The Daily Sandwich

I like them beans just fine, thanks....

2008-11-04T23:31:00.002-05:00

...but here's hoping my home state will show its traditional spirit by siding with common sense and going blue.

Reign of Terror

2008-11-01T00:08:00.002-05:00

My Halloween wasn't particularly spooky. In fact, if it hadn't been for the pagan rituals of fundamentalist Christians, I wouldn't have been scared at all.

There's a reason the progressive blogs had a huge laugh over this. I'm not sure I'd go so far as to say it's because we tend to know our scripture better than... well, better than the sort of people you'd expect to find A) laying hands upon a golden idol B) on a street known the world over for being Wall Flippin' Street (with all that implies for those of us with three-digit IQs. C) Comic books are typically read by teenage boys, and even they make fun of the concept that you have to put your hand on something in order to employ any special mental abilities.

D)I know, I know. Why even bother at this point? Things have actually gotten this stupefyingly stupid. But it's still sad to see something this phenomenally, aggressively, misguidedly.... imbecilic? Asinine? Mondo retardo? Feel free to suggest your own negative superlative to describe "a spectacle this-- BLANK, Charles Nelson Reilly."

Hai-keeba!

2008-10-29T14:30:00.003-05:00

I've been relieved to see that actual violence has been pretty limited. There was the usual example of a young true-believer ginning up a phony attack, a few assaults on yard signs, the white supemacist "plot" that was apparently closer to being thunk up by the Three SStooges. And plenty of bullying, of course. Hopefully that's all we'll see.

Of course, one GOP trick that's still working entirely too well is purging state voter rolls. Why the press still doesn't seem to get worked up about this is beyond me-- particularly with all the attention they gave to bogus accusations against ACORN.

But what I'd like to mention today is that I think Obama and Biden are doing exactly what they should be in the face of the increasingly surreal attacks coming from all quarters. And I'd like to mention it in no small part because it's something I've been promoting for years now: using their hysterics against them with a little verbal aikido.

I thought Biden's example on the Florida news channel was brilliant. A local anchor asks him-- with all the psuedo-gravitas she can muster-- if Obama isn't actually a closet Bolshevik who wants to turn the country into a communist state. This being one of the most retarded questions he's probably ever been asked, Biden simply laughed and asked if she was joking. Awesome.

Now Obama is joining in:

"[B]ecause he knows his economic theories don't work, he's been spending these last few days calling me every name in the book," Obama said. "Lately, he's called me a 'socialist' for wanting to roll back the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans so we can finally give tax relief to the middle class. I don't know what's next. By the end of the week, he'll be accusing me of being a secret communist because I shared my toys in kindergarten. I shared my peanut butter and jelly sandwich."

Brilliant. There will always be a (disappointingly large) number of Americans who'll swallow whatever baloney the right-wing serves up. DLC types have-- by treating these ideologues and their puppet masters seriously-- played into their hands by legitimizing their nonsense at the expense of the nation's health and wealth. But beyond the hopelessly-blinkered, there are always people who will believe the hype. Especially when the fringe is legitimized by sane people. But if the fringe is rightly perceived by them as the fringe, they won't want anything to do with it.

That's why I love to see moments like this: people have come to see Obama and Biden as the serious, thoughtful people in this campaign, and when they (rightly) dismiss this "red scare" goofiness with malice-free humor, it serves to highlight the lack of seriousness and thoughtfulness on the part of the accusers. This will, in turn, encourage sensible people to cringe when they hear these things. I'm really pretty impressed with most people's willingness to give people the benefit of the doubt, but I think this technique will help Democrats quite a bit in moving the country away from the disastrous economics of the post-Reagan GOP.

Grand Old [American] Psycho

2008-10-22T00:22:00.005-05:00

Sarah Palin has been exposed as a complete fraud and inveterate liar since her selection by the reality-deficient kingmakers of the GOP. Why, the AP just released a report (the what-- fifth of its kind?) revealing that her political career is nothing so much as a ham-fisted attempt to craft the sort of personal narrative that has come to define the Republican party in recent decades. Family members as props? Gladly. Political power as a means of personal vindictiveness? Natch! Crowd-pleasing rhetoric in please of policy and principle? Yes, please. And of course, that ol' time religion that's become the right wing's stock in trade: an unthinking committment to a sense of personal entitlement.

As hopeful as things look for the coming election, I'm afraid that it could go horribly wrong. If the rage and racism McCain's campaign is now aggressively courting erupts into violence, or if their disturbing attempt to disenfranchise voters becomes the final, desperate front in the attempt to maintain their empire of greed... well, I fear for the nation. But principled conservatives have already rejected their party leader, even if they've been overly timid in their convictions. The press is clearly uncomfortable with Republican attempts to exhort the party faithful to blind rage. And America appears once again to be demonstrating the unity that has made it a great and powerful nation, as well as a beacon-- thought it may flicker in stormy times-- of the Enlightenment values that have been our greatest legacy.

Still, I am afraid. The noblest thing we can do now is to assist our fellow Americans in exercising their rights as citizens. Our fellow countrymen shall not disappoint us if we ensure that all may exercise their birthright.

The Battle of the Sixties

2008-10-14T08:48:00.002-05:00

A little optimism is kinda nice every once in a while, right? As reality has peeled support away from the GOP and caused the right's politicians to turn the Slime-O-Matic campaign machine up to eleven, we're seeing the inevitable result: the people still cheering loudly at GOP events are the scariest elements of the true-believing base. Racists, the desperately ignorant, religious fanatics, ideologues, and so on. In other words, the first people to join extremist movements and the last people to give up on a lost cause.

E.J. Dionne takes a look at it all and suggests that maybe this is it-- the last time we'll see the right campaign on the bitter legacy of the 1960s. The embarrassing idea that fighting in Vietnam was a brilliant plan somehow subverted by treasonous hippies. The lingering fears that a racially integrated/non-theocratic/equitable society will cause national collapse before you can say "bust up this chifforobe."

Ayers has been dragged into this campaign because there is a deep frustration on the right with Obama's enthusiasm for shutting down the culture wars of the 1960s.

Precisely because Obama is not a baby boomer, he carries none of that generation's scars. Most Americans (including most boomers) are weary of living in the past and reprising the 1960s every four years.

Yet culture war politics is relatively mild compared with the far right appeals that are emerging this year. It is as if McCain's loyalists overshot the '60s and went back to the '50s or even the '30s.

I disagree with his larger point that a new hard-right is rising phoenix-like from the ashes of McCain's presidential bid. After all, the "mainstreaming of the far right" is a process that began in the Reagan years and reached its zenith under the current administration. Sure, if you were to hang around with a group of College Republicans you'd hear them making the same tired remarks about Vietnam and the Black Panthers, but from footage of McCain and Palin's campaign appearances it looks like the faithful are more AARP than UCLA.

Too nutty even for ideologues

2008-10-10T15:46:00.002-05:00

Christopher Buckley doesn't have the stones to print it in the National Review (of course, plenty of NRO contributors are very much caught up in the GOP's cavalcade of hate, so personal security could be a concern), but at least he's saying it. And I have to give him three bonus points for the title.

Sorry, Dad, I'm Voting for Obama

I have to say, I find his writing style to be too precious by half for my tastes, but it's worth a look.

Reaping the Whirlwind

2008-10-10T13:21:00.002-05:00

I've been saying for quite a while that it would take a national emergency to finally wake the non-insane from their Republican-induced slumber. It was just a question of how serious the emergency would have to be. The disastrous Iraq war wasn't enough, the lawlessness of the current administration wasn't enough, Katrina wasn't enough, and so on. Hopefully the market turmoil won't continue to worsen, but the way things are looking it could be the wake-up call that was needed to alert the country to the complete moral and intellectual bankruptcy of the American right in the last few decades.

Sensing this, wingers are doing just what extremists throughout history have done when their diabolical plans start to unravel: undertaken serious introspection, put the welfare of mankind above personal ambition and greed, and rolled up their sleeves to get to work on the business of making things better.

I'M KIDDING!!! Like extremists throughout history, they're letting the facade slip away in their anger, exposing themselves as loathsome cowards and avaricious miscreants who are more than happy to spread hatred, fear, and misery because they think it might be to their advantage.

On CNN last night, David Gergen, a Republican advisor to Presidents Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and Clinton, commented on the "anger" evident at McCain/Palin rallies of late. "There is this free floating sort of whipping around anger that could really lead to some violence," Gergen said. "I think we're not far from that."

When Anderson Cooper expressed skepticism about whether violence was likely, Gergen said he "really worries" given "the kind of rhetoric" coming from the Republican ticket.

When a mainstream, Republican presidential advisor goes on national television and expresses concern that Republican voters might literally become violent in response to the Republican presidential ticket's rhetoric, it's safe to say we've reached a rather dramatic point.

This week has been unusually incendiary. The McCain campaign has deliberately been whipping the angry, far-right Republican base into a frenzy. That includes increasing frequency of "Hussein" references, but it also includes looking the other way while campaign supporters exclaim "treason!," "terrorist!," and "kill him!" during official rallies.

On Wednesday, during a McCain harangue against Obama, one man could be heard yelling, "Off with his head!" On Thursday, Republicans erupted when an unhinged McCain supporter ranted about "socialists taking over our country." Instead of calming them down, McCain said the lunatic was "right."

The Republicans want an angry mob, they need hysterical supporters, and so they've stoked the fires of hate, fear, and ignorance. It's become a surprisingly toxic cocktail.

Both the Washington Post and the Politico have good items today on the explosive, enraged emotions at this week's Republican rallies. Slate's John Dickerson described the participants' "bloodthirsty" tone.

Lord forbid that we see any violence, but that's the next thing you'd expect from a group of people who've been deliberately whipped into a frenzy by opportunistic politicians and talking heads. If you hear anything about pitchforks and torches being handed out at Palin's rallies, you'll know...

The sound and the fury. And plenty of both

2008-10-09T10:07:00.006-05:00

A week of good news for Obama seems to have the GOP doing the only thing they can-- fighting dirty, only harder. Only speak when the deck is stacked. Stoke racial fear. Lie your socks off. And all the while, do everything you can to keep people from voting.

The MSM has been showing signs of not playing along this time out. Seems like a good time to write letters to the editor to ensure that people are paying attention, getting angry, and trying not to let it happen again. After all, the wingers are doing all they can:

Groups looking to register new voters, and to get out the vote, took advantage of this window and killed two birds with one stone. One group in particular focused on a group of people who might not normally be expected to turn out. From the New York Post:

Volunteers supporting Barack Obama picked up hundreds of people at homeless shelters, soup kitchens and drug-rehab centers and drove them to a polling place yesterday on the last day that Ohioans could register and vote on the same day, almost no questions asked.

Some bloggers on the right, having read the Post’s article, are crying voter fraud. Obviously, there are some class issues in play here, and most bloggers who responded to the story focused on the homeless angle — not surprising, given the headline, “Homeless ‘Driven’ to Vote Obama.”

RedState’s Pejman Yousefzadeh, however, had a slightly different complaint — he noted that the Post’s report quotes a convicted felon who was driven to a polling place as part of the effort. In a post titled “Tell Me Again How Voter Fraud Doesn’t Exist …” Yousefzadeh wrote:

Because this story would beg to differ. Note that you are not supposed to be able to vote with a felony conviction.
Voter fraud regularly gets denied by our friends on the other side of the partisan divide. If they open their eyes, they will see that it is all around them … If there was any justice in the world, every media establishment would be flooding into Ohio asking just what kind of shoddy oversight was allowing convicted felons to register to vote.

(His emphasis.)

There’s just one problem with Yousefzadeh’s argument — the entire thing is based on a false assumption. In fact, if he had just paid closer attention to the Post article, he would have seen that felons who’ve served their time are now allowed to vote in Ohio.

UPDATE: Watch closely, because this is the face of insanity. "secret left-wing radical". . ."wild-eyed radical". . . "Maoist". . . "What Obama is about is infiltrating (and training others to infiltrate) bourgeois institutions." All excellent examples of why progressive bloggers use the term reality-based community. The trick, you see, lies in being a functional adult even if you're not fighting battles that ended decades ago.

Lies, lies, all of it!

2008-10-02T22:47:00.003-05:00

I watched the debate in a bar in Cambridge, Massachusetts. That was a first. Not that anyone's keeping track, but the last time I watched this level of debate in a bar was in my home town of Springfield, Missouri. See how I'm establishing my own 'folksiness' there?

Yesterday, in anticipation of the event at good ol' Washington University, I quoted Martin Lawrence by suggesting that her cutie-pie ignorance might not play too well in the debate because "shit just got real." Watching the debate, I was surprised to see that Biden defied the bloggers by hitting fast and hard. And he managed to completely avoid sounding condescending or bullying at the same time-- especially when she tried to use her scripted "laugh lines." In retrospect, it was amazing to see her visible discomfort when the "wait for big laffs" cue didn't result in actual laughter. (Trying to combine 'say it ain't so, Joe' with 'there you go again' and having it all fall like a gosh-darn souffle. You could almost see her thinking 'But that was supposed to be my big moment!')

Anyway, we'll see what happens when we all wake up. But between Biden's 'shit just got real' approach, Palin's continuation of the Big Lie strategy that hasn't been playing so well lately (unlike the last two presidential campaigns), and her clear inability to come across well without a stacked deck, I think-- and I think conservatively about these things these days-- it won't hurt the Obama-Biden ticket at all. And given the shift in public opinion this last week, that's nothing to galdurn sneeze at, don'cha know.

BONUS: On the question about the ding-dang veep being part of the executive branch, when Biden said that Cheney was 'most dangerous vice-president in history,' the bar erupted in applause. It was great.

Oh, and the link. Liveblogging from the WaMo. Just 'cuz you've got to have a link, right?

Special prize to anyone who can identify the source of my title.

Afterthought: How do you suppose it would've played if Biden had dealt with Palin's awkward phoniness--and the GOP ticket as a whole-- by saying "These aren't the droids we're looking for"?

Captain Obvious

2008-09-29T18:34:00.002-05:00

I'm not going to go on and on about the incredible spectacle of the last five days, with McCain quite literally holding the economy hostage while the world watches and House Republicans claim that they would've voted yes on the bailout if Nancy Pelosi hadn't made them cranky. Plenty of other bloggers have covered it at great length, and it at least looks like McCain's desperate flailing in the wake of his campaign-stunt-gone-horribly-wrong is having a genuine impact in polling numbers.

Nope, instead I'd like to direct your attention to a little something that's appearing in the latest issue of Newsweek.

Let me confess that I was genuinely unnerved by Sarah Palin's performance at the Republican convention. Given her audience and the needs of the moment, I believe Governor Palin's speech was the most effective political communication I have ever witnessed. Here, finally, was a performer who—being maternal, wounded, righteous and sexy—could stride past the frontal cortex of every American and plant a three-inch heel directly on that limbic circuit that ceaselessly intones "God and country." If anyone could make Christian theocracy smell like apple pie, Sarah Palin could.

Then came Palin's first television interview with Charles Gibson. I was relieved to discover, as many were, that Palin's luster can be much diminished by the absence of a teleprompter. Still, the problem she poses to our political process is now much bigger than she is. Her fans seem inclined to forgive her any indiscretion short of cannibalism. However badly she may stumble during the remaining weeks of this campaign, her supporters will focus their outrage upon the journalist who caused her to break stride, upon the camera operator who happened to capture her fall, upon the television network that broadcast the good lady's misfortune—and, above all, upon the "liberal elites" with their highfalutin assumption that, in the 21st century, only a reasonably well-educated person should be given command of our nuclear arsenal.

It really is a frightening measure of just how much damage the right wing's decades-long propaganda war has done to bring out the absolute worst in their most committed supporters. Do you know what else is a frightening measure of how successful they've been? Newsweek's spineless pseudo-disclaimer accompanying the article:

When Atheists Attack: A noted provocateur rips Sarah Palin—and defends elitism.

Considering that the author's argument pretty much boils down to "If you're plumbing's busted, call a plumber," it takes a special kind of timidity to suggest that it's the stance of someone who's clearly a godless, bomb-throwing snob.

Well, I guess he didn't need to show up after all....

2008-09-26T13:08:00.002-05:00

I hope that the beyond-embarrassing examples of stupidity and egotism on display from the GOP's chosen candidates this week is starting to sink in nationwide. The MSM seems to be inching closer and closer to observing fact, now that the disgraceful "he-said/she-said" reporting of this century is embarrassing them as well.

Whether the public is jarred awake by McCain's blatant eagerness to use a national economic crisis as a photo-op-- struggling American homeowners be damned-- or frightened by Palin's complete inability to form a coherent sentence on even a single national or international issue, hopefully it will mark a turning point in the public consciousness. Hey, I know it's a longshot after eight years of Republican stupidity and corruption, but it helps keep me sane.

And hopefully we'll keep seeing more stories of GOP ineptitude like this:

The Washington Post's Chris Cillizza notes that an ad proclaiming "McCain wins debate!" was already running on the Wall Street Journal's Web site Friday morning. (A screen shot of the page can be seen here.) The reader who tipped Cillizza also saw a second ad that contained a quote from McCain campaign manager Rick Davis: "McCain won the debate -- hands down."

It's like 1984 starring the Three Stooges. All we need now is for McCain and Palin to reach for the same oil company check and bump heads with a coconut sound.

I'm "Craven" McCain 2008

2008-09-25T10:44:00.003-05:00

The cowardice McCain has shown in every aspect of his decision to flee the presidential debate once the going got tough is sickening. But he's certainly learned "Campaigning for Oily Liars" from cover to cover. From Kevin Drum:

A couple of hours ago I suggested that maybe John McCain would try to postpone the first debate to October 2nd because that would then eliminate the vice presidential debate. (So sad....) I thought I was just being hackishly cynical when I said that, but no: according to CNN, that's exactly what McCain is proposing. The VP debate would then be "rescheduled." (Perhaps to November 5th, joked Dana Milbank.)

The big question is how the MSM will treat this whole thing: will they once again roll over and repeat the campaign's baldfaced lies on how eager he is to roll up his sleeves and get right to the dirty work of closed meetings and open photo-ops on Capitol Hill? Or will they point out that McCain just left a McCain-shaped hole in the wall in his haste to avoid anything even remotely resembling a serious policy question?

Admittedly, "what do you have to say now that the economic policy you've backed fervently for decades has caused a massive fiscal crisis?" is a tough one. But McCain isn't supposed to be running for Crybaby in Chief.

(Updated) Did I say Cousin Oliver? I meant Knucklehead Smith.

2008-09-25T10:19:00.005-05:00

I hope that reference wasn't too out-there, but 'Charlie McCarthy' seemed way too complimentary for Sarah Palin. His head was made of wood and he could trade barbs with W.C. Fields. Her head is made of a black hole that sucks up all logic & reason-- and she can't even handle MSM softballs.

COURIC: You've said, quote, "John McCain will reform the way Wall Street does business." Other than supporting stricter regulations of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac two years ago, can you give us any more example of his leading the charge for more oversight?

PALIN: I think that the example that you just cited, with his warnings two years ago about Fannie and Freddie — that, that's paramount. That's more than a heck of a lot of other senators and representatives did for us.

COURIC: But he's been in Congress for 26 years. He's been chairman of the powerful Commerce Committee. And he has almost always sided with less regulation, not more.

PALIN: He's also known as the maverick though. Taking shots from his own party, and certainly taking shots from the other party. Trying to get people to understand what he's been talking about — the need to reform government.

COURIC: I'm just going to ask you one more time, not to belabor the point. Specific examples in his 26 years of pushing for more regulation?

PALIN: I'll try to find you some and I'll bring them to you.

Be a-scared. Be very a-scared.

UPDATE: I couldn't bring myself to actually watch the video of the possible next vice-president of the nation with her head so far up her ass she needs an exorcism from a Kenyan preacher, but this is apparently the tip of the insanity iceberg.

COURIC: If this doesn't pass, do you think there's a risk of another Great Depression?

PALIN: Unfortunately, that is the road that America may find itself on. Not necessarily this as it's been proposed has to pass or we're going to find ourselves in another Great Depression. There has got to be action — bipartisan effort — Congress not pointing fingers at one another but finding the solution to this, taking action, and being serious about the reforms on Wall Street that are needed.

I'm feeling something entirely new-- part befuddlement, part terror..... it's terfuddlement.

Get 'im, Dave! Get 'im!

2008-09-25T08:29:00.003-05:00

I've been saying for years that what the Democratic party needs is talented comedy writers. It's pretty damn clear that logic and policy aren't going to sway Republican voters who've been fed a steady diet of xenophobia, cultural warfare, and paranoia. (If it were, the US electoral map would look like the Economist's electoral map.) Ridicule and shame, however, may well be the thing when you consider how much the right has "normalized" ridiculous and shameful behavior.

After receiving a call from the McCain campaign canceling an appearance on tonight's Late Night with David Letterman, it was discovered that McCain stopped down the street to be interviewed by CBS' Katie Couric rather than rushing back to Washington to work on the proposed Wall Street bailout, as Letterman had been told.

"Hey Senator," Letterman mocked in front of live video of the interview, "can I give you a ride home?"

Letterman had earlier expressed suspicion at McCain's move to suspend his campaign. "This doesn't smell right," he said. "This isn't the way a tested hero behaves."

"I think someone's putting something in his Metamucil...He can't run the campaign because the economy is cratering? Fine, put in your second-string quarterback, Sarah Palin. Where is she?"

"What are you going to do if you're elected and things get tough?" Letterman added. "Suspend being president? We've got a guy like that now!"

That's a relief. I was afraid we'd have to do something.

2008-09-24T14:16:00.003-05:00

Democrats have decided to allow a quarter-century ban on drilling for oil off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts to expire next week, conceding defeat in a months-long battle with the White House and Republicans set off by $4 a gallon gasoline prices this summer.

I suppose I can still see why Congressional Dems are still acting like battered spouses. The DLC's star might be fading (and none too soon), but it's no secret that their "do whatever the GOP says" strategy to winning elections still has plenty of adherents.

Still, there's a point where you hope that our elected representatives will look at the money-grubbing pissants across the aisle and their latest attempt to transform America's legacy into diamond stickpins & private jets and say "No. This is not only the empirically sound course of action-- it is the undeniably moral course, and the universally acknowledged responsible course for our economy, and indeed the future of our very planet."

Most of us reached it on behalf of congressional Dems.... what, five years ago? Of course, we're perfectly aware that, whether Democrats are principled or gutless, the 21st century Republican party will use us like a passed-out prom date whenever possible.

"If true, this capitulation by Democrats following months of Republican pressure is a big victory for Americans struggling with record gasoline prices," said House GOP leader John Boehner of Ohio.

See? It reminds me of a gruesome story I heard about faith healers. The huckster in question would shout hallelujahs while claiming to cure an elderly person's cataracts. They would actually pierce the eye, letting fluid drain out temporarily-- "curing" the afflicted and emptying wallets at the same time. When the con artist was safely out of town with his money, the healed individual's eyes would cloud over worse than ever, depriving them of what little sight had remained.

