talking about. Just tell them that if they don't immediately fly the plane into the tallest building in Los Angeles, you'll blow them up with your Sneakers of Mass Destruction. They won't want that, I can assure you.

#2: Uh... there's something I don't understand.

#1: Yes?

#2: How do we explode our way into the cockpit and still threaten to blow up the plane?

#1: Fool, that's why we hide the explosives in our shoes. Just use one shoe on the cockpit door. That way we still have the other shoe to threaten to blow up the rest of the plane with.

#2: Ooooh. That makes sense. Sort of. [long pause] We get to take them off first, right?

#1: I assume. Let me check [paper shuffling]. Well, I don't see where it says we can't. So I suppose it should be okay. [pause] Wait. Did you hear that?

#2: Yes, I did. Is there somebody else on the line? You don't have a party line, do you? Please tell me you paid for a private line...

#1: Yes, of course this is a private line. Now shut your hookah-hole, I'm trying to listen. ["if you'd like to continue this wiretap for another --ten-- minutes, please insert an additional --75-- cents"] ACK! I think this line is being tapped!

#2: Do Americans have such technologies?

#1: Damn. I once read where they did, but I completely forgot about that.

[click]
digby 2/11/2006 06:26:00 AM |

 
Ah, Brownie.

by tristero

I didn't see the hearings but if this description of what he said is accurate, one can only wish he had been half as good a FEMA chief as he is a Republican loyalist:

Mr. Brown said that he told a senior White House official early on of the New Orleans flooding, and that the administration was too focused on terrorism to respond properly to natural disasters...

The Bush administration, as a whole, he said, did not seem to care enough about natural disasters and had relegated natural disasters to a "stepchild" of national security.

"It is my belief," Mr. Brown told the senators, that if "we've confirmed that a terrorist has blown up the 17th Street Canal levee, then everybody would have jumped all over that and been trying to do everything they could."

Did they actually let him get away with that nonsense? Did nobody point out the obvious which Atrios immediately saw? That there is no essential difference between a response to a terrorist blowing up the levee or a hurricane blowing it? That you cancel your vacation and get your butt in gear 'cause you got a serious, serious emergency - thousands of lives are at stake - that requires the full attention of the fucking president?

Was Brown forced to concede that the Bush "intense focus on terrorism" is really a perverse obsession with the publicity at the expense of reality? Those of you who saw Brown testify - did anyone make that point?

Apparently not. Yes, Brown blamed the White House for the failure in Katrina rather than his own ineptitude; given the amount of trouble he's in, he had no choice. Even so - this is incredible! - he re-emphasized, without contradiction or explanation, THE single most important Republican talking point:

Republicans make national security and fighting terrorism Priority 1.

And while he spewed this partisan bullshit, Democrats "gently" urged him to keep his chin up and "keep fighting!" Brownie, you truly have done a heckuva job.
tristero 2/11/2006 01:21:00 AM |

Friday, February 10, 2006

 
Testy, testy

by digby


Mr Victoria Toensing just had a hissy fit on Wolfie because his co-pundit Richard Ben-Veniste agreed that Cheney didn't break the law but pointed out that it was hypocritical for Cheney to lecture people about leaking when he was authorizing his staff to selectively leak to reporters under cover of anonymity.

Mr Toensing rose up and bared his claws at Wolf because he had apparently agreed to come on to only discuss the "legal" issues and not to get into a partisan discussion. He's just an old non-partisan, country lawyer, you know. He doesn't do politics.



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digby 2/10/2006 04:35:00 PM |

 
Born Yesterday

by digby

White House aides had arranged for only the first few minutes of the session to be open to reporters. But an apparent mistake left a microphone on for longer than anticipated.

In the interim, he said, "I support the free press, let's just get them out of the room. ..."

"I want to share some thoughts with you before I answer your questions," he went on to the Republican House members. "First of all, I expect this conversation we're about to have to stay in the room. I know that's impossible in Washington."

He then moved to a defense of the NSA program that allows wiretaps without court warrants as part of certain terrorist investigations.

"I wake up every morning thinking about a future attack, and therefore, a lot of my thinking, and a lot of the decisions I make are based upon the attack that hurt us," Bush said.

Referring to the controversy surrounding whether the program is legal, he said, "We put constant checks on the program."

"I take my oath of office seriously. I swear to uphold the Constitution and laws of the United States," Bush said.

Isn't he terrific? Even in private he is exactly the same as he is in public. Boy oh boy, it sure is a good thing he didn't say anything controversial, though. That "technician" (who is coincidentally named Karl Rove --- go figure) would have been given a first class ticket to the woodshed. But our preznit is the same stalwart patriot no matter who he is speaking to so that technician knew he had nothing to worry about.



Update: Wolfie fell for it.


hat tip to FauxReal



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digby 2/10/2006 03:25:00 PM |

 
More Angry Leftists

by digby

Uh oh, better tell the Beltway Quilting Bee and Ladies Circle Jerk Society that the Angry Left is at it again. One of them infiltrated the annual Republican Decency In Public Discourse Convention and reported on their confidential internal discussion. These leftist barbarians have no shame:

Before an overflow crowd of at least 1000 young right-wing activists, Coulter took her brand of performance art to new heights. Afterwards, I caught up with Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist to ask him about Coulter's characterization of Muslims as "ragheads." Before I reveal his indignant response, here are a sampling of Coulter's most memorable lines.

Coulter on Muslims:

"I think our motto should be post-9-11, 'raghead talks tough, raghead faces consequences.'" (This declaration prompted a boisterous ovation.)

Coulter on killing Bill Clinton:

(Responding to a question from a Catholic University student about her biggest moral or ethical dilemna) "There was one time I had a shot at Clinton. I thought 'Ann, that's not going to help your career.'"

Coulter on moderate Republicans:

"There is more dissent on a slave plantation then amongst moderates in the Republican party."

Coulter on the Holocaust:

"Iran is soliciting cartoons on the Holocaust. So far, only Ted Rall, Garry Trudeau, and the NY Times have made submissions."

Coulter on the Supreme Court:

"If we find out someone [referring to a terrorist] is going to attack the Supreme Court next week, can't we tell Roberts, Alito, Thomas and Scalito?"

After Coulter's speech, I approached Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist in the CPAC exhibitor's hall. I asked him what he thought of Coulter's characterization 15 minutes earlier of Muslims as "ragheads." HIs reply? "I wasn't there so I better not comment."

Something's going to have to be done about all these rude leftwing bloggers. They have no business sneaking around asking Senator Frist questions like that. Don't these people have any manners at all?

Update: Jane finds even more grubby angry leftists pretending to be journalists. Lock your doors and hide the wimminfolk.


Update II: Kevin at Catch reports that certain right wing blogs are unhappy with Coulter's tasteless comments. That's surprising. They never said anything before. She's been wowing 'em at the CPAC for years.


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digby 2/10/2006 02:39:00 PM |

 
Careerist Crooks

by digby

Josh Marshall has posted an interesting piece of correspondence from a Democratic staffer regarding the Abramoff affair. There are as number of things in the letter that are worth discussing, but there is one point that offers an intriguing talking point:

The vast majority of Democratic staffers work on the Hill, despite the miserable pay and long hours, to try to achieve some measure of good. Many, many Republican staffers- convinced that government is an evil- work here in order to make money off that necessary evil. That breeds corruption. When you have a majority of members and staffers that could care less about policy ad governing and more about power/influence/money/profit Abramoff is inevitable. When the hard, tedious work of legislating and oversight is done by people motivated by careerism rather than professionalism not only do you have Abramoff, but you have Michael Brown, Halliburton, and illegal NSA wiretapping.

We need to think about ways to communicate why this "culture of corruption" is so pervasive in GOP government and why it is unique to them. This is one good way to explain it:

When Republicans are in charge, watch your wallets. Corruption and incompetence naturally stem from sending people who hate the government to Washington. They obviously aren't there to be responsive to the public because they don't believe the government can or should be responsive to the public. They are either there to exercize power for power's sake, make contacts and build their careers or they are second rate hacks who can't make it in the private sector. Democrats come to Washington to do good. Republicans come to Washington to feed at the trough.


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digby 2/10/2006 01:52:00 PM |

 
Professional Journalamalism

by digby

Most people have already heard how poor little Brownie took down that unctuous haircut with lips, Norm Coleman, this morning. What you may not know is that shortly afterward on MSNBC, professional journalist Bob Kur used Coleman's attack as an example of bipartisan anger at poor little Brownie --- identifying Coleman as a Democrat. .


Somebody get Duncan on the phone. He's going to have to clear his schedule for another blogger ethics panel.



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digby 2/10/2006 01:50:00 PM |

 
Call Comey

by digby

I wrote sometime back that we had reached a point with this administration that we were entirely dependent upon the integrity of a few members of the legal community to save the country. I know that sounds hyperbolic, but I think it may literally be true.

I'm not usually a big friend of tough prosecutors. I hate the drug war and I think they play fast and loose when trying to take down a target by squeezing people who are only peripherally involved. There is always tension between civil libertarians and the government and that is as it should be. It's that balance that allows us to live in a (mostly) civilized society.

When a government becomes corrupt and power mad one normally depends upon the political opposition and the press to sound the alarm --- and to some extent that has happened. But due to a corporate media that pumps non-stop sensation into people's heads 24 hours a day, the signal to noise ratio is seriously out of whack, even when something very important happens. Only terrorist attacks and catastrophic natural disasters can break through the static. As Peter Daou writes today, the sheer number of scandals makes it almost impossible for the press and the public to see any of them clearly.

And even if something begins to break through, we know from the Plame scandal and others that the administration exerts an iron grip on the media almost as painful as the one with which it chokes dissenters in its own party. After all, when Scooter Libby called Tim Russert to complain about Chris Matthews' coverage, bureau chief Russert didn't simply say that Matthews had a right to his opinion or that NBC always provided a forum for the administration to rebut any claims and leave it at that. No, he reported Libby's complaints to the president of NBC, Matthews' bosses. I think that pretty much tells the tale of the Washington press corps in a nutshell. I wouldn't count on them to help us out of this mess.

In addition, our two party tradition provides for very little real power to be invested in an oppostion party on its own --- the rules have been devised for bipartisan compromise. When you have a very disciplined majority (even if only with a slight numerical advantage) the minority party can be virtually shut out of government, as in a parliamentary system. We have little experience with this kind of government and without the open floor debate and partisan press that exists in other systems, this makes for very lopsided power structure.

The structural political imbalance, the media cacophany and the overwhelming numbers of crises and scandals both large and small have virtually paralyzed this country's ability to deal with the very serious constitutional crisis that is developing over the president's assertion of unlimited executive and warmaking powers. I think the law is our only backstop on this. It's appearing more and more that we are going to have to ask certain lawyers, cops and judges who understand that their duty to their country is bigger than their duty to this president to step up. And that brings me to James Comey.

All evidence suggests that I would not agree with James Comey's politics, but I can't be sure since he has scrupulously guarded his poltical leanings. I very much doubt that this law and order prosecutor sees the world through my ACLU lens. However, like many of the growing numbers of law enforcement officers who have grown alarmed by this administration's lawless governance, he is by all accounts a straight arrow. He was the number two man in the Justice Department when all the recent affronts to the constitution (torture, spying, the death of habeus corpus, indefinite detention, presidential infallibility) were delivered and from what we know he objected vociferously. It is, therefore, no surprise that this non-political career civil servant is no longer in government.

It is vital that he testify in a future hearing on the illegal NSA spying hearings. I do not know what he will say, and he may even defend the program on some level. But there is a reason why Comey refused to sign off on reauthorizing this program, forcing Gonzales to go to the hospital and try to strong arm a man who just had surgery to sign off on it instead. In his testimony earlier this week, Gonzales implied that it may have been a problem with another program. How very interesting.

We need to know just what in the hell was going on during the period between the time the program was instituted and the time Comey and others refused to reauthorize it. Why was it suspended? We need to know if there were other illegal spying programs. Comey is the man who can answer those questions.

Apparently, Comey believes that the administration may invoke executive privilege. Considering what poor little Brownie said this morning, I suspect that all former administration officials are told that if called before congress the president will likely invoke executive privilege. He is after all, infallible. But at the very least the committee should force the administration to invoke it. Let's get all the cards on the table.

I have no idea if there are other illegal programs out there or if this program has been used for domestic spying. But it's clear that something about all this stinks to high heaven and the Democrats know it. The smart money says that they've created a full-on datamining capability along the lines of Total Information Awareness and they are using it on US Citizens for god knows what purpose. Maybe Americans don't mind being subject to constant monitoring by the government. And maybe they really are so afraid of terrorists that they are willing to officially end our 230 year experiment in liberty by codifying an elected dictatorship rather than a carefully balanced representative government. But before we flush the constitution down the toilet, let's give democracy one last hurrah, shall we? Let's find out if these actions are legal and constitutional (and if the people of this country really are the bedwetting cowards the Republicans take them for.)

Firedoglake is collecting comments on this matter in the hopes that the powers that be on the Judiciary Committee will understand that the grassroots are engaged and knowledgeable on this issue and will back up any Democratic Senator who pushes for more testimony, specifically the testimony of James Comey. Either leave a comment here or go over to FDL and add your voice to the chorus if you agree.



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digby 2/10/2006 01:26:00 PM |

 
White House Knew of Levee's Failure The Night Katrina Struck

by tristero

So you're thinking, "Surprise, surprise, Bush lied." Well then just read the entire article and see if you can still maintain a cynical, world-weary attitude as the details accumulate about the sheer extent of what happened - and didn't - during Katrina. And the extent of the lying.

I'll stop here; I'm too angry to write. Unforgivable. Unforgivable.
tristero 2/10/2006 02:48:00 AM |

Thursday, February 09, 2006

 
Civilization vs The Big Babies

by digby


I just saw that fatuous gasbag Bill Bennett on CNN talking about the cartoons and was reminded once again of the seemingly limitless hypocricy of the wingnuts. I realize that it is futile to point this out to them since they have completely abandoned all claims to intellectual integrity, but we should document these atrocities anyway if only to keep things straight in our own minds. Luckily, intrepid bloggers are on the case.

First we have Kip from Long Story Short Pier subbing for Julia:

So lemme see if I got this right:

* The editorial page of a newspaper—a community organ—is a perfectly appropriate place to print ill-conceived, unfunny cartoons for pretty much the sole purpose of mocking the faith of some members of that community, and it’s irresponsible to voice even quasi-official disapproval despite the shockingly murderous backlash because, hey, free speech, they should grow up and suck it up and learn to deal;

* However, a memorial service—for a woman whose life has been dedicated to the fight for peace and justice and damn well grabbing the arc of the universe and bending it with her own bare hands—is a staggeringly inappropriate place to say much of anything at all about the fight that was her life, and the very particular strife and injustice yet afflicting her world and her country, because, hey, the president might be embarrassed, and how dare they carry on like that.

Being 'appropriate" is so difficult these days isn't it? Embarrassing a craven opportunistic president whose sole claim to civil rights credibility is having his picture taken with black children and appointing every black conservative in the country to his cabinet, is a terrible, terrible faux pas. Printing cartoons guaranteed to inflame millions of people in order to make an obscure point is the height of principled behavior. Ok.

And then there's this gem from Arthur:

The Bush war propagandists proclaimed with deafening unanimity: "Newsweek is directly responsible for the rioting and the deaths that occurred in Afghanistan after its story appeared. Freedom of the press doesn't mean you can or should publish anything you think is a 'story.' We're at war! It is the war between civilization and barbarism! Newsweek hurt America and helped our enemies. They're on the other side! That's the evil leftwing media for you!" In terms of what follows, let's remember just two examples I noted in my first post about the Newsweek story: Drudge's huge headline: "THE NEWSWEEK RIOTS," and the phrase that, predictably, Michelle Malkin injected into every war propagandist's discussion: "NEWSWEEK LIED. PEOPLE DIED."

The allocation of blame and moral culpability was of particular interest, especially given the rightwing propagandists' usual praises for personal and moral "responsibility." As one perceptive commentator noted:

What is singularly lacking from the rightwing hatefest currently sweeping across the Internets is condemnation of the killers themselves. ... The rightwing line is therefore that these murder[er]s are within their rights, are acting with justifiable outrage in killing people because of what was allegedly done, or not done, to their precious book.

He went on:

As everyone from Glenn Reynolds to the fools at Powerline to the moronic Michelle Malkin line up to condemn Newsweek, the only thing that matters to them is that they can score a few points against what they perceive to be the dreaded leftwing media. If that means turning a blind blog to the Islamic terrorists murdering people just because of a true-or-false account of damage being done to the Koran then that's just fine by them.

Score one for the case of Islamic terrorism courtesy of the rightwing scream machine.

[...]

But in the case of the cartoons, the war propagandists now tell us that every news organ in the world is obliged to print them. Nothing less than the future of civilization is at stake. I do not exaggerate: "This really is a case of civilization against the barbarians."

(Read the whole thing.)

Can you believe it? The comparison to the Newsweak flap could not be more apt. The entire wingnut apparatus went completely around the bend, blaming Newsweak for killing people because they printed a tiny blurb reporting that Korans had been desecrated. No pictures. No "depictions." The story was old news and had been reported before. But when cynical political actors in the mid-east stoked the hot coals of Muslim anger, the right didn't blame the leaders or the rioters --- they blamed Newsweak. Indeed, they claimed the magazine was personally responsible for the carnage. And the poor rioters were just responding as one would expect to such a heinous insult to their religion.

I wonder what it's like living with no intellectual consistency at all? Do you suppose they find it confusing? But, I guess they don't really need any. They're good team players. Just like the "barbarians."

And speaking of cartoons: what about the garment rending just last week over Tom Toles' political cartoon depicting "the army" as a man without arms or legs? Yes, nobody rioted. They just whined and pouted and stomped their tiny feet about how "mean" it was.

It wasn't a case of civilization against the barbarians, it's true. It was a case of civilization against the whiny ass titty babies.

Update: Oh, and that poker addicted racist calumniator is hardly one to to be going here:

ZOGBY: The policy of the Catholics during the Inquisition is not synonymous with my church, nor is the policy of the Islamic extremists synonymous with the Prophet Mohammed. Let's be fair and use one standard. I agree, we have a double standard and frankly I think the way this story is cast is the wrong double standard.

BENNETT: Here's the standard. Catholicism is as Catholicism does, Judaism is as Judaism does, and by God Islam is as Islam does and what it's doing right now I wouldn't wanted to associated with

.

As a practicing Catholic, he probably needs to stop and think about that a little bit. You don't have to go back to the Inquisition to see that he's on very slippery ground. Bennett complained about the priest scandal, but he very much remained "associated" with his church. Decades upon decades of covering up for and enabling these priests by the highest members of Bennett's church aren't wiped away by throwing a handful of sick men in jail. To this day the Church has refused to adequately deal with that horror. Bennett has some nerve lecturing to John Zogby about the morality of his religion when the shards of his glass house are lying all over the floor. Muslims should not be held to any higher standard than he is.



(To be clear, I'm not saying that Catholicism is inherently "evil" either. All religion has a dark side. But it's outrageous to cast aspersions on Islam's "theology" with the inquisition, witch burning and covering up for pedophile priests all being part of Christian history --- and in each case there was ample "theology" that could be called up to support their actions. It ain't the faith, it's the humans who interpret it and abuse the power it gives them.



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digby 2/09/2006 02:57:00 PM |

Wednesday, February 08, 2006

 
Reality-Based Science Equals Real National Security

by tristero


I really was hoping someone would get the not so subtle hint in my previous post. So I'll just spell it out.

An astute political party could easily start to nail Republicans to the wall on their atrocious national security policy simply by making a major issue of the GOP's obsession with faith-based technologies and their assault on science education.

That same astute party could also point, in contrast, to an excellent science and tech policy and promise to halt the decline in American science perpetrated by the right and make genuine science a priority if they ever got elected.

Too hard to explain? Nonsense. The NRA's opposition to an autmatic rifle ban. THAT'S hard to explain. But they they have. Making it clear that it's a bad idea to fund a missile defense system armed with the power of prayer and nothing else is child's play in comparison.

[UPDATE: It will take a lot more than this, duh, to reverse the perceptions. But, my God, you couldn't ask for a more stark situation to get started.]
tristero 2/08/2006 05:47:00 PM |

 
Political Outliers

by digby


Matt Stoller nicely deconstructs this Red State post about the King funeral that is perfectly illustrative of right wing comportment vapors and thinly veiled racism. Here's just one little bit to give you the flavor:

I also think I have a clearer understanding of why the culture of so many black Americans in this country is below what it should be and is capable of being.

One expects this kind of thing over in Freeperland. They pride themsleves on being crude and thuggish, after all. Via pandagon, here's a sampling of their cute caption contest:




“I would like another roll with dinner please.”

“Two classy people sitting behind a pile of trash.”

Lowery: And yesim, we’s be black and we’s be proud. We’s for the gubmit but not Bush’s gubmit. Bush’s gubmit is against us black peoples…

W: “What’s that old saying, ‘Better to be thought a complete race baiting moron than open your mouth and remove all doubt.’”

“Psst…Laura, you sure that ain’t Looter Guy?”


47 posted on 02/07/2006 2:56:13 PM PST by Horatio Gates (Go Seah….uh…Mariners! Congrats to the Steelers. Well done.)

Ok. It's Freeperland. But here we have Red State, commonly thought of as the "thoughtful" right wing community. They aren't quite as crude, to be sure. But they share many of the same impulses:

You evidently did live during the civil right era. There was nothing peaceful about it.

If the truth be told, it was an extortion scam to enrich themselves. Mrs. King carried on this tradition. Anytime you wanted to use anything that was MLK, Jr. you had to pay Mrs. King.

Don't forget who the pupils were of this scam; Jesse Jackson, Joesph Lowery, and Hosea Williams. They practiced this extortion of Corporations all of their lives and some are still doing it.

So lets be honest, praise Mrs. King for the loss of a husband and who had to raise her children by herself, but don't latch on to a myth and try to make it true.

----

Bush should take back New Orleans money and force these aholes to come begging for it.

-----

I don't know the makeup of the King funeral attendees but you can bet a large portion were high profile Dems with an even higher concentration of race hustling poverty pimps. It was their show and if they want to defile the King legacy with no-class antics, why shouldn't it be on TV?

Whether anyone in the audience walked out in protest or not, Bush #41 and #43 were class acts and that won't be lost on reasonable viewers -- including many black families watching at home.

----

Anyone who didn't find that, or the Wellstone funeral, offensive, lacks a sense of decorum. If the Afro-American community applauds this funeral, they will make a statement about no one but themselves. And that is just what that group did at the funeral.

------

Back during the Bush/NAACP speech flap, I thought Bush should have sent in a third-tier official to give a speech explaigning that Bush wasn't going to cater specifically to them since he could win elections without their vote, and catering to them wouldn't change their vote anyway.

Simple fact it, Dems must have the black vote to win, and even with it they loose more often than not. Yet the Dems are quite capable of taking the black vote for granted.

What is worse political messages at a funeral about a great civil rights leader or people trying to turn those messages as something that the late "Queen" would find offensive.

Not simply political messages but cheap shots. Perhaps she would have been fine with such cheap shots. But the proper way to pay respect in such a situation is to not take such cheap shots, and act with dignity--irrespective if the deceased would have demanded such dignity or not.

Frankly, it ain't about her or blacks in general.

----

He was Joseph Lowery, former head of the SCLC. One of the biggest extortinist organization in the country. They used the same tactics that Jesse Jackson uses to extrort money from Corporations. You pay or we picket.

Myth buster, these were pupils of MLK, Jr.

---

This is Al Sharpton to Howard Dean in 2004:

"Do you have a senior member of your cabinet that was black or brown?"

Dean did not, but apparently, we can take Sharpton's cue and refer to all non-African dark-skinned people as "brown"...unless he meant Latinos only, in which case we must deploy "sienna" and "umber" in our earth-tone rainbow coalition.

It really is funny to watch you "progressives" jump all over itrytobenice for picking up the wrong crayon. Why don't you throw in a lecture on the difference between "colored people" and "people of color"?

-----

Those who follow leaders like Dr, Lowry deserve to be marginalized.

Funny, but I recall that African-Americans are losing political clout in America, as the Hispanic population increases in size.

So, explain to me again why the NAACP and other "mainstream" African-American organizations should be accorded respect, if they refuse to be respectful-- or even polite themselves?

---

That crowd looked to be heavily Afro-American, and with their response and their applause, they showed themselves to be the same--no class! Just like the Paul Wellstone funeral--the memories of many are going to be long.

Insulting the sitting President of the US, when he has the respect to come to a funeral to honor the deceased and the causes they/she fought for--this is going to stick with me, a long, long time.

This is a crowd that as Karl Rove said, is pre--9/11. Protect the country, forget it. Every chance they get they'll just want their political ox gored, and their handouts increased.

----

blah ... blah .. blah blah
It's doubtful that either Coretta or MLK will be standing up for any reason ... not anymore.

----

And The Winner Of the Most Idiotic Moonbat Meme of the Year, for the FIFTH year running is. . .?

"You can't tell us how to mourn!"

Gee, if those Muslims burning down embassies claimed to be mourning someone (Mohammed, presumably, since Cindy Sheehan demonstrates that there's no time limit on this principle, either), I guess they'd have an airtight justification among our friends on the left.

-----

Actually, I can't wait for the unsealing of the secret FBI King files in 2027 to reveal the truth about MLK and his less than honorable life and legacy (thanks to a liberal judge and the King family they have bought time preventing their release under FOIA... hmm, you think they have something to hide?). In the mean time, the country remains held hostage to the unbalanced and intellectually dishonest legacy of this man and his family. Pardon me if I choose not to worship at their phony altar.

Also, I can see clearly why blacks just love the Democratic party for all its done for them in perpetuating their continued pride in their own sense of victimhood. Bravo!

Got racial hostility much?

I have written a lot about race on this blog over the last three years. It's a topic that I feel strongly about and work hard to understand. Everytime I write about it, I'm told by more than a few people that racism isn't really a problem anymore, it's a class issue.

With the amount of energy expended in that Red State thread deriding blacks for having "no class" perhaps in one respect that is true. But in the sociological sense, it is not. Class is an issue in this country, to be sure. But it is not the same as or the cause of racism. Racism lurks just beneath the surface of our culture. Lurking beneath the surface is an improvement over the blatant violence and legal segregation of the Jim Crow era of 40 years ago, but racism has not disappeared.

The comments and the disgusting picture above are indicative of the racist strain that has been a presence in both political parties but which settled on the Republican side after the civil rights movement. Over the last quarter century this impulse was regulated with coded race speech and marginalization of the worst purveyors of racist sentiment to the fringes of political life. But something seems to be changing. I'm seeing this more often all of a sudden and not just in wingnut sinkholes like Free Republic, but in mainstream blogs like Red State, the constantly recurring discussion of "The Bell Curve" and the pages of the Wall Street Journal where James Taranto writes things like this:

The truth about race that Katrina illuminates, then, is that, at least when it comes to matters involving race, black Americans are extreme political outliers. This is why attempts to play the race card are politically futile: They have to appeal not just to blacks, but to a substantial minority of whites. The Gallup poll results makes clear that the current racial appeals are not resonating with whites.

Fuck the blacks. They don't vote for us anyway.

But then, there's always some good reason to fuck the blacks isn't there? I wrote a comment about the continuing problem with hiring patterns some years back on Kevin Drum's old blog:

Hiring minorities is a problem because:

1955 - They are an inferior race
1965 - They aren't good workers
1975 - They make old white customers uncomfortable
1985 - Affirmative action means their diplomas are bogus
1995 - They are a litigation risk for discrimination

When it comes to equal rights it's always something, isn't it?

2006: They don't know how to behave in public.







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digby 2/08/2006 03:00:00 PM |

 
Unbalanced Reporting

by digby

Did anyone catch Wolfie getting all nervous and twitchy when he thought that Cafferty hadn't been "fair and balanced" in reporting the response to his question aabout Boehner renting his apartment from a lobbyist? He was very agitated that Cafferty didn't report any emails that said it was ok if Boehner "paid fair market value and the apartment wasn't luxurious." The fact was that Cafferty did read an email that said exactly that (how odd) but Wolfe apparently didn't hear it. Unfortunately for Wolfie, his little fit made Cafferty mad and when pressed on the matter, Cafferty said that out of 700 or so emails he had received only half a dozen or so supporting Boehner. Oops. Wolfie's in the doghouse now. His masters pay him big money to manage these situations and they expect him to do it better than that. (I certainly got the feeling that somebody's been leaning on Cafferty about "balance" and he's not happy about it.)

This is reminiscent of Chris Cillizza of the Washington Post being forced to add a "Democratic scandal" to a story on recent scandals even though the Democrat in question was out of congress when the scandal happened. "Balance it out, by God, even if you have to make something up."