It's far, far past time for Democrats to stop being the timid neighbors who do nothing in order to preserve the town's good name, and start being the ones to hunt the bastard down and beat him within an inch of his life.

(P.S.- I know it's tied to a key spending bill that the GOP was going to make a show of vetoing. And they gave Dems the usual choice of "obstructionist America-hater or total wuss." The thing is, the Democrats are right. Again. And it's getting to the point where the MSM and the public are finally paying some attention.)

BAILOUT! The Musical

2008-09-24T08:57:00.002-05:00

This is a must-see link. I was just wondering this morning how the 80s S&L scandal compared to the current corporate welfare debacle, and wouldn't you know... this administration's "economic stewardship" is once again Reaganism on steroids.

Blogs have started to grumble about the dearth of coverage on McCain's long and pathetic career as a champion of the deregulation that led to both crises, although the press is at least getting fed up with the campaign's most egregious lies on the issue, like campaign manager Rick Davis being on the payroll of Freddie Mac, etc., etc. But "Keating Five," despite its very great relevance to the current campaign, isn't appearing anywhere outside progressive blog-dom.

The press seems to have had its fill of being used as a GOP propaganda tool when it comes to Palin as well, given the no-words-allowed UN meeting. But I doubt that will translate to calling a spade a spade when it comes to McCain's wholesale adoption of BushCo's Potemkin Village campaign events.

The list of conservative talking heads who are (finally!) fed up with their party's race to the bottom keeps growing as well, but I don't think that's going to accomplish a whole lot after thirty years of talk-radio style sloganeering.

Which, incidentally, hasn't stopped. In fact, as wingers get more desperate, they're finally starting to stoke racial fears. Just one more thing to look forward to in the coming weeks. I don't know what role race will ultimately play in the national vote (I suspect younger voters won't care, but older voters will find it harder to go with Obama-- kinda like the gay marriage issue), but with the press and conservative pundits discovering that they could possibly be vertebrates, maybe we'll see some backlash on this front as well. That would be a welcome first.

As it (incredibly, stupefyingly) is, McCain still seems to have the electoral edge. I'm still none too optimistic about the final outcome, either.

McCain thinks Spain is somewhere near Bah-raaaaaain. Or, Once a Pageant Contestant, Always a Pageant Contestant

2008-09-18T10:09:00.004-05:00

More likely, he really just doesn't care where it is, who the president is, or much of anything else beyond getting his fat, pasty ass in the Oval Office. It might not be quite as bad as the current Disgrace in Chief thinking the Taliban was a rock band, but it isn't what anyone would've called 'presidential' until the 21st century (TPM has video):

"Would you be willing to meet with the head of our government, Mr. Zapatero?" the [Spanish] questioner asked, in an exchange now being reported by several Spanish outlets.

McCain proceeded to launch into what appeared to be a boilerplate declaration about Mexico and Latin America -- but not Spain -- pressing the need to stand up to world leaders who want to harm America.

"I will meet with those leaders who are our friends and who want to work with us cooperatively," according to one translation. The reporter repeated the question two more times, apparently trying to clarify, but McCain referred again to Latin America.

Finally, the questioner said, "Okay, but I'm talking about Europe -- the president of Spain, would you meet with him?" The Senator offered only a slight variance to his initial comment. "I will reunite with any leader that has the same principles and philosophy that we do: human rights, democracy, and liberty. And I will confront those that don't [have them]."

Encouraging, isn't it? And while McCain does his best to match Bush's idiocy and mendacity on the campaign trail, Sarah Palin keeps making a complete ass of herself whenever she has an unscripted moment. It's just like Miss (Teen) South Carolina's nonsense about maps and education that became such an Internet phenomenon a while back. Only Sarah Palin is in her forties, and running for the second highest office in the nation:

During a quick stop at a diner in Cleveland, Ohio, Sarah Palin was asked for her reaction to the AIG bailout.

“Dissapointed [sic] that taxpayers are called upon to bailout another one,” she said. “Certainly AIG though with the construction bonds that they’re holding and with the insurance that they are holding very, very impactful to Americans so you know the shot that has been called by the Feds its understandable but very, very disappointing that taxpayers are called upon for another one.” . . .

Though she has been on the campaign trail for nearly three weeks, Palin has yet to hold a press conference, and this morning’s stop marked the first time she answered a question from the press on the fly, prompting concerned looks from staffers.

The real stories here are, of course should be reported as "Presidential Hopeful Unaware Spain is in Europe," and "Vice-Presidential Hopeful Doesn't Understand Current Market Crisis." The reported stories will almost certainly be "McCain-Palin staffers say candidates 'misspoke.'"

Cousin Oliver is so adorable when he talks nonsense.

2008-09-09T10:08:00.006-05:00

Know how I mentioned my growing habit of nicking Kevin Drum's pieces as one reason I stopped blogging? Well, here's another one that I agree with from start to depressing finish:

Sarah Palin, peeking out from a thicket of pre-scripted talking points in Colorado Springs, goes off message briefly and explains what went wrong in the home mortgage market:

The fact is, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, they've gotten too big and too expensive to the taxpayers.

A gaffe! But how does it measure up? On a technical basis, I'd say it's impressive. Until now, Fannie and Freddie haven't cost the taxpayers a dime and their current problems aren't really related to their size either. This leaves only a few conjunctions and proper names as sensible parts of this sentence.

On artistic merit, however, the judges have to score this one for Palin. Nobody cares about the minutiae of how GSEs work, after all, and liberal attacks on this score are almost certain to backfire because (a) we're obviously harrassing her unfairly over trivia because she's a small town mom and (b) we're just trying to show off how smart we are. Besides, as Palin said, John McCain is in favor of "reforming things," so he's obviously the right guy to tackle whatever problem it is that Fannie and Freddie suffer from. For liberal critics, then, there's no there there.

Actually, what's really impressive about this is that even though Palin obviously didn't know what she was talking about, she managed to dig smoothly into the standard movement conservative playbook to say something pleasing to the base anyway. Got a problem? It must be government's fault! Something somewhere got too big and too expensive and conservatives need to rein it in.

I think it's more than impressive-- it's absolutely staggering. And yet, it's just the latest entry in the vast "lying or incompetent" archives. Palin's statement is the exact opposite of reality. And in spite of the fact that she is running for the second-highest office in the nation, an example of ignorance (and/or dishonesty) that shows a dangerous lack of concern with major policy issues will have no coverage, no impact, and no repercussions.

Exactly why I'm afraid things haven't gotten bad enough for righties to start jumping ship. I really, really hope it doesn't take something like the Great Depression to finally sink the GOP's post-Nixon era of complete intellectual and moral bankruptcy, but it doesn't look like we're there yet.

UPDATE: Matt Yglesias agrees-- we're still in Bizarroworld. "All this liberal sneering at public officials for not having, you know, [an] in-depth knowledge of policy matters is exactly why we’re seen as out of touch."

Third time's the charm.....?

2008-09-08T13:25:00.004-05:00

One of the reasons I stopped blogging was that I found myself linking more and more to fewer and fewer bloggers. One of them was Kevin Drum. I always liked his posts, but I've become more enthused about his work as time has gone by. And the reason, at least as I perceived it, is that he's become more fired up over time. Mainly, in that he's gotten off the fence more frequently and made his own dissatisfaction with the state of things clear, rather than equivocating in the name of objectivity all the time. Anyway, I'm going to swipe on of his posts in its entirety, since it just about sums up the way so many progressives feel about this election.

TORCHES AND PITCHFORKS....Joe Klein on the GOP's attempt to play that old time gospel one more time:

Maybe I'm getting old, maybe it's that I've seen this act so often before, maybe it's that the people I talk to when I go out on the road really are having a harder time paying for things like health care, gasoline and college tuition, but I'm finding the Republican attempts to derail the conversation from the actual state of the country really depressing and disgraceful this year. They practice Orwellian politics of the crudest sort. They are trying to sell a big lie — that the election is about the social issues of the 1960s, or Barack Obama's patriotism or his eloquence, or the "angry left," when it's really about turning toward a more moderate path after the ideological radicalism and malfeasance of the past eight years.

Hey, when he's right, he's right. And he's right: it's very depressing indeed watching John McCain immolate both himself and the country in yet another raging round of the culture wars solely because he's decided that it's the only way to put John McCain in the Oval Office.

But I don't think it's going to work. The American public isn't going to buy it this time around, and in the end McCain will, once again, have dishonored himself and have nothing to show for it. It's the story of his life.

Of course, Drum is more optimistic than I am. I can't help but think that things can get much, much worse before the people who keep voting these greedy ideologues into office stop voting for the same old lines about atheist/immigrant/Hollywood/Commie/gay/[your bogeymen here!] conspiracies and wake up to the fact that the country is on the brink of multiple crises-- economic, diplomatic, democratic, and environmental-- and that all that cynical flag-waving and Bible-thumping has only served to turn American against American while the GOP carves up the nation into thick, juicy slabs of wealth and power for distribution among themselves.

Of course, I'm basing much of my opinion on conversations I've had with conservative friends and family members. Educated folks all, but still entirely willing to overlook reality and keep on voting GOP.

Reactions to Cousin Oliver's debut

2008-09-04T13:14:00.002-05:00

A tiny sample size, but hopefully indicative of the response we'll see nationally when convention-mania dies down.

Republican reaction: "Wow! Once again we see that the GOP can do no wrong!"

Democratic reaction: "Oh, Lord, not again..."

Independent reaction: "I never did like that episode where Greg's hair turns orange."

Actually, here are a few actual reactions from self-described independents:

"She was a Republican novelty act with a sophomoric script."
"She spent little time helping Americans learn who she is."
"I found her barrage of snide remarks and distortions to be a major turn off."
"Her delivery style reminded me of a high school valedictorian who also might have been a cheerleader."

Cousin Oliver 2008

2008-09-04T10:36:00.002-05:00

I figured I was pretty much finished with blogging. Life was getting a little too complicated to devote as much time to it as it requires, and confronting the endless stream of horror that is the Bush era was taking its toll.

But the news of the last week has just been a little too much to take. Namely, the rather impressive performances and platform of the Democratic convention being immediately followed by the red meat and circus of the Republican convention.

After an initial feeling of joy at the GOP selection of someone whose background is pure Bushco-style history of failing upward, I quickly remembered the reality of the last two elections. After all, the upward-failing nimrod on those tickets was at the top.

And how did the media react to a complete knucklehead with a habit of openly lying about his own public record? We know the answer to that all too well.

Yes, the Republican convention has been utterly devoid of substance. Not only that-- it's been devoid of anything resembling reality. Mitt Romney's baffling "let's drive the liberals out of power" speech got plenty of applause, Giuliani's stupefying potshots at Obama's "east coast elitism" were well-received, and everyone loves the classic "big-spending, big-government liberal" routine, even though the reality has been the exact opposite for nearly thirty years now. Palin is apparently going to go with the "powerless wealthy white man" ploy. With the ol' twisteroo that she's female, naturally.

So once again, it's going to be issues and policy from progressives, and belligerent nationalism from the right. And our track record isn't too good these days.

What will we get from the media? While there was a refreshingly noteworthy MSM presence in reporting Palin's (largely misrepresented, if not outright falsified) background, the campaign has made its decision: if you ask her about policy, you're sexist. If you ask McCain about policy, you're a traitor. If you ask about the GOP platform, you're an angry extremist. Judging from, say, Peggy Noonan's now-infamous discrepancy between her published opinion of the ticket and what she apparently believes, that will probably be a relief for most lazy journalists. After all, there's nothing easier than writing sappy paeans to veterans and working mothers.

Of course, unless you happen to catch prominent conservative pundits speaking candidly, you're not going to hear that Palin's selection was a cynical gimmick aimed solely at short-term electoral gain. Except on progressive blogs. And we're all drooling radicals.

To get to the above link, I think it's almost poignant how people who blog professionally--for actual money-- can still manage a 'Eureka!' moment when GOP luminaries stand in front of a national audience and lie their socks off. They don't care. Their supporters don't care. Most journalists don't seem to care, and those who do aren't getting any serious exposure.

And one final note on the Noonan affair: something that shocked me in the exchange was (assuming I understand this right) their mutual assertion that the GOP always blows it when they adopt a personality-driven campaign instead of an issue-driven campaign. That might've been the most counter-factual statement of the whole convention.

Eleven days? Already?

2008-02-11T21:07:00.000-05:00

I guess that officially makes it a hiatus. I have a lot of irons in the fire at the moment-- and after three and a half years and 3,000(!) posts, I probably shouldn't feel bad about some R&R, right?

Stay tuned, folks. And thanks for staying tuned.

Shhhh! John McCain is making sense.

2008-01-31T13:28:00.000-05:00

No, I haven't fallen off the face of the virtual earth. I haven't even been moping around because of Edwards' departure from the race. I was going to write up another encomium yesterday, but the blogs were so flooded with totally sweet odes to his campaign that I didn't feel the need to chime in.

Plus, it's been a really busy week. Which I never enjoy too much when it involves work and doing my taxes and stuff. Yes! I filed my returns in January! And it's possibly the first time-- ever-- that I didn't lazily file for an extension.

Moving on. The big thing about McCain's candidacy that baffles me, and pretty much every other rational person who follows politics, is why he's earned so much contempt from the right. In a lot of ways, he's the most conservative guy in the race. From this tidbit, though, it appears that the major complaint against McCain is that he's not a dyed-in-the-wool plutocrat.

When the Wall Street Journal reports that Republicans are in danger of losing support in the Florida Panhandle, you know trouble is brewing for the GOP. How the World Works spent its high school years in northern Florida, and the Panhandle is as rock-ribbed a slice of conservative deep South as you will find in either adjoining Alabama or Mississippi.

"A toxic brew of economic anxiety, a deepening housing slump, skyrocketing home insurance, strained schools and the lingering effects of recent hurricanes have spawned a gloomy mood in Florida," writes the Journal's Corey Dade.

But do Republican opinion-makers understand this? Watching the bloggers at the National Review's "The Corner" during Wednesday's Republican debate, you couldn't ignore the feeling that the right-wing elite simply don't understand the mess they're in, or why Sen. John McCain has been winning primaries.

Witness one representative comment:

Yeah, Senator, That's the Problem [Andy McCarthy]

McCain: "There are some greedy people on Wall Street who need to be punished."

Is he our guy, or what?

Trust me, the sarcasm there is so thick you couldn't push through it in a turbo-powered Humvee.

For the despairing folks at the National Review, McCain's threat to punish the greedy is proof of his GOP-values-betraying pro-big government proclivities.

Here's hoping he keeps reminding people about his wacko foreign policy ideas and total ignorance of matters economic.

sdrawkcaB dlroW ehT

2008-01-28T15:14:00.000-05:00

Kinda strange, isn't it? Or-- when you put it in the grand tapestry woven in this nation since the Second Gilded Age began-- maybe it's just the same old crap. From Abu Ghraib to Enron (let's go ahead and throw in Iran-Contra, New Orleans' crumbling levees, and the 80's Savings & Loan scandal) and now the credit crunch, it's always a great time to screw up when you're atop the pyramid [scheme].

Under the stewardship of Dow Kim and Thomas G. Maheras, Merrill Lynch and Citigroup built positions in subprime-related securities that led to $34 billion in write-downs last year. The debacle cost chief executives their jobs and brought two of the world’s premier financial institutions to their knees.

In any other industry, Mr. Kim and Mr. Maheras would be pariahs. But in the looking-glass world of Wall Street, they — and others like them — are hot properties. The two executives are well on their way to reviving their careers, even as global markets shudder at the prospect that Merrill and Citigroup may report further subprime losses in the coming months. . .

The quick comebacks of these executives stand in stark contrast to the plight of the hundreds of investment bankers who have received pink slips in the last two weeks. They also illuminate a peculiar aspect of Wall Street’s own version of a class divide. Senior movers and shakers often land on their feet, no matter how egregious the losses tied to them. The industry rank and file, however, from mergers-and-acquisitions bankers at Bank of America to sales executives in Citigroup’s hedge-fund servicing business, see their jobs eliminated despite being far removed from the subprime crisis.

Just thought I'd help get the week off to a wretched start, ya know?

Our Man Edwards

2008-01-25T17:17:00.000-05:00

This week has made me a bit sad. The Clintons are taking a pasting in the blogosphere for their shady campaign tactics, and reinforcing my cynical view that we've got to sink much, much lower economically and morally as a nation before we see any significant change.

And, of course, John Edwards has pretty much been written off by the media. Here's hoping that he makes a strong showing in South Carolina-- or that Obama, at least, has woken up to the fact that being a Blue Dog Democrat just ain't cutting it these days.

So I might dip into my meager bank account and cough up another small donation to Edwards. I suspect we won't see him as president, but I have great respect for his dedication to social justice, a society that actively works to minimize the number of economic have-nots our corporatist nation spits out by the millions, and a more participatory republic in which the voice of the people drowns out the rattling coins of industry.

John Edwards has run a principled campaign. He talks about poverty even though poor people can afford to give him little money and turn out to vote at low rates, especially in primaries. His "Back Home, Back Roads Barnstorm" campaign this week took him by bus from one small, rural area of South Carolina to the next, even though small cities like Lancaster, Seneca and Greenwood are not nearly as vote-rich as Greenville, Columbia or Charleston. Whatever else might be said of him, if Edwards suffers a crushing, third-place defeat on Saturday, nobody can say he abandoned his core campaign themes or target audiences. One could argue that his rhetoric, his stance on the issues, has slowed Clinton and Obama's rush to the center, has increased their focus on economic issues. . .

Colorfully nicknamed political advisors Dave "Mudcat" Saunders and former Georgia Rep. Ben "Cooter" Jones are traveling with Edwards in the final days before Saturday's do-or-die primary. In Bennettsville, Jones drew a comparison between the sitcom that made him famous and the current campaign. "I wish the world were like Hazzard County," said Jones, who starred in the popular "Dukes of Hazzard" during the late 1970s and early 1980s. "Because the good guys always won, nobody got hurt, and the Duke brothers always made the right moral choice."

If only Edwards' path to the White House were so simple and formulaic. Given the economic situation in the country and the power of Edwards' campaign themes -- delivered as they are by an articulate, attractive, Southern son who ably employs emotional stories of uninsured or displaced Americans to humanize his message -- why haven't more rank-and-file Democrats rallied behind Edwards?

That's the sad question whose answer has eluded me for months now. And one that looks to haunt me for some time to come.

For Sale: Leadership of Global Superpower

2008-01-23T09:05:00.000-05:00

Hopefuls should be ready to spend a minimum of $10 million. Creepy, messianistic autocrats preferred. Ability to lie with straight face a must.

Associated Press, January 8, 2007:

Republican Mitt Romney and 400 of his strongest supporters raised over $6.5 million on Monday in a glitzy fundraising blitz aimed not only at financing his fledgling presidential campaign, but also scaring off potential rivals and putting existing ones on notice…

Romney himself said later that contributing any of his personal wealth to the campaign “would be akin to a nightmare,” but he said he reserved the right to do so should circumstances warrant.

Washington Post, January 22, 2008:

[Romney] has told supporters he will supplement individual donations with a sizable investment from his personal fortune. He lent his campaign $17 million from January to September of 2007, and some in his camp say they expect him to spend $40 million to $50 million on his effort to secure the nomination.

This whole "economy" thing is starting to make me a little nervous

2008-01-22T16:37:00.000-05:00

I'm just trying to figure out how scared I should get, is all.

[T]he hyperlinked global markets of the 21st century measure a Fed chairman by his rate cuts, not his über-rational reasoning. And when you shock the world with an emergency three-quarters of a percentage point cut in the Fed Funds rate that is larger than anything the U.S. has seen in 23 years, your image as Mr. Calm is bound to take a beating. Wasn't he telling us just a few months ago that the housing bust was "contained"?

Well, that's pretty scary. But no reason to panic, right?

Given the clear connection between Tuesday's rate cut and global market turmoil, it is hard to avoid at least one conclusion. Bernanke has proven, once and for all, that juicing the stock market is now considered Job No. 1 for the Federal Reserve Bank. The material effects of rate cuts do not show up in economic growth statistics for months or even years after their enactment. By making an emergency "inter-meeting" cut a mere eight days before its regularly scheduled meeting, Bernanke is conducting economic policy in order to appease market psychology. The fragile psyches of Wall Street traders who played such a pivotal role in creating this mess by romping through the derivatives wonderland, are now in control of government strategy.

Does this mean that my horrible fear of a "stimulus package" that bails out the greedy bastards responsible for this meltdown are as well-founded as I'm thinkin' they are? Hardly a surprise, but pretty frightening.

How bad can it get? Economist Nouriel Roubini, who has been preaching doom for years, declares that the oncoming "recession will be ugly, deep and severe, much more severe than the mild 8-month recessions in 1990-91 and 2001." Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, observes that the housing bust "is creating the largest financial crisis since the Great Depression and might well lead to the most serious recession since World War II."

Such rhetoric seems to belong to a different universe than that which the Federal Reserve inhabits: Its statement, explaining its actions Tuesday morning, was far more constrained, attributing its action to "a weakening of the economic outlook and increasing downside risks to growth." And Treasury Secretary Paulson did his best to give the bad news a positive spin, arguing that what the Fed's rate cut "shows to this country and the rest of the world is that our central bank is nimble and is able to move quickly to respond to market conditions. That should be a confidence builder.''

Well, that's not terribly encouraging, but at least some people are still keeping their cool.

At a White House briefing for reporters, press secretary Dana Perino confined her comments to noting that the White House did not comment on Fed rate cuts or market fluctuations, but that the "the president's advisers are advising him that they are not forecasting a recession."

Never mind. We're screwed.

MLK

2008-01-22T15:02:00.000-05:00

I don't remember who the comedian was, but the bit was a good one. Say a friend is visiting your town and gets lost. Calling you for directions, your friend says he's on Martin Luther King Boulevard. Your response, in any city in America, is going to be the same: "Get the hell away from there, now!" Funny, but sad.

Much less amusing is the attempt by "conservative intellectuals" to rewrite King's legacy-- and their own racism. We still see some of the latter, as when Jonah Goldberg recently mused on the likelihood that Barack Obama would (I think this is what he was trying to say, anyway) win a general election out of white fear that blacks would go collectively insane and burn down the continent.

But Rick Perlstein wrote a pretty sweet essay about MLK's awesomeness that seems like a nice thing to post today.

When Martin Luther King was buried in Atlanta, the live television coverage lasted seven and a half hours. President Johnson announced a national day of mourning: "Together, a nation united and a nation caring and a nation concerned and a nation that thinks more of the nation's interests than we do of any individual self-interest or political interest--that nation can and shall and will overcome." Richard Nixon called King "a great leader--a man determined that the American Negro should win his rightful place alongside all others in our nation." Even one of King's most beastly political enemies, Mississippi Representative William Colmer, chairman of the House rules committee, honored the president's call to unity by terming the murder "a dastardly act."

Others demurred. South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond wrote his constituents, "[W]e are now witnessing the whirlwind sowed years ago when some preachers and teachers began telling people that each man could be his own judge in his own case." Another, even more prominent conservative said it was just the sort of "great tragedy that began when we began compromising with law and order, and people started choosing which laws they'd break."