Man, the media are really petrified of Karl Rove, aren't they?
digby 2/08/2006 01:59:00 PM |

 
Outreach

by digby


That liberal media strikes again. Now we find out that one of MSNBC's senior employees, a man who has produced Chris Matthews in the past and now produces Banjo Boy, gives paid lectures on "How to Reach Masses of Conservative Voters with Your Cause, Policy or Political Message."

We thought that Chris Matthews and the other right wing shills on MSNBC were promoting Republicans out of their own personal beliefs. But it would appear now that this is a much more systemic problem. The Republicans have people throughout the organization who are actively working as partisans and getting paid for it.

If you haven't visited the Open Letter To Chris Matthews page lately, check it out. It has all the required links to contact MSNBC and it's advertisers. It appears tha the entire DC media establishment is in bed with the Republican Party these days. And getting paid handsomely to do it. Of course, that's why we call them mediawhores.



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digby 2/08/2006 12:19:00 PM |

 
Faintus Interruptus

by digby

I received more right wing links to the post below than any post I've ever done. I also got more right wing hate mail than ever before wherein I was called "sick," "hateful" and "fat."

Apparently we ruined their Ladies Swooning League funeral etiquette seminar. What a shame.



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digby 2/08/2006 09:17:00 AM |

 
The Lie Was Bad Enough. The Real Problems Are Far Worse.

by tristero

It is good news that George Deutsch, the illiterate, fanatical nitwit who became a public embarassment to NASA was caught lying on his resume and resigned. Lying on your resume truly is a tacky, unethical thing to do and thanks are due to Nick at scientificactivist for his efforts at exposing Deutsch's low character to the world.

It is not the main issue, however:

Yesterday, Dr. Hansen said that the questions about Mr. Deutsch's credentials were important, but were a distraction from the broader issue of political control of scientific information.

"He's only a bit player," Dr. Hansen said of Mr. Deutsch. " The problem is much broader and much deeper and it goes across agencies. That's what I'm really concerned about."

"On climate, the public has been misinformed and not informed," he said. "The foundation of a democracy is an informed public, which obviously means an honestly informed public. That's the big issue here."

Indeed it is. And let's be quite clear what that issue is. It's not partisanship, although Bush has far exceeded any other president in politicizing science policy. It's mis-informing and dis-informing the public that's the problem. And the odious Deutsch is just an irritating mosquito. I'm glad he's been swatted, but the scientific agencies are crawling with these pests, not only in pr but in positions that require serious decision making.

Let's be clear about this. This is the kind of incompetent behavior that right wing ideologues, obsessed with ideology and appearance over reality, repeat again and again and again. And it has consequences.

Bush's wholesale trashing of US science policy -climate change research is just one area- has the potential to lead to serious threats to our national security.

Note to Rightwingers: I suppose you noticed that the last two paragraphs were pretty partisan. But I am not to blame. It's simply not my fault that the facts and their consequences favor reality over Bushism. That's just the way it is, kids.

Reality-based science equals real national security. Bush's faith-based science is an angel wing and a prayer. Your choice.
tristero 2/08/2006 06:43:00 AM |

Tuesday, February 07, 2006

 
Stop Making Sense

by digby


That dessicated waste of space Kate O'Beirne is on Hardball right now screeching for the laudenenum because "liberals don't know how to act at funerals!" Oh lawdy, lawdy, lawdy Miss Mellie, I do decleah these Democrats are so ungenteel! Why, they were talkin' politics and singin' and dancin' and actin' all Negro and everything!

I personally find it absolutely outrageous, OUTRAGEOUS! that Republicans are attacking Coretta Scott King and her family this way. Why, she is an American icon! How dare they! Do they really think that African Americans don't know how to behave at a funeral for one of their own? How very white of them.

Kate O'Beirne isn't fit to wipe Coretta Scott King's shoes and criticizing her on the day of her memorial service is disgusting. What kind of unfeeling ghouls have Republicans become??


Update: Oh and I think they need to apologize to the Reverend Lowry. He is a man of the cloth and a friend of the deceased. Are they saying that leaders of the African American church are less worthy of respect than the white churches they are so proud of representing? It sure sounds like it. Republicans, it seems, only respect the church when its leaders "behave" the way they deem appropriate.

Update II: Matt Singer writes:

If you haven't read about it elsewhere, President Bush apparently looked a bit sheepish at Coretta Scott King's funeral service today. Why? Because two speakers had the gall to talk about the values the Kings stood for: fighting poverty, fighting racial division, standing up for working Americans.

Yes, it had to be unpleasant for poor little President Bubble Boy having to deal with something other than his hand-picked sycophants. He's probably never even heard this stuff before.

Typically, his supporters' knee jerk response is to rhetorically lynch African Americans.

Update III: Check out Americablog if you would like to know a little bit about the man who Kate O'Beirne and her fellow funeral etiquette harpies are taking to task for being inappropriate at King's funeral.

For shame.


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digby 2/07/2006 02:54:00 PM |

 
Spooked

by digby


ReddHedd has the full deconstrution of John Dickerson's juicy new memoir of his role in the Plame case today, so I will just give you the link to follow if you haven't already been there. I just want to make a couple of observations.


Dickerson says that this push-back by administration officials was highly unusual:

What struck me was how hard both officials were working to knock down Wilson. Discrediting your opposition is a standard tactic in Washington, but the Bush team usually played the game differently. At that stage in the first term, Bush aides usually blew off their critics. Or, they continued to assert their set of facts in the hope of overcoming criticism by force of repetition.

[...]

At this point the information about Valerie Plame was not the radioactive material it is today. No one knew she might have been a protected agent—and for whatever reason, the possibility didn't occur to us or anyone else at the time. But it was still newsworthy that the White House was using her to make its case. That Scooter Libby and Karl Rove mentioned Plame to Matt was an example of how they were attempting to undermine Wilson. They were trying to make his trip look like a special family side deal not officially sanctioned by the agency. No one at a high level in the government was worried enough about the veracity of the uranium claim to send a "real" special envoy. And no one at a high level ever saw Wilson's report when he returned. Later we would learn that Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley had been warned by the CIA that the uranium claims were shaky and that Wilson's wife was one of many people involved in the decision to send her husband.

I've always thought there was something quite unusual about the fact that they copped to the 16 words. This is a group that never admits to doing anything wrong ever. yet, they did it this time in an apparent effort to contain this story. According to Dickerson's recital, they were close to panic.

What was it about Wilson that had them so spooked that they would break with their highly successful methods? It's true that it was an escalating battle between the CIA and the White House over who was oging to get blamed for the WMD failure. Why didn't they just blow off their critics, get Tenent to take the fall, repeat their mantra like robots and move on?

I suspect that it has to do with Niger forgeries, but that's a guess. The IAEA had long before debunked them, but considering the infighting, Wilson's connection to the CIA may have made them very nervous. (Still no word on that, hmmmm?)

And maybe it's just the fact that there were no WMD. If I had hyped the danger as much as they did, I might have been spooked too. But they got over it. They quickly pulled themselves together and developed a better strategy. Just before the Special Prosecutor was appointed, the Financial Times reported:

"We let the earthmovers roll in over this one."

Or so they thought.



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digby 2/07/2006 11:24:00 AM |

 
Trust Them

by digby


Or else:

The White House has been twisting arms to ensure that no Republican member votes against President Bush in the Senate Judiciary Committee’s investigation of the administration's unauthorized wiretapping.

Congressional sources said Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove has threatened to blacklist any Republican who votes against the president. The sources said the blacklist would mean a halt in any White House political or financial support of senators running for re-election in November.

"It's hardball all the way," a senior GOP congressional aide said.

The sources said the administration has been alarmed over the damage that could result from the Senate hearings, which began on Monday, Feb. 6. They said the defection of even a handful of Republican committee members could result in a determination that the president violated the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Such a determination could lead to impeachment proceedings.

Over the last few weeks, Mr. Rove has been calling in virtually every Republican on the Senate committee as well as the leadership in Congress. The sources said Mr. Rove's message has been that a vote against Mr. Bush would destroy GOP prospects in congressional elections.

"He's [Rove] lining them up one by one," another congressional source said.

Mr. Rove is leading the White House campaign to help the GOP in November’s congressional elections. The sources said the White House has offered to help loyalists with money and free publicity, such as appearances and photo-ops with the president.

Those deemed disloyal to Mr. Rove would appear on his blacklist. The sources said dozens of GOP members in the House and Senate are on that list.

I guess we are supposed to believe that an administration that will strong-arm its own caucus on a fundamental constitutional question of the separation of powers would never spy on its political rivals.



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digby 2/07/2006 09:20:00 AM |

 
Cartoon Violence Bake Two

by tristero


A very interesting discussion about the previous post on the cartoon riots. Just a few quickies and then I hope the cartoon riots quickly become history for all of us.

Today, the Wall Street Journal has a very interesting article on the history of the protests. As one would expect, the story is far more complicated than the Wag the Camel scenario. In fact, the protests were encouraged first of all not by Saudis, but by secularists in Egypt who wished to shore up their pro-Islam cred as secularists have come under pressure from radical Islamists. These protests then got out of hand. One more example of how impossible it is to tame a maelstrom. And of not recognizing that you're dealing with a maelstrom.

In comments, Michael said that I have no idea what art is for. That is absolutely true, and I've been thinking passionately about art, and studying it, for as long as I can remember. More to the point, however, is whether that is a question worth answering, except perhaps provisionally, through specific examples. I don't think so.

Mona, and some others, were unequivocal in defense of the paper, in advocating that the West teach the Muslims a lesson about free speech, and in rejecting of any argument that rioters have a claim to the moral high ground. To say the least, I strongly disagree with most of this, I'm sure I'm not alone in my disagreement, and I see no reason to repeat the arguments I've already made. That said, Mona's argument, combined with those who considered the cartoons "satire," spurred an interesting angle I hadn't considered before.

If I think of nasty satire, I think of Voltaire flaying Spinoza's Leibniz's optimism or of Philip Roth's Tricky Dixon in "Our Gang." But it's striking: The objects of satire are often - always? - respected authority figures or ideas within the culture of the satirist. WITHIN the culture, not OUTSIDE the culture. Even in Evelyn Waugh's Scoop, the object of satire is not really the third world country to which Bill Boot has been booted by an editor who confused two Boots. It's the British press's hopeless, corrupt reporting from such countries. The satire was directed directly at institutions that were part and parcel of Waugh's upper class British Twitworld.

In contrast, as I see it, Islam is not part of mainstream Danish culture. Mohammed has no genuine cultural authority the way, say, the royal family might. To call the cartoons satire, therefore, seems to me inaccurate. It's simply ridicule, and ridicule of a figure from a culture that, from within Denmark - the satirizing culture - is Other. Danes are heeping scorn and humiliation on someone's religion, someone who is not Us. Someone who doesn't look like us, doesn't act like us, doesn't think like us, isn't as rich as us. And just can't be us.

Mona and those who believe the cartoons really are satirical probably don't see it this way, I suspect. To them, it's pretty simple: Muslims should act like everyone else and take their knocks like everyone else. If anyone's excluding them, making them peculiar and Other, it is Muslims themselves, by acting like jerks and failing to understand the importance of free speech. No excuses: Muslims are just like everyone else and if they don't behave decently, we need to be teach them some lessons.

My objection to this argument starts with the firm belief that there is a utopian, mistakenly optimistic premise behind this kind of argument of equality. The playing field for Muslims is not equal in Denmark. Even if they behaved exactly the same way as their non-Muslim neighbors, they'd still be judged non-Danish. Right now, Denmark, like other Scandinavian countries, is grappling with the rapidly changing nature of Danish identity. The children of Muslim immigrants are far from being thought equally "Danish" as the children of those who can trace their ancestry back to some 12th century ancestor. Muslims in Denmark, and in the Western world in general, are not often in positions of authority, the religion is not dominant in the West, nor are Muslim citizens in many positions of power. So, if satire is an assault on authority within the satirist's culture, as I think it traditionally has been, there's nothing [or little] for the Danish cartoonists to satirize in Islam and Muslims. But there are some - many - who will find much to scorn and ridicule in those who they think can never be part of Danish culture. And those folks will find much to hate in the Other. (You might object: What about Satanic Verses? What about it? Yes, it satirized Muslims and the Qu'ran, but Rushdie was raised Indian and Muslim. The satire was within his own cultural milieu.)

So let me revise an earlier sentence. As I see it, Islam is not part of mainstream Danish culture yet. It will be some day. given current trends. And when it is, the ethnocentrism, the racism, that is so egregious is these cartoons (and, yes, I've seen them) will be muted. That's because Danish cartoons that will actually satirize Islam will be different in kind than these cartoons. They will make less use of ethnic stereotyping, for one thing. But right now, the paper that published the cartoons was up to a lot more than simply dispensing the indisputed (to the West) moral lesson that free speech is good. The paper was also teaching a lesson - "We" know better than the Muslims. AND the paper was holding up to ridicule not authority figures within its culture, but the beliefs and authorities of the most abject members of its culture.

It's may be laudable to imagine a time when Islam can be treated satirically and with the full viciousness Tim Robbins lavished on the rightwing in "Bob Roberts". But it's a serious mistake to think now is the time.

Let me add some boilerplate caveats, which should be obvious, but apparently aren't to some folks. I do not advocate banning any kind of speech and nothing above can be construed as doing so without twisting the obvious meaning of what I wrote. I deplore what the paper did, not the publishing per se, but the whole shebang. But they had the right to do it and I wouldn't restrict them from doing so. Being friends with the editor, now that's a different story.

Simply because the cartoons are blatantly offensive, and intended to be, in no way excuses the utterly insane reaction in which people have senselessly died. Those deaths lie at the feet of the cynical bastards within the Muslim communities that incited people to riot (and with some, not all, of the rioters), not the paper or the cartoonists.

While many details can and should change - yeah, the art argument was off topic in post 1 - I still think my first post on this crazy mess got it right. What's behind the cartoon riots are very deep, very troubling notions that cause perfectly sensible people to think it is the West's job to teach the non-West lessons in how to behave, or to think that when the West behaves like a first year medical intern with no social skills, the appropriate response is a bullet or a bomb. To get out of this insane murderous dance, the first tiny step must be to put away all those gut reactions and do some serious thinking about what is going on and why.

That is why we need a far freer press than we have, or Denmark has. We simply have to know what is going on. All of it, even the ugly bits. That is why before we can even begin to understand how sensibly to deal with the any of the disparate Muslim communities in the world, we sure as hell need to find out a lot more about them and stop pretending they are an equal part of the Western world or so repellent or backwards they need us to teach them how to behave.

That's it. No more posts on these damn cartoons, I swear!
tristero 2/07/2006 07:46:00 AM |

Monday, February 06, 2006

 
Process Talk

by digby


Via Armando over at Kos I see this statement from Tom Vilsack today:

Gov. Tom Vilsack said Monday that Democrats risk political backlash if they object to the Bush administration's wiretapping but cannot show that Americans' civil liberties are at risk.

The Democratic governor, who is weighing a 2008 presidential bid, said the party will suffer if it continues to be perceived as weaker than Republicans on national security.

. . . "If the president broke the law, that's unacceptable. But I think it's debateable whether he did," Vilsack told Des Moines Register editors and reporters. "And I think Democrats are falling into a very, very large political trap," he said. "Democrats are not going to win elections until they can reassure people they are going to keep them safe."

There are many things about this statement that are bullshit. I don't have to lay them all out for you. But I would like to expound on one aspect of this statement that drives me crazy: it's a process answer.

A process answer is saying what "we should say" instead of just saying it. Nothing drives me more nuts than a politician who talks process instead of engaging voters directly. In this instance it's a backstab equal to anything one of those run-at-the-mouth strategists says to the NY Times to boost his cool factor among the mediatarts. He's positioning hemself as a "reasonable" centrist on national security, but he clearly has nothing to offer on the subject at hand so he just talks about what "we should be doing."

A lot of politicians do this, in different ways. Even Howard Dean used to do it when he said "we should be appealing to those guys with the confederate flags on their pick ups --- they don't have health care either." I wanted to shout "Great! Do it. What's the pitch?" The pitch never came. That's the rub with these process discussions. Just saying that we should do something or we need to do something is not the same as doing it. And it's a big reason why people are confused about what we stand for.

If they think that we should be tougher on national security, they shouldn't say "we can't win elections until we reassure people that we can keep them safe." They should say, "here's how we'll keep you safe..." If Vilsack really thinks that Democrats will lose if we don't support unconstitutional domestic spying programs then he should just say, "I think the program is probably legal and I support it." A winning message is a winning messsage, right? Why all the navel gazing?

I suspect that he knows most Democrats don't support his stance. But then perhaps he ought to think about how to convince us that we are wrong on the substance of this argument instead of appealing to us on this issue of "winning." Maybe we can be convinced. Or if he doesn't actually believe that the program should be supported but thinks he has to go along with it or Democrats will lose, then he could try persuading Republicans that the program is wrong. Either way, he will have given a clear message instead of trying to signal some sort of defeatist "this is the only way we can win" argument to the base while sounding like a half baked philosopher to the opposition. It's this meaningless "we must convince people" process mush that will ensure that nobody knows what in the hell he actually believes. And that's the biggest problem most Democratic politicians face.



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digby 2/06/2006 08:21:00 PM |

 
It Could Be Anyone

by digby

Crooks and Liars has a clip from Glenn Greenwald's appearance this morning on Washington Journal in which he mentions that many conservatives are concerned about this. He brought up super conservative Bruce Fein's opinion that this could be an impeachable offense.

But he didn't have time to mention a couple of things that I think are worth looking at in this vein. The first is this group that calls itself Patriots To Restore Checks and Balances who have formed an alliance with the following groups to protest the government's increasing encroachment on Americans' civil liberties:

Brad Jansen
Adjunct Scholar, Competitive Enterprise Institute
Association of American Physicians and Surgeons
American Civil Liberties Union
American Conservative Union
Americans for Tax Reform
American Policy Center
Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms
Free Congress Foundation
Libertarian Party
Gun Owners of America
Second Amendment Foundation


The press release I linked above says this:

"When the Patriot Act was passed shortly after 9-11, the federal government was granted expanded access to Americans' private information," said Barr. "However, federal law still clearly states that intelligence agents must have a court order to conduct electronic surveillance of Americans on these shores. Yet the federal government overstepped the protections of the Constitution and the plain language of FISA to eavesdrop on Americans' private communication without any judicial checks and without proof that they are involved in terrorism."

Where are these guys today? Shouldn't they be called to testify before this committee and give their views? Are these "hard-core, doctrinaire" conservatives (as Greenwald elegantly calls them) just another branch of the Karl Rove Eunuch Society? I thought they always considered themselves to be something more than party hacks and second rate cronies but perhaps I was wrong.

Grover Norquist, as I have pointed out before, should be concerned about this for more than theoretical reasons. Perhaps he thinks he's safe because he is the ultimate insider. But he should ask himself whether the fact that other insiders consider him a security threat might just put him in the crosshairs.

Grover Norquist has for some years now been promoting Islamist organizations, including even the Council on American-Islamic Relations; for example, he spoke at CAIR's conference, "A Better America in a Better World" on October 5, 2004. Frank Gaffney has researched Norquist's ties to Islamists in his exhaustive, careful, and convincing study, "Agent of Influence" and concludes that he is enabling "a political influence operation to advance the causes of radical Islamists, and targeted most particularly at the Bush Administration."

But if Grover Norquist is indeed a convert to Islam, it could be that he is not just enabling the Islamist causes but is himself an Islamist. (April 14, 2005)

Grover looks like just the sort of guy they'd be likely to tap, don't you think?

This really isn't a partisan issue. Any American could fall under this illegal spying scheme and there is no oversight by anyone to determine whether it's legal, necessary or useful to national security. It could be political enemies... and it could be political friends who some believe have suspicious ties to "the enemy." You just don't know. That's the problem.

And knowing how these people operate --- as Grover surely does, having been a part of the dirty tricks apparatus for more than 20 years --- you can bet they are doing whatever they think is advantageous to their cause. I would think that keeping an eye on "unreliables" like Grover with his Muslim wife and libertarian leanings could be seen by the administration as important.

And as I noted in this earlier post, they don't just spy on their enemies; they spy on their friends too. To make sure they don't stray ... if you know what I mean.


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digby 2/06/2006 03:40:00 PM |

 
Shorter Wiretaps

by tristero

It's Watergate "done right:"

I believe that the Judiciary Committee will find, if it is willing to persist, that within the large pointless program there exists a small, sharply focused program that delivers something the White House really wants.

tristero 2/06/2006 03:17:00 PM |

 
How We Will Win The War On Terror

by digby

The oceans no longer protect us. The terrorists are coming over any minute to kill us all in our beds. They are a ruthless enemy who hide in caves until they suddenly decide to strike without mercy. But they have an achilles heel. They are all suffering from serious memory problems. Unless they see it in the paper they forget that we are tapping telephones. Then they slap themselves in the forehead and say "Oh no! I've been calling my friend Mohammed in LA planning that awesome terrorist attack and like, totally fergot that the infidels are listening in. Fuck. Man, Zawahiri is gonna to be so pissed."

This is why it was so horrible that that the NY Times revealed the program. It jogged the terrorists' memories and now they won't use their phone and e-mail accounts anymore. Until they forget again, that is. So, shhhh. Loose lips sink ships.

So says Alberto Gonzales.



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digby 2/06/2006 01:36:00 PM |

 
Cartoon Violence

by tristero

Note: I'm not sure the following is entirely cooked. Consider this three quarters baked. Or less.

Mahablog has a bunch of links to opinions about the cartoon riots. And links to some opinions about the opinions.

In a different post, Barbara links to Juan Cole's comments on the matter and as always they are interesting. Juan believes, among other things, that there something akin to an economic thing at work here. That's 'cause Muslims, many if not most, live in Third World countries and communities. In short, in part it's the rich and well off ridiculing the poor.

Maybe.

But as I recall, during the Satanic Verses flap (which in many important ways, I think, the cartoon riots do NOT resemble), Khomeini was in the midst of some serious domestic problems - bad economy in Iran, enormous number of deaths in a futile war with Iraq. Rushdie's book was the perfect deflection. Similarly, Saudi Arabia had some very good reasons to stoke the controversy. During the recent haj, some 350 Muslims died. Now if the cartoons were published in September, why in late Jan/early Feb is there suddenly such shock, shock? In short, the cartoon riots are part of a Wag The Camel strategy.

Maybe.

And maybe Atrios is ultimately right, that the right to ridicule Muhammed must be defended, but the decision to do so is open to serious question. Especially given how tense things are presumed to be between the West and Islam.

But while Atrios' take is as close to mine as I've read, what seems behind all the craziness is pretty deep stuff, deeper than a first glance might seem. I'm gonna go through my steps in coming to my own somewhat different conclusion, complementary to Duncan's.

I must confess my Inner Contrarian was the first to react. No, not less but even more offensive cartoons! The world needs more mockery of Muhammed and Islam, I thought. The more they're mocked, the less power the mockery has and that's good for everyone. The more it's mocked, the less sensitive Muslims will become to every slight. The worst thing to do in this situation is to declare ridicule off limits. It makes Islam above human reach, like the acts of Zgriertwrw (the substitute word for the name of the US president, whose name has become too holy to be uttered by non-Republicans).

But then I thought more about Art and Morality. Soundbite version: It simply isn't art's job to teach anyone a lesson.

True, it's not art's job to be polite. If it was, there wouldn't be Michelangelo's David, let alone the poems of Baudelaire, or the late recordings and performances of John Coltrane. And it is certainly not art's job to make a culture less sensitive and passionate.

But then I flipped that all around and a glimpse of a personal opinion on this mess started to occur to me. If it is not art's job deliberately to console, it also is not art's job intentionally to piss anyone off. The dissonances in Monteverdi's madrigals were not deliberate provocations, as many thought. It's simply what he heard. Stravinksy wasn't trying to cause a riot with Le Sacre. He was furious, not happy for the publicity. An artist, if s/he's really an accomplished artist, doesn't seek to anger. What a monumentally trivial objective!

In the case of the cartoons, it seems as if they were commissioned for moral reasons, to illustrate a point of view, propagate an ideology - freedom of speech impinged upon by Muslim objections. Their existence was not drawn from some internal kind of inner aesthetic impulse (people have argued for hundreds of years what's meant by that kind of a drive and I'm not gonna go any further now to define what I mean) but from without.

In short, the cartoons are art to teach a lesson. But while the artist can control his/her brushstrokes, the reaction to art cannot be controlled. In moral art, the reactions are often far from ones the artists desire. Put another way most of us who've read the Inferno stop right there. I'm sure the good parts are wonderful, but I think I've already read the really good - ie, lurid- parts.

And that's sort of like the problem with my initial impulse. I, too, wanted to teach those sumbitches a lesson - who, exactly? I dunno, those sumbitches. And that's just like the newspaper that originally published the toons. But, as I thought through what I was saying, I realized it's not my business to teach anyone a lesson and that thinking it was is nuts. Gut feelings are very often not good.

Now, perhaps a bit of a digression but it really isn't. A bit of detail on the use of moral themes in art.

Some great artists have conciously worked with moral themes in art today, to try to come to terms with it. One of the greatest masters of the trend is - irony of ironies - the Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier. His masterpiece, "Breaking the Waves," (don't rent it, see it in a theater where you can't escape) is both a deeply moving affirmation of Catholic faith and a harrowing, pornographic rant against the superhuman sacrifices required to live a life truly in imitation of Christ. You can easily conclude that art as the mediator of morality has not been deconstructed but eviscerated in von Trier's work. But you can just as easily see in the fate of Emily Watson's character the redemptive, sacrificing love of Christ and the good that can flow from it. And that's just for starters in trying to approach this amazing, impossibly aggravating film.

Von Trier's film is shattering, insane, magnificent, fiercely ambiguous, sublime. By intent, Lars makes you seek your own sense of morality within the structure and actions of the film. And just as intentionally, you are doomed to fail. This isn't a paen to relativism or amorality. Rather, for von Trier, it's something like the point of the Book of Job: the moral compass of humans is too puny to grasp God's greatness and thoughts. But while you're on this doomed journey of moral discovery, you just might think to wonder how your sense of good and evil gets shifted and twisted and turned inside itself. And if there is a "good" in the film, it's that sense of wonder. An aesthetic sense. The sense of art. It's an exhausting experience to watch Breaking the Waves. And unforgettable.

By contrast, the Muhammed cartoons are, morally dull, even by their own admittedly less high-falutin' standards. And the reason is obvious after a bit of thought. The intention behind them is not to work out some kinky artistic/personal problems. No, the intentions behind the cartoons were those of the self-righteous Western mediocrity and they couldn't be clearer - let's show Them free speech is a good thing.

Wow, that's taking a controversial position! But much to the amazement of the Danes, they found that it actually was. And this is what makes the cartoons indefensibly awful, even stupid. Unlike Stravinsky, for whom teaching moral lessons was the last thing on his mind; unlike von Trier, whose control is simply awesome over fiendishly complicated moral themes; the cartoonists and their editors set out, like the naive, idealistic Kevin Costner in the Untouchables, to do good. They got their asses handed to them.

So here's the point of this long digression into von Trier, aesthetics, et al.

Why do the cartoon riots remind me of Paul Wolfowitz and George Packer, who seemed to have nothing to do with it? For a very simple reason. The same perverse sense of entitlement and exceptionalism underlies the anti-aesthetic impulse of the editors: Let's do some good! This is not to argue for a crude Scowcroftian realism, but rather to protest, strongly, against the insanity of making simplistic moral/political statements either in art or in foreign policy. A lot of the time, they just make things worse. A lot worse.

So to sum up. Yes, on the level that most often should be addressed - the practical level - Atrios is right and that's as far as anyone needs to go. Of course, the rioters are, at best, grossly overreacting and at worst, have been driven insane by those that provoked them to overreact. Of course, free speech needs defense, and of course commonsense propriety was in short supply in the newspaper's newsroom. But underneath these self-evident truisms lies a sad truth that bears some thinking about. The events of the cartoon riots, in all their mad senselessness and fatal tragedy, reflect - epitomize - some of the worst but most virulently widespread presumptions of our time: the arrogance and shallowness of white boy moralizing; the maniacal self-destructive sense of sheer helplessness that descends into pointless murder, destruction, and horror.

As I see it, both the decision to commission and publish the cartoons and the riots that followed simply defy comprehension not because one couldn't predict the consequences but because one could, with depressing ease. Unless they come to their senses, the white do-gooders are gonna get us all killed in their crusades. And the recipients of all this do-gooding are gonna do the exact same thing when their fury at the do-gooders is cynically stoked and channelled into senseless destructiveness and murder.

In short, no more cartoon riots. No more cartoon editors. No more cartoon evil cavemen. And no more cartoon American administrations. It's time not to listen to what our gut says, it's time to give it some alka-seltzer and get it to shut up so we can think.
tristero 2/06/2006 01:35:00 PM |

 
First Rate Burglary

by digby

I'm beginning to wonder if the Democrats might not have some information that the administration has done domestic surveillance without a warrant. They keep asking. Pointedly. And Gonzales keeps saying that he isn't "comfortable" acknowledging the question.

It is indisputable that the admnistration has engaged in surveillance of political groups. We know this. It has been verified. We also know that they believe that political dissent gives aid and comfort to the enemy. The president says so himself.

Therefore, it is entirely reasonable to suspect that this administration would use this illegal surveillance program for purposes other than that to which they have admitted, particularly since they consider political dissent to be bordering on treason. This is, remember, an administration that has made a fetish of the politics of personal destruction. The gathering of "oppo research" is the life's blood of their political strategy and it goes all the way back to the Big Kahuna.

From Bush's Brain:

At a seminar in Lexington, Kentucky, in August 1972, Rove and Robinson recounted the Dixon episode with considerable delight. They talked about campaign espionage, about digging through an opponent's garbage for intelligence --- then using it against them. Robinson recounted how the technique had worked well for him in the 1968 governor's race in Illinois when he "struck gold" in a search of an opponent's garbage. He found evidence that a supporter had given checks to both sides in the race, but more to the Democrat, Sam Shapiro.

"So one of our finance guys calls the guy up the next day and told him there was a vicious rumor going around," Robinson said, according to a tape recording of a seminar. "The guy got all embarrassed and flew to Chicago that day with a check for $2,000 to make up the difference," he said.

This was the summer of the Watergate break-in, with the first revelations of a scandal that unraveled the Nixon presidency.The Watergate burglars broke in to the Democratic National Committee offices on June 17 and the whole business of political dirty tricks was rapidly becoming a very sensitive subject. Both Rove and Robinson recognized that. They even specifically mentioned the Watergate break-in at the seminars, not as a reason to avoid campaign espionage, but as a reason to keep it secret.

"While this is all well and good as fun and games, you've really got to use your head about who knows about this kind of thing." Robinson warned.

"Again in those things, if it's used sureptitiously in a campaign, it's better off if you don't get caught. You know, those people who were caught by Larry O'Brien's troops in Washinngton are a serious verification of the fact that you don't get caught."

Remember: Watergate was about bugging the Democratic National Committee. The "3rd rate burglary" was to replace an illegal bug that had been planted on the telephones of prominent Democrats.

The lesson of Watergate for the chagrined Republicans was that they needed to be more forceful in assuming executive power and they needed to be more sophisticated about their campaign espionage. This is what they've done.

Anybody who even dreams that these guys are not using all their government power to spy on political enemies is being willfully naive. It is what they do. It is the essence of their political style. This is Nixon's Republican party and they have finally achieved a perfect ability to carry out his vision of political governance: L'etat C'est Moi. If the president does it that means it's not illegal.


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digby 2/06/2006 12:10:00 PM |

 
The Eunuch Caucus

by digby

I've been digesting this morning's hearings and I am dumbstruck by the totality of the Republicans' abdication of their duty. These men who spent years running on Madisonian principles ("The essence of government is power; and power, lodged as it must be in human hands, will ever be liable to abuse") now argue without any sense of irony or embarrassment that Republican Senators are nothing more than eunuchs in President Bush's political harem. They have voluntarily rendered the congress of the United States impotent to his power.

I've watched this invertebrate GOP caucus since 2000 as they submitted themselves to this lawless administration again and again, shredding every bit of self respect, every figment of institutional pride, every duty to the constitution. The look in their eyes, which is somehow interpreted as strong and defiant by the equally servile media, is actually a window to empty little men who have given up their manhood to oblige their master. The only reward they seek is unfettered access to the taxpayers money for their own use.

We are looking at fifty-five of the most powerful people in the country. Collectively the Republican Senators represent almost a hundred and fifty million citizens. And they have allowed a callow little boy like George W. Bush along with his grey eminineces Karl Rove and Dick Cheney to strip them of their consciences, their principles and their constitutional obligations. What sad little creatures, cowardly and subservient, unctuously bowing and scraping before Karl Rove the man who holds their (purse) strings and dances them around the halls of congress singing tributes to their own irrelevance at the top of their lungs. How pathetic they are.

Barry Goldwater is rolling over in his grave.


Update: Oh, and don't get excited about Huckleberry Graham's "tough" questions. This is his schtick. Going all the way back to the impeachment hearings, he has done this. He hems and haws in his cornpone way how he's "troubled" by one thing or another until he finally "decides" after much "deliberation" that the Republican line is correct after all and he has no choice but to endorse it.

Update II: Matt Yglesias notices the same thing and wonders why the senators don't have a hunger for pwoer. I say it's because they are craven, bedwetting cowards who are afraid of Karl Rove and addicted to stealing from the American people.


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digby 2/06/2006 10:36:00 AM |

 
Declaring War

by digby

I'm watching the NSA hearings and it occurred to me: did the UK and Spain "declare war" on terrorism or al Qaeda? After all, they have been attacked as well and I wonder if they are operating under wartime conditions or wartime laws. Dores anyone know whether we are the only country in the world that considers itself "at war" with terrorism in the literal sense of the word?



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digby 2/06/2006 09:31:00 AM |

Sunday, February 05, 2006

 
Question Of The Day

by digby


From today's New York Times:

One who attended was George Terwilliger, a deputy attorney general in Mr. Bush's father's administration, who said that questions over the spy program were "not so much a debate about the law as about the tactics that are necessary to combat the type of violent enemy we've never confronted before."

He added, "I hope the A.G. will make that point very strongly, that there is no precedent for what we're dealing with here."

I'm hearing everywhere that the Democrats are skittish about pursuing the NSA scandal due to the GOP's aggressive framing of the program as necessary to protect the American people. It is indisputable that Republicans have been very successful at portraying themselves as strong and Democrats as weak on national security for more than 40 years and have used this issue aggressively in the last two elections. Indeed, the only time we won the presidency since 1964 was during times when national security was not on the agenda (or their president was forced to resign in disgrace.) They have appropriated certain master narratives about heroism and courage to define Republican leadership which they sell as necessary when the country is under threat --- a threat which they also insist upon defining as existential (communism and terrorism) and which always requires brute force rather than strategic cunning or intelligent maneuvering. (Remember that at the country's most dangerous moment in the last 50 years -- the Cuban Missile crisis --- the hawks insisted that the only answer was to launch a pre-emptive strike while cooler heads insisted on trying to figure out a way to step back from the brink.)

So, knowing this and knowing the Rove has been telegraphing that they plan to pull out their wellworn playbook once again, I'm throwing this out to you readers today to mull over and discuss. Since the Republicans have been successful in winning elections on national security, how should Democrats deal with it?



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digby 2/05/2006 11:23:00 AM |

 
This Is More Like It, Mr. Keller

by tristero

Normally, in articles like this one, another dispatch from the front lines of the extreme right's War On Brains. a quote packed with the usual lies of the extreme right is reproduced without context or fact checking. This gives the reader the impression that the facts are basically right and therefore what the fanatic is saying may be a reasonable, even if unusual, opinion to hold:

"I got tired of people calling me and saying, 'Why is my kid coming home from high school and saying his biology teacher told him he evolved from a chimpanzee?' " Mr. Buttars said.

This time around, however, the reporter, Kirk Johnson, was permitted to be a genuine reporter and report the whole truth, not just be a quote puppet. The very next paragraph reads:

Evolutionary theory does not say that humans evolved from chimpanzees or from any existing species, but rather that common ancestors gave rise to multiple species and that natural selection — in which the creatures best adapted to an environment pass their genes to the next generation — was the means by which divergence occurred over time. All modern biology is based on the theory, and within the scientific community, at least, there is no controversy about it.

Yes, exactly. The only thing that's remarkable about this is that this kind of apropriately critical attitude is rare. The lies that the extreme right and radical christianists spew out as a matter of course can only be stopped from polluting the discourse if they are met immediately and head on.

This article has the right idea. Someone might wanna inform their colleagues at the Book Review that reviewers and essayists, too, are obligated to know enough about their subjects to separate fact from fiction and not be seduced into a bogus equivalence of value by rightwing lies no matter how confidently asserted.
tristero 2/05/2006 07:27:00 AM |

 
Brokeback

by tristero

Daniel Mendelsohn is right.

An while you're at the NY Review of Books (NOT the Times Book Review), check out, among other great pieces, Thomas Powers' review of James Risen's book, "State of War."
tristero 2/05/2006 02:13:00 AM |

Saturday, February 04, 2006

 
Why The Fight Against IDiocy Matters

by tristero

It always amazes me when a practicing scientist and nobody's fool thinks "intelligent design" creationism is not his or her problem:

Our energy is misdirected if we fight harmless beliefs in angels or intelligent design. There are antiscientific illusions with far more serious repercussions for society. Among these are the continuing belief in ballistic missile defense; or an irrational fear of terrorism when alcohol, automobiles or suicide pose much greater risks. On these fronts, you will find practicing scientists engaged.

The front against creationism is fought mostly by science philosophers, because intelligent design is fodder for their discipline, and by science educators, because creationism infringes on their professional activity.

He makes some good points, but he is utterly wrong.

The reason is this: although I can see how someone might develop an argument that, say, fear of terrorism is irrational, I disagree. At the very least, it's quite arguable whether a substantial level of fear of terrorism once your town has lost some 3000 citizens in a single day is rational or not. The comparison of terrorism stats with alcohol deaths, et al is specious - for many reasons, this seems apples to oranges to me.

Reasonable people cannot disagree about "intelligent design" creationism. It's garbage, the same way Star Wars is garbage. But it is not a harmless folk belief. Far from it.

ID is a carefully crafted strategy, extravagantly funded by the most extreme elements of the religious far right, to undermine science. Destroying science is but one front in an openly declared struggle to replace the American republic with a theocracy.*

And indeed, to drive the point home as to how important it is for scientists to combat fake science of the IDiotic variety Atrios points to an article with excerpts from a memo that actually circulated within NASA. There is much that is distressing in this article, but it is this part I want to focus on here:

The Big Bang memo came from Mr. Deutsch, a 24-year-old presidential appointee in the press office at NASA headquarters whose résumé says he was an intern in the "war room" of the 2004 Bush-Cheney re-election campaign. A 2003 journalism graduate of Texas A&M, he was also the public-affairs officer who sought more control over Dr. Hansen's public statements.

In October 2005, Mr. Deutsch sent an e-mail message to Flint Wild, a NASA contractor working on a set of Web presentations about Einstein for middle-school students. The message said the word "theory" needed to be added after every mention of the Big Bang.

The Big Bang is "not proven fact; it is opinion," Mr. Deutsch wrote, adding, "It is not NASA's place, nor should it be to make a declaration such as this about the existence of the universe that discounts intelligent design by a creator."

It continued: "This is more than a science issue, it is a religious issue. And I would hate to think that young people would only be getting one-half of this debate from NASA.

Get it? This fight is not about what kids learn in high school. This is a knockdown drag out fight - no, this is a culture war - in which the extreme right is trying to re-define science as just one more set of religious doctrines. This crap about the Big Bang, discussed in all seriousness in a government document!, comes from the the wackiest fringes of religious fundamentalism, people who think all of particle physics is a lie and what constitutes the universe are not quarks, electrons, protons, neutrons, and so on, but Jesus. I kid you not. This bizarre comic strip is not a parody.

Ominously, the notion that somehow science is just one more set of equally believable opinions about the world, no different than say, astrology, has just been made legitimate in the Times Book Review:

neo-Darwinists [sic] emphasize natural selection, a god-like mechanism

This is so utterly wrong I'm at a loss for words. The reviewer not only doesn't know a damn thing about modern evolutionary science. He doesn't even know basic theology.

Thomas Aquinas hedged his bets, saying that astrology might have a deterministic interpretation when applied to people in large populations, but that individuals, in communion with God, are freed from the bondage of the group. This aptly parallels the relationship between Newtonian mechanics

It does not.

quantum physics, in which individual particles are allowed the luxury of free will.

This is bullshit, even in an informal sense, even in an attempt at wit.

Popular astrology, with its simplistic emphasis on sun signs and their psychological traits (e.g., Geminis are fickle; Virgos are meticulous), is a wan replica of traditional astrology.

Bullshit. "Traditional astrology" in terms of accuracy and validity is just as bogus and arbitrary as "popular astrology." There are just more levels of bogosity.

But astrology can also be seen as early science, an attempt to understand nature.

Bullshit. That would mean that any and all creation myths or crystal ball gazing are just crude, early forms of science. This entirely misrepresents what science actually is, and how it differs from creation myths and crystal ball gazing.

Modern man can choose from a veritable smorgasbord of Type 1 errors: string theory, neo-Darwinism, cosmology, economics, God. Astrology is as good as any...

Bullshit. This reviewer doesn't know the first thing about any of the topics in his list.

There has been a great deal written about the faked memoirs of James Frey. The Times itself has printed editorials deploring the author. But somehow, a genuine peabrain who hasn't met a fact or an idea that he can't scramble beyond any recognition - is he, perhaps, this guy using a pseudonym? - was permitted to review in the Book Review, and the paper published it without bothering to run it past a single scientifically literate person who would immediately spot the omnipresent fraudulence.


*I have documented every single assertion, and every single adjective within these assertions far too often to repeat them. Anyone seriously interested in the details is welcome to pick up Forrest and Cross's "Creationism's Trojan Horse" which goes into enough detail for most laypeople. Any comments attempting to excuse or advocate for the "worth" of "intelligent design" creationism will be ignored by me in the comments. Even before Dover, that was not an argument intellectually honest people could make with a straight face. After Dover, there are no excuses to give it the time of day.

[UPDATE: Mark in SanFran over at Kos] fills in some details of the science, and some background information on the reviewer of the astrology book.]
tristero 2/04/2006 02:24:00 PM |

 
Michael Berube Is Professor Keef

by tristero


It's now official. There's no point in denying the rumors any longer; we knew they were true long ago. Our very own Michael Berube is none other than the Keith Richards of Academe. Congratulations, Michael! No false modesty now, you've earned it. You deserve the title. I hold my lighter to the sky in your praise.

Who sez Berube's Herr Professor Keith, the inimitable virtuoso of chalk in Open G? No greater an authority than David Horowitz does. Yes, THAT David Horowitz (and I'll be fried in Crisco before I'll give him a link). David says so in his new book called The Professors, listing the 101 most dangerous college profs in America.

Close that slack jaw, buster. It's real, I saw it with my own eyes last night in a store (didn't buy it, natch). Think I could make something like that up? No one in their right mind could begin to imagine a book about academics that endanger America with their ideas. (Um...Better move right along before anyone notices...)

And in said tome, betwixt pages 71 and 73, we can learn all about the evil Berube, his darkest, his grooviest, his most Keith-iest transgressions:

1. How he supported the invasion of Afghanistan and the toppling of the Taliban but then relapsed into standard leftist opposition to war when it came to Iraq.

2. How he teaches a class in creepy postmodernistical deconstructionalistical what-have-you, during which Berube makes the case that sane laws and ethics devolve from people and not from attempts to discern the commands of a divine, supra-human will. Never you mind that sounds a lot like the argumentation in the Declaration of Independence. David Horowitz says this is evil. And David knows a lot about evil. (eh... well, as I was sayin')

3. Michael Berube dilates in class. That's right, it's there in black and white in David's book, look it up. Michael Berube dilates in class.

Who knew? In fact, I've met Prof. Berube twice for dinner and concerts and I never guessed. Again and again, I stared straight into the eyes of one of the most dangerous professors in America. He stared back. I stared. He stared. We both stared. I could swear he never dilated. Not once.

Now, you might ask, "Did he ever get up, excuse himself, and say, 'I'll be right back, gotta dilate' " ? He did not.

The closest I came to seeing anything remotely like dilating occurred just after dinner. Professor Evil, with a sideways glance worthy of Cary Grant in Notorious, reached into his sports jacket and pulled out a dangerous looking metallic device, flicked it open with a wrist motion that bespoke hundreds of hours of intensive practice, mashed a few buttons and then muttered some cryptic words into it that sounded suspiciously like, "Hey, howru? Jamie ok?"

But everyone knows that's "dialating" and Horowitz was quite specific. Berube dilates. Daily. And in class, no less.

So it's official, Michael Berube is fookin' dangerous. And, just as Keith is proud of his reputation as the Bad Boy of Rock, Michael, too, should take this as a badge of honor. I'm thrilled to know one of the most dangerous men in the country. Let me say it ever so loud and proud. I want the world to know:

I stand completely behind Michael Berube.

(Obviously. Because if I stood anywhere else, who knows what I might get hit with when he dilates?)

Will there be an award? Will Michael unite with his old band at the ceremony, will the songs sound as fresh as the day they prematurely split, and will they reunite for one last tour of triumph, selling out Albert Hall and the Garden? Stay tuned.


PS As mentioned, I didn't buy the book and I didn't have much time. So, perhaps there are more of my buddies listed, both in the blogosphere and in MeatLand. To all of you, my heartfelt congratulations.
tristero 2/04/2006 06:14:00 AM |

Friday, February 03, 2006

 
Ripping Them Off Again

by digby


Just in case you missed this Diary over at Kos earlier this week, I urge you to read it. Mary Beth Williams of Wampum has put together a series of posts outlining a whole other dimension of the Abramoff scandal, namely his involvement in running a slush fund to obstruct an accounting of the Bureau of Indian Affairs --- an accounting ordered by the federal court in the biggest class action suit in American history.

The story is complicated and amazingly disgusting. Apparently, there is just no limit to how often and how thoroughly this country can fuck over the Indians.

Here is a post at Wampum with links to all the posts Marybeth has done on this subject. This is fascinating, amazing work. If the fine folks at Wampum didn't take themselves out of the running for the Koufaxes, this would be a major contender for best series.


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digby 2/03/2006 07:58:00 PM |

 
Stickin' It To DeLay

by digby

I'm sure all of you already know about the Ciro Rodriguez race down in Texas that the luminaries of the blogosphere are backing. He sounds like a perfect netroots candidate and there could be nothing more thrilling than ousting a preznit Bush kissing Democratic shill.

I think that one of the underdiscussed reasons for supporting this, however, is to stick it to Tom Delay and his scumbag lackeys in the Texas legislature who resdistricted in 2002, (something with which Kos reports today the quisling Cuellar was personally involved.) Delay himself, in what may well be remembered as one of the greatest acts of hubris in American political history, redistricted himself out of a very safe majority and may just go down because of it.

I had great admiration for the Texas Dems' true grit when they left the state to avoid a quorum. (I wrote about it here, in one of my early tributes to Lord Saletan's sniffing condescension about partisanship)Those guys and gals had some guts to do what they did and I salute them for it. It would be beautiful poetic justice if we were able to take back a couple of those seats --- especially the seat of a "Democrat" whose sole function in life is to give Junior bipartisan cover.


Update: From Crooks and Liars

Delay: This effort is being driven by the left wing groups like Common Cause, Democracy 21, the ACLU and others...their ultimate goal is public financing of campaigns and total isolation of elected officials."

And don't forget the ultra-left wing center of the vast Left Wing Conspiracy: the Bush Justice department.



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digby 2/03/2006 03:06:00 PM |

 
Lovely Rita

by digby

Dear Gawd. I didn't think it was possible to drag down the quality of Hardball any further, but the addition of Rita Cosby is a new low. I'm sure she's a very good tabloid crime reporter. People seem to like her. But her take on politics is so shallow she is making Tweety and Tucker look like intellectual heavyweights. She clearly spent too much time at FOXNews not entirely paying attention. The result is a lethal combination of knee-jerk wingnutism and tabloid silliness. I guess this is an MSNBC attempt to boost her profile, but it's cringe worthy even by "making a drunken fool of yourself at a dinner party" standards.



Update: I take it all back. Matthews is just as silly and stupid as she is. (Why did Americans like Hugh Grant playing the prime minister in "Love Actually" rather than Billy Bob Thornton's creepy American president? Because we all love Tony Blair, that's why! Jayzuz....)


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digby 2/03/2006 02:47:00 PM |

 
Pundit Putz

by digby

Atrios linked today to a very insightful post by the man who wrote "What Liberal Media?" I urge you to read the whole thing if you are interested in the cozy, insider nature of political reporting you see coming out of Washington. Nobody gets it better than Alterman.

Alterman wrote a similarly insightful column last week in which he took mushy triangulator Joe Klein to task for his insulting mischaracterization of liberals and the facts, even as he plays a "liberal" columnist on TV and in the pages of TIME:

Among the most egregious offenders against journalistic standards and simple honesty for the purpose of abusing liberals is Time's Joe Klein, who is, amazingly, the most liberal commentator currently employed by America's highest-circulation newsweekly. (Klein's animus toward liberals coupled with his cavalier treatment of inconvenient facts could hardly be in greater contrast to that of Newsweek's high-profile liberal columnist Jonathan Alter, whose solid reporting and tempered idealism serves as a kind of remnant and reminder of the long-defunct liberal Establishment.)

To take just one recent example, a Klein column posted January 8 accused Democrats of "playing too fast and too loose with issues of war and peace." Now look who's talking:

Klein writes, "The latest version of the absolutely necessary Patriot Act, which updates the laws regulating the war on terrorism and contains civil-liberties improvements over the first edition, was nearly killed by a stampede of Senate Democrats." In fact, this "stampede" was led by four Republicans.

Klein writes, "A strong majority would favor the NSA program...if its details were declassified and made known." In fact, when an Associated Press poll asked Americans if the Bush Administration should be required to get a warrant before wiretapping, 56 percent answered affirmatively.

Klein writes, "Until the Democrats make clear that they will err on the side of aggressiveness in the war against al-Qaeda, they will probably not regain the majority in Congress or the country." This statement ignores that the Bush Administration diverted resources from capturing bin Laden and destroying Al Qaeda to send them to Iraq, where no such threat existed but where one has since been created. It also ignores the fact that Republicans received a minority of the Congressional vote in 2004, as well as in the presidential votes of 2000, 1996 and 1992.

Joe Klein is everything that is wrong with the allegedly liberal punditocrisy. His anachronistic establishment politics are wrongly seen by many, including many elected Democrats, as the "reasonable" middle ground for which we must strive in order to attract some ephemeral centrist voter who exists only in their imaginations. He is the embodiment of the now wholly irrelevant DLC experiment. With none of the down home common touch of Clinton or the earnest idealism of Gore, he is nothing but a big bowl of warmed over 90's centrist hype in a time where battles lines are by necessity, sharply drawn. He's the political equivalent of reruns of "Mad About You."

Every time he is seen as representing any form of winning liberalism, we lose. He obviously hates real Democrats, the vast majority of whom do not agree with anything he has to say, and his hostility to what we believe contributes mightily to the disdain and fear that the Democratic establishment feels toward the grassroots. He represents nothing but the clubby little world of highly paid poltical pundits who have as much in common with average Americans as Madonna does.

And he is a thin-skinned prick. Here's is his response to Altermann's criticisms, via Alternet:

"Eric Alterman is simply not a serious person --- and I'm writing about a very serious issue," says Time columnist Joe Klein, in response to Eric Alterman's recent ad hominem attack in The Nation, wherein he dubs Klein one of the mainstream media's "most egregious offenders against journalistic standards and simple honesty."

"I don't want to address Eric's remarks because they're not worth addressing," Klein says. "This guy just spews opinions without having any information or doing any reporting. You just did something Alterman has never done, for example, actually calling me to do some reporting!"

In the course of generally noting, "The punditocracy's ignore-except-to-attack attitude toward liberals," Alterman dissected a recent Klein column that Alterman claimed "accused Democrats" of playing too fast and too loose with issues of war and peace. He then criticized Klein for his perceived "animus toward liberals coupled with his cavalier treatment of inconvenient facts."

"That's typical of his essential narcissistic laziness," Klein responds. "Alterman has been personally attacking me for years. It's what he does instead of working … He's so peripheral, I forget he's in the business until someone calls or emails me his latest attack!"

[...]

"I'm not nearly as smart as Eric, to have opinions without bothering to report first," Klein counters. "Instead let me react by speaking to the facts. After all, I've lived my life by seeking out facts and then reporting them. One advantage I think I have over other columnists is that I do reporting."

Klein says he will "have a lot more to say on this (NSA) issue next week -- but first I have to learn more about it."

Asked for an example, Klein says, "The notion of calling it wiretapping is questionable, I think, although I'm still not entirely sure.

"People like me who favor this program don't yet know enough about it yet," he says, "Those opposed to it know even less -- and certainly less than I do."

According to Klein, the NSA employs a "powerful front-end computer program that can scan computers and cell phones and access all previous communications." Then, he says, analysts look for patterns in the calls and emails.

"Once they've gone through that process," he explains, "Then they go to the FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) special court."

In Klein's analysis, "the liberals are reacting to this issue in their usual reflexive way. Meanwhile, George Bush and others in his administration are being very cynical."

The political flap over the NSA actions, Klein says, could be easily resolved. "All that's needed is an updating of the FISA Act or the Patriot Act." But this is unlikely to happen, Klein believes, "because George Bush is spoiling for and creating a fight on this issue, since he thinks it's a fight he will win in the court of public opinion."

As for his fight with Eric Alterman, Klein's willing to forfeit. "Who cares, really?" he concluded. "He's written lots of inaccurate, foolish stuff about me before. It's just silly. If it were someone who actually KNOWS stuff or caught me in an inaccuracy, then I'd be concerned. But Eric? He can say what he wants."

Yes, well, there is no need for Klein to be concerned because he holds a very important perch as a faux liberal in the punditocrisy, a highly paid profession that specializes in pushing the "liberals are icky" meme that serves the Republicans so well. He's a good lapdog "liberal" and he and all his lickspittle cohorts are killing us.



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digby 2/03/2006 01:53:00 PM |

 
It Would Be A Cakewalk. After All, More Soldiers Speak Spanish Than Persian, Right?

by tristero

To hell with Tehran. Real men covet Caracas. Doesn't it seem like the Bush administration is deliberately being as obnoxious as possible so they can start a war somewhere, anywhere, it doesn't matter, just as long as there's some bang bang? Where do you find people like Donald Rumsfeld?

"I mean, we've got Chavez in Venezuela with a lot of oil money," Rumsfeld added. "He's a person who was elected legally _ just as Adolf Hitler was elected legally _ and then consolidated power and now is, of course, working closely with Fidel Castro and Mr. Morales and others."

There have been increasing signs of hostility between Washington and Caracas, and on Monday Chavez said Venezuela's intelligence agencies have "infiltrated" a group of military officials from the U.S. Embassy who were allegedly involved in espionage.

Venezuelan authorities, including the vice president, have accused officials at the U.S. Embassy of involvement in a spying case in which Venezuelan naval officers allegedly passed sensitive information to the Pentagon.

It was not the first such charge by Chavez.

I have a favor to ask. Occasionally, I've tried to understand Chavez but can't. The mainstream press in the US has been worthless (worse than usual and that is not a good sign, frankly). There were a few interesting articles in the New York Review of Books - no fans of the Bush administration - from which I took away the impression that Chavez must have been born in Macondo. It sounded like he was completely nuts but that somehow, through a thicket of immense corruption, life for some poor people in Venezuela were marginally improved under Chavez for the first time.

If anyone has any suggestions about a knowledgeable article or book to read on Chavez, please drop the reference in comments.

In any event, when I start to agree with commentators about how vicious and uncivilized it is to use rhetoric that reminds people that Nazi admirers have no business in the US government and that anything in their past is fair game to humiliate them and get them out of it, i just have to read something like these remarks from a high Bush official to recall precisely the nature of the fight we're in. Bush's vicious discourse cannot be ignored, minimized, deflected or muted. It must be met head on. Always.

As Zappa sez, The meek inherit nothing.

(By the way, I'm gonna predict 10 comments or less.)
tristero 2/03/2006 08:16:00 AM |

 
America's Nominee For The International Monty Python "Walking Up And Down The Square" Competition

by tristero

Who else?

With the United States beginning its February presidency of the Security Council, John R. Bolton, the American ambassador, reported the failure of his first effort from the chair, to get the 15 Council members to begin meetings promptly at 10 a.m. "Starting on time is a form of discipline," he said. "I brought the gavel down at 10. I was the only one in the room, though."

tristero 2/03/2006 05:45:00 AM |

 
A Belated Open Letter To George W. Bush

by tristero

Dear George,

In your recent TV show, you read

[E]ven tough debates can be conducted in a civil tone, and our differences cannot be allowed to harden into anger. To confront the great issues before us, we must act in a spirit of good will...