That was Ronald Reagan, the governor of California, arguing that King had it coming. King was the man who taught people they could choose which laws they'd break--in his soaring exegesis on St. Thomas Aquinas from that Birmingham jail in 1963: "Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. ... Thus it is that I can urge men to obey the 1954 decision of the Supreme Court, for it is morally right; and I can urge them to disobey segregation ordinances, for they are morally wrong."

That's not what you hear from conservatives today, of course. What you get now are convoluted and fantastical tributes arguing that, properly understood, Martin Luther King was actually one of them--or would have been, had he lived. But, if we are going to have a holiday to honor history, we might as well honor history. We might as well recover the true story. Conservatives--both Democrats and Republicans--hated King's doctrines. Hating them was one of the litmus tests of conservatism.

Recommended.

"I've got it! Let's try cutting taxes!"

2008-01-17T16:55:00.000-05:00

The fact that Fearless Leader announced that his plan for fighting a recession was to give more money to billionaires is considered to merit a headline in any publication more sophisitcated than Highlights for Children is sad.

On the positive side, Ben Bernanke, who's suddenly under the national microscope, demonstrated that he's not stupid enough to believe supply-side nonsense.

A number of analysts have raised the possibility that fiscal policy actions might usefully complement monetary policy in supporting economic growth over the next year or so. I agree that fiscal action could be helpful in principle, as fiscal and monetary stimulus together may provide broader support for the economy than monetary policy actions alone. But the design and implementation of the fiscal program are critically important. A fiscal initiative at this juncture could prove quite counterproductive, if (for example) it provided economic stimulus at the wrong time or compromised fiscal discipline in the longer term.

To be useful, a fiscal stimulus package should be implemented quickly and structured so that its effects on aggregate spending are felt as much as possible within the next twelve months or so. Stimulus that comes too late will not help support economic activity in the near term, and it could be actively destabilizing if it comes at a time when growth is already improving. Thus, fiscal measures that involve long lead times or result in additional economic activity only over a protracted period, whatever their intrinsic merits might be, will not provide stimulus when it is most needed. Any fiscal package should also be efficient, in the sense of maximizing the amount of near-term stimulus per dollar of increased federal expenditure or lost revenue. Finally, any program should be explicitly temporary, both to avoid unwanted stimulus beyond the near-term horizon and, importantly, to preclude an increase in the federal government's structural budget deficit. As I have discussed on other occasions, the nation faces daunting long-run budget challenges associated with an aging population, rising health-care costs, and other factors. A fiscal program that increased the structural budget deficit would only make confronting those challenges more difficult.

The terrible thing about it is that this is all A) painfully obvious, and B) the antithesis of everything the Republican party has been working to force on the public for the last two decades.

The disaster that keeps on disastering

2008-01-17T16:47:00.000-05:00

Funny how the administration screwed up Afghanistan so badly that the Taliban are asserting control over large swaths of land again. And how the country is producing record crops of opium poppies. But pitch-black irony is just never quite enough for today's GOP. No, they have to frost that black irony cupcake with Satan's toejam.

Well! Here is some good news for the "free markets solve everything!" crowd!

Iraqi farmers, desperate to make ends meet while simultaneously facing escalating fuel and fertilizer costs, as well as cheap imported fruits and vegetables, have taken to growing opium poppies. Poppy cultivation is spreading rapidly all across Iraq, but is especially prevalent in Diyala province, where local police and security forces are so preoccupied with the ethnic conflicts among the residents of the region, as well as a tenacious insurgency that brings the war and it's associated chaos home - suffice it to say that the drug trade is low on their list of priorities.

Put one more hashmark in the "Law of Unintended Consequences" column, I guess.

The shift to opium cultivation by Iraqis is a very recent development. The first fields, underwritten by Afghani smugglers who supplied the lucrative markets in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, were discovered less than a year ago near Diwaniya in the south, but the practice has now spread to the lush orchards of Diyala, north of Baghdad. A local agricultural engineer identified as M S al-Azawi said that the local farmers received no government support, and turned to opium production as an effort to offset high production costs and low sale prices.

Consider this my personal plea to the entire Republican party: please, do something, anything before the 2008 elections that doesn't waste mountains of cash, completely backfire, or involve criminal activity. Note that I used "or" there-- I'll settle for just one. Please?

Eeeeeeek!

2008-01-16T19:46:00.001-05:00

I'd really like to find the piece I read earlier this week about the story of Iranian threats against an American warship that just didn't add up. It also mentioned one GOP presidential hopeful who said he thought the incident was being blown out of proportion, and people were oh, being a bit premature in talking about war. The other hopefuls immediately recognized this level-headed piece of analysis for what it really was: the perfect opportunity to act like complete shitheads. "I would've bombed 'em." "Well I would've invaded." Oh, yeah? Well I would've glassed the hemisphere!" Which is roughly the Republican equivalent of choosing your street gang's leader by picking the one who screams loudest and jumps on the highest piece of furniture when a mouse walks in the room.

At any rate, the story of provocative, aggressive action on the part of the Iranians doesn't hold water-- and this account has the usual hallmarks of the same White House spin ladled to the same press stenographers.

Gareth Porter, a journalist who previously broke a story regarding a secret Iranian peace overture to the Bush Administration in 2006, writing for the Asia Times states that the event was hyped up into a major incident after the original press release described the event as somewhat routine and did not refer to any threat to "explode" US ships or any similar confrontation. . . .

The fact that several mainstream reports then emerged at the same time all carrying almost identical accounts of the incident, including the details of threats to explode vessels and dropping white boxes, can be traced back to a press briefing by a top Pentagon official in charge of media relations, Porter divulges.

He identifies Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman's off the record comments to journalists as the catalyst for the ensuing pandemonium. Porter states that Whitman hadn't wished to be identified as the source:

In an apparent slip-up, however, an Associated Press story that morning cited Whitman as the source for the statement that US ships were about to fire when the Iranian boats turned and moved away - a part of the story that other correspondents had attributed to an unnamed Pentagon official.

Three days later, at the height of the hype, the Pentagon released a video of the incident into which had been inserted audio of a strange voice threatening to "explode" the US vessel.

Special thanks for the link go out to fruitylips-- thunderlips. I meant thunderlips. I did.

Special Bulletin

2008-01-16T17:18:00.000-05:00

My fellow citizens, clearly, the day is upon us when we must, regrettably, relinquish some of our cherished personal liberties in favor of peace, strength, and security. An enemy threatens the United States from within-- seeks to undermine the values we hold most dear simply because of their blind hatred of our freedom and liberty. This scourge of justice has infiltrated the highest levels of our government in a despicable attempt to wreak havoc that we simply cannot sit idly by and watch, though these instruments of darkness would throw our freedoms back in our face with contempt and derision, pleading for the free speech and tolerance that they would deny us at the first opportunity.

That is why I am signing into law, with the heaviest of hearts but the clearest of consciences, the Republican Internment Act of 2008.

Just be glad you're not this guy

2008-01-16T16:34:00.000-05:00

Michigan? I had two reactions: I keep hoping different candidates win, and the fact that Romney now has two firsts and two seconds under his belt is significant. As Kevin Drum put it last night, may the bloodletting continue.

But the story I wanted to mention has been at the top of the page at Salon all day. When the headline mentioned Lee Siegel, my first thought was "Who?" The word blogofascism brought it all back, though. The douchebaggery, the pompous rants on utterly insignificant aspects of daily life-- in hell, the forces of ultimate darkness might replace observational humor with the tedious sanctimony of Siegel's 'observational outrage.' It's just as hackneyed and unfunny as the stereotypical airline food routine, but it also inspires clinical depression and a profound sense of helplessness.

I think the most unfortunate part of the whole thing is how desperate he is to convince anyone who'll listen that society is being ripped apart by black-hearted fiends who do things like misrepresent themselves in online forums in order to spread disinformation and strife. You know, except when he does it. I'm not sure if it's the fascinating end-is-nigh tone of his goofy diatribes, the incredible he-can't-be-serious spectacle of watching someone caught in flagrante dilecto insisting for literally years that "that whole dressed like a French maid in an alley while trading crack for sex with an underage hooker thing" was a prank. ("What's the matter? Don't you get it?!?")

Or maybe it's just the schadenfreude buzz I get from seeing pomposity and hypocrisy get the ignore-the-man-behind-the-curtain treatment. Go ahead and have a helping. It's delicious.

According to Wikipedia (an institution he despises), Siegel has been book critic for the Nation, art critic for Slate, staff writer for Talk and Harper's magazines, contributing writer for the Los Angeles Times Book Review, senior editor at the New Republic ... on and on he goes, a culture unto himself, weighing in on all things great and small. He has even managed to have an opinion about baseball caps, which -- I never knew this -- signify "a lazily defiant casualness ... a hopelessness about the possibility of originality ever to fly in the face of hierarchy."

Siegel's Olympian perch began to sag a little in September 2006 when, stung by anonymous reactions to his New Republic culture blog, he decided to pose as a reader himself under the handle "sprezzatura." Slamming all his detractors ("immature, abusive sheep") and dousing the blogmaster with incense ("Siegel is brave, brilliant, and wittier than [Jon] Stewart will ever be ... You couldn't tie Siegel's shoelaces"), author and sock puppet were quickly sniffed out by other readers. Siegel was suspended, and his blog was cast into the ether.

Which brings us to his book on how the Internet is denying us the high-minded genius sprezz... errrr, Lee Siegel.

And to do it in the guise of public service. Those anonymous assassins, it turns out, weren't just hurting Siegel (and, he reminds us, his mother), they were ripping holes in our cultural fabric. The subtitle of Siegel's book is "Being Human in the Age of the Mob," and it's worth noting the Burkean scowl of that "mob." Siegel may have liberal credentials, but he is making, at bottom, a conservative argument: in favor of gatekeepers and cultural elites, against the cacophony of untrammeled opinion.

In the same way that Edmund Burke regarded the guillotine in the Place de la Révolution, Siegel regards Gawker and YouTube. And when he writes that "the Internet is possibly the most radical transformation of private and public life in the history of humankind," he doesn't mean "radical" in a nice way (any more than Burke did). Bad times are a-brewing. The "borders of truth" are eroding. Knowledge is "devalued into information." Americans are producing, not enjoying, their own leisure. Our interior lives are being "packaged like merchandise," and "the sources of critical detachment are drying up, as book supplements disappear from newspapers and what passes for critical thinking in the more intellectually lively magazines gives way to the Internet's emphasis on cuteness, novelty, buzz, and pursuit of the 'viral.'"

See? I told you it was tasty stuff. And if anyone comes across defenses of Siegel's unintentionally silly noodlings that aren't from "conservative intellectuals," please let me know. Seriously, cuteness, novelty, and buzz? Apparently Siegel was never a child and fell to earth in a meteor. Or otherwise missed the Pet Rock, Smurfs, Troll Dolls, Rubik's Cube, Pac-Man, the Slink, Hello Kitty and about a zillion other fads from the last thirty years or so. Or maybe he's just decided that the imminence of the collapse of Western civilization has an inversely proportional relationship to society's respect for Lee Siegel.

In the words of Marcia Brady....

2008-01-15T13:48:00.000-05:00

"Something suddenly came up." Yep, I've gotten pretty busy here, so today will be postless. Sorry, folks. But y'all come back now, ya hear?

This tale of efficiency brought to you by the Imaginary Free Market

2008-01-14T09:25:00.000-05:00

With additional support from the Meritocracy Council.

When I saw the headline Millions Lose Homes, Lender CEO Gets $88 Million, I had no idea this story would be such a worthy example (you know, in a dark, hellish, eternal-nightmare-of-the-soul sort of way) of everything that's wrong with our corporatist system.

Angelo Mozilo, the co-founder and public face of troubled mortgage giant Countrywide, is eligible for tens if not hundreds of millions in compensation and perks on the sale of the company to Bank of America.

During calendar 2006, the latest period available for review in Securities and Exchange Commission filings, Mozilo took home $48.1 million in compensation. An early analysis of SEC filings by the Los Angeles Times suggests he could get upward of $115 million when he leaves after the sale is complete, despite the fact that the company tanked during the recent subprime mortgage crisis.

In December, Countrywide reported a record number of foreclosures and delinquencies in its loan portfolio. The value of shares has fallen more than 84 percent since mid-May of last year.

I'll bet you can see where I'm going with this. It's been the long, sad story of the mortgage/credit mess we're still walking blithely into in this country. And the preferred business model of revered executive minds like Ken Lay or Dennis Kozlowski. It's exactly the same model promoted by one of my undergraduate business professors-- the most reviled individual in the department, at least by students, for being a complete prick and damn proud of it, thank you very much.

Fitting that his company is being picked up by Bank of America, issuer of credit cards to people carefully selected for their ability to be debt slaves for decades to come.

You know, if I were to enumerate the many ways in which this article gives the lie to the entire myth of GOP economic policies, I'd lose my entire day. Read it, be outraged, pass it around. The lesson I take away is this: the Republican definition of a free, open, and competitive market is one in which the wealthy are able to restrict, close, and manipulate the market to provide themselves with impossibly large sums of money, airtight job security, and a Soviet-era guarantee that even failure will bring a personal windfall if you know the right people. All you have to do is deprive as many less-wealthy people as you can of money, job security, a future of possibility, and preferably health care and a home.

Okay. So the guy with decades of experience walked right into a moneymaking scheme that anyone with half a brain could have told him would mean an inevitable day of reckoning. At least, in spite of his carefully constructed safety net, he'll be leaving the company in shame and disgrace, right?

The company will retain Mozilo as a consultant. Mozilo is obligated to make himself available for a specified period of time each month through December 2011 and at the rate of $400,000 per year.

The most average newspaper article of the year

2008-01-14T09:05:00.000-05:00

Somewhere, anyway. It isn't that the article is amazing on its own merits, but it leaped out at me for being surprisingly fact-filled and objective. So it stands head and shoulders above most lazy campaign coverage we see, but in a more mature time and place, I'd like to think that this qualifies as simply a normal, run-of-the-mill, everyday, quotidian, perfectly average newspaper article.

The coalition of fiscal conservatives, national security conservatives, anti-tax activists and social conservatives that rallied behind Reagan in 1980 and has defined the Republican Party ever since is coming apart at the seams heading into the 2008 election.

All the men running for the party's presidential nomination invoke Reagan's name repeatedly. But all of them offend at least one wing of the party enough that they'd find it difficult, and perhaps impossible, to pull the disparate elements of the old coalition together.

The thing that gets me is why they feel obliged to employ euphemism when reporting on candidates' more questionable actions and ideas. There's no mention of McCain's fervent (or simply insane) support of the Iraq disaster, and Rudy Giuliani's tawdry-- and very public-- personal life "falls short of Christian conservative ideals." But I admit that a little unnecessary discretion is far preferable to countless hours of inane cable coverage of cigarette-smoking, expensive haircuts, or wardrobe choices.

And if anyone can explain the baffling bit about GOP support for Clinton at the end, I'd be grateful.

Election season is law-breakin' season down at the megachurch

2008-01-10T18:02:00.000-05:00

Sure, pastors are people, too. And asking someone to completely divorce (or annul) their politics in front of the congregation is probably too much to ask. But using your tax-exempt status to create a national network of election-year activists is just plain wrong. Oh, and illegal.

Today the Texas Freedom Network (TFN), a religious right watchdog group, asked the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to investigate a non-profit organization behind funding the Texas Restoration Project, which sponsored "Pastors' Policy Briefings" featuring Texas Governor Rick Perry (when he was running for office), and which are being replicated in other states, where they have featured Mike Huckabee as a speaker.

The TFN revelations are a major development in uncovering the money behind the Texas Restoration Project; until today, the funding behind the group remained cloaked in secrecy, despite its efforts to influence the election in Texas.

TFN charges that a 501(c)(3) organization set up in 2005, the Niemoller Foundation, provided the funding for the Texas Restoration Project. The Niemoller Foundation's 2005 tax return shows that it received funding from James Leininger, a major financial backer of the religious right who hosted a fundraiser for Huckabee last month; Bo Pilgrim, founder of the Pilgrims' Pride poultry processor whose nephew Buddy Pilgrim hosted a fundraiser for Huckabee in November; and Bob J. Perry, a big funder of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. TFN asked the IRS to investigate whether the organization violated its tax-exempt status by engaging in partisan electioneering.

As I've reported in The FundamentaList, Huckabee has spoken at at least two "Pastors' Policy Briefings," sponsored by the Iowa Renewal Project and the South Carolina Renewal Project. These briefings, which have also taken place in other states, have featured Newt Gingrich riffing on his book, Rediscovering God in America; David Barton, a former Texas GOP co-chair and Republican National Committee consultant who fancies himself a historian but is better described as a historical revisionist anxious to peddle the "Christian nation" mythology; Huckabee backer Tim LaHaye; and Laurence White, a Texas minister who organized the Texas Restoration Project and served on the board of the Niemoller Foundation.

A call to the Niemoller Foundation phone number turned out to be the number for an insurance firm in Houston, whose general counsel, Andrew Adams, is on the Niemoller board. Adams did not immediately return the call. According to the insurance firm's Web site, Adams is a member of White's church.

One other note: a man who publicly professes to believe that men and dinosaurs hung out together is probably not your best bet for leader of a global superpower.

Hopefully the last word on "Liberal Fascism"

2008-01-10T17:23:00.000-05:00

The Prospect follows up their excellent review shredding Goldberg's goofy screed by catching him accidentally(?) telling the truth. And a funny interpretation. I apologize if linking to a post that links to other posts is too "meta," but I couldn't resist.

Jesus' General shares this Jonah Goldberg gem from a recent NPR interview:

Jonah Goldberg: The benefit of Bush’s compassionate conservatism [in 2000] was that it was majorly a marketing slogan…
Alex Chadwick: You mean you’re worried Mike Huckabee might actually mean it?

Goldberg: Yes, that’s what I’m terrified of.

Sadly, No! interprets this in light of Goldberg's statement that "populism is a useful and healthy passion when aimed at the liberal elite."

In other words: it’s cool to rile up the idiot vote by telling them that liberals want to ban Christmas, but helping them pay for their kids’ health care goes way, way over the line. Religion, in Jonah’s world, truly is the Cheetos bag of the masses.

Indeed, this tracks pretty well with former White House official David Kuo's experience, as described in his book Tempting Faith: Conservative elites openly scorn the working-class evangelicals whose fears they crassly manipulate in order to implement their pro-rich agenda.

"Majorly"?!? Yes, he's one serious intellectual. But that's about as close to an admission that his goal is to implement the "Big Lie" strategy of furthering his own authoritarian dreams.

Twisteroos. And spankings for narcissistic pundits.

2008-01-09T15:20:00.000-05:00

What a day in the blogosphere, eh? Personally, I like Kevin Drum's coverage of last night's results. It's a lot less snide than others in chiding the press, but also makes a lot of salient points. Particularly on the electability of McCain:

It's true that matchup polls show McCain doing well against Hillary, but honestly, does anybody think those polls are even remotely meaningful nine months before the election? I don't.

There are two things that keep me from being worried about a Clinton vs. McCain matchup. The first is that this simply looks to be a Democratic year. Tick off the reasons: Americans don't like to keep a single political party in the White House for more than eight years (it's only happened once in the postwar era). The war in Iraq is unpopular. The economy is sinking. The 9/11 effect has worn off. Conservatives are tired and plainly lack new ideas.

Second, I don't think McCain is nearly as attractive a candidate as a lot of people think. Again, tick off the reasons: He's 72 years old. He's a dead-ender for the war. (Do you think "a million years in Iraq" will play well with moderates in November?) A lot of his independent cred has been shredded over the past couple of years. He'll get evangelical votes, but he won't get their enthusiastic support, the way George Bush did. Ditto for nativist votes. He's got a long, very conservative voting record that's never really been exposed to a national audience. The Keating Five scandal will get revisited. Press ardor for McCain will likely diminish as his campaign becomes less open, as it's bound to do.

That all makes sense to me, with the exception of the press continuing to ignore facts in favor of narrative.

But my main disappointment with the outcome is that Edwards didn't manage another second-place finish. Already ignored by a press corps obsessed with the Clintons and the erstwhile Horatio Alger story of Obama, this is probably going to be a serious blow to his campaign. On the other hand, if upcoming primaries result in a few more Obama-Edwards headlines, I won't be shedding any tears. Several bloggers and columnists ahve noted a sudden uptick in Obama's use of words like "progressive" and talking about the struggling middle class. Hopefully it wasn't just calculated to siphon votes from Edwards, and the inane DLC notion of an ever-more-conservative America is in the toilet.

Hopefully I'll find myself able to get back to more serious topics soon. But it's always nice to take at least a wee vacation from terrifying tales of credit card and mortgage woes, looming recession at a time of unprecedented fiscal insecurity, a new low for the US health care system, a dim Defense Department forecast on Iraq-- you know, that sort of thing. Have a lovely evening!

Something tangentially related to New Hampshire!

2008-01-08T15:28:00.000-05:00

Tying in with a post from yesterday and my rant du jour of the day, here's Rudy Giuliani de-linking a loaded term from its grave, historical significance. Only the outcome is that he's losing all his credibility and making it harder for fellow authoritarians to transform fear and tragedy into political power. Keep up the self-parody, Rudy!

"[Hillary's "emotional moment"] is not something I would judge anybody on one way or the other. And the reality is, if you look at me -- Sept. 11, the funerals, the memorial services, there were times in which it was just impossible not to feel ... the emotion."

(Video at the link. And early reports indicate that primary voting in a certain New England state is, like Iowa, very high. Always a good thing.)

Nothing about New Hampshire!

2008-01-08T14:19:00.000-05:00

I was going to break my word right out of the gate, but I think yesterday's posts conveyed how frustrated and disheartened I am by the way this (monumentally important) presidential election is being treated like an episode of..... Saved by the Bell, maybe. Instead, I'm going to bring up something that I find even more troubling, but in a different sort of way.

Revisionism, or (to use one of the author's words that was new to me) revanchism, has become one of the central tactics of American conservatism. But as scary as it is to see Holocaust deniers present absurdities as thoughtful scholarship, and as sad as it is to see global warming deniers pass off their ignorance as intellectual honesty, leading conservative voices have no trouble whatsoever presenting lies as fact. To wit:

The title [of Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism] alone is enough to indicate its thoroughgoing incoherence: of all the things we know about fascism and the traits that comprise it, one of the few things that historians will readily agree upon is its overwhelming antiliberalism. One might as well write about anti-Semitic neoconservatism, or Ptolemaic quantum theory, or strength in ignorance. Goldberg isn't content to simply create an oxymoron; this entire enterprise, in fact, is classic Newspeak.

Indeed, Goldberg even makes some use of Orwell, noting that the author of 1984 once dismissed the misuse of "fascism" as meaning "something not desirable." Of course, Orwell was railing against the loss of the word's meaning, while Goldberg, conversely, revels in it -- he refers to Orwell's critique as his "definition of fascism."