Given that you only listen to what fellow Republicans have to say, I can only quote the immortal words of your Vice-President, Richard Cheney:

Go fuck yourself.

Love,

Tristero
tristero 2/03/2006 04:16:00 AM |

 
Tom v. Tom

by tristero

My friend Peter Swales is one of the most important historians of psychoanalysis in the world (I must return his calls). Among his greatest recent achievements is research into the real Sybil, the publication of whose case (but NOT her real problems) eventually spawned an epidemic of Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD) diagnoses about 10 or 12 years ago, a travesty that seriously wronged a lot of emotionally vulnerable people.

Well, Peter, I love you dearly, but Tom Friedman just proved that MPD is real and it's not pretty:

Oh, come on, Friedman, get real! The president throws a few paragraphs your way and you go all weak in the knees. Show some spine, man! You need to trash this thing. You know these guys are not serious. This is a president who once called for putting a man on Mars and then just dropped it. You assumed they were going to do the Iraq war right — remember? Look where that got you, you moron. You should have listened to your wife!

Yeah, I know all that. But here's what else I know: Mr. Bush is going to be president for the next three years. We do not have three years to lose — not on climate change, energy efficiency or improving math/science education. I am not going to sit around for the next three years just trashing these guys and praying that some Democrat gets elected and does all the right things. We don't have time, you moron!

[snip]

There's no pain-free solution. Remember how President Kennedy ended his May 25, 1961, State of the Union speech calling for a moon shot? He said: "I have not asked for a single program which did not cause one or all Americans some inconvenience, or some hardship, or some sacrifice."

Pigs will fly before Bush says that.

You may be right. And if he fails to carry through with this energy initiative, I'll be the first to rip him for it. In the meantime, I prefer to give him a new reputation to live up to. You never know. ... And by the way, pal, you got a better horse to ride right now? [Emphasis added.]

If you think I'm gonna enter an argument between two Tom Friedmans, you must think Mama Tristero raised a fool. But I do want to point out that little phrase I boldified:

You never know. ...

Hmm...Didn't I hear that like a few years ago? Didn't a guy named Packer or something just say exactly that to excuse his inexcusable naivete?

Dear Tom,

I do know.

Love,


Tristero
tristero 2/03/2006 03:54:00 AM |

Thursday, February 02, 2006

 
Karl The Whistleblower

by digby


So it turns out that the CIA told Cheney and Libby back in June of 2003 that the Niger claims were bogus. (Via Crooks and Liars)

Vice President Cheney and his then-Chief of Staff I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby were personally informed in June 2003 that the CIA no longer considered credible the allegations that Saddam Hussein had attempted to procure uranium from the African nation of Niger, according to government records and interviews with current and former officials. The new CIA assessment came just as Libby and other senior administration officials were embarking on an effort to discredit an administration critic who had also been saying that the allegations were untrue.

CIA analysts wrote then-CIA Director George Tenet in a highly classified memo on June 17, 2003, "We no longer believe there is sufficient" credible information to "conclude that Iraq pursued uranium from abroad." The memo was titled: "In Response to Your Questions for Our Current Assessment and Additional Details on Iraq's Alleged Pursuits of Uranium From Abroad."

Despite the CIA's findings, Libby attempted to discredit former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who had been sent on a CIA-sponsored mission to Niger the previous year to investigate the claims, which he concluded were baseless.

I guess that blows ole patriotic whistleblower Karl Rove's excuse out of the water, too. Remember how all the wingnuts said he was just warning the press off a bad story when he spoke to Matt Cooper?

For Mr. Rove is turning out to be the real "whistleblower" in this whole sorry pseudo-scandal. He's the one who warned Time's Matthew Cooper and other reporters to be wary of Mr. Wilson's credibility.

Here's what Karl said in case you forgot:

"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 ... "

I'm shocked, I tell you, shocked. Karl Rove lied. But that is no reason for reporters not to believe him now, of course. It was just the one time.



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digby 2/02/2006 03:03:00 PM |

 
Reflexive Cheating

by digby

So the House Republicans tried to rig their own election. It just doesn't get any better than that, does it?

But, after all, it's what they are trained to do from the time they join the Party:

Everyone who watched this summer's race for College Republican National Committee (crnc) chair with any detachment has a favorite moment of chutzpah they admire in spite of themselves. Leading the count are the following: speaking sotto voce of your opponent's "homosexuality"; rigging the delegate count so that states that support your candidate have twice as many votes as those that don't; and using a sitting congressman to threaten the careers of undecided voters. I can understand the perverse appeal of each of these incidents. But I cast my vote for the forged letter.

It's so much a part of their make-up that it's hardly even remarked upon. Their friends in the media don't seem to find it worthy of mention either. Republicans believe that stealing elections is perfectly moral and right. They do not believe in democracy. That's why they talk about it all the time.



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digby 2/02/2006 11:06:00 AM |

Wednesday, February 01, 2006

 
Bring On The Screeching Harpies

by digby


These missing Cheney e-mails are very intriguing. This is particularly so because we went though a similar event during the Clinton administration and the Republicans went completely apeshit over it. In 2000, it was revealed (through the machinations of Judicial Watch) that some emails had not been properly archived and it was suspected that some of Monica Lewinsky's had not been turned over as a result. Dan Burton held hearings and the Independent Counsel, Robert Ray, was assigned to look into it.

Judicial Watch ended up filing an ethics complaint against Ray for declining to follow it up but it was clear from the get that it was another bogus witch hunt, as all the Clinton scandals were. But in the course of it we all found out what kind of an archiving system the White House has for maintaining emails:

... whenever a White House staffer clicks "send," a message reminds them that a copy of their missive is being sent to records management.

When it comes to saving e-mails, the White House is held to a higher standard than the private sector, and even Congress.

Companies that have a policy of saving e-mails usually do so only for three to six months, according to records-management consultants. Many companies consider them the same as phone calls, and don't archive them unless they are equal in weight to a written communication.

But the White House is different. It saves its records for posterity. After President Clinton vacates his office next January, at least 30 million stored e-mails will be deposited with the National Archives, an unfathomable mountain of data ranging from "how about lunch?" to speech drafts, to perhaps more juicy communications.

Now Fitzgerald says:

We have learned that not all email of the Office of Vice President and the Executive Office of President for certain time periods in 2003 was preserved through the normal archiving process on the White House computer system.

And here I thought the grown-ups from the private sector with their fancy pants ways were going to fix all those technical problems.

Whatever the case, there is ample precedent for a full-on congressional hissy fit and a thorough special counsel investigation. The Republicans held fiery hearings on this matter just months before Clinton left office, so great was the urgency, and there was absolutely no evidence that any emails of the president were involved. But because there might have been an email from Monica to the president that said "I wuv you" that hadn't turned up yet, they grilled the entire White House counsel's office for days.

There can be no complaints from the Republicans about Fitzgerald investigating this. None. The precedent was set just five and half years ago --- by them.



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digby 2/01/2006 10:06:00 PM |

 
Schwarzenegger's Got Cash Troubles. It's Time To Hit Him Hard.

by tristero

The lying piece of Nazi-admiring trash California has the misfortune of having as a Governor doesn't have any money in his re-election fund. That's good news.

Democrats should drive him into personal bankruptcy and revisit in lurid detail all those nasty personal issues Schwarzenegger deflected when he was campaigning the first time. They should start right now and not stop, even after he's been driven from office and he's sold his last Hummer.

I know. I'm letting him off easy.
tristero 2/01/2006 09:56:00 PM |

 
Useless

by digby

Sometime back I was in the minority here in the blogosphere when I argued that I understood why NARAL was staying with its backing of Chafee:

I understand that we all need to stick together, but if I were NARAL I'd be getting very, very concerned about some Democrats' willingness to "soften" their stance on the issue of choice because it's allegedly hurting the party --- you know, moral values and all that. I might just think it's smart to show some muscle. There is no way I'd blindly trust anyone in this environment to fight this battle for me.

There is a great example of how this works over the long haul and it comes from the grandaddy of all single issue groups --- the NRA. They are certainly an indispensible and active part of the GOP coalition as they've always been, but they have plenty of Democrats on their side now too. And they did not get to where they are by being good little GOP soldiers. They fought every single battle on the gun issue alone and they insisted on every candidate they backed being on board. When they started their campaign it was not the default mainstream position in either party.

And they backed plenty of Democrats over Republicans if they had to. Sometimes they backed the losing candidates because they were in urban elections where the Republican couldn't win without endorsing gun control. And if there ever existed a red state Republican who was for gun control you can bet that the NRA would back a Democrat who was against it --- even if control of the Senate depends on one seat (which is not the case for Chafee.) In Illinois, for instance, Governor George Ryan was elected to office in 1998 over an NRA-backed Democrat. In the last election they didn't endorse either senate candidate in Oklahoma because both had a 100% rating with the NRA. The issue was off the table and so were they. More often they support NRA Republicans over NRA Democrats, but that's just smart politics considering who presently owns the government. They keep focused like a laser on what matters to them and they have done this during good times and bad for the GOP.

But does anyone believe that even though they are a single issue "special interest" that the NRA doesn't help the Republican party in the most substantial way possible? They've pretty much killed us in the rural areas and turned the red states blood red. They've won. Except in big cities, this issue is dead. Republicans have nothing but respect for them --- even if they backed a Democrat or two along the way. They know what they brought to the party.

If the NRA had been in NARAL's position this past week, they would have ripped their support from Lincoln Chafee so fast it would make Trent Lott's hair crack. They know when to pull the strings. Chafee chose his gang of 14 cred over his pro-choice cred. That's all you need to know about him. He has shown himself useless to the cause and should be dropped immediately. This is a seat that can be picked up by a real pro-choice Democrat who isn't running as a bowl of lukewarm water.

I honestly can't understand what in the hell they were thinking. It's one thing to back Chafee to make the Democrats not take you for granted. It's quite another to continue to back him after he failed a monumental test. Now Chafee knows they won't press him when the shit comes down and Democrats see them as a spent and useless force. What a spectacular strategy. When forced childbirth becomes the law of the land, I'm sure they'll be able to sleep nights knowing they cleverly backed a man who played them for fools.

Jane is all over this one (as I'm sure most of you know.) I'm very disappointed in NARAL --- as well as all the other groups to whom I've long been giving money in anticipation of these Supreme Court battles. I don't know if this was winnable, but goddamit, I expected them to pull out all the stops --- and that means, at the very least, pulling support from pro-choice Republicans whose only purpose was to step across the aisle in battles like this, trading a vote for a red state Democrat who would lose his seat if he did it and making the vote bipartisan (and, therefore, "winnable" in the eyes of the media.) That's it. They are now officially not worth the coathanger flyers their names are printed on. And unless NARAL gets a clue, fast, neither are they.



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digby 2/01/2006 06:33:00 PM |

 
Dear Me

by digby


I'm sure most of you have noticed that the Republicans, the media and now even the military have been spending a lot of time on the fainting couch lately and I have to admit that I'm getting concerned for this nation's security because of it. This isn't happening just because their whalebone corsets are laced too tight. It's because the angry left has been saying some very ... how can I put this ... inelegant things and that makes it nearly impossible for our manly leaders to guard democracy and protect us properly. Think about it.

The Republicans have rightly been in a tizzy about our oafish ways, notably heaving their matronly breasts in indignation at the shocking behavior of the Democrats on the judiciary committee who churlishly badgered Samuel Alito about his perfectly innocent association with a lovely alumni group that consisted of all the best people. Why, they molested that nice Mrs Alito until she broke down and wept at the unfairness of it all. (Little Lord Lindsay nearly mussed his Beaver) Just how are Republicans supposed to defend this country from evil killers if Democrats behave so boorishly in a political debate?

And that's not all! Why, just the other day a group of hooligans invaded a meeting of the Washington Post Temperence Society and engaged in hate speech! Right out in the open with no regard for anyone's feelings or anything. The vicious ringleader of the ill-mannered brutes, Jane at firedoglake, has written in one of their grubby little "alternative" newspapers that calling for the firing of an ombudsman for refusing to do her job is just part of the give and take in a freewheeling democracy. Hah! It's nothing but anarchy! (Somebody should have given the dowager Brady some laudenum in the first few minutes to dull the pain of hearing all that foul language. I understand he burst into tears and had to be led away when he saw some of those crude four letter words. As an ex-sportwriter, he's never heard such vulgarities. )

And now today, I hear that the Pentagon Ladies Embroidery League has called for the removal of a horrible "tasteless" cartoon featuring a wounded soldier in the Washington Post that they find much too dreadful to bear. Why, seeing such a thing is almost as bad as being wounded themselves --- worse! It's just so, well... insensitive. It's hard enough trying to eradicate evil and tyranny in our time. But this! Is there no humanity left?

These brave and tough defenders of freedom in the Republican party, the media and the military don't deserve this kind of treatment. It hurts their feelings and shocks their delicate sensibilities. Again, I ask you, how are these people supposed to defend us from the evil islamofascists who are trying to kill us in our beds if they are swooning with shock at our ill-bred criticisms? Free speech isn't a suicide pact, you know.



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digby 2/01/2006 02:33:00 PM |

 
Second Thoughts

by digby


When I saw that Cindy Sheehan had been arrested I was sort of disappointed that she'd decided to do any kind of stunt. My feeling was that she didn't need to because she is a living symbol of anti-war sentiment all by herself and would have made a statement just by being there. This government is always so protective of their King and his pageants that I didn't find it all that surprising that she would be removed for wearing a t-shirt.

This morning, while listening to president Bush spit the words freedom and democracy as applause lines, I read Glenn Greenwald's latest piece, which reminded me that I'm beginning to lose my awareness of being a frog slowly being brought to a boil. Sheehan did not break the law, she has a perfect right to wear a t-shirt in the capital and her arrest was an outrage. These things matter beyond politics or strategy.

Sheehan was wearing a shirt that had the number of American deaths written on it. It was not vulgar or disrespectful in any way. It is as much an expression of support for the troops as the one for which Mrs Young was ejected (and for which she was not arrested, despite the fact that unlike Sheehan she resisted and called the police "idiots.") And all this concern "for the troops" plays out as this failed president used them as both a prop for his unpopular policies and a cudgel to silence his critics:

Yet there is a difference between responsible criticism that aims for success, and defeatism that refuses to acknowledge anything but failure. Hindsight alone is not wisdom. And second-guessing is not a strategy.

With so much in the balance, those of us in public office have a duty to speak with candor. A sudden withdrawal of our forces from Iraq would abandon our Iraqi allies to death and prison . put men like bin Laden and Zarqawi in charge of a strategic country . and show that a pledge from America means little. Members of Congress: however we feel about the decisions and debates of the past, our Nation has only one option: We must keep our word, defeat our enemies, and stand behind the American
military in its vital mission.

Nice trick. Speak with candor as long as you support me. It's the same trick that rhetorically conflates dissent with treason, using the phrase "aid and comfort." In this case, his speechwriters very deftly forced the entire congress to leap to its feet to applaud their own irrelevance --- they ended up cheering the assertion that "second-guessing" in "hindsight" is unpatriotic and that their only option is to do as he orders. Nice democracy we've got here.

Rick Perlstein reminded me that it was Coretta Scott King who raised Martin's consciousness about the war in Vietnam. She was speaking out about it for two years before he was, marching in her first peace march in 1965. Perhaps it was because she, like Cindy Sheehan, was a mother. Or maybe she was just more willing to expend moral capital on a cause that can be marginalized as unpatriotic.

From Perlstein:

In Taylor Branch's new At Canaan's Edge about that 1965 march: "Martin Luther King commended the draft of Coretta's address, but canceled plans to speak himself. (She exhorted the crowd never to forget that democratic commitment made America a historic great nation: 'This is as true in spite of the bombings in Alabama as well as in Vietnam.')."

It is a sad irony that on the very day she died, the president cheaply invoked her great contribution at virtually the same moment his government was silencing the woman who carries her message today. Arresting Cindy Sheehan for asking how many more American troops must die on the same day that Coretta Scott King passsed away is perfectly emblematic of the bankruptcy of every soaring tribute George W. Bush makes to freedom and democracy.


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digby 2/01/2006 12:17:00 PM |

 
Tristero Hearts Mahablog

by tristero

This is spot on:

There is another Left, one that is more serious about good government than it is about making posters. And that Left is serious about winning elections. It’s also serious about building progressive coalitions that can have a real impact on making and enacting policy.

The Left Blogosphere, more than anyone else, speaks for the mainstream Left. And we are the descendants of the Progressive Era and the New Deal. The GOP wants to make us out to be the same old New Left of the 1960s, and there are plenty of people (International ANSWER, Ralph Nader, etc.) who are ready to oblige and play the role of the cartoon “pinko commie left” in front of news cameras. But IMO that’s not who we are. Not most of us, anyway.

I anticipate getting comments about how we should support other lefties instead of Bush. But though its corpse is still twitching the New Left is dead. And its baggage is holding us back. Cut it loose, I say.

The point Barbara is making seems to me similar to one many of us, including most importantly Paul Krugman, an honorary Blogospherian, have been saying for years: Many of us out here in Left Blogosphere are actually moderate liberals. Angry as all hell, it is true, but moderate liberals nevertheless. We are "Left" the way anyone to the left of Louis XIV is Left. We have nothing in common with the Ward Churchills out there even if we wouldn't quit ACLU if they defend him, just as we didn't when they defended Oliver North).

We are not the radicals. To force women who wish to terminate their pregnancies - for whatever reason - to use coathangers - that's radical. And unspeakably cruel. To refuse to recognize, both legally and publicly, a couple in love - that's radical. And narrow-mindedly cruel. To base foreign policy on the president's "gut" and an obviously untenable unilateralism - that's radical. And stupid. To get a team of unscrupulous lawyers trained in the black arts of sophistry (ahem!) but ignorant of American history to gut the Constitution and argue that a president is just an ominipotent monarch under a different name - that's radical. And utterly un-American.

That's why I'm blogging. It's not to advance a "leftwing agenda." Unless preventing Social Security from being gutted by rightwing maniacs is considered a leftwing agenda. Unless demanding that the US president behave like the president of the United States is supposed to behave towards the victims of a devastating hurricane is a leftwing agenda. Unless insisting that the nation's schools teach science and not cynical lies is a leftwing agenda.

These are some of my issues. If I thought marching and protesting could help them today, I would march and protest. But I think there's something we can do that's more effective to counter Bush and Bushism. That is to help build a genuine second-party that will stand up against these scoundrels and provide this country the intelligent, genuinely strong leadership it deserves. And that will require a different kind of left - the left of blogs like Mahablog. (And it will require a lot more than just blogs, to say the least, but we have to start somewhere!)

I think the timeframe we have to create such a party is vanishingly small. Even the NY Times editorials are sounding like an hysterical blogger from a few years ago, hinting of the dangers to America of totalitarian rule, fascism, whatever you want to call it from Bushism. In any event, the US democracy may, just may, right itself when Bush's presidency is over. But if the next president is anything like this one... God help us.

Another president like Bush and even the most cautious amongst us will be forced to conclude that the project of American democracy - or at least the version of it I learned about and, yes, admire - is over. That would not be a Good Thing. Barbara's clear insight gives me some hope that good, substantive ideas about what to do - and good people to do them - are percolating up to a place where they can have some genuine impact.

[Update: This post has elicited some angry comments. To respond briefly, I'm genuinely puzzled. I fail to see how one could understand what I wrote as casting aspersions or caricaturing folks on the left who fought the Klan, or got their heads bashed in protesting the Vietnam War. How could I? I, too, marched, but to mention that sounds ridiculously patronizing. And to say "the left did great things" is to say something so obvious, it's even more insulting. Of course, that's true. And for me to fulsomely praise those who personally confronted the Klan? Praise doesn't go far enough, certainly not my praise. In a just world, those encomiums would come from 1600 Pennsylvania.

But the problem in the US today ain't about left vs. right, at least not as I see it. It's about the extreme right versus everyone else: left, right and center.

I'm amazed that this is so difficult to express without infuriating people who are some of the very last people to whom I would address any disparaging comments. Did I really imply that the Democratic Party should move even more to the right? I don't think so, I think that's a terrible idea, in any event. How could one find that in what I wrote? I thought I implied that the politcal discourse in the US is so far right already that even moderate liberals like Krugman are considered too far left to be taken seriously.

In any event, the strong negative reaction in comments was truly unexpected and therefore fascinating. If its purpose was to spur second thoughts about what how I perceive the present mess in the US, considered me so spurred. I doubt I will change my mind much, but I'll try to understand your points a little better. That may sound like mushy liberal hogwash, but I can't see what good purpose either ignoring or disparaging what you wrote could possibly serve.]
tristero 2/01/2006 10:03:00 AM |

 
Dean's World (The Blog) Hearts Andres Serrano

Thanks to the always useful bag 'o links at the Daou Report (and his own blogging is great), I came across this most amusing post:

Remember "Piss Christ," the piece of "art" consisting of the image of a crucified Jesus Christ submerged in the author's urine (with a government grant, no less; your tax dollars hard at work!), and how upset Christians got about that?

Well, compare and contrast.

[Link to the recent uproar over the caricatures of Muhammad on display in Denmark.]

You know, the art community is always congratulating itself for being "daring" by mocking Christ, but this is territory that's apparently a bit too scary for them, as art mocking Muslims is exceedingly rare.

First of all, as a card-carrying (well, we don't have cards, but you know what I mean) member of the downtown New York avant-garde scene, I do indeed remember Serrano's Piss Christ with a tremendous amount of affection - that's right, affection. Who wouldn't look back fondly to an issue and a time when one of the Great Questions Of Our Age was whether it was right for the NEA to fund an artist who peed on a crucifix and took a picture of it? (Not that the NEA actually funded Piss Christ, they didn't. See below.) Can you believe that once - before Monica, before impeachment, before Bush and the attendant horrors - anyone had the mental space to give a damn? Those were the days...

Back then, Serrano was one of those mediocre artists who was more tolerated than respected. He was an indifferent craftsman, as someone once noted in print, that is, his photographic technique was pretty amateurish, given his own aspirations. And his subject matter was pretty lame - a big pic of a nude woman in bondage, wow, how original! - but which gained a certain offensive je ne se quois when a SoHo gallery chose to display it in their window and created a ruckus (Tris, you spoke French, Cara mia!).

In short, no one cared too much what he did. Until, that is, he, Karen Finley (whose career at the time was not doing terribly well), Robert Mapplethorpe (conveniently dead) and some other naughty, naughty artists were made into a cause celebre by the Jesse Helmses on the right (I still remember Helms describing a Mapplethorpe print: "A black man is making love to a white man on a green marble tabletop." Well, yes. And the problem? Would you rather the marble pink?). Prices for their work skyrocketed and the rest of us, while rallying immediately - and rightly - to their defense, couldn't suppress quite a bit of private grumbling into our beers when late at night down at Puffy's: hey, man, why does fuckin' Andres deserve all that publicity?

In other words, "Piss Christ" is a construction of the rightwing, who elevated one unimportant artist's photograph from just one more passmeby at an obscure gallery into an Important Statement. Talk about strawmen!

A couple more things. Dave Price says art mocking Muslims is exceedingly rare. Well, I immediately thought, of course, of Satanic Verses (ironically, a co-blogger with Dave, Mary Madigan, has an entire post about the book), but one can also find numerous examples throughout European art. There's Mozart/Schikaneder's Moor in the The Magic Flute, for one. In C.S. Lewis's Narnia, there are the Calormenes: "oily cartoon Muslims who wear turbans and pointy-toed slippers and talk funny." I don't have more examples, especially of modern art, simply because the subject matter - mocking Muslims - interests me even less than Piss Christ did. But trust me, Dave, you wanna find art mocking Muslims, you'll find lots of it in Western Art.

Which brings us to Dave's contention that modern artists are somehow only faux-daring because they mock Christ but ignore Muslims. I'm tempted to quip, "Not in Denmark newspapers they ain't!" but let's assume for the moment Dave is correct when it comes to modern American artists. The reason artists who wish to consider themselves "daring" may not bother too much with dissing Muslims is: the rightwing beat 'em to it! Remember the religious leader - invited to the White House, no less - who characterized Muhammed as a pedophile and Islam as a "gutter religion?" No, if you wanna be thought "daring" - always a good marketing idea in art since Beethoven - you go after (pardon the slightly homogenized metaphor) the sacred cows of your own culture, not others. And one of the biggest is Christianity and its iconography. Duh.

But in terms of art and the artworld, is an artwork like Piss Christ that daring? Not to anyone who knows the first thing about art. Bad art, yes. Poorly executed, yes. Interesting, well... maybe to some. But daring? Hardly. But I'll go even further. Like most normal people in the West who aren't trying to impress others with their self-righteousness, I"m indifferent to religious blasphemy. I'm just not gonna get, eh, pissed about it and start issuing fatwas; even if I found it patently offensive. It doesn't matter like it did to the Ayatollah and Jesse Helms (did I just equate them? Bad Tristero, bad Tristero! ). Dave may find Piss Christ ugly, offensive, even blasphemous, but so what? Get over it, dude. If anyone's religious faith is shaken by a photo of a cross floating in pee, then that faith is shaky to begin with, my friend. But if you wanna blame someone, blame Jesse Helms for rubbing your face in Piss Christ, without whose yeoman pr efforts, no one would have seen it.

Indeed, it comes down to this. The only people who consider Serrano a "daring" artist are the suckers on the right who make the mistake of taking him seriously - and the artist's buddies and gallery, natch. A few years ago, the Village Voice published some of Serrano's then latest work - nude photos of people with fairly unusual leisure time activities and concerns - and Richard Goldstein enthused about how astonishingly transgressive they were.* Oh? Apparently, Richard forgot Frank Zappa's immortal "Mud Shark" from 1971, or Berg's Lulu from the 1930's, an opera about a venereal-diseased hooker who seduces and destroys everyone she meets until she's finally murdered, to the tune of a blood-curdling scream, by Jack the Ripper and whose epilogue consists of a heart-breakingly beautiful love aria sung by Lulu's lesbian lover as dies, infected with Lulu's syphyllis. dies. It's performed every few years or so at the Met (not often enough, imo). That, dear Richard, is fucking transgressive. That, my dear Dave, is daring.

Oh, and one more thing. It looks like Dave's seeing his basic facts through a yelllowish-amber haze of stale urine. Turns out that Piss Christ was not funded with a government grant. Here's the skinny for those who care:

For many years, the Southeast Center for Contemporary Art (SECCA) in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, has hosted "Awards in the Visual Arts," a national competition for individual artists. In 1988, Andres Serrano was one of seven winners. His prize was $15,000 plus a place in the group show exhibiting the work of the winners. The fund that provided the money for the cash prizes came from the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, private donors, corporate donors and the NEA.

Serrano's submission to SECCA was a series of untitled photographs involving bodily juices, some of a crucifix submerged in various fluids, including milk and, for the controversial "Piss Christ," "Serrano's own urine. Serrano was not a NEA Fellow, nor did the NEA commission his work, including "Piss Christ," in any way. The NEA was merely one of the "Awards in the Visual Arts" sponsors. Even this loose association, though, was enough to give the theocratic right a point of vicious attack on the endowment and its granting practices.

So in conclusion, thanks Dave, for reminding me of Piss Christ, not the artwork - that still fails to do much for me one or the other - but the huge flap-de-doodle. Face it Dave, don't you, too, wish we could go back to a time when the country could afford to obsess over something so monumentally stoopid? Ah, those were the days, indeed.

*I love Richard Goldstein. What's not to love about a fellow so oblivious that he panned Sgt Pepper's in The New York Times when it first came out? The art world would be a lot more dreary without people like him.
tristero 2/01/2006 07:35:00 AM |

 
And What Do Addicts Do When They Don't Get Their Fix?

by tristero

Steal, lie, rob their grandparents (or grandchildren). They become irrationally violent. Uncontrollable.

In short, Bush just put the world on notice. For the next 20 years or so, America's official policy is "Anything for Oil."
tristero 2/01/2006 04:03:00 AM |

Tuesday, January 31, 2006

 
Doing His Part

by digby

In a system of two parties, two chambers, and two elected branches, there will always be differences and debate. But even tough debates can be conducted in a civil tone, and our differences cannot be allowed to harden into anger. To confront the great issues before us, we must act in a spirit of good will and respect for one another - and I will do my part.

Uh huh.

September 26, 2002

The [Democratic controlled] Senate is more interested in special interests in Washington and not interested in the security of the American people."

Of course, that was a long time ago. He's changed since then. He's working hard to do his part now.

Ooops.

"I ask all Americans to hold their elected leaders to account and demand a debate that brings credit to our democracy not comfort to our adversaries," Bush said.

Oh. And "second guessing" is not a strategy.


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digby 1/31/2006 06:14:00 PM |

 
What About Mars?







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digby 1/31/2006 04:30:00 PM |

 
State Of The Strawman Preview

by digby

Good news. On Fox, "Stretch" Cameron just said the president is going to reject the approach of "some" that says we should surrender to terrorism.

He's going to say:

"In a time of testing, we cannot find security by abandoning our commitments and retreating within our borders. If we were to leave these vicious attackers alone, they would not leave us alone. They would simply move the battlefield to our own shores."

Boy that's telling all those people who are anxious to "leave the vicious attackers alone." All four of them.

I also understand that he is going to announce a bold new program to allow people to pay for their own health insurance so that employers can keep more of their money. (After all, it's their profits!) I do hope that he is going to put the same people in charge of designing it that he put in charge of the prescription drug program (if there are any who aren't working for Big Pharma now.) That's worked out awfully well.

He's going to say that we are all addicted to foreign oil, which is an excellent point. We should have weaned ourselves long ago. But he may not be the best evangelist for the cause. After all, his good friends in the energy industry have just overdosed on windfall profits and are lying face down in a pool of oily tax-payer subsidies. (But hey, it's their profits!)

And then there is the expected soaring rhetoric:

"Abroad, our Nation is committed to an historic, long-term goal - we seek the end of tyranny in our world. The future security of America depends on it."

And just as soon as we end tyranny in our world we will turn our attention to restoring the Bill of Rights to the Constitution.


No word on how the manned mission to Mars or the crusade against steroids are going. And one can assume that the bold plan to privatize social security has been a rousing success too. Strangely, nobody is talking about it.



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digby 1/31/2006 03:40:00 PM |

 
Master Debaters Redux

by tristero

I was very interested to read the comments to my query: How on earth could Liberty beat Harvard in debate? Most commentators made points like no one cares about college debate, debating contests are esoteric and not real world, Liberty spends a lot of money on debate and Harvard doesn't, the rankings are misleading, and so on. All of this I have no doubt is true but it sidesteps a crucial fact that reverberates far beyond the trivialities of college debating:

There are no circumstances in which a contest between Harvard University debaters and a team from Liberty should even be close.

I'm not saying that Harvard has the smartest and most knowledgeable kids in the country, but I'll be damned if it doesn't have many of them. Conversely, I'm not saying that Liberty has the dumbest, most ignorant kids in the country, but it sure has a helluva lot more than Harvard. (For the record, I did not go to Harvard. Or Liberty.)

In short, Harvard should cream Liberty. Hell, nearly every school in the country should cream Liberty. But apparently they don't. And I'd like to know exactly how and why. We should all be interested in the answer.

Assuming it really is the case that Liberty can beat Harvard -and it seems to be* -, then it is one more example of how seriously undervalued the study of rhetoric - the art of persuasion - has become within the reality-based community. It's also illustrates how seriously important rhetoric is considered among the wingnuts. Once again, they are systematically training, with no expense spared, the next generation of rightwingers. Training them to roll America back to the halcyon years of Cotton Mather. And convince the majority of the country that that's a Good Idea.

Yes, the corruption of the media is a dreadful problem in getting out the truth about these nuts. Yes, the crazies can and do outspend us. Yes, they will lie, distort, and defraud elections, scientific data, and their opponents' positions. Yes, the Democratic infrastructure is cowardly (notable exceptions duly noted).

But from where I sit, that doesn't fully explain the serial failures by Democrats and liberals to make their case, a case which is so obviously sensible, especially when compared to the arguments of the winners on the right. What's left out of the explanation of failure can easily be symbolized - if not actually demonstrated - in this seemingly trivial, unimportant debate contest.

If we care about a world where religious lunatics aren't telling the rest of us what we can and cannot do, we damn well better figure out how to beat clowns like Liberty every time, no matter how trivial college debating might seem to some of us.


*One hightly knowledgeable commentator said the rankings were just pr and that Liberty was known as a joke among the varsity. That may have been true in 199x, but according to the article

Liberty is competitive at all three levels—varsity, JV and novice. "They're tough. [But] we're not afraid to debate Liberty," says Harvard coach Dallas Perkins Jr., whose varsity team was beaten by Falwell's last month.

[UPDATE] A very good discussion of why the ranking of Liberty as #1 is somewhat misleading. Perhaps most importantly, Liberty focuses on novice debaters and since it enters so many contests, its program, not its debaters or their teams, is ranked one. As Ed says in his reply to the fellow from Liberty, the Newsweek article reads as if the best debating teams in the country are at Liberty. Hat tip to TW in comments.

Even so, that doesn't get at the heart of the matter for me, which is why Liberty *still* does so well, apparently even beating Harvard.
tristero 1/31/2006 02:42:00 PM |

 
Tweety And Tom

by digby


Atrios wonders why Matthews is so easy on Tom DeLay, which is to say, given his normal proclivities, incredibly easy. Suspiciously easy.

Maybe it's this:

Matthews implicated in Abramoff scandal

[...]


Now there are two big issues here -- one is the fact that Matthews has cavorted with Abramoff in the past, to the point of helping out with one of his sham charities.

Then there's the ethical issues with this so-called journalist hanging out in (and helping with) such a blatantly partisan event. It's again obvious that his schmoozing with the rich and powerful have hampered his ability to commentate on those issues properly detached and rational. He's been co-opted by the DeLay/Abramoff machine.

I hate to jump to conclusions, here. Matthews loves all Republicans, especially big powerful ones who have awesome masculine nicknames like "the hammer." He gets all tingly merely being in their presence. But his "interview" with Delay last night was adoring and worshipful even for him. He looked like Nancy Reagan staring at the gipper during his inauguration speech. (He even actively coached him at times, just like Nancy in the later days.) There's more to this than your normal Tweety Codpiece envy.

GEARY

I passed out.

[He stands up and moves over the bed where we see a bloody dead girl.]

I -- I'll fix it.

[He unties the girl's hand from the bed post.]

Just a game.

[He takes a towel and begins to wipe up the blood that is all over her. He looks at the towel and wipes off his hands.]

Jesus, Jesus.

[He begins to cry. As he does, TOM looks over at NERI who is wiping his hands in the bathroom.]

Jesus, God -- Oh, God. I don't know -- and I can't understand -- why I can't remember.

TOM

You don't have to remember -- just do as I say. We're putting a call into your office -- explain that you'll be there tomorrow afternoon -- you decided to spend the night at Michael Corleone's house in Tahoe -- as his guest.

GEARY

I do remember that she was laughing...we'd done it before -- and I know that I couldn't've hurt -- that girl

TOM

This girl has no family -- nobody knows that she worked here. It'll be as if she never existed. All that's left is our friendship.

If you wonder what is going on between Tweety and Tom, you can ask him, here.


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digby 1/31/2006 11:38:00 AM |

 
Freedom Roast

by digby

All you latte-swilling, wi-fi worshipping, NY Times reading, muffin scarfing liberals should head over to Dave Johnson's new blog, "Smelling the coffee" He's talking about the iconic symbol of everything we godless Democrats hold dear.

(I'm drinking a cup of french press medium roast Kona as we speak. Mmmmmm. After I finish it I'm heading for the beach to protest the war and sing kumbaya in a drum circle.)


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digby 1/31/2006 10:25:00 AM |

Monday, January 30, 2006

 
Hey Beavis

by digby


The Editors found many good wankers this week, but this one's a keeper:

The Pillsbury Pantload sums up pretty neatly why Bushbots will never catch Osama:

OSAMA’S TRUCE [Jonah Goldberg]

What if Bush offered/accepted one and then, under the flag of truce, had Osama killed and his minions rounded up?

It’s amusing to imagine what some of Bush’s biggest critics might say.

No, “amusing” is imagining Jonah Goldberg’s first day at Marine boot camp. “Retarded” is fantasy schadenfreude about what would happen if Osama fell for some crap shananigans you saw on The A-Team. I think killing Osama is going to require a different brand of cunning than the sort required to get B.A. on an airplane. Although: you’ve given me a great idea! What if Bush and Cheney went to Osama’s hideout dressed like trouble-shooters from the power company, and told Osama that his neighbors were having some work done and then, when he let them in to check the fusebox, they killed him and all the terrorists in the world gave up? It’s a foolproof plan, and I bet that would shut Paul Krugman up but good. Or, how about this one:

What if Osama pulled off the biggest terrorist attack in human history in the United States, killing 3,000 people, and, five years later, Bush still hadn’t caught him? He lowered taxes a bunch of times, invaded a country for no outstanding reason, and proposed some nonsense about going to Mars, but, doggonit, never quite got around to getting that Osama feller. Can you imagine?

It’s amusing to imagine what some of NRO’s doughiest wankers might say.

I can only add: Jonah Goldberg has a regular op-ed column in the Los Angeles Times. That symbolizes everything that is wrong with this world.


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digby 1/30/2006 11:21:00 PM |

 
The Lighter Side of Self Loathing

by digby


Kick Me, I'm A Democrat

by Michael Kinsley.

It seems to be time once again to play Kick the Democrats. Everyone can play, including Democrats. The rules are simple. When Republicans lose elections, it is because they didn't get enough votes. When Democrats lose elections, it is because they have lost their principles and lost their way. Or they have kept their principles, which is an even worse mistake.

Democrats represent no one who is not actually waiting in line for a latte at a Starbucks within 150 yards of the east or west coastline. They are mired in trivial lifestyle issues like, oh, abortion and gay rights and Americans killing and dying in Iraq, while the Republicans serve up meat and potatoes for real Americans, like privatizing Social Security and making damned sure the government knows who is Googling whom in this great country. Just repeat these formulas until a Democrat has been sent into frenzies of self-flagellation, or reduced to tears.

There is always a pick-up game of Kick the Democrats going on somewhere. But something about the Alito confirmation—the pathetic and apparently surprising inability of 45 Democratic senators to stop 55 Republicans from approving anyone they want—seems to have made the game suddenly a lot more popular.

How dire is it for the Democrats? George Will noted on TV the other day that they have lost five of the past seven presidential elections. This baseball-like statistic—"Democrats have lost X of the past Y elections"—has been one of Will's favorite tropes over the generations. But why now five out of seven? Two out of the past four would be equally accurate, and not nearly as grim. If you take a longer view, things get grimmer again. In fact, you can measure back from the present to any of the past 20 elections (which takes you back to 1928) and only once (starting in 1932) do the Democrats come out ahead. But this hardly supports Will's contention—and everyone else's—that things went to hell in the 1960s. If this exercise has any meaning, they've been in hell continuously since 1936.

Sounds right.


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digby 1/30/2006 10:55:00 PM |

 
10 Questions

by digby


As we absorb our latest loss --- it sucks being in the minority, you hardly ever win --- we need to keep our eye on the ball and remember that we have hearings coming up on the illegal NSA wiretaps. Glenn Greenwald has been the go-to guy in this and he's compiled ten questions that he'd like the Judiciary Committee to ask Alberto Gonzales. Glenn says:

I believe the paramount objective with these hearings is to force out into the open the theories of Presidential power which the Administration has embraced in order to justify its transgressions of FISA -- not just as applied to eavesdropping but with respect to all decisions broadly relating to the question of how this country will respond to the threat of terrorism. Thus, the questions posed to Attorney General Gonzales should absolutely not be confined strictly to the question of the NSA eavesdropping program, but must explore how the Administration’s theories of its own power apply generally.

The Committee, with its questioning, must make clear to the public that this scandal is not about whether we should be eavesdropping on Al Qaeda, because everyone agrees that we should and must do that. That is why we have a law -- FISA -- which specifically authorizes eavesdropping on terrorists. Nobody opposes eavesdropping. The scandal is about -- and these hearings must therefore emphasize -- the scope of the President’s claimed powers, and specifically his claimed power to act without what the Administration calls "interference" from the Congress or the courts, even including -- literally -- engaging in actions which are expressly prohibited by the criminal law.

Read the entire post and look at the questions. Glenn is looking for feedback on this. He received some major media attention this past week from Knight Ridder, the NY Times and The Washington Post for his outstanding catch of the administration's 2002 objection to loosening the FISA laws. He is in a position now to advance this another step.


Update: TalkLeft has a post up that says Russ Feingold is openly accusing Gonzales of lying in his confirmation hearings. It sure looks like he did.

Sen. Feingold: And I also would like you to answer this: does the president, in your opinion, have the authority acting as commander in chief to authorize warrantless searches of Americans' homes and wiretaps of their conversations in violation of the criminal and foreign intelligence surveillance statutes of this country?

MR. GONZALES: Senator, the August 30th memo has been withdrawn. It has been rejected, including that section regarding the commander in chief authority to ignore the criminal statutes. So it's been rejected by the executive branch. I categorically reject it. And in addition to that, as I've said repeatedly today, this administration does not engage in torture and will not condone torture. And so, what you really are -- what we're really discussing is a hypothetical situation that --

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digby 1/30/2006 09:56:00 PM |

 
"It Is The Only Way We Can Live"

by digby


So we only got 25 Senators to vote for a filibuster of a Supreme Court nominee who, if defeated, would be replaced by someone just as bad by a president in the pocket of his radical right wing. Well.

Do you know how many votes the Republicans managed to get when uber wingnut Antonin Scalia was confirmed? 98. And Democrats had a majority. We didn't have to even think about a filibuster. We couldn't defeat Clarence Thomas and we had a majority, a huge push from women's groups and a very dramatic set of hearings that went into the wee hours of the morning. It is very, very tough to do.

Kevin Drum says:

The lefty blogosphere has spent the last week trying to fire up support for a filibuster of Samuel Alito. This campaign was never likely to succeed, and today it failed as expected. But that's not all: it failed by the embarrassingly lopsided margin of 72-25.

I'm glad the filibuster took place, because even in failure it puts a marker down for future court fights. Still, even given the amateurish way that Senate Dems handled it, I expected it to get more than 25 votes. So here's today's assignment: In 5,000 words or less, what does this say about the influence of the lefty blogosphere?

I didn't expect it to get more than 25 votes and I'm frankly stunned that we did as well as we did. Indeed, something very interesting happened that I haven't seen in more than a decade.

When it became clear that the vote was going against the filibuster, Diane Feinstein, a puddle of lukewarm water if there ever was one, decided to backtrack and play to the base instead of the right wing. That's new folks. Given an opportunity to make an easy vote, until now she and others like her (who are legion) would always default to the right to prove their "centrist" bonafides. That's the DLC model. When you have a free vote always use it to show that you aren't liberal. That's why she was against it originally --- a reflexive nod to being "reasonable."

Obama had to choke out his support for a filibuster, but he did it. A calculation was made that he needed to play to the base instead of the punditocrisy who believe that being "bold" is voting with the Republicans. Don't underestimate how much pressure there is to do that, especially for a guy like Obama who is running for King of the Purple. The whole presidential club, including Biden joined the chorus.

The last time we had a serious outpouring from the grassroots was the Iraq War resolution. My Senator DiFi commented at thetime that she had never seen anything like the depth of passion coming from her constituents. But she voted for the war anyway. So did Bayh, Biden, Clinton, Dodd, Kerry and Reid. The entire leadership of the party. Every one of them went the other way this time. I know that some of you are cynical about these people (and ,well, they are politicans, so don't get all Claud Rains about it) but that means something. Every one of those people were running in one way or another in 2002 and they went the other way. The tide is shifting. There is something to be gained by doing the right thing.

I keep hearing that it's bad that these Senators "pandered" to the blogosphere and I don't understand it. We want them to pander to the blogosphere. In their book Politicians Don't Pander; Political Manipulation and the Loss of Democratic Responsiveness Lawrence R. Jacobs and Robert Y. Shapiro argue:

Politicians respond to public opinion, then, but in two quite different ways. In one, politicians assemble information on public opinion to design government policy. This is usually equated with "pandering," and this is most evident during the relatively short period when presidential elections are imminent. The use of public opinion research here, however, raises a troubling question: why has the derogatory term "pander" been pinned on politicians who respond to public opinion? The answer is revealing: the term is deliberately deployed by politicians, pundits, and other elites to belittle government responsiveness to public opinion and reflects a long-standing fear, uneasiness, and hostility among elites toward popular consent and influence over the affairs of government

.

Bingo.

It isn't actually pandering. It's responsiveness. I believe that there is finally a recognition that the Party has hit the wall. We have moved as far to the right as we can go and we have been as accomodating as we can be without thoroughly compromising our fundamental principles. Most of us are not "far left" if that means extreme policy positions. Indeed, many of us would have been seen as middle of the road not all that long ago. We are partisans and that's a different thing all together. The leadership is recognising this.

I know it hurts to lose this one. I won't say that I'm not disappointed. But it was a very long shot from the outset and we managed to make some noise and get ourselves heard. The idea that it is somehow a sign of weakness because we only got 25 members of the Senate, including the entire leadership, to vote to filibuster a Supreme Court nominee is funny to me. Two years ago I would have thought somebody was on crack if they even suggested it was possible.


Firedoglake has a very nice post up about John Kerry and the others who voted to filibuster a Supreme Court nominee tonight and I urge you to read it. I agree with every word. This is a dramatic moment for the netroots. Get ready for marginalization, evocations of 1968 and 1972, calls for purging us from the party, the whole thing. That's what happens when the citizens rise up. Don't let it shake your will. We are the heart of the Democratic party and we can make a difference.

If you don't believe me, here's a great Democrat who might just convince you, Robert F. Kennedy:

"Some believe there is nothing one man or one woman can do against the enormous array of the world's ills. Yet many of the world's great movements, of thought and action, have flowed from the work of a single man. A young monk began the Protestant reformation, a young general extended an empire from Macedonia to the borders of the earth, and a young woman reclaimed the territory of France. It was a young Italian explorer who discovered the New World, and the thirty-two-year-old Thomas Jefferson who proclaimed that all men are created equal.

"These men moved the world, and so can we all. Few will have the greatness to bend history itself, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all those acts will be written the history of this generation. It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.

"Few are willing to brave the disapproval of their fellows, the censure of their colleagues, the wrath of their society. Moral courage is a rarer commodity than bravery in battle or great intelligence. Yet it is the one essential, vital quality for those who seek to change a world that yields most painfully to change. And I believe that in this generation those with the courage to enter the moral conflict will find themselves with companions in every corner of the globe.

"For the fortunate among us, there is the temptation to follow the easy and familiar paths of personal ambition and financial success so grandly spread before those who enjoy the privilege of education. But that is not the road history has marked out for us. Like it or not, we live in times of danger and uncertainty. But they are also more open to the creative energy of men than any other time in history. All of us will ultimately be judged and as the years pass we will surely judge ourselves, on the effort we have contributed to building a new world society and the extent to which our ideals and goals have shaped that effort.

"The future does not belong to those who are content with today, apathetic toward common problems and their fellow man alike, timid and fearful in the face of new ideas and bold projects. Rather it will belong to those who can blend vision, reason and courage in a personal commitment to the ideals and great enterprises of American Society.

"Our future may lie beyond our vision, but it is not completely beyond our control. It is the shaping impulse of America that neither fate nor nature nor the irresistible tides of history, but the work of our own hands, matched to reason and principle, that will determine our destiny. There is pride in that, even arrogance, but there is also experience and truth. In any event, it is the only way we can live."

You rise to the occasion every time it's necessary. It is the only way we can live.




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digby 1/30/2006 05:40:00 PM |

 
Master Debaters

by tristero

Falwell's college has the best college debating team in the country. Harvard's is 14th.

Questions, anyone? I have one: How on earth is that possible? (And no, the ranking doesn't seem to be entirely explained by the amount of debating tournaments they enter.)
tristero 1/30/2006 03:31:00 PM |

 
When Thrill Rides Turn Deadly

by tristero

I'd like to riff a moment on Digby's post, that radical Islamism does not pose an existential threat to the US.

Digby is absolutely right that radical Islamism has been so overly hyped and pornographied, and the "war on terror" so fictionalized, that we are more like a country watching a horror film than a country at war. It is absolutely the case that bin Laden's gang can't possibly bring down the US government.* And while it is distressingly easier than it ought to be for bin Ladenists to acquire nuclear technology, it is highly unlikely in the next few years that a nuclear attack - or even a biochem attack - will succeed. When you think about how hard it is to acquire, store, weaponize, manufacture, ship, deploy, and initiate an attack, it becomes very clear that this is beyond the technological capabilities, as we know them, of al Qaeda, even assuming that some members hold degrees in engineering. It is no accident that al Qaeda's spectacular attacks involved box cutters and simple bombs.

But there's an important caveat which I'm sure both Digby, Glenn Greenwald, and others are aware of, even if they disagree with my argumentation here. Radical Islamism is not an existential threat today. But given that the Bush administration has turned Iraq into a terrorist petri dish and that Afghanistan is little better - and that's just for starters - it is very likely that the growing isolation and consequent increasingly virulent opposition to the US will create a self-fulfilling prophecy. More secularized opponents of the US will have more and more reasons - the death of their children, for example, by US bombs - to become radicalized. And if the US traumatizes enough people, and makes it clear, as Bush stupidly does, that it is the US who is doing the traumatizing, you will eventually have a population of very angy young people which includes the technologically sophisticated, people who hate our guts and also have the wherewithal to inflict considerable damage to US populations through guerilla operations of many different sorts.

A cynic, or a paranoid, might think that a terrorist breeding ground was the goal all along for Bush/ Iraq - to create a genuine existential threat for the US to fight - which would maximize profits, destroy liberalism, etc. I don't think that's so. It's too simplistic a formulation to satisfy me; the world is more complicated than that. But in a certain sense it doesn't really matter. Deliberate psychopathy or blithering stupidity or both: The reality is that Bush has opened the gates of Hell.

There is still some time, I think to close the gates and contain the horror, but what, exactly, should the US do? The first thing is to get Bush and Bushism out of power. That is a necessary precondition to avert disaster. Since Bush will not be impeached, rational observers must operate under the assumption that the world situation by 2009 will almost certainly be very dire. Let's set aside all that can still go wrong and which Bush will certainly do wrong in the next few years. The fact remains that many of the children of Bush's victims - and let's not forget, Iraq has a very young population - will be in their late teens. Many will be growing up fully committed to radical anti-US movements. And some of them will be very, very smart. And there will be no way to kill 'em all, even if there were hundreds of Fallujahs, even if it were just.

So what should the US do in 2009? I don't have a clue. But I do know what not to do: continue the suicidal policies of the Bush administration. I'm talking not only about respecting fundamental human rights. A full repudiation of Bushism - from its economic terrorism to its lust for military "solutions" - would be a minimum first step. What to do after that is anyone's guess.

If the US wishes to avoid serious danger, it will simply have to stop aspiring to rule the world in a militarily and economically enforced Pax Americana. It will need brilliant leadership to negotiate the Post-Bush world, a world this total moron of a president made immeasurably more dangerous than the one he presumed to rule in January 2001.

I don't fear the present - in spite of my dread. I don't even fear al Qaeda, but I admit they worry me a great, great deal. I don't even fear al Qaeda's sons and daughters. What I fear more than anything is that the US will continue to place in power catastrophically awful leaders who will fulfill their own prophecies of Armageddon by acting to cause it.


*Unless, of course, the US government is even more negligent than they were prior to September 11, and that seems pretty unlikely, imo.
tristero 1/30/2006 07:17:00 AM |

 
Molly Ivins, Bless Her, Doesn't Understand How Republicans Think.

by tristero

Oh, I love Molly, don't get me wrong. But this seriously misunderestimates the Republican mindset:

I am confounded by the authoritarian streak in the Republican Party backing Bush on this [extensive, illegal spying on Americans]. To me it seems so simple: Would you think this was a good idea if Hillary Clinton were president? Would you be defending the clear and unnecessary violation of the law? Do you have complete confidence that she would never misuse this 'inherent power' for any partisan reason?

Molly, you're assuming that sooner or later there actually will be a Democratic president. Republicans assume that will never, ever happen again. And they're doing everything possible - controlling voting machines, gerrymandering, fraud, blackmail, buying the media - to make sure it doesn't.

So why bother worrying the "other party" will abuse the power Bush now has? It's like worrying about a large asteroid colliding with Earth. Sure, it's theoretically possible, but...

Wouldn't it be nice if they were wrong? And Republicans no longer were in a position to wreak the havoc they've inflicted on our country over the past 5 plus years? And the laws were again obeyed?

Me, I'd be perfectly happy if none of the scoundrels currently destroying our country's way of life and government were never prosecuted if we could just keep them out of power. Well, not happy exactly, but I'd settle for it.
tristero 1/30/2006 06:15:00 AM |

 
Micro-Propaganda

by tristero

Dontcha just love this stuff?

The tiresome pas de deux between rigid civil libertarians in denial of reality and an overaggressive executive branch seemingly heedless of the law...

Get it? You think it's a parallel construction, both sides are wrong. But look closer. Rigid civil libertarians deny reality - there's no question about it. The Bush administration seemingly ignores the law in its "overaggressiveness."

Cute.

At the end Bobbitt has two sentences more about "the executive branch's repeated appearance of an indifference to law" before finishing up with another swipe at reality-denying wimpiness. Oh, and didja notice? Somehow, the executive branch that possibly, maybe be giving the appearance of breaking the law remains nameless. Who could they be, I wonder.

But let's not be naive, folks. We're living in an America in which you cannot criticize Bush if you want to have any influence. Once we understand that, it's obvious that this little essay (and I haven't begun to discuss its substantial problems of logic and fact) wasn't meant to be read by John and Jane Q. Public but by King George and/or his codpiece full of courtiers. Given this is his target audience, what Bobbitt's saying becomes equally obvious:

He wants the Bush administration to do better at denying the reality that it is breaking the law. That way, Bush can better accuse civil libertarians and other liberal commie radical Muslims of denying reality in a post-9/11 world.

Cute.
tristero 1/30/2006 03:51:00 AM |

Sunday, January 29, 2006

 
Snark Boomerang

by digby

From the interesting tid-bit files, from Robert Parry:

Nevertheless, the Republicans may have added a complication to their expected Alito victory parade by ridiculing Kerry for making his filibuster announcement while at an economic summit in Davos, Switzerland.

As Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s right-wing Washington Times gleefully reported, Republicans quickly dubbed Kerry the “Swiss Miss.” [Washington Times, Jan. 28, 2006]

Presidential spokesman Scott McClellan joined in mocking the Massachusetts Democrat by joking at the daily White House press briefing that it was a “pretty historic” day.

“This was the first time ever that a senator has called for a filibuster from the slopes of Davos, Switzerland,” McClellan said. “I think even for a senator, it takes some pretty serious yodeling to call for a filibuster from a five-star ski resort in the Swiss Alps.”

These insults added a personal element to the decision facing Democratic senators. With Republicans hooting down the Democrats’ last presidential nominee, as well as a longtime Senate colleague, crossing the aisle to support Bush’s Supreme Court nominee suddenly had the bitter taste of an act of political treason.

They have been strutting like high stepping chorus boys all week-end, shrieking with hysterical laughter and high-fiving like mad. If I could do nothing else, I'd force these bastards to wait until Wednesday for a vote, regardless of the outcome. Deny the arrogant fucks a quorum and watch them have a full-on hissy fit on the day of the speech. Maybe they can even get Mrs Alito to pump out another fake tear or two.




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digby 1/29/2006 07:13:00 PM |

 
Katrina Needs Glasses

by digby

Katrina Vanden Heuvel, who I love, is taking the liberal blogosphere to task for its outraged fury over picking Tim Kaine for the Democratic rebuttal at the SOTU. (Was there a fury and nobody invited me? I'm hurt.) I know I said "feel the magic" when it was announced, but I wouldn't call that a fury. A little snarky, maybe. But you know, I can only get really furious 27.3 times a week or I get low blood sugar and Kaine just didn't make the cut for me.

Apparently Ezra was a little bit more than snarky and Katrina got snarky right back:

Liberal writer Ezra Klein (no Brad Pitt, last time I checked him out) vented that Kaine is "a squat, squinty, pug-nosed fellow."

Now I told you that I love Katrina and I do. But she has gone too far here. I know Ezra Klein and you can say what you will about his writing, his politics or even his little American Prospect friends --- but don't say he is no Brad Pitt. This is crazy talk. He's almost as pretty as Katrina herself.


Ezra:


Katrina:


Tim Kaine:



Update: I see that Jane, Mrs TBOGG and David E have weighed in on this important matter as well, thank heavens. Case closed.



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digby 1/29/2006 05:28:00 PM |

 
Thrill Ride

by digby

Glenn Greenwald points to this op-ed in today's NY Times which points out something that many of us have been hammering for years, namely that Islamic fundamentatlist terrorism is not an existential threat. (That's not to say that violent fundamentalism isn't threatening, but the problem cannot be solved with warfare --- sadly, it's much more complicated than that.)