It's more than just "lying." It's a breathtaking misrepresentation of reality, an attempt to hoodwink an entire nation into believing that up is down, and a fraud of epic proportions made worse by its malicious intent. And it wouldn't be complete without the sick irony that it is exactly what it professes to oppose. But we're also given a bonus sick irony at no extra charge (but only if you drink the Flavor-Aid, so act now!). What is presented as fearless truth-telling serves the purpose of obfuscating the truth by de-linking these loaded, overused terms from their grave and all too real historical significance. And using Orwell to do it, no less.

More astonishing is the reaction of Goldberg's boosters (have a look at some discussions of the book on Amazon's site, where it ranks in the top 100 sellers). The baffling arguments they make to support what they want to believe are just as nonsensical-- and as obstinately, defiantly, and proudly misinformed as they could be. But that's covered in the review as well:

More to the point, perhaps, is that discussing fascism's "intellectual foundations" is a nonsensical enterprise in the face of the consensus historical understanding that anti-intellectualism is an essential trait of fascism, a fact that Goldberg briefly acknowledges without assessing its impact on his thesis. As Umberto Eco put it, the fascist insistence on action for its own sake means that "it must be taken before, or without, reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation." In this worldview, the instincts of the fascist leader are always superior to the logic and reason of puling intellectuals. (. . .)

Liberal Fascism is like a number of other recent attempts at historical revisionism by popular right-wing pundits -- including, notably, Michelle Malkin's attempt to justify the Japanese-American internment in her book In Defense of Internment, and Ann Coulter's attempt to rehabilitate McCarthy's reputation in her book Treason -- in that it employs the same historical methodology used by Holocaust deniers and other right-wing revanchists: namely, it selects a narrow band of often unrepresentative facts, distorts their meaning, and simultaneously elides and ignores whole mountains of contravening evidence and broader context. These are simply theses in search of support, not anything like serious history.

What goes missing from Goldberg's account of fascism is that, while he describes nearly every kind of liberal enterprise or ideology as representing American fascism, he wipes from the pages of history the fact that there have been fascists operating within the nation's culture for the better part of the past century.

Yup. It's an excellent piece on a dangerous recent trend in American politics. And a scenario that's played out countless times in human history.

The "Memory Hole" President

2008-01-07T19:55:00.000-05:00

Sigh. It's been an incredibly annoying week already in campaign coverage. But it would be interesting to understand the chicken-or-egg issue of bounces, comebacks, and all that other stuff. The MSM has been playing drama queen all along, and while early primary wins are obviously going to fuel interest in and support for candidates, it's tough to imagine how much of that is generated by breathless pseudo-journalistic pipe dreams (e.g., "He's like a black JFK!" or "He's from Arkansas-- and he's a comeback kid, too!"). But instead of going off on a tear, I'll just say that nothing's changed in the loathsome role of major news outlets in covering presidential campaigns.

On the Republican side, the press has been a bit more fickle than usual. They wrote McCain off pretty early in favor of Giuliani and his now-infamous "[Noun] [verb] 9/11" strategy. Of course, he turned out to be an authoritarian crook. Romney was treated pretty well for a while there, but doesn't seem to be getting much press at all these days-- much less effusive, hero-worship press. Fred Thompson got some great press until he started appearing in public. Huckabee makes for great copy, but still doesn't seem to be taken very seriously in terms of policy (and thank heaven for that, from the asinine "flat tax" to his complete lack of even basic foreign policy knowledge).

Most recently, John McCain is getting a big second look-- and astonishingly positive press, considering how nuts he appears to be. Then there's the fact that his foreign policy appears to be based largely on the American public being pretty stupid and having no attention span. Clueless, arrogant, and condescending. No wonder Lieberman likes him so much.

According to presidential candidate John McCain, only the handling of the Iraq war was a mistake -- not the war itself.

"It's not American presence that bothers the American people, it's American causalities," said McCain in an interview with Tim Russert on NBC's "Meet The Press" on Sunday. (. . .)

"What I believe we can achieve is a reduction in casualties to the point where the Iraqis are doing the fighting and dying [and] we're supporting them," McCain said.

He said it would be "hard to say" how many U.S. troops would need to stay in Iraq, but assured that they would be "out of harm's way."

When Russert asked him if, like Bush, McCain would have supported the Iraq war even if no weapons of mass destruction were believed present in Iraq, McCain seemed to dismiss the question as irrelevant.

"If frogs had wings ... we can talk about lots of hypotheticals," he said. "The point is if we had done it right, you and I wouldn't even be discussing it now."

Strange, given that McCain's entire premise is a hypothetical. Even stranger, his opinion of "doing it right" is apparently "admitting Iraq was the enemy of Iran, Afghanistan, and Al Qaeda, had no WMDs, and no connection with 9/11-- but invading them anyway." And he's the one heaping scorn on those who question his batshit crazy ideas.

'Daily Howler' is already taken, right?

2008-01-07T13:42:00.000-05:00

I'm finding it difficult to write posts these days. I'm sure part of it is vacation hangover, but the real culprit is the primaries. Trying to express anything substantive about them is practically impossible-- something that's obvious with a glance at pretty much any progressive blog. The campaign coverage is devoid of substance, the press is devoted not to informing the public but in creating their lazy narratives and gossiping about candidates' spouses. And, as always, it pretty much plays out in the MSM as feckless Democrat versus tough, serious Republican. Only this time, it isn't going all that well on the GOP side since all the candidates are frightening or nutty in some very tangible way.

Glenn Greenwald found a way to cover all of that, and add a cherry of racism on top, in his discussion of prominent conservative leaders' and the successes of Barack Obama.

Over at National Review, Jonah Goldberg has a "theory" about what might help Obama win in the general election. After noting that Obama will be "the first serious mainstream black contender for the White House," Goldberg warns (emphasis added):

I think it's worth imagining a certain scenario. Imagine the Democrats do rally around Obama. Imagine the media invests as heavily in him as I think we all know they will if he's the nominee -- and then imagine he loses. I seriously think certain segments of American political life will become completely unhinged. I can imagine the fear of this social unraveling actually aiding Obama enormously in 2008.

I wonder: in Jonah Goldberg's "imagination," which (ahem) "certain segments" of the American population exactly will "become completely unhinged" if Obama loses and thereby spawn "social unraveling"? And who are the people who are going so deeply to fear this "social unraveling" that they vote for Obama just in order to keep those "certain segments" in line and well-behaved?

This actually fits a couple of Republican maxims: A) If they accuse you of it (the whole "liberal PC thought police" routine), they're doing it themselves, and B) the more outrage they express, the more accurate the accusation. Oh, and it's unfathomably retarded. And yes, outraged Republicans, it's hopelessly racist. The dog-whistle racism isn't fooling anyone, no matter what David Brooks would like to think.

He also touches on one of the most under-reported stories of the decade-- the oppressed, white, Christian males flown from D.C. to Florida to deny people the right to have their votes counted in 2000. Which, if memory serves, much of the MSM presented as "regular folks" expressing such a surprising amount of angry indignation that they must be onto something valid.

One thing about Greenwald's post: it has a thousand comments! And I hate to even look at them. Not just because there's going to be plenty of outrage from the aforementioned picked-on, powerless white Christian males (and Michelle Malkin), but because there will undoubtedly be a fair amount of chomping-on-the-bait silliness from liberal commenters. No, I can't bear to look. But I'm sure I will at some point. Sigh.

Obligatory Iowa Post

2008-01-04T12:33:00.000-05:00

Following up on yesterday's post theft, I'm going to, uhhhh..... steal another post. I wasn't surprised that Huckabee won, I'm glad that Giuliani did so poorly (and has managed to pretty much destroy GOP pimping of 9/11 single-handedly), and it was nice to see Edwards take second. The popular prediction seems to be that it was victory or the end for him in Iowa, but I'm inclined to think that a victory over either Obama or Clinton would mean more coverage for his campaign, and as I'm pretty sure I mentioned before, a lot of dyed-in-the-wool conservatives I know actually admitted to liking Edwards. And preferring him to most of the GOP contenders. Even though he's the most liberal of the top-tier candidates!

It's been interesting to observe the anti-Huckabee fury coming from corporatists, supply-siders, etc., and I welcome any divisiveness in that famed Republican party discipline. "He doesn't detest to detest non-millionaires" is about the best thing I can say about him, and wouldn't you know that's exactly what the WSJ crew hates about the guy.

Anyway, I liked what Kevin Drum had to say about the results:

I still think Obama had a helluva victory last night and is now the likely (though far from certain) Democratic nominee, while Huckabee also had a helluva victory but seems highly unlikely to be the eventual Republican nominee.

So who will be? I don't know, but after watching this I sure hope it isn't John McCain. What an imperialist! Then again, I also hope it won't be Rudy Giuliani. What a lunatic! And not Huckabee of course. What an empty Bible-thumping suit! But not Mitt Romney or Fred Thompson either. What a couple of image mongers! Can I root for them all to lose?

And congratulations to Obama. I prefer Edwards as more genuinely progressive, and in no small part because of his efforts to get corporate cash out of politics (it's already screwed uped broadcasting, credit card and mortgage debt, student loans, CAFE standards, and presents huge obstacles for action on global warming, health care reform, etc.), but I certainly don't have any axe to grind with Obama. I'm just generally uncomfortable with 'unknown quantity' candidates.

OK if I DON'T check the news for a while?

2008-01-03T15:07:00.000-05:00

I'm not looking forward to the results in Iowa, and somehow the presidential campaign as a whole just keeps getting more unsettling. Without saying too much about it myself, I'll just steal a post from Scott Lemieux at the Prospect that sounds like I could've written it. Except for the stuff about Romney. I suspect that his Mormonism and obvious artificiality (it's all about convincing insincerity with the GOP rank and file) are bigger hurdles than a lot of fellow liberals believe. On the Republican side, I'll be rooting for a surprise win by Incitatus.

In addition to Tom [Schaller], I see that Josh Marshall -- who, like me, had written off McCain's candidacy long ago -- now sees McCain as the favorite. Depressingly, I think this is right. Certainly, I agree with Josh that the GOP is now an effective two-man race between McCain and Romney, and you have to think that McCain has a good shot (although I also agree that Romney really shouldn't be written off; he will be more acceptable to a lot of conservatives than McCain.) For reasons that Matt explains here, a McCain win would be very bad for the Dems: despite his moderate reputation he's a fiscal and cultural reactionary with nutty foreign policy views, he has the best chance of winning of any major GOP candidate, and a McCain candidacy (especially if he's matched up against Clinton or Edwards) would result in an anti-Democratic media bloodbath comparable to 2000. I'm definitely cheering for Romney tonight...

After a zillion of these stories, I've officially run out of clever titles.

2008-01-03T13:23:00.000-05:00

Not that we need any more examples of the social Darwinism of Federalist Society-style conservatism or this administration's inability to do anything unironic-- I'd be thrilled to have far fewer-- but here we go again.

As expected, California has wasted no time in starting off the new year with a challenge to the the EPA's recent Clean Air Act waiver denial, filing a petition for review in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals today. The lawsuit has been joined by fifteen other states or state agencies. In his statement on the case, California Attorney General Jerry Brown emphatically dismissed the December 19 letter to Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger that marks EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson's formal denial of the petition:

"The denial letter was shocking in its incoherence and utter failure to provide legal justification for the administrator's unprecedented action," California Attorney General Brown said. "The EPA has done nothing at the national level to curb greenhouse gases and now it has wrongfully and illegally blocked California's landmark tailpipe emissions standards, despite the fact that sixteen states have moved to adopt them."

"The Tapes," BushCo Style

2008-01-03T11:22:00.000-05:00

If it seems like this administration is determined to repeat every error of the last five or so Republican administrations-- only tenfold-- it's because that's exactly what they're accomplishing. I realize it's way too early to start comparing the destroyed interrogation tapes with Nixon's famous silent stretches, but at least it represents another (typically slim) chance to see justice served when it comes to this administration's crimes.

It looks like the CIA's torture-tape scandal has hit the big time.

Attorney General Michael Mukasey appointed an outside prosecutor Wednesday to lead a criminal investigation into the destruction of CIA interrogation videotapes.

The CIA acknowledged last month that it destroyed videos of officers using tough interrogation methods while questioning two al-Qaida suspects. The acknowledgment sparked a congressional inquiry and a preliminary investigation by Justice.

"The Department's National Security Division has recommended, and I have concluded, that there is a basis for initiating a criminal investigation of this matter, and I have taken steps to begin that investigation," Mukasey said in a statement released Wednesday.

Overseeing the case will be John Durham, a federal prosecutor in Connecticut, and a former colleague of Kevin O'Connor, the current #3 official in Mukasey's Justice Department.

It's often difficult to know for sure how independent a prosecutor is going to be, but the AP notes that Durham has "a reputation as one of the nation's most relentless prosecutors," which he earned "as an outside prosecutor overseeing an investigation into the FBI's use of mob informants in Boston and helped send several Connecticut public officials to prison."

That doesn't appear to be p.r. spin; Paul Kiel posted his c.v. and it certainly looks like he's a credible, veteran prosecutor.

Jus' Reg'lar Fokes

2008-01-02T14:48:00.000-05:00

THEN: When a Glamor correspondent asked Governor Bush what he thought about the Taliban, he just shrugged his shoulders, bemused. It took a bit of prompting from the journalist ("discrimination against women in Afghanistan") for Bush to rouse himself: Taliban in Afghanistan! Absolutely. Reprisals. I thought you were talking about some rock group.

NOW: Huckabee came under fire in early December when, in response to a reporter’s question about the Iran report, Huckabee said he wasn’t aware of it. Huckabee’s lack of familiarity with the National Intelligence Estimate — a report that showed Iran had discontinued its nuclear program — provided fuel for his critics who said he was a lightweight on foreign policy.

“The whole perception was based on an ambush question on the NIE report,” Huckabee said in an interview Monday with the Quad-City Times. “From there, it was like, ‘Wow.’ That was released at 10 o’clock in the morning. At 5:30 in the afternoon, somebody says, ‘Have you read the report?’ Maybe I should’ve said, ‘Have you read the report?’ President Bush didn’t read it for four years; I don’t know why I should read it in four hours.”

While I'm confident Bush was telling the truth when he mistook the Taliban for a band, Huckabee has seen fit to lie about his own ignorance of current events. The report was headline news for several days before Huckabee was "ambushed" with the question. His Bush-style quip defending his ignorance, however, is quite honest:

“The point I’m trying to make is that, on the campaign trail, nobody’s going to be able, if they’ve been campaigning as hard as we have been, to keep up with every single thing, from what happened to Britney last night to who won ‘Dancing with the Stars.’ ”

Translation: "In this day and age, pretending to be fit for high office is a full-time charade. Especially for an idiot."

I'm not sure whether I should be more frightened by the fact that imbeciles are considered top-tier candidates for the Republican nomination these days, that they're so gleefully indifferent to their own stupidity... or that they actually win elections. (Or at least come close enough to steal them.)

Business as Usual

2008-01-02T14:21:00.000-05:00

I'm back, I had a nice vacation, and all that stuff. And wouldn't you know that not much has changed in the intervening two weeks.

BushCo is still BushCo-- as witnessed by a recent signing statement. In just one stroke of the pen, the White House has managed to defy the unanimous will of Congress, demonstrate that they couldn't care less about 'federalism,' and also don't think much of free market capitalism.

The bill, which passed both houses of Congress unanimously, makes it easier for mutual funds and private pension fund managers to sell their investments and allows states to prohibit debt financing for companies that do business in Sudan. It also requires companies seeking contracts with the federal government to certify that they are not doing business in Sudan. . .

But the administration has expressed reservations about the bill, and Mr. Bush’s signature was accompanied by a proviso known as a signing statement, in which he said he was reserving the authority to overrule state and local divestment decisions if they conflicted with foreign policy. The statement said the measure “risks being interpreted as insulating” state and local divestment actions from federal oversight.

The NYT article also makes a baffling claim: "Mr. Bush has long sought an effective way to press Sudan to end the violence in Darfur." Technically true, since it only claims he's seeking a way to get Sudan to do something, but it suggests that he's actually doing something. Aside from pay lip service to some ideal he actually couldn't care less about (like federalism, free market capitalism, etc.).

Overdue, postponed, and out of sight.

2007-12-23T12:30:00.000-05:00

Yes, I should've gotten to this yesterday, but the week got away from me in preparation for the coming holidays. Sadly, there was no shortage of stories to scare the pants right offa ya. But I thought I'd at least get in a couple of stories before heading for the airport to start my desperately needed vacation.

ITEM! GOP presidential hopefuls evasive, despotic in response to questions on presidential power!

Republican John McCain says that if he is elected president, he would consider himself bound to obey treaties because they are "the law of the land." But Mitt Romney says he would consider himself free to bypass treaties if they "impinge" on his powers as commander in chief.

It gets scarier from there, but at least McCain acquits himself well for a Bush-era Republican. Glenn Greenwald has a worthwhile follow-up in Salon today. It's guaranteed to give you that democracy-at-a-fateful-crossroads feeling.

ITEM! Matt Sandwich: "Caring means sharing!"

If you're like me-- and I know I am-- you were a big fan of Mystery Science Theater 3000. A while back, some of the cast started producing audio accompaniments to current movies called Rifftrax. That was nice and all, but it didn't involve my favorite cast members. I was always a big fan of TV's Frank, though, and recently learned that he's written some comedy sketches named Cartoon Dump! that are available online here and on YouTube.

Just days after discovering Frank Conniff's new gig (which is also a bit hit-or-miss*), I came across the Cinematic Titanic. Joel is back at it, and managed to get several other favorites of mine to help out. They just released their first project, and the trailer is downloadable/viewable here. Hopefully they'll do great things. But it's made my Christmas brighter already.

I'll probably manage to sneak in some posts during the week, but here's wishing everyone a lovely week.

*It suffers from Silverman-Cook Syndrome, which I named after comedians whose fame far, far outstrips their talent-- almost certainly because of their looks. But the culprit on Cartoon Dump is only on two episodes. Still, she's pretty bad. But pretty.

Danger: Death Rates!

2007-12-18T21:35:00.000-05:00

It's sorta like the way that BushCo ignored warnings about terrorist threats, hurricanes, nuclear weapons programs, abstinence-only programs, tax cuts, etc. It's also just like the way they keep fucking the majority of Americans.

Until the boom in subprime mortgages turned into a national nightmare this summer, the few people who tried to warn federal banking officials might as well have been talking to themselves.

Edward M. Gramlich, a Federal Reserve governor who died in September, warned nearly seven years ago that a fast-growing new breed of lenders was luring many people into risky mortgages they could not afford.

But when Mr. Gramlich privately urged Fed examiners to investigate mortgage lenders affiliated with national banks, he was rebuffed by Alan Greenspan, the Fed chairman.

In 2001, a senior Treasury official, Sheila C. Bair, tried to persuade subprime lenders to adopt a code of “best practices” and to let outside monitors verify their compliance. None of the lenders would agree to the monitors, and many rejected the code itself. Even those who did adopt those practices, Ms. Bair recalled recently, soon let them slip.

And leaders of a housing advocacy group in California, meeting with Mr. Greenspan in 2004, warned that deception was increasing and unscrupulous practices were spreading.

John C. Gamboa and Robert L. Gnaizda of the Greenlining Institute implored Mr. Greenspan to use his bully pulpit and press for a voluntary code of conduct.

“He never gave us a good reason, but he didn’t want to do it,” Mr. Gnaizda said last week. “He just wasn’t interested.”

Today, as the mortgage crisis of 2007 worsens and threatens to tip the economy into a recession, many are asking: where was Washington?

Where were they? They wuz stayin' outta my hair by sendin' Messicans back to Aferka, nukin' ragheads, 'n helpin' me hand my shrinkin' salary over to loan sharks 'stead uh the libruls!

Abstinence-Only? I'd like you to meet Just Say No.

2007-12-18T09:36:00.000-05:00

I'm not sure when an utter refusal to admit when you've completely botched something became a bedrock belief of the GOP (maybe its roots lie in that Reagan-era exhortation to 'never speak ill of a fellow Republican'), but here we are. My "favorite" example is missile defense, although it hasn't killed anybody yet.

But the ironically named abstinence-only education program, which believes that the best defense against disease is ignorance and religious propaganda, is a 21st-century classic in its own right. It's just a shame that this particular boondoggle is causing emotional and physical suffering to American teens in the name of sanctimonious demagoguery.

The good news: an increasing number of states are abandoning the Republican plan to give even more money to those willing to increase teen pregnancy and encourage the spread of STDs.

The number of states refusing federal money for "abstinence-only" sex education programs jumped sharply in the past year as evidence mounted that the approach is ineffective.

At least 14 states have either notified the federal government that they will no longer be requesting the funds or are not expected to apply, forgoing more than $15 million of the $50 million available, officials said. Virginia was the most recent state to opt out.

Two other states -- Ohio and Washington -- have applied but stipulated they would use the money for comprehensive sex education, effectively making themselves ineligible, federal officials said. While Maryland and the District are planning to continue applying for the money, other states are considering withdrawing as well.

Until this year, only four states had passed up the funding.

"We're concerned about this," said Stan Koutstaal of the Department of Health and Human Services, which runs the program. "My greatest concern about states dropping out is that these are valuable services and programs. It's the youths in these states who are missing out."

Missing out on what-- the joys of chlamydia?!? I guess the sad irony of it all is that either way, the Republicans win with one delusional group of followers. They can either claim victory or play martyr to kiss fundamentalist ass, or boast about how they're shrinking government. Which wasn't true in the 1980s, either.

It isn't much, but I'll take it.

2007-12-17T14:01:00.000-05:00

People are really going to be amazed at the many ways in which this administration committed crime after crime and screwup after screwup-- all while a quarter of the population cheered them on, the media turned a blind eye, and Lord-only-knows how much irreparable harm was done to the nation and the planet.

How bad is it? It's so bad that this story strikes me as incredible progress. And it's something that had probably never even occurred to any previous administrations.

White House visitor logs are public documents, a federal judge ruled Monday, rejecting a legal strategy that the Bush administration had hoped would get around public records laws.

The ruling is a blow to the Bush administration, which is fighting the release of records showing visits by lobbyist Jack Abramoff and prominent religious conservatives.

The records are created by the Secret Service, which is subject to the Freedom of Information Act. But the Bush administration has ordered the data turned over to the White House, where they are treated as presidential records outside the scope of the public records law.

Trofim Lysenko Named National Science Advisor

2007-12-13T11:51:00.000-05:00

Hoo boy. As difficult as it is to believe at this point, the White House has yet again replaced a departing official with someone even more grossly inappropriate for the position. It's that strange inability BushCo and the GOP have these days to do nothing that isn't brutally ironic.

Departing is the shockingly ineffectual Karen Hughes. All right, I take that back. Predictably ineffectual, given that she was nothing more than a beneficiary of the spoils system. Her most notable achievement?

Hughes boosted the number of Arabic speakers representing the U.S. in Arabic media, set up three rapid public relations response centers overseas to monitor and respond to the news, nearly doubled the public diplomacy budget to almost $900 million annually. Despite her efforts, polls have shown no improvement in the world's view of the U.S.

Which definitely earns her a place in the 21st century Republican pantheon of those mystical beings who dedicate themselves to fiscal responsibility and small government by spending vast amounts of cash to expand government programs that achieve nothing.