The oceans never protected us. I guess our president with his degree in history from Yale, doesn't know that the British live across the oceans and sailed over to burn down the White House in 1812. Or that we have lived under the nuclear unbrella for more than 50 years. All those drills when I was a kid were for the exercise.

And this is not a "different kinda war" or "World War IV" or any other type of war. And allowing it to be called a "war" is a grave mistake that we probably can't go back and undo. And unfortunately, we now know that mere unleashing of the word "war" can kick in a whole bunch of executive powers that nobody ever knew existed.

I have thought about what it is that 9/11 really evokes in people. It is assumed that it is fear, and I think that most people probably interpret it that way. Glenn attributes it, in part, to the success of bin Laden's terrorist tactics:

The cause of this irrationality, this inability to view the terrorism threat with any perspective, is not a mystery. Terrorists like Al Qaeda deliberately stage attacks which are designed to instill fear in the population far beyond what is warranted by the actual threat-level posed by the terrorists. That's the defining tactic and objective of terrorists. Fortunately for the terrorists, in the United States, Al Qaeda has a powerful ally in this goal: the Bush Administration, which for four years has, along with Al Qeada, worked ceaselessly to instill in Americans an overarching and excessive fear of terrorism.

That may be true, but I don't see a society that is truly fearful. I've been to countries that were at war. And life always goes on to some extent. But this country does not feature the psychological traits of a country that is really at war or one that really fears terrorism in any palpable way. It features the psychological traits of a country watching a horror movie, which is not the same thing at all. You certainly see this in the fevered one-handed war blogging and the endless evocations of pre-9/11 and post 9/11 thinking reminds me of nothing so much as people who are hooked on a stimulating drug.

Of course we all felt real fear in the early days, none so much as those who lived in New York and DC. It was almost unbelievable to see those scenes. But there was a sense of spectacle and drama about it that was literally unreal to those of us who watched it on television. This was fear put to music, with dramatic title treatments and a soaring voice-over. Because of that, on some level, 9/11 was a thrill for many people, even some Democrats. It was sad and horrifying, of course, but it was also stimulating, exciting and memorable because of the way it was presented on television. (When we were talking about this, Jane described it as if "the whole country was watching porn together every time the rerun of the towers falling was broadcast.") And we subsequently fetishized the "war on terrorism" to the point where some people become inexplicably excited whenever it is mentioned. They want that big group grope again, that sense of shared sensation. That is the "fear" that people say they have. And it's why they want to vote for the guy who keeps pumping it into the body politic.

It's why the "war on terrorism" still has some potency for the Republicans that the very ugly, very real war in Iraq does not. We can't lose the "war on terrorism" because it isn't a real war. Unfortunately, because we have allowed those words to be used, we have opened the door for authoritarian Republicans to assume the powers of a dictator under its auspices.

Greenwald and Ellis both argue very persuasively that islamic fundamentalist terrorism does not present an existential threat to our country. I think that idea is beginning to get some traction in the national security debates. I don't know how long it might take to break this country out of its shared fetish for the "war on terrorism" but perhaps it's time to start addressing that as well. Until we finally admit that we aren't "at war" by any real definition of that term, we are going to be hamstrung in addressing the very real national security challenges we do face.

I haven't the vaguest idea how to do it, though. This nation is on the "war on terrorism" thrill ride and is enjoying it so much they've bought a season pass. And like most thrill rides these days, after the first little while I start to feel nauseated.



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digby 1/29/2006 11:16:00 AM |

 
Gnocchi

by digby

What I learned on Press the Meat this morning:

The Republicans' numbers are in the dirt but they are going to win decisively on the optimistic issues of endless war and endless debt. The Democrats' numbers are substantially better but they will never win anything because they are icky.

The NSA illegal spying scandal is good for Republicans because there is no evidence that the president has ever used it for political purposes.

No word on the federal case against two close presidential advisors who are accused of exposing a clandestine CIA agent for political purposes.

Bill Frist has the charisma of day old gnocchi.



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digby 1/29/2006 08:21:00 AM |

Saturday, January 28, 2006

 
Unconcerned About Bin laden

by digby

MYDD has part two of their poll up and it's quite interesting. It seems that Republicans aren't very worried about Osama bin laden. But then, neither does their president:

"I don't know where he is. You know, I just don't spend that much time on him. ... I truly am not that concerned about him."

Just what are they so bedwetting afraid of then?





Update: Also check out this boffo MYDD post by Matt Stoller.



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digby 1/28/2006 12:55:00 PM |

 
Republican Moolah

by digby

If you read nothing else this week-end, check out this report from the American Prospect that demolishes the theory that the Abramoff scandal is bi-partisan.

The analysis, which was commissioned by The American Prospect and completed on Jan. 25, was done by Dwight L. Morris and Associates, a for-profit firm specializing in campaign finance that has done research for many media outlets.

In the weeks since Abramoff confessed to defrauding tribes and enticing public officials with bribes, the question of whether Abramoff directed donations just to Republicans, or to the GOP and Democrats, has been central to efforts by both parties to distance themselves from the unfolding scandal. President Bush recently addressed the question on Fox News, saying: “It seems to me that he [Abramoff] was an equal money dispenser, that he was giving money to people in both political parties.”

Although Abramoff hasn’t personally given to any Democrats, Republicans, including officials with the GOP campaign to hold on to the Senate, have seized on the donations of his tribal clients as proof that the saga is a bipartisan scandal. And the controversy recently spread to the media when the ombudsman for The Washington Post, Deborah Howell, ignited a firestorm by wrongly asserting that Abramoff had given to both. She eventually amended her assessment, writing that Abramoff “directed his client Indian tribes to make campaign contributions to members of Congress from both parties.”

But the Morris and Associates analysis, which was done exclusively for The Prospect, clearly shows that it’s highly misleading to suggest that the tribes's giving to Dems was in any way comparable to their giving to the GOP. The analysis shows that when Abramoff took on his tribal clients, the majority of them dramatically ratcheted up donations to Republicans. Meanwhile, donations to Democrats from the same clients either dropped, remained largely static or, in two cases, rose by a far smaller percentage than the ones to Republicans did. This pattern suggests that whatever money went to Democrats, rather than having been steered by Abramoff, may have largely been money the tribes would have given anyway.

Gosh, that must be why he said this:

‘I wish those moronic Tiguas were smarter in their political contributions. I'd love us to get our mitts on that moolah!! Oh well, stupid folks get wiped out.’

Doh.

Can somebody get this to Tim Russert because he's under the impression that this is a bi-partisan scandal.



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digby 1/28/2006 12:45:00 PM |

 
Conviction Politics

by digby

I just saw a very interesting exchange on FOX News. The designated Democrat was Bob Beckel, the other two were typical faceless wingnut gasbags and I can't remember their names.

When asked how the Democrats could make such a stupid mistake by allowing Kerry to call for a filibuster (the two wingnuts giggling like schoolgirls at the question) Beckel replied something like this (I'm paraphrasing)

"Now you know that in this enviroment if a Democratic president nominated a pro-choice, pro-affirmative action, pro-government secrecy judge to the high court that many Republicans would want to filibuster. Sometimes politicans do things out of conviction and many Democrats are supporting a filibuster because they really believe that he should not be on the Supreme Court."

The wingnuts were very taken aback by that statement, one of them replying: "Well, that's putting the best possible face on it."

Indeed it is. It's one of the big issues lurking beneath this Alito fight. The Republicans know very well that their future depends upon Americans continuing to see Democrats as weak and lacking in conviction. That's all they've got.

The chattering classes are all very sure that the Democrats have made a grave mistake on Alito. According to reports in the press, many insider Democrats believe this too. I believe they are wrong. This may look like a ragged strategy in some respects, but it is good for us to be seen doing things that have no obvious political advantage and for which we can legitimately claim to have taken the moral high ground. Yes, the tittering congnoscenti will flutter their fans and whisper that Democrats are witless and dull, but in this case we are talking directly to the people not to them. They have no idea anymore that a world exists out here where poltical calculation is beside the point.

Regardless of how this comes out in the end, and we don't know until the votes are cast, this may be seen as a defining moment for the Democratic Party. When a calculating political creature like Dianne Feinstein rushes to support a filibuster rather than reaffirm her opposition once conventional wisdom says a filibuster will fail, is meaningful. Democratic politicians (if not their moribund strategists) are feeling the pressure from the people to do the right thing.

Voters are still working hard this week-end to convince Democrats to support the filibuster. You can get action items and information at Kos, The Agonist and Democrats.com .

And ... I know that it is somewhat unpopular to say this, and I will get a ration of angry comments for suggesting it, but I'm doing it anyway. If any of the following are your Senators, think about taking a minute to thank them for announcing they will support the filibuster. They are being ridiculed and scorned by everybody in the beltway for being dimwitted tools of the angry left or craven political opportunists. It seems to me that if we tell them we like it when they act out of conviction, they'll do it more often. I still think we should get their back on this:

1. Barbara Boxer (D- CA)
2. Dianne Feinstein (D- CA)
3. Christopher J. Dodd (D- CT)
4. Richard J. Durbin (D- IL)
5. John F. Kerry (D- MA)
6. Edward M. Kennedy (D- MA)
7. Paul S. Sarbanes (D- MD)
8. Debbie A. Stabenow (D- MI)
9. Harry Reid (D- NV)
10. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D- NY)
11. Charles Schumer (D- NY)
12. Ron Wyden (D- OR)
13. Russell D. Feingold (D- WI)
14. Barack Obama (D-IL)
15. Robert Menendez (D-NJ)




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digby 1/28/2006 10:51:00 AM |

 
Harper's In February

by tristero

You really should grab the February issue of Harper's. They don't post much online so they kinda get short shrift in Blogworld, but in this issue there is an hilarious, brilliant first person account of the Dover "intelligent design" creationism trial by none other than Darwin's very own great-great grandson.

And there's also a superbly written, heartbreaking, infuriating account of the trials of Lynddie England and the other "bad apples" at Abu Ghraib, trials that took place in a legal atmosphere so deliberately disconnected from the reality of the tortures that, as the article points out in a heart-stopping passage, someone got away with murder at Abu Ghraib.

Must reads, both of them.
tristero 1/28/2006 02:51:00 AM |

 
Posted Without Comment

by tristero

New York Times:

Human rights organizations and the co-chairman of the Congressional Human Rights Caucus protested on Thursday a decision by the Bush administration to back a measure introduced by Iran denying two gay rights groups a voice at the United Nations.

In a vote Monday, the United States supported Iran's recommendation to deny consultative status at the United Nations' Economic and Social Council to the Danish National Association for Gays and Lesbians and the International Lesbian and Gay Association, based in Belgium.

Nearly 3,000 nongovernmental organizations have such status, which enables them to distribute documents to meetings of the council.

Among countries with which the United States sided were Cuba, Sudan and Zimbabwe, nations the State Department has cited in annual reports for their harsh treatment of homosexuals.

[snip]

Mark P. Lagon, a deputy assistant secretary of state, said in an interview that the vote did not stem from "being against gay rights groups" but was based on "the controversial history of the International Lesbian and Gay Association — an affiliate of the North American Man/Boy Love Association, was associated with it in the past and openly condoned pedophilia."

Scott Long, a Human Rights Watch director, said that the association had publicly expelled the man/boy group in 1994.

tristero 1/28/2006 02:26:00 AM |

Friday, January 27, 2006

 
Mau-mauing the Media

by digby

Jane points me to this wildly enjoyable recounting of a close encounter between the barbarian bloggers and the Beltway Quilting Bee and Ladies Circle Jerk Society, also known as the DC press corps. My goodness, it sounds as if somebody got up on the wrong side of the fainting couch that morning.

I've been writing a lot lately about how the mainstream media internalize the criticisms of their right wing critics. I suspect they are always subconsciously seeking ways to prove that they aren't actually liberal --- and the more liberals in general are demonized, the more they want to distance themselves from us.

I've also been trying to show how it looks from our side: years of relentless violent eliminationist right wing rhetoric toward liberals goes unnoticed or unremarked upon and yet a few hundred hostile e-mails to the Washington Post ombudsman turns the whole town into a tizzy. The liberal blogosphere is thus turned into a rampaging vulgarian force while the relentless cacophany of wealthy right wing gasbags continues to go out to tens of millions of people unabated, undisturbed and unnoticed by the media cognoscenti.

How can that be, we wonder? Why, after all these years of being called every name in the book by the conservatives, can the "so-called liberal media" be upset when the liberals use very mild tactics in comparison to what has been happening on the right?

Perhaps this is why:








It is another right wing meme that has been absorbed by the mainstream media.

Here's Michelle:

From the Inside Flap
Un·hinged

adj : affected with madness or insanity; [syn: brainsick, crazy, demented, distracted, disturbed, mad, sick, unbalanced]

- The American Heritage Dictionary

*** Warning: Unhinged liberals are hazardous to the nation’s health.

They’re slashing your tires. Burning your lawns. Heaving pies at Republican pundits. Hurling racist epithets at minority conservatives. Nursing nutty conspiracy theories. And pining publicly for the murder of President Bush.

And they call us crazy?

In Unhinged: Liberals Gone Wild, Michelle Malkin plays conservative Margaret Mead to the alien political creatures of the American Left. With uproarious detail and rollicking reportage, Malkin chronicles the bizarre world of leftists gone mad in their natural habitats: the mainstream media, academia, Hollywood, and Washington.

Unhinged unmasks liberals who’ve completely abandoned rationality and reality. They’re taking chainsaws and bayonets to campaign signs. Running down political opponents with their cars. Setting fire to political opponents in effigy. Defacing war memorials. Swiping yellow ribbons off cars. And supporting the fragging of American troops.

Michele didn't come up with this on her own. It's a consciously applied meme for specific purposes. All these books allegedly about liberals called "Slander" "Treason" and "Unhinged" would have been written no matter what we did. It's how they control the mainstream media. After all, they've been calling the media liberal for more than a quarter century. They're talking about them as much as they are talking about us. And reporters don't like that. They have to live in that town.

Now we can deal with this two ways. We can be quiet and respectful and try to prove to the mainstream media that we aren't the crazed, violent freaks that Michelle says we are.

Dear Ms. Howell,

Would you be so kind as to check your facts regarding the Abramoff scandal.I think you are mistaken. I do not believe that Mr Abramoff personally gave any contributions to Democrats. Indeed, the evidence suggests that he was part of a long running Republican plan to create a political machine that exclusively funneled money from business to elected Republicans and back again.


I would very much appreciate anything you can do to clear this up. Thanks ever so much for all your hard work.

sincerely,

a nice liberal

meanwhile:

Deb,

I received a call today from Karl Rove on double secret-super-duper-deep backround. He was hopping mad. He says this Abramoff thing is a bi-partisan scandal and we're going to be embarrassed when it comes out that certain Democrats are the dirtiest Abramoff guys in town. I told him I'd look into it and get back to him.

I'm not suggesting you change your reporting. You are the ombudsman, after all. Just make extra sure you have all the facts and tell both sides of the story. The White House is riding my ass big time.


Len Downie

See you later at Sally and Ben's picnic. I hear Lynn Cheney's bringing her famous chili and Russert's going to sing.

And then there's this:

"Liberals can't just come out and say they want to take our money, kill babies and discriminate on the basis of race."

That's how it becomes "he said/she said" and "stay tuned" and why the words "crazy liberal" just rolls off their lips. The right has mau-maued the press by going aggressively in their face with everything they've got every time they write a word that can cause them trouble. And back in the day, they carefully fed the press the kind of tabloid scandal stories that made good copy and caused ratings to rise. They work this stuff from all angles.

We can be nice liberals and continue that highly successful strategy (for them) or we, the great unwashed blogosphere, can mau-mau the media into being accountable for what they write. It isn't pretty --- they are calling us nasty names and everything. But for the first time in memory we actually have a vehicle for pushing back from the other side and we literally represent millions of people who are willing to take the time to join the fight. That's powerful juju.

Over time, they will see that we are actually giving them an excuse to lean the other way. When Karl calls up Len, he can say that liberals are on the rampage --- what does he want him to do, ignore his own readers? We liberal bloggers and readers can produce some ballast on the other side so that the press has a way to resist the wingnuts.

This is a huge change and everyone involved is going to resist. Tonight they were talking about the "angry left on both coasts" on Lehrer, as if we aren't real Americans again. That's nonsense, as we know. My traffic comes from all over the country, much of it deep in the heart of Red America. They don't know what they are dealing with.



Update: Jim VandeHei has written an interesting piece in the Post today about how we barbarians fit into the Democratic infrastructure. (Short answer: they don't know what to think about us. They love our money and they need our energy. They just don't like it that we have dug in our heels and refuse to move any further to the right. It means they have to rethink their whole strategy.)

And I think this is largely correct:

The closest historic parallel would be the talk-radio phenomenon of the early 1980s, when conservatives -- like liberals now -- felt powerless and certain they did not have a way to voice their views because the mainstream media and many of their own leaders considered them out of touch. Through talk radio, often aired in rural parts of the country on the AM dial, conservatives pushed the party to the right on social issues and tax cuts.

The question Democrats will debate over the next few years is whether the prevailing views of liberal activists on the war, the role of religion in politics and budget policies will help or hinder efforts to recapture the presidency and Congress.

We can't do any worse, now can we?


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digby 1/27/2006 04:40:00 PM |

 
Flip-Flopping Fredo

by digby

The Carpetbagger reports that preznit Bush has adopted candidate John Kerry's "ignorant" and "dangerously wrong" proposed policy toward Iran.

And some of the preznit's supporters are all confused:. Apparently they were under the misapprehension that Junior Codpiece had some sort of coherent philosophy.

President Bush's endorsement of a plan to end the nuclear standoff with Iran by giving the Islamic republic nuclear fuel for civilian use under close monitoring has left some of his supporters baffled.

One cause for the chagrin is that the proposal, which is backed by Russia, essentially adopts a strategy advocated by Mr. Bush's Democratic opponent in the 2004 election, Senator Kerry of Massachusetts.

"I have made it clear that I believe that the Iranians should have a civilian nuclear power program under these conditions: that the material used to power the plant would be manufactured in Russia, delivered under IAEA inspectors to Iran to be used in that plant, the waste of which will be picked up by the Russians and returned to Russia," Mr. Bush said at a news conference yesterday. "I think that is a good plan. The Russians came up with the idea and I support it," he added.

I'll let you click over to the Carpetbagger for the punchline.

Sigh.




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digby 1/27/2006 01:01:00 PM |

 
Straight Answers

by digby


A few weeks ago MYDD put out a call for contributions to finance a poll. There was tremendous frustration at the time, if you'll recall, at the reticence of the major pollsters to ask questions that were deemed politically incorrect or beyond conventional wisdom. And considering that the major media's long standing habit of assuming the GOP dominant narrative, they wanted to verify their numbers.

That's why Chris Bowers and Matt Stoller over at MYDD went out of their way to engage a credible pollster with impeccable credentials and pledged to let the chips fall where they may. We want real information guiding strategy, not push polls or partisan slant. This is for real. Today, the first results are in.

These first numbers are not surprising. They track with what we've seen in all the other major polls. But over the next few days, the rest of the poll will be rolled out and we will probably see some questions asked and answered that we haven't seen before. And perhaps we will gain some understanding of where the electorate stands on so many of the issues we discuss here in the blogosphere every day.

As Lil' Debbie Howell would say: Stay Tuned.



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digby 1/27/2006 11:39:00 AM |

 
Flower Shops and Bodegas

by digby


Via Crooks and Liars

What planet does this man live on?

MATTHEWS: Welcome back. Antonio—Antonio Villaraigosa?

MAYOR ANTONIO VILLARAIGOSA (D), LOS ANGELES: Villaraigosa.

MATTHEWS: Villaraigosa. Is the first Latino mayor of Los Angeles since, catch this, 1872. He's also been picked, more importantly, to deliver the Spanish-speaking response to the president's State of the Union address next week. Well, the big question is, will it sound different in a different language, your response, from the Democrats' response of the Governor Tim Kaine of Virginia?

VILLARAIGOSA: Well, the answer is I made it absolutely clear that I had to have control of the editorial content of this response, since it's mine. And I thought it's important—I think any message should be a hopeful message, a positive message, one that speaks to the American dream for more people.

MATTHEWS: What's the difference in tenor when you speak in English and Spanish? Is there more of a—a more of a—I don't want to be derogatory, but I know it sounds better. It's more upbeat? It's more positive? What would be—call it—more romantic?

VILLARAIGOSA: No, I try to—well, first of all, I was born in the U.S., so my English is a lot stronger than my Spanish, but I say that the message is the same

Is he drunk? The State of the Union response will sound more romantic in spanish? Jesus H.Christ. Maybe we can get Marc Antony and J-Lo to sing the motherfucker, Chris. With a taco in one hand and a pinata in the other.

This is why we cannot have people ever thinking this man is a Democrat. It's rich, pampered beltway bubble boys like him who are killing us.

But that wasn't all. Tweety, the voice of the manly working man, had this to say about immigrants:

MATTHEWS: When I think of people who have come to this country from other countries where they speak Spanish—Puerto Rico is not another country, but it's the commonwealth—hardest working people, they are extremely entrepreneurial. If it's just owning a flower ship, it's owning a small business, a bodega, right? Puerto Ricans come to this country to start business. Cubans certainly come here to start businesses. The hardest working people in the United States are people who just got here from Mexico, the first day they get here. Everybody knows—they don't want a big social democracy. They want free enterprise and entrepreneurialism, don't they?

VILLARAIGOSA: I think what they want...

MATTHEWS: They sound like they're natural Republicans to me.

That's certainly the first time I've heard "needing to earn a dollar so I can eat today" described as being "entrepreneurial." Or Republican.

Poor people are natural Republicans because they work hard to survive. I assume the opposite is true as well. Rich people are natural Democrats because they sit on their asses all day like parasites living off of other people's hard work. No? Oh that's right. Rich people are the most productive people in the economy so they shouldn't be asked to pay a fair share of their income --- because they'd lose their motivation to work so hard. See how this works? Everybody who works or hires people who work is a natural Republican in Tweety's world. Fifty percent of the nation just doesn't know it. Except for the fags, of course. And the bitches. And the blacks.

Tweety likes to see himself as a man of the people and he is. He's a man of the rich celebrity people. But even in his little beltway bubble he still has his finger on the pulse of one fine group of regular Americans: the bigots:

The mayor got a firsthand look at the different values held by some Americans as he was peppered with questions about immigration from callers on C-SPAN's "Washington Journal."

After saying that Los Angeles is not going to follow the lead of Costa Mesa and involve police officers more in identifying illegal immigrants, a caller from Arkansas said not enough was being done to counter illegal immigration.

The woman declared: "It's only after the influx of illegals that you were elected, sir. How is this possible?"

Clearly stunned, Villaraigosa responded, "Are you kidding?" After a long silence, he added, "I was born in the United States."

The mayor of the second biggest city in the nation has to inform bigoted assholes from Arkansas and big money celebrities on MSNBC alike that he was born in America and English is his first language. Unbelievable.


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digby 1/27/2006 10:07:00 AM |

 
Thin Skin Tim

by digby


I hear the High Priest of Kewl Kid High is all upset that Arianna is reporting that the Carville radio talk show The Monsignor promoted on his show this past week-end is being produced by his own son --- a fact which he omitted. But then he has a habit of omitting information --- like the dozens of discussions on his show about the Plame leak without telling his viewers that he was a primary witness, for instance. (He's since revealed that a reporter has no ethical obligation to tell the public what he knows if doing so might harm his relationships with his social class.)

But this thing with his son really is beyond the pale. How could Arianna delve into his private life like this ... into his family for crying out loud? This is his son who has been outed as a radio producer on the pages of the mighty Huffington Post. For shame.

Of course there are times when it's absolutely necessary to drag the family into it, as in this case: Russert's first exchange with presidential candidate Howard Dean in his first appearance on Meet The Press in 2003 (via the Daily Howler)

RUSSERT: You said that your son got in a scrap. He was arrested for driving a car in which some of his friends broke into a beer cooler and stole some beer—

DEAN: Right.

RUSSERT: —and was indicted. How are you—

DEAN: He hasn’t been indicted, but he—

RUSSERT: Cited.

DEAN: He’s been cited, right.

Howard Dean had no expectation that his teenage son's mortifying lapse in judgment would not be talked about on Press The Meat. I'm sure he was prepared for it, although he might have thought that something more important would open the discussion (or at least that Russert wouldn't claim his high school aged kid was indicted.) Still, it's part of the game, and public families know what they are getting into. Everybody is just doing their jobs, no matter how sleazy.

But apparently, if someone points out that Father Tim is shilling for his kid's show on Press The Meat without revealing his son's involvement, it's out of bounds, deserving of a full PR push back from NBC News replete with sour grapes from none other than professional Republican sleazebag, Ed Rollins.

Interesting ethics you've got there, padre. I must have missed that day in Aquinas class.


Check out the Tim Russert Blog. Leave a comment and help push it to the top of Google search. His Holiness is a busy man and his assistants don't have time to search for all the things people say about him. Let's make it easy for him.



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digby 1/27/2006 08:34:00 AM |

Thursday, January 26, 2006

 
What A Coincidence

by digby

So, Via Talk Left, I see that the lead prosecutor in the Abramoff case is leaving because Bush has appointed him to a federal judgeship:

The prosecutor, Noel L. Hillman, is chief of the department's public integrity division, and the move ends his involvement in an inquiry that has reached into the administration as well as the top ranks of the Republican leadership on Capitol Hill.

....Colleagues at the Justice Department say Mr. Hillman has been involved in day-to-day management of the Abramoff investigation since it began almost two year ago. The inquiry, which initially focused on accusations that Mr. Abramoff defrauded Indian tribes out of tens of millions of dollars in lobbying fees, is being described within the department as the most important federal corruption investigation in a generation.

Shumer and Salazar are calling for a special prosecutor.

When I read this a minute ago, I was reminded of a similar story from a month ago:

The Florida prosecutor investigating radio talk-show host Rush Limbaugh will soon be weighing cases rather than prosecuting them.

Gov. Jeb Bush has announced Assistant State Attorney James Martz has been appointed a Palm Beach County judge, filling a vacancy left after this year's legislative session.

TOM

Senator Cauly apologized for not coming personally -- he said you'd understand. Also, some of the judges. They've all sent gifts.

(then, toasting to the Don)

Salute!




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digby 1/26/2006 11:33:00 PM |

 
Whirlwind

by digby


With all of my politicking today I failed to note this unbelievable development in the mid-east: the terrists won an election in Palestine. And they won big time.

What does this mean for the preznits cartoon foreign policy? Here I thought that democracy was all like magic 'n shit and we were spreadin' freedom to everybody so they'd love us.

Here's Juan Cole:

How do you like your democracy now, Mr. Bush?


Jan. 27, 2006 | The stunning victory of the militant Muslim fundamentalist Hamas Party in the Palestinian elections underlines the central contradictions in the Bush administration's policies toward the Middle East. Bush pushes for elections, confusing them with democracy, but seems blind to the dangers of right-wing populism. At the same time, he continually undermines the moderate and secular forces in the region by acting high-handedly or allowing his clients to do so. As a result, Sunni fundamentalist parties, some with ties to violent cells, have emerged as key players in Iraq, Egypt and Palestine.

Democracy depends not just on elections but on a rule of law, on stable institutions, on basic economic security for the population, and on checks and balances that forestall a tyranny of the majority. Elections in the absence of this key societal context can produce authoritarian regimes and abuses as easily as they can produce genuine people power. Bush is on the whole unwilling to invest sufficiently in these key institutions and practices abroad. And by either creating or failing to deal with hated foreign occupations, he has sown the seeds for militant Islamist movements that gain popularity because of their nationalist credentials.


[...]

Bush has boxed himself into an impossible situation. He promoted elections that have produced results opposite of the ones he wanted. For all his constant rhetoric about his determination to hunt down and kill terrorists, in Palestine he has in effect helped install into power a group he calls "terrorists." His confusion over whether this is democracy, which should be legitimate, or is an unacceptable outcome -- and his unwillingness to address the underlying issues behind the Israeli-Palestinian conflict -- suggest that a fatal paralysis will continue to afflict the region.

The man who is planning to run the mid-terms on his great success as a wartime president just facilitated the first elected Islamic terrorist government and delegitimized moderates throughout the region. That's quite an achievement.

Here's what the commentators were saying tonight on Lehrer. (Both of them looked like they were giong to shoot themselves right after the show was over.)

KHALIL JAHSHAN: I think the program that the president has been advocating has definitely suffered as a consequence of these elections. There is a big question mark right now on a program that was hastily put together post 9/11 without thinking of the consequences of this type of advocacy of democracy without tilling the ground, if you will, or tilling the soil to allow that type of democracy to grow and to be able to nurture it from a distance. These results, I think, made that criticism a lot more credible and more forceful today than yesterday.

[...]

MARTIN INDYK: Basically, look, I agree that recently we've heard the last few days some interesting statements from Olmert at the Herzliya Conference, some of the Hamas leaders during the election showing some hope that one could build on. But frankly this is deja vu in the sense that these results I think have set us back probably 20 if not 30 years.

We're going to go back to again negotiating over charters and negotiating over removing the destruction of this party by the other party. And so there is -- the chances of two parties who have conducted ten years of negotiations coming back to the table and restarting their negotiations from where things stopped right now are much dimmer. These chances are much dimmer and much slimmer than anticipated.

I'm sure all the warbloggers have been feverishly typing "bring it on!" all day. But this is actually very serious stuff and it is a direct result of a simpleminded American policy. It isn't the first failure and it is going to be far from the last. You cannot successfully run the world on comic book slogans and third rate biblical homilies. When the Supreme Court installed a halfwit in the oval office we reaped the whirlwind.

Oh, and in case anyone's thinking that this really wasn't in the hands of Americans:

MARTIN INDYK: ... And, by the way, one should say in this regard, that there was an opportunity to postpone the election. Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the PA wanted to do so. But this administration insisted that it go ahead.

When it comes to elections, there is nothing more sacred to a Republican than an arbitrary, meaningless deadline.



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digby 1/26/2006 10:46:00 PM |

 
Learning To Lose Well

by digby


I hope some of the comments I'm reading around the blogosphere aren't reflections of of a knee jerk cynicism on the part of Democrats who have fallen in love with their assessment that they are superior to their elected leaders. This is a very dangerous state of mind.

John Kerry stepped up today. Apparently, that isn't enough for some. He is still a "loser" in their eyes and is to be shunned. He didn't do it soon enough. Or he didn't do it right. Or he is nothing but a political opportunist. I'm beginning to think that some Democrats have gotten attached to their vision of Democrats as losers so they won't be emotionally shattered anymore. That's understandable. It's painful to get beaten. But, the rank and file need to step up too and be willing to lose and not hate ourselves or our leaders for it. How we lose on issues like this makes the difference for the future.

Sustaining a filibuster of a Supreme Court nominee is a huge undertaking with the numbers we have. (Read Kos' Reality Check on this.) It's worth doing anyway because it's important to stand up for principles. We can "lose well" by beginning to make a case to the American people that we believe in something other than splitting the difference. And we might just pull it off. Either way, we make the country (and the media) see that there are lines that we won't cross.

But the way some people are acting, if we now lose this one it will be seen by the grassroots as just another example of Democratic fecklessness, even Kerry's fecklessness, which is self-defeating and unfair. If we carp when our elected politicans take risks just as we carp when they don't take risks, they have no motivation to listen to us at all.

Kerry and Kennedy stepped up today. They aren't going down without a fight. This is worth doing and if we lose it, we should reward them and those who stood with them with our gratitude and support not another round of complaints about how they are a bunch of losers.

Go vote in this stupid CNN poll and give Kerry some props for doing something out of conviction. This isn't a big winner for him and he didn't have to do it. We need to let our politicans know we have their back when they take a stand.



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digby 1/26/2006 06:26:00 PM |

 
Heterosexually Yours

by digby

The General is passing the collection plate. He sits on the right hand of Republican Jesus, so helping him is the same as helping the Lord.


A General's Prayer:

Lord, please bless the State Security Apparatus, that it might conduct it's wiretaps to the best of its abilities. Provide Our Leader with the ability to look into our bedrooms, so that He might catch French politicians putting their little soldiers in ladies' mouths and watch celebrities doing it. And Lord, let him share those videos with godly men like myself, who may then rail against these evils from our pulpits.

And bless our interrogators and their glowsticks and electrified nipple clamps of freedom. Provide them with the ability to induce pain as close as possible to that experienced during organ failure without quite equaling it.

And give us the ability to kill brown people more efficiently, so that our contractors may garner more fruit from their labor.

Praise Be.



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digby 1/26/2006 02:02:00 PM |

 
Filibuster!

by digby


John Kerry is calling for a filibuster of Alito. Flood your Senators' offices with phone calls now.

Here are the phone numbers.

Might I make a special appeal for Califronia voters to make a forceful appeal to our Senator Dianne Feinstein. She is supposed to be a voice for women in the Senate and right now she is a voice for lukewarm water. Let her know that her constituents demand that she represent the people of California's support for a women's right to choose and a judiciary of fairminded jurists, not Federalist Society fascists.

(202) 224-3841---Washington
(415) 393-0707---San Francisco
(310) 914-7300---L.A.
(619) 231-9712---San Diego
(559) 485-7430---Fresno



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digby 1/26/2006 01:45:00 PM |

 
Men Of Principle

by digby


The Editors deconstruct the Deborah Howell story as only they can. An excerpt, regarding those who bemoan the new leftist barbarity:

When one is an Elder Statesman of the American media, and when one can’t be bothered to look into the particular details of some issue, it is never a bad idea to fall back on Ecclesiastes, and remind the readers - in a tone as wise and weary as you can muster - that the seasons change and the winds blow now this way, now that, turn turn turn, but there is nothing new under the Sun. As there was a time of saying Clinton was a coke-dealing Commie and a serial rapist, now comes the time of saying that George W. Bush shouldn’t run secret torture prisons. Men of Principle lament both of these equally, for they are just two sides of the same lamentable coin. Vanity of vanity, all of it. Can’t we just play nice?

Amen.
digby 1/26/2006 01:33:00 PM |

 
Political Fandango

by digby


I know that Atrios and others have already discussed this, but it's such an obvious example of Tweety bullshit that I have to pile on.

Matthews yesterday claimed that an ad about GOP corruption implied incorrectly that DeLay was charged with bribery:

MATTHEWS: Dana, you've got to love it. This is America in action. Have you noticed in the Democrat ad, though, they do a close-up on Tom DeLay and they said "bribery"? Well, that's not a charge against Tom DeLay. His charge is this thing about hard money, soft money. It's a political little bit of a fandango. But nobody's accused him yet of bribery. But that ad sure does.

The problem is that it clearly doesn't. The ad shows a picture of DeLay when they say "money laundering" and a picture of Abramoff when they say "bribery."

This is the kind of stuff Matthews does all the time. Just recently he had really bizarre hissy fit about Alito:

MATTHEWS: Well, I don't know, I mean the Democrats, I've got a, I'm sitting here holding in my hands a pretty disgusting document. This is a, uh, put out for not for attribution, but it comes from the Democrats. They're circulating it, I can say that. And in their complaint sheet against Judge Alito's nomination, the first thing they nail about this Italian-American is he failed to win a mob conviction in a trial 20 years ago or -- way back in '88. In other words, they nail him on not putting, putting some mobst -- Italian mobsters in jail, the Lucchese family. Why would they bring up this ethnically charged issue as the first item they raise against Judge Alito? This is either a bad, a very bad coincidence, or very bad politics. And either way, it's going to hurt them. This document -- not abortion rights, not civil rights, the fact he failed to nail some mobsters back in 1988. And this is at the top of their list of what they got against this guy. Amazingly bad politics.

He was so way out there on that one, that it didn't even get traction among the Republicans. The document was about Alito being a lousy lawyer, which was clear when you read it ---- unless you are Chris Matthews, of course, whose world is filled with people who love Bush for his sunny nobility and lying Democrats who slime fine public servants like the "moderate living" Tom Delay for crimes they didn't commit. He is living in Bush's bubble.



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digby 1/26/2006 12:58:00 PM |

 
Gentleman's Agreement

by digby

Maureen Dowd is the Queen Bee of the Kewl Kidz. And she is one of those most responsible for the media's current narrative of American Politics: Republicans are jocks, Democrats are nerds.

Here's Dowd's nasty and dangerous little sideswipe today:

"As the White House drives its truckload of lies around the country, it becomes ever clearer that Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Hillary Clinton, John Kerry and Al Gore are just not the right people to respond to the administration's national security scare-a-thon."

And whoever does end up speaking for the Democrats will also fall short. In Maureen's world, a Democrat is an object of derision, always. She may put down the Republicans, but she always reinforces the accepted narrative: Republican strong/Democrat weak. She has reduced the whole world into her stifled little junior high dating drama, and her influence is immense. She represents one of the most serious problems Democrats have.

Reed Hundt takes Maureen on today in a scathing post over at TPM. But here's the nut:

In its way, this sorry tale resembles that of many other erstwhile liberals in the mainstream media who, when invited to the never-ending Washington cocktail party, have chosen to smile obligingly at the contemptible remarks made about progressives rather than to express repugnance for the viciousness. Ms Dowd is famously shy in person, they say, but in writing she's laughing it up at the bar with the rest of the crowd. The original movie version was Gentlemen's Agreement, starring Gregory Peck.

For those of you who aren't familiar with that movie, here's the pertinent passage from the NY Times review:

This film stars Gregory Peck as recently widowed journalist Phil Green. With a growing son (Dean Stockwell) to support, Green is receptive to the invitation of magazine publisher John Minify (Albert Dekker) to write a series of hard-hitting articles on the scourge of anti-Semitism. In order to glean his information first hand, Green decides to pose as a Jew. As the weeks go by, Green experiences all manner of prejudice, the most insidious being the subtle, "gentleman's agreement" form of bigotry wherein anti-Jewish sentiments are merely taken for granted. Green's pose takes a toll on his budding romance with Minify's niece Kathy (Dorothy McGuire), who comes to realize by her own example that even those who insist that they harbor no anti-Semitic feelings are also capable of prejudic

This is why we out in the hinterland are alarmed by people like Deborah Howell and Chris Matthews. These are people who are not open partisans. Yet by "gentlemean's agreement" they take for granted certain negative assumptions about Democrats and pump them out into the body politic. It has been so internalized that they seem to not even know they are doing it. In a world where toxic liberal-eliminationist rhetoric is openly celebrated as "mainstream" and where liberals are commonly derided as cowardly and denounced as treasonous, this is very disturbing indeed.

I'm sure that most of Washington laughed uproariously when Grover Norquist made this crude characterization of Democrats as animals last January:

Once the minority of House and Senate are comfortable in their minority status, they will have no problem socializing with the Republicans. Any farmer will tell you that certain animals run around and are unpleasant, but when they've been fixed, then they are happy and sedate. They are contented and cheerful. They don't go around peeing on the furniture and such.

And I'm sure that the same people whose sides were splitting over that hilarious bon mot were nodding their heads in agreement when Lindsay Graham admonished the Democrats to behave with decorum toward Samuel Alito and then fell over with the vapors when readers of the Washington Post rebelled against an ombudsman who refused to acknowledge a biased assumption. Not only are we democrats cowardly and tresonaous, we have no sense of humor, either. That's the curency of the nation's capital.

Many of us out here in the country are seeing a capital that operates in dozens of ways on a Gentleman's Agreement that Democrats are bad. Our values are wrong, our leaders are dishonest, our philosophy is weak, our policies are ridiculous and our beliefs are immoral. The conventional wisdom is crystalizing into prejudice.

Here's Howard Kurtz talking about Rush Limbaugh (via the Daily Howler):

KURTZ: Has Tom Daschle lost a couple of screws?

Did the normally mild-mannered senator accuse Rush Limbaugh of inciting violence?

He came pretty darn close. There were cameras there. You can watch the replay.

We can understand that Daschle is down, just having lost his majority leader’s job and absorbed plenty of blame for this month’s Democratic debacle.

What we can’t understand is how the South Dakotan can suggest that a mainstream conservative with a huge radio following is somehow whipping up wackos to threaten Daschle and his family.

Has the senator listened to Rush lately? Sure, he aggressively pokes fun at Democrats and lionizes Republicans, but mainly about policy. He’s so mainstream that those right-wingers Tom Brokaw and Tim Russert had him on their Election Night coverage.

Here is the commentary Daschle was referring to:

Limbaugh: You seek political advantage with the nation at war. There is no greater testament to the depths to which the Democratic Party and liberalism have fallen. You now position yourself, Senator Daschle, to exploit future terrorist attacks for political gain. You are worse, sir, than the ambulance-chasing tort lawyers that make up your chief contributors. You, sir, are a disgrace. You are a disgrace to patriotism, you are a disgrace to this country, you are a disgrace to the Senate, and you ought to be a disgrace to the Democratic Party but sadly you’re probably a hero among some of them today...

Way to demoralize the troops, Senator! What more do you want to do to destroy this country than what you’ve already tried? [pounding table] It is unconscionable what this man has done! This stuff gets broadcast around the world, Senator. What do you want your nickname to be? Hanoi Tom? Tokyo Tom? You name it, you can have it apparently. You sit there and pontificate on the fact that we’re not winning the war on terrorism when you and your party have done nothing but try to sabotage it, which you are continuing to do. This little speech of yours yesterday, and this appearance of yours on television last night, let’s call it what it is. It’s nothing more than an attempt to sabotage the war on terrorism for your own personal and your party’s political gain. This is cheap. And it’s beneath even you. And that’s pretty low.

In case anyone failed to notice, Daschle lost his next election. And nobody connected the dots, least of all Howard Kurtz or Maureen Dowd, who bask in the glow of establishment approbation for mainstreaming the idea that Democrats are crazy, ineffectual and treasonous.



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digby 1/26/2006 12:39:00 PM |

 
The Humor Of The Humorless

by tristero

Recently, comedian Joel Stein in the LA Times called anti-Bush/Iraq war troop-supporters wusses and openly admitted,"I don't support the troops." The right has pilloried the schnook. And they are trying to turn Stein into the latest deadly serious cause celebre now that Belafonte's had his Two Minute Hate. But I think the right's gonna have problems with Stein.

Y'see, when you boil it down, Stein's saying that if you support the troops, then you're not supporting the troops; however, if you don't support the troops then you are, in fact supporting the troops. So Stein does, in fact, support the troops. Except he doesn't. I'se like, Wha?

So...if you make the rightwing's mistake of taking Stein's writing as worthy of serious notice, then you are compelled to conclude he's even dumber than John Ashcroft. And that immediately creates a serious existential problem, because no one can be dumber than Ashcroft and breathe without medical assistance. And that, Stein is doing, or so I'm led to believe. Therefore, anyone who knows how to read English should find it patently obvious that to argue with Stein's "ideas" is to tilt at a very stoned windmill. They're a joke.* And jokes are what comedians do, duh. And jokes are often offensive, duh.

Now, I don't happen to think his column was very funny. But I DO find it gut-busting hilarious that the right would be so STOOPID as to interpret his remarks as a serious starting point for an earnest discussion. What next, are they gonna seriously complain that SpongeBob's gay?

Ooops...


*That Joel Stein the citizen might actually believe what Joel Stein the comedian says is not relevant. It was Stein the comedian who was clearly the "I" in the op-ed.
tristero 1/26/2006 10:01:00 AM |

 
Google v. Bush: Not After Personal Records?

by tristero

In comments to an earlier post, Seth wrote that he's read the documents in the Google versus Bush dispute and that they are not after personal records in this case. As it happens the Times makes the same point today. The article, states, "The government apparently wants to show that real-world searches will pull up offensive materials that filters will not catch" and goes on to say that "Google's main argument was that its 'highly proprietary' trade secrets could be jeopardized."

I'd like to make the point that I respect this conclusion. I haven't read the subpoena but I trust their reporting. Both Seth and the Times (I know the reporter) have examined the documents, reported what they found, and stated their conclusion without spin or hyperbole (the Times article has several qualifications but clearly the impression left is that there are no serious privacy issues at stake).

Where we disagree is not on the legal issues in play, but on the potential for abuse of the data by an administration which has demonstrated time and again its obsession with character assasination as well as its desire to amass huge amounts of information while insisting that it operate at an unprecedented level of unaccountable secrecy. Despite assurances that searches cannot ever be linked to individuals, some of us who remember John Poindexter's Total Information Awareness program, which advocated mining of vast amounts of seemingly random information, can't help but worry that a week's worth of Google searches in the hands of the Bush administration is an invitation for heretofore unknown forms of blackmail and abuse of anti-Bush critics.

That kind of worry, of course, is a matter of opinion, it's an assertion of intent which depends upon the weighing of relevant facts, not upon reporting a set of facts and performing a more straightforward analysis. And honest people can disagree about how much weight should be applied where, and even whether certain facts, such as prior performance, are relevant.

In this case, I'll gladly, and carefully, read the subpoena if someone will link to it, but I don't think my concerns about it will abate. Technical details might help convince me that there could never be a problem here - I do know a smattering of statistics and I'm pretty stubborn when it comes to understanding technical issues - but I also know that even an expert's knowledge might not encompass all scenarios, including very simple ones that are inadvertently overlooked. A few years ago, a record company went to a lot of trouble and expense to copy protect their cd's against copying them in a computer. I'm sure the documentation that the copy protection was robust was quite convincing. And no one imagined that, soon after the system's debut in the real world, someone would be able to subvert it using nothing more than a black magic marker. So I'll keep an open mind about this, which means in this case a highly skeptical one, but not entirely dismissive.

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and sometimes a subpoena for searches will not have anything to do with trolling for dirt on individuals. But sometimes a cigar is more than a cigar. Given Bush's history, I think that clearly this is one of those cases. I hope Seth is right, however, and I hope I"m overreaching. I'm pretty sure I'm not and only time will tell.

[Update: Seth has kindly provided some links. Some court documents and an analysis can be found here. More analysis here. Seth discusses the subpoenas. While he criticizes what the government is up to, he strongly believes that the blogosphere has entirely mischaracterized these searches as privacy issues when they are not. He speculates that Google may be angling to improve its image and be perceived as a Defender of Freedom.

I've read his criticisms and skimmed the court documents, reading carefully the parts having to do with the requests made and their purpose. Nothing causes me to change my opinion that this is unnecessary and potentially ominous. Yes, even to individuals. That other engines may have complied doesn't mean they were right to, or that Google should. I see no reason why the US government, and especially the Bush administration, should have this information. At the very least, it would set dangerous precedents which all of us know all too well the Bush administration will perceive as a boot in the door to ask for much more. At worst, Google's trade secrets will be compromised, the Bush administration will have URLs and search queries which could, in some ways, come in handy down the road for nefarious purposes, and personal information will be included as it was when the Bush government requested passenger lists.

Finally, apparently it won't it serve much of a useful purpose in addressing the stated objectives of the government to defend the COPA law as constitutional.]

{Update: Another interesting link about the legal precedents courtesy Seth.}
tristero 1/26/2006 01:53:00 AM |

Wednesday, January 25, 2006

 
Smoke Signals

by digby


I missed this yesterday and it's fascinating. Via Think Progress, here's Michael Isikoff yesterday:

ISIKOFF: As a general rule, if you’re the president … you don’t like pictures out there of you with convicted felons. It sounds like … there’s at least one picture of him with at least one convicted felon and another indicted, so it’s probably not a picture the White House is eager to have out there. The other interesting aspect of this is, while the White House hasn’t put these out, Jack Abramoff has clearly shown them to people. I don’t know anything about Time sources, but I do know that he showed them to Washingtonian magazine, which suggests he may be playing a little bit of a game here. He has, of course, pled guilty already to the Justice Department. But it does raise a question in my mind at least as to whether Abramoff is maybe sort of sending some sort of signal out here: “Hey, I’ve got this stuff.” Maybe he wants something from somebody at the White House, or he wants someone at the White House not to do something, and just sort of subtly playing with people here.

It seems to me that might qualify as obstruction of justice. But what do I know? My recent exposure to that crime was when Clinton allegedly betrayed the republic by wearing a certain tie to signal Monica Lewinsky to ... well, we were never sure just what he was signalling her, now that I think about it.

Felon Jack Abramoff sending signals to the White House that he has embarrassing photos certainly doesn't rise to that level. That must be why this time we aren't seeing the heads of every graduate of the Barbizon School of Blond Former Prosecutors spin around on their shoulders while they spew green bile and speak in Aramaic on all the cable news shows. It just isn't as important, I understand that.



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digby 1/25/2006 07:11:00 PM |

 
Unitary Criminal

by digby


For those of a certain age, Bush's contention that he has the constitutional right to ignore the law sounds strangely familiar. That's because you have heard it somewhere before --- and when you heard it you were appalled but not surprised, considering the source.

Take a trip down Memory lane over at Crooks and Liars:

When The President Does It Means It's Not Illegal



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digby 1/25/2006 06:56:00 PM |

 
Resurrection

by digby


Responding to all the Claud Rainsing on the right yesterday about manipulation of Amazon reviews I wrote a post about their own long standing manipulation of Amazon reviews.

How serendipitous, then, that one of the most notorious of Amazon manipulators in history should show up on the pages of the NY Times today. John Lott was long ago discredited as a social scientist. Indeed, economists at the University of Chicago use his work to illustrate shoddy scholorship. But naturally, even though he is held in almost universal opprobrium by every expert in his field, because he is a right wing academic he was granted a cushy sinecure at AEI and a lucrative speaking schedule. That he has now landed on the most valuable journalistic real estate on the planet, however, is nothing short of shocking.

But as I mentioned, Lott is even more interesting than just being a lousy (dishonest) scientist. In one of the blogosphere's earliest triumphs, Lott was exposed as being slightly nuts:

Mary Rosh thinks the world of John R. Lott Jr., the controversial American Enterprise Institute scholar whose book "More Guns, Less Crime" caused such a stir a few years ago.

In postings on Web sites in this country and abroad, Rosh has tirelessly defended Lott against his harshest critics. He is a meticulous researcher, she's repeatedly told those who say otherwise. He's not driven by the ideology of the left or the right. Rosh has even summoned memories of the classes she took from Lott a decade ago to illustrate Lott's probity and academic gifts.

"I have to say that he was the best professor I ever had," Rosh gushed in one Internet posting.

Indeed, Mary Rosh and John Lott agree about nearly everything.

Well they should, because Mary Rosh is John Lott -- or at least that's the pseudonym he's used for three years to defend himself against his critics in online debates, Lott acknowledged this week.

"I probably shouldn't have done it -- I know I shouldn't have done it -- but it's hard to think of any big advantage I got except to be able to comment fictitiously," said Lott, an economist who has held senior research positions at the University of Chicago and Yale.


[...]

Julian Sanchez, a Cato Institute staffer, is the cybersleuth who tracked Mary Rosh back to John Lott.

Sanchez is a blogger -- someone who maintains a Web site where they report and comment on the news -- who had been tracking the debate between Lott and critics of his gun research. He became suspicious about Rosh after he noticed that several of Rosh's online defenses of Lott seemed to track closely with arguments the scholar himself had made in private e-mails to Sanchez and other bloggers. He tracked Mary Rosh's IP address (the computer code translation of the standard e-mail address) to Pennsylvania.

"I compared that IP with the header of an email Dr. Lott had sent me from his home address. And by yet another astonishing coincidence, it had originated at the very same IP address. Now, what are the odds of that?" he wrote in a posting on his Web site. "Sarcasm aside, we're a little old to be playing dress up, aren't we Dr. Lott?"

I hear that South Korean stem cell researcher is out of work. Maybe The Times can get him to come on board as their science editor. Credibility is certainly not a requirement.



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digby 1/25/2006 04:34:00 PM |

 
Uh Oh

by digby

Tweety's got a problem. A big problem.

Those of us on the left of center aren't going to sit back and take it anymore. I'm sorry if that's hurt people's feelings but they've left us no choice. We are half of this country and yet our views are consistently marginalized, often by fake Democrats like Chris Matthews. Samela, a regular reader of mine heard Matthews speak sometime back and he was quite upfront about his agenda. He said "they like it when I beat up on the liberals." He is the definition of a media whore. He whores for ratings and he whores for access.

Update: I always find it interesting when Chris Matthews and Rush Limbaugh use the same talking points, don't you? How do you suppose that happens?



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digby 1/25/2006 01:06:00 PM |

 
Incivility

by digby

Boy that Washington Post chat with bloggers sure was fun, huh kids? It's really cool when guys like Glenn Reynolds cojmpletely misrepresent themselves in a national forum. It shows once again how out of control the left is.

Here's Glenn:

My own sense is that it's very hard to preserve civility -- or even a good ratio of interestingness to flaming -- on sites that have high traffic without a fair degree moderation. There's some sort of a threshold after which things tend to break down into USENET-style flamewars, which some people like, but which I'm tired of. I find the comments on Atrios, Kos, or for that matter Little Green Footballs, to be tiresome.

[...]


I love open comments, just as I love free beer, free pizza, and other giveaway goods. But I'm not entitled to them. And those who partake, I think, owe a certain degree of civility to their hosts.

Yes, and one certainly shouldn't celebrate such incivility and encourage your readers to participate, right?

December 20, 2005

THE NYC TRANSIT WORKERS' UNION has an unofficial blog, and it's getting an earful in the comments. Here are some excerpts:

[S]econdly, if i could meet the masterminds behind this strike, i'd personally spit in each of their faces. I know fifty people at my campus who now cannot return to their families for the holiday season, and are being forced to spend their break in a hotel off campus until the transit system is running again. You ought to be ashamed of yourselves doing something this stupid this time of the year. Every single worker participating in the strike is extremely selfish and short sighted.

-----

You guys really have a lot of balls. All you do is drive around in circles. Your job isn't hard at all. You get paid as much as cops and firemen, while much more as teachers. Something is wrong. You're asking for way too much here.

-----

I am thoroughly disgusted with the TWU. Who are you to think you're above the law? Who are you to take well-paying jobs (for your education levels) serving millions of people and then hold us hostage by striking?

I have a 16 month old son who will be taken to day care today in his STROLLER. In 20 degree weather. I am paid hourly and will lose today's salary.

But they're standing up for working people!

Meanwhile, Bloomberg has to be asking himself, "What would Rudy do?"

(More here).

UPDATE: Apparently someone woke up long enough to remove the comments. [LATER: CraigsList removed the link, which was to an item featuring pictures of transit workers asleep at their posts.]

Glenn Reynolds knew exactly what he was doing when he linked to that blog and sent his massive readership over there to flame them. That's within the rules of engagement. But it's chickenshit when you don't have comments yourself. And it's dishonest in the extreme to pretend that you don't engage that way when you do.

Jeff Jarvis: Glenn: I agree with your assessment of those particular sites. I wonder whether that is a function of size or topic or host's tone.

I hate it when the host's tone creates a tiresome atmosphere that promotes flaming ,don't you? For instance, how about this for tone?

Instapundit:
There was a time when the Left opposed fascism and supported democracy, when it wasn't a seething-yet-shrinking mass of self-hatred and idiocy. That day is long past, and the moral and intellectual decay of the Left is far gone.

Reynolds doesn't have comments. Fair enough. He prefers to play hit and run. Which is also fair enough. But he is in no position to be lecturing about civility. He's a rabid partisan who knows exactly how the game is played.

It appears to me that this chat today was structured as a combat between Jane Hamsher and Jim Brady, with Jarvis and Rosen there as filler --- and Reynolds there to promote hte idea that lefty blogs are uncivilized in contrast to the upslifting atmostphere of the right wing (oddly similar to Brady's interview with Hugh Hewitt.)

But let's review the history of civility in our recent public discourse, shall we? Let's take a look at some of the words of people who are brought on the highest rated television shows to give political commentary, who are paid hundreds of millions of dollars to pontificate freely on radio day after day, who are welcomed into the homes of major establishment players in Washington:

I mean, if there is a party that's soulless, it's the Democratic Party. If there are people by definition who are soulless, it is liberals -- by definition. You know, souls come from God. You know?

I said at the conclusion of previous hours -- part of me that likes this. And some of you might say, "Rush, that's horrible. Peace activists taken hostage." Well, here's why I like it. I like any time a bunch of leftist feel-good hand-wringers are shown reality.


Liberals have a preternatural gift for striking a position on the side of treason. You could be talking about Scrabble and they would instantly leap to the anti-American position. Everyone says liberals love American, too. No they don't. Whenever the nation is under attack, from within or without, liberals side with the enemy. This is their essence.

O'REILLY: It's a good question, Juan. And I don't see it as a threat. I mean, I think you have to say to people, as we do with all our guests here, this is what's likely to happen. And if they continue, those people continue to attack people personally, as Frank Rich does almost every week, and Keller allows it, then we'll just have to get into their lives.


O'REILLY: All right, and that brings us to the other group. And you know, certainly ABC News is a responsible organization. They made a decision. And the folks can decide for themselves whether -- who they agree with. The ACLU, I think, is a grossly irresponsible, irresponsible organization that is going out of its way to help Al Qaeda, that I don't think ABC News is in that category at all. I mean, I think they're doing what they think is best for the country. The ACLU is doing what they think is best for the country they envision, not the country we have now, but certainly is aiding and abetting the enemy.