Already drowning in foreign-relations irony, who would the White House choose to replace her? How about the 'conservative intellectual' best known for making one of the most egregiously stupid predictions of the Information Age?

Of course, the AP article doesn't point that out. Instead, they praise his experience and "familiarity" with the problems he'll face. Salon points out the one thing Glassman is actually known for by the public at large: the book Dow 36,000.

Few people encapsulated the madness of the 1990s stock market bubble better than Glassman, and the appropriateness of such a blithe purveyor of happy talk as the Bush administration's chief spinmeister for foreign policy seems both absurd and utterly unsurprising.

Blogging at The Atlantic, Matthew Iglesias remarks that initially he couldn't believe the news: "Obviously, the same George W. Bush who thinks public diplomacy is just about salesmanship wouldn't give the job to one of the least credible salespeople on the planet."

Brad DeLong, after documenting how Glassman strove mightily to pretend that his book had never predicted that the Dow would jump immediately to 36,000, calls him a "mendacious wacko of the right" and says "It would be an elementary point to say that somebody who cannot tell the truth about his own book shouldn't be held out as the public face of American diplomacy by any administration."

Our Objective Press

2007-12-12T18:00:00.001-05:00

An article on Raw Story relates a Public Radio interview with John Boehner finds him trashing Congressional Democrats for their underhanded tactics:

On Tuesday afternoon, House Minority Leader John Boehner lashed out at the Democrats who control Congress, accusing Speaker Nancy Pelosi of using strong-arm, partisan tactics to force through legislation without attempting to negotiate with GOP lawmakers. Of course, as Boehner himself acknowledged, the Democratic strategy has virtually mirrored Republican tactics when they controlled the House.

NPR host Robert Siegel asked the Ohio lawmaker about his pledge earlier this year that Republicans would work with Democrats in addressing issues important to the country: "What evidence of that has there been so far, since you've been leader?"

"Well, unfortunately, Robert, there hasn't been any," Boehner confided, although he insisted the unfriendly atmosphere in Washington was not the GOP's fault. "I was hopeful that Speaker Pelosi wouldn't make some of the mistakes that the Republican majority made by overreaching and going it alone. But what we've seen all year is an effort to overreach, to only consider what the Democrat majority wants to do."

While the inability of a hacky ideologue like Boehner to demonstrate any degree of intellectual honesty renders the entire piece useless, Siegel sorta tried to turn it into something resembling journalism.

Siegel tried to clarify that Pelosi's behavior "reminds you of what Republican behavior was" when they controlled Congress before the 2006 elections.

"Well, some of it -- it sure does," Boehner said with a laugh.

See? Objective, hard-hitting journalism. Except for its complete failure to resemble reality. By which I mean the actions Boehner's party is taking every day:

Mr. McConnell and his fellow Republicans are playing such tight defense, blocking nearly every bill proposed by the slim Democratic majority that they are increasingly able to dictate what they want, much to the dismay of the majority leader, Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, and frustrated Democrats in the House.

In fact, the Senate Republicans are so accustomed to blocking measures that when the Democrats finally agreed last week to their demands on a bill to repair the alternative minimum tax, the Republicans still objected, briefly blocking the version of the bill that they wanted before scrambling to approve it later.

Kevin Drum, like myself, is pretty steamed:

It's hard to say anything about this other than the obvious: the Democrats have a very slim majority; the rules of the Senate work against them; and the Republican Party, even as it prepares to shuffle into what may well be a decade of irrelevance, continues to display a genuinely remarkable ancien régime ability to stick together and insist that nothing is wrong until its collective face turns blue. Even the fact that the entire country may well turn blue next November as a result doesn't dissuade them.

What bugs me about this is not the fact that the modern Republican Party doesn't really care about actual governance. This is hardly news. At this point, it's an exhausted organization so bereft of ideas that it really doesn't have much choice except to follow a policy of obstruction to its logical, nihilistic conclusion.

But why does the media have to play along? It's nice that the Times ran this story, but it would be nicer if the media simply reported what was happening on a regular basis. I'm not asking for special treatment, just headlines that tell us what's really going on. If Republicans have adopted a strategy of simply blocking every piece of legislation that makes it to the floor of the Senate — and everyone agrees that they have — then we should be regularly seeing headlines that say "Republicans Block ______. " There's nothing partisan about this, it's just a description of what's happening.

Bizarroworld Dispatch: Huddled Masses Edition!

2007-12-12T12:15:00.000-05:00

An overwhelming majority of Americans know better than to believe the White House's claims that the invasion of Iraq was all about spreading democracy. Most five year-olds would understand that arbitrarily bombing the shit out of a country, killing tens of thousands of civilians, and building permanent fortresses on their turf isn't an appropriate way to say "I only want what's best for you."

But the idea that we can promote democracy by highlighting people's productivity and happiness in a dignified and open society is pretty sweet. We should try and do that sometime. My innate talent for business tells me the export market's pretty much saturated when it comes to repressive autocrats trying to do away with the latter three.

This week, [American] unions are debating how to deal with China's not-really-a-union union movement; some kind of wary, conditional proto-recognition may be in the works. The other anti-union mega-nation is our own United States, a fact that increasingly poses a problem for workers everywhere as U.S.-based transnationals try to bring their union-busting practices to their far-flung facilities. At the moment, says [International Trade Union Conference head Guy Ryder], anti-union U.S. consultants are advising Chinese companies how to get around a mild Chinese labor-rights law that takes effect Jan. 1.

And why is American Progress always so eager to blame America first? Don't they appreciate the fact that America produces the best damn robber barons in the world? And we always will!

Bizarroworld Dispatch: Free Market Edition!

2007-12-12T11:29:00.000-05:00

Drug companies particularly favor one argument when they're trying to defend their prices (or their price discrimination). You could call it the 'appeal to capitalism.' You know the routine: "We only charge what we need to fund research. You don't want us to abandon research on new, pioneering medication, do you?"

And yeah, that sounds reasonable. Aside from the fact that profits are actually soaring in addition to the hundreds of millions they're putting into marketing instead of research. But the point still stands, right? It's all about the innovation, and the virtuous work of curing previously untreatable diseases.

Only it isn't. Ezra Klein takes note of a couple of articles highlighting pharmaceutical companies' focus on the quick buck.

From the WSJ: As acting head of chemistry at [Pfizer's now-shuttered] Ann Arbor labs, Dr. Sliskovic earned far above the $112,000 a year paid to the average chemist of his experience level. Dr. Sliskovic says he will receive severance pay for between 18 months and two years. With two children in college and another in high school, he says, two years is the longest he could afford to forgo a paycheck.

Dr. Sliskovic has already repainted the family kitchen and living room. Now he is festooning the house and yard with holiday lights. Worried about their financial future, his wife, Cindy, took a second part-time job at the barn where they keep their horses. The irony that the drug her husband helped discover will bring in nearly $13 billion for Pfizer this year hasn't been lost on her. As a staff scientist, Dr. Sliskovic earned no bonus or royalties for his work on Lipitor.

He was one of 2,100 workers of the research facility to get the axe. The WSJ suggests that there simply may not be new discoveries to be made. One investigative journalist begs to differ. (It's tough to excerpt these meaty articles, but they're highly recommended reading.)

[T]he pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries have been showered significant government support in the form of direct public investment, tax credits, reduced regulatory burdens and a laissez-faire government attitude toward the industry charging exorbitantly high prices in the largest market in the world, and the government’s auditors recognized something beyond the industry’s traditional lament – “R&D is growing more costly; it now costs (fill in the blank: first it was $500 million; then $800 million; now $1.2 billion) to develop a new drug” – was called for. It has become painfully apparent that throwing more money at the industry in the form of higher prices isn’t going to solve it lackluster performance in coming up with new and innovative therapeutics.

In today's installment: The financial incentives formed by the stock market force R&D decision-makers to focus most of their attention on developing blockbuster drugs for proven mass markets. Minor aches and pains, allergies, depression, cholesterol management, acid indigestion – the rewards for a successful new entry in one of these categories, whether or not it represents a significant new advance over previous therapies, are measured in the billions of dollars in sales.

However, the cost of developing new drugs in these categories is high and major contributor to growing R&D costs since showing superiority to placebo for these products often requires clinical trials that enroll thousands if not tens of thousands of patients. Why? Since the drug itself has marginal utility, consumers, regulators and the companies themselves require larger trials to allay concerns that the new, unproven product may be less safe than readily available, proven alternatives. The additional expense of the larger trials inevitably inflates research costs and deflects scientific talent from investigating fields where the risk of failure is far greater.

Should I even bother to point out that the champions of the free market are the ones who are rigging the game-- and doing so in favor of companies who are actively subverting their own stated goals? Probably not.

The People's Choice

2007-12-12T10:02:00.000-05:00

I almost feel guilty posting this, since Edwards is my candidate of choice among the current field. And because I'm not fond of citing poll results-- especially with so much time remaining before the actual primary voting starts happening. But it's nice to see not only as an Edwards booster, but as someone thoroughly tired of the press drooling over the Clinton/Obama thing (and how easy it is to dash off a story about her shoes or his racial identity).

Anyway, CNN released a poll yesterday that has Edwards doing well in hypothetical matchups with the Republican front-runners. Really well. In fact, he beats pretty much every GOP hopeful by a wider margin than Clinton or Obama. And is the only one who bests McCain.

Interesting stuff, although not too much can be read into it at this point. Also worth noting? Edwards is the most progressive candidate in the poll.

Sideshow Huckabee

2007-12-12T09:22:00.000-05:00

The GOP race for the nomination is an odd one. Mitt Romney can't seem to do anything right, and neither can Rudy. It's interesting to see them fall victim to the very religious extremism their party has put so much effort into cultivating. (Although I actually thought more people of Pat Robertson's 'stature' would get behind Giuliani as the best bet.)

Then there's Huckabee's recent promotion to official media darling. It's pretty silly, given that he has vacillated as much as any of the candidates when it comes to convenient position changes on rather basic issues-- such as the age of the earth. In fact, the one thing Huckabee seems to do well is brush aside questions with a chuckle and clever-enough-for-the-MSM zinger.

Like Mitt Romney's speech, in which he hoped to take his particular faith off the table and demonstrate his fundamentalist bona fides at the same time, Huckabee's game plan is apparently to.... well, like all the candidates, he's adopted Bush's strategy of talking liberal, aw-shucksing his way out of actually committing to anything, and all the while keep giving a sly wink to fundamentalists. For him at least, it's working.

And as it happens, there's a nice article in Mother Jones about Huckabee's religious shell game.

During a question-and-answer session with students at fundamentalist Liberty University last month, he asserted that his rise in the polls has an explanation that is "beyond human" and is due to the power of his supporters' prayers. Afterward, he backtracked slightly, adding, "I'm saying that when people pray, things happen.... I'm not saying that God wants me to be elected." (At a victory rally held after Huckabee won a 1993 special election for lieutenant governor, Huckabee told his supporters that he had only won because God had intervened, according to the Texarkana Gazette.)

With Huckabee walking this fine line, his campaign has declined to make available sermons that Huckabee delivered during his preaching days. . . .

Huckabee has indeed mixed religion with policy previously. In 1997, when he was governor, he answered a question about capital punishment during a call-in show:

Interestingly enough, if there was ever an occasion for someone to have argued against the death penalty, I think Jesus could have done so on the cross and said, "This is an unjust punishment and I deserve clemency."

I seem to remember something he said about the people executing the sentence, though. And it doesn't say much for the argument that the death sentence is never given to the wrong guy. Still, snappy one-liner.

Mondays with the Krug

2007-12-10T12:49:00.000-05:00

I always wondered why the most religious people I know also tend to be the most rapacious capitalists, and I have no idea why observation struck me as a sensible way to begin this post, because... well, I guess it's because of the way they're becoming so inextricably combined in this century through the decades-long effort of the GOP to make them that way. And the rather blatant manner in which they are coming together to resemble the opposite of what they profess to be.

I'm speaking, of course, about the sub-prime mortgage market, the inaction of anyone to take meaningful action, and the slow-motion train wreck of watching another corporate bailout in the making.

As Elizabeth Warren, the Harvard bankruptcy expert, puts it, “The administration’s subprime mortgage plan is the bank lobby’s dream.” Given the Bush record, that should come as no surprise.

There are, in fact, three distinct concerns associated with the rising tide of foreclosures in America.

One is financial stability: as banks and other institutions take huge losses on their mortgage-related investments, the financial system as a whole is getting wobbly.

Another is human suffering: hundreds of thousands, and probably millions, of American families will lose their homes.

Finally, there’s injustice: the subprime boom involved predatory lending — high-interest loans foisted on borrowers who qualified for lower rates — on an epic scale. The Wall Street Journal found that more than 55 percent of subprime loans made at the height of the housing bubble “went to people with credit scores high enough to often qualify for conventional loans with far better terms.”

And in a declining housing market, these victims are stuck, unable to refinance.

So there are three problems. But Mr. Paulson’s plan — or, to use its official name, the Hope Now Alliance plan — is entirely focused on reducing investor losses. Any minor relief it might provide to troubled borrowers is clearly incidental. And it is does nothing for the victims of predatory lending.

And I really don't think it's far-fetched to suggest that a meltdown would culminate with the American public footing the bill for massive corporate mismanagement-- after being victims of corporate crimes. It wouldn't be first time, and it wouldn't even be the first time a Bush was involved. But it would be a classic example of what wingers pretend is 'the liberal way': let the mugger keep the victim's wallet, and order the muggee to pay for his rehabilitation program as well.

Sermon on the Mic, Part II

2007-12-06T17:26:00.000-05:00

Romney's speech was actually dumber than I realized when writing the previous post, and who better to remind me of that than the MSM?

As Media Matters observes:

A December 6 Associated Press article by reporter Glen Johnson uncritically reported Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney's complaint that a "religious test" to become president was "prohibited in the Constitution," without noting that Romney himself has repeatedly stated that Americans want a person of faith to lead them.

The AP report -- which previewed Romney's then-upcoming December 6 "Faith in America" speech, in which Romney discussed how, in his words, his "own faith would inform his Presidency if he were elected" -- stated that "Romney, confronting voters' skepticism about his Mormon faith, declared Thursday that as president he would 'serve no one religion, no one group, no one cause,' and said calls for him to explain and justify his religious beliefs go against the profound wishes of the nation's founders."

Not only is this contrary to Romney's entire "zealous like you" campaign, but it reminded me that it was just ten days ago(!) that Romney was reported as saying a Muslim wouldn't merit a cabinet post. In short, his speech contradicts not only the meaning of democracy, but his own statements. But we wouldn't want the press to point out that an individual seeking the highest office in the nation is a habitual liar.

Sermon on the Mic

2007-12-06T15:08:00.000-05:00

About sixteen tons of virtual ink have been spilled already on Romney's "religion speech." And it's not as though I'll be making any extraordinary contributions to the dialogue, but sometimes it just feels nice to vent.

The obvious parallel is with Kennedy's 1960 speech about his Catholicism. Strange as it is to think that many Americans were suspicious of him because of his religion, his response was to point out that holding public office to him meant serving the public-- not pushing an ideological agenda. Mitt Romney did almost exactly the opposite. Intentionally.

That's pretty breathtaking, considering that the beliefs he was trying so hard to sell were those America's founders wanted so much to escape. For example:

"Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom. Freedom opens the windows of the soul so that man can discover his most profound beliefs and commune with God. Freedom and religion endure together, or perish alone."

It's almost poignant to see how hard Romney and his group of writers, marketers, and focus groups tried so hard to make Bartlett's book. But that entire passage is meaningless, in addition to its glaring similarity to actual famous quotations. But Romney didn't build his career on sincerity:

"Americans tire of those who would jettison their beliefs, even to gain the world."

This from the guy who runs as a different person for each office, but always in a completely studied, pre-fab sort of way. But two especially troubling aspects of the speech were touched upon by Sarah Posner:

[His speech] was, at its core, as anti-Enlightenment as Rod Parsley's most recent book, Culturally Incorrect, which pointed to the Enlightenment as the root of all of our current problems. Romney posited that Americans believe that "liberty is a gift of God, not an indulgence of government" and belittled the grand but empty cathedrals of Europe, suggesting, with as much robotic sarcasm as he could muster, that Europeans are perhaps "too enlightened" to venture inside. While Romney was asking Americans to have an enlightened response to the variety of religions in our country (or, or more specifically, asking biblical literalists to forgive his religion's deviation from their brand of literalism), he was simultaneously mocking the very basis for the constitutional republic: a government by and for the people. Not by God, and not for God, either.

That said, the fact that Romney felt compelled to defend his religion tells us a lot about whether Americans -- or at least the Americans in his target audience -- really do believe, as he suggested, that anyone who prays to the Almighty is A-OK. Mike Huckabee hasn't been asked to explain why he has embraced the endorsement of Tim LaHaye, who thinks non-Christians have been making a 2,000 year-old terrible mistake for which they'll pay at Armageddon. Why the Book of Mormon is considered weird but Left Behind isn't says a lot about what the issue here really is.

First, the reactionary sentiment. Mitt Romney's speech was antithetical to our system of government. And it's the way every last GOP candidate talks. As one conservative friend likes to say about that trend, "he's just saying that to get votes-- he doesn't really believe it." As if being a practiced and confident liar is an improvement. It's interesting to see someone point out the anti-Enlightenment feelings of the political right. Particularly because so many academic postmodernists do the exact same thing. Truth as a totally subjective phenomenon, disregard for science and logic, and a dismissal of humanist liberalism-- these are things common to the Republican party and postmodernists today. I suppose it's a good thing the GOP detests higher education so much, because they share a whole lot more than they think.

Second, there's the dramatic fashion in which Romney and far too many other Americans just keep missing the point. And it's the one thing his speech had in common with Kennedy's.

He was recalling the early days of the Continental Congress in Philadelphia, on the brink of the Revolutionary War, when the early Americans from various faiths were gathered together. They wanted to pray, Romney said, but they did not know whose prayer to use.

"Then Sam Adams rose, and said he would hear a prayer from anyone of piety and good character, as long as they were a patriot," Romney said, reading off the teleprompter. "And so together they prayed, and together they fought, and together, by the grace of God, they founded this great nation."

This only serves to highlight the Enlightenment views that motivated the Founding Fathers-- namely that people should be judged by their integrity, actions, and ideas rather than their professed religion or a hereditary title. That's what makes a nation democratic. John F. Kennedy recognized it in 1960, but at the close of 2007 Mitt Romney and the Republican party have taken exactly the wrong lesson from our own nation's history.

Can Such Things Be?

2007-12-04T17:57:00.000-05:00

I think I've used that title before, but it sure fits the news this week. And Ambrose Bierce is still the man.

ITEM! Politicians recognize severity of mortgage market, propose swift action!

It looks as though President Bush and several of the leading presidential candidates are finally getting serious about helping people who are being hit by the collapse of the housing bubble. The proposal to freeze the interest rate on adjustable rate mortgages at their teaser rates is far more serious than anything previously placed on the table. (. . .)

The obvious question that should be asked is whether the plan is helping the people who we want to help. The answer here is mixed. It is helping the people who took out adjustable rate mortgages that have not yet reset; a group that includes speculators and wealthy homeowners. (Of course, many homebuyers are defaulting even before the reset, suggesting that they are having problems even paying the teaser rates.) The freeze does not help people who took out fixed rate mortgages or homeowners whose mortgages have already reset.

ITEM! White House: If it looks, smells, and acts like Iraq, it must be... Iran!

What you need to know about the new National Intelligence Estimate on Iran: George W. Bush was first told in August or September that "fresh intelligence" suggested that Iran had stopped its nuclear weapons program in 2003.

Yes, that was before Bush said that he took "the threat of Iran with a nuclear weapon very seriously," and that the best way to prevent "World War III" would be to prevent the Iranians from obtaining the "knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon."

It was before Condoleezza Rice said Iran is "pursuing nuclear technologies that can lead to nuclear weapons-grade material."

It was before Dick Cheney said that the United States should "reach for any tool that's available" -- including the "possible use of military force" -- to "discourage the Iranians from enriching uranium and producing nuclear weapons."

It was before Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said the United States should "have no illusions about the nature of [the Iranian] regime or its leaders -- about their designs for their nuclear program, their willingness to live up to their rhetoric, their intentions for Iraq, or their ambitions in the Gulf."

It was before Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman said of the Iranians: "We are convinced that they are developing nuclear weapons."

ITEM! Time Magazine: "He actually said a foolish consistency is pretty shrewd."

First, Sen. Russ Feingold submitted a letter to Time protesting the false statements in Klein's article. But Time refused to publish it. Sen. Feingold's spokesman said that the letter "was submitted to TIME very shortly after Klein's column ran but the letters department was about as responsive as the column was accurate.". . .

Second, Rep. Rush Holt -- before he published his response in The Huffington Post detailing Klein's false claims -- asked that he be given the opportunity to respond to Klein's false column directly on Time's Swampland, where Klein was in the process of making all sorts of statements compounding his errors. But Time also denied Rep. Holt the opportunity to bring his response to the attention of Time's readers. . .

Third, at least 100 individuals wrote letters to Time's editors protesting Klein's article and responding to its claims. I know this because that's how many people (at least) cc'd me on their letters, forwarded them to me, and/or copied their Letters to the Editor in the Comment section here. Managing Editor Rick Stengel's voice mail and email box overflowed with responses.

Nonetheless, Time -- while publishing 15 separate letters on a whole array of topics in its print edition this week -- did not see fit to publish a single letter about the Klein falsehoods. . .

Finally, Howard Kurtz of The Washington Post and CNN -- who dives head-first into every right-wing blog controversy -- has been completely mute about the Klein/Time scandal, even though it was one of the central focuses of blogs for more than a full week and relates directly to the media criticism issues he is ostensibly assigned to cover. Worse, Kurtz has now been asked about this matter by multiple readers in two consecutive weekly Monday chats he hosts at the Post, but has refused to take a single question about it.

I'm scared. You?

Yeah, I know. No one cares.

2007-11-29T14:04:00.000-05:00

I don't think I've ever linked to the Politico before, but this is a mighty disturbing story:

As New York mayor, Rudy Giuliani billed obscure city agencies for tens of thousands of dollars in security expenses amassed during the time when he was beginning an extramarital relationship with future wife Judith Nathan in the Hamptons, according to previously undisclosed government records.

The documents, obtained by Politico under New York’s Freedom of Information Law, show that the mayoral costs had nothing to do with the functions of the little-known city offices that defrayed his tabs, including agencies responsible for regulating loft apartments, aiding the disabled and providing lawyers for indigent defendants.

Again, I'm reminded of the book The Authoritarians book I brought up a couple of weeks ago, and the author's observation that authoritarian leaders have the attitude that if they manage to rob you blind, it's your fault. Or as Matt Groenig put it in his pre-Simpsons days, it's the philosophy "When I bite into the apple, the worm better watch out for itself."