The radical Democratic left is an army of soulless ghouls. Being of the living dead, they live in a world of death and try to impose it on we the living. Witness who led the charge: a radical homosexual, Barney Frank. A radical abortion Mafiosa, Barbara Boxer. What is difficult for we the living to comprehend is the reason they can engage in such anti-life abominations is because they have no souls.

That's the tip of the ice berg. These are people who are feted by the president of the United States, who appear on the cover of TIME magazine and are profiled as merry jokesters, people who mainstream journalists refer to as "wonderful." The Washington Post and NBC news referred to at least one of these people as "mainstream."

Please, please spare me the crocodile tears about leftist incivility. We are living in a political world formed by rightwing commentators who have made a fetish of harsh eliminationist rhetoric hammered over and over again into the ether until it sounds like normal discourse. And we've been waiting for more than a decade for the mainstream media to notice that rightwing celebrity pundits, who reach millions upon millions of listeners and viewers a day, routinely accuse liberals of treason and celebrate our deaths. It's made us a little bit testy. When important news outlets like the Washington Post see "leftist incivility" as a topic worthy of the rending of garments and gnashing of teeth it makes us wonder if they are even living in the same universe we do.

Famous and wealthy toxic political commentators like Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly are routinely lauded as normal mainstream partisans while ordinary readers of the Washington Post are excoriated for incivility when they complain about inaccurate coverage that benefits Republicans. This is bizarro world. It is insane. It is a sign of a very sick political culture.





Update: Jane's not done with Brady yet.

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digby 1/25/2006 11:24:00 AM |

 
Ubiquitous Anonymity

by tristero

This New York Times article on Internet privacy inspired the thought that one good way to protest at least some of the behavior of an American government acting like a third rate Stalinist satellite is to make anonymous websurfing the standard.

As you probably know, Google is locked in a fight to turn over their users' identification data to George W. Bush, ostensibly so Bush can stamp out illegal forms of pornography"establish a profile of Internet use that will help it defend the Child Online Protection Act, a 1998 law that would impose tough criminal penalties on individuals whose Web sites carried material deemed harmful to minors" . If you believe that they're not seeking individual records of searches, there's a Playboy centerfold of Phyllis Schafly I'd like to sell you (and I'll throw in a free rubber ducky). Those who object to this blatant Big Brotherism are met with the fallacious accusation that they are in favor of young kids being exposed to pornography and with the equally fallacious fascist threat that if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear.

You don't like George Bush having the opportunity to spy on you? Make yourself invisible, even when you surf for groceries. That way, simply using anonymity software will not be considered suspicious in itself - hey, I forgot to turn it off! And obviously, the more people who use anonymity software, the less suspicious its use by any one person.

So, here are a few Mac OSX programs to get started (the Times article has links to some PC programs). It's probably a good idea even if you don't want to use them now to download them anyway. Given this administration's proclivities, there's no telling how long anonymity software will be available.

You might ask: How good is this stuff? Does George Bush have a backdoor into these programs or their techniques, rendering them useless against a malicious US administration? Are they difficult to set up and use? Do they slow down web surfing and emailing?I don't know. I've been told that PGP is exactly what it says it is: pretty good privacy, meaning it takes a very sophisticated computer program a considerable amount of time to decrpyt. The others are new to me so if anyone has any info please drop a note in the comments.

ANONYMITY SOFTWARE: MAC OSX

GPGMail 1.1.1 - PGP For Apple Mail
Caem (OS X)
Java Anonymous Proxy X 1.037
Proxify
Easy ways to access Proxify
NetShade
Tor

[Update: Link added to TOR. Link added to clarify the law at the center of the issue. Fallacious accusation #1 was corrected and changed in response to reader comments.]
tristero 1/25/2006 03:46:00 AM |

Tuesday, January 24, 2006

 
Foxy Eddie

by digby

Atrios links to the Bob Casey/Ed Rendell endorsement of Alito and it is pretty hard to take. I happened to see Rendell on Fox earlier today (Bill Hemmer's show) and he didn't just endorse Alito. He went out of his way to bash Democrats for being so partisan and failing to recognise that Alito is superbly qualified. Oh, and Bush won the election so he is out King.

He was good little Fox Democrat. I hope they gave him nice chew bone and a scratch behind the ears when he was done.


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digby 1/24/2006 07:24:00 PM |

 
Probable Destruction Of The Fourth Amendment

by digby


Talk Left has an interesting post up about a proposed expansion of the uniformed secret service which is being called a "federal police force."

I guess the FBI, DEA and ATF aren't getting the job done.

But why should they be given the power to "make arrests without warrant for any offense against the United States committed in their presence" ... "or for any felony cognizable under the laws of the United States if they have reasonable grounds to believe that the person to be arrested has committed or is committing such felony."

The last I heard police had to have probable cause to arrest someone. Apparently, the Republicans are trying to change the plain meaning of the fourth amendment.

I hate to get all Godwin, but come on.

Update: Here is what the above link says about reasonable suspicion and probable cause:

Definition of Probable Cause

Many factors contribute to a police officer’s level of authority in a given situation. Understanding the what, when, why, and how of police conduct during a stop is confusing for most people. Varying standards of proof exist to justify varying levels of police authority during citizen contacts. While FyR maintains that it is never a good idea to consent to a search or answer incriminating questions, an understanding of these standards will help the citizen understand when police can surpass constitutional protections.

Reasonable suspicion Facts or circumstances which would lead a reasonable person to suspect that a crime has been, is being, or will be committed

At this stage, police may detain the suspect for a brief period and perform a frisk. In some cases, drug-sniffing dogs may be called to the scene, although officers must cite a reason for suspecting the presence of drug evidence in particular. Refusing a search does not create reasonable suspicion, although acting nervous and answering questions inconsistently can. For this reason, it is best not to answer questions if you have to lie in order to do so. Police authority increases if they catch you in a lie, but not if you refuse to answer questions. As a general rule, reasonable suspicion applies to situation in which police have reason to believe you’re up to something, but they don’t know what it is.

Probable cause Facts or evidence that would lead a reasonable person to believe that a crime has been, is being, or will be committed and the person arrested is responsible

At this stage, police may perform a search, and often an arrest. Probable cause generally means police know what crime they suspect you of and have discovered evidence to support that belief. Common examples include seeing or smelling evidence which is in plain view, or receiving an admission of guilt for a specific crime.

For the conscientious citizen, the best advice regarding police authority is to stick to your guns and not waive your constitutional rights under any circumstances. Police officers will often give misleading descriptions of what their authority is, but you have nothing to gain by submitting to coercive police tactics. Police must make ad hoc decisions in the streets regarding their authority level in a given situation and these decisions are subject to review in court. Asserting your rights properly is good way to avoid arrest, but it is an even better way to avoid a conviction.

Here is what Law.com says:

probable cause

n. sufficient reason based upon known facts to believe a crime has been committed or that certain property is connected with a crime. Probable cause must exist for a law enforcement officer to make an arrest without a warrant, search without a warrant, or seize property in the belief the items were evidence of a crime. While some cases are easy (pistols and illicit drugs in plain sight, gunshots, a suspect running from a liquor store with a clerk screaming "help"), actions "typical" of drug dealers, burglars, prostitutes, thieves, or people with guilt "written across their faces," are more difficult to categorize. "Probable cause" is often subjective, but if the police officer's belief or even hunch was correct, finding stolen goods, the hidden weapon or drugs may be claimed as self-fulfilling proof of probable cause. Technically, probable cause has to exist prior to arrest, search or seizure.


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digby 1/24/2006 03:12:00 PM |

 
Update to the post directly below:

Speaking of writing your own epitaph: It's not the same James A. Baker.

This is particularly galling because I was aware of the earlier flap about James A Baker,even wrote about it, so I checked. When I saw the Wikipedia entry I made the assumption that it was the "real" James Baker this time, "serving quietly" in an oversight position (which I assumed to be kind of like the defense policy board or something.) Wrong, wrong, wrong. Wiki was wrong and I was wrong to have believed it.

Played For A Fool

by digby

I'm sure that most of you have already read Glenn Greenwald's blockbuster catch today in which it's shown that Mike DeWine submitted legislation in 2002 that would have reduced the standard for FISA wiretaps from "probable" to "reasonable" cause, but the administration's own Office of Intelligence Policy argued against it. Needless to say, this blows General Hayden's explanation yesterday out of the water.

One little tid-bit I don't think people may get right away about this is that the man who issued the statement arguing against changing the law is none other than major league heavyweight, James A. Baker III.

Since 2001 he has quietly served as head of the Office of Intelligence Policy and Review. This government agency handles all Justice Department requests for surveillance authorizations under the terms of the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, advises the Attorney General and all major intelligence-gathering agencies on legal issues relating to national security and surveillance, and, according to the agency website, "coordinates" the views of the intelligence community regarding intelligence legislation. Baker has often testified before Congress on behalf of Bush administration intelligence policies, and most recently has defended the USA PATRIOT Act before the House Judiciary Committee.

You. Do. Not. Fuck. With. Jim. Baker. Not even Rove would dare try it.

I think Jimbo needs to be added to the witness list as well. Maybe we can "devaaaahn the will of the administration" from him.

In June of 2002, James Baker didn't even believe it was constitutional, necessary or practical to use this "reasonable" standard to wiretap non US citizens. It's very hard to believe that he's changed his mind so much that he now thinks it was fine for the administration to wiretap US citizens without any kind of warrant at all.

He's a very slippery operator. I'm sure he'll come up with something creative to square what the administration was already doing when he made that public judgment. But it's going to have to be mighty creative or he's going to look like an idiot. I don't think James A Baker III likes looking like an idiot.


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digby 1/24/2006 12:01:00 PM |

 
Getting With The Program

by digby


I am really loving the wingnut magnolia wilting over us rude leftist vulgarians. I am tempted to get out my bulging folder filled with examples of right wing cretinism (which I've been collecting for over 15 years) but it's a waste of time. The newsmedia is feeling beseiged by the left and that is an unadultered good thing. Being nice is beside the point.

But it's a pleasure to reprint this e-mail from Rick Perlstein to this little naif over at CBS who seems to think that the left invented swarming the Amazon reviews section:

Cher colleague, you know nothing about Amazon.com and have fallen for a
right-wing propaganda campaign. People have been driving down the ratings of books for ideological reasons since there have been reviews on Amazon, with conservatives in the lead by about half a decade.

I append an article I wrote on the subject in 2000, in which I observed "most conservative books" garner "80 percent five-star ratings and 20 percent one-star, as opposed to pro-Clinton books, which receive 20 percent five-star, 80 percent one-star."

I humbly suggest a correction.

Rick Perlstein

That article was written in 2000.

To those of us not living in a cave for the last decade, the manipulation of book reviews on Amazon by freepers of one ilk or another is not a surprise any more than is right wing manipulation of book sales. I've always kind of admired them for it. For decades the right has had book clubs and book stores and now online book clubs and book stores to promote their own thinkers and writers. They support their idea people explicitly and compensate them well. I think that's a good idea if your job is to persuade people that your idea is better than the other guys' which is what politics is all about.

They also learned very early on to game the system in both the media and in places like Amazon by placing fake "liberals" on TV and radio and creating a false impression in the public's consciousness that conservatism is a much more powerful force than it actually is. They have been using mischief to manipulate the Amazon rating system for years.

This is simply another illustration of the whiny-ass bedwetting that characterizes so much of the right wing. They benefit for years from gaming the system and then faint with the vapors when subjected to their own tactics.

What a shame. Here's a hankie.



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digby 1/24/2006 10:50:00 AM |

 
Reasonable

by digby


Kevin notices something quite important about General Hayden's Q and A yesterday; He said the illegal wiretapping this was not some sort of vague, impersonal data mining:

Hayden stressed that the program "is not a drift net over Dearborn or Lackawanna or Freemont, grabbing conversations that we then sort out by these alleged keyword searches or data-mining tools or other devices that so-called experts keep talking about. This is targeted and focused."

Ok. Good to know. Kevin says:

This was just ordinary call monitoring, according to General Hayden, and the only problem was that both FISA and the attorney general required a standard of evidence they couldn't meet before issuing a warrant. In other words, the only change necessary to make this program legal was an amendment to FISA modifying the circumstances necessary to issue certain kinds of warrants. This would have tipped off terrorists to nothing.

So why didn't they ask Congress for that change? It certainly would have passed easily.

Matt Yglesias surmises that their "reasonable" (as opposed to probable) standard is probably quite elastic. They might just think it's reasonable to monitor any call made overseas by an American of Arab descent. They could, after all, know someone who knows someone who knows Kevin Bacon. In any case, their reason for not working to change the law or finding ways to do this legally is clearly because they knew very well that reasonable people can disagree quite disagreeably about what is reasonable.

For instance, in this week's Newsweek, we learn more about another program the government is using to protect us from terrorists:

The demonstration seemed harmless enough. Late on a June afternoon in 2004, a motley group of about 10 peace activists showed up outside the Houston headquarters of Halliburton, the giant military contractor once headed by Vice President Dick Cheney. They were there to protest the corporation's supposed "war profiteering." The demonstrators wore papier-mache masks and handed out free peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches to Halliburton employees as they left work. The idea, according to organizer Scott Parkin, was to call attention to allegations that the company was overcharging on a food contract for troops in Iraq. "It was tongue-in-street political theater," Parkin says.

But that's not how the Pentagon saw it. To U.S. Army analysts at the top-secret Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA), the peanut-butter protest was regarded as a potential threat to national security. Created three years ago by the Defense Department, CIFA's role is "force protection"—tracking threats and terrorist plots against military installations and personnel inside the United States. In May 2003, Paul Wolfowitz, then deputy Defense secretary, authorized a fact-gathering operation code-named TALON—short for Threat and Local Observation Notice—that would collect "raw information" about "suspicious incidents." The data would be fed to CIFA to help the Pentagon's "terrorism threat warning process," according to an internal Pentagon memo.

Just because one secret government spying program thinks that handing out peanut butter sandwiches outside Halliburton is a threat to national security perhaps we shouldn't jump to any conclusions about this secret NSA program either. But let's just say it makes it "reasonable" for us to have some suspicions. Critics of the president have been told often enough that we are giving aid and comfort to the enemy, which is the explicit constitutional definition of treason.

"The American people know the difference between responsible and irresponsible debate when they see it…. And they know the difference between a loyal opposition that points out what is wrong, and defeatists who refuse to see that anything is right," Bush said.

"I ask all Americans to hold their elected leaders to account and demand a debate that brings credit to our democracy — not comfort to our adversaries," Bush said.

When the president says things like this, how unreasonable is it to demand that somebody oversee his secret program?

I know one person who should be very worried about this now that the NSA has revealed that this is not a random program: Grover Norquist. Needless to day, his "leave us alone" coalition should be supportive of a check on executive power and against warrantless wiretaps on principle alone. But Norquist also happens to be married to a Muslim, had contacts with the Taliban going way back and spent considerable time cultivating the Muslim community in the US as a Republican voting block. He is the prime example of an American who the government could find it "reasonable" to monitor without a warrant.

Perhaps Norquist would like to testify before the senate judiciary committee in the illegal wiretap hearings next month. Aside from proving that he isn't all talk and no action when it comes to privacy and liberty, this could be a very personal issue for him.


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digby 1/24/2006 08:21:00 AM |

Monday, January 23, 2006

 
Liars For Life

by digby


William Schneider did a little blurb earlier today on Blitzer about the Alito nomination in which he said that most people think that Samuel Alito will not vote to overturn Roe vs. Wade:

SCHNEIDER ... Just over a third of the public believes Alito would vote to overturn Roe. While 44 percent believe he would not. That's what shapes opinion on Alito's confirmation. People who favor Alito's confirmation overwhelmingly believe he would not vote to overturn Roe. Those who oppose Alito believe even more strongly that he would vote to overturn Row. But the number of people who believe that is not large enough to turn public sentiment against him.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

(on camera): Is there public support for filibuster of Alito's confirmation? By 48 percent to 38 percent the public says a filibuster is not justified -- Wolf.

People who favor Alito's confirmation overwhelmingly believe he would not vote to overturn Roe.

Bullshit. It is absurd to think that the wingnuts who support Alito so fervently don't believe that he will overturn Roe. They are lying.

When I saw an anti-abortion activist appear on NOW a couple of weeks ago I was struck by how deeply and profoundly dishonest she was:

BRANCACCIO: The head of Kansans for Life, Mary Kay Culp has a good reason for watching the big story in Washington this week.

Appeals court judge Samuel Alito did not trip up in any grotesque way this week. The conventional wisdom that dictates these things signals that Alito will soon occupy the swing seat on the Supreme Court. And his rulings could shift the court's position on hot-button issues like abortion.

It's just that kind of shift on the court that Mary Kay Culp and her group in Kansas have been hoping for.

BRANCACCIO: Thanks for coming in.

MARY KAY CULP: Thanks for having me.

BRANCACCIO: Well, looks like Samuel Alito is going to get this. That must, given all the work you've done over these years, make you happy.

MARY KAY CULP: I am glad that President Bush's nominee looks like he's going to make it on the court. Whether or not it's going to make me happy from a pro-life point of view, I think that remains to be seen.

BRANCACCIO: Why are you being tentative? He--

MARY KAY CULP: Well, he looks like he's a real careful-- a real careful, thoughtful, analytical guy, and I like that. And-- because I'm a little tired of this being portrayed as if he has an agenda, that all of a sudden, poof is going to happen if he gets on the court.

BRANCACCIO: Agenda being getting rid of Roe v. Wade?

MARY KAY CULP: Exactly. I don't think that that's going to happen. And if it does, all it means is that the issue comes back to the states.

BRANCACCIO: But, with all the work that you've been doing in Kansas for all these years, don't you think that if it becomes a State's matter that in Kansas like that (SNAP) you'll get rid of abortion? Huh?

MARY KAY CULP: No. I don't. Unh-uh. I don't think that'll happen in the states. But, what can happen is a real discussion. What can happen are committee hearings in your Senate and your House where witnesses are called-- witnesses who have had abortions-- witnesses on both side of the issue. And, it can be heard — the most frustrating thing about Roe is that it just slammed the door. When you try to get a State law passed even to regulate just a little bit, or partial birth abortion, anything, a legislator will tell you-- "Well, you know-- we can't do that under Roe versus Wade anyway."

BRANCACCIO: But you must be encouraged about the way things are going with Samuel Alito? All right, I'll encourage you then.

MARY KAY CULP: Okay.

BRANCACCIO: You know-- Pat Buchanan?

MARY KAY CULP: Uh-huh.

BRANCACCIO: My favorite conservative commentator.

MARY KAY CULP: Yes. Uh-huh.

BRANCACCIO: He said with Alito-- here's the quote from this week.

MARY KAY CULP: Okay.

BRANCACCIO: "Roe could go. George W. Bush is one Justice away from succeeding where Nixon, Ford, his father and even Ronald Reagan all failed."

MARY KAY CULP: That would be - one Justice after Alito.

BRANCACCIO: One Justice after Alito.

MARY KAY CULP: Unless-- not with Alito. Yeah.

BRANCACCIO: So, it's gettin' there.

MARY KAY CULP: Right.

BRANCACCIO: I don't understand how Kansas wouldn't-- ban abortion quit quickly after that. What do you know about the state of that debate in your state...

MARY KAY CULP: It isn't that. It's just that I know how the political system works. Then you can have real discussion. Then every-- both sides are gonna get aired, and if the media's fair about it, both sides are gonna get aired. That-- you know, that's a question. But at least democracy will have a chance to work on it. But, that doesn't necessarily mean anything either way.

But, well, I do know what might happen in Kansas. We have late term abortions in Kansas, and we're known for having late term abortions in Kansas. Those, yes, we might be able to get rid of right away.

BRANCACCIO: But, really there are two questions here. There's the political calculation that I did ask you about. Do you think that Roe v. Wade's going to be overturned and therefore abortion will become illegal? You don't think so. But, what about your goal? Would it make you happier? Is this your vision of America where abortion is illegal.

MARY KAY CULP: It would be nice to know that tomorrow morning no knives are gonna be taken to unborn babies. That'd be a nice thing. But, in order for that to happen and for it to-- to stay in place, I mean, if you just boom turn it around-- without people really understanding the issue, it's not as-- certainly not as satisfying as it happening for the right reasons.

Because, the media in this country becomes unafraid to actually hear both sides of this issue, 'cause that hasn't been the case for 30 years. It's been getting better. But, really it's kind of an interesting dynamic, because-- I didn't notice really a change until a partial birth abortion issue came along in Congress, and that really earns you a lot of credibility. And, then people start to look and listen. And, as we got stronger politically, it's really-- it's amazing how a political win really can draw peoples' attention to an issue.

BRANCACCIO: You know, Mary Kay, from your discussion, though, there are a lot of people who do not like abortion, who want to reduce the number of abortions I America--

MARY KAY CULP: Uh-huh.

BRANCACCIO: But are very concerned about an America where if a woman chooses to do this for whatever complicated reason that they have that choice. You could have some of these States deciding based on a different Supreme Court, "We are gonna outlaw it." And, that means if you got the money, you go to another state. If you don't got the money and your poor, terrible things could happen.

MARY KAY CULP: You know, terrible things are happening right now-- terrible things. But, nobody knows about 'em, because nobody's really looking at the other side of this issue. Terrible things can happen on both sides of this issues, if it's recognized for what it is and the way it impacts a woman's life and impacts society. And that's what I think we need to look at.

There are a lot of mainstream Americans out there that care about this issue. It isn't-- you know-- people can stereotype us and call us names if they want to. You know what? We don't care, because there's just more and more of us, and we're having more of a political effect. And, I hope we'll get some credibility with the media only so that we can look at these issues in a-- in a real way.

BRANCACCIO: Well, Mary Kay Culp, Kansans for Life, thanks for coming in to help us understand where you're coming from and possibly understand where the ascent of Samuel Alito came from.

MARY KAY CULP: Thank you for allowing me to come. I appreciate it.

That woman who believes that abortion is the killing of babies with knives is one slick political operator. She knows that this isn't about any dialog. She knows that Alito will vote to overturn Roe. She knows that the minute Roe is overturned a whole bunch of states will make it illegal. She is lying about all of that.

Why in the hell is it necessary for some woman from Kansas not to tell the truth about her cause or her goals? What is she so afraid of? Why does the born again conservative president have to phone in his support instead of appearing proudly and openly before his pro-life supporters? If this is an issue of deeply felt morality that all Americans are having difficulty dealing with, why can't they just admit openly that they want to outlaw abortion?

We know why:

Only 25 percent of those polled said they believe the precedent should be overturned, while 66 percent said they believe Roe should stand.

Could someone please inform the Democrats that when 66 percent of the public agrees with you on an issue that you can feel confident that you are not losing elections because of that issue?

Pro-life people even at the state level are savvy political con artists who are pretending to be more powerful than they are while lying about their goals. They are operating from a position of weakness not strength. Anybody in politics who is fooled by this crap should be fired.



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digby 1/23/2006 04:28:00 PM |

 
What Creeps Me Out More

by digby


From the future ex-Mrs Limbaugh:

KAGAN: Yes, I'm not doing that. I don't know what creeps me out more, vampires or the idea of Colin Farrell kissing a 14-year-old girl in this other movie, "The New World."

LEATHERMAN: It's really weird. It's a little bit strange.

KAGAN: It's illegal is what it is!

LEATHERMAN: When they made this movie she was 14. And the thing about this movie is everybody knows the plot. It's about the settlers coming over. He plays John Smith, who gets in a relationship with Pochahantas, who was -- the actress was 14 when they made this movie.

This is a Terrence Malick film. He makes a film about one every 27 years.

KAGAN: Yes, that's good.

LEATHERMAN: A lot of people really love his work. I have to tell you, I thought this movie was tedious and slow, boring and slow and slow. It was just -- for the parts of the movie I was awake, Daryn, it was beautiful to look at. But if you're looking for a good snooze, I suggest you go see "The New World."

KAGAN: And you got the biggest womanizer in Hollywood kissing a 14-year-old girl. Pass and pass.

LEATHERMAN: You are angry.

KAGAN: I'm angry about that.

I'm angry that sometimes I turn on my television and this woman appears, instantly bringing to mind a picture of her in bed with that gelatinous pill-popping cretin. And then I throw up a little in my mouth.



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digby 1/23/2006 03:48:00 PM |

 
Tally Me Bananas

by digby


I see that many people are upset about Father Tim's rather odd question this week-end in which he queried Barack Obama about Harry Belafonte. Attaturk defends the Monsignor and rightly so:

Before we get too angry at Li'l Russ

He didn't ask about Harry Belafonte's quotes of just Barak Obama and Colin Powell just because they are African-American.

After all the next time he has Condelezza Rice on, I'm sure he won't ask her about Belafonte.

He'll stick to asking her about what she thinks of Li'l Kim serving time.

I also heard that His Holiness plans to ask Russ Feingold about Barbra Streisand's political contributions, so that's good. It's not like it's a black thing.



Be sure to click the link to Attaturk for an illustration of what we can expect the next time the Secretary of State appears on Press the Meat.


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digby 1/23/2006 03:14:00 PM |

 
Lefties Rule

by digby


How great is it that every blog nominated for best Political Blog in the Bloggies is a member of the left blogosphere?

Wonkette, Kos, Talking Points Memo and Crooks & Liars, Firedoglake

Great blogs, all of them.

That would not have happened just a year or so ago. When I first started lurking around the blogosphere it was pretty slim pickings for libs. I had to pretend that Instapundit was a real libertarian and actually read him because there just wasn't much else. Liberals were way in the wilderness then.

Now a thousand bloggy liberal voices have bloomed. Congratulations to all the nominees.


And pay a little visit to our very own friendly folks at Wampum, too, who are hosting the Koufaxes --- Left Blogistans community awards. And toss them a couple of bucks if you can. They are wonderful people who devote a ridiculous amount of time to doing this every year for us.



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digby 1/23/2006 02:41:00 PM |

 
Tweety's Oeuvre

by digby


If you haven't paid a visit to An Open Letter To Chris Matthews today, check it out. They have gathered quite a list of Tweety's biased (and bizarre) comments.

But come on folks, how could you leave this one out?

I want to see him debate somebody like John Kerry or Lieberman or somebody wearing that jumpsuit ... it was like throwing that strike in Yankee Stadium a while back after 9/11. It's not a stunt if it works and it's real. And I felt the faces of those guys--I thought most of our guys were looking up like they were looking at Bob Hope and John Wayne combined on that ship.

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digby 1/23/2006 02:08:00 PM |

 
Shameless

by digby

I don't know what class in Wingnut U teaches phony sanctimony, but it's clearly a requirement for graduation. Even the father of convicted felon Jack Abramoff has the unmitigated gall to pull a "this is not a goood man" on George Clooney:

He said the lobbyist’s daughter, who was watching the show, was in “a fit of tears” after hearing Clooney’s remarks.

“Are you proud of that?” Abramoff wrote. “Shame on you.”

Huckleberry Graham would be proud. The man whose son, the orthodox Jew, just pled guilty to several felonies and is about to implicate his friends and colleagues in any number of crimes says, "shame on you" to someone who derides him publicly. It clearly didn't even occur to him that he had no legitimate claim to the moral high ground; it didn't occur to him that he should be hanging his head in shame himself. Indeed, he apparently felt entirely justified in publicly protesting that his son's immoral and criminal behavior was the subject of public derision.

No matter how nasty, how ruthless, how cruel or how unjust Republicans are (and they are) they never fail to shamelessly turn on the crocodile tears and blubber into their lace hankies like Miss Manners when Democrats say "enough." They have taken manipulative behavior to its most exalted level. Dems need to jettison the political strategists and start consulting psychologists.


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digby 1/23/2006 11:18:00 AM |

 
Killing Me Softly

by digby

I'm feeling down right now. I know I shouldn't. The fact that Tom DeLay has stepped down is such a huge victory for humanity all by itself that I should be dancing a jig for the next six months. But, I'm down in the dumps, mostly because I am watching George W. Bush repeat his patented mantra for the 514,346th time. It's filled with lies, mischaracterizations and simple-minded gibberish, as always, and I'm watching it go out unfiltered, in its entirety, unchallenged by the media, no Democrats in sight, on every cable channel. I think they are personally trying to drive me crazy.

There is one new wrinkle. Regarding the illegal wiretapping, he just said, "it's amazing to me when people say I just wanted to break the law. If I wanted to break the law why would I brief congress?"

His masterful sound guy is there, compressing the sound, building the audience response to statements like that from a distant chuckle to a soft moan of appreciation, slowly ratcheting it up to a low roar until it reaches a crescendo of ecstatic, sustained hysteria. I think I even saw some rending of garments in the fourth row.

They a