Our Useless Press

2007-11-29T13:52:00.000-05:00

This is just the sort of thing that continues to amaze me. Especially maddening is the fact that I can't see how this has become the norm in this country. Laziness? Outright stupidity? The rise of journotainmentism? Media consolidation? Dunno. But nothing's changed in the last decade, and I honestly think it could lead the country to ruin-- it's come within spitting distance already. I'm putting the whole post here (sorry Prospect).

Last week, Chris Hayes had a great story in the Nation about the phenomenon of the right wing email forward, and how this new form of "folk media" serves to keep various rumors and urban legends alive. One of the most notorious of these is the notion that Barack Obama is secretly a Muslim extremist who plans to throw a burkha over the Statue of Liberty and institute shari'a law after taking his oath of office on the Qur'an while munching on falafel, or something. Today, the Washington Post demonstrates how "respectable" news outlets keep these rumors moving in the media bloodstream:

"Since declaring his candidacy for president in February, Obama, a member of a congregation of the United Church of Christ in Chicago, has had to address assertions that he is a Muslim or that he had received training in Islam in Indonesia, where he lived from ages 6 to 10. While his father was an atheist and his mother did not practice religion, Obama's stepfather did occasionally attend services at a mosque there.
Despite his denials, rumors and e-mails circulating on the Internet continue to allege that Obama (D-Ill.) is a Muslim, a "Muslim plant" in a conspiracy against America, and that, if elected president, he would take the oath of office using a Koran, rather than a Bible, as did Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.), the only Muslim in Congress, when he was sworn in earlier this year."

We are then treated to a clown parade of right-wing operatives, pseudo-scholars, Limbaughs, and Savages, who continue to float these stories like so much stale gas. At no point in the article is there any indication that these rumors, which are nothing more than lies designed to stoke base cultural prejudices, have been exhaustively investigated and disproven. Astonishingly, the article even references an email rumor featured on Snopes.com without bothering to mention that Snopes then debunks the rumor.

Of course, we also get the requisite denials from Obama's defenders, all of which creates (and is designed to create) the impression that there is "controversy" where there is only gossip, "questions" where there is only innuendo.

Debate, so to speak

2007-11-29T13:32:00.000-05:00

It's really been something to read coverage of the Republican debate last night. While a genuine "man in the street" format would probably be pretty cool, it's just about impossible for me to imagine that it wouldn't be manipulated, tweaked and screened by ratings experts before airing-- which isn't any better than the staged "Town Hall" meetings, press conferences with plants (remember Jeff Gannon?), or pre-screened audiences and questions that have become the norm during the Bush years. At least until Hillary Clinton set up one question-- then it was a national scandal, of course.

But the most striking thing about it is, depending on your viewpoint, that A) so many inane things were uttered by the candidates, and B) the press was more than happy to give them a pass.

A few examples:

McCain: It was pretty depressing to see what a huge round of applause he received for blaming "American public opinion" for the loss in Vietnam. (Delusional.)

Also, McCain claimed every single soldier in Iraq supports the surge and a continuous U.S. presence there. (Disingenuous, if not delusional, and demagogic.)

Romney: When Romney refused to rule out [waterboarding]: "And I get that advice from Cofer Black, who is a person who was responsible for counterterrorism in the CIA for some 35 years."

Indeed, Black is the former head of the CIA's Counterterrorism Center. He was in charge there after 9/11, when the agency set up its network of secret prisons where "enhanced" interrogation techniques -- including waterboarding -- were allegedly carried out.

Oh, and in case you were wondering about Romney's judgment in asking for advice, Black is also vice chairman of Blackwater USA. (Stupid.)

Huckabee: To hear the press tell it, the best moment of last night's debate was when Mike Huckabee answered a question about whether Jesus would support the death penalty by saying, "Jesus was too smart to ever run for public office." Reporters were in awe. The Washington Post called it "the best line of the night.The Chicago Tribune said Huckabee hit the question "over the fence." It was the only quote from the debate Mara Liasson included in her NPR report.

But what reporters didn't note is that Huckabee was dodging a direct question on the very area -- the intersection of religion and policy -- on which he is building his campaign. The man whose ads call him a "Christian Leader" and who says his faith "defines me" wouldn't answer a pretty simple question on how his faith affects his opinion on a policy issue. (Oily.)

Hunter: Duncan Hunter said most troops are "conservatives" and uncomfortable serving with gays. (Demagogic, delusional, or both.)

Sad, huh?

Journalism the Hard Way

2007-11-28T15:49:00.000-05:00

It's interesting to see how much attention Joe Klein's now-infamous column is getting from the blogs. And it's a good thing to see-- even though I realize it's exactly the sort of thing that convinces conservative friends of mine that I'm a goofy radical.

As Glenn Greenwald noted two days ago, his attempts to get Time magazine to own up to the failure of Klein, his editor, and the powers that be to correct a demonstrable falsehood published in their print and online versions were met with silence. But that all changed yesterday, when his attempts were met with scorn and derision. And, of course, the usual defense that their job consists solely of recording the he-said/she-said of a given issue. Facts, just as a friendly reminder, are irrelevant.

Time's correction:

In the original version of this story, Joe Klein wrote that the House Democratic version of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) would allow a court review of individual foreign surveillance targets. Republicans believe the bill can be interpreted that way, but Democrats don't.

And Greenwald's continuing amazement (shared by many of us) that this is considered acceptable by the press:

It is worth underscoring that this entire episode began when Klein toldTime's 4 million readers -- and Time actually claims an average issue audience of more than 20 million people -- that House Democrats were seeking to protect foreign Terrorists to the same extent as American citizens (and were therefore "well beyond stupid"). When it was demonstrated that Klein's statements were outright false, he said that a source told him this and "I have neither the time nor legal background to figure out who's right." Time's Editors now think that no correction to this false smear is needed beyond: "Republicans believe the bill can be interpreted that way, but Democrats don't."

By their own numbers, 20 million people could see Klein's bogus claims-- presented as fact, later revealed to be a Republican sound bite and a lie. But he doesn't care, his editors don't care, and his bosses don't care.

So why not at least try to have a chuckle over the whole affair? The link above takes us all to task for lacking even the most elementary knowledge of what journalism is all about.

. . . but it helps!

2007-11-27T13:11:00.000-05:00

Old punchline. New lead-in: "You don't have to be an idiot to be a GOP presidential candidate..."

I know I'm not alone in being completely baffled by the overt stupidity on display pretty much daily from these bozos, but here are a couple of items that-- while not on the level of Bush thinking the Taliban was a rock group while he was running for president-- help demonstrate how little we could expect from a Republican successor.

Romney: I asked Mr. Romney whether he would consider including qualified Americans of the Islamic faith in his cabinet as advisers on national security matters, given his position that "jihadism" is the principal foreign policy threat facing America today. He answered, "... based on the number of American Muslims [as a percentage] in our population, I cannot see that a cabinet position would be justified. But of course, I would imagine that Muslims could serve at lower levels of my administration."

Hopefully that statement isn't accurate, because it's stupid on so many levels I'm not sure I could enumerate them all. I'll just pick one of the more smart-assed: Mormons make up less than 1.5% of the population, Mitt. Which 3.5 Mormon senators will you ask to resign?

Huckabee: Huckabee displayed his roots as a Baptist minister when he said with a shaky historical grasp, "[The Israeli-Palestinian] conflict isn't new. It has been going on since all the way to the time of Abraham."

What was even more startling was when Huckabee appeared to reject long-standing Clinton-Bush policy and oppose a Palestinian state that would include portions of the West Bank. "It would be very problematic for Israel to give up the West Bank, from their own standpoint of security," Huckabee said. Instead, the surging republican long shot suggested, "there are a lot of options that involve other territory that doesn't have to include the West Bank or the Golan Heights. There is an enormous amount of land in Arab control all over the Middle East."

UPDATE: I just noticed that Kevin Drum has a pretty funny take on the story right here.

Giuliani: Rudy Giuliani said yesterday he "never had any doubt" that if he were President four years ago, he would have invaded Iraq. He said he is now "even more certain" that it was the correct national security move.

Fine, I admit that one could go either way-- stupid or insane. Or both.

And while it's probably more indicative of unctuousness than stupidity, we have this asessment of the candidates' positions on "abstinence-only education," which is neither educational nor results in abstinence. Naturally, the Bush administration has spent hundreds of millions on it.

*Giuliani, the only Republican candidate still waffling about his pro-choice stance, avoids the issue.

*McCain promotes abstinence-only education programs but the Arizona senator has previously promoted comprehensive sex education.

*Romney promoted abstinence education in Massachusetts classrooms as governor of that state from 2003 to 2007. Romney mentioned this in the May South Carolina debates to show his credentials as a "clear and consistent conservative.". . .Romney, however, checked a box saying he supported comprehensive sex education in a 2002 Planned Parenthood candidate survey.

*Thompson backs abstinence education.

*[Hunter] wants to give abstinence the same amount of teaching as the dangers of sexually transmitted diseases.

*Huckabee favors abstinence-only and opposes abstinence-plus,

*Paul favors abstinence-only programs.

*Tancredo favors abstinence-only programs.

OK. I've destroyed the entire premise of this post. To be a candidate, you are required to exhibit some combination of ignorance, dishonesty, and madness.

Werd!

2007-11-26T21:45:00.001-05:00

Savvy Internet user that you are, you've probably heard of the site Free Rice. But after Vigil-Auntie sent me a link, I decided to overlook the "10 grains at a time" thing and have a look. It's addictive. It's fun. It's full of words they're probably more familiar with in England.

And why just settle for latte, NPR and sashimi when you could be showing your fellow elitist liberals up with your wordiness? I'm at level 49, and gunning for the top. Oh, and doing good stuff for charity or whatever. It's worth noting that crossword buffs and people who've studied Latin have a serious edge.

You-a Culpa II

2007-11-26T15:13:00.000-05:00

[UPDATED BELOW]

Time to continue with the theme of "Our Worthless Press," and the sad way in which they vaguely, in a half-assed sort of way, admit that there's a problem with what they, as journotainmentists, are still doing on a daily basis.

As an aside, I'll mention that I had a thought yesterday. Journalists often express their contempt for bloggers as angry radicals, people who criticize through ignorance, reckless troublemakers, etc. Another thing that troubles me is how aloof the press has remained even as the Internet has come to dominate communications. Journalist writes article/column, it's published, someone points out an error, error is ignored or journalists huffily makes excuses. Anyway, my thought was that journalists treat bloggers the way politicians used to treat journalists-- like gadflies. And that's a wonderful thing for a democracy. And bloggers (good ones, anyway, of which there are many) treat their work as journalists used to-- very seriously. I'd suggest that you won't find headline-making bloggers on the guest lists of swanky Beltway cocktail parties. But these days, you'll find plenty of top MSM journalists in attendance.

In my last post, I was talking about Mark Halperin's goofy NYT op-ed, a classic "nonpology" of the sort that makes less sense the more I read it. Although it did make clear that the press is still obsessed with Bill Clinton's tackle-- and takes it more seriously than Bush lying us into war, 80,000 or so corpses, and a few trillion dollars. I really don't know when "journalistic objectivity" came to be defined as equal time for two rivals' biggest boo-boos. Especially when you're talking about the difference between jaywalking and homicide, but there you have it.

Now it's time to talk Klein. Joe Klein. Because the other (or at least one other) shortcoming of today's press is sheer laziness. This is another stunner in the wired world. Fortunately, I don't have to go on and on about it, because Glenn Greenwald has done it for me. Two days running. Sunday's is here, and today's is here.

From Sunday: On Wednesday, I documented the Joe Klein's column in this week's Time magazine contained multiple false statements about the new FISA bill-- the RESTORE Act-- passed by House Democrats last week. The most obvious and harmful inaccuracy was his claim that that bill "would require the surveillance of every foreign-terrorist target's calls to be approved by the FISA court" and that it therefore "would give terrorists the same legal protections as Americans." Based on those outright falsehoods, Klein called the House Democrats' bill "well beyond stupid."

The facts wrong. The accusation groundless. The column in print and online. The journotainmentist weasely.

Today's column looks at the big picture-- how the MSM lets us down beyond election coverage (remember that pesky Iraq-war cheerleading?). Not to mention the cavalier attitude with which they dismiss criticism of such egregious examples of passing on government disinformation as fact.

Greenwald has a helpful link at the end of today's post, too (it comes from a group who should know whereof they speak):

One of the most amazing episodes in modern American journalism has emerged from a flagrantly inaccurate and misguided Time magazine column by Joe Klein. He's a political writer whose work in this case may become Exhibit A for what's wrong with the craft today.

I'd also recommend the first comment on that post. It seems quite reasonable, but highlights the problem: in spite of the fact that Time ran a story attacking an entire political party because the author and editorial staff were either too stupid, lazy or inept to do basic fact-checking-- and in the process misinformed perhaps millions of Americans-- the only people who seem to give a damn are progressive bloggers.

UPDATE: Over at the Prospect, Paul Waldman takes a look at two articles on a little to-do between the Romney and Giuliani campaigns. The papers writing it up were the WaPo and the NYT. And guess what?

If I were an editor at one of these fine papers, and my reporters turned in one of these stories, I'd tell them to figure out whether Romney or Giuliani is telling the truth. You won't find it in either story. So which is it?

That gave Waldman a revolutionary idea: he invested five minutes in a web search-- so that he and his readers would actually know the facts.

You-a Culpa

2007-11-26T11:53:00.000-05:00

Yeah, I still feel pretty sheepish when I suggest that American democracy is at a perilous crossroads. I still feel like something of a kook when I argue that our electoral system is such a game of money and marketing that we barely qualify as a republic.

The trouble is, whenever I try to put on a happy face, something goes wrong. Example: the MSM's recent bout of guilt over the way elections are covered. I took that to be a positive thing. Sure, we're seeing the same crap we have for the last decade, but at least big-name journotainmentists (I just know I'm going to cash in on my oh-so-clever neologisms one of these days) are admitting that they're ladling up poop stew, right? Well, I mentioned this to a relative a couple of months ago and she immediately asked me if I'd heard any of them blame themselves for poor coverage. Nope, she said, they always seem to blame unnamed others. Tim Russert is a standout. He's done his share of tut-tutting over the poor quality of campaign coverage, but keeps right on with the gotchas and non-substance. And he was one of the absolute worst when it came to torpedoing Gore's 2000 campaign. No, I've never heard any self-doubt from him.

Then there's Mark Halperin. As founder of ABC News' The Note, widely hailed as a must-read source of the latest DC buzz, he reigned over a fiefdom of smarm. Non-news news items, endless catty asides-- it was a gossip column pretending to be hard journalism, which is exactly the problem with MSM journalism. And one of the major reasons the nation is in so much trouble.

He penned an op-ed for the NYT today, and while it contains the words "I was wrong," they come with a qualifier and it isn't really an admission of shoddy reporting, or helping to foster an environment where issues of national importance are brushed aside in favor of "patriotic lapel pin" debates. And what it appears to boil down to is a journotainmentist version of excusing one's behavior by saying "It was society."

Voters are bombarded with information about which contender has “what it takes” to be the best candidate. Who can deliver the most stirring rhetoric? Who can build the most attractive facade? Who can mount the wiliest counterattack? Whose life makes for the neatest story? Our political and media culture reflects and drives an obsession with who is going to win, rather than who should win.

For most of my time covering presidential elections, I shared the view that there was a direct correlation between the skills needed to be a great candidate and a great president. The chaotic and demanding requirements of running for president, I felt, were a perfect test for the toughest job in the world.

But now I think I was wrong. The “campaigner equals leader” formula that inspired me and so many others in the news media is flawed.

Case in point: Our two most recent presidents, both of whom I covered while they were governors seeking the White House. Bill Clinton and George W. Bush are wildly talented politicians. Both claimed two presidential victories, in all four cases arguably as underdogs. Both could skillfully serve as the chief strategist for a presidential campaign.

But their success came not because they convinced the news media (and much of the public) that they would be the best president, but because they dominated the campaign narrative that portrayed them as the best candidate in a world-class political competition. In the end, both men were better presidential candidates than they were presidents.

Okay, I like Clinton well enough, although I wouldn't put him on a list of great presidents. So I'm just going to ignore Halperin's petty-- and frankly asinine-- equivalence of Bill Clinton with his successor. Huh. Actually, it's impossible to ignore. So is the whole "Gee, I was duped" routine. And it's because both are part of the same problem.

Anyone with Web access and five minutes' time could distinguish on-camera Bush from the reactionary, coward, and incompetent boob his record showed him to be. Actually, in addition to Web access and five minutes, you'd have to give a damn. The press didn't. They favored snarky one-liners about cigars and inventing the Internet. No matter that Gore never said that, or that the Texas education bill Bush regularly boasted about "signing into law" on the campaign trail was one he'd actually vetoed.

Another profoundly disturbing indicator of Halperin's obliviousness is this lament over what Bill Clinton did: "squandered a good deal of the majesty and power of the presidency." Monarchs are known for their majesty-- not American presidents. And limiting the power of the American president is built right in to the system. Maybe Halperin thought long and hard about how he could seem objective by giving a blowjob the same stern disapproval as the deaths of tens of thousands of civilians, but that's exactly why so much of the MSM's product is useless.

Also worth noting is that Halperin insists that "we" were fooled. Not Beltway journalists, but every last American. To return to 2000, in spite of the MSM's constant hammering of Gore, he won the popular vote. To return to the 90's, a majority of Americans considered Clinton's fling to be getting news coverage ridiculously out of proportion to its significance.

"We" weren't fooled, Mark Halperin. It's your fault. It's your colleagues fault. And you're still serving up the same devil's cocktail of gossip, scandals-that-aren't, and fashion critiques.

Which brings me to another recent story. But since their site is down, it'll have to wait.

Booooo!

2007-11-21T16:23:00.000-05:00

Sure, I should've known it was too good to be true. And when you think about it for a sec, "Former BushCo crony makes unequivocal statement on administration's misdeeds" just isn't the sort of thing we see from them.

Instead, it looks like McClellan's sizzling expose of life as a minister of disinformation is simply going to be about ass-covering. So I guess I could claim that my take on the story was half-right. And if I really wanted to be snide, I'd say I was just too optimistic about the integrity of a 21st-century GOP operative.

After a day of wide coverage and swift reactions on the Web, the publisher, Peter Osnos of PublicAffairs, told MSNBC that Mr. McClellan "did not intend to suggest Bush lied to him" about two senior aides' role in leaking the identity of Valeria [sic] Plame Wilson, a C.I.A. operative, to the conservative columnist Robert Novak and others in 2003.

How does that square with the book excerpt, where Mr. McClellan wrote that "the President himself" was "involved" in his offering false information to the press about the leak? Mr. Osnos offered an explanation to Bloomberg News:

"He told him something that wasn't true, but the president didn't know it wasn't true," Osnos said in a telephone interview. "The president told him what he thought to be the case."

I guess that rules out 'lying,' and leaves us with 'incompetent' or 'lying and incomeptent.' And since when is "the president didn't know what his staff was doing" an acceptable excuse?

Gentlemen, start your fingers!

2007-11-20T11:31:00.000-05:00

I'm sure you've noticed how White House officials have a tendency to start pointing fingers after they resign. But there's no little gremlin named "Not Me" running around (I can't believe I just wrote that). I think it suggests that they already have a pretty good idea of how the Bush years will be remembered by historians, and they'd prefer their little asterisk in the history books to say "but this guy wasn't so bad." The only problem there is the cowardice involved in lying your socks off as long as the checks keep clearing, conscience be damned.

To no one's surprise in a world where top White House aides with any president eventually write a book about it, former Press Sectetary Scott McClellan will be coming out with his volume in April.

It's called "What Happened" and its publisher, Public Affairs, at its Web site carries this brief excerpt:

"The most powerful leader in the world had called upon me to speak on his behalf and help restore credibility he lost amid the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. So I stood at the White house briefing room podium in front of the glare of the klieg lights for the better part of two weeks and publicly exonerated two of the senior-most aides in the White House: Karl Rove and Scooter Libby.

"There was one problem. It was not true.

"I had unknowingly passed along false information. And five of the highest ranking officials in the administration were involved in my doing so: Rove, Libby, the vice President, the President's chief of staff, and the president himself."

Mr. Nice Authoritarian

2007-11-20T10:05:00.000-05:00

Hoo boy. As if Giuliani's record (his real record, not his made-for-TV record) weren't enough, his campaign has made some moves weird enough to make anyone doubt his niceness, if not his sanity. From his foreign policy team of "the only thing wrong with the war is that we haven't opened it up on enough fronts" lunatics to the racist cheese steak photo-op, it's tough to imagine why anyone-- much less a majority of people-- would consider him anything but a mean, petty, and egotistical bastard. Oh, right, the press has decided to repeat their "drinking buddy election" theme in favor of a guy who appears to be a sneerless Dick Cheney.

Which candidate is the most likable? On the Republican side, Giuliani gets the nod, both from GOP voters and among voters overall. None of the Democratic candidates has a clear advantage among Democratic voters, with Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards running about even.

There's a silver lining, though. The public might not be buying it this time.

Ask voters which qualities are most important, though, and they put likability well down the list. They attach far more importance to being honest, ethical, decisive and strong.

Let's hope.

News in a hurry!

2007-11-16T15:55:00.000-05:00

Before signing off for the weekend, I couldn't resist passing this story along-- and taking another potshot at the MSM for their.... lameness.

Actually, it's too long to excerpt. Just read the whole thing.

Static

2007-11-16T10:43:00.000-05:00

Since I've been picking on the media so much lately, why not continue? We're being subjected to an infotainment (even that might be too generous) presidential race, in which Barack Obama's choice of lapel decoration or Hillary Clinton's stance on driver's licenses for illegal immigrants in New York state-- a plan which has been dumped anyway, making it a moot point-- are center stage.

What are we not hearing anything about from the MSM? The dire state of the union, and problems which are genuine, significant, and complex. Including issues of terrorism and border security terrorism, which the GOP has spent hundreds of billions trying to resolve in their usual inept way.

*U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) is the governmental agency responsible for keeping terrorists and other inadmissibles out of the United States. They are charged with fulfilling this mission while simultaneously facilitating the cross-border traffic of millions of international travelers every year. The CBP conducts this mission at 326 ports of entry (international airports, harbors, border crossings) throughout the United States. In Fiscal Year (FY) 2006, nearly a quarter million ineligible individuals were interdicted by CBP and turned away, but the agency estimates that several thousand more were admitted to the country through our ports of entry.

Weaknesses that compromise border security include not verifying the nationality and admissibility of individuals. This failure of the system is the most acute at land crossings. When the GAO did spot checks, they found some checkpoints entirely unmanned.

*In the intervening time since the [FBI's Terrorist Screening Center] watch list was initiated, it has mushroomed to include records on over three-quarters of a million individuals. The list has led to approximately 53,000 positive matches. These matches have led to arrests, denial of entry into the U.S., but most often questioning and release. In a disturbing revelation, the GAO found that some of these positive matches occurred after-the-fact. Individuals positively identified and confirmed to be inadmissible to the United States had already boarded and flown on aircraft, or even been admitted to the country, and perhaps become untraceable. . .

Although the GAO found that some progress has been made in the promotion of effective screening procedures, both in the federal sector and the private/critical infrastructure sector, many potentially effective screening opportunities remain untapped. This situation is perpetuated because the government lacks a current strategy and implementation protocol for optimizing the terrorist watch list.

In addition to the lack of formal protocol, clear lines of authority, accountability and responsibility are missing.

*After the new [aviation security] protocols were in place, a request was made for the GAO to test the system. To do this, the GAO attempted to:

Obtain the instructions and components needed to create devices that a terrorist might use to cause severe damage to an airplane and threaten the safety of passengers and
Test whether GAO investigators could pass through airport security checkpoints undetected with all the components needed to create the devices.

. . .[T]wo GAO investigators demonstrated the weaknesses of the security screening process in American airports by smuggling the components for multiple explosive devices and one incendiary devise through security and aboard commercial airliners, without being challenged by TSA officers.

The Blivet Elite

2007-11-15T14:05:00.000-05:00

I've been wondering why it is that Media Matters is singled out so frequently by right-wing pundits. Sure, they've got to be really pissed that simply quoting reactionary blowhards shows how full of shit they are, but you don't really want to call attention to that.

Anyway, the important thing is that somebody's doing it. For the obvious reason that high-profile conservative talking heads are big, fat, overstuffed bags of shit. Hence the title.

Illustration: George Will is all about mandates

. . .Clinton is so polarizing that, if she wins the general election, she'll do so only narrowly, and such a slim victory will deny her the mandate to enact any sweeping changes as president. "Large undertakings in domestic policy -- e.g., the enactments of Social Security in 1935 and of Medicare in 1965 -- often follow landslide elections," Will writes. A "close election" in 2008, on the other hand, will "guarantee another four years of paralysis," and that's great news for conservatives "who think gridlocked government is wonderful."

George Will sez mandates are for wussies:

To the contrary, in a column published in December 2000, Will pooh-poohed the very idea that Bush, so narrowly elected, should take a bipartisan approach to governance. Bush, Will wrote, "probably knows that most political and journalistic boilerplate about the need to 'heal' the 'deeply divided' nation has the partisan purpose of paralyzing him, turning him away from his political program, toward therapeutic gestures of 'healing.'" In urging Bush to resist those call, Will wrote: "Conflict avoidance becomes habitual. Risk-averse presidents are constantly at risk. The rule regarding power is use it or lose it. And Bush will never have more of it than he will have next spring."

I really, really, really don't want to what these loathsome characters earn for what they do. And I haven't even brought up David Brooks' shameless column about the "myth" of Republican dog-whistle politics in the days of Reagan. One thing I sorta hope, though, is that I never lose my capacity to be shocked, disappointed, offended, and/or outraged any time I see someone lie as blithely and habitually as the Blivet Elite do on a daily basis.

Morality, by any means necessary

2007-11-15T12:41:00.000-05:00

Here's an article that brings together a lot of the stuff I've been writing about lately. Science, authoritarianism, and useless journalists who consider he-said/she-said to be objective reporting. Except when they're trying to come up with zingers and gotchas to further their careers.

In watching the [Nova documentary on the Dover intelligent design case], I was struck by the parallels between the Dover story and movement conservatism generally. The selling of “intelligent design,” and the idea itself, has much in common with Social Security privatization, supply-side economics, the invasion of Iraq, school vouchers, and other half-baked causes that the right has relentlessly been pushing in recent decades. (. . .)

[The Discovery Institute] developed an internal game plan called the “Wedge Strategy,” which states as an overarching goal the replacement of science as currently practiced with “theistic and Christian science.” What the center was most effective at was developing a soft-sell marketing pitch intended to minimize the opposition that would arise against a creationism hard-sell. So, for example, it advocated that biology classes “teach the controversy” as a means of incorporating its attacks on Darwinism into lesson plans, rather than insisting that intelligent design replace evolution. (. . .)

Now think about the role played by the Cato Institution and the Heritage Foundation in selling Social Security privatization. Akin to the “Wedge Document,” they developed the 1983 game plan “Achieving a 'Leninist' Strategy.” For years they honed a pitch aimed at reassuring everyone that, far from phasing out Social Security, they actually wanted to bolster it. They even softened the lingo from “privatization” to “private accounts.” When confronted with fundamental flaws with the concept, such as the massive additional federal debt it would create while imposing added risks on Americans, the think tanks came up with lame excuses while steaming full speed ahead with the same ill-conceived idea that would advance their broader agenda. Just as some intelligent design advocates outright lied in saying religion had nothing to do with their motivations, many privatization advocates lied in saying they wanted to strengthen Social Security.

As a commentor notes, these groups have to lie about their actual beliefs and motivation-- because the "wisdom of crowds" (is that just another term for common sense?) would consign them to the booby hatch otherwise.

Oh, and the documentary is supposed to be available online starting tomorrow.

Decision '08: Goose or Gander

2007-11-15T11:53:00.000-05:00

I'm pretty confident that most of us are already feeling an intense dread of the coming year. Not just because the GOP hopefuls are tripping all over themselves trying to out-unitary executive and out-Grand Inquisitor each other, but because the press is already giving us a repeat of the 2000 and 2004. Yeah, I know. You know that. And I know you know that. And so on. But sometimes just laying it out and seeing how breathtaking the whole thing is can just really inspire a sense of awe.

Two things that are the most obvious: the press is dying for Hillary Clinton to be the candidate. It'd make for easy copy, lazy reporting, and as I've mentioned before, book contracts or elevation to a Maureen Dowd sort of spot as "Renowned Catty Pundit." Every trivial word or gesture would be endlessly scrutinized, analyzed, and criticized. Actual record and positions on the issues? Ignored.

For their part, the GOP candidates still inspire homoerotic paeans to their masculinity and toughness-- again to the exclusion of actually checking out their records in public life. While early on, Fred Thompson seemed to be the phony tough-guy of choice for 'conservative intellectuals,' (I still snicker a bit when I write that) but the press has dumped their former boyfriend John McCain. Mike Huckabee gets plenty of serenades from the press, in spite of a rather checkered past, but perhaps in no small part because of the way his last name lends itself to oh-so-clever column titles.

But more and more, the press seem to be gravitating toward Giuliani. Which is a shame, because in a field of movement conservatives of dubious intellect, integrity, and morality, he's as bad as they come. Not to mention the nightmare of another kook evading scrutiny by paying lip service to bipartisanship or demagoguing 9/11. (I wish I could remember who came up with this description of Giuliani's every sentence: "(Noun)(Verb) 9/11.")

And now that this is already too long, thanks to my usual noodling, I'll get to the articles:

Hypocrisy? Yes, please.
John McCain yesterday on the "bitch" flap: "I can't dictate what other people say -- that's not my business. Nor is it an appropriate role for me to play in a gathering at a restaurant, and if anybody thinks that I should, then I think they have the wrong idea of what gatherings are all about."

John McCain in September on MoveOn's Petraeus ad: "Now, [the Democratic presidential candidates] acknowledge that [Petraeus] is an honorable and fine military man, but they refuse to repudiate MoveOn.org. And as you say, if you can't stand up to them, how can you stand up to the tough challenges that are presented to you as president of the United States? I don't know the answer to that."

The definitely level playing field

Try to imagine what would have happened if Hillary Clinton had called a press conference to announce that she had secured the endorsement of Minister Louis Farrakhan. Reporters would be apoplectic with the shock of it. How could she do such a thing? What about all the crazy things Farrakhan has said? What about the anti-Semitism? Why would she want to be associated with such a man? (. . .)

When the support of someone like Pat Robertson -- a man who expresses disgust at American society, who advocates the assassination of foreign leaders, who believes that adherents of any religious sect other than his own are destined to spend eternity in hell, who says that presidents of the United States are agents of Lucifer, who propagates bizarre, antiquated anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, whose hatred and mania know no limits -- when the support of such a man is eagerly sought by a party’s presidential candidates, we should not be surprised when each campaign that party runs is more centered on fear, more grounded in hate, more morally putrid than the one that came before it.

The same article cites a few of the "scandals" that have already cropped up around the Dems, by contrast:

As Christopher Hayes detailed recently in The Nation, emails are circulating around the country claiming that Obama is a practicing Muslim; the Obama campaign is evidently concerned enough about them that they have issued statements explaining that he is not a Muslim but a Christian. Emails are also circulating in Iowa claiming falsely that Obama refuses to put his hand on his heart when saying the pledge of allegiance; this follows on a spasm of feigned outrage over the fact that Obama doesn't bother to engage in that most meaningless of patriotic poses, the wearing of an American flag pin. "First he kicked his American flag pin to the curb," said the spectacularly dim-witted Steve Doocy of Fox & Friends.

It's enough to make a fisherman cry.

Torture, torture, it pleasures me!

2007-11-14T09:53:00.000-05:00

Waterboarding. I'm sure there are plenty of people wonderinng why there's even a discussion about whether this qualifies as torture. But the feckless MSM seems willing to apply their usual 50-50 time for a 95-5 issue, a la global warming, even though the only people claiming it's anything but torture historically identified with brutal and ruthless regimes are Fox News clowns, reactionary politicians, and probably some evangelical leaders.

But don't take my word for it. The WaPo recently featured an op-ed in which an accomplished gentleman who's served as JAG, professor of law, and judge describes the practice and America's historic relationship with it:

After World War II, we convicted several Japanese soldiers for waterboarding American and Allied prisoners of war. At the trial of his captors, then-Lt. Chase J. Nielsen, one of the 1942 Army Air Forces officers who flew in the Doolittle Raid and was captured by the Japanese, testified: "I was given several types of torture. . . . I was given what they call the water cure." He was asked what he felt when the Japanese soldiers poured the water. "Well, I felt more or less like I was drowning," he replied, "just gasping between life and death."

Nielsen's experience was not unique. Nor was the prosecution of his captors. After Japan surrendered, the United States organized and participated in the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, generally called the Tokyo War Crimes Trials. Leading members of Japan's military and government elite were charged, among their many other crimes, with torturing Allied military personnel and civilians. The principal proof upon which their torture convictions were based was conduct that we would now call waterboarding.

But howzabout I do him one better? Because waterboarding isn't a modern invention by any means. Neither is its equivalence with torture. Here's an example of it turning up in literature:

The prisoner underwent the first and second applications with unshrinking courage, but on the infliction of the water-torture, which is indeed insupportable to humanity, either to suffer or relate, he exclaimed in the gasping interval, he would disclose every thing.

That's from the 1820 novel Melmoth the Wanderer, written by an Irish clergyman. And he's writing about the preferred methods of the Inquisition circa 1675. So for at least 300 years, this has been considered not just a cruel and inhumane practice, but one so vile that it's reserved for a time when other methods just aren't brutal enough.

But somehow, in 21st-century America, tormenting suspects-- including the innocent-- through a method preferred by swell guys from Torquemada to Pol Pot is subject to debate.

It's insane. Which must be why National Review is all for it. And why Rudy Giuliani approves. Who doesn't? George H. W. Bush, it would appear. But you might expect that from one of the last Republicans in high office to both see combat and demonstrate some moral integrity.

Global warming, so-kalled

2007-11-13T12:00:00.000-05:00

I almost forgot to mention the most worrying aspect of Altemeyer's book on authoritarianism: his observation that true believers will never be swayed by a little thing like reality. Which certainly explains the whole hating Bill Clinton for his sins while rooting for a serial adulterer Republican.

But that sorta goes along with the recent global warming hoax. It was responsible for the latest tidal wave of sanctimonious outrage in Wingerland, from talk radio to the blogs. Sort of a reactionary Sokal hoax.... wait, that's not really accurate. Because it's more about the mindset of the duped, and in my opinion today's trendy academic theories are every bit as reactionary as today's politics. But that's another conversation entirely.

What I'm getting at is the weird way people have of clinging to what they want to believe, even when it's demonstrably false. Or taking the more "intellectually honest" approach of saying 'even if that instance was false, my point still stands.'

The “death of manmade global warming theory” lasted 70 minutes last week, showing the amazing power of the Web to amplify, and then dismantle, fictions at light speed.

On Nov. 7, news flashed around conservative and climate-skeptic e-mail chains, some Web sites and a couple of talk-radio programs that an important new scientific paper proved that undersea bacteria, not people, were responsible for most of the recent buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

70 minutes is undoubtedly a journalistic convenience, given the many venues in which the article was presented as proof that 98% of the world's scientists know less about climatology than Rush Limbaugh, but it does speak well of the ability to correct misinformation so rapidly with the advent of the Web.

Oh, and there's a much funnier post mortem of the hoax here.

Mein Furor

2007-11-13T09:47:00.000-05:00

Late last week, I ran across Bob Altemeyer's online book Authoritarians, and if you haven't run across it before you should definitely have a look. I'm never big on theories of everything, and I just as much want to believe that Altemeyer is wrong about some of his observations. But it's a fascinating read, especially for the many of us ready to start beating our heads against the wall after a decade of dealing with people who went from excoriating Bill Clinton as the devil made flesh, deriding Al Gore as some sort of con man, and portraying Kerry as a man so cowardly he'd injure himself for a medal. All that is bad enough, but compounding it by adopting a see-no-evil attitude when confronted with the actual draft-dodging, history-fabricating thieves and liars who've been running the GOP and therefore the executive and legislative branches for the past (almost) seven years... well, I don't have to tell you how maddening that is.

At any rate, I find Altemeyer's arguments more convincing than those presented in the spate of books that purported to get to the bottom of the red-blue divide a few years ago. The part on cognitive dissonance as a way of life ('compartmentalized thinking,' I believe he calls it) is pretty fascinating, but also the discussion of violence and the application of justice. As he notes, it supports anything but the old "liberals are weak on crime" cliche.

Last week, I was going to link the book to stories about what slimeballs the GOP presidential hopefuls are, along with the obvious disconnect that they're supported by people who thought Bill Clinton was amoral and unscrupulous. But now I'll just link it to a fairly apropos piece on media preferences. Which has that unsettling funny-yet-sad quality we've all become so familiar with this decade.

Out of 15 TV and film genres, “arts” emerged as the one with the highest positive correlation to liberal viewers and the highest negative correlation to conservative viewers. In other words, while 48% of liberals prefer arts programming, only 17% of conservatives do. At the other end of the scale, less than 5% of liberals say they do not like the genre at all, compared to almost 25% of conservatives.
Cerebral material like documentaries and arts and educational programming all appeal more to liberals, who are 57% female.
And what shows do liberals skip? If it’s a game show or reality programming, they probably don’t watch it.

Go ahead and feel a little smug. It feels kinda good sometimes, doesn't it?

UPDATE: Nova should be interesting tonight, speaking of documentaries. The title is Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial. It's all about the trial in Pennsylvania two years ago, when a judge astonished the anti-science crowd in ruling in accordance with the facts-- namely declaring that intelligent design is religion, not science, and an effort to force children to be taught the goofy beliefs of a fringe religious group. (I'm paraphrasing.)

How are creationists responding? Predictably.

I.D. will also be striking back in "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed," a pro-I.D. documentary, to be released in February. Featuring conservative writer and political commentator Ben Stein, it portrays I.D. proponents as a group of iconoclastic firebrand scientists with the guts to go after the dogmatic Darwinists who have, the I.D.ers say, grown lazy and corrupt sitting atop a monopolistic theory with zero tolerance for dissent, within or outside of their ranks.

As someone whose name I can't recall once wrote, although folks like this always liken themselves to Galileo, they're forgetting one important thing-- to be like Galileo, you can't just be criticized for your view, you also have to be correct.

Reality Deficit Disorder

2007-11-08T10:41:00.000-05:00

Funny, if annoying. Regnery, the publishing house that produces goofy, reactionary screeds is being sued by some of its goofy, reactionary authors. Why?

Well, they're "acting like a Marxist cartoon of a capitalist company."

And how are they acting like communists, exactly?

Well, they're depriving their "writers of royalties by selling their books at a steep discount to book clubs and other organizations owned by the same parent company.

The alleged result?

The authors argue that in reducing royalty payments, the publisher is maximizing its profits and the profits of its parent company at their expense.

I know I don't need to spell out the comedy here, but I'm going to anyway. Because it makes me laugh. In today's political bizarro-landscape, Karl Marx (and today's liberals) intended for communism to be a system whereby the wealthy could become even wealthier through aggressive exploitation of workers. Fortunately, free-market capitalism came along to see to it that exploited workers could collectively bargain with their wealthy employers to see that they get an equitable piece of the pie. If that wasn't sufficient, free-market capitalists could use the court system to pursue what commies (and today's liberals) call "frivolous lawsuits," but what they consider a mainstay of democracy. That's why liberals are constantly fighting to protect business interests from having to account for their unfair, irresponsible, illegal, and even dangerous actions. They actually think that people are rich only because they work hard, play by the rules, and totally deserve it! Free-market capitalists, on the other hand, recognize that sometimes factors beyond our control are involved, that some people get rich by illegal means, and that the playing field isn't perfectly level.

...In Bizarro-world! Oh, and one more thing-- companies that have friends and allies buy large quantities of product at fire-sale prices? Think Scientology, Regnery authors. That's how laughable fringe books make the bestseller list.

With friends like these...

2007-11-07T11:08:00.000-05:00

The campaign of Giuliani has always scared me (admittedly, that's true of every GOP candidate this time around), but I dropped my guard there for a while. My initial reaction to his candidacy was that it'd be as vacuous-- and effective-- as the recent GOP standard. Plenty of flag-waving, 9/11, bumper-sticker patriotism and ominous suggestions that critics are almost certainly America-hating subversives. And as little as possible about the issues, because the candidate is pretty damn scary.

This endorsement, which should scare the hell out of otherwise sensible Republicans buying into the same reactionary-as-moderate/moderate-as-radical scam they swallowed in 2000 and '04, probably won't.

Pat Robertson, a prominent Christian leader and social conservative, endorsed Republican presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani on Wednesday.

"It is my pleasure to announce my support for America's Mayor, Rudy Giuliani, a proven leader who is not afraid of what lies ahead and who will cast a hopeful vision for all Americans," Robertson said in a statement issued by the Giuliani campaign. . . .

"Rudy Giuliani took a city that was in decline and considered ungovernable and reduced its violent crime, revitalized its core, dramatically lowered its taxes, cut through a welter of bureaucratic regulations, and did so in the spirit of bipartisanship which is so urgently needed in Washington today," Robertson said.

In other words, he tamed the whore of Babylon even as he cut taxes? Wow! And all he did wrong was out-sin Clinton, rule like a tyrant, and ignore the rule of law. That's our boy, all right.

Gotcha! the Home Game

2007-11-07T09:45:00.001-05:00

It's always tough to know where to begin when I get back to posting after an absence. Jaw-dropping stories are never in short supply these days-- sort of an embarrassment of blogging riches, you could say. Only I'd be much happier without so many things to speak out against.

The pre-primary presidential campaigns continue to play out as the last two elections did, but six months earlier than usual. The MSM seems to have anointed Hillary the candidate with the most perceived "electability," although my inner cynic suggests that many of today's blow-dried pundits and their would-be heirs are already planning on how to wrangle a multi-million dollar contract out of their fantasy "gotcha moment."

One recent attempt aimed at Hillary Clinton came from Tim Russert at a Democratic debate. Not only was El Potato continuing the unfortunate trend of media personality as self-anointed arbiter of public discourse, but in the best "mote in another's eye" tradition he both laments the superficiality of election coverage and the disaster it's brought about even as he continues to be completely superficial-- and conveniently ignore his own role in bringing down Al Gore.

Another gotcha moment starred Dennis Kucinich and CBS reporter Hannah Storm on the issue of Iran:

Storm: "So you'd meet person to person, backdoor the State Department?"

Kucinich: "[T]here is no one I wouldn't meet with to create more security for our nation and peace in the world."

'Backdoor' the State Department? Storm is speaking of a hypothetical POTUS Kucinich here, so what the hell is that supposed to even mean? Storm wasn't finished there, though. Next up was "screw the issues-- let's dish!"

Storm: "You have a core group of supporters for your political views, but a lot of people [are] talking about your wife and the fact that she's over three decades younger and she's statuesque and beautiful and has a pierced tongue. What do you make of the attention on her?"

And it actually gets more ridiculous from there as Storm asks probing questions like "would you remove it if you became first lady," and "can we see it?"

More recently, Kucinich is taking hits from the NYT and WaPo over impeachment proceedings against Dick Cheney. I don't even want to get started on how the press has devolved since the days of Watergate in this regard. Seeing top national papers dismiss criminal acts in the White House that dwarf Nixon's isn't getting any less scary.

But for once, a conservative candidate faced at least something like a gotcha moment. Ron Paul, who pointed out that Iraq has just become the deadliest year for American troops yet, was confronted with the nonsensical rejoinder "but October casualties actually decreased." Paul's response, to the effect that "one month does not a year make," was probably more tempered and gentle a rebuke than I would've managed in the face of such stupidity. (Sorry, I can't seem to find the link to that story.)

Holding Pattern

2007-11-06T11:13:00.001-05:00

Well, the busiest work week of the year is officially over. I really didn't have a chance to post last week, but it's behind me. Unfortunately, I picked up a little something to keep with me-- gonorrhea. Not really. Just a cold. I'll try to get back into the swing of things this week, but posts will probably be less frequent than usual.

BushCo and the Ol' Potemkin Village Routine

2007-10-26T09:12:00.000-05:00

At least this WaPo story tells it like it is. Even if the ruling party hadn't been doing this for the last six years, this agit-prop tactic is so well-known from 20th century China and the Soviet Union that these imbeciles should've been laughed out of office long ago. But you can't have it all.

FEMA has truly learned the lessons of Katrina. Even its handling of the media has improved dramatically. For example, as the California wildfires raged Tuesday, Vice Adm. Harvey E. Johnson, the deputy administrator, had a 1 p.m. news briefing.

Reporters were given only 15 minutes' notice of the briefing, making it unlikely many could show up at FEMA's Southwest D.C. offices. They were given an 800 number to call in, though it was a "listen only" line, the notice said -- no questions. Parts of the briefing were carried live on Fox News, MSNBC and other outlets.

Johnson stood behind a lectern and began with an overview before saying he would take a few questions. The first questions were about the "commodities" being shipped to Southern California and how officials are dealing with people who refuse to evacuate. He responded eloquently.

He was apparently quite familiar with the reporters -- in one case, he appears to say "Mike" and points to a reporter -- and was asked an oddly in-house question about "what it means to have an emergency declaration as opposed to a major disaster declaration" signed by the president. He once again explained smoothly. . . .

Of course, that could be because the questions were asked by FEMA staffers playing reporters. We're told the questions were asked by Cindy Taylor, FEMA's deputy director of external affairs, and by "Mike" Widomski, the deputy director of public affairs. Director of External Affairs John "Pat" Philbin asked a question, and another came, we understand, from someone who sounds like press aide Ali Kirin.

But rest assured-- the new, highly competent head of FEMA made it clear that while it was made to look like an actual press conference even though it wasn't, there's no reason for the public to harbor an doubts about the integrity and openness of uhhhh.... FEMA.

They're only tellin' you what they want you to know

2007-10-25T13:51:00.000-05:00

Busy, busy day. And it's going to get worse next week. But I have one cool find-- Sidney Blumenthal's piece on the journalistic legacy of Walter Lippmann. My thinking recently has been that human history isn't so much a march of progress punctuated by disastrous periods of reactionary power as an endless march of authoritarianism punctuated by occasional outbreaks of reason and progressivism. Although I hate being that cynical. Anyway, here's some Lippmann for ya:

Just as the most poisonous form of disorder is the mob incited from high places, the most immoral act the immorality of a government, so the most destructive form of untruth is sophistry and propaganda by those whose profession it is to report the news. The news columns are common carriers. When those who control them arrogate to themselves the right to determine by their own consciences what shall be reported and for what purpose, democracy is unworkable. Public opinion is blockaded. For when a people can no longer confidently repair "to the best foundations for their information," then anyone's guess and anyone's rumor, each man's hope and each man's whim becomes the basis of government. All that the sharpest critics of democracy have alleged is true, if there is no steady supply of trustworthy and relevant news. Incompetence and aimlessness, corruption and disloyalty, panic and ultimate disaster, must come to any people which is denied an assured access to the facts. No one can manage anything on pap. Neither can a people.

"Ignore the man behind the Arkansas Project!"

2007-10-24T10:47:00.000-05:00

If you're an informed progressive type, you know the name Richard Mellon Scaife. If you're already deciding which Republican to vote for in '08, you probably don't. Even though he's played a significant role in forming your whole Clinton-obsessed, anti-critical thought, political weltanschaung. Sad, really.

But let's cut to the sex, sin, and assholery, shall we? Here are some excerpts from this unsurprisingly sordid tale of a leading values voter and conservative icon who's actually a serial adulterer (a la Giuliani and Gingrich) and unapologetic reprobate (a la Bush and Cheney).

*Unfathomable but true, when Scaife (rhymes with safe) married his second wife, Margaret “Ritchie” Scaife, in 1991, he neglected to wall off a fortune that Forbes recently valued at $1.3 billion. This, to understate matters, is likely going to cost him, big time. As part of a temporary settlement, 60-year-old Ritchie Scaife is currently cashing an alimony check that at first glance will look like a typo: $725,000 a month. Or about $24,000 a day, seven days a week. . . . The numbers are just one of many we-kid-you-not dimensions to this tale. In late 2005, Ritchie Scaife peered through a window at one of her husband’s many homes and saw him with one Tammy Sue Vasco, a woman whose colorful criminal history includes an arrest for prostitution.

*Dickie, as he’s known to his handful of friends, acquired a mean streak at an early age, according to his now-deceased sister, Cordelia Scaife. (She once told The Washington Post that she and her brother hadn’t spoken for 25 years.) His trouble with alcohol started when he was at prep school, and he later was tossed out of Yale when he rolled a keg of beer down a flight of stairs and broke the legs of a fellow student. His father, a below-average businessman, died a year after Richard graduated from the University of Pittsburgh. His mother was “just a gutter drunk,” as Cordelia put it.

Pop Quiz: Know your neo-cons.

2007-10-23T09:14:00.000-05:00

Via Kevin Drum, a quick quiz on neoconservative crackpots:

Can you match up the neocon with his description from the recently published journals of Arthur Schlesinger?

1. Marty Peretz 2. Norman Podhoretz 3. Charles Krauthammer

A)"Writes particularly obnoxious neo-conservative trash"

B)"Unprincipled egomaniac"

C)"Odious and despicable"

Follow the link up top for the answers. I'm actually a little disappointed that I got all three right.

Blackwater to "diversify operations"

2007-10-23T08:51:00.000-05:00

Sometimes a story comes along that's so painfully obvious I kick myself for not having predicted it. I'll just leave it at that.

Blackwater is planning to build an 824-acre military-style training complex in Potrero, Calif., a rural hamlet 45 miles east of San Diego. The company's proposal, which was approved last December by the Potrero Community Planning Group and has drawn protest from within the Potrero community, will turn a former chicken ranch into "Blackwater West," the company's second-largest facility in the country. It will include a multitude of weapons firing ranges, a tactical driving track, a helipad, a 33,000-square-foot urban simulation training area, an armory for storing guns and ammunition, and dorms and classrooms. And it will be located in the heart one of the most active regions in the United States for illegal border crossings.

While some residents of Potrero have welcomed the plan, others have raised fears about encroachment on protected lands and what they see as an intimidating force of mercenaries coming into their backyard. The specter of Blackwater West and the rising interest in privatizing border security have also alarmed Democratic Rep. Bob Filner, whose congressional district includes Potrero. Filner says he believes it's a good possibility that Blackwater is positioning itself for border security contracts and is opposed to the new complex. "You have to be very wary of mercenary soldiers in a democracy, which is more fragile than people think," Rep. Filner told Salon. "You don't want armies around who will sell out to the highest bidder. We already have vigilantes on the border, the Minutemen, and this would just add to [the problem]," Filner said, referring to the Minuteman Project, a conservative group that has organized civilian posses to assist the U.S. Border Patrol in the past. Filner is backing legislation to block establishment of what he calls "mercenary training centers" anywhere in the U.S. outside of military bases. "The border is a sensitive area," he said, "and if Blackwater operates the way they do in Iraq -- shoot first and ask questions later -- my constituents are at risk."

Wasn't it Nero who said you aren't really 'rich' until you have your own army?

Blackwater: "Let's get sissy!"

2007-10-22T11:41:00.000-05:00

Now, Blackwater isn't a place for wussies. That goes without saying. But I still figure that it's a real wet-dream factory for GOP politicians-- with that whole Ronald Reagan, Fred Thompson ethos of pretend military service. You can just imagine how turned on the idea of ordering around a bunch of super-secret commando types makes that bunch.

But all that vicarious studliness comes at a price much steeper than a home theater system and a 300 DVD. There's the embezzling, the murders, and the tax fraud (that one's brand new, folks!). But, ever the smooth covert types, the no-nonsense businessmen at Blackwater know that when things start to go sour, there's just one thing to do: go all Jack Nicholson "You can't handle the truth" and give those lily-livered whiners a harsh dose of reality!

No, wait. That's not it. When things go sour there's just one thing to do: hire a PR firm to give you a teddy-bear image and pretend the public unveiling is a complete coincidence.

[Blackwater's] well-armed men remain, but the company’s roughneck logo — a bear’s paw print in a red crosshairs, under lettering that looks to have been ripped from a fifth of Jim Beam — has undergone a publicity-conscious, corporate scrubbing.

The company said the decision to update its logo was made long before Sept. 16, the day a Blackwater team guarding a State Department convoy in Baghdad fatally shot 17 Iraqis near a bustling traffic circle. But the new logo did not appear on Blackwater’s Web site until after the incident, a Blackwater spokeswoman said. . . .

Blackwater also began the process of altering its name to Blackwater Worldwide.

The author doesn't come right out and say it, but the idea is pretty clearly "now that we're in the public eye, it's time to break out the camouflage." I would've gone with a unicorn on a rainbow, but that's why I'm not earning six figures as a business consultant.

While you were out

2007-10-22T10:32:00.000-05:00

(Quick 2nd update: Mukasey's son is also proving what a stand-up guy he is by helping Giuliani misrepresent himself.)

I haven't put much effort into following the Mukasey confirmation hearing, and that makes me due for a mea culpa. But either in spite of or because of the deluge of incompetence and evil we see from the 21st century GOP, it's easy to forget that even a relatively non-controversial White House nominee for anything would have been considered completely unacceptable to either party just a few decades ago.

Andrew Sullivan, whose tone suggests the weariness I suspect millions of us feel, provides a reminder of why we have to keep paying attention. And fighting.

Matt [Kleiman] calls [Mukasey] "completely unacceptable." Having read the testimony, I'm afraid I have to abandon my early hopes and agree. An attorney general who believes a president has a permanent right to ignore the rule of law because peacetime is now wartime for ever, is an attorney general defending the rule of one man over the rule of law. If I were a Senator, (heh, indeed) I'd vote no. This is the faultline of our time. If we are redefining war as a permanent state of being, and redefining presidential authority to give him/her extra-legal and extra-constitutional power to what s/he wants anywhere in the world, including the United States and to its citizenry, then American liberty is in extreme peril. To approve an attorney general who does not dissent from this position is a terrible precedent.

Don't people see that this is what Cheney is doing? He is setting precedent after precedent for totalist, secret executive power. And with each precedent for unchecked, uncontrollable executive power - including the power to detain and torture within the United States - the America we have known is being surrendered. This is the other war - a constitutional war at home against American liberty and the Constitution - as dangerous in a different way as Islamism. One attacks our freedom from the outside; the other hollows out our freedom from within. The fight against both is the calling of the time.

UPDATE: Incredibly, I just came upon a post that looks as though it could've been written specifically to support Sullivan's case. A must-read.

According to Higazi, the investigators coerced him into confessing to a role in 9/11. Higazi first adamantly denied any involvement with 9/11 and could not believe what was happening to him. Then, he says, the investigator said his family would go through hell in Egypt, where they torture people like Saddam Hussein. Higazy then realized he had a choice: he could continue denying the radio was his and his family suffers ungodly torture in Egypt or he confesses and his family is spared. Of course, by confessing, Higazy's life is worth garbage at that point, but ... well, that's why coerced confessions are outlawed in the United States.

So Higazy "confesses" and he's processed by the criminal justice system. His future is quite bleak. Meanwhile, an airline pilot later shows up at the hotel and asks for his radio back. This is like something out of the movies. The radio belonged to the pilot, not Higazy, and Higazy was free to go, the victim of horrible timing. Higazi was innocent! He next sued the hotel and the FBI agent for coercing his confession. The bottom line in the Court of Appeals: Higazy has a case and may recover damages for this injustice.

As I read the opinion I realized it was a 44 page epic, too long for me to print out. I blogged about the opinion while I read it online and then posted the blog as I ate lunch. Then something strange happened: a few minutes after I posted the blog, the opinion vanished from the Court of Appeals website! I had never seen this before, and what made all the more strange was that it involved a coerced confession over 9/11.

That's only the beginning of the story, but it's a chilling account of why torture, the 'unitary executive' theory, government secrecy, and the erosion of our civil rights have really brought America to a perilous crossroads.

Red, White, and Business

2007-10-22T09:09:00.000-05:00

Not exactly huge news, but funny. The debut of Fox's business channel has certainly meant one thing for cable television: more babe-age per square foot than you can shake a SWOT at.

Rupert Murdoch's new finance channel just launched its Website, and it lends a little insight into what the network will be offering up when it launches on October 15. Namely, foxy young broads!* Almost all of the on-air talent that's plugged on the site are skinny, youthful beauties like Shibani Joshi (a former model in India), Cheryl Casone (a former flight attendant), Jenna Lee (she played Division One softball in college), and Nicole Petillades (she loves slalom waterskiing!).

There are plenty of hunky guys, too, so Fox hasn't forgotten about you businesswomen and homosexuals out there! I know, it's tough to rip Fox for this-- that's just how broadcast journalism works. And there's so much other stuff to ridicule them for...

To talk up Fox Business News, Ailes must talk down its cable competition, CNBC, accusing it of harboring subversive strains of Krugmanism in its chromosomal makeup. Smoke chimneying from his ass like a papal decision, Ailes told Joe Nocera of The New York Times: "They’ve decided recently that America is not such a terrible place and capitalism isn't so bad"—another reaction, he seemed to be saying, to the prospect of some new pro-America competition. "They used to get really excited if a C.E.O. was going to jail and they got depressed if a company announced a profit. They are offended by rich people unless it’s them."

Wow. Those other cable business channels were actually commies all along! And, you know, if you want intelligent and truthful commentary, you want Fox:

But for sheer brazenness, what took the biscuit was a bit of mockery from Ailes over CNBC's weekend schedule: "On Monday, for instance, Bill Carter of The New York Times wrote an article in which Mr. Ailes mocked the infomercials that CNBC runs on weekends (for 'nose tweezers and pimple squeezers,' he said). . .

I'm guessing you see the punchline coming already.

Like I was sayin'...

2007-10-19T12:35:00.000-05:00

Yes, and like we've all been saying.

They can't stop the war or override the president's veto on S-CHIP. Harry Reid is less popular in his home state of Nevada than the president is in the country, and, if you listen to the pollsters and the pundits, the Democrats are about to choose one of the most divisive political figures in the Republic’s history to be their 2008 presidential nominee.
Which begs the question: When should Democrats begin to panic?

The answer is "not yet." But the truth is that unless they can re-establish some of their 2006 momentum, Democrats may find themselves going into the next election tagged as the party that couldn't stop Bush when given a chance, or as the party that did not try hard enough.

Democrats should be particularly concerned by the storyline the White House is peddling this week, which claims, in effect, that the president has his “mojo” back and that the Congress is ineffective. After outlining a long list of things he thinks the Congress should be working on, the president on Tuesday declared, "It's little time left in the year, and Congress has little to show for all the time that has gone by."

Worth a look.

When politicians tell the truth!

2007-10-19T12:09:00.001-05:00

Regarding the SCHIP veto and razor margin that upheld that veto, one Republican Congressman laments that the demise of the healthcare program could ruin lives. No, not the lives of sick and injured kids, you rube! The lives of Republican Congressmen!

But some Republicans, like Representative Thomas M. Davis III of Virginia, who was chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee when Mr. Bush ran for election in 2000, were furious with Mr. Bush for putting them in such a difficult spot on children’s health.

“He’s not going to get his way on this,” said Mr. Davis, who voted to override the veto and predicted that Mr. Bush would ultimately be forced to sign a measure similar to the one he rejected.

“And he’s jeopardizing people’s careers,” added Mr. Davis, who is contemplating a race for the Senate.

Does Philip K. Dick dream of electronic surveillance?

2007-10-19T11:16:00.000-05:00

It hasn't been a good week for paranoiacs. First was the whole revelation that telecoms had handed over much more private user information to the administration than they'd previously admitted (actually, didn't they just deny it?), and that Congress is going to look the other way as they're given immunity from lawsuits relating to their, uhhh... illegal activity.

Now Comcast has reversed its public statement that it doesn't interfere with customers' private use on the Internet. A quick Internet search will reveal a whole slew of cases where people had their Comcast service cut off with no explanation. When they were told it was from excessive bandwidth usage (indicative of spammers, the company claimed), they naturally asked what the limit was so they could monitor it themselves. And were promptly told "the limit varies." In other words, Comcast reserves the right to A) monitor what you're doing (well, that's fairly reasonable), B) cut you off without notice if they don't like it (hey, every company does that), and C) provide no guidelines or explanation for their actions. Not good.

Comcast Corp. actively interferes with attempts by some of its high-speed Internet subscribers to share files online, a move that runs counter to the tradition of treating all types of Net traffic equally.

The interference, which The Associated Press confirmed through nationwide tests, is the most drastic example yet of data discrimination by a U.S. Internet service provider. It involves company computers masquerading as those of its users.

If widely applied by other ISPs, the technology Comcast is using would be a crippling blow to the BitTorrent, eDonkey and Gnutella file-sharing networks. While these are mainly known as sources of copyright music, software and movies, BitTorrent in particular is emerging as a legitimate tool for quickly disseminating legal content.

Anyway, the whole thing is worth reading-- and I'd strongly encourage you to do a Google search for cases of Comcast cutting off people's connections without notice, then refusing to explain why the customers were in violation. Even as they admit that they frequently change what constitutes a violation. And many of those customers were apparently using significantly less bandwidth than they were promised in the first place.

The bottom line is that the already hugely profitable telecoms are perfectly willing to use their market share muscle (a monopoly in some parts of Boston) to keep charging more for providing less.

You'll laugh, you'll cry

2007-10-19T09:15:00.000-05:00

I'm not sure if it's just me, or if the media's sensible response to the kooky Graeme Frost smears have given me a false sense of hope. But winger blogs are starting to look a bit less irritating these days, and a little more silly. The right's responses to a given issue are so predictable at this point that they're finally striking me as laughable. Hopefully it isn't just me-- because the day that the Malkins and Dobsons of the nation become walking punchlines is the day that the reactionary stranglehold on our politics will have been loosened, and they will resume their rightful place at the lunatic fringe of society.

Here's another recent example: right before Gore was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, the online reactionary community was touting a British court case as definitive, irrefutable proof that the science behind An Inconvenient Truth was a pack of lies. Something seemed fishy right off the bat. After all, judges in the court system don't determine what's science and what isn't (creationism, anyone?). But it gets even sillier. In the rush to pillory Al Gore, no one bothered to mention what the case was all about.

Stewart Dimmock's high-profile fight to ban the film being shown in schools was depicted as a David and Goliath battle, with the Kent school governor taking on the state by arguing that the government was 'brainwashing' pupils. . . .

Dimmock credited the little-known New Party with supporting him in the test case but did not elaborate on its involvement. The obscure Scotland-based party calls itself 'centre right' and campaigns for lower taxes and expanding nuclear power.

Records filed at the Electoral Commission show the New Party has received nearly all of its money - almost £1m between 2004 and 2006 - from Cloburn Quarry Limited, based in Lanarkshire.

The company's owner and chairman of the New Party, Robert Durward, is a long-time critic of environmentalists.

And there you have it: the American right's shocking expose of the global warming conspiracy was based upon the impeccable scientific credentials of a right-wing, UK mining & petroleum magnate.

Now, since I'm already talking about Gore, I'd like to direct your attention to a recent article that pretty much sums up my state of mind. And is very well-written.

One of the consequences is that what actually ought to be gaffes -- statements that reveal something truly problematic about a candidate -- almost always get ignored. For instance, when John McCain said in the same debate, in response to a question about interest rates, "I wish interest rates were zero," one might have thought it would merit some notice. After all, the comment suggests an alarming ignorance of the most elementary economic principles (if interest rates were zero, no bank would lend any money), raising serious doubts about whether a person so uninformed should be in charge of the federal government. Or contrast what Romney got criticized for this week with a what he said back in May: "They want to bring down the West, in particular us. And they're coming together as Shia and Sunni and Hezbollah and Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda, with that intent."

That someone who might actually be the president of the United States understands so little about the religious and political cleavages within the Muslim world is nothing short of terrifying. Does Mitt Romney actual think that Shia and Sunni are "coming together" to attack us? Does he believe that Hezbolla, Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, and Al Qaeda even have similar goals, let alone are in some kind of alliance? If so, he isn't qualified to make photocopies in the Beirut embassy, let alone chart our nation's strategy to prevent terrorism. Yet that statement caused no flapping of gums on "Hardball," no wagging of fingers from the seasoned reporters like Dan Balz, no prodding from the pundits to get with the program already and act like a serious candidate.

Which brings us back to Al Gore. With the possible exception of Barry Goldwater thirty-six years before, no presidential candidate in the television age has been treated with the kind of naked contempt reporters heaped on Gore during his 2000 run. While they portrayed George W. Bush as an honest and genial fellow who was "comfortable in his own skin" if not the sharpest tool in the shed, Gore was ridiculed as a liar and a phony whose very desire to be president was disqualifying in and of itself.

Highly recommended.

SCHIP veto upheld in House

2007-10-18T12:39:00.000-05:00

*Updated*

You see, Democrats? This is why you should be fighting. Even thought SCHIP is a loss (for the time being), the GOP get to demonstrate that they're more interested in fanatical right-wingerness than helping Americans. They get to be the guys who are saying-- in the face of massive public opposition, "Sorry, kids, but if you get medical care then the communists will have won."

Mean, stupid, greedy, and possibly insane. Sure, since 2000 they've largely been getting a pass on all of these from Bush and Cheney on down, but isn't it nice to be on the side of justice and equality?

House Democrats on Thursday failed to override President Bush's veto of a children's health insurance bill that opponents said was too expensive.

By a vote of 273 to 156, the measure fell 13 votes short of the two-thirds majority needed for an override. Forty-four Republicans voted for the override, and one Democrat cast a ballot against it.

Democrats, sensing earlier that they didn't have the votes, vowed to continue the fight, despite a defeat.

See what you do here, Democrats? You point out that the GOP is more than happy to spend $500 billion to kill Americans in Iraq-- but absolutely refuses to spend one seventh of that to save American lives at home.

UPDATE: Ezra Klein suggests that Pelosi will try to make this the Democrats' version of ANWR drilling. Which does seem smart-- the more times SCHIP is vetoed by Fearless Leader and dies in the House, the better Dems will look. Given the sheer fringiness (seriously, follow that link) of the GOP, that could be the only outcome that's even kinda positive.

Pelosi has pledged to reject anything that doesn't expand coverage to 10 million children, which means she'll bring a bill almost exactly like this one to the floor again and again. Bush can keep vetoing, and the Republicans can hold their line, and S-CHIP could expire, tossing millions of kids off the insurance rolls. Pelosi is betting that won't happen, and that congressional Republicans, already worried about their prospects in 2008, will fold rather quickly.

As Klein notes, we'll see. But either way, it could work to the Dems' favor. The bad news being that kids are the ones taking the fall.

He who never fights and runs away stays in office to not fight another day.

2007-10-18T08:06:00.000-05:00

I'm officially at a total loss.

Senate Democrats and Republicans reached agreement with the Bush administration yesterday on the terms of new legislation to control the federal government's domestic surveillance program, which includes a highly controversial grant of legal immunity to telecommunications companies that have assisted the program, according to congressional sources.

Disclosure of the deal followed a decision by House Democratic leaders to pull a competing version of the measure from the floor because they lacked the votes to prevail over Republican opponents and GOP parliamentary maneuvers.

The collapse marked the first time since Democrats took control of the chamber that a major bill was withdrawn from consideration before a scheduled vote. It was a victory for President Bush, whose aides lobbied heavily against the Democrats' bill, and an embarrassment for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who had pushed for the measure's passage.

Okay. There have been times when I haven't minded seeing the Dems choose their battles. Like when they decide not to go all-out on a minor issue because something serious is pending. But one reason for that is the bullying and harassment they get from the MSM as well as every talking-head gasbag on TV. Another was that the American public wasn't galvanized in their opposition to the way the GOP had been running the show.

But the Democrats won majorities in both houses because the public wanted them to stop things just like this. And the MSM will continue to portray things in a negative light, and the foam-mouthed loons who still think the Bush years have been a golden age are going to call anyone who defends the Constitution a traitor. But there's a point where-- super-majority or no-- it's time to fight. When the government is systematically depriving citizens of their civil rights, and granting the same authority to corporations, that time has come.

The reason I'm at a loss is that the 'why' of it completely escapes me. A sea urchin could see by now that DLC-style capitulation has been a complete failure. The sea urchin's special needs cousin could see by now that no matter what the Dems do, they're going to be tarred as traitors by the extremists running the GOP circus. A fossilized sea urchin sitting on a dusty storage shelf in the basement of a museum in Utrecht could see by now that rolling over (and over) on every damn issue that comes up means Dems will also be labeled cowards. And it's painfully, shamefully apparent to 75% of the American public that the government actions of the last six years have been completely contrary to everything for which our nation purportedly stands. And that there's a world of difference between being called a cowardly traitor for doing the right thing and being called a cowardly traitor for refusing to take a stand against the subversion of democracy and the honor of a nation